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Apr 22, 2026
His Holiness Jainacharya Yugbhushan Suriji

The Sabarimala Review Series: The Colonial Residue in the Constitution Part 2

When the Republic Inherited What the Crown Had Rejected The British sailed home in 1947. The lens through which they governed India’s religions did not. Seventy-nine years later, it sits quietly inside the Republic’s own statutes, reports, and judicial reasoning — unacknowledged, unexamined, and untouched by the independence it outlived. The first article in this series posed a question that remains unanswered: where is the instrument of transfer by which the Indian State acquired jurisdiction over the internal governance of Indian religions? This sequel examines something arguably more troubling — the colonial architecture through which that jurisdiction was normalised after Independence, and how the very reports commissioned by the free Republic carried forward the reasoning of the power it had replaced. One Vatican, Many Forgotten Seats Before examining that architecture, a question must be confronted that cuts across the usual divisions of Indian political thought — one that should matter equally to those who cherish this land’s civilisational inheritance and to those who hold constitutional equality as an uncompromising first principle. For on this question, the two camps converge: both should be troubled by what follows. Religions whose origins, organisation, and sustenance trace back to foreign sources are intrinsically different from religions indigenous to India — in their historical trajectory, their disposition towards pluralism, and the very philosophy of their ultimate goal, whether materialistic or spiritual. Today, Vatican City stands as the only religious entity on earth recognised as a sovereign international person — a status India itself accords through full diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The Holy See, as sovereign of the Vatican City State, is recognised in international law as representing the Catholic Church worldwide. No comparable recognition — and not even a lesser form of institutional autonomy — is extended to the spiritual seats of India’s own ancient traditions: the Mathas, the Takhts, the Jain Acharya lineages, and the Sangha. Seats older than most modern nation-states, rooted in the very civilisation the Constitution claims to represent, stand unrecognised on their own soil. And such recognition is no diplomatic compulsion. The People’s Republic of China severed relations with the Holy See in 1951 and has never restored them; the Vatican remains the only European seat with which Beijing maintains no formal diplomatic ties. If a neighbouring civilisational State has declined to extend recognition where it would conflict with its own self-understanding, the question for India is not whether it may decline or not, but whether it must cherish its own civilisational heritage and constitutional equality both. Two live constitutional questions follow. Does Article 25, which guarantees equal entitlement to all religions, mandate that Indian-origin religions too be recognised as international legal persons? Or does Article 14 permit differential treatment on the principle that equality must be observed among equals — and that, in certain measurable respects, foreign-origin and Indian-origin religions are not equals? These are not rhetorical provocations. They are live questions that may converge with what the nine-judge bench on Sabarimala ultimately decides. And to answer them honestly, one must first confront a prior question: Is the disregard itself a colonial inheritance? To find out, one must look back before looking forward. The Shawcross Admission Eighty years ago, during the debates on the Indian Independence Bill, the Attorney-General of the United Kingdom, Hartley Shawcross, made an admission whose implications have never been fully absorbed. Britain, he stated, did not propose to recognise the princely states as separate international entities upon the transfer of power — not because it chose not to, but because, as the then Prime Minister had acknowledged, it simply did not possess the authority to do so under the binding treaties. What is not possessed cannot be transferred. The consequence was striking. The princely states, political entities with defined territories and standing armies, received formal acknowledgement: the explicit dissolution of paramountcy, subsequently to be negotiated through instruments of accession and merger. Now consider what Britain chose not to address, and the deliberateness of that silence. The Shankaracharya Mathas, the Jain Acharya lineages, the Sikh Takhts, the Buddhist Sangha — institutions older than those principalities by a thousand years — received no notice, no recognition, no acknowledgement whatsoever. This was no oversight. The British were meticulous draftsmen of sovereignty: they catalogued every treaty, enumerated every obligation, and planned every residual claim with surgical precision. That they addressed the temporal sovereignty of princely states through explicit instruments while leaving Indian religious autonomy entirely untouched was a calculated omission. Britain did not forget to disregard autonomy of Indian religions. It knew it had no such power to do so. The silence was the strategy — leave the claim unmade, but the