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September 20 - September 21, 2020
In 2018, the decision of the executive committee of the Travancore Devaswom Board to dismantle a Veda school and convert it into a non-vegetarian, beef-serving restaurant generated much outrage.
In 2013, the United Democratic Front (UDF) government, an alliance between the Congress party and the Indian Union Muslim League, made an attempt to legalise child marriage.
As of June 2020, child marriage in the Muslim community is not banned in India.
In 2017, former Vice-President of India Hamid Ansari attended an event organised by the radical Islamist outfit Popular Front of India (PFI).
In June 2018, Hyderabad MP and chief of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) Asaduddin Owaisi exhorted all Muslims to vote for Muslim candidates ‘if you want to keep secularism alive’. ‘If Muslims become a political power, secularism and democracy will be strengthened,’ he asserted.98 This was not very different from Sonia Gandhi’s appeal to India’s Muslim community during the 2014 general election campaign, jointly issued with the Shahi Imam of New Delhi, to reject Narendra Modi and protect ‘secularism’.
Only in India can open calls for sectarianism be passed off as an appeal to strengthen secularism.
The concept of Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam … It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India—Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs—cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism.
‘there is no practice of celebrating the International Yoga Day in Mizoram as it is a Christian-majority state’
Tripura, a mosque didn’t allow a few Muslims to pray inside the premises because they had joined the BJP.
The entire country mourned the passing of Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee on 16 August 2018, and his ashes were immersed in rivers across the nation to honour his memory. Only in Nagaland did this move encounter pushback. The BJP was accused of imposing ‘alien rituals’ on a ‘Christian-majority state
Congress questioned the arrest of the alleged mastermind of the terrorist attack on Gandhinagar’s Akshardham temple in 2002.
The Delhi Archbishop called for nationwide prayers to influence 2019 general elections.
In November 2019, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot doled out 1.88 crore108 as a grant to madrasas in the state,
The difference is that while the BJP-led Union government is attempting to bring minorities into the mainstream through modernising instruction and formalising institutions,109 certain ‘secular’ governments seem more interested in continuing with the orthodox mode of religious instruction.
modern education. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, whose rise in politics was proffered as the emergence of a new kind of educated leader, also could not resist cashing in on the political payoffs of providing salaries from the public exchequer to imams.
In February 2020, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath announced an increase in the salaries of imams
History tells us that the day the BJP starts treating members of the majority and minority communities as equal citizens before the law, all we will witness is organised scaremongering that the minorities are under threat. It is not without reason that the faithful are exhorted by their religious clergy to vote against the BJP.
But under a template pioneered by Nehru, which all the Indian ‘secular’ leaders follow dutifully even today, secularism has been perverted to mean discriminating between citizens on religious grounds.
As the scientist and writer Anand Ranganathan has pointed out, just five states in southern India control 90,700 temples, with Tamil Nadu controlling 36,425 temples and 56 mathas,
While temples suffer from maladministration by the government and fritter away what should be their due income, Christian religious institutions raise funds from abroad and build schools and hospitals, with such educational and health institutions often enjoying liberalised regulations, giving them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
As early as 1951, T.S.S. Rajan, a minister in the Madras state government, had said that it was the wish of Jawaharlal Nehru that there should not be any private temples.115 This thinking cemented State control on Hindu temples but allowed minority places of worship to remain outside the State’s influence.
It was not until 1992, under P.V. Narasimha Rao, that India gave official recognition to the Jewish state of Israel and established full diplomatic ties.
Modi introduced a new dimension to India’s response options on Pakistan’s policy of supporting terrorism
He boldly refused to pander to Muslim sentiments, while those who promised new politics, the likes of whom included IIT-educated engineer Arvind Kejriwal,117 donned the Muslim skull cap to court the Muslim vote bank.
For example, the 93rd constitutional amendment, as discussed earlier, expanded reservations to all educational institutions except those run by minorities, thus discriminating against Hindus.
Hindus too should be allowed to run educational institutions freely and be given administrative control of their places of worship, both of which are liberties that their minority compatriots enjoy. It is unconscionable that after centuries of colonial rule and seven decades of independence, the modern Indian State should make arbitrary distinctions between individual citizens based on the religious identity of the citizen.
In fact, with very few honourable exceptions, the rationalist movement in India is only an extension of the pseudo-secularist movement. Rationalists are acutely secular in that they seem interested only in weeding out superstition and malpractices from Hinduism, a polytheistic system where any Hindu or non-Hindu can challenge as well as reject or denounce a given prescription from the panoply of scriptures
One cannot say whether rationalists feel condescension towards minority faiths, a fear of physical retaliation from religious extremists or if they simply have a devotion to reforming only the majority religion.
