Our Personal Laws are out of sync.....

Those who have been following the travails of the baby born to a surrogate mother of Japanese nationality can only feel sympathy for the infant with three mothers but cared for by a grand mother. The father, Dr Yamada, got the baby conceived by one woman, had the baby born through a surrogate mother and then divorced his first wife and remarried. Along the way, he created a legal tangle which he still has not been able to disengage from.

Although India has become the favored destination for those who are looking for surrogate mothers for their yet to be born babies as more and more Indian women are prepared to go through surrogacy, the laws have not kept up adequately to cope up. Of course it is another matter that the reason that India’s laws being so lax and medical expenses being affordable and wombs being so readily available that has contributed to India’s rise as the favored destination for surrogate pregnancies.

On the odd occasion, having antiquated laws can be of help too. There is a story that the reason that the cable TV revolution and the mobile telephony revolution took off so well and so fast in India is because the laws governing these in the initial days was the 19th century Indian Telegraph Act. The law regulating cable television was enacted only in 1995 by which time cable television was firmly entrenched. Similar is the case with mobile telephony – by the time the relevant telephony was firmly entrenched and had proved itself to be a boon.

But when it comes to personal laws and laws governing family life, such a delay can lead to numerous heart aches. For instance in the case of little Manji, there are several cards stacked against the baby. For instance, though India is the land of the great surrogacy bazaar, there are no laws governing surrogacy in the country and the surrogacy bill meant to regulate it is pending in Parliament. In its absence, the laws that apply quite mirroring the situations cited earlier- are the laws governing adoption- and principally when it comes to foreigners ,it would be another 19th century legislation – the Guardians and Wards Act of 1890

Laws in India are paradoxical because they seldom seem to be in sync with society. On hand we have laws which society has not fully accepted like the laws banning child marriage which are flouted with impunity on occasions like akshya tritiya. Look at the data: According to UNICEF, 82 percent of girls in Rajasthan, where the practice is particularly widespread, are married by 18; 15 percent of girls in rural areas across the country are married before 13; and 52 percent of girls have their first pregnancy between 15 and 19.

Or look at Sati an act whose practice and glorification has been banned on many occasions. Historically, efforts to prevent Sati by formal means were extent even before the Moghul rulers came to power. Yet as we all know and read about, sati still happens clandestinely in the country in conservative communities from time to time.

On the other hand, in matters of adoption, succession, divorce and many others including surrogacy society has moved far ahead but laws have not. The adoption laws for all but Hindus are antiquated; The Supreme Court of India, has only in 2007 accepted a petition to make provision for Christians to be able to adopt children legally and the journey ahead is long for Muslims who have not yet even begun. Similarly the divorce provisions for Christians which was codified in 1869 were modified only in 2003 to reflect modern social realities and again the journey has not even begun for Muslims. And then of course we have not even begun thinking properly about emerging areas like surrogate parenting and all that.

Some times I wish that the Uniform Civil Code hadn’t got bogged down in religion based politics and got buried for ever. While the men go and fight out petty battles to score petty points and bills keep pending in parliament, women and children suffer… like Manji, the daughter of Dr Yamada.

Brown Man's Burden

Vijay teaches in the English department in a small American town in Prasenjit Gupta’s short story “A Brown Man”. He is single. His mother in India wants him to marry an Indian girl; no foreigners were to be trusted. So Vijay found Asha his girl friend for three years until she – more liberal in her ways than even the white girls his mother worried about, left Vijay for a hippie.

Vijay is single and lonely and his departmental senior Philip and wife Sharon are good friends and they are trying to act match maker; but that is not going to work for Vijay is very conscious of parental authority and won’t do any thing that will offend his mother, but then Philip and Sharon do not know that of course. So they introduce to Vijay, a distant cousin by the name of Amy who is on a short vocation and staying with them. Vijay is not too interested; remember his mother is wary of white girls out to seduce her son, but out of courtesy to Philip and Sharon who are good people, he agrees to spend some time with Amy and “show her around” the town.

Amy is a good enough girl but Vijay is not interested; he has already been hurt once and remember; his mother has warned him to wary of the white girls. “Don’t bring home a foreigner” was the unambiguous message. Though they go out several times and though they get along well enough, there is no trace of romance. He shares about the Indian girl who left him and she in turn tells him about the boy who left her. Slowly he is falling in love with a white woman despite all the warnings that he has received. On one of his monthly phone calls to his mother, he crosses the Rubicon by telling his mother that he has been seeing a white girl. She sighs into the phone. A sigh of hopelessness.

It is the end of Amy’s vacation and they are going out for their last outing. Amy has never looked more beautiful and Vijay knows that if he must propose, this has to be the night. As they are settling into their meal, a white man comes and sits down opposite their seat and looks disdainfully at him and admiringly at Amy. Vijay shrinks within himself as he remembers the many times he has been snubbed at by white people over the years. The dinner ends with the proposal never uttered and Vijay drives a very visibly low Amy back home. The next day, as Vijay drops Amy to the airport, she casually mentions that her old boy friend wants reconciliation and she was open. Vijay shrivels further inwards as he bids her good bye … for the last time and heads back home.

