Are Hindus who support the movement to reclaim their religious rights communal? If you put that question to the so-called secular intelligentsia, expect the answer to be “yes". Which is why an injunction contemplated by the Kedarnath and Badrinath temple committee barring entry to non-Hindus is being met with predictable secular disapproval.

But secular hand-wringing aside, the orders contemplated by the Badrinath and Kedarnath Temple Boards mark an important moment in India’s long and uneven relationship with religious autonomy.

To the casual observer, these measures may appear exclusionary, even at odds with the big tent ethos of the all-embracing Hindu tradition. An editorial in a leading daily argues that “access for all in Hindu temples is a battle hard-won…the state cannot allow a return to hoary segregationist practices and remain wilfully blind to law and constitutional morality."

Yet optics should not be allowed to obscure the underlying reality. The proposal by the Badrinath and Kedarnath temple committee is not an act of social exclusion but an assertion of religious autonomy, one that seeks to reclaim Hindu places of worship from decades of excessive State control and civic overreach. Hindu temples, though often treated........

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