machinery in place, and let the successor State make the mistakes. And here we follow. What Britain deliberately refrained from claiming, the Republic quietly assumed. The result is the unequal treatment we see today — where India still disregards the status of its own indigenous religions that it continues to accord, in full sovereign measure, to the Vatican City. The Post-Independence Report Through the Colonial Lens The most revealing evidence of this inheritance is found not in legislation, but in the reports that informed it. The 1962 Hindu Religious Endowments Commission — commonly associated with the framework laid down during the tenure of C.P. Ramaswami Iyer — traced the very source of the State’s religious jurisdiction back to the British. It reported that the colonial regime had asserted supervisory rights over endowed properties through Regulation 19 of 1810 (Bengal), Regulation 7 of 1817 (Madras), and Regulation 17 of 1827 (Bombay). Astonishingly, the post-Independence report adopted this colonial assertion as a historical continuum rather than an aberration to be corrected. The Commission catalogued State power over Indian religions in minute detail, while the one foreign religious entity on Indian soil remained entirely beyond its reach. The 1858 Proclamation: The Crown’s Own Admission The most devastating counter to the colonial-continuity thesis lies in the proclamations of the Crown itself. On 16 May 1857, the Government of India issued a proclamation declaring that it had invariably treated the religious feelings of all its subjects with careful respect, that it entertained no desire to interfere with their religion, and that nothing had been or would be done to affect the free exercise of religious observance by any class of people. The Proclamation of 1858, issued by Queen Victoria herself, pledged that none should be favoured, molested, or disquieted by reason of religion. If this was the Crown’s solemn commitment, the regulations of 1810–1827 must be read as aberrations to be corrected, not precedents to be perpetuated. And indeed, the Crown itself treated them as such. By 1842, the British had adopted strict non-intervention. The Religious Endowments Act of 1863 divested the government of all direct control over religious endowments. The trajectory is unmistakable: the Crown moved from intervention to withdrawal. It is the post-Independence Republic that reversed that trajectory. The Bangiya Brahman Sabha’s Forgotten Argument In 1933, in a submission now buried in the National Archives, the Bangiya Brahman Sabha raised an argument that the free Republic has never squarely answered. The British Parliament in 1919 had passed the Church Assembly Act, extending ecclesiastical autonomy to the Church of England. The Sabha drew the inevitable comparison: if the Mother of Parliaments recognised spiritual independence for its own Church, on what basis could a legislature in India — elected on purely secular qualifications — presume ecclesiastical jurisdiction over India’s religions? Citing Lord Acton, they submitted that religious liberty is the right of communities to the practice of their own duties and the enjoyment of their own constitution. Citing Vasudev v. Vamanji, they reminded the legislature that the regulation of religious ritual is not within the province of civil governance. The Sabha’s question of 1933 returns today with undiminished force. On what principle does the Republic extend sovereign recognition to a Church seated in Rome, while withholding even institutional autonomy from the Mathas, the Takhts, the Jain Acharya lineages, and the Sangha seated upon its own soil? Whether one measures the answer by civilisational justice, or by Articles 14 and 25 of the Constitution? The Lens Must Be Changed The post-Independence reports on religious endowments were not, upon inspection, acts of free India’s constitutional imagination. They were acts of inheritance — inheriting a colonial framework of State control that the Crown itself had begun to dismantle, while ignoring the scriptural foundations of a civilisation that had always drawn a firm boundary between temporal protection and spiritual autonomy. To cite the supervisory practices of Hindu kings as justification for the statutory apparatus of the modern administrative State is to confuse a civilisational relationship of patronage with a bureaucratic regime of control. From the Sukra Niti to the Mahabharata to the Kalpasutra, the scriptures declared the two spheres — temporal and spiritual — autonomous. Shawcross’s admission remains the constitutional key: what was never possessed cannot be transferred, and the British never possessed any authority over the internal governance of Indian religions. The Proclamation of 1858 remains the moral key: the Crown pledged non-interference, and the Republic broke that pledge. A civilisation that bureaucratises its soft power cannot project spiritual authority beyond its borders. India cannot import soft power from abroad while bureaucratising her own at home. As the nine-judge bench convenes to consider the foundational questions of the Sabarimala review, it would do well to examine not merely the constitutional text, but the colonial lens through which that text has, for decades, been read. What the coloniser rejected, the colony adopted. The lens outlived the colony. It is time it is examined afresh.

