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Jan 1311 min read

Saffronization of Judiciary: An Open-Letter to the Chief Justice of India

Posted on 13/01/2024 (GMT 07:40 hrs)

Dear My Lord, The CJI, (alas! A colonial practice of addressing in order to maintain the hierarchy in the context of vertical society!)

We are surprised, perplexed and worried:

a) when we have seen the photos-videos-interviews of you, Honourable CJI, where you are OPENLY offering worship in quite a few orthodox Hindu temples, and also defending your given stand in an interview given to the Indian Express.


You have previously done similar things in the recent past, a few of which are given as follows:

CJI DY Chandrachud offers prayers to Lord Balaji at Tirumala temple VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 29th December, 2022 ©Times of India)


The CJI is in a Hindu Shrine, where Heinous casteism and Filthy Dedication of Women as Devadasis are/were maintained

b) when the imagined nation-state “India” is heading towards a theocratic Hindutvavadin totalitarian state, and egalitarianism has been reduced to a mere far-cry. We inhabit a “partly free” nation, where “Freedom of the Press” is a myth, religious tolerance is a joke and building the Ram Temple is rendered more important than addressing our ever-worsening ranks in the Hunger, Poverty, Happiness, Depression and Unemployment Indexes.

For more on India’s failing state, visit the following link:


INDIA WOUNDED: A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

Our first reaction to your public visits to these Hindu temples was a re-cognition of the fact that all the Indian political parties in fact play with the same card, i.e., aping the BJP’s agenda of religious vote-bank politicization. It entails, quite obviously, the crude politicization of one or the other particular religions. It constitutes a blurring of the “public-private divide”, a deliberate transgression for personal gains/profits.


All parties are playing with the same card: Religion by mimicking Sangh Parivar’s Ethnographic Hindutva

c) when debt-ridden India is autocratically governed by a King Liar⤡, who is installed as a puppet by the three international terrorist organizations, viz., WB-IMF-WTO, to execute their neo-imperialistic expansionist goals.

At this moment of multifaceted crises that face India in social, economic, political and religious-cultural terms, we, the Indian citizens, who have had lost our faith in the Indian judiciary⤡, were rejuvenated with fresh hope at the moment of your rightful/legitimate appointment as the CJI.

However, it is a plain matter of regret that the said initial “rejuvenation” has totally gone astray with this particular deed of yours, where you are visiting SOLELY/EXCLUSIVELY Hindu temples (and also singing Christmas Carols in the Supreme Court of India⤡) of worship. If we are not wrong (due to the lack or insufficiency of our investigations), you have not visited any mosque, following the Indian meaning of “secular”, i.e., sarvo dharma samobhava (as we dare not to speak about the European meaning of Secularism for the time being, i.e., “not religious, not spiritual“).

Thus, you have been trapped by the current ruling party’s ideological standpoint that has manufactured a form of collective Islamophobia⤡.

In fact, the spectacle (a la Guy Debord) of your visits by wearing a peculiarly Saffron attire (and wearing garlands) necessarily entails or implies, in the public sphere, that you are acting in favour of the saffronization of all the four pillars of democracy by somehow forgetting your basic sense of Constitutional Propriety.

Is this because you are forced by higher political rank-holders to do so, or else, there will be certain professional hazards or even fatal outcomes (We cannot forget Justice Loya!)⤡? Are you, a sensible intellectual, being blackmailed thus? If you are, we sympathetically understand. But even then, you will still remain open to the question: does political pressure make you forget your ordained duty to serve the Constitutional values? If that is the case, there can be no hope for the future of “justice” in India! Sigh…..!

The ideological/constitutional transgression suffered by you quite intentionally/deliberately was well-pointed out by the noted Historian Ramachandra Guha in his recent writing on this very event. We are fully subscribing Guha’s position on this affair:


Prof. Ramchandra Guha’s justified objections to the CJI’s Temple visits

What does this constitutional propriety or sensitiveness towards the foundational framework of the Indian Constitution consist in? Instead of quoting several portions of the Indian Constitution in our favour that defend the legitimate separation of Church and the state (or any machinery of the state), it would be sufficient to cite only one particular Article for the time being at the present juncture:

51A(h). It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.

We cannot help but notice the direct implications (or entailments) of your aforementioned acts at the present juncture of Indian socio-polity, which is stricken by the venomous effects of communal hatred guarded by the current ruling party of India. You might say that you went there as a private individual (or that you acted in your “personal capacity”), having nothing to do with the office that you presently hold.

If you say so, we would simply quote Brecht’s harsh words:

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”

This quote makes terms such as “apolitical”/”political neutral” vanish off into the air, where the stipulated personal becomes the social or the political, whereby:

“It is not consciousness of men (sic) that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”.

