Achi news desk-
At a civil society meeting in Bangalore this week, the question was asked whether a Hindu Rashtra is on the horizon in the event of a third term for the Modi government. To see if this is possible, one must start asking what it is, and how the Hindu Rashtra will be different from what we have today.
Until 2008, after which it became a republic like ours, Nepal was a Hindu Rashtra, the only one in the world. Why was it Hindu Rashtra? Because executive power was derived from Kshatriya (Chhatri) King as prescribed b Manu Smriti. Nepal’s 1959 constitution identifies the head of state as a “follower of the Aryan culture and the Hindu religion.”
The 1962 constitution defines Nepal as an ‘independent, indivisible and sovereign Hindu state’ and repeats the wording of King Kari and Hindu. The Raj Sabha or Governing Council includes the head Brahmin (Bada Gurujiu) and the officiating priest (Mol Purohit).
The 1990 Constitution of Nepal defined the country as “a multi-ethnic, multilingual, democratic, independent, indivisible, sovereign, Hindu kingdom and a constitutional monarchy”. He re-specified the king’s ‘Aryans’ and ‘Hindus’. The Raj Sabha was now to be called the Raj Parishad and the Mol Purohit was excluded, although the Bhada Guruji remained.
The 1959 constitution did not have freedom of religion as such, and ‘no person shall have the right to convert another person to his religion’. A citizen is only allowed to ‘practice and say his religion as it was handed down from ancient times’, that is, it was not allowed to spread, a principle that was still practiced in Nepal.
