The Unfinished Decolonization: A Power the State Was Never Given

There is a principle that every democrat, every liberal, and every anti-colonial thinker agrees upon: state power must be traceable to a legitimate source. A government cannot simply exercise authority over something without empowerment — it must be able to show how it acquired that authority. Consent. Transfer. Delegation. Something.

This is not a radical idea. It is the foundation of constitutional governance everywhere. The State taxes because it is granted the power to tax. It legislates because a constitution authorises legislation.

Now apply this principle to one domain and ask a simple question: when did the Indian State acquire the authority to govern the internal affairs of Indian religions? 

Not to regulate public order. Not to enforce criminal law. Those powers are uncontested. The question is narrower and more specific: when did the State acquire the power to appoint committees over temples, administer religious endowments, determine what is "essential" to a faith, and adjudicate spiritual practices from the bench?

There should be an answer to this. There isn't.

How Power Moved in 1947 — And What Didn't Move

When India became independent, the transfer of power was a documented legal event. What the Indian Independence Act, 1947, transferred was temporal, i.e., authority over territory, revenue, criminal law, defence, etc. The princely states then received an explicit dissolution of paramountcy — their relationship with the Crown was formally acknowledged and formally ended.

Constitutional scholar H.M. Seervai made a foundational observation: the Constituent Assembly's power was derivative. It came from the Independence Act. A derivative authority cannot exceed its source. It can only pass on what was handed to it.

Here is what was not handed to it: authority over the internal governance of Indian religions. The British Crown never claimed spiritual jurisdiction over Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, or any Indian religion. It could not have — these traditions did not recognise the Crown as a spiritual authority, and the Crown never asserted itself as one.

So the question becomes inescapable: if the British never held this power, and the Constituent Assembly's authority derived from the British transfer — where did the State's jurisdiction over religion come from?

It was not debated. It was not legislated. It was not consented to. It was assumed — silently, incrementally, and without any identifiable instrument of transfer.

What Existed Before the Independent Indian State

To understand what was assumed, one has to understand what existed before the assumption.

Bharat is a nation whose political landscape was previously shaped by princely states; at times, the land was fragmented under the rule of many such princely states, each sovereign in its own right, while at other times it found itself unified under a single powerful state as witnessed during the reign of the Nanda Dynasty and later the Maurya Empire under Chandragupta Maurya and Emperor Ashoka. Yet through all these shifts of power, its ‘religions’ endured, standing as the true and unbroken succession in the civilization. They were not informal. They were not ad hoc but based on independent philosophical foundation. They were structured, rule-bound, borderless, and self-perpetuating.

In the archives of Odisha lies a report that the world of constitutional lawyers would have never noticed. The Report of the Shri Jagannath Temple Administration Improvement Committee, chaired by Shri B.D. Sharma, Governor of Orissa, describes the temple's governance as "a small state within a big state." And the Jagannath Temple was not an exception it was the norm.

The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, one of the wealthiest and most visited sacred institutions in the world, was governed not by bureaucratic appointment but by spiritual authority and custodial tradition. The Jain Hills of Palitana and Parasnath, both objects of worship, governed under spiritual regimes with a succession lineage from the great Sudharma Swami. The Padmanabhaswamy Temple of Thiruvananthapuram, where the royal family served as servants and custodians on behalf of the deity. The four Shankaracharya Mathas established in the 8th century, each governing a cardinal direction of the subcontinent, maintaining unbroken succession for twelve hundred years. The Ashta Mathas of Udupi rotating the administration of Sri Krishna Math every two years for seven centuries, without a single IAS officer in sight. The Sikh Takhts, even at present, are self-governed by Jathedars. The Buddhist Sangha with its Vinaya code.

Each of these was and is a self-governing, self-perpetuating system, drawing authority not from any temporal source but from scriptural mandate, spiritual succession, and the voluntary allegiance of millions. The question is not whether they governed well; the question is whether any power was ever transferred from religion to State.

A Comparison That Clarifies

Consider the Vatican. No democratic nation claims the right to restructure Catholic governance, rewrite Catholic canon law, or appoint bureaucrats to manage Church properties. The Vatican's institutional autonomy is recognised globally — not because Catholicism is more legitimate than other faiths, but because an obvious principle is being respected: the internal governance of a religion is not the State's domain.

Most Indian religions described above are older than the Vatican by centuries. Their scriptural codes predate European constitutional thought by nearly two millennia. Why is institutional religious autonomy obvious when applied to one religion and invisible when applied to others?

And closer to their home — consider England. The first clause of the Magna Carta, in 1215, declares that the English Church shall be free, its rights undiminished. Even where the Crown is formally the "Supreme Governor" of the Church of England, and 26 bishops sit in the House of Lords, the government does not regulate churches.

