Nirmukta » Culture

Organizing The Rationalist Movement In Uttar Pradesh

Narendra Nayak — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:00:09 +0000

Uttar Pradesh (UP) is the most populous state in India and is known to be one of the most backward too. In National politics it is always said that the party that comes to power in UP will eventually rule the center (a bellwether state, as they say in the Uniter States). It is hence necessary that a strong rationalism movement is built up in UP if a national level impact is to be effected.

We have been trying this for a long time and have developed contacts with a good number of affiliated organisations and committed individuals from this state. But what is needed is a presence in all the districts and an effective network of dedicated workers. Through organisations like Arjak Samaj, which has thousands of members, and the Social Development Foundation which also has many dedicated workers, we have been trying to create a network in this state. Premanand had conducted training programs here two decades ago and a few volunteers who could explain miracles were thrown up. There are some activists who have learnt the tricks and have been performing and explaining them on their own. But to develop a rationalist movement we need much more. We have been struggling to develop a network which would be broad based as well as active, but we have not succeeded so far.

After Premanand’s first workshop in the 1990s in Lucknow, a few of the trainees developed their skills, and have now started training others too. But there have been a lot of limitations for them. I too have conducted a number of training programs in various places, but the impact had been very, very minimal. In terms of social development, this state ranks somewhere near the underdeveloped countries of sub Saharan Africa. Although it has contributed more than half of the Prime Ministers of the nation and great national leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Ram Manohar Lohia etc., the situation has not improved. The people of this state are very superstitious.

So, last year when Dr.S.K.Singh, the director of the Voluntary Institute for Community Applied Science (VICAS) told me that he had applied for a grant from the NCSTC for conducting four training programs to cover all the 60 plus districts of this state, I was very happy and thought that we could use this opportunity to build up a good network here. After eighteen months of work, I am glad to announce that we have made a start that appears to be quite promising.

The first training program, catalysed by the NCSTC and conducted by VICAS, was in Allahabad in the month of January, 2009. We had a training program for thirty activists who had come from around 15 districts. It was for five days and it went on quite well.

At that time we had a fire walk on the banks of the Yamuna river which was filmed by a number of TV channels and we got some of the best footage we ever had of this event. Impressed by this, one of the channels called Sahara Samay invited me to their studio for a live phone-in program. Although we had some publicity, it did not make a great impact.

Some of the trainees for that program have been active in the field but even there the program is projected like a magic show or an entertainment program and not as a means to develop scientific temper. Then, after about a year, the same organisation contacted me for a series of training programs in the same state. This time they were organised in Lucknow, Allahabad and Baghpat. To each of these, around thirty activists from various organisations had been invited. The training programs were to start from the 1st of June and end of the 17th. After these four programs we would have covered all the districts of the state in terms of training activists from each of them.

First of the series was held at the Youth Hostel, Lucknow from the 1st of June. The number of participants was around 25. But we made an impact on the media persons who had come to cover the event. There were a number of reports in newspapers and the training program went on reasonably well.

One of the reporters who had come to cover the event was the Bureau Chief of the India TV channel of Lucknow. She was very impressed by our work and invited me to their studio for a live program on the 5th of June . That program started at 7 pm and went on to 9.30 pm. There were other participants who were at the Delhi studio. A considerable amount of time was devoted for our exposure of the so called miracles and that program made a huge impact via the media.

On the next day I went to Allahabad for the next training program and by that time the media was ready. We had about thirty participants here though the number went up to forty in the next few days. Many were those who had read about it in the newspapers and wanted to learn things. We had to tell them that they could be only observers and were not eligible to use any of the other facilities like lunch. However some of them expressed great interest and took part.

Click to play all 5 parts of Prof Nayak’s appearance on News 24 India

It was at Allahabad that the media really started taking interest in us! I was invited to the studio of the Sahara group and went on air at 4 pm on a channel called as Sahara UP - Uttarakhand. On the same evening, at 6pm, I was invited live on another channel that was part of the same group, called as Sahara Samay. After the hectic activity of the day, when I was relaxing, there was a phone from a channel called Live India TV. The live program was supposed to be for 30 minutes but went on for an hour. As soon as the program was over I was invited to come on the very next day to Delhi to their studio for a live program there. I had to refuse as I had my training program to look after.

The next day i was to go to Baghpat for another 5 day training program and there was a free day in between the two. But, the channel was so insistent and they sent someone to meet me at the railway station at Meerut where my journey from Allahabad to Baghpa was supposed to end by train, and I was taken to Delhi for a live 2 hour program. During this presentation, I was helped to a great extent by Mr.Pramod of VICAS, Allahabad, who was helping me with the training too.

I think that that live program was the real turning point. We started getting calls from dozens of TV channels asking for where our next program would be and what it would be. Many of them came to the place, Aryabhatt College of Engineering and Management, where our training program was going on, and one of them wanted a live program in their studio.

That channel was India TV and we went live on a Sunday at the prime time-9pm. In two days we were to perform some of the very sensational ‘miracles’ like getting buried underground, removing fried things from hot oil with bare hands, preparing tea with fire on the head etc. It was a great surprise to us that this program done on the 15th June was covered by 17 TV channels including 2 live!

Those who were covering it live had brought their OB vans and were waiting for the events to happen. The print media gave us wide coverage with some of them making features and half page write ups. It also helped that two girls who had come for the training, Sanju and Anju, were bold enough to get buried for 2 hours and then come out and walk on embers!

The UP programs were the most successful to date as for as the media coverage was concerned. The organisers of the Training program VICAS and the department of the central govt, the NCSTC were immensely pleased with the results and we are sure of their co-operation in the next training programs. In fact we have lined up a lot of programs for this state. We propose to have district level training programs first and train activists from all over the district and send them to the field to convey our message of scientific temper to the people. I plan to go with the team for a few of these training programs and then let them continue the process. During these programs, those who have been already trained by us will also take part and help in the process. After about a year of developing activists, we plan on building a state-level organisation whose task shall be exclusively devoted to the spreading of our movement and educating the people about the need for scientific temper.

In this part of India it is very necessary to create a spirit of enquiry and scientific temper among the people. We hear of so many atrocities and dangerous superstitious practices that it would need a whole life time to just make a list of them. The large population, lack of medical facilities and superstitions put into the minds of people from a very young age make the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh. Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh the most backward in India. Unless we build up strong movements there to go to the people and develop their critical faculties, the nation is not going to progress.

That is one of main reasons why the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations has decided to focus on these states for the coming years. We have already managed to start one such in Bihar called as the Bihar Rationalist Forum. We hope to start one in Uttar Pradesh too within a year. That would mean that we have managed to cover the two most populated states of our country and probably the most superstitious too.

How the movement develops in these states shall be a pointer to how it is going to fare in the rest of the Hindi belt. While we have a presence in Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh we are yet do develop in Chattisgarh and Rajasthan. We have to bring these states too into our ambit as soon as possible.

Professor Narendra Nayak is the President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA). He regularly tours the country, giving demonstrations and holding workshops to develop scientific temper.

Heretics, Rebels, Reformers And Revolutionaries - Part 1

Prabhakar Kamath — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:35:23 +0000

In this series of articles, we will study the stories of heretics, rebels, reformers and revolutionaries who attempted to overthrow organized priestly religions all over the world. In the first article of this series we will study how the first great revolution against ‘Brahmanic’ religion was launched in Egypt in 14^th century B. C.

Priest-Kings And Temples

In the dawn of ancient civilizations, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, priests were practically the rulers of the land by virtue of their skills in magic, medicine, astronomy, temple architecture, literature, and knowledge of various gods, which they created to represent some aspect of nature. Temples were their power bases. They held sway over people in a given community, and established rules of social conduct within that community. They deluded common people into believing that their gods would fulfill their desires and protect them from evil forces. They gave the society the internal stability, and by means of great personal sacrifices, they safely conveyed civilization from one generation to another. In the process they earned much gratitude of common people, and became wealthy and powerful. Before secular kings came on the stage of history, there were the priest-kings.

Kings And Palaces

The Intellectual priestly class in ancient civilizations suffered from two great weaknesses:

1. They just could not subdue their jealousies of other priests in charge of temples dedicated to other gods, which led to chronic conflicts among them.

2. They were not able to effectively fight off barbaric tribes marauding their lands.

These two problems required creation of secular kingships. The fighting men chosen to be kings built an army of able-bodied men who could protect the society from external aggression, and wage war on other lands to increase their wealth, power, and territory. In the language of Brahmanism, they were both Dhananjaya (Conquerors of Wealth) and Paranthapa (Enemy Burner). However, with the kings came their palaces. Now palaces became the second center of power in the ancient societies. As secular kings became more powerful, they began to hold sway over people’s lives by virtue of their muscle power and wealth. However, the priestly class did not totally surrender to the kings. Instead they manipulated kings into believing that their rule must be shown to the public as granted by the grace and will of the gods, who just happened to reside in their pockets. Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.), the founder of the first Babylonian empire, acknowledges the supremacy of Sumerian gods by beginning one of his inscriptions, “When Anu and Bel entrusted me with the rule of Sumer and Akkad…” (H. G. Wells). Conflict between priestly class and kings is a universal theme in the history of all civilizations. As we read in my earlier articles, Upanishadic revolution to overthrow Brahmanism was led by Kshatriya sages.