From Buddha to Swami Dayanand Saraswati, the nation’s history is replete with examples of common folk embracing and worshipping spiritual reformers even if they use harsh language and methods of admonition. But the rationalist movements of the recent past, led by the likes of anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar and writer M.M. Kalburgi have resulted in more antipathy than sympathy. The killings of Dabholkar in Maharashtra and Kalburgi in Karnataka are worthy of unreserved condemnation. Both campaigned for decades against practices and ideas that they deemed to be superstitious and
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Should the heinous murder of an activist be a pretext for the deployment of State power to control an individual’s choices on matters of belief and faith?
The draft law proposed by Dabholkar’s Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS) had mentioned a list of practices it wanted outlawed including those acts that ‘defame, disgrace the names of erstwhile Saints/Gods, by claiming to be there (sic) reincarnation
Does this group of activists believe that there was once an era of gods and saints, and there cannot be one today?
This is a strange distinction, for faith, by definition, is blind. This arbitrary differentiation seems to have been introduced because the activists don’t have the intellectual capacity or more likely the moral courage to make a consistent case against faith per se, and instead want to anoint themselves arbiters of ‘rationality’ through the instrument of State power.
But, to paraphrase what the Chicago School economists famously asked, is it really irrational to be a chain-smoker? Who decides the costs and benefits, except the concerned individuals? Are non-religious superstitions any more rational? As Nassim Taleb writes in Skin in the Game: When we look at religion and, to some extent ancestral superstitions, we should consider what purpose they serve, rather than focusing on the notion of ‘belief’, epistemic belief in its strict scientific definition. In science, belief is literal belief; it is right or wrong, never metaphorical. In real life, belief is
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Judging people on their beliefs is not scientific. There is no such thing as ‘rationality’ of a belief,
Writing in Nautilus magazine, Carleton University cognitive scientist Jim Davies said that ‘any of us can become superstitious given the right circumstances’ and brought out how ‘the tendency to resort to ritual in an effort to manage a challenging situation isn’t exclusive to humans’.126 As early as 1948, Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner showed how pigeons could be induced to partake in ritual and superstition.
An uncertain environment generates an excess of dopamine, and this tends to make humans paranoid and incredulous, leading us to imagine patterns and connections where none exist.
The legislative solution to ban superstitions hardly addresses this problem—it only criminalises what is a natural human tendency. Thus, those lionised as advocates for the cultivation of a scientific temper, as encouraged by India’s Constitution, are blissfully ignorant of the scientific reasons for superstition to take root.
To quote Taleb again, ‘Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules.
While Taleb builds an intellectually sound case on how to think rationally about rationality, clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson is scathing in his assessment of those who turn rationalism into a cult. He says that ‘the worship of the rational mind makes you prone to totalitarian ideology’ because ‘the rational mind always falls in love with its own creations’.
The truth is that it is impossible for anyone to draw a line defining what is waste and what is legitimate consumption in a society. If a bunch of activists argue that there is a wastage of resources caused by bad television shows, should such content be outlawed?
It is up to each individual to decide what they should or should not spend on weddings, and it does not behove the government to intervene and try to regulate such choices.
The big, fat Indian wedding sustains many small businesses and local jobs.
The criminalisation of the Aghori identity is lamentable, for the existence of sects like the Aghoris captures the deepest strains of liberalism in the Hindu faith—their way of life pushes the boundaries of what is considered morally acceptable by mainstream society.
India’s society does not have to accept the arbitrary diktats of moralistic activists on what is rational and what is not.
In 2012, Salman Rushdie was prevented from participating at a literature festival for having written The Satanic Verses two decades earlier. In 2015, Hindu Mahasabha leader Kamlesh Tiwari was arrested and detained under the draconian National Security Act by a ‘secular and liberal’ Samajwadi Party government for making ‘derogatory remarks’ about the prophet of Islam. In 2019, Kamlesh Tiwari was murdered, and those who conspired to kill him confessed that their motive had been to avenge what Tiwari had said.
Employing wily statecraft and plausible deniability, the Congress–UPA government achieved its political objective of stopping Rushdie from attending the event.
While there was highfalutin outraging from the chattering classes and the customary online petition imploring the government to remove the ban on Rushdie’s book, almost nobody came to the defence of Kamlesh Tiwari—the principle of free speech be damned.
In a new low, in 2011, columnist Anish Trivedi, who had supposedly written an ‘anti-caste’ article was convicted and jailed for six months by a court of law.
Much to the shock of India’s Tibetan community, the Censor Board decided that Tibetan flags shown in the song ‘Sadda Haq’ celebrating rebels, in the 2011 film Rockstar, must be blurred out so as not to offend the Chinese.137 The song is an anthem against authoritarianism and for individual freedom performed by the singer Mohit Chauhan and written by the poet Irshad Kamil. The mandarins thus ended up hilariously and emphatically making the musical masterpiece’s point.
