Brenda Cossman Ratna Kapur The recent series of Supreme Court judgments in cases against elected representatives of the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra has delivered a mixed message. While finding several of the accused guilty of corrupt electoral practices, the court has given legal sanction to the Hindu right's ideology of hindutva as well as to its discursive strategy of hijacking secularism for its own unsecular agenda. This paper examines the court's decisions in detail and shows how it has erred in failing to take into account the political context in which the concepts of hindutva and secularism have been evolved by the right.