God-Kings Of Egypt

In Egypt, however, Pharaohs, as the kings were known, with the connivance of the priests, declared themselves as the earthly manifestation of various Egyptian gods such as Osiris, Hathor and Amun Ra. Due to the enormous power derived from their purported divinity, and authority over people derived from their prowess in war and public service, they were able to muster enough manpower to build colossal monuments to their glory such as pyramids, temples and Sphinx. To prevent diluting their divine blood, they married only immediate relatives of opposite sex, such as sisters or cousins. Anyone marrying outside the ‘divine clan’ was subject to social ostracism, which, of course was in the domain of priestly class. Even though the power and authority of the Pharaoh living in relative isolation of their palaces was seemingly absolute, the priests of great temple-casino complexes such as the ones in Karnak and Luxor, held considerable amount of stranglehold on the Pharaohs as well as the populace. As long as the Pharaohs toed the line drawn by the priests, their power base was secure. If they crossed that line, they would do so at their own peril. Inevitably, such a delicate balance of power would certainly receive a jolt sooner or later.

Seeds Of Revolution

An incident happened during the rule of Amenhotep III, a Pharaoh of 18^th Dynasty who ruled from 1386/88 -1349/50. He fell prey to his lust for a beautiful damsel of Syrian/Semitic extract by the name of Tii (“Tee”), and made her his principle wife. This did not sit well with the priests of the chief god Amun Ra. The priests did not hide their dislike for Tii or her offspring. Amenhotep III did another thing to offend the priests. He took an obscure sun god known as Aten, and elevated it to the position of the chief god, while tolerating other gods side by side. (We read in my articles on the Bhagavad Gita how Upanishadic sages took the mysterious spirit Brahman invoked by Brahmins at Yajnas and elevated it into ‘all-pervading Universal Soul Brahman’; and Bhagavatas promoted prince Krishna of Mahabharata epic to the status of Parameshwara.) Thus provoked by Amenhotep III, the priests of Amun Ra became angry, vengeful and turned on his entire family. They did not treat the offspring of Tii well, particularly her second son who came to power later on as Amenhotep IV. Hate for the priests of Amun Ra grew in the heart of Amenhotep IV. It is said that Tii further fuelled the fire of hate in the heart of her son. Now a struggle began between the priests of Amun Ra and the family of Amenhotep III.

Pharaoh Amenhotep IV Launches Monotheism

Amenhotep IV succeeded his father upon his death, following two years of co-regency. He set out to destroy the entire priest-dominated Egyptian polytheistic religion, which had evolved over at least two thousand years. Realizing that the only way to undermine the power of the priests was to take their gods away from them, he rejected Amun Ra as the supreme god, and elevated Aten the Solar Disc to the position of the Only Supreme God as declared in the hymn, “O Sole God beside whom there is none!” This declaration of One Supreme God –monotheism- has echoed through the centuries in Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. It has been speculated that Moses got the idea of monotheism from Akhenaten as evidenced by his First of Ten Commandments, “You shall have no other gods before Me,” and in Islam’s oft-repeated utterance, “There is no god but God.” In fact, its echo could be heard even in the monotheistic Bhagavata creed as uttered by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, “Surrender unto Me alone” (18:66) and “Worship Me alone” (9:22).

Amenhotep IV Becomes Akhenaten And Attacks Old Religion

Amenhotep IV changed Amun in his name into Aten, his Supreme God, and called himself Akhenaten. He named his son Tutankhaten, whom we now know as Tutankhamen (king Tut). Akhenaten built many huge temples for Aten in Thebes and systematically knocked down old temples dedicated to Amun Ra as well as other gods. He abolished all different quarrelling sects. Disgusted by the narrow-mindedness and oppressive atmosphere created by the priestly class, which completely dominated his capital city Thebes, he built a new capital at Amarna, 180 miles north of Thebes. He named his new capital Akhetaten. He banished priests from his capital and banned their ancient religious ceremonies. In his religion, one could relate to Aten directly, without brokers. He dictated that his statues should be as realistic as possible so that his subjects would see him as he is rather than as an awe-inspiring phony figure as dictated by the priestly rules of sculpturing. Defying the priestly tradition, he portrayed his wives and children with him in the carvings so that his subjects would see him as having a family life just like them. He made sure that the Sun Disc with radiating rays was depicted in all his portraits. Thus he became the first king in history to initiate a revolution to overthrow the ancient polytheistic religion mediated by hoards of corrupt and powerful priests, and establish a monotheistic religion without priests.

The Priestly Backlash

Akhenaten did not live long. He died around 1334 B. C. after ruling Egypt for seventeen years, and his revolution died immediately thereafter. As Ashoka the Great did, he underestimated the weed-like power of priests rooted in two thousand years of Egyptian history. The priests had merely bent with the wind. As soon as the winds blew away, they came back to power and immediately began to destroy every temple and palace Akhenaten had built so lavishly. They used the debris of the demolished buildings as the filler material for the foundations of their new temples built for Amun Ra. Akhenaten’s successor Tutankhaten was about eight years old when he was put on the throne, and he could not rule the country without the guidance of experienced priests. The priests renamed him Tutankhamen to reflect his renewed allegiance to Amun Ra, and made him a puppet in their hands. Like Brahmins did to Ashoka the Great after his death, they wiped out the names of Akhenaten and his family from the history of Egypt. Thanks to their thoroughness, Tutankhamen’s tomb remained intact till Howard Carter discovered it in the early part of twentieth century. Grave robbers did not know such a king existed and so they did not look for his tomb!

Why Akhenaten’s Revolution Failed

Ordinary people, who had been bewildered by the new religion of Atenism, reverted back to the comfort of worshiping their old animal-headed gods by means of their traditional rituals and festivals conducted by their trusted priests, no different than 21^st century Hindus finding solace in worshiping elephant-headed god Ganesha or monkey god Hanuman. They could better relate to these gods in their cool stone temples than to the Sun Disc in the burning desert. The concept of a Sun Disc as the Supreme God was too abstract for their simple minds, just as people of post-Vedic period found it difficult to relate to the concept of all-pervading, invisible Brahman as replacement for various anthropomorphic Vedic gods. Besides, unlike Ashoka the Great, Akhenaten did not appoint a huge cadre of emissaries to spread the message of his new religion far and wide. Ashoka’s incessant effort resulted in Buddhism becoming the dominant religion of India for a thousand years, and one of the great religions of the world to this day. Besides, unlike Ashoka, Akhenaten did not undertake great community projects such as building wells, tree-lined roads, hospitals, etc. to serve the public and enhance his own stature. Some historians say that because of Akhenaten’s preoccupation with his religious revolution, he neglected his kingly duties; did not wage war against potential enemies as expected of Pharaohs, nor maintained proper diplomatic relationship with his neighbors. Others have provided evidence to contradict these claims by quoting correspondence in the clay tablets unearthed at archeological sites in Amarna. In any case, the truth is whereas in the beginning of his rule Egypt was very prosperous, by the time he died, decline had already set in. Thus ended the first great revolution against ‘Brahmanism’ of Egypt.

Lessons From Akhenaten’s Failed Revolution

Akhenaten was a revolutionary, but unlike Ashoka the Great, he was not a visionary. It is clear from all the available evidence that Akhenaten attempted to overthrow the old religion of Egyptians by brute force rather than by means of clever set of strategies and tactics. He did not understand the limitation of power of even God-Kings, and the extent of power of priests over the minds of common people. He did not understand the reality that to reform or overthrow a well-established priestly religion, he needed to take small steps, and carry people with him by means of reasoning, education, sympathy and support. He did not realize that for a new ideology to take roots and spread, he would need the services of thousands of dedicated emissaries and selfless volunteers. He underestimated the power of priests over the minds of simple folks, which they had gained over two thousand years by means of great personal sacrifices. He seemed driven more by hatred for the priests than by genuine desire to reform Egyptian religion. Besides all this, he failed to understand that the new ideology or religion must be so down-to-earth that even common people should be able to relate to it.

Atheists should note that Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam took deep roots only because thousands of dedicated missionaries sacrificed their lives to promote them. No one can convert another person to his way of thinking without making great personal sacrifices. Modern day Atheists dedicated to enlightening common people about stupidity of religion will do well to take note of the lessons from the Story of Akhenaten’s Revolution.

(To be continued)

Read Dr. Kamath’s series on The Truth About The Bhagavad Gita here.

Dr. Prabhakar Kamath, is a psychiatrist currently practicing in the U.S. He is the author of Servants, Not Masters: A Guide for Consumer Activists in India (1987) and Is Your Balloon About Pop?: Owner’s Manual for the Stressed Mind.

‘Freedom Of Speech’ in India- Case Studies: Islamist Zakir Naik, Maoist Rebels, Film Actress Kushboo, Artist M.F. Hussain

Ajita Kamal — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:38:15 +0000

A series of high-profile incidents over the past few months have stirred up conversation among Indians online on the subject of freedom of speech. Not surprisingly, parallels between the cases have been drawn at will to make ever possible argument for and against every side of the debate. This article is an attempt to look at the subject of free speech from a democratic and humanistic point of view.

I begin by outlining the essentials of four cases from the recent past. This will be followed by a short discussion on the notion of freedom of speech. Finally the implications of this discussion will be applied to each case.

PRESENTING THE CASE STUDIES

1. Zakir Naik Banned from UK and Canada

The man in question is a self-styled medical doctor turned Islamic preacher who delivers lectures, holds debates and answers questions in front of large audiences worldwide, all in the effort to spread the ideology of Islam. Naik is known for his hate-filled propaganda, delivered with a self-pretentious smugness designed to carry all the appeal of a tough inner-city kid wrangling his pants around his knees as he delivers one cheeky ad hominem after another on the MTV show “Yo’ Mama”. Its nothing short of cheap, logically incoherent, crowd pleasing rhetoric- going for the PWND factor. This image is the vehicle that he uses to promote a deceptively sugar-coated extremist ideology. He works with an Islamic television channel and also frequently travels India and abroad, spreading his version of fundamentalist Islam.

