UNIFORM CIVIL CODE FOR THE HINDUS? REALLY SO?

UNIFORM CIVIL CODE FOR THE HINDUS? REALLY SO? Heterogeneity of the Hindu Property Laws Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay Rupa Sanyal Akhar Bandyopadhyay It is found that under the unofficial Hindutvavādins’ regime in India, the ruling party is striving for “Uniform Civil Code” for all the citizens of the ‘secular’ Indian nation-state. Therefore, they are trying to reform non-Hindu ‘Muslim Laws’ in general, and especially they have already altered some parts of the Islamic divorce system. However, they do not look into their own inconsistent laws that also affect the collection of revenue through income tax. Strikingly enough, as mentioned in this paper-letter, the Hindu property distribution system, instead of being a homogeneous, composite whole, tend to be applied differently across different states. Principally, the Mitākṣarā, Dāyabhāga and Marumakkattayam law-schools of inheritance reveal the complicated, localized diversity within the imagined construct called “Hinduism”. The conflict between religious and constitutional law is also pertinently addressed through the paper-letter. The problems centering the notion of a “Hindu United Family” (HUF) are also mentioned. All the abusive words used in the discursive formation of this letter represent the discriminatory, exclusivist mindset of the militant Hindutvavādin groups. Therefore, the senders of this inherently sarcastic (obviously for escaping the onslaught of the Saffron fascists) letter to the President of India are claiming for an impossible set of tasks that itself defeats the homogenization agenda of the Hindutvavādins and the Sangh Parivār. The authors of this letter have adopted deconstructive strategy to dismantle the coercive attempts to singularize the plurality of the South East Asian cultural milieu. To The Honourable President, Republic of India, Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi- 110004 Sub: A Plea from a Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) to enforce a (a) Uniform Property Distribution System; (b) Uniform Civil Code for all the insecure Hindus of India and the (c) abolition of the Special Marriage Act Respected Ācārya, We, the adherents of the Saṅgh Parivār ideology and as the appellants for a Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), are proud enough to stand for a homogenized, pasteurized, standardized, essentialist and uncontaminated Hindu raṣṭra of Bhāratvarṣa following our Guruji’s (Sri M.S. Golwalkar) imperative that we should nullify territorial nationalism, which is the worst by-product of western modernity. However, it is a matter of regret that the localized or territorial distribution of property rights amongst the Hindus is an evident impediment in our religious war or crusade, which is hindering the attainment of our goal of a culturally unified, exclusivist mono-religious nation-state, though that is also a derivative of western imagination. The laws that govern the rules of inheritance and succession amongst us, the Hindus, are complicated to an unimaginable extent. At present, in order to properly comprehend or analyze these laws, one has to cut through “a bewildering maze of rules” ⤡ (p. 78), as Indian sociologist S. C. Dube observes, which have been prescribed through our glorious sacred texts, religious codes, modern legislative measures as well as customary norms and practices. On the one hand, there exists a uniform criminal law under the purview of the Indian democracy, yet, on the other hand, the territory of family or kinship is still governed largely by the might of personal law, which varies greatly from one territory to another, from one religion to another. It is against Guruji Golwalkar’s dream of building a Hindu Bharat through cultural nationalism. Broadly speaking, the Hindu property rights (including the nāstika Buddhists, nāstika Jains and Sikhs) are geographically distributed across the country into three main types: the Mitākṣarā, Dāyabhāga and Marumakkattayam law-schools. The Mitākṣarā law is mostly prevalent in the northern, central, western and southern parts of the country, making it the most commonly followed rule of reckoning descent. On the other hand, the Dāyabhāga law-school is mainly followed by the Hindus of Bengal, eastern Bihar, certain parts of Orissa and Assam as well. Thirdly, the Marumakkattayam law only applies to some of the matrilineal communities of southern India. Under the Mitākṣarā School, the male child acquires the rights to ancestral property of his joint family right at the moment of his birth. In legal terms, he becomes a “coparcener” or “co-owner” of the existing ancestral property at birth. All the members of the joint family enjoy the coparcenary rights even during the patriarch father’s lifetime. Under the Dāyabhāga School, this notion of coparcenary in terms of “inherent rights” of the male child in the ancestral property is absent. He can only acquire the property after the event of his patriarch father’s death, and not during the latter’s lifetime. In case of dāyabhāga, there are also differences of opinions among the pundits: Raghunandana, Nula Panchānana and Devivar Ghaṭaka. How could we tackle so much heterogeneity among the Hindus? How could we meet Guruji’s dream concept of cultural nationalism? It