Moreover, you are an official highest representative of the Constitution of India, which has nothing to do with any particular religion’s raison d’être. It does not concern itself with such matters that deal with the realm of organized, institutionalized religion. The constitution is a byproduct of centuries of work done by social visionaries such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Derozio, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule, Bhagat Singh, Periyar, Gandhi, Ambedkar and so many significant others. They were all quite aware of the progressive ideals that inspired the writing of the Constitution in the first place, whereby the shackles of traditional dogmas/indoctrinations/superstitions/prejudices were supposed to be shattered by the agents of the Constitution. You have an agency when it comes to the “Law of the Land”, so why did you do this without even a sense of fundamental social commitment?

We do not know that whether the members of executive, legislature and judiciary are spending their own money to visit these Hindu temples or are they spending the taxpayers’ money? If the second option is true, it is to be condemned with rational prudence.

This makes us go back to the polemic over the Somnath temple issue between the then President Dr. Rajendra Prasad and the then Prime Minister Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru.

One particular portion from one of Pt. Nehru’s letters to Dr. Prasad during that time deserves special attention in this context:

“My dear Rajendra Babu, I confess that I do not like the idea of your associating yourself with a spectacular opening of the Somnath Temple. This is not merely visiting a temple, which can certainly be done by you or anyone else, but rather participating in a significant function which unfortunately has a number of implications.”

When Dr. Prasad constantly asked Pt. Nehru about the fact that he has visited temples before, then why cannot he now? To which, Panditji replied each time by foregrounding the Constitutional efficacy whereby any office-holder under the purview of the constitutional framework is bound to abide by the secular underpinning by not engaging in the public display (with the presence of the press doing photo and videography) of his religious affiliations.

The essential point of our disagreement derives from the same rational sentiment as cultivated by Nehru (who has now become a scapegoat by the ruling party in every case of default) . He was not opposed to individuals privately going to temples or viewing the aesthetics of the architecture, but to office-holders of a secular state participating in religious rituals that promote a certain form of religion is surely something to be strictly questioned.

(It is to be noted that PM Modi has actually misquoted Pt. Nehru in the last report, since Nehru did not oppose the creation/re-construction of Somnath temple from private funds, but he simply pointed out the constitutional obligations of a secular state’s dignitaries with regard to the handling of such situations).

As Guha has rightly pointed out, you have done this just a few weeks before the grandiose inauguration of the much disputed/controversial/problematic Ram Temple in Ayodhya. (We have not forgotten that you did not sign the Ram Mandir verdict and remained anonymous. Are you indifferent to this issue or are you simply afraid??) Now, the point is, your act is bound to be interpreted by the public domain (i.e., through the lens of the public sphere) as legitimizing the current regime’s overt/predominant religious extremism/majoritarianism for hiding market fundamentalism. In this way, you are subscribing the Hindu Rashtra and the Hindu Constitution as proposed by the Sangh Parivar, which is based on the essentially vulgar, toxically misogynist, casteist treatise: The Manusmrti, which was burnt down by the Father of the Indian Constitution. The public sphere cannot distinguish between Chandrachud as a person and Chandrachud as a Chief Justice– two fragmented identities!


The imagiNATION of an irredentist Akhaṇḍa Hindustāna (अखण्ड हिन्दुस्तान)

You have rationalized yourself in the Indian Express by saying that you have been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s “life and ideals”. However, Gandhi did not even visit a temple as such in his entire life, except once in the Menakshi temple in Madurai, that too, for promoting the equal rights of the Dalits to access such public spaces. Moreover, Gandhi was verily inspired by the likes of Sant Kabirdas, which made him engage himself in, as pertinently noted by Guha, inter-faith meetings held on open grounds, instead of “spectacular” theocratic structures embodying the show of polymorphous religious-political power-hierarchy.

As you have mentioned, that the “dhwaja” (sacred flag) of Hindu temples signify a “unifying force” seems to be way too ill-founded. Well, Hindu temples have been known for centuries for discriminating grossly against the so-called Dalits and women, which are widely known. The way Hindu temple priests (the higher rank-holders of the temple conglomerate) have treated Dalit persons and women clearly show how Hindu temples have historically stood for instruments of oppression and marginalization of the “other” voices. For these “othered” people, the temple structural complex represents a symbolized sense of domination, not of unity or social cohesion.


You have reversed the entire narrative and made it a part of the ideological state apparatus, which is conducive to the current ruling party’s exclusivist goals, instead of Gandhi’s (whom you mention, or rather, “use” to defend or rationalize your stand) ideal of non-violent inclusive tolerance based on the ideal of a totally different “Rama” (not the militant, war-mongering Rama as projected by the BJP and its associates of the Sangh⤡).