Naik has been in the news recently after being disallowed entry into the UK and Canada. Both governments within days of each other rejected his application to enter their respective countries on his speaking tour of the world. Naik is appealing against both the bans.

2. Verbal Support of Maoist Rebels Banned

The ongoing Maoist insurgency against the government of India and the people who abide by its constitution is comprised of members belonging to various indigenous tribes in the forests of Central and North Eastern India. The Communist Party of India, Maoist, (not to be confused with the CPI Marxist) has been designated a terrorist organization by the government. The Maoists have been responsible for much destruction of life and property in recent years, as they fight the government supported incursion of mining companies into their lands.

Early in May of 2010, the Indian government released a statement warning that those who speak in support of Maoist terrorists could be prosecuted, under Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

3. Supreme Court Clears Film Actress Kushboo

In 2005, Indian film actress Kushboo was charged on 22 counts of obscenity because she said in an interview that it is acceptable for women to have premarital sex, “provided safety measures are followed to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases”. There were mass protests in Tamil Nadu where Kushboo was worshiped by some as a goddess. Needless to say, the temples built in her honor were destroyed after this incident. In April of this year, the Supreme court dismissed all 22 charges brought against her.

4. Artist M F Hussain Gains Citizenship in Qatar

India’s most celebrated artist in modern times, Muqbool Fida Hussain, took up Qatari citizenship in February of this year. Hussain was awarded the Padma Shri 1955, the Padma Bhushan in 1973, the Padma Vibhushan in 1989 and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986. He gained notoriety in 1996 when pieces that he had painted in the 70s were reprinted in a Hindi magazine. Initially 8 cases were filed against him which eventually escalated to a large number of cases (about 900 or so) spread throughout the country. More details here.

In 2006, the death threats and acts of vandalism increased, forcing Hussain to spend an increasing amount of time abroad. His decision to take up Qatar’s offer of citizenship requires him to give up his Indian citizenship.

ON FREE-SPEECH

What does it mean to be Free to Speak?

Popular conceptions of political ideals vary depending on the cultural mindset of the population in question. In secular democracies the freedom to speak as and when one wishes is tempered with a sort of commonsense that many find comforting. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t agree that some forms of expression should not be permitted. The problem then is that in practice very few of us can agree on where to draw the line. It is because of this that we must pay attention to the semantics involved in formulating such principles.

Common wisdom on the notion of freedom of speech is that we are free to say anything we want as long as our speech does not impinge upon the ‘fundamental freedoms’ of others. The idea is that one’s freedom of speech must not cause ‘harm’ to others. This sort of reasoning leaves much unresolved, because in reality the problem of deciding what counts as ‘fundamental freedoms’ or ‘harm’ is not so simple. In fact, the reasoning often seen in the media and as popular opinion is simply designed to ignore the question or pretend that it has been answered. The problems begin just shy of where commonsense ends.

The law, when it is shaped by such general commonsense notions, remains ambiguous. Such ambiguity is often necessary, given that moral problems are almost always situational. However, there are practical limits to such ambiguity. These limits are to be determined by objective facts and logic.

Limiting Ambiguity Using Logic and Reason

In order to present a clear understanding of the problem, we must focus on understanding the semantic and political philosophy behind the idea of free-speech.

“…there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.“

John Stuart Mill

This excerpt is from Mill’s seminal work ‘On Justice” which has been instrumental in shaping modern conceptions of the rights of the individual in a democratic state. Let’s see in detail what Mill was talking about.

The freedom to criticize/express all ideas is a stranger to every dictatorship on the planet. The one thing we know for sure about freedom of speech is that the more it is practiced in a country, the less oppressed the people. This includes the freedom to criticize everything, including the state itself. It also includes the right to support any idea, however repugnant that idea might be to you or I. So, it is clear that such freedoms are a good thing. But how do we reconcile this right to support any idea with the ambiguous notion that freedom of speech must not impinge on the fundamental freedoms of others?

According to Mill, there are two major clauses to free speech. The Harm Principle and The Offense Principle. The first is valid (examples of use include hate speech, incitement of violence and making death threats) and the second is not (examples of use include blasphemy, criticizing an ideology, supporting an ideology/religion). This is the foundation of logic and reason over which we can build an appropriately malleable legal structure. Without such a logical framework, the ambiguity is a tool of oppression. The rest of this section is concerned with understanding the democratic interpretation of the harm principle.

Understanding the Harm Principle

The only valid restrictions on freedom of speech are those that are clearly meant to prevent harm. However, governments must go about doing this without stripping us off our freedom to offend. We must find a balance between the two. But how do we determine where this line lies? The only way to practice such a balance is to restrict the law to criminalize only those aspects of speech that clearly are intended to cause harm. Consider a case of hate speech, incitement of violence or making of death threats. A clear and intended causal effect must be drawn between the act of expression and the harm done. This is the only legitimate way in which the Harm Principle can be evoked to restrict certain forms of speech.

In order for an act of speech to violate the harm principle, it must call for and/or intend harm against individuals, and/or target specific locations or events. That is, one must express intent towards furthering specific harmful acts for the harm principle to be violated. On the contrary, if an act of speech expresses support for the notion of harm, or argues that harm is the only way for something to get done, it cannot be construed of as violating freedom of speech. This is the nuance that is often missed. One instance involves verbally endorsing an act of physical aggression (with the intention of furthering said act). The other is about simply supporting an ideology (without calling for harmful action). Of course, the ideology can have unintended harmful consequences, but that is immaterial. It can be argued that every influential ideology has harmful consequences, including yours and mine. This distinction between action and ideology makes a world of difference in real situations- the type of situations that such laws are meant to help navigate. The reason why we need this clear distinction is to avoid ambiguity in practice. This distinction prevents abuse by governments that want to get rid of certain popular ideas, under the pretext that they are “terrorist” ideas.

Note: In this case, ‘harm’ must also be defined in logical and reasonable terms. I will forgo that discussion here.

How Intent Separates Ideology from Action

There is possible overlap between support for ideology and support for action, which is why the distinction between discussion of ideas and the intent to harm is important. For example, it is perfectly OK for us to discuss the merits (or demerits) of destroying Israel or Palestine (just as an example). But if we demonstrate an intent to destroy Israel or Palestine by supporting specific actions, that should not be protected under free speech.

In order to clearly understand the role of intent, the colloquial interpretation of ideology must be properly qualified. Intention is the key dividing factor here. Accordingly, we must separate pure ideologies which have do not include intentions, from action-based ideologies which do. For the sake of convenience, we classify the former as ideology and the latter as action. Intention to cause harm is the difference between the two. Ideologies are very complex sets of beliefs, and no ideology is a self-contained entity. The only way we have of preserving freedoms and removing ambiguity is to clearly distinguish ideologies from acts that are intended to harm. This is the form of the word ideology that we must use to preserve democratic freedoms. This is very important, because politics, like everything else, needs careful analysis of the semantics used.

Free Speech and Free Society

In general, countries with citizenry that are relatively more free have a better understanding of the distinction between support of terrorist ideology and conspiring to commit acts of terror. In India as with much of the world, we are unfortunately unable to find such nuance in our political dialogue. The justification for allowing any ideology to be freely proclaimed and discussed is a whole different subject. I will not venture to tackle it here, but suffice to say that such freedom is one of the most highly valued commodities in the “free world”. In fact, it is the reason why the “free world” is so relatively “free”. The instant we begin adding restrictions to the free discussion of ideas we are in authoritarian territory.

Countries of the World Ranked According to Press Freedoms- 2008, Reporters Without Borders

However, when speech does indeed demonstrate intent to cause harm, democratic governments have a duty to prosecute the speaker. The failure of this clamp-down on certain kinds of speech is also a failure of democracy.

Note: In a democracy, you are free to choose any platform that is willing to express your views, but you may not demand that a private entity provide you with a platform to air them.

REEVALUATING THE CASE STUDIES

1. Zakir Naik:

Why is Naik considered controversial in the UK and Canada and not in India? India has faced more Islamic terrorism than either of the other two countries, and yet Naik has not been the target of the Indian government.

A closer look at some of the most vile of Naik’s statements offers some clues. The one statement of Naik’s that has been quoted the most in the aftermath of the recent incidents is this: “If he (Osama) is terrorizing the terrorists, if he is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, every Muslim should be a terrorist.’

Terrorism is an ideology, and a repulsive one at that to any civilized human being. But, as we have seen in the discussion above, specific terrorist acts must be described and endorsed before one can be accused of violating the harm clause. So, in my opinion, the above sentence, if taken by itself, is not grounds for prosecution. However, there are other statements made by Naik that, together with the above statement, conspire to discredit the notion that Naik is not endorsing violent acts. Specifically, Naik has made it clear multiple times that the ideology- the specific form of Islam- that he supports, requires homosexuals and apostates be put to death. Can you imagine him saying such a thing about Hindus? If Zakir Naik came out and said that the belief system that he is promoting on TV and using loudspeakers requires all Hindus to be put to death, he would be behind bars quicker than you can say “inshallah”! It is, however, socially (and apparently, legally as well) acceptable in India to say such things about homosexuals and kafirs.