Apr 22, 2026
YagnaSri

The Dravidian Deception: Tamil Nadu Post- Jayalalitha, Post-Karunanidhi and a Decade of DMK Misrule Part 7

Part A The death of two titans and the political vacuum they left — how Tamil Nadu navigated the interregnum between dynasties The Collapse of the AIADMK The death of Jayalalithaa in December 2016 threw the AIADMK into an immediate and existential crisis. The party had been built entirely around her personality — there was no second tier of leadership with independent political standing, no ideology beyond Amma-worship, and no institutional mechanisms for orderly succession. The moment she was gone, the factionalism that her authority had suppressed erupted with destructive force. The central drama was the Sasikala episode. V.K. Sasikala — Jayalalithaa's long-time companion and the most powerful figure in her household — moved swiftly to claim the Chief Ministership, engineering the election of herself as AIADMK legislature party leader. Governor Ch. Vidyasagar Rao refused to invite her to form the government, citing the pending Supreme Court verdict in the disproportionate assets case. The Supreme Court then convicted Sasikala in the disproportionate assets case, sending her to prison and ending her direct political ambitions. The Edappadi K. Palaniswami government that resulted from the ensuing AIADMK internal negotiations was a minority government surviving on political manipulation, defection management, and the tolerance of a weakened opposition. Palaniswami — a Gounder caste leader with a base in western Tamil Nadu but no statewide charisma — was a caretaker figure rather than a political leader in the Jayalalithaa mould. His government's record was marked by administrative drift, continued corruption, and the emergence of the Sasikala family's nexus (the so-called 'Mannargudi mafia') as a parallel power centre. Karunanidhi's Decline and Death Muthuvel Karunanidhi spent his final years in declining health, conducting the business of party leadership from his Gopalapuram residence in Chennai through an increasingly dysfunctional arrangement in which his sons M.K. Stalin and M.K. Alagiri competed for succession. The Alagiri-Stalin rivalry was vicious, deeply personal, and a devastating commentary on the dynastic corruption at the heart of Dravidian politics — the patriarch's sons fighting over the inheritance of a political machine built on public power and private enrichment. Alagiri — the elder son, who had served as a Union Minister during the UPA years — was expelled from the DMK in 2014 following a period of open rebellion against Stalin's rising authority within the party. His expulsion removed the more aggressive and criminally connected faction from formal party politics, strengthening Stalin's position but also reflecting the depth of the family's internal contradictions. The DMK succession struggle was not a contest between political visions or governance philosophies — it was a dispute over who would control the inheritance of a political patronage machine. Karunanidhi had built the DMK as a family business, and his sons treated it accordingly. Karunanidhi died on August 7, 2018, at the age of 94, the same age as his mentor Periyar at death. His passing was marked by a massive public outpouring, state funeral arrangements, and a dispute even over his burial site, with the family demanding burial at Marina Beach near the memorials of Annadurai and Jayalalithaa. The Supreme Court ultimately permitted the burial at Marina Beach. Even in death, the DMK's politics were conducted through drama and confrontation with state authority. The 2019 Elections: DMK's Partial Comeback The 2019 Lok Sabha elections saw the DMK, now firmly under M.K. Stalin's leadership, mount a significant electoral comeback in Tamil Nadu. The party won 23 of the state's 39 Lok Sabha constituencies as part of a broader anti-BJP coalition, positioning itself as the central force of Tamil Nadu's opposition to Modi's national government. The AIADMK, which contested in alliance with the BJP, won only a handful of seats — a dramatic reversal of its earlier dominance. The 2019 results reflected both the genuine public anger at the AIADMK's post-Jayalalithaa mismanagement and the DMK's skilful assembly of a coalition that united Dalit organisations, Muslim political groups, and left-leaning parties behind its leadership. The election also demonstrated the BJP's weakness in Tamil Nadu — the party won zero seats, a persistent challenge in a state where its Hindu nationalist message has been consistently countered by Dravidian ideological dominance. New Entrants: Kamal Haasan, Rajinikanth, and the Illusion of Change The post-2016 political vacuum in Tamil Nadu attracted two of Tamil cinema's biggest names as potential political saviours. Kamal Haasan launched the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) in 2018, positioning himself as a progressive, rational, technocratic alternative to the corruption-ridden Dravidian duopoly. Rajinikanth announced his intention to enter politics in 2017 with a more spiritually inflected platform that drew from his personal religious journey and his enormous popular following. Both ventures ultimately failed to materialise as significant political forces. Rajinikanth withdrew from the political arena in December 2020, citing health concerns aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Kamal Haasan's MNM performed poorly in the 2021 assembly elections, winning no seats and failing to capture the anti-establishment