Editorial, "Communal Cauldron', in the 15-31 March 2010 Martyrs Memorial special issue of LAW ANIMATED WORLD

The Communal Cauldron

seems to be ceaselessly seething in this subcontinent, even after the bloodcurdling partition of 1947 along religious lines and the subsequent adoption of a secular democratic constitutional framework in the major part of it. If the two nation theory has proved to be basically flawed and foul with the passage of time, neither the one nation theory works, even concerning the major part. The minor parts are still far from their respective one-nation ideals and the western unit is in real danger of break up due to its own fundamentalist and fissiparous tangles. The minor parts largely solved their problems with their minority community by decimating it to a negligible part in population and power structure both. But that could not be, as it was not intended to be, done here and it is generally recognized that the minority community here thrived enormously in population and considerably in prosperity also, despite the incessant allegations of their discrimination and backwardness. This of course is not to deny the presence of any such backwardness and discrimination altogether, but to point out that it is but a part of the general backwardness prevailing in the country, affecting even a bulk of the majority community, and the discrimination is more out of the insecurity, real and imaginary, felt by the majority community about the higher growth rate of minority population as also the unceasing illegal immigrations, especially from Bangladesh. This feeling of insecurity is exacerbated by the incendiary propaganda of fundamentalist forces among the majority community which gains ground and acceptance only because the governments at the helm do not seriously address and try meaningfully solve these problems affecting and also emanating from the minority community. Religion-based reservations have already done massive damage to the fabric of united India leading to its vivisection and we would only repent and be condemned to relive all that horror if such exercise is to be undertaken once again. However, the backward class criteria cut across religious denominations and so can be used to lift the really downtrodden sections of the minority community too. The insecurity regarding population growth and potentially subversive immigrations has to be firmly tackled by strictly banning such migrations, disenfranchising the existing illegal migrants and taking effective steps to deport most if not all of them to their homelands, as also by general amelioration measures.