By endorsing specific harmful acts against innocent civilians, through the process of spreading a particular extremist ideology that, by Naik’s own admission, absolutely requires those acts, Zakir Naik has violated the harm principle. He should have been prosecuted for hate speech and incitement of violence by the Indian government, long before Canada and the UK made clear the hateful deception that he represents. Naik’s fault is not the fact that he has defended and even promoted the idea of terrorism, but that he has clearly and explicitly endorsed specific acts of terror.

2. Maoist Rebels:

Under the conditions set by the democratic interpretation of free speech, the newly passed amendment to Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967 is a violation of our right to freedom of speech. There are two clear arguments to be made against the law..

a. The law is deliberately ambiguous.

This is the relevant portion of the statement, taken from the article:

“Any person who commits the offense of supporting such a terrorist organization (like Communist Party of India (CPI)-Maoist) with inter alia intention to further the activities of such terrorist organizations would be liable to be punished with imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years or with fine or with both,” a home ministry statement said.”

The article goes on to say:

“It said such action would be taken under Section 39 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.”

Free speech can be preserved while respecting the harm clause. This requires a clear distinction in the law between legitimate discussion of ideas and expression of intent to harm. This is clearly missing in the law. A law restricting free speech becomes a tool to be used for suppression of ideas when it is so purposefully unclear. The harm clause could easily be stated very clearly and simply. Why could the lawmakers have not been more clear? One simple change in the language of the law would make it perfectly acceptable. If the law said “… the intention to further the terrorist activities of such organisations”, we would not be having this conversation. This is a simple switch from “furthering the activities of terrorist organizations” to “furthering the terrorist activities of these organizations”, but the effect is dramatic and extremely significant. This switch would remove the ambiguity inherent in the current law, but make the law ineffective as far as stifling of dissenting ideologies is concerned. My argument is that that the ambiguity is deliberately designed and put in place to suppress public expression and discussion of this ideology, through government intimidation.

b. The law is redundant

The new law is redundant regarding its stated purpose of targeting Maoist terrorism. It is not required for the government to do what it should be doing to stop terrorist acts. Whatever the contents of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act prior to the addendum, it was fully sufficient to address Maoist terrorism. The recent change only pushes through one addition that makes any difference- the targeting of the Maoist ideology. This is why the new law is redundant as far as the purpose of targeting terrorism is concerned. It does not bring anything new to targeting the terrorist activities. The sole purpose of this law is to target the ideology.

Both these arguments (a and b) conspire to discredit the proposed intent and to lay unwarranted power in the hands of the government.

Some Additional Points

The tyrannical suppression of the freedom to believe and to propagate particular ideologies is commonplace in dictatorships and rare in true democracies. India does have a lot of freedoms compared to dictatorships and tyrannical regimes, but this is a hard fought and hard earned set of freedoms. In India, we can fight against tyranny confident that someday the truth will prevail, despite the forces that tend to accumulate power. The process of dialogue is key to our democracy, like it is to all democracies. The problem is that when laws are made to target ideologies rather than actions, this freedom to discuss and debate ideas is compromised. It was undemocratic when Stalin banned expression of religion and it is undemocratic if India bans expression of Maoist ideology (this is not the case with the law, but it comes awfully close, using intimidation to suppress ideas).

No ideology is self-contained, including Maoist ideology. Contained within the Maoist ideology is a deeper political ideology with ideological roots in many other systems of thought that must not be censored. It must be debated and discussed in the free-market of ideas. Simply dismissing all Maoist ideology as terrorist is exactly the kind of thing that the distinction between supporting actions (intended to cause harm), and supporting ideology (with no intention of causing harm) is meant to prevent. This sort of attack on an ideology by the government constitutes blatant censorship of ideas, under the pretext of protecting the people. This is exactly the kind of authoritarian government intrusion into public life that democracy is supposed to guard us from.

Under the current law, a professor of political science can easily be arrested for saying that the Maoists have a point. Maybe it won’t stick in court, but in any case this law does not necessarily have to be used to arrest individuals based on their ideological support, in order for it to have its intended effect. It is more about intimidation and control of mainstream culture. An objective observer must look at the language of the law and see how easily this law can be used to shut down political and social dissent.

Finally, I would like to expose a key assumption in the arguments supporting the law- the assumption that censoring Maoist ideology will somehow reduce Maoist terrorism. Where is the evidence for this? I think a very good case can be made that it will have the opposite effect by, for example, driving the Maoist elements underground and away from open and free discussion with democratically-minded and peaceful people. There may be better counter arguments, and there even may be studies on this subject. In any case, this particular point is irrelevant to the case against the law, because the two arguments presented above are sufficient to demonstrate that this law is draconian.

3. Kushboo

The events leading up to the cases against Kushboo, and the eventual dismissal of all the cases by the supreme court, do not deserve to be on this list. But I have included this issue here to make a specific point about free-speech. Adults are free to have consensual sex with other adults. At a much more benign level, adults are free to say so. The cases against Kushboo are an example of a primitive and dangerous slant in the public mindset towards restricting democratic freedoms in India. The only thing scandalous about the conclusion of the events here is that the government didn’t punish those who filed cases against Kushboo for saying there is nothing wrong with premarital sex. The cases were clear examples of frivolous lawsuits and constitute a waste of the court’s time (and are serving to intimidate free citizens). The supreme court should have imposed stiff fines on those who filed the court cases against Kushboo. However, ultimately the blame here lies with the public.

4. M.F. Hussain

As with the case of Kushboo, the issue of Hussain’s paintings and their widespread condemnation by communal elements is more a failure of society than a failure of government. The government’s inadequate response deserves its share of the blame for Hussain having to eventually accept Qatari citizenship, but it was Indian society, polluted by an ideology that demands automaton-like in-group behavior, that was the ultimate force that drove Hussain away.

The standard arguments that I have come to expect from those who support Hussain’s move to Qatar (instead of criticizing those violent factions that threaten his life) have to do with the moral imperatives concerned. “Why does he paint nude Hindu goddesses?” “Why not the Muslim prophet Muhammad?” “Hussain is mocking Hinduism” “Hussain’s ideas are offensive to Hindus” “Hussain is a provocateur”. One is, of course, free to make these arguments, and one may even be right. However, one may not in a democracy expect that these arguments are sufficient cause to take legal action against Hussain.

Those who make these arguments are missing the point about free-speech. Hussain’s motives are irrelevant as long as he is not promoting violent acts against people. The problem is that where religion is concerned, people lose the ability to see that criticism of all ideas is a human right. Moreover, many of those who criticize Hussain’s actions (which are protected under free-speech law) have made death threats and even sabotaged Hussain’s shows and art works. These are acts that are absolutely not protected by the law. Yet the outrage from the Indian community and media has focused on the paintings and the “expert opinion” on whether they constitute “offensive material”, and not on the truly undemocratic abuse of speech by those who have threatened harm against Hussain.

CONCLUSION

To re-iterate, we must draw a clear distinction between discussion of ideas and endorsement of acts that are intended to harm. It is understanding this distinction that can liberate India from the popular undemocratic mindset that is constricting her, preventing the resolution of a vast many social and political issues that need be addressed using reason.

Everybody Bake Jesus Day - Facebook Event

Editor — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:01:48 +0000

Yeah we realize the title is not very imaginative coming on the heels of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, but wait till you hear all our reasons for why we think you should participate in this particular celebration of free speech and expression.

The Everybody Bake Jesus Day facebook event is being organized as a response to a recent incident involving an assault on our fundamental right to a well-cooked Jesus. Javier Krahe, a musician from Spain, has been charged with blasphemy simply because of a benign and victimless act of self-indulgence committed over 3 decades ago. Krahe made a satirical home video in 1978, in which he oven-baked a properly seasoned statue of Jesus that he pulled off a crucifix. A few frames from this 54 second video were shown on Spanish TV more recently and the Catholic church went all batshit crazy over it. Now Krahe could end up paying a fine of up to 192,000 euros. P.Z. Myers blogged about this on Pharyngula last month. We have decided to make this an official event on facebook along the lines of Everybody Draw Muhammad day.

Event : Everybody Bake Jesus Day

Start Time: Saturday, July 3, 2010 at 12:00am
End Time: Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 12:00am
Location: Everywhere

Support free speech by baking Jesus in your favorite cake, cookie, pie, pastry, whatever. Have a barbecue and bake Jesus shaped pork ribs. If you’re vegan, bake a tofu Jesus. Maybe you’d like to get together with your friend Jesús from next door and do some ‘baking’ together. If you cannot actually bake anything for want of hardware, do something creative. Make a video or design a graphic. Whichever way you choose to participate, join the rest of us on Saturday the third of July, and share your ideas by posting them on facebook.

It is true that the forms of Christianity in practice today are on average less violent and fundamentalist than modern Islam, and this case of Javier Krahe is indeed an aberration in the West. But nevertheless, we think that this case deserves our full attention. Even if we are unable to provide any real support to Javier Krahe, we must at least use this incident to demonstrate to those in the Muslim world that the atheist/freethought community is equally critical of and opposed to attempts by all religious authorities and groups to transgress on the fundamental rights of human beings. The message that we send is peaceful and coordinated defiance of the coercive tactics that religionists resort to when their absurd beliefs are ridiculed. The message is that one act of censorship of ideas will inspire many more acts of free expression of ideas in its place. The message we send to the mullahs and priests of all religious communities is this: If you want to escape the ridicule of the world’s nonbelievers, censoring us or attempting to criminalize free speech is the last thing you want to do.

