Ranjona Banerji: A step in the 'right' direction

Since Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh speaks to a large community apparently he has power and jurisdiction over his women devotees and that includes rape PicAFPStating that the Supreme Court judgment making privacy a fundamental right was a mistake a wellknown rightwing commentator explained to those of us cursed with lower levels of understanding how giving rights to the individual was against the Indian concepts of family community society and faith This idea of the upstart individual is a Western notion which presumably has no place in traditional IndiaTo be fair I am going to assume that the said commentator was only trying to defend the Government of India which had argued against privacy being a fundamental right And to give that argument validity why not throw in a bit of pop sociology Of course to take his line of thought further the Supreme Court is a western concept so is democracy so is the Constitution so is writing in English So perhaps we need to discard all of them and genuflect at the feudal medieval court of Emperor Narendra ModiHowever as far as I am concerned this is the greatest judgment made in recent or even distant memory A full ninejudge bench of the highest court in the land unanimously mdash in six lucid erudite voices mdash gave Indian citizens the right to be free to control their own lives Many of these rights question the tyranny of community and society and family and faith They allow the individual to eat dress think love the way he or she wantsA few hundred years ago your family and community wanted you to be burnt alive on your husbands funeral pyre Luckily some Western notion of murder made that practice illegal Ironically those rightwing Hindutva proponents applauding the Supreme Court judgment making instant divorce illegal in India are not weeping about the loss of the power of family community and faith when it comes to Muslim women Instead they applaud the newfound individual rights of Muslim women mdash as they should How hypocritical or how Western or bothYou see the same bogus argument was made by those who support Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh boss of the Dera Sacha Sauda now convicted on charge of rape Because Singh speaks to a large community he has power and jurisdiction over his women devotees and that includes rape Further the violence unleashed by his supporters is also excusable because a massive group of people believed in him Luckily some courts in India do not buy the logic that the sentiment of a community is more important than law or indeed than women being rapedThe rightwing commentariat must also oppose individual rights because they must support the government in power Therefore even if they hated the Aadhaar scheme when the UPA government introduced it mdash as Modi did when he was the chief minister of Gujarat mdash they must now support it The UPA left several loopholes as far as privacy and Aadhaar went but they did not make it mandatory The Modi government made it mandatory in many insidious ways even as various Supreme Court pronouncements reiterated that enrolment in the Unique Identification Scheme was voluntaryThis outright defiance of the highest court of the land was presumably a show of strength against the Western notion of justice Interestingly the Modi governments track record on Aadhaar goes directly against its election promise of minimum government maximum governanceIt is the Supreme Court of India that has given us a chance to breathe through maximum government control In todays India who we love what we eat what we drink and what we wear have all been under attack by a socially conservative government trying to impose the collective view of its religious community on all of us This Supreme Court judgment will have a bearing on laws on beef consumption on prohibition on sexual choice and interfaith marriages as well as on data privacy and government snoopingAll of these individual choices have over the years in India been attacked and never more so than under the current dispensation The brave people who fought against the government and for the right to privacy have done us an incalculable service and we owe them our gratitude To live in a democracy is not just about the right to vote It is about the right to be It is about freedom of thought and expression It is about the right to choose Thank you for that against all the oddsRanjona Banerji is a senior journalist You can follow her on Twitter ranjona Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycom