Supreme Court is stuck on semantics

In the Rahul Gandhi versus RSS case, the Supreme Court seems to have shown inadequate appreciation of history and society, and politics and ideology. The top court also seems to have done inadvertent violence to logic.

As bright, upright, hard-working and hard-worked our top judges are, they can sometimes fall at the first hurdle (being human). A defamation case has been brought against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi by a RSS functionary for reportedly saying, “RSS people killed Gandhiji”. Justices Dipak Mishra and R.F. Nariman observed on Tuesday, “If you had said some people from RSS had killed Gandhiji, it would have been different.”

Is there a difference in meaning between what the bench is proposing and what Mr Gandhi reportedly said Most reasonable persons would think not. “RSS people” (Mr Gandhi) and “some people from RSS” (the judges) — experts in semantics may be hard put to set the two apart. A strong sense can indeed arise here that the judges in question are resorting to sophistry — plain and simple.

Going a step further, the bench reportedly told Mr Gandhi’s counsel, “But you said RSS killed Gandhiji.” In all fairness, can this meaning be drawn from Mr Gandhi’s reported speech of “RSS people” killing Gandhiji

Nathuram Godse, Gandhiji’s assassin, had been close to the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, and was a clear receptacle and victim of the ideology of the “Hindu Rashtra” and other strands of Hindu-supremacist thought propounded by the religious far Right of India’s majority community. Gandhiji paid with his life for espousing a cause at odds with theirs — of Hindu-Muslim unity in a democratic India, which fundamentally means a parity in treatment of the two as citizens, at all levels.

This is why the Indian state moved against not only Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin but also against the RSS. As Union home minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel banned the RSS following Gandhiji’s murder. Was that “collective denunciation” of the RSS — to quote the SC bench in question — by the Sardar

To take a parallel, each time we refer to the horrendous 26/11 Mumbai attacks, will it suffice to say that terrorists sent by Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayyaba mounted the attack Or must we say each time the issue comes up that “Kasab, who belonged to the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, attacked Mumbai along with his criminal associates (giving each name)” — spelling it out syllable by syllable If we didn’t follow the latter route, going by the logic of Justices Mishra and Nariman, we would be engaging in collective denunciation of the LeT. The judges have asked Mr Gandhi to prove his statement was in the “public good”. They should be less dramatic in dealing with questions of ideology and politics, else they would be opening a Pandora’s box.