(News Analysis in The Hindu Dt. Sept 6, 2026: Varghese K George)
Brief summary of the column
Varghese K. George’s column, titled “The dilemma over treatment of ancient, religious texts,” considers the contrasting public treatment of the Manusmriti and the Quran after Rahul Gandhi’s criticism of the Manusmriti and comments attributed to Islamic scholar Kanthapuram A. P. Aboobacker Musliar about women.
It argues that modern constitutional values conflict with patriarchal prescriptions attributed to both texts, identifies rejection, reinterpretation and agnosticism as broad approaches to ancient religious texts, and observes that political calculation and theological loyalty often shape selective reinterpretation.
Its concluding proposition is that public life should be governed by the Constitution and the rule of law rather than any ancient text.
Rahul Gandhi’s denunciation of the Manusmriti at Pune was not a passing aside. He quoted the familiar proposition that a woman is under her father in childhood, her husband in youth and her sons in widowhood, and then pronounced it “a shame.” He told young women that they belong to no one but themselves. He urged them, in effect, to break the social cage built by patriarchy.
No decent constitutional democrat need quarrel with the moral core of that appeal. A woman is not the property of her father, husband, son, community or cleric. Her liberty, equality and civic personality do not depend on the permission of a family, a caste assembly, a priesthood or a scripture. The Constitution must be the final public authority.
But Mr Gandhi chose a language larger than criticism of a particular verse. He spoke of a “Manusmriti mindset.” That phrase invites a necessary question: does he apply the same test to every religiously sanctioned form of female subordination in India, or does his moral thunder fall selectively upon Hindu texts and Hindu social history?
That is not a demand that he ban books. It is not even a demand that he renounce religion. “Banish” here means banish from the political and moral mind: reject, clearly and without evasion, the belief that an ancient authority may diminish the equal citizenship of women. If the Manusmriti must be morally expelled from contemporary public reasoning when its verses contradict equality, then the same rule must apply to patriarchal claims advanced under the name of sharia, church doctrine, custom or any other sacred inheritance.
The principle is simple: no text—Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist or otherwise—has a constitutional right to command inequality.
Not a ban, but a standard
The relevant distinction is elementary. A free society may study an old work, criticise it, translate it, defend it, contextualise it or reject its social prescriptions. The State need not and should not prohibit texts merely because they contain propositions that modern citizens find morally indefensible. India’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience and religious practice does not turn every scriptural injunction into enforceable civil law; still less does it license the State to suppress every contested religious book.
What constitutionalism demands is different. It demands that where a religious doctrine, clerical pronouncement or personal-law claim is invoked to reduce women’s liberty or legal equality, the public authority of the Constitution prevails.
That standard gives no community a special exemption. It permits a Hindu to say that the Manusmriti is historically important but not a binding code for modern India. It permits a Muslim to reject a patriarchal reading of Islamic law. It permits a Christian to reject ecclesiastical or scriptural interpretations that restrict women’s agency. It asks no believer to abandon faith; it asks every citizen to accept that faith cannot displace equal citizenship.
The Manusmriti itself is not Hinduism in its entirety. It is only one ancient dharmaśāstra text — albeit a very important and seminal one — among a vast, internally diverse civilisational archive, interpreted, debated, neglected and contested across centuries. The Quran occupies a different place in Muslim religious life, and the Bible a different place in Christian life. Yet differences of theological status do not alter the constitutional issue. A text’s sacredness to a believer cannot be a defence for unequal civil rights.
The unanswered question of sharia
Here lies the difficulty for Mr Gandhi. In Pune he found unequivocal words for a verse he associated with the Manusmriti: “a shame.” Has he, with comparable clarity and regularity, condemned the doctrinal and legal claims made in the name of sharia when they subordinate Muslim women?
The question is not fanciful. India has repeatedly confronted controversies over divorce, maintenance, marriage, inheritance, seclusion, guardianship and religious personal law. In such disputes, the central moral issue is not whether a particular practice is Hindu or Muslim, majority or minority, fashionable or unpopular. It is whether an Indian woman stands before the law as an autonomous equal.
A secular politician should be able to say all of the following without hesitation:
- Instant triple talaq was unjust and incompatible with women’s equal dignity.
- A divorced Muslim woman is entitled to meaningful legal maintenance and protection.
- No religious interpretation can make a woman permanently dependent upon a father, husband, son or clerical establishment.
- State policy must oppose discrimination without converting a necessary civil reform into a communal instrument of political theatre.