energy it had sought to channel. Tamil Nadu's electorate, it turned out, was more deeply embedded in the Dravidian party structures than the celebrity-reformist narrative had assumed. Part B The Stalin government's record of communal appeasement, governance failures, anti-Hindu bias, and the case for a civilisational alternative The DMK Returns: 2021 and the Promise of Change The DMK under M.K. Stalin won the May 2021 Tamil Nadu assembly elections with a comfortable majority of 133 seats, ending the decade-long AIADMK rule and returning Dravidian governance under its original family to power. Stalin campaigned on promises of administrative reform, anti-corruption measures, economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and a new model of governance that would break from both the Jayalalithaa and AIADMK traditions. The expectations of reform were high among significant sections of Tamil Nadu's educated middle class. Those expectations have been comprehensively disappointed. The DMK government's record since 2021 has continued the worst traditions of Dravidian governance — corruption, dynastic entrenchment, anti-Hindu administrative bias, communal appeasement, and the subordination of good governance to political calculation. The promised break from the past has not materialised; instead, Tamil Nadu has witnessed the most brazen examples of nepotism and administrative capture since the worst excesses of earlier Dravidian governments. The Udhayanidhi Stalin Episode: Dynastic Succession on Open Display The appointment of M.K. Stalin's son Udhayanidhi Stalin as a minister in the Tamil Nadu cabinet — and his rapid elevation within the government hierarchy — is the most blatant example of dynastic politics in contemporary Tamil governance. Udhayanidhi, a film producer and actor, entered the assembly in 2021 from the Chepauk-Thiruvallikeni constituency and was promptly elevated to a ministerial position in a government ostensibly committed to administrative professionalism. His public statements have consistently courted controversy. In September 2023, he made a speech at a conference calling for the 'eradication' of Sanatana Dharma, comparing the Hindu civilisational tradition to diseases like malaria and dengue fever. The statement — delivered by a sitting state minister — provoked nationwide outrage and raised fundamental questions about whether members of the Tamil Nadu cabinet can make statements calling for the eradication of the faith tradition of the majority of their constituents and face no governmental consequence. When a serving minister calls for the eradication of Sanatana Dharma — the philosophical foundation of Hindu civilisation — this is not a political opinion deserving protection. It is an incitement against the religious and cultural identity of hundreds of millions of citizens. The DMK government's defence of Udhayanidhi's statement revealed the party's continued commitment to the anti-Hindu civilisational agenda that Periyar had pioneered nearly a century earlier. Anti-Hindu Governance: The Temple Takeover Regime One of the most institutionalised forms of anti-Hindu discrimination in Tamil Nadu is the state government's control of Hindu temples through the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department. Under this system — unique in India and without parallel in the treatment of any other religion's institutions — approximately 44,000 Hindu temples in Tamil Nadu are under state government control. Their revenue, properties, appointment of priests, and administration are all managed by a government department. The consequences have been devastating for Tamil Nadu's Hindu institutions. Temple revenues — which should serve the maintenance of temples, religious education, and the welfare of temple employees — have been diverted to general state expenditure. Ancient temple properties have been alienated, encroached upon, or mismanaged under government administration. The hereditary rights of priestly communities have been disrupted. Temples of immense historical and spiritual significance — including some of the most ancient Shaivite and Vaishnavite institutions in South India — have fallen into physical disrepair under government stewardship. Meanwhile, churches and mosques in Tamil Nadu are free from government control, managing their own properties, revenues, and institutions without state interference. This discriminatory framework — which treats Hindu religious institutions as government departments while protecting the institutional autonomy of other faiths — is a direct product of the Dravidian political tradition's anti-Hindu ideology. No DMK government has shown any interest in remedying this constitutional inequity; successive DMK administrations have, if anything, deepened the state's extractive relationship with Hindu temple wealth. Communal Appeasement and Vote-Bank Politics The DMK government's governance has been marked by systematic appeasement of minority communities — particularly the Muslim community — in ways that have distorted administrative neutrality and created legitimate concerns about equal treatment under the law. The government's response to communal incidents, its appointments to key administrative and judicial positions, and its handling of religious sensitivities have consistently demonstrated a double standard that treats Hindu religious interests as less worthy of protection than those of minorities. The Coimbatore blast case — in which an NIA investigation established links between Tamil Nadu-based