Here is the original video by Javier Krahe:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Moral and Virtuous People Don’t Need God Or Mindless Religion

Prabhakar Kamath — Sat, 22 May 2010 02:09:33 +0000

1. The Original Intent Of Religion And God

The original intent of Hinduism (Brahmanism) was to bring Law and Order into the lawless and chaotic society. That is why religion was known as Dharma -that which holds. The original purpose of creating various gods was to fulfill one’s desires and protect one from evils, both tangible (wicked people) and intangible (vagaries of nature). Gradually vested interests took over the religion, and it became a big business. This is consistent with Law of Solutions: All noble solutions for societal problems sooner or later become problems themselves.

2. All Religions Are A Way Of Life

Hinduism evolved into what it is today by incorporating a wide array of belief systems, while it maintained the elitism of Brahmins within that amorphous entity. So today a wide spectrum of belief systems, some of which are contradictory to each other, could be found in Hinduism. Hindu religionists try to explain away this nebulous feature of Hinduism by uttering parrot-like, “Hinduism is a way of life.” This mindless utterance seems to suggest that other religions are not a way of life. The fact is all religions are more or less a way of life.

Ad by the American Humanist Association

3. Two Broad Aspects Of Hinduism: Mindful And Mindless

The Hindu way of life has two broad aspects: Mindful and mindless. The mindful part of Hinduism consists of moral values and noble virtues, which guide people’s behavior towards others in the society. This is the true aspect of Hindu Dharma. These morals and virtues are timeless and relevant to all people in the world regardless of their beliefs. Since there is no money to be made by this aspect of Hinduism, it has become an orphan. Neglect of moral values and noble virtues is evident in the antisocial and corrupt behavior of most Hindu leaders in power in India today.

Most of today’s Hinduism consists of mindless rituals and traditions, which have absolutely no relevance to the modern times. These rituals evolved over the centuries, often due to misinterpretation of scriptures, and were propagated for financial gains. Yajnas, Poojas, Abhishekas, astrological predictions and a thousand other profit-motivated superstitions have become hallmarks of today’s Hinduism. This aspect of Hinduism is thriving today, as there is a lot of money to be made by means of these shenanigans. To the vast majority of Hindus, this is Hindu Dharma.

4. Moral Values

The moral values prevent us from harming others in the society. These values arise from our conscience, which represents the values our parents put in us. These values basically tell us: You shall not be a bad person! Here is a short list:

1. Do not steal.

2. Do not lie.

3. Do not hurt.

4. Do not betray.

How do we feel when we violate our own moral values? We feel guilty. Guilt is the function of conscience. Readers could add their own pet moral values to this list.

5. Noble Virtues

Noble virtues consist of those behaviors that encourage us to be helpful to others in the society. These values basically tell us: You shall be a good person !

1. Empathy

2. Generosity

3. Forgiveness

4. Humility

5. Kindness

6. Gracefulness

7. Fearlessness

Every single reader of this article is smart enough to know what these virtues stand for. How do we feel when we practice these virtues? Well, we feel good about ourselves.

6. We Don’t Need God Or Religion To Be Good

If one makes a list of these moral values and noble virtues and practices them in his daily life, s/he does not need religion, god, tradition, rituals, fasting, meditation, praying, Swamis, Babas, Gurus, magic, ash, lingam and other nonsensical stuff 99% of Hindu religion is made up of.

One simple way of inculcating noble virtues is to post writings related to them where one could read them often. For example I have the following statement on the wall where I can see it when I talk on phone. This has helped me to make conscious decision to help those who call me asking for my help:

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any fellow human being let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Stephen Grellet.

Now give me one valid reason why any moral and virtuous man or woman might need a religion or god? Now let us review a few facts why we should reject the mindless part of religion.

7. Temple-Casino Complexes

Today, thousands of glittering temples in India and abroad have become like Las Vegas casinos attracting millions of mindless devotees seeking fulfillment of their desires and protection from evil. The temple of Tirupati is the best-known temple-casino complex in India. Every year new temple-casino complexes are rising all over India. The ostentatious Swami Narayan Temple in New Delhi is a prime example. Bewildered by Brahmanic charm and trappings, Hindus throng to these temple-casinos and keep gambling away their wealth in mindless rituals hoping against hope that they would someday hit a jackpot, but getting nothing in return. The donation box you see in front of the sanctum sanctorum of every temple is like a slot machine.

There are all kinds of Entertainment Shows in this Las Vegas-like landscape: Babas perform magic shows; Swamis perform sex shows; Yogis perform 70-year starvation shows; freaks perform hanging-by-skin-on-chariot shows, charlatans perform walk-on-fire shows, prostitutes perform dance shows, and the like. In fact the list of freak shows, such as Kumbh Mela, Amar Nath Yatras, bathing in Ganga, procession of ash-smeared naked Sadhus and the like, is very long indeed. Who are the ‘enforcers’ of this wonderland of religion? Well, you guessed it right: RSS, Sri Ram Sene, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, and other assorted hire-for-riot men whose only ‘virtue’ is hate-mongering of other religions. Really, there is absolutely no difference between today’s Hinduism and Las Vegas of bygone days when the Mafia controlled the casinos. Now Las Vegas is absolutely honest about the whole shenanigan and Hinduism is still run by hypocritical Brahmanic Mafia, often supported by the government itself, as is the case in Karnataka.

Tell me, why would anyone want to be part of this part of Hindu religion?

Freeing Devi: A Pragmatist Argument For Gender Equality In The Freethought Movement In India

Ajita Kamal — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:41:16 +0000

In countries like India where goddess worship is prevalent, the argument is often made that such superstition actually helps the cause of women’s rights. To feed the flames, more than a few Western feminists (such as Kathleen Erndl, Sarah Caldwell) have suggested that women in India should embrace these superstitious notions and derive strength from the myths, in order to the counter real prejudice that they face everyday. I disagree with this notion on two levels. Firstly, I don’t think that it is, in practice, possible to separate ‘good’ superstitious beliefs from the ones that are responsible for increasing suffering in society, since these are inter-dependent irrational sets of beliefs that defy logic. Secondly, these superstitious beliefs about goddesses and fairies prevent us from gaining a better understanding of the problem and finding stable long-term solutions based on reason. Furthermore, other feminists like Cynthia Humes have shown that there is a difference between the view of women as goddesses and the experiences of the majority of ordinary women in these cultures. Studying the reasons for this difference is, in my opinion, key to understanding gender inequality in such cultures.

I submit that the goals of the Freethought movement are aligned with those of the women’s rights movements in these countries, and that therefore there is a practical reason for Freethought groups to actively promote the feminist cause.

The Essence of the Argument:

Superstitions such as goddess worship are cultural impediments to realizing true gender equality. True gender equality will help make such superstitions socially redundant. The Freethought movement must actively pursue gender equality, even as it confronts the superstitions that justify injustice.

Before I defend the above argument, two points must be clearly stated.

The idea that women deserve equal treatment in society is accepted as a moral good steeped in the humanistic tradition of compassion, guided by reason.
Any social good that a belief in the supernatural could possibly bring to women’s rights can be fully addressed and achieved through compassion and reason.

“The worship of the Goddess, of the divine as female, has a long history in India and continues to become even more popular today. By virtue of their common feminine nature, women are in some contexts regarded as special manifestations of the Goddess, sharing in her powers.”

Is the goddess a feminist?: the politics of South Asian goddesses, by Alf Hiltebeitel, Kathleen M. Erndl

(Note: The word ‘Devi’ is a generic Sanskrit term for ‘goddess’, used colloquially to also refer to a particular woman, or more accurately, one narrative of an idealized woman out of many possible ones. All religions have, in some form or the other, the idea that women must be set apart from men, assigning them many contradictory narratives. In this sense, Devi can be taken as a metaphor for all sets of supernatural beliefs that project contradictory notions of the nature of a woman.)

The Devi Paradox:

A curious phenomenon becomes apparent when one compares women’s rights across cultures. The more a culture deifies women, the less rights women actually have in that culture. The deification of women could take many forms, including worshiping them as goddesses (living or as myth), and assigning supernatural status to women, referring to some mysterious ephemeral quality that makes them special. One manifestation of the Devi Paradox is seen when women are elected to positions of power in parts of the world where the women’s rights record is the worst. How is it that misogynistic men can abuse women in regular society as part of customary practice, and yet elect one into office?

For example, from wikipedia:

“Muslim majority countries have produced several female heads of state: Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Mame Madior Boye of Senegal, Tansu Çillerof Turkey, Kaqusha Jashari of Kosovo, and Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia. Bangladesh was the first country in the world to have one female head of state follow another, those two being Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina “

Yet no one can deny that these Muslim countries are relatively worse off than most of the West when it comes to their treatment of women in society at large. While particular women are put on a pedestal and respected for their ability to lead, women in general have much lesser rights than men. Often such paradoxes are possible only because contradictory behaviors are justifiable by selectively adopting superstitious beliefs from within the culture. Could this explain why women are simultaneously worshiped and abused in such cultures?

Explaining the Paradox:

In any culture where the individual rights of women are valued less than superstitious edicts from primitive times, it is possible to see the Devi Paradox in action. Superstitious rules may have evolved as a means for society to organize itself into relatively well-defined social units. In modern times these beliefs are responsible for creating contradictory supernatural narratives about women, allowing any one particular narrative to be chosen when it becomes convenient. Thus a man can then use one narrative to justify abusing women, and another narrative to defend the culture that allows abuse. Let’s study this in the Indian context.

