According to the court, “the state cannot control what a citizen does in his house … the state cannot make an intrusion in his home and prevent a citizen from possessing and eating food of his choice”. The case followed a plea by a Hindu couple who said that they ate beef because it was cheap and nutritious.

It is easy to see that the judgment takes a position based not only on the rights of individuals, but also on what is common sense in today’s world. It is obvious that “intrusion” by the government into private homes will lead to chaos. What was permissible in medieval times is not allowed today.

Notwithstanding the verdict, it is doubtful whether the beef-eaters in Mumbai, which once aspired to be like Shanghai, will be able to consume their favourite meat in their “own castle”, to quote the judgment again, in a relaxed frame of mind in view of the possibility that saffron vigilante groups may intervene as in Dadri near Delhi in September last year.

Even then, what the judgment has done is to tell the Maharashtra chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, and several other BJP ministers – Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, for instance, who told beef-eaters to go to Pakistan – that their campaign against beef was illegal.

It is known, of course, that illegality has marked the BJP’s acts virtually throughout its career, starting from the demolition of Babri masjid to attacks on churches to the coercion of Muslims to renounce their faith and “return” – ghar wapsi – to their supposedly original religion of Hinduism.

As is obvious, all these activities, including Fadnavis’s view that those unwilling to say, Bharat Mata ki Jai, have no right to stay in the country, are manifestations of the BJP’s and the Hindutva camp’s ultra-right wing objective of suppressing liberal beliefs and imposing their fascistic writ.

They also apparently believe that this muscular approach pertaining to religious and nationalistic beliefs and dietary choices is the route to political success.

Since there has lately been an increase in the propagation of an anti-Muslim line, including negating widely accepted historical perceptions such as about the “greatness” of Mughal emperor Akbar and the deletion of Jawaharlal Nehru’s name from textbooks in Rajasthan, it is obvious that the BJP’s 2014 success has been interpreted by the Sangh parivar as a signal to push ahead with its pro-Hindu agenda.

There is little doubt, however, that the BJP – or the party’s militant section – is making a mistake. What they haven’t realized is that India is changing, especially where orthodoxy is concerned.

For the moment, the change may be mostly confined to the urban middle class, which voted in large numbers for Narendra Modi in the last general election. But their support for Modi was not for the imposition of saffron diktats, but an expression of the belief that he would take the country away from restrictive conservatism to a modern society based on a free market.

Since he hasn’t been able to do so, his stocks have started falling. The only way for him to retrieve his position is to really run a presidential form of government, as former BJP minister Arun Shourie has said.

If Modi utilizes such authority to crack down harder on the saffron fundamentalists, there is some chance of his recovering the image of 2014. Otherwise, he is doomed to go further down in the popularity stakes.

If he is serious about taking the country along the road to an open economy, he has no option but to rein in the Hindutva storm troopers. For it is known that an open economy is intrinsically linked to individual freedom.

It is not only that free enterprise is driven by an unconstrained entrepreneurial spirit, but also that the mercantile instincts have to flourish in an atmosphere of individualism – a typical Western trait – which shuns all restrictions except those sanctioned by law. Societal prohibitions based on the inhibitions of earlier times have no place in such an environment.

That the judiciary is becoming aware of the changing trends is evident from several of its recent pronouncement such as the latest one on the beef ban and the expected relook by the Supreme Court at its verdict on homosexuality, which has overturned the decriminalization of such “aberrant” behaviour by the Delhi high court.

The BJP, however, continues to be divided between its moderates and hardliners. Even as the former try to soften the party’s traditional anti-minority outlook by saying, as Modi has done at a Sufi conference, that Islam is a religion of peace, there is also a need to tell the hawks that their uncompromising attitude towards individual rights will hinder the flourishing of the economy. (IPA Service)