journal of law, religion and state 5 (2017) 117-147 brill.com/jlrs Reexamining Secularism The Ayodhya Dispute and the Equal Treatment of Religions Geetanjali Srikantan* Assistant Professor of Global Legal History, Tilburg Law School
[email protected] Abstract It is widely recognized that the secular Indian state unlike its Western counterpart does not follow the strict separation of religion and state, opting to intervene in the domain of religion by treating religions equally. This article examines how the concept of equal treatment of religions is applied in the legal domain by an intellectual history of the Ayodhya litigation and argues that the courts cannot treat religions equally due to the incompatible nature of the claims made by the parties i.e. the history of reli- gion claim of the Hindus vis-a-vis the property rights claim of the Muslims. Departing significantly from the current consensus about the litigation being characterized by defective legal interpretation and political influences, it further argues that the real le- gal challenge in resolving this dispute is addressing the theological frameworks within modern property law which are dependent on a set of normative inferences embed- ded in colonial discourse. * Acknowledgments: Versions of this paper have been presented at the symposium on “Unex- pected Sources of Law” held at the David Berg Foundation Institute for Law and History, Tel Aviv University, and the Conference on Religion and Equality held at Bar Ilan University. For inputs on this paper I am indebted to Ron Harris, David Schorr, Assaf Likhovski, Roy Kreit- ner, Lena Salaymeh, Levi Cooper and Ayelet Libson.