Muslim Woman Denied Housing: Justice Bhuyan Highlights Gap Between Constitutional Values and Reality

While the Constitutional has set a benchmark, 'the morality we practice at home or at the community level is often at variance with what the Constitution expects us to practice”.

The Wire Staff

While the Constitutional has set a benchmark, 'the morality we practice at home or at the community level is often at variance with what the Constitution expects us to practice”.

muslim woman denied housing justice bhuyan highlights gap between constitutional values and reality

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan. Photo: sci.gov.in.

New Delhi: Speaking at a seminar in Hyderabad recently, Supreme Court judge Justice Ujjal Bhuyan pointed out how social realities are often at odds with constitutional values. It is the duty of courts, he added, to decide cases based on constitutional values and not popular public opinion, Bar and Bench reported.

Justice Bhuyan was delivering a lecture on 'Constitutional Morality and Role of District Judiciary' at a seminar organised by the Telangana Judges Association and the Telangana State Judicial Academy.

To highlight the gap between prevalent realities and the ideals enshrined in India's Constitution, Justice Bhuyan gave the example of his daughter's friend, who was denied rental accommodation in Delhi because she's a Muslim. “She approached a landlady who was running a working women’s hostel in her building in South Delhi. The landlady asked her as to what her name was. When she told her name, which was quite ambivalent, the landlady queried further and asked her about her surname and when she said that, it revealed her Muslim identity. The landlady then told her quite bluntly that accommodation was not available and that she could search for some other place,” he said.

While the Constitutional has set a benchmark, "the morality we practice at home or at the community level is often at variance with what the Constitution expects us to practice”, he said, according to Deccan Herald.

He gave another example from Odisha on how this happens, where parents of schoolchildren object to the midday meal being cooked by a Dalit woman. "The government was having a programme of mid-day meal in schools which has encouraged students particularly in the rural areas to go to school and avail basic education. In this context, the government has employed several women, mostly from anganwadi centres, for cooking the mid-day meal. A hue and cry was raised by some of the parents, that too quite aggressively, that their children would not consume food prepared by Dalit women," Justice Bhuyan said.

These examples, he said, are not exceptions: “The above two are just random examples, just the tip of the iceberg revealing how deep the societal faultlines are. In fact, this is a mirror to us showing how distant we still are from the benchmark of constitutional morality even after seventy five years into our republic.”

Highlighting a case where the courts made clear that popular morality was not and could not be equated with constitutional morality, Justice Bhuyan brought up the Delhi high court’s decision in Naz Foundation vs Union of India and its endorsement by a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in Navtej Singh Johar. “In our scheme of things, constitutional morality must outweigh the argument of public morality, even if it be the majoritarian view. For a constitutional court, it is the constitutionality of the issue before it which is relevant and not the dominant or popular view.”

This article went live on February twenty-fourth, two thousand twenty six, at twenty-seven minutes past two in the afternoon.

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