Jayalalitha, Chief Minister of TN, Worshiped as a Living Goddess.

The contradictions in how women are perceived in India, by both men and women, are staggering. India is a country that had a woman for it’s 4th Prime Minister, well-respected for most of her tenure as a strong and determined leader. It is also the country where women in some rural parts are frequently tortured and killed on accusations of witchcraft. It is the land where certain women alive today are built temples and offered prayers, while a thriving trade in sex-slaves continues to take place underground. Women graduating from the prestigious management and science schools are taking up high level positions in board rooms and research labs. Meanwhile, thousands of female infants are brutally killed every year to escape perceived difficulties in raising girls in a predominantly male-dominated society. The list goes on.

Such contradictions are kept alive in society by sets of contradictory cultural beliefs. These contradictory beliefs are necessary to perpetuate the notion that women are to be protected at the cost of their own freedom. The patronization inherent in such dubious notions needs to be justified for the cognitive dissonance that the ideas induce to be resolved. This is where superstition comes in. The deification of women as goddesses, feared and worshiped, pure and powerful, gentle and bloodthirsty, emotional and stoic, strong and delicate, angry and loving, and any other stereotype one wishes to project onto the female sex, has contributed to the persistence of these contradictory ideas about women in popular culture. To put it simply, the notion of woman as goddess is a set of popular cultural memes that serve to justify anything one believes about women.

Superstition Justifies Injustice

When superstition has such influence on people, it becomes a social weapon, subtle yet devastating. In the case of gender inequality it works by soothing the conscience of the perpetrators of injustice. The superstitious beliefs about gender are many and dangerous. But the vast extent of the damage that these beliefs inflict is covered up by religious folk trumpeting the fact that superstition actually solves a small section of the problems that it causes! The goddess is the ultimate defense of the misogynist. When there are thousands of women to worship in myth, how can women be lesser than men? The facts and the numbers about daily abuse of women’s rights can seem acceptable and even normal to someone who exists within this reality where women are glorified in myth and kept down in society. It’s OK for a husband to beat his wife, because that is the established standard of equality.

Similar contradictory supernatural beliefs are perpetuated in Islam and Christianity. In fact, there are Islamic Feminists! Women in Islamic societies have been fighting for a version of feminism that wouldn’t seem like feminism at all to most women elsewhere. This is only possible because the meaning of ‘equality’ has been altered, redefined in a superstitious context. When the rules of Islam become the reality within which one operates, the role of a woman is restricted to one of the many goddess forms that Islam projects on her.

Victims in Favor of Victimization:

Superstition works on the victims as much as on the perpetrators of injustice. In India, the number of women who believe that men have the right to beat women is higher (54%) than the number of men who believe so (51%)!

Religions often impose strict conditions on women, and balance these demands by allowing women certain roles within the culture. These roles are often patronizingly referred to as “virtues”. In the most repressed of societies, this quality called “virtue” that women supposedly have is primarily associated with sexual “purity”. Within these cultures, these “virtues”, although far from true equality, are the epitome of an average woman’s range of achievement. Consequently, many are afflicted by a form of Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological condition when a kidnapping victim begins to empathize with his/her kidnappers. In this analogy, we’re all hostages to religion.

The fact that women in the Muslim world are amongst the staunchest supporters of mandatory restrictive clothing for all women should come as no surprise. Women in the Muslim world are believed to have mysterious and dangerous powers that can “tempt” men. Imagine the average Muslim woman in the Middle East, conditioned her entire life to act in submission to men, staying out of sight and unnoticed, out of fear that even the thought of exposing an inch of skin could damn her to burn forever in hell. As far as she is concerned, the layers of black cloth add strength to her constitution. In the context within which she lives, the darkness gives her rights. Such victims of religion are the ones with whom it will hurt the most to reason.

Pragmatic Reasons for Pragmatic Reasons:

My argument for gender equality in the Freethought movement assumes as intersubjective moral truth the axiom that women and men are equally free. This is not to say that the two sexes are the same in every regard, but that men and women deserve the same rights in society. This idea of something as morally true, the basis for the argument from morality, is a popular motivator for action when it comes to creating awareness about equal justice. But the argument from morality is only one part of the larger argument for gender equality.

There is another layer to the argument that we have been ignoring- the argument from pragmatism. I think most of us would agree that teaching our daughters to be strong for themselves and to respect their ability to achieve whatever they desire is a much more effective way of dealing with gender inequality than teaching them to derive strength from a supernatural entity. The implication here is that the women’s rights movement is inextricably linked to the Freethought movement. A strong motivator for action in achieving equality for women is the fact that the struggle for social, cultural, economic and political equality of women in countries like India is aligned with the goals of the Freethought movement as a whole. I submit that this completes the universal argument for equal rights.

The Role of Reason and Compassion:

When the day comes when women are considered equals to men in every applicable social index, reason and compassion will have played the starring role in getting there. Perhaps these two qualities will not always be draped in the colors of Freethought, publicly renouncing ideological enemies such as superstition and bigotry, but real and permanent progress can come only through reason and compassion.

The social rules restricting people to strict gender roles were the result of linear thinking in primitive times. As cultures evolved, these social rules were written into the religions. In modern use these rules are barriers to the quest for a successful and content society. It is in the interests of building a strong Freethought movement to actively pursue equal opportunities for both genders in the organizing and development of the movement.

The Freethought community is already without doubt highly motivated about progressive social issues such as campaigning for gender equality. What’s needed is a stated commitment to make gender equality a core goal of the movement. What’s needed is action.

Freeing Devi

My proposal is that any organization or group that takes on the job of challenging superstition and religion in India must make a conscious effort to break established patterns of gender inequality.

Kumari Devi, the Nepalese living goddess.

Most readers here must be familiar with Freethought groups on social media sites like Facebook and other forums, and can no doubt vouch for the fact that almost every one of those groups is dominated by men. This is not limited to India, by any means, but in general the ratio of women to men is worse in the Freethought movement in India than it is in the West. This must be directly addressed with the explicitly stated goal of creating an equal future for Freethought. This is just the first step, but one that needs to be taken.

Women who are Freethinkers have been real champions for change when it comes to challenging the hatred and misogyny that passes for tradition in many cultures. This sort of activism must be formalized and advanced, especially in countries like India. All Freethinkers must endorse and support gender equality in the Freethought movements around the world. We must particularly focus on movements in countries where women are oppressed. For example, there are Atheist and Humanist movements in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore. There are also some Freethought groups in the Middle East. Just as in the case of India, women atheists in these parts of the world need the support of feminists from the “free world”. On this point it should be mentioned that thousands of people on Facebook and other social networking sites, both men and women, reach out everyday across borders and strive to create a more equal world. These folk are the real heroes of the Freethought movement.

When it comes down to it, the most important thing that the movement needs are strong feminist representatives. In the West, numerous websites and groups for freethinkers who are women have sprung up. One of the most popular of these is Skepchick, a blog run by Rebecca Watson and her gang. Embedded below is the first part of a video of Rebecca giving a talk on the subject ‘Why Chicks Matter’. The rest of the parts can be found here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll conclude with the observation that India needs its own feminist Freethinkers, people like Rebecca Watson, to stand beside Sunitha Krishnan (TED video below) and fight the root of the problem– the superstitious beliefs that serve to justify injustice.

Legacy Of Ancient Religions Of India

Prabhakar Kamath — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 02:13:49 +0000

Note: All articles in Dr. Kamath’s series on The Truth About The Bhagavad Gita can be accessed from here.

In this article in our series on Brahmanism, we will review its legacy, the evidence of which we can see all around us even in modern times. Just about every single malady we see in India today -communal disharmony, caste-based politics, untouchability, illiteracy, poverty, superstitions, irrational fear of authority, passivity, widespread corruption, Hindu fundamentalism, priestly misconduct in and out of temples, goondaism of para military armies, antisocial behaviors of politicians, bureaucrats and police, fleecing of bewildered people by Babas and Swamis, and many more problems- could be directly traced to the doorstep of corrupt Brahmanism. All these are Karmaphalam (fruits of misdeeds) of three thousand years of Brahmanic legacy Indians eat every day.

1. Rise And Fall Of Buddhism

As we read earlier, Buddhism, Jainism and other heterodox Dharmas arose in reaction to decadence of Brahmanism in the post-Vedic period of India’s history. From third century B. C. till 8^th century A. D. Buddhism’s prestige steadily rose in India due to widespread royal patronage. Even though Buddhism started out as a rational Dharma opposed to mindless rituals, soon Brahmins infiltrated it, and it degenerated into just another ritual-ridden Dharma.

”Although originally a rationalization of human condition and a code of ethics, both of which largely ignored deities and rituals associated with conventional religion, Buddhism had been assuming the trappings of orthodox religious practice ever since the Buddha’s death…. Indeed Buddhist icons of Pala period are so anatomically exaggerated and so generously provided with extra heads and arms that only a trained eye would identify them as Buddhist.”

-John Keay

Buddhism’s teachings of compassion, ethical behavior and nonviolence were not suitable for kings who must protect their kingdom from enemies, conquer them, and administer law ruthlessly. Ashoka’s empire, softened by Buddhist philosophy, fizzled out within fifty years of his death in 231 B. C. Following Ashoka, various kings of north India patronized Buddhism and none of them lasted long, including Harshavardhana. Religion had a way of sapping out the strength of Kshatriyas. Referring to the effect of Buddhism on the once mighty Pala kingdom R. C. Majumdar writes:

”Seemingly it disintegrated under a succession of rulers of a pacific and religious disposition.”

