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ELDERLY folks in Muslim families are usually adept at interpreting the istekhara, a way of gleaning divine hints from religious texts to give counsel on critical decisions.
A rough Marathi equivalent, which Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, India’s outgoing chief justice, would be familiar with is: “Devi ni kaul dila.” (The deity has given her verdict for or against something.) Should one travel to their village on a given day? Should this girl marry that boy? The istekhara and the kaul guide decisions.
‘Faal’ is a Persian way of reading verses usually from Hafez Shirazi that guide crucial decisions. Anarkali, the ill-fated heroine in the movie Mughal-i-Azam, was doomed by a quote from Hafez that suggested her heart would be stolen by a handsome Mughal prince. The faal led to tragedy. A widely favoured method of fortune-telling and decision-making, unhinged from science, is tarot cards. In village melas and urban fairs, a trained parrot is deployed to pull a card from a stack that advises the next steps to the person who has paid a grand fee for the revelation. Suppose a time comes when judges start consulting the parrot about a verdict they are writing. Tasseography, or reading tea leaves, is another way of divining one’s choices.
India’s constitution shuns the role of religion or obscurantism in matters of state. In fact, it specifically bats for the scientific spirit as the best panacea for the country. Judges, regardless of their beliefs or religious stripes, are required to make rulings based on material facts, and not give quarter to a spiritual or temporal entity other than the constitution. The secular constitution framed under the stewardship of a Dalit legend is often called the Bible and Geeta of India’s democracy.
God, however, is often invoked with politico-spiritual purpose in secular democracies.
“In God we trust” is the American motto, which is matched by the state-sponsored British petition to God to protect their king or queen as the occasion may warrant. Hindu prime minister Rishi Sunak read from the Bible as part of the ritual during the anointment of King Charles. But it’s hard to recall a court ruling in these countries — including by the eight Jewish justices that the US supreme court has had — in which a judgment invoked God as witness or as inspiration.
Judges, regardless of their beliefs, are required to make rulings based on material facts.
It came as a shock, therefore, when the Harvard-educated chief justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud revealed that he had invoked his deity’s help to decide a case that would cause global ripples. And that’s how he wrote the landmark and hugely controversial Ayodhya judgment, we were told.
The chief justice recently revealed during a puja that he was a practising Hindu, which would have been fine but only by a stretch. Judges are by convention expected to be sequestered from public view. Many do not even go to restaurants with their families. Implicitly, they are also advised to keep their private beliefs private.
A large section of Indians watched with bewilderment when the chief justice of India had Prime Minister Narendra Modi over during a Ganapati puja at his home last month. The event saw the head of the Indian government performing Hindu rituals at the home of the apex court’s chief judge before TV cameras. We have known that Mr Modi never shies away from harnessing religion to invigorate his politics. It should have been a greater incentive for Justice Chandrachud to keep the event private.
The Ayodhya verdict, written with the guidance of the deity, as Justice Chandrachud told us, abandoned the long-accepted judicial dictum that religious matters are non-justiciable. That’s how the Ayodhya case was hitherto treated by experienced judges as a land dispute bereft of claims dipped in religious beliefs. The verdict in which Justice Chandrachud was on the bench eventually gave a Hindu deity a chunk of the disputed land on which the mosque stood until its destruction in 1992. The judges led by then chief justice Ranjan Gogoi (who was made a Rajya Sabha MP soon thereafter) handed the disputed land to Hindutva activists who supported the demolition of the mosque, which the same court had described as criminal.
To his credit, Justice Chandrachud did raise hopes of offering a reprieve from a series of troubling verdicts from the apex court before him. His liberal views on gay relationships made him a hero with the urban middle classes. Then came his celebrated lines. “We must send a message today to the high courts as well. Please exercise your jurisdiction to uphold personal liberty.” The remarks came from Justice Chandrachud who was on a bench that overturned the Bombay High Court’s decision denying bail to a journalist in a suicide abetment case. A divisive character Arnab Goswami is, but one still believed that his bail presaged a precedent for the needier. It was a poor guess.
Too many prisoners of conscience languished in jails without trial during Justice Chandrachud’s watch as supreme court judge and as India’s chief justice, steadfast dissenter and student leader Umar Khalid among them. G.N. Saibaba, the admired 57-year-old almost fully paralysed former teacher of English literature at the Delhi University died recently after a failed gallbladder surgery. He told me days before his death how surprised he was to come out alive from prison in March. Saibaba was convicted of Maoist links in 2017 and acquitted in 2024. He would have been free in 2023 and got medical treatment sooner. But the supreme court when Justice Chandrachud was the master of the roster stalled his acquittal for a year.
The 84-year-old Catholic priest Stan Swamy, a revered tribal rights activist accused of terrorism, died in a Mumbai prison for want of medical care in 2021. Prison officers denied ailing Swamy’s request for a straw to sip water with. There were good tidings too during Chandrachud’s tenure as chief justice. A Mumbai court did sanction the straw to the dying priest.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2024
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