Following the Supreme Court's refusal to review the Hindutva Act which states that using religion during an election campaign does not amount to a corrupt practice, senior Supreme Court advocate K.T.S. Tulsi on Thursday said the judgment has only paved the way for campaigners to ask for votes in the name of religion.
"Supreme Court must see the contradiction. After all Hindu religion and Hinduism cannot be two separate things. Every religion is a way of life, if Hinduism is a way of life, is Sikkhisim not a way of life, is Christianity not a way of life? Every religion prescribes the code of conduct as your way of life; and to say that Sikh is different from Sikhism is semantics we are then providing a loophole by which the principle of secularism in the matter of campaign is going to get punctured and people will get away from escape route. I really think that the concept of secularism in the electoral politics needs to be strengthened and protected," Tulsi told ANI.
In December 1995, Justice J.S. Verma delivered the ruling where it held that pleas made by appealing to the terms "Hindutva" or "Hinduism" during an election campaign did not necessarily constitute a corrupt practice in violation of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (RPA) since the terms ordinarily refer not to religion but only to "a way of life".
Last week, social activist Teesta Setalvad had sought to intervene in the matter with an application stating that religion and politics should not be mixed and a direction be passed to.
An interlocutory application was filed by Setalvad who requested the bench to reconsider the 95 judgment.
However, a seven-judge constitution bench, headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur, said the court will not go into the larger debate as to what is Hindutva or what its meaning is and will not reconsider the 1995 judgment.
During the hearing by the seven judges' Constitutional bench, the apex court on Tuesday said it won't reconsider 1995 judgment which defined Hindutva as "a way of life and not a religion.