Author: Abhijit Majumder
Publication: News18.com
Date: December 11, 2024
URL:   https://www.news18.com/opinion/counterview-blunt-truth-in-justice-sk-yadavs-words-has-hit-liberals-and-islamists-hard-9152130.html

At every bend of his speech, Justice Yadav has been right. It is just the blunt, unfiltered force of his words that has rattled ‘liberals’, who expect the judiciary to be in an eternal cosplay of wearing cloaks and wigs to beat around the bush.

If Chief Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud left India’s so-called liberals disillusioned by delivering justice according to the Constitution and not their expectations, Allahabad High Court judge Shekhar Kumar Yadav has got them positively distraught.

Talking about Muslims at a public event, Justice Yadav said: “The people I am talking about, most of them are not bad. They don’t want four wives, or triple talaq, or killing daughters. But the katmullahs…it’s the wrong word, but I have no hesitation in saying that they are destructive people. They incite hatred among communities, cause riots, and try to stop the nation from progressing. There should be no compromise with them. Because the Uniform Civil Code will not only end the ills of [Muslim] personal law, but will take our nation forward."

Justice Yadav also said that the minority cannot impose its will on the majority, because even in a family, what the majority of members want prevails.

He also criticised Muslims for exposing their children to witnessing and participating in animal slaughter, especially during festivals.

The first point of liberal outrage has been the word “katmullah". How could a sitting judge of the high court use such a derogatory word? In effect, “katmullah" means a kattar mullah or an Islamic hardliner, a radical Muslim. I have heard the word being used extensively and pejoratively by Bangladeshi Muslims intelligentsia who blame katmullahs for the ruination of their country.

Do Islamists deserve a pejorative?

The jury is not out on that. Justice Yadav is right. He called them out for what they are. The same ‘liberals’ did not flinch when PDP leader and daughter of former Jammu and Kashmir CM Mehbooba Mufti called Hindutva a disease. Hindutva literally means the essence or quality of being a Hindu. Junior Mufti simply spat on a whole faith and got away with it, but Justice Yadav’s judicial credentials were questioned for calling out the radical section within a community.

In fact, main media reports and Islamo-Leftists on social media conveniently skipped the first part of his quote where he says most Muslims do not want outdated and repressive laws.

The second point of liberal indignation is over the judge’s assertion that the majority will prevail. But that premise is the bedrock of democracy, isn’t it? Most of India’s festering wounds — the Waqf Act, Places of Worship Act, allowing unrestricted conversions, keeping temples under state control but not minority institutions, giving special status to J&K, quotas without creamy layer, not bringing progressive farm laws or birth control regulation, not acting against demographic takeover by illegal immigrants — are all consequences of steamrolling the will of the minority over the majority.

While Hindu Code Bills reformed personal laws of the majority community back in the 1950s, then PM Jawaharlal Nehru chickened out of cleaning up the way more egregiously regressive Muslim personal laws. Justice Yadav is again right on the dire need to bring the Uniform Civil Code.

And the judge is right the third time too in calling out the normalisation of violence in a Muslim child’s life right from the formative years. Even an Afghan scholar like Mohammadullah Motamed, a professor of psychology faculty at Bamyan University, has said that slaughtering animals in the presence of children was a violent and unnatural act. It results in psychological issues such as bedwetting, nightmares and behavioural changes, he said.

So, at every bend of his speech, Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav has been right. It is just the blunt, unfiltered force of his words that has rattled ‘liberals’, who expect the judiciary to be in an eternal cosplay of wearing cloaks and wigs to beat around the bush.