Building the future vs remaking the past

Learn from history for sure, but one of the lessons to be learnt is that campaigns to rearrange the past could injure the present

- Rajmohan Gandhi

When Chief Justice of India (CJI) Sanjiv Khanna and justices Sanjay Kumar and KV Viswanathan resume hearing petitions involving the Places of Worship Act of 1991, the media will once more call the petitioners "Hindu" or "Muslim". After the CJI and his fellow justices give their judgment, the media are likely to headline the "victory" of one side. In fact, the judgment will be far more consequential. It will have a bearing on the contest between two clashing visions, one wanting democracy with equality in India, the other promising the majority's supremacy. The judgment will also influence the world's perception of Hinduism.

Hinduism's global image was aided by Swami Vivekananda's famous words before the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893: "I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true." Fully aware that reality on the Indian ground did not always match this picture of harmony, Vivekananda said something equally important three years later: "I strongly believe," he said in London in 1896, "that Indians will embrace democracy (and that) unity and equality will descend upon us." (quoted in D. Dabholkar, Unraveling the Real Swami Vivekananda)

The democracy that Vivekananda hoped India would embrace, and the plants of unity and equality that he wanted India's soil to raise, were visible from 1949, when India's Constitution was adopted. Its Preamble pledged "justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equality of status and of opportunity; and fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation".