After US President Barrack Obama’s last visit to India in Jan 2015, when he was the chief guest at our Republic day parade, I wrote an article titled ‘Is Communal Disharmony A Challenge To India’s March To Greatness?’ Talking to Delhi University students, he brought out that “No society is immune from the darkest impulses of men,” said Obama. “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith.” I had traced the history of exploitation of religion and religious disharmony in India and had concluded that five diverse reasons existed for latent religious disharmony in India manifesting into large-scale unrest and violence that would undermine India taking its rightful place as an emerging economic and political power.
It has been eight months since I wrote the article. Lets take stock of how far have we reached in the politicisation of religion and secularism. Lets start in the news item of 22 Sep 15, in Hindustan Times:
‘The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) believes the concept of being secular was “irrelevant” in the Indian context and the “artificial injection of secularism” was not needed in a social order as hospitable and assimilative as Hindu society.
Sangh publicity chief Manmohan Vaidya said at an event in Chennai that Bharatiya or Indian tradition has from time immemorial regarded all faiths and sects as one.
“Secularism evolved along the themes of separation of the church and state in Europe and since India doesn’t have a history of theocratic states, the concept of secularism is irrelevant in the Indian context,” he said addressing more than 80 columnists from the southern states at an RSS-organised seminar last weekend.
Vaidya’s remarks closely follow RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s suggestion to set up a committee to review reservation system. This remark has already evoked sharp political reactions.
“Perversion of the concept of secularism in India has resulted in the terming of nationalists as communal and people with communal thinking being hailed as secular,” Vaidya said in the presence of RSS general secretary Suresh Bhaiyaji Joshi, the second-most powerful man in the outfit which is the BJP’s ideological mentor.’
One would like to believe these proclamations at face value; more so if one belongs to what once was the most benign, inclusive and reasonable religion in the world: Hinduism. However, in the past few decades of Congress rule, and in the more recent BJP rule, the divisive forces are being constantly fanned over what should be non-issues. The result is that over the electronic media, the minorities have openly started saying that they feel uncomfortable and insecure.
Take a look at the following illustrative diagram:
Despite the obvious spelling mistakes in the diagram, I found it illustrative of how the state must keep clear of religion and individual choices. Yes, as Manmohan Vaidya said, we don’t have a history of theocratic states. But, the state’s interference in matters of religion and individual choices has been on the increase. All political parties in India exploit religions as possible vote-banks. That’s precisely the reason why pooja-pandals have smaller pictures of the gods for whose collective worship the pandals have been made but much larger pictures of the political leaders sponsoring the pandals. One would want to hear from Manmohan Vaidya why wouldn’t the political parties in India leave religion to the people? Why would a BJP MLA make open and publicized remarks against the High Court’s curbs on noise during religious festivals by saying that the courts should respect people’s freedom of religious practices? Why does a political leader feel compelled to be a spokesperson for a particular religion if, as Vaidya said, we do not have, like the Europeans, the merging of the church and the state? Talking about the church, a government functionary in south India preaching the teachings of Christ in his official duties is as bad as the state getting involved in what is euphemistically called respecting the religious sentiments of the people (Please also read ‘State Sponsored Noise’ and ‘Who Are The People Whose Sentiments Need To Be Respected?‘)
I have read any number of articles on the net and otherwise extolling the virtues of idol-worship in India. The virtues range from child like innocence and purity of approach when a person stands reverently in front of an idol in total submission to how the idols help us to concentrate and stay focused. All very well and I would have been for it. However, when the same idol-worship, that should have been a private and personal affair becomes politically exploited communal affair, there are great challenges and dangers. Some of these are:
1. Keeping People From Scholarly Pursuits. Hinduism, the religion that I respect most, is all about scholarly pursuits. I wrote in my ‘A Quieter Mumbai – Is It A Pipedream?‘ that the name of the country Bharat is a combination of two Sanskrit words Bha (Knowledge) and Rat (Absorbed in); and that Bharat literally means a country whose people are absorbed in knowledge. People collectively always seek the easy way out and hence most rituals in religion abound in which people can be easily swayed to join. For example, our priests openly exhort us to offer to an idol thinking of the idol as the real God. Scholars are supposed to reason out things; our religion is perhaps the only religion that has encouraged reasoning (Arjuna did it with our Lord Krishna even in the battlefield). So, if you reason out such offerings to the idols, you would conclude, as I did on my page ‘Make Your Own Quotes’:
When the Chinese pilgrims Fa-Hein and Huien-Tsang visited India in the 5th and 7th centuries AD (during the Gupta dynasty), they were impressed by the scholarly pursuits of our people and Brahmins. Indeed, Baidyanath Saraswati has brought out in ‘Swaraj in Education’ how Kashi (now Varanasi or Benaras) grew into a great seat of learning surpassing other civilisational centres of the world including Rome and Mecca. Except for Bihar, they didn’t find a single place in the entire route of their pilgrimage in India where idol worship was being performed. Whenever, people deviated from the scholarly religious pursuits our religious leaders tried to bring us back such as Swami Vivekananda and Guru Nanak.
Take the latter, Guru Nanak, for example. The incident at Jagannath Puri, just before the annual rath yatra has Guru Nanak being invited for the Aarti at the temple has been recorded in our history.