Referring to the demise of Pala rule John Keay adds, “One renounced his throne to become an ascetic, others attended to their spiritual advisers and to the welfare of the monastic establishment which still flourished in the Pala heartland of Bihar and Bengal.”

History has repeatedly taught us the danger of mixing religion and politics. Yet, Indian politicians, most of whom are uneducated in history, have not learned this lesson.

2. Brahmanism During The Quiescent Period

Overshadowed by Buddhism, Brahmanism weakened as political power and remained quiescent till Guptas came to power around 320 A. D. During this quiescent period, though Brahmanism appeared to be in deathbed its brain kept on ticking. Brahmins did not let their dormancy come in the way of producing various mesmerizing mythical works such as the eighteen Puranas (Ancient Stories), the main goal of which was to quietly promote Brahmanism and supremacy of Brahmins in the scheme of things. They further expanded the Mahabharata epic. They incorporated various regional sub-sects into Brahmanism and developed the basic tenets of Vaishnavism and Hinduism. Impressed by their erudition and literary skills, prominent royal houses began to come under the sway of Brahmins. South India was almost completely converted to Brahmanism, with the exception of a few smaller kingdoms, which embraced Jainism. As the fortunes of Buddhism declined, those of Brahmanism rose steadily. By the time of Harshavardhana (606- 647 A. D.) Brahmins were strong enough to attempt his assassination for his obvious bias for Buddhism. Harshavardhana executed the leader of the conspiracy and exiled five hundred Brahmin co-conspirators (Keay).

3. Grave Consequences Of Brahmanic Manipulation Of The Gita

We read in our previous articles how:

Brahmanic seers edited the Bhagavad Gita to hide both Upanishadic and Bhagavata revolutions and project is as a monolithic text.
Shankaracharya misread, misrepresented and obfuscated the true meanings of revolutionary shlokas.
Brahmins corrupted Bhagavatism by eliminating Yoga in Bhaktiyoga and attaching Pooja to it, which was nothing but Yajna in disguised form.

All these Brahmanic manipulations resulted in serious long-term consequences for India.

Thousands of temples were built all over the country to house thousands of idols. This temple building frenzy continues to this day.
Millions of people visited these temples and donated generously to their upkeep. Temples became fabulously rich. This practice is going on to this day.
Temple wealth attracted the attention of Islamic adventurer Mahmud of Ghazni and others such as Sultan of Ghor.
Misinterpretation of Karmayoga and Bhaktiyoga undermined the Code of the Warrior and weakened the resolve of Hindu warriors.

4. Temple Building Frenzy

From seventh through tenth centuries, Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas of Karnataka, Pallavas of Kanchi, Cholas of Tanjore, and Pandyas of Madurai built great temples dedicated to Hindu gods. Chalukyas even established a school for temple-building arts at Aihole and Pattadakal in Karnataka. Some of the finest examples of temple building experiments survive to this day in these two sleepy little towns. In north, central and east India, temple building frenzy began a little later. By 13^th century both north and south India were dotted with thousands of beautiful temples to house multitude of idols.

Gifts to Brahmins running these temples and donations to these temples based on the literal interpretation of shloka 9:27 (”Whatever Dana (gift) you give away, do it as an offering to Me.”) became common practice. In the course of time millions of people, induced by greedy Brahmins and deluded by the alleged magical powers of the idols in Hindu temples, began to donate enormous amount of gold, silver, precious stones, coins and jewelry to these temples hoping that in return these gods would fulfill their desires (9:22) and protect them from evil (18:66).

The tragic irony of all this was that none of these illiterate, semi-literate, and even educated masses knew that when Krishna said in 18:66, “I shall liberate you from all evil, do not grieve!” the “all evil” he was referring to were Shokam (grief), Dwandwam (restlessness of mind) and obsession with earning Karmaphalam (wealth, power, heaven) in Yajna arising from the twin doctrines of Brahmanism, namely the Gunas of Prakriti and Law of Karma; and the inequities of Varna Dharma based on these two evil doctrines.

5. Temples Bloat With Wealth

In north India, which will be the focus of our discussion, Hindu devotees in Multan, Mathura, Kanauj, Thaneshwar, Somanath, and thousands of little towns built magnificent temples. As money poured in, all these temples became obscenely ostentatious in keeping with Brahmanism’s addiction to ostentation. On the one hand Brahmins attached to these temples professed austerity, wore saffron or white clothes and seemingly led simple lives. On the other hand they demanded or extorted donations and fees from patrons, performed ostentatious Poojas, and induced kings to build gargantuan temples. To manage the flocks of mindless pilgrims whole townships grew around these temple complexes. Thousands of Brahmins attached themselves to these great temple complexes like blood-sucking leaches. They offered to perform hundreds of complicated rituals of graded complexity to please gods and sponsors, and above all, themselves. Annual pilgrimage to these holy temples became a compulsive ritual for millions of Hindus, no different than what we see today all over India.

To attract pilgrims to their temples Brahmins did not hesitate to use any means necessary. As reported by a thirteenth century Arab author, Brahmins of Somanatha temple even managed to levitate the lingam of Shiva in the air by surrounding it with an elaborate magnetic contraption (R. Thapar). If this was true, it must have been a great scientific achievement by any measure, not to mention how Brahmanism used science to delude people as far back as eleventh century. As we will read below, the naïve belief of Brahmins in the magical power of levitating lingam had disastrous consequences when in 1025 A. D. Mahmud of Ghazni entered the compound of the temple to steal its enormous wealth and knock it down.

6. Mahmud Makes Annual Pilgrimage To Pillage And Plunder

The fabulous wealth in these temples was safe from other kings of India most of whom were Brahmanic or Buddhist by faith. Soon the fame of these vast idle treasures reached far and wide. When the greedy Mahmud of Ghazni heard about the fabulous treasures of India, he decided that he, too, was going to make annual pilgrimage to these temples, but with more sinister motives. Being a fanatical Muslim, he cloaked his greed with religious zealotry. He declared that it was his religious duty to destroy the idols and temples of Hindus. Just about every harvesting season, Mahmud descended from his mountainous capital in Afghanistan to the plains of India, attacked the temples, killed Brahmins in thousands, and took the enormous loot back to his kingdom. He expanded his kingdom with the money he had stolen from India. When in 1025 A. D. Mahmud raided Somanatha temple, he mercilessly massacred fifty thousand deluded Brahmins who had absolute faith that the levitating lingam of that temple would protect them from evil Mahmud of Ghazni. Their blind faith in their god was such that there were no warriors protecting the temple when Islamic raiders showed up at the gate.

Between 1001 and 1027 A. D. Mahmud of Ghazni raided Indian temple towns seventeen times and Indian kings were impotent against the relatively smaller forces of Mahmud. There was neither one strong emperor ruling India around this time to oppose him, nor a united front. During the previous two centuries the petty kings who ruled the border kingdoms had ignored the growing menace of Islamic kings from the west. They neither studied the doctrines of Islam nor the methods of warfare of Islamic kings.

7. Brahmanic Hubris

In spite of the predictable annual raids by Mahmud, or perhaps because of them, Brahmins kept urging people to donate to these temples and people obeyed them blindly. Their haughtiness and complacency were well summed up by Al Biruni who was then in India as part of Mahmud’s entourage:

“There are other causes, the mentioning of which sounds like a satire -peculiarities of their national character, deeply rooted in them, but manifest to everybody. We can only say, folly is an illness for which there is no medicine, and the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner. According to their belief, there is no other country on earth but theirs, no other race of man but theirs, and no created beings besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khurasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they travelled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is…. Now such is the state of things in India.”

With this kind of know-it-all attitude, they learned nothing from their mistakes.

8. The Code Of The Warrior

Practice of Brahmanism in the third century B. C. basically consisted of two codes: The Code of the Brahmin, which consisted of ritual-related duties of Brahmins, such as performing Yajnas, and the Code of the Warrior, which consisted of duties of Kshatriyas as warriors.

Code of the Warrior is summed up in the following two shlokas in the Arjuna Vishada part of the Bhagavad Gita:

2:37: Slain you will gain heaven; victorious you will enjoy the earth. Therefore rouse resolved to fight. 2:33: But if you will not wage this righteous warfare, then forfeiting your own duty and honor, you will incur sin.

This code rewarded warriors with wealth here on earth and heaven hereafter for their bravery, and punishment with dishonor here on earth and hell hereafter for cowardice. The original Brahmanic Code of the Warrior as enunciated in Arjuna Vishada required the warrior to be both Paranthapa (Enemy Burner) and Dhananjaya (Conqueror of Wealth). As we read in an earlier article, Brahmanism hated Ashoka the Great because he rejected the Kshatriya Dharma out of compassion for his enemies. They branded him as one suffering from Ahamkara (egoism, self-centeredness) for abdicating his Kshatriya Dharma. Arjuna Vishada was composed to condemn this “compassionate Kshatriya” concept. Brahmanism was absolutely correct that as long as a king stuck to the Code of the Warrior, his kingdom was safe from foreign invasion. Rajputs who ruled the kingdoms bordering Afghanistan practiced this Code of the Warrior to its perfection till 10th century.

