Supreme Court to consider revisiting ‘Hindutva’ definition case

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would expedite hearing on a pending petition seeking revisiting the court’s earlier definition of ‘Hindutva’ as a way of life and hear arguments for and against the plea from certain quarters to disqualify candidates if they made use of ‘Hindutva’ to seek votes.
A bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde said it would hear the petition after completion of arguments in the faith versus fundamental rights case arising from pleas seeking review of the SC’s judgment striking down the religious custom banning entry of women in the 10-50 year age group into Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in Kerala.
CJI Bobde said the nine-judge bench led by him, and comprising Justices R Banumathi, Ashok Bhushan, L Nageswara Rao, Mohan M Shantanagoudar, S Abdul Nazeer, R Subhash Reddy, B R Gavai and Surya Kant, would resume hearing the Sabarimala case on a day-to-day basis from March 16. The hearing was derailed because one of the judges was down with swine flu.
In the case relating to Abhiram Singh, pending since 1992, senior advocate Arvind Datar said several candidates had been acquitted in the electoral malpractices case relating to the 1990 Maharashtra assembly polls. “But my client Abhiram Singh is stuck with the case as the petition was referred to a three-judge bench, then to a five-judge bench and finally to a seven-judge bench which decided to expand the scope and ambit of disqualification of a candidate for seeking votes by appealing to religion, race, caste, community or language of his own, his rival candidates or electors,” he said.
When Datar sought early hearing on Abhiram Singh’s petition, CJI Bobde said the opposite side wanted the court to revisit the definition of ‘Hindutva’. “Their prayer is to offset the ‘Hindutva’ judgment. It will take time as long arguments are expected on the issue. We will try to hear this petition after completing hearing in the Sabarimala case,” he said.
On December 11, 1995, in the Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo case, SC had ruled that mere use of the words ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hinduism’ in an election speech would not attract the rigour of disqualification under Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act. “Mere use of the word ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hinduism' or mention of any other religion in an election speech does not bring it within the net of sub-section (3) and/or sub-section (3A) of Section 123, unless the further elements indicated are also present in that speech,” the SC had said.
“No precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms ‘Hindu', ‘Hindutva' and ‘Hinduism', and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage. It is also indicated that the term ‘Hindutva' is related more to the way of life of the people in the subcontinent,” the court held.
The court had said, “It is difficult to appreciate how in the face of these decisions, the term ‘Hindutva' or ‘Hinduism' per se, in the abstract, can be assumed to mean and be equated with narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry, or be construed to fall within the prohibition in sub-sections (3) and/or (3A) of Section 123,” it had said.