has been alleged by the bloody secular sociologists and Pakistan-aided historians that under both the above systems, female family-members are deprived of their equal and absolute property rights besides the male members. Her proprietary rights are only minimal and limited to her specific “life-interest” without ensuring full ownership in any manner. According to these phoren-funded scholars, both the above systems adhere to the patrilineal, patrilocal mode of inheritance and succession, which further reaffirm and reinforce the ruling misogynist, patriarchal or androcentric hegemony. This is also against the Guruji’s claim that, when he was opposing the Hindu Law of Succession (which was the first though incomplete, step towards giving Hindu women equal rights to men) on the grounds that it was regressive, “[g]ranting of rights to women would cause great psychological upheaval ‘to men and "lead to mental disease and distress. The result would be a race of effeminate men. Similarly, the Sangh opposed the ⤡ Excerpts from Bunch of Thoughts, September 16, 2016 © Rajiv Gandhi Institute For Contemporary Studies. The Marumakkattayam law enables property inheritance along the female line in a few matrilineal, indigenous communities of south India, providing shares of property to both the daughters and sons of the family. These indigenous people have continued to practice this customary norm of theirs. The Aliyasantana law is also practiced by the Tuluva matrilineal tribe in Karnataka, south India. The latter is quite similar in structural terms to the Marumakkattayam School. Urban Naxal anti-nationals object at this point. They ask: can these tribes be said to be a part of the construct of a so-called “Hindu society”? This objection is absolutely pointless. Each and every person living in this ancient and glorious land of the Āryas (this holy land of Hindu-raṣṭra, according to Sri Golwalkar, not only includes the present-day India, but also Afghanistan, Iran, Myanmar, Singapore and Sri Lanka) is indispensably, undoubtedly, unquestionably a “Hindu”, whatever be his/her acquired, proclaimed or surface-level identity. This is what our supreme sanghchalak has emphasized, too⤡! In 1956, the Hindu Succession Act as well as its consequent amendment (2005) ⤡, during the Congress regime, legally and formally abolished these three prominent systems, the Mitākṣarā, Dāyabhāga and Marumakkattayam law-schools. It ensured the equal right of the women-family members alongside the men. The legal heirs of a man sharing equal rights under this act are his widow, mother, son, daughter, widow of a pre-deceased son as well as sons/daughters of predeceased sons and daughters. Women possess the right to absolute ownership of property, which is not limited or narrowed-down to cover merely their life-interests. We are condemning such an amendment as it goes against our scriptures. Yet, the above act in actuality failed to achieve its target, i.e., uniformity did not come about in Hindu society’s material conditions in terms of its multifarious property distribution schemes. Hindu Property Rights Mitākṣarā Dāyabhāga Marumakkattayam School School School Nula Panchānan School Raghoonandan School Devivar Ghaṭaka School Aliyasantana or Aliyakattu School DISTRIBUTION OF THE AFOREMENTIONED LAWS IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF INDIA: Considering the above pluralistic scenario within the Hindus, it becomes pretty difficult for us to achieve our divinely-ordained goal for homogenized Hindu Raṣṭra due to this immanent, irreconcilable heterogeneity. If this exceedingly diverse state of affairs continues to exist, we, the members of Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), would not ever be able to collectively feel our religious, mechanical solidarity with other Hindu-brothers (not sisters) and enjoin in our collective crusade against the traitors of our ancient land, i.e., the invaders or foreigners, viz., the Muslims, Christians and the bloody communists. This lack of fraternal consensus or ‘brother’-hood among us, the fellow Hindus, was what anti-national Urban Naxal Ambedkar once pointed out in his much-celebrated book: “There is an utter lack among the Hindus of what the sociologists call "consciousness of kind." There is no Hindu consciousness of kind. In every Hindu the consciousness that exists is the consciousness of his caste. That is the reason why the Hindus cannot be said to form a society or a nation.” (Annihilation of Caste, Section 6 ⤡) Although Dr. Ambedkar talked specifically on the issue of the so-called “caste rigidity”, if there is any, in our holy “Hindu society” (there is no such thing for that deśdrohi Ambedkar!), still the above quote makes sense when one takes into consideration the regional variations in property rights under the purview of the great Hindu religion. More than two hundred years ago, an anti-national, anti-Hindu, precursor of the urban Naxals, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, brought up this very issue before our venerable, revered, esteemed British colonial prabhus or masters. Raja highlighted the “terrible plight” (was there any??) of the Hindu widows, focusing especially on the Dāyabhāga School of patrilineal descent in the state of Bengal, which snatches away the property rights of women and makes them