Is racism for real or is it an imagined shadow that Vijay seems to see every where, often without any substantial basis ? His colleague Philip and his wife Sharon cared enough about him to notice his loneliness and try and do some match making and Amy as she went out with him, evening after evening dared to hope that the man she had come to love and to admire would one day propose to her. But though he skirted edgily around the subject, he never did. He was haunted by his own mother’s demons – that white American girl was bad though Vijay’s own experience was to have been let down by an Indian girl trying hard to be “Western”.

Now that racism is no longer institutionalized, it is obviously that much more difficult to track down and identify. And how much of it is real and how much of it is magnified by past experiences, mental imagery, perceptions –true and imagined that we end up interpreting wrongly and often with tragic consequences as happened with Vijay? Vijay’s interpretation of what a white woman would be like was largely conditioned by what his mother whispered on the phone as they talked every month and indeed in India, even before he had left the country’s shores to go to America. Although he had enough caring white people in his life, he still could not bring himself to trust himself and trust them when it came to the defining moment of his life and that moment eventually passed him by.

We talk often of stereotyping – racial and ethnic and religious and others and imagine that these flawed judgments that we make of others harm them, discriminate against them, and deny them opportunities….. But stereotyping is actually like a boomerang it comes back and denies us the very same joys that we imagine others are losing out on.

Minority Institutions: Examining the Foundations

In all this debate about St. Stephen’s College and its decision to go and have a Dalit Christian reservation, we have not taken time to unpack the concept of the minority institution. When the constitution guaranteed the minorities the right to start and manage their own institutions, they were not handing out freebies. The liberal climate that prevailed when the constitution was being drafted had the vision of a welfare state. They wanted the constitution to lay the foundation of a secular state where all sections of society would live with their identity and culture intact. It was such a benevolent gesture that made them reserve two seats in parliament for members of the Anglo Indian community, a practice that continues to this day, though the population of Anglo Indians might number in their thousands. Probably the two Anglo Indian members of Parliament represent their constituency more effectively than the elected members if the ratios and the representation formulae are taken into consideration.

The Minority institutions that were typically envisaged to enjoy the state’s protection were those which would actually serve to preserve minority languages, customs and traditions. The feeling was that minorities could get overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the majority community surrounding them and their culture and unique identity could just get subsumed into one large anonymous melting pot. So they needed a helping hand and the benign protection of the state. In this understanding of the concept, if a minority institution is not doing its job of preserving the ethos and culture and traditions and identity of a community, it is not really doing its job. A bunch of Muslims or Christians or Sikhs could get together and run a secretarial institute or a typing college or even a degree college running conventional BA and B.com courses. Would such institutes qualify to be a minority institute ? Not really in the spirit of the constitution.

The Christian Medical College, Vellore has put it well. When asked to explain why it should reserve so many seats for Christians when it was just another medical college , it replied that it wasn’t just another medical college. It put forward the very correct argument that running hospitals and clinics and providing affordable health care to the poor was an important function of the church from its earliest history in India and Vellore was training doctors to continue and preserve that tradition of the church. It was not another commercial minded, doctor generating machine but an instrument to preserve the identity of the Christian community in India which has always been associated with a spirit of service and especially so in the fields of health and education.

Another example one could cite is that of the Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi. Run by the foundation associated with the makers of the famous sherbet Rooh Afzah, the campus has a distinctly Muslim feel to it. It teaches conventional courses all right , but also has an impressive array of courses relating to Islamic theology, Persian , Arabic , Unani medicine and other facets of liberal Islamic culture.

But not every institution is CMC Vellore or Jamia Hamdard. I know of many several church run institutions- (and this is very likely true in the in instances of other communities as well) where there is very little of Christ or His teaching to be seen or heard. What makes it a minority institution is that the Board of Management is headed by some Bishop or Priest or church official. The Bible is seldom referred to or opened, students go to tepid moral science classes and the morning assembly is anemic. When the church is persecuted from time to time , it is common to hear that many eminent people attended such and such Christian school. Well they might have done so but the moot question is whether they were exposed to the teachings of Jesus in their student days or it just happened that the school happened to be run by some religious order or denomination but beyond these legal niceties , it ran as any secular institution would do.

The plumb line to determine if any institution is a minority institution – be it linguistic or religious or ethnic is to examine what minority values and cultures are being imparted there. If after studying in a Christian school for ten years or more, a child comes out with negligible knowledge of the church, its contribution to nation building and the Bible or if a Sikh institution teaches little about the history of the community, the valor and sacrifices of the Sikh Gurus or the Guru Granth Sahib, then in what way is the establishment representative of the Christians or the Sikhs ? They are no more than secular institutes which just happen to be run by a group of people who speak a particular language or profess a particular religion.

Let me end with an example from my own life. I studied in a school run by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The Ashram management in no sense of the term attempted to” convert” any one to Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy but in every turn and gesture, they indicated in word and deed , that they cherished Sri Aurobindo and his successor, The Mother and their teaching wasn’t just lip service for them. Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is not easy to understand ,but in the school assembly where his teachings were unabashedly taught , the school principal and other speakers made every effort to present them with passion and reverence and the atmosphere was live and electric and Sri Aurobindo’s thinking and influence was every where and it wasn’t phony.

My Ashram school of course wasn’t a minority institution of course, but to me it represents all that a minority institution should be. Its mandate was to promote the teachings and ideas of Sri Aurobindo and it did so earnestly and with compassion and grace. In the same way, the definition of what is a minority institution is not to be determined by who owns a piece of property or who sits in the board room but by the larger question ---- is the institution fulfilling its mandate ?