radical networks and explosives infrastructure — received a muted political response from the state government. The DMK's reluctance to be seen as acting against Muslim community interests, even where those interests conflict with national security, reflects the electoral arithmetic that governs its communal calculations. The government's appeasement of Islamic radical organisations operating within Tamil Nadu, its tolerance of anti-national speeches at certain religious gatherings, and its failure to adequately address the organised harassment of Hindu communities in certain coastal and border districts reflect a systematic subordination of national security and constitutional equality to vote-bank calculations. Corruption Under Stalin: Old Wine, New Bottles Despite Stalin's anti-corruption campaign rhetoric during the 2021 elections, the DMK government has presided over significant governance scandals. The sand mining mafia — a chronic source of corruption in Tamil Nadu's governance for decades — has continued to operate with apparent protection during the DMK's tenure. Complaints from district administrations about organised criminal networks controlling sand extraction along Tamil Nadu's rivers, with political connections that protect them from enforcement, have been consistent features of reporting on the state's governance failures. The appointment of party loyalists to key positions in the Tamil Nadu government — including public sector undertakings, regulatory bodies, and government corporations — has proceeded at a pace consistent with previous Dravidian administrations. The promise of merit-based, clean governance has dissolved in the face of the same structural imperatives that have always governed Dravidian politics: maintaining the patronage networks that deliver electoral support. The DMK government's first years have demonstrated a simple truth: Dravidian governance cannot reform itself because corruption and patronage are not bugs in the system — they are features. The anti-Hindu ideology, the dynastic succession, the communal appeasement, and the patronage politics are not aberrations from Dravidian governance values — they are its expression. The Road Ahead: Tamil Nadu's Need for a Civilisational Alternative Tamil Nadu stands at a civilisational crossroads. The Dravidian political duopoly — DMK and AIADMK — has governed the state for over five decades, during which Tamil Nadu has failed to achieve the developmental outcomes its intellectual capital, geographic advantages, and institutional inheritance should have produced. States like Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka have surged ahead in industrialisation, educational quality, and administrative efficiency, while Tamil Nadu has remained mired in competitive populism, institutional decay, and governance failures rooted in ideological dysfunction. The BJP's growth in Tamil Nadu — gradual but consistent — represents the most significant political alternative to the Dravidian duopoly. The party's challenge is to demonstrate that a politics rooted in Hindu civilisational pride, administrative professionalism, and genuine social inclusion can resonate in a state that has been systematically inoculated against it by decades of Dravidian ideological hegemony. This requires patient work: engaging with Tamil cultural pride on its own terms, recovering the genuine Tamil-Hindu synthesis that Subramania Bharati and the Nayanmars represented, and presenting a governance alternative that Tamil people can trust with their aspirations. The ideological reclamation must precede the political one. Tamil people must be helped to see that their culture — the Shaiva Siddhanta philosophy, the Alwar devotional tradition, the Sangam poetry's celebration of dharmic values, the Chola civilisation's magnificent synthesis of art, religion, and governance — is not the enemy. The Dravidian ideology that has spent decades attacking this heritage is the enemy. Recovering Tamil pride from Dravidian misappropriation is the first step toward Tamil Nadu's political renaissance. Conclusion: Truth as a Political Weapon This seven-article series has traced the political history of Tamil Nadu from its proud freedom-struggle heritage to the manufactured crisis of Dravidian ideological hegemony. The facts are clear: the Aryan-Dravidian divide was a colonial invention; Periyar was an anti-national collaborator with colonial power; the DMK built its rise on separatism and anti-Hindu cultural warfare; its governance has been marked by corruption, dynastic entrenchment, and communal appeasement; and its most recent iteration under M.K. Stalin continues these traditions while adding new outrages against Hindu civilisational dignity. Tamil Nadu's people deserve the truth about their political history. They deserve leaders who celebrate their genuine civilisational heritage rather than manufacturing a fake victimhood narrative. They deserve governance that serves their development rather than their rulers' enrichment. And they deserve a political alternative that respects both their Tamil pride and their Indian identity — recognising that these two are not contradictions but complements, two aspects of the same ancient civilisational inheritance. The elections ahead offer Tamil people the opportunity to begin this renewal. The first step is understanding how they arrived at this moment — and what forces have systematically distorted their political consciousness. This series has been offered in service of that understanding.