dependent upon the male property-owners. Raja remarked that such a system of property distribution leaves only three “either/or” options to the widows: either to sell themselves as prostitutes, or be lifetime slaves to the male authority, or ascend the funeral pyre of her husband to become the “sati” (Cf. “Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females”, 1822; “The Rights of Hindoos over Ancestral Property”, 1830). In all these writings, Raja showed the contradictions among the various śāstras, viz. Manusmṛti, Yājñavalkyasmṛti etc. and thus had profaned our ancient scriptures. I cannot understand what exactly the problem of Raja with this system is! Isn’t it natural to handover the ancestral property only to the male members of the family? It would be our kind and humble request to you Ācārya, the current guardian and saviour of our Hindu society, to kindly look into this grave matter and arrange for a) A uniform property distribution system commonly applicable to all Hindus following our holy scriptures across the Indian subcontinent in order to ease the working of our programme for a homogenized, pasteurized, standardized, essentialist and uncontaminated non-territorial Hindu raṣṭra. We do not want any disparity amongst our fellow ‘brethren’ (not sisters), i.e., no conflicts arising from the current heterogeneous, pluralistic admixture, as noted above. b) Thus, the dire need of the hour is the enforcement of a “Uniform Civil Code” for the Hindus, which can at once do away with all these stark territorial variations. c) The atheistic, secularistic, anti-dhārmika, “Special Marriage Act” (1954), giving full scope to the non-Hindus, non-believers from all types and kinds of communities to establish marriage bonds among themselves irrespective of the their respective caste and religious affiliations, is a sheer antithesis and insult to our Hindu tradition of varṇāśrama dharma that restricts inter-caste marriages and maintains the pristine nature of the divinely-destined caste hierarchy. It also violates our pure Aryan racial supremacy since it encourages the dangerous synthesis of different genes or races. This cannot take place as long as we, the Hindus, inhabit this country as its sole proprietor. Therefore, our third request is to abolish this Special Marriage Act and declare the Hindu Marriage Act as the sole means to solemnize all marriages within the Indian subcontinent. In tune with the previous affirmation of our sarsanghchalak, all the other religious communities belonging to India (the invaders, traitors, phoren infesting bugs and “the crops of two-legged animals” [as proclaimed by the great Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Sri Yogi Adityanath] ⤡, viz., Muslims, Christians, Parsis/Zoroastrians and Jews) must either convert themselves to the Hindu religion or be ready to face our majoritarian onslaught (pestilential liberal Alexis de Tocqueville designated this attitude as the “tyranny of the majority”). The Hindu Marriage Act in its present form includes the Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs within its scope as well as the various sects or cults within Hinduism such as the Virashaivas, the Lingayats or the followers of the Brahmo, Prarthana or Arya Samaj. Reinstating this Hindu Marriage Act will ensure the survival of the Hindu Undivided Families like us as well. I would request you sir, as the esteemed judge of our “internal matters”, to not listen to the dictates of the Law Commission, which once problematized the HUF PAN Card, saying that the ever-increasing presence of a large number of such families is hindering revenue-collection. Law Commission proposes doing away with concept of Hindu Undivided Family VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on September 1, 2018) ©Business Standard Tax saving tool HUF may cease to exist: Law Commission proposes to abolish it. VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on September 19, 2018) ©Economic Times We, the Hindus of India, are within a life-or-death situation at the present socio-political juncture. Still, we are blessed enough by the grace of the almighty iśvara (saguṇa Brahman who can be worshipped and prayed to, not the intangible, disembodied, abstract nirguṇa Brahman) to have a President, a Prime Minister and a party, who do care only for our rights, needs and aspirations. Our fight is against all odds that keep us away from establishing a cultural nationalist dharmocracy ruled by the godly, inviolable dictates of the Manusmṛti, in place of this current decadent Western form of pluralistic, tolerant Democracy, which bases itself upon the illogical notion of civic or territorial nationalism. In achieving this target, we derive inspiration from our revered path-shower, Guruji M.S. Golwalkar. Yours Obediently, Dr. Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay Mrs. Rupa Bandyopadhyay Mr. Akhar Bandyopadhyay COPY TO: 1. The Honourable Prime Minister, Government of India 2. The Honourable Minister of Home Affairs, Government of India 3. The Honourable Chief Minister, Government of Uttar Pradesh 4. Dr. Mohan Bhagwat, Sarsanghchalak, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 5. The Honourable President, Bharatiya Janata Party बहुजनहहताय बहुजनसख ु ाय च॥ (“For the happiness of the many, for the welfare of the many”)