What’s Behind BJP's Shift over Divorce, Food and Inheritance Laws?
"The joint family and indissoluble marriage have been the basis of Hindu society. Laws that alter this basis will ultimately lead to the disintegration of society. The Jan Sangh will, therefore, repeal the Hindu Marriage and Hindu Succession Acts.” This is from the party’s manifesto of 1957. The Jan Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party's opposition to divorce and its championing of joint families was accompanied then by an attack against the rights of women.
In his draft legislation in the early 1950s, Dr B. R. Ambedkar had proposed modest changes to Hindu personal law, especially on the question of inheritance for women. He identified the two main sources of traditional Hindu civil law and found them to be most backward and unfair for women. In its 1951 manifesto, the Jan Sangh opposed this proposal on the one count, saying some Hindus still lived as a joint family above but for some. Then in 1957, the once acceptable value, a society in which there was not room for individualism and divorce, became “Rootless individualism” and an excuse was cited, it altered.
This is one of the many issues to deny the idea of eternal marriage. However, the material world was not letting go: widowed mothers and widowed daughters-in-law inherit property. This position changed over time, but there is no explanation why the party changed its position on these positions. As divorce became less rare in Indian society and as urban, upper caste, middle-class families (the BJP’s base) became more nuclear, the pledged loyalty to joint families eroded.
As we have seen in the earlier column, looking at a similar abandoning by the Jan Sangh/BJP of its socialist policies on the economy, this is not necessarily a problem. All parties have the right to alter and shift and turn, but when a position is laid out, then it is retreat and concealment taking up of a stand and abandoning it, the opposed should also be laid out and explained. This, the RSS-linked political force has chosen not to do.
An uneasiness with how to handle caste is also reflected in the BJP’s current policy.
The Jan Sangh wanted to remove caste and untouchability in Hindu society by liquidating untouchability and caste. But it did not show how this was to be done. It sought the end of job and education reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes but went only by putting it off and refusing to acknowledge the possibility that the inequality existed and needed to be fixed. This is another example of where the BJP moved from the 1950s. On the language issue, too, the Jan Sangh insisted that India should have one national language and that all regional languages should be made subservient to Hindi. The Constituent Assembly had debated the question of national language for a long time and then had left it to individual states to determine their own official languages and recognise all local languages, and especially Hindi. This is where the home minister Amit Shah spoke about recently. After an uproar, the BJP forced media outlets to delete his video, likely because it offended their middle-class base.
Another place the Jan Sangh showed itself to be a party of the urban middle class was in agriculture. The first point on agriculture of its first manifesto calls for “a country-wide campaign to educate and enthuse the cultivator about the necessity of harder work for more production.” Today it would take a brave BJP minister to accuse India’s farmers of not working hard enough, and the surrender on the farm bills shows that the party continues to be removed from the way the Indian farmer thinks.
On foreign affairs, a subset on which the BJP has also abandoned its ideological core: the Jan Sangh wanted India to be militarily aggressive in the world and India’s place in it, besides saying that India should have nuclear weapons. It wanted India to be given a place in the UN Security Council, but then no reference was made to how this would be done. It said that India should not follow the so-called idealist path of Jawaharlal Nehru for losing the war to China. The 1972 manifesto made no reference to the war in Bangladesh, which had been created out of Pakistan only weeks earlier. Its idea of defence policy came through such demands as compulsory military training for all boys and girls, removal of foreign influence, banning muzla-sodha (meat of slaughtered cows), and strengthening the National Cadet Corps.
The Jan Sangh’s foreign relations stood together with the US and with the countries that used these weapons. It had no problem criticising the Indian government on foreign soil.
Perhaps none of this is an evidence of raising ideology, as the party has become pragmatic. Perhaps the sense is that the BJP is the largest electoral machine and focused more on what the middle class wanted and cared for: anti-corruption. That’s important. But when all said and done, the way this is dealt with has continued to shape the party. It is now focused on social issues, but as we have seen with its own positions on issues of social policy and economic and foreign policy, these are subject to change. In the earlier years, it also had more power in the states where its power was rooted: Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan. In the north it was a rural party. The 1992 manifesto made no reference to the time it emerged from a Pakistan–Portuguese alliance. These statements made no reference to China but opened with an admonition against Jawaharlal Nehru for losing the war to China.
Aakar Patel is the chair of Amnesty International India. Twitter: @aakar_patel
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