The Guru visited the temple not to offer Aarti to Lord Krishna but to teach the people that the worship of God is superior to the worship of the deity. It was the evening time and the priests brought a salver full of many lighted lamps, flowers, incense and pearls and then all stood to offer the salver to their enshrined idol-god. The ceremony was called ‘Aarti’, a song of dedication. The high-priest invited the Guru to join in the god’s worship. The Guru did not join their service which enraged the priests. On being asked the reason the Guru explained that a wonderful serenade was being sung by nature before the invisible altar of God. The sun and the moon were the lamps, placed in the salver of the firmament and the fragrance wafted from the Malayan mountains was serving as incense. The Guru, therefore, instead of accepting the invitation of the high-priest to adore the idol, raised his eyes to the heaven and exhorted people to worship God directly rather than through the idol of God.
The sad part is that a small percentage of Hindus chose to become Sikh (learned or taught) and chose the easy way out to form a separate religion rather than to seek religious reforms from within.
2. Environmental and Other Damages. There is a great deal of debate, for example, on the environmental degradation due to visarjan of the huge idols, for example, particularly of our water bodies. In congested cities and towns (and we have only that variety), traffic problems get multiplied during such public idol-worship due to both: the pandals coming up on the roads and the almost everyday processions. Noise that affects us all aurally and adding to hygiene and medical problems is now too large to be ignored. Many of our people are now becoming gradually deaf.
3. Dangerous Trend of Intolerance. Most right-minded and sane minded people feel that such public show of idol worship is as far from religion as we can get and is only with vested commercial and political interests. However, such is the demonstrated intolerance of the mobs that are exploited for these that most of these people have to now cower in fear of violence. Imagine religion leading to violence! However, when mobs do such things that should be individual and personal and private choices, reason is often the victim. Such competitive intolerance amongst communities does no good to people but is the bread and butter of politicians and those who have to gain by dividing people along religious lines.
4. Keeping Us From Our Obligation towards Humanitarian Issues and Causes. Yes, idol-worship does provide focus to us. However, now a stage has reached when we can do without such focus. Recently, we have found out through the audits of the four largest temples in India that the offerings in these temples are enough to feed our country for the next 200 years. And yet, we have the largest number of poor in the world in India. In Human Growth Indices our country ranks a lowly 140 or so. The conclusion to be drawn is that our people would do anything to save their own souls by offering to the idols in the temples rather than giving directly to people in need. That’s utterly selfish use of idol-worship, diametrically opposite of the virtues that are extolled in all the articles that I have read.
5. Not in Keeping with the Times. There are other religions which opposed reforms and tried to become as medieval as possible. A flagrant example of these is Jihad in the name of God. We, on the other hand, were much better off with assimilation of modernity in our thoughts whilst doing away with anti-social traditions such as Sati, Untouchability, and Child-marriage. The open idol-worship (as opposed to personal and private) is taking us backwards to medieval times. As I wrote in my ‘Whose God Is It Anyway?’:
‘God is within us and all around us. We neither have to go to mountains, nor churches, mosques and temples to worship Him or Her. Collective worshipping of God or gods helps no one except to divide communities (who are also the same God’s creations and hence related to us) and only helps the politicians or so called custodians of faith who thrive from such polarization.’
If you read the full article, you will agree with me that the reasons to have collective worship of God or gods no longer exist. Religion and such devotion should increasingly become private and personal, if at all.
The need of the hour is for us individually and collectively engage ourselves in poverty-alleviation programmes, education of the deprived and infrastructure building rather than dissipating time, energy and effort in telling God to save us and our should or our community or our nation.
Goodness is another name for God and is the most relevant in the modern times.
Ravi you have hit the nail on the head! If the nation has to progress as a whole, we need to get out of the clutches of religious bigots. All religions are attempts by sections of the society to concentrate power to themselves. These power centres periodically produce miracles to convince those believers who are sitting on the fence- doing nothing but watching. Some fanatics are so convinced by such miracles that they make it their single point agenda to propagate the debatable unscientific concept.
I live in a quiet locality at Kochi. When I settled here over a decade ago, I used to wake up to soft soulful religious music, of all religions, Several more outlets (again of all religions), have mushroomed over this period, challenging the environment in no small measure. Besides severe noise pollution there is also competition between each outlet to outdo the other in feasts, fireworks, decoration etc-each adding its share of pollution to ruin the environment. Why this state of affairs when you could actually get into the good books of God by dealing directly with Him? Here is where the brokers of God make a killing using His name.
I feel Modi is not a fool. He is fully aware of the way the religious bigots are dissipating his energies on issues of irrelevance. I feel he is giving all of them a very long rope. One fine day, his patience is likely to reach a dead end, and then he would pull the rope. I hope and pray that the era of religious politics would then get a decent burial!
Reply
Thank you John. This is the nth time I am witness to the clarity of your thoughts. Thank you very much for such detailed comments with absolutely brilliant and logical built up.
I must pray that there will be more and more of sane and balanced-headed people who would not only heed your advice but also add to it.
An excellent exposition sir…. somewhat profound but your inherently lucid style of writing made it easy to read for someone like me.
Thank you Sundeep. I had to deliberately avoid trivializing the issue and that’s why you found it a little profoundas you say. In a debate, for both parties to be churlish doesn’t help.