Mumbai: Two days after the Madras high court delivered a judgement in a batch of petitions filed against Tamil Nadu ministers Udhayanidhi Stalin and P.K. Sekarbabu as well as Nilgiris MP A. Raja in connection with their comments made against sanatana dharma, the judge has made multiple corrections to the judgement that was uploaded on the court’s website.
Justice Anita Sumanth, who pronounced the verdict on Wednesday (March 6) and had a copy of the judgment uploaded on the court’s website the next day, suddenly introduced several changes.
However, these changes were seemingly made without listing the case freshly.
The verdict and Justice Sumanth’s comments came under public ire on Wednesday.
“By equating sanatana dharma to HIV, AIDS, leprosy, malaria and [COVID-19], the individual respondents [Stalin and Raja] have revealed an alarming lack of understanding of Hinduism,” Justice Sumanth had written in her judgement.
Among some of the controversial observations that Justice Sumanth made and were widely criticised include her take on the “origins of the caste system”.
The first version uploaded on the website read:
“The origins of the caste system as we know it today are less than a century old. The State of Tamil Nadu has 370 registered castes and the State is a cacophony of pulls and pressures by groups of persons claiming allegiance to one caste or the other.”
“The categorisation of castes as we know them today, is a far more recent and modern phenomenon. The State of Tamil Nadu has 184 registered castes and the State is a cacophony of pulls and pressures by groups of persons claiming allegiance to one caste or the other.”
A reference to the number of castes registered in Tamil Nadu had also changed between the two versions.
Similarly, in another paragraph of the first uploaded copy, the judge stated that a study of the original Vedic texts was carried out by experts at Chennai’s Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute.
According to the judgement, the study confirmed on the face of it that the phrase ‘sanatana dharma’ was always used in the context of “high moral values and virtuous living”.
“… There is absolutely no material to lead to the conclusion that that phrase was used in the context of the Varna system or to propagate unfair and inequitable divisions of society in any manner,” the first judgement claims, referring to the research institute’s opinion.
However, in the corrected web copy, the word ‘only’ was added, changing the sentence to: “There is absolutely no material to lead to the conclusion that that phrase was used only in the context of the Varna system or to propagate unfair and inequitable divisions of society in any manner.”
In one of her key observations, the judge had attributed “ferocity” shown by some people in claiming allegiance to certain castes to the benefits made available to them.
“This ferocity among persons belonging to different castes is also, in part, on account of the benefits made available to them. Can one lay the blame for these torturous circumstances entirely on the ancient Varna system?
The answer is emphatically in the negative,” the judge observed.
This statement, which was also widely criticised, is still retained in the new version of the judgement.