Relevance: GS Paper II
Why has this cropped up?
The recent hearings in the Supreme Court relating to the Sabarimala case have turned the spotlight on the status of religious faith in a system governed by the rule of law and the Constitution.
Faith vs Constitution
- A person of faith and belief feels that from the time of the advent of the Constitution, no religious practice has been safe in a system of Constitution-controlled governance.
- However, the clash between religious faith and the law is not of recent origin and it would be unfair to lay the blame at the doorstep of the Constitution.On the other contrary, it is an inevitable consequence of human evolution.
- For centuries, religious faith and the principles it enunciated were the “law” that regulated society.But in a democracy with the Constitution as a guiding force, it is natural that the new order would challenge the old, and the litigative battles that we see in court today are the struggles between that old order and the new in the path of human evolution.
- This is, however, not to say that the struggle between the law and religious faith did not exist before the Constitution came into existence. There were people who asserted the supremacy of the law over religious belief even in the pre-Constitution days. One such example was the “Tirupathi Mahant case” in the Madras High Court.
The Tirupathi case
- The East India Company, till the middle of the 19th century, oversaw the management and administration of the properties of the deity, Venkateswara or Srinivasa (or Balaji).
- After the Madras Regulation of 1817 was passed, the temple came under the Board of Revenue which supervised it through the District Collector.
- However, a movement in England (around 1840) disapproved a Christian company (the East India Company) administering Hindu and Muslim religious institutions.
- Consequently, the administrative reform management of the temple was handed over to a mahant who, as the head of that mutt, had his headquarters in Tirupathi. He was also commonly referred to as the Mahant of Tirupathi.
- When a flagstaff for the temple was erected, devotees donated large sums of money to acquire gold coins. These were to be placed in a vessel which was then buried at the base of the flagstaff.
- But soon a charge of criminal breach of trust and misappropriation was made against the mahant, with the allegation that the coins had been substituted with copper coins.
- Such a charge could have been proved or disapproved only by digging up the base of the flagstaff. But religious faith proved to be an obstacle. The mahant pleaded that the flagstaff could not be dug up after it had been sanctified and installed and such a course would prove calamitous to the sentiments of worshippers.
- Interestingly, the high priest, much against public sentiment, persevered and filed an application to have the vessel produced. The Magistrate ordered the application as prayed for. Against the order of the Magistrate, a revision petition was filed before the Madras High Court which in turn led to one of the most sensational cases in its history.
- The court upheld the Magistrate’s order. It was a revelation. The vessel had no gold, just base metals.
Conclusion
Therefore, even before the adoption of the Constitution, our legal history is replete with interesting cases of religious faith versus the law. If for any reason the Sabarimala case were to induce heartburn among its ardent devotees, whatever be their sentiments, they must bear in mind that the Constitution cannot be blamed.
