Political News: ‘Majority’, ‘Minority’ Appellations Not Needed As All Have Equal Rights In India: Kerala Guv Arif Mohammad Khan

“Indian civilisation has never been defined by religion, all other civilisations were defined either by religion, mostly by religion, and also before that by race and language,” he argued and quoted a few shlokas to back his claim. On a question of whether Indian politics has moved from resorting to minority appeasement to majoritarianism in the last few decades, Khan claimed the word ‘Hindu’ is not used in any of our scriptures.

“We were ruled for a long period of time by people who are foreigners, and I do not mean in a negative sense, but in a sense that they were not familiar with Indian ethos and philosophy and viewpoints. “The thousands of years old Indian civilisation, don’t know when this journey began, but it was never defined by religious faith,” he said. “Their (foreign rulers’) own attitude was that this civilisation, its background was ‘defined by religion’. “Therefore, they have to use a word which symbolised, and used more in the sense of faith, so they used it,” he claimed.

But Indian thought leaders were never satisfied with that appellation, he asserted. “That is why in the Constituent Assembly, the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, they were included in the definition of Hinduism, making it amply clear that the term ‘Hindu’ does not mean uniformity of belief, or uniformity of practices in the matters of religion. Therefore, the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ term is nothing,” Khan said.

“It is not only our Constitution that gives equal rights to people, but more than that our cultural heritage, the Indian civilisation, has no concept of discrimination on the basis of religion, therefore to link the two, I find it preposterous,” he said. Minority rights are needed in countries that are theocracies because there is a ceiling on growth and citizens are not treated equally, Khan argued.

“In India, there has never been a theocracy, so, when you say ‘Hindu Rashtra’, you are equating it with a Muslim theocracy or Christian theocracy, which have existed in the past, and somewhere these are still existing,” he said. Khan also said that any citizen of India who wears a “badge of identity” other than that of Indian identity will “have a problem”. And, those who wear a badge of Indian identity may face a problem, but constitutionally and legally speaking, there is no such issue.