A system built on structural violence against the so-called “lower castes” and one that institutionalizes gendered stratification against women (the so-called “second sex”) is evidently a system that cannot run parallel to the core Constitutional values.

In this very context, the public-private debate crops up, which has been hinted on earlier.

This debate is largely a byproduct of the Enlightenment, which distinguished between the realm of public exercise of (un-)reason and the domain of introspective contemplation.

This has fueled the ethos of modern democracy, which has come to reaffirm this public-private dichotomy, clearly demarcating areas of public life and the areas of private (or personal; though the personal is also political, as previously noted) life. There are some things which are allowed and some which are disallowed in both these spheres for the smooth functioning of democracy.

It is no wonder that this sense of “democracy” that we have at present is closely aligned with the values of secularism. Secularization (a la Gouldner) as a process consolidated a republic of free-thinking, critical outlook, argumentation and intellectual engagement in general through the form of dialogue or rather polylogue (keeping in mind the Popperian paradox of tolerance VIEW HERE ⤡), without resorting to religious forms of thought-control. Religion should be kept merely within closed quarters, without gravely affecting the lives and conducts of other people/fellow-beings, thus upholding the very crux of Mill’s “Harm Principle”.

You cannot thus ignore the direct political implications of your act as an agent of the ethnographic Hindutvavadin’s camp, which you cannot simply repudiate by saying that you were “not aware” of such public exposure/interpretation of your said acts. It only seems absurd, since you are usually portrayed as a man of intellectual genius and a distinguished upbringing.

The following quote is from Ben Anderson, who critiqued the idea of nationalism. We are decontexualizing the quote as Anderson pointed out that one of the characteristic forms of “feeling shame” (he was taking cue from Durkheim in the context of Mechanical Solidarity), which we are also undergoing after seeing the state of Indian judiciary (if and only if, we are presupposing or subscribing the very notion of modular “nation-state”, which was even problematized by Rabindranath Tagore in his Nationalism lectures; he replicated the same sentiment in his novel Home and the World, lectures entitled Personality; it is to be noted that Tagore never translated the term “nation” in Bangla and kept it as it is, since it is borrowed and altered according to colonial inheritance in the hybrid and mimicked space of South-East Asian territory):

Your utilization of the “dhwaja” (sacred flag) metaphor to denote national unity has to be refuted thus.

We are still at a shock with regard to your peculiar (and ahistorical) interpretation of the Hindu temple flag as a symbol of unity and justice for all. No doubt, the metaphor, or otherwise, displacement of non-secular flag with secular justice system is a grand error on your part, if we keep in mind the Preamble of our Constitution along with the previously quoted Article 51A(h). Moreover, your use of the metaphor excludes the “other” religious cults, sects, units as well as organized theological practices. Therefore, the semion of the Hindu temple flag is utterly unconstitutional at its core. Thus, we, the agnostics or otherwise atheists, cannot help but quote Tagore in this context, the Red Oleanders (1925), where Tagore showed the semioclasm of the semion/signifier of the Flag. The hierarchy of the King and subjects was destroyed when the king himself broke his own flag by getting at the grassroots: 

NANDINI। For the last fight between you and me.

KING। But I can kill you in no time, this instant.

NANDINI। From that very instant that death of mine will go on killing you every single moment.

KING। Be brave, Nandini, trust me. Make me your comrade to-day.

NANDINI। What would you have me do?

KING। To fight against me, but with your hand in mine. That fight has already begun. There is my flag. First I break the Flagstaff, thus! Next it’s for you to tear its banner.

GUARDS।[rushing up] What are you doing, King? You dare break the Flagstaff, the holiest symbol of our divinity? The Flagstaff which has its one point piercing the heart of the earth and the other that of heaven! What a terrible sin, on the very day of the Flag-worship! Comrades, let us go and inform our Governors.

[Both Exit]

KING। A great deal of breaking remains to be done. You will come with me, Nandini?

NANDINI। I will.

[PHAGULAL comes in.]

PHAGLUAL। They won’t hear of letting Bishu off. I am afraid, they’ll Who is this? The King! Oh you wicked witch, conspiring with the King himself! O vile deceiver!

KING। What is the matter with you? What is that crowd out for?

PHAGULAL। To break the prison gate. We may lose our lives, but we shan’t fall back.

KING। Why should you fall back? I too am out for breaking. Behold the first sign: my broken Flagstaff.

Yours Hypothetically,

Thus, WE THE minority PEOPLE OF INDIA, atheists/agnostics/seculars

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