BackWhy diversity can’t be used in defence of obsolete ways
Uniform laws make sense as there are diverse ways of being unfair and only one broad way of being fair
PremiumIs there only one way to be good? This is the question of the season, as politicians preparing for general elections next year measure the interest of Hindu society in reforming other people, a process that is not without a bit of torment.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed a desire to end or dilute personal laws that let religious traditions govern important aspects of domestic life, like the exclusivity of marriage, divorce and inheritance, generally favouring men. Over the decades, Hindu reformation has ensured that most Hindus enjoy or endure modern laws that deem men and women equal. They have agreed to consider caste discrimination illegal, unless it is used to favour ‘lower castes’, and Hindu men have conceded vast ground to Hindu women. But Indians of other faiths, especially Muslims, have markedly different rules for marriage, divorce and inheritance. A Muslim man can take four wives, negotiate a favourable alimony, divorce easily and expect to inherit a disproportionate share of property. This has for long annoyed Hindu men. Muslim women would have never guessed so many Hindus wish them well. Bringing Muslims into the fold of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) has for long been the political desire of an unknowable proportion of Hindus. But it involves the inconvenience of forcing hundreds of tribes to abide by the same, which has little emotional resonance among the majority but is needed for the spectacle of national reformation.
Opposition to a UCC has two faces—one that is emotional and the other that is esoteric. The primary defence of the clergy and other conservatives who benefit from existing personal laws is that the influence of religion in their domestic life is the core of their religious identity and that in any case they have done a bit of internal reform. Also, some tribes, whose ways of life are protected by the Constitution, have threatened revolt if these are subsumed by a reformation. For instance, among Khasi people, family inheritance goes to the youngest daughter. How can modernity better this; so why change? The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the primary pressure group of Hindus, too has in the recent past objected to proposals that alter some ways of life, like the government’s bid to raise the minimum age for women to marry to 21 from 18. Should modernity interfere so much with society, it wondered.
The more esoteric argument against a UCC comes from people who are not religious or traditional, but who lament the loss of something called diversity. An odd thing about worshippers of diversity is that they are usually a monoculture themselves. That is the point they miss.
It is in the nature of public morality and reformation to insist that it is common to all, that there is only one way to be right, to be just. What is diversity, then? Just a fancy dress parade of costumes and cute marriage functions and weird food? I think it is a bit more than that.
Language, climate and culture do influence how people think, and how people think matters. People who do not have eight words for shame think differently from people who speak in more vivid languages, and hot-climate philosophers are different from cold-climate philosophers, a matter for another day. So diversity is not trivial. But when it comes to the reformation of a society, that process where some things that were created to favour some people in another time are altered for fairness, there is not much scope for diversity. Across the world and across ages, human beings have demonstrated that there are diverse ways of being unfair and only one way of being fair. This is why morality is a form of clarity. So, by its basic nature, a reformation has to be ‘uniform’. The argument that diversity must be preserved because it is ancient heritage, and preservation is a good thing, is farcical.
People are and will be inescapably diverse—in appearance, in speech and in what they like to eat and how they think—but what modern India is trying to say through its UCC campaign is that in some important matters of domestic life, everyone will have to leave the antiquity that created their traditions and step into modernity, which is the name of a time that has won a cultural war.
Actually, all personal laws were, at one time, the uniform code of the victorious who replaced diverse tribal customs with mainstream religious edicts. The first imposition of Sharia law, for instance, was done by a Muslim elite which abolished the cultural practices of tribes that had adopted Islam. Hinduism and Christianity did the same.
Critics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party point out that the problem with a UCC is that the party’s intention is not noble. Amartya Sen said a few days ago, “…There is definitely some connection between the urgency to implement the UCC and paving the way for the far-fetched idea of Hindu Rashtra."
But then, that is how society reforms. It is naïve to believe that societies become better because people want to suddenly become better, or slowly for that matter. A society changes because parents love their children, children don’t want to be their parents, and one community has a grouse against another and wishes to torment it on moral grounds. Modern democracy itself originated partly in the disenchantment of Britain’s second rung of society, people who sought to control the monarchy by forcing it to accept a set of moral undertakings.
After love, it is grouse that makes the world a better place.
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