Religion, Law, and Minorities in India

Abstract

The dispensation of justice in matters per-taining to religion is always a ticklish task in secular, liberal democracies. Quite often the right to freedom of religion is at odds with secular laws, resulting in a predicament about which principle should gain prece-dence. Orthodox Jews and Sikhs, for in-stance, demand that they should be exempt from wearing the headgear in the police or military because doing so conflicts with their religious practices. Sikhs in India ar-gue that the state has no right to prevent them from boarding a plane just because they carry the traditional kripan(a small dagger), mandated by Sikhism. But the state maintains that in view of the escalating in-cidence of terrorism, it has no choice but to impose a blanket ban on all kinds of ’weapons’ that could be potentially used for hijacking. In Montreal and Paris, the ma-jority French resent the fact that Muslim schoolgirls insist on wearing the hijab(head scarf), violating the secular rules of the edu-cational system. By a similar token, the mi-norities, particularly the Muslims, take ex-ception to the Sunday holiday laws because they see a majoritarian bias in them. Why not allow us to close our shops on Fridays, they ask?