A recent interview of former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud with the news website Newslaundry and the attack on Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai are two separate incidents. However, both incidents are linked with a rising militant idea of fraternity in our political and republican lives and discourse. This is an idea of fraternity presented by Hindutva politics, which is violent in its varied manifestations. These two separate incidents must be viewed in the context of the ascendancy of the Hindutva idea of fraternity.The fraternity formed a crucial segment of the trinity of famous slogans of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Fraternity was seen as the ‘brotherhood’ of men and citizens. Such ‘brotherhood’ as imagined by the French revolutionaries was gendered in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which envisaged liberty, equality and freedom to own property only for men. Olympe de Gouges, in 1791, came up with a women’s charter titled “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen,” in which she demanded “liberty, security, and especially resistance to (male) oppression.” The point here is that, though fraternity is often presented as a uniform idea that binds the constituents of a nation, in reality, it is plural in nature, as there are multiple manifestations of fraternity within every nation and society. Also read: Five Reasons Why Throwing a Shoe at Dalit CJI in Sanatan’s Name Goes Beyond Judicial Insult to Threaten IndiaSome manifestations of fraternity can be progressive and emancipatory, as in the case of Olympe de Gougas’s revolutionary polemic in which she called out the erasure of women from the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but there are also violent manifestations of fraternity. In the Indian context, this fraternity, as imagined and proposed by Hindutva, is one such violent idea of fraternity that has captured our social, political and constitutional discourse.Contested fraternity in the Indian constitutional discourseFor Harsh Mandar, fraternity or bandhuta is an idea that makes us brothers, sisters and friends despite “our differences of wealth, gender, caste, religion, language, ability, the color of our skins, the size of our eyes and noses, who we choose to love and marry, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and so much else.” To me, this was a remarkably progressive interpretation of fraternity, which effectively captures the ideals of Gandhi and Ambedkar to a great extent. But this imagination of fraternity is under great constraint today, or I dare say – it is under siege. For Ambedkar, fraternity is central as he suggested that without fraternity, “equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.” For him, as V. Geetha points out, social fellowship, or maithri, was crucial, as compassion or karuna alone would not suffice. Fraternity was the enabler to make equality and liberty the “natural course of things” and subvert the different forms of social dominations. However, he was acutely aware of the graded inequality of the Hindu Varna system, and he feared that caste would make fraternity impossible in India. Other subjugated identities have sought to find their place within the constitutional concept of fraternity. They have critiqued and engaged with it to expand the concept of constitutional maithri for disfranchised groups. But at the same time, a different idea of fraternity was also expanding itself, living a secret life, and came out in the open in various episodes of history, such as the assassination of Gandhi and the Babri Mosque demolition. In 2014, it finally tasted a resounding victory, and since then, it has put India’s constitutional institutions under great siege. This is Hindutva’s idea of brotherhood, which has a very dominant and lurking presence in our political and constitutional discourse.The psychology of Hindu ‘brotherhood’Two separate incidents related to our Supreme Court can provide insight into the psychology of the Hindutva brotherhood. Shruti Kapila gives a great detail of the psyche life of this Hindutva brotherhood, which, according to her, is an ‘eruption of a new fraternity’ that weaves its worldview around enmity to Muslims. Savarkar’s Hindutva created a ‘combative fraternity’ in which war and enmity were central. Kapila points out that, though enmity was a central theme, Savarkar kept shifting the enemies from Muslim to Buddhist, and in this worldview, even Ashoka was an “anti-national.”Within this context, we need to address these recent incidents. In his interview with Newslaundry, the former CJI and author of the Babri Mosque judgment asserted that the erection of the Babri Mosque was “the fundamental act of desecration,” while claiming that his and his brother judges’ judgment was based on evidence, not faith. He defended his Gyanvapi survey order and the trial court judges, ordering the survey of Muslim places of worship from Banaras to Sambhal in the name of the rule of law. The interview itself can be included in the teaching modules on judicial bias, exploring how the language of the rule of law, feminism and democratic dialogue can be misappropriated to justify apparent judicial biases. While Justice Chandrachud served the cause of the Hindutva fraternity in the cases of great constitutional significance – employing his linguistic sophistry to support the BJP’s agenda on the Ram Mandir, the Gyanvapi mosque and Article 370 – in individual cases, he invoked the language of liberal constitutionalism, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s progressive reading of intersectionality and the constitutional idea of fraternity, presenting himself as a liberal constitutionalist. In one of his judgments, he opined that the progressive grundnorm “seeks to eschew from societal prejudices and biases”. On fraternity, he said, “Fraternity, far from being mere collegiality among citizens, imagines a holistic sharing of goals and aspirations. It recognises that to progress together we must join forces in our mutual advancement and emancipation. The framing of the preambular virtue of fraternity identifies the dignity of all individuals as a precondition.” One may wonder, in light of his series of interviews, whether he really believed in that or it was merely performative. The judgment on ‘Om Rathod vs. Director General of Health Services and Ors.’ case.The attack on Chief Justice B.R. Gavai is a violent manifestation of this new Hindutva fraternity. As the attacker is giving his interviews to various media houses, it is clear that he did not like the address by the CJI in Mauritius, where Gavai rebuked ‘bulldozer actions’ associated with the BJP governments, particularly Adityanath’s government in Uttar Pradesh. These bulldozer actions are primarily targeted against Muslims who are ‘enemies’ in the worldview of this militant Hindu brotherhood. The invocation of ‘insult to Sanatan Dharma’ by the attacker also hints that Buddhists and Dalits remain key enemies to this violent fraternity. It is not a surprise that the CJI is a Buddhist and a Dalit whose rational thinking has rattled the foot soldiers of Hindutva. Somehow, in our mainstream constitutional discourse, this violent fraternity is not examined enough. The defenders of the constitution must examine and problematise the increasingly creeping presence of this violent fraternity in our constitutional discourse. If not understood and given pushback, this morbid idea of fraternity will put our constitutional freedoms in deep slumber, sometimes through constitutional, sometimes with unconstitutional and violent means.Vijay K. Tiwari is an Assistant Professor (Law) at WBNUJS, Kolkata.