That last qualification matters. Criticising the criminalisation scheme of the 2019 triple-talaq law is not necessarily a defence of triple talaq; a legislator can object to imprisonment as the remedy while accepting that the practice itself is invalid. But a politician who takes that route must still speak plainly about the injustice being remedied. Procedural objections cannot become a refuge from moral clarity.
Mr Gandhi’s public persona makes this contrast unavoidable. He has made the Manusmriti a vivid emblem of patriarchy. Yet the public memory does not contain an equally memorable Gandhi campaign against patriarchal religious claims in minority personal law… or in the ongoing debate on Uniform Civil Code. That asymmetry may be politically expedient. It is not the even-handed secularism he professes so loudly on the public stage.
Shah Bano: the Congress inheritance
The most inconvenient historical exhibit is Shah Bano.
In 1985, the Supreme Court held that Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman, could claim maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. The provision was a secular social-protection measure: it applied to persons unable to maintain themselves and was not confined to any one religious community. The judgment thus affirmed a basic proposition of citizenship—that a divorced woman should not be left destitute because of the religious personal law invoked by her former husband.
The Rajiv Gandhi government responded to the political backlash by enacting the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986. The legislation was widely understood as limiting the immediate reach of the Shah Bano ruling and as an accommodation to conservative religious pressure. Later judicial interpretation ensured that Muslim women could seek maintenance under Section 125 as well as under the 1986 law. But the political symbolism of 1986 cannot be erased.
Rajiv Gandhi, of course, was Rahul Gandhi’s father, not Rahul Gandhi himself. A son is not automatically responsible for every decision of a father. Yet Rahul Gandhi is not an ordinary son discussing private inheritance. He is the principal heir and contemporary standard-bearer of the Congress political tradition. When he deploys morally absolute language against the “Manusmriti mindset,” he cannot evade the question whether his own party’s historic mindset placed electoral management and clerical appeasement above the secular rights of a divorced Muslim woman.
The Shah Bano episode remains a warning about selective secularism: one law for abstract equality, another for religiously sensitive constituencies; one indignation for a majority tradition, another prudential silence for minority orthodoxy.
Women’s representation and political seriousness
The same question applies to women’s reservation in Parliament. Congress leaders, including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, supported the Women’s Reservation Bill when it was brought before Parliament in 2023. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that they opposed women’s reservation.
But endorsement at the moment of passage is not the same as a record of sustained political achievement. The proposal circulated through Indian public life for decades. Congress-led governments had long periods in office and repeatedly declared their commitment to women’s political representation, yet did not deliver the constitutional measure. The law was finally enacted in 2023, that too with implementation tied to the post-census delimitation process.
This does not prove indifference to women’s advancement. It does expose a difference between symbolic radicalism and legislative resolve. It is easier to denounce an ancient text before an appreciative audience than to assemble parliamentary consensus, confront entrenched political interests and secure enduring institutional representation for women.
A serious feminist politics must be judged not only by its villains but by its achievements: maintenance rights, access to justice, safety, education, employment, property rights, representation, equal family-law protection and the practical capacity of women to live independently.
The one rule that matters
The sensible secular position is neither scriptural iconoclasm nor scriptural immunity. It is constitutional priority.
Let Hindus argue over the authority, date, reception and interpretation of the Manusmriti. Let Muslims debate jurisprudence, reform and the meaning of justice within Islamic traditions. Let Christians confront the long history of gender hierarchy sustained in parts of church doctrine and biblical interpretation. Such debates belong to the freedom of a living society.
But when any of these traditions enters public life with a demand that women be legally subordinate, the answer should be identical: No. Not in a constitutional republic.
Mr Gandhi is right that women belong to themselves. The proposition is not controversial; it is the moral minimum of modern citizenship. But he must not reserve its most vehement application for Hindu society alone. If “Manu mindset” denotes the belief that women require male or religious guardianship, then the mindset is not confined to a Sanskrit legal text. It reappears wherever a woman’s freedom is made conditional upon religious authority, family control or communal respectability.
The real test is therefore not whether Rahul Gandhi will or will not ban the Manusmriti, the Quran or the Gospels — the unlikely event of his getting elected Prime Minister of India. He should banish from his own political thinking the temptation to measure patriarchy by the religious identity of those who practise it. Until he confronts patriarchal claims in every tradition with equal candour, his denunciation of the “Manu mindset” will remain rhetorically impressive but morally incomplete.
Before you go “shaming” the “Manu Mind-Set,” Mr Rahul Gandhi, first check out your own mindset.
(Concluded)