India has zero spiritual representation in Parliament. Not one Acharya. Not one Jathedar. And yet the State owns & administers temples, manages & controls endowments, and adjudicates religious practice. What medieval England recognised for its religion eight centuries ago, modern democratic India has not recognised for its religions.

This is the colonial residue.

Two Sovereignties — One Forgotten

We live in an age of sovereignty crises. Tax sovereignty — nations struggling to retain the power to tax corporations that operate across borders. Data sovereignty — governments scrambling to assert jurisdiction over Tech Giants. AI sovereignty — states racing to ensure they are not governed by algorithms they did not build. Currency sovereignty —Central banks struggle to maintain control against the rise of digital currencies, striving to balance reserve currency with the borderless and decentralised nature of digitised stablecoins that loom ever larger on the horizon. Trade sovereignty finds itself increasingly compromised by the binding obligations of GATT and WTO. Political sovereignty, too, is subject to the compulsory obligations of the United Nations that bind member states in ways that often override the true independence of a nation.

In each of these, the State once possessed the power and is now struggling to retain it against external actors.

But there is one sovereignty that is the exact reverse. Spiritual sovereignty — authority over religion, scriptural interpretation, practice, lineage, and the inner architecture of religions. Here, astonishingly, the State never possessed the power in the first place, yet it assumed it. Silently. Incrementally. Without any instrument of transfer.

Temporal sovereignty commands territory, armies, taxation, and legislation. Spiritual sovereignty in India was never derived from or subordinate to temporal power — it preceded it by millennia, shaped its foundations, and outlived every dynasty that ever claimed power over this land.

The Unanswered Summons in the National Archives

In File No. 50/VII/33-Poll. of the National Archives of India lies a document that reads like a constitutional summons that was served but never answered. His Holiness Jagadguru Sree Sankaracharya Swami of Pushpagiri Pitham submitted his considered opinion and made an argument that no Indian jurist can ever refute:

"The Indian Legislature is incompetent to legislate on questions like the one under reference (pertaining to ancient Indian religions), since by its very constitution, the members of either house thereof have been, are and will have to be elected on purely secular qualifications, and since no member thereof has been elected or nominated under the Act by recognized diocesan, groups, associations or bodies professing or pertaining to, any or all of the great and ancient religions of this land and possessing authoritative knowledge on matters of religion."

No religious head nominated these legislators. No denomination transferred its spiritual authority. Yet the Legislature presumes ecclesiastical jurisdiction over scriptures it has never studied, whose parampara it has no part in.

His Holiness went further — he proposed an artificial solution. If the State wishes to legislate on religion, let it first constitute a "Jagadguru Mandali" — a chamber of religious heads of all faiths, constituted as a Third Chamber or part of a "Board of Faith."

The Key Is Being Asked For

A nine-judge bench has been constituted to reconsider the foundational questions of religious autonomy — the Sabarimala review and similar matters that touch the very core of the State's relationship with religion. Hope the key to the crucial questions mentioned above is asked for to obliterate the colonial residue.

The Mool Murti Is Inside

In Hindu tradition, the river Ganga originates from Shiva's Jata — yet no matter how far upstream you voyage, you cannot locate Shiva's hair. The sovereignty of the modern State, as K.M. Munshi observed, is similarly untraceable — a matter of belief rather than location. You cannot find the sovereign body; you roam around the executive, legislative, judiciary and people, but what only you can do is believe that it resides in "We the People," but cannot locate it.

But religious sovereignty is not like that. It is not untraceable. It is not abstract. It is located — precisely, historically, documentarily — in persons that have names, addresses, lineages, and supported by scriptures, and governance systems older than the Republic. The Mool Murti is inside the Garbha Griha. It has always been there.

The only people who cannot locate it are those who don't want to — and yet presume to administer it.

Show us the instrument of transfer from temporal to spiritual for Indian religions. Until that instrument is shown, every temple committee appointed by the State, every bureaucrat who administers a religious endowment, every court that determines what is "essential" to a faith it does not practice — exercises a jurisdiction it was never given — and is extra-legal.

Abhimanyu entered the Chakravyuh and could not find his way out. The Indian State has entered the Chakravyuh of religious sovereignty — a domain it was never equipped to navigate.

Once India parts away from this colonial entanglement, and the State refrains from indulgence in spiritual matters, India can escape from the Chakravyuh — and its spiritual soft power will flourish.

The spiritual sovereign is asking the temporal sovereign about what was never taken from it — because it was never given away.

– An article on Sabrimala Review by Spiritual Sovereign His Holiness Jainacharya Yugbhushan Suriji, the 79th successor to Tirthankar Shri Mahavir Swami