9. Rajputs: True Practitioners Of The Code Of The Warrior

The western region of India -what is now Rajasthan and parts of Pakistan- was then ruled by fierce warrior kings who perhaps originated from the settled tribes of the Hunas whom Kumara Gupta had fought in the 5^th century A. D. Wisely, Brahmanism absorbed them into the mainstream of the society by conferring on them Kshatriya status by means of a great fire sacrifice performed at Mount Abu. These tribes later came to be known as Rajputs (sons of kings). Like all new converts to any religion, these Kshatriyas staunchly adhered to Brahmanic Code of the Warrior. They considered it an ultimate insult to die in bed. The following shloka of Arjuna Vishada seemed to be their anthem:

2:32: Happy are the Kshatriyas who obtain such warfare that comes unsought as an open gate to heaven.

Their allegiance to Brahmanism was so strong that they followed Brahmanic injunctions to the letter of the law. Women of these tribes even indulged in Jauhar (mass suicide by jumping into the collective funeral pyre), or Sati (individual suicide by being burnt with husband’s dead body). This ancient practice was perhaps rooted in the severe proscription Brahmanism expressed against Varnasankara resulting from the death of men in war. Arjuna laments the consequences of decline of family when men die in war:

1:40-44: In the decline of a family, its time-honored usages perish; with the perishing of sacred rites impiety overtakes the entire family. With the growth of impiety, the family women become unchaste; and women getting corrupted, caste admixture ensues. Hell is verily the lot of the family destroyer through Varnasankara (class admixture); for their ancestors fall deprived of manes-cakes and libations. The everlasting Jati (caste) virtues and Kula (family) virtues become ruined due to Varnasankara created by the bad deeds of family destroyer. Hell is verily the long lasting abode of men whose family religious practices have been broken.

The importance of the above information lies in the fact that by 8^th century, Gita had gained recognition as the handbook of Brahmanism and Kshatriyas implicitly accepted its Code of the Warrior as sacred.

10. Taking Advantage Of Complexities Of Sanskrit Language

By 10^th century, the Bhagavad Gita was widely known as the handbook of Hinduism as attested to by Al Biruni in his famous book Kitabu’l Hind. When I read the following passage in it, I was dumbstruck because I had reached the same conclusions while studying the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

“If you want to conquer this difficulty (i.e. to learn Sanskrit), you will not find it easy, because the language is of an enormous range, both in words and inflections, something like the Arabic, calling one and the same thing by various names, both original and derived, and using one and the same word for a variety of subjects, which, in order to be properly understood, must be distinguished from each other by various qualifying epithets. For, nobody could distinguish between the various meanings of a word unless he understands the context in which it occurs and its relation both to the following and preceding parts of the sentence. The Hindus, like others, boast of this enormous range of their language, whilst in reality it is a defect.”

Brahmins took full advantage of this “defect” in their “perfect” language to explain away internal contradictions in the Bhagavad Gita. Their primary goal was to hide both the Upanishadic and Bhagavata revolutions to overthrow Brahmanism, and project the Gita as a monolithic document representing a monolithic philosophy. This, as we will see soon, undermined Brahmanism’s own Code of the Warrior.

11. Beliefs And Behavior

All our actions are based on underlying beliefs. A change in our belief results in corresponding change in our behavior. For example, if you believe that your doctor is extremely trustworthy, you would take any medicine he gives you without hesitation. However, if someone you trusted told you that your doctor had killed several of his relatives due to incompetence, a seed of distrust is now sowed in your mind about your doctor, and your behavior toward him would change correspondingly. You would not accept his treatment as readily as you did before.

Likewise, if a warrior were indoctrinated into believing that it is his bounden duty to fight and win or die fighting, his belief in this doctrine would reflect in his heroism in war. If the same warrior were indoctrinated that he should fight but be indifferent to victory or defeat, and gain or loss, he would certainly come across as indifferent while fighting. If the same warrior were indoctrinated into believing that he should surrender his action to the lord and not worry about the outcome, the warrior’s action would reflect that fatalistic attitude.

Let us now see how a seed of doubt was sowed into the Code of the Warrior due to erroneous interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita.

12. Potpourri Of Three Codes: A Recipe For Disaster

Many reasons have been forwarded to explain why capable Hindu kings commanding vast armies lost to Muslim invaders who began to make deeper forays into India: Disunity, pathological jealousy, tendency to enjoy adversary’s discomfiture in the hands of enemies, lack of awareness of seriousness of threat, lack of effective strategy, haughtiness, inability to learn from mistakes, etc. However, I think there is an additional, thus far unexplored, cause, which we need to look at closely. This is purely a psychological issue arising from the misinterpretation of the Gita by Brahmanic seers beginning with Shankaracharya in early 9^th century. Let us examine this issue in greater detail.

A. The Brahmanic Code of the Warrior: In the In Arjuna Vishada, the term Karma unequivocally stands for Action as in fighting. The message to Arjuna in the Mahabharata context and to renegade Kshatriyas in the historical context is clear as daylight:

2:37: Slain (while fighting) you will gain heaven; victorious (in fighting) you will enjoy earth. Therefore rouse up, O son of Kunti, resolved to fight. 2:33: But if you will not wage this righteous warfare, then forfeiting your own duty and honor, you will incur sin.

There is no ambiguity in this message. A warrior’s duty is to kill his enemies and plunder his property. In other words, his job is to gain Karmaphalam in action. There should be no hesitation or doubt about this in the minds of the warriors. The warrior is rewarded for his heroism. In fact, he would incur dishonor and sin if he did not fight. Rajputs followed this advice when they fought war with their neighbors. As long as Hindu warriors fought in this spirit, they were second to none.

B. The Upanishadic Code of Karmayogi: In the Upanishadic Gita, the concept of selfless action (Karmayoga) was introduced to counter selfish Yajna (Kamya Karma) of decadent Brahmanism. Here the word Karma meant Yajna, not Action as in fighting. In order to condemn Kamya Karma, Upanishadists declared Karmaphalam as sin. The only way to avoid earning sin is to perform Yajna with indifference to gain or loss (2:48-51). However, to legitimize interpolation of Karmayoga into Arjuna Vishada, Upanishadists pretended as though they were advising Arjuna to do so on the battlefield:

2:38: Treating alike pain and pleasure, gain and loss, victory and defeat, engage yourself in the battle. Thus you will incur no sin (Karmaphalam).

If applied to a Kshatriya, this shloka said that gaining and winning earned him sin. To avoid earning sin, he should be indifferent to gain or loss, and victory or defeat. How do we know that this shloka’s real purpose was to introduce Buddhiyoga (Karmayoga and Jnanayoga) to replace Kamya Karma (desire-driven Yajna) and not to apply it to fighting? Well, in shlokas 2:39-53 that follow Upanishadists introduce Buddhiyoga as the alternative to Kamya Karma and soundly condemn all aspects of Brahmanism. Obviously, the advice given to Arjuna by Upanishadists in 2:38 was merely a pretext to introduce Buddhiyoga into the Gita with the sole purpose of overthrowing Brahmanism. In fact, it is diametrically opposite to the Code of the Warrior in 2:33 and 37, and is impossible to apply in warfare. No one in his right mind could go to war with an attitude of indifference to pain and pleasure, gain and loss, or victory and defeat. Karmayoga has no place in the battlefield. If a king has been brainwashed into believing that he should engage in battle with indifference to gain or loss, victory or defeat, and that gaining anything is sinful, he is doomed to lose the battle.

The true intent of 2:38 becomes evident in shloka 2:47 in which Upanishadists lay down the law that Kshatriyas performing Kamya Karma have no right to its fruits:

2:47: Your entitlement is only to Karma (Yajna) and never at any time to its fruits (for fruits belong to the Devas: 3:10-14). Never be the cause of Karmaphalam (when you act, for by doing so you will suffer rebirth); and never be attached to inaction (just because there is nothing in this for you, do not become an inactive Sramana).

Yet addressing Arjuna the Kshatriya, Shankaracharya says: 2:47, “Never, in any state of life whatsoever, should you crave for fruits of your works -this is the idea.” His advice goes directly against the Code of the Warrior as stated in 2:37. He failed to tell Kshatriyas the truth about this shloka, which is:

”Warriors, this shloka was inserted into Arjuna Vishada by Upanishadists during the post-Vedic period with the goal of weaning away corrupt Kshatriyas from performing Kamya Karma, and to covert them into selfless Karmayogis (3:17-26). Karmayoga cannot be applied in warfare. You need to follow the Brahmanic Code of the Warriors when you fight.”

Admitting this truth meant admitting that there existed a revolution against Brahmanism. Shankaracharya would have none of it. Or, equally likely, he did not know about it.

C. The Bhagavata Code of Bhaktiyogi: In the Bhagavata Gita Krishna tells people:

18:66: Abandon all Dharma and take refuge in me alone; I shall liberate you from all evil. Do not grieve.

Left alone, this shloka would not have undermined the Code of the Warrior. However, as we read in the previous article, because Shankaracharya did not want to admit that the phrase ‘all Dharma’ in this shloka meant all contemporary religions of the post-Vedic period including Brahmanism, he decided to misrepresent this phrase as ‘all Karma,’ and he said to Arjuna: ‘Give up all righteous as well as unrighteous Action.’ He never bothered to explain what he meant by this statement. Shankaracharya said this as if it was applicable to Arjuna in the Mahabharata context, and by extension, to all Kshatriyas.

Had Shankaracharya understood this shloka accurately, he would have said,

”Warriors, when Krishna said ‘abandon all Dharma’ he did not mean you should abandon your Code of the Warrior. Krishna wanted people of post-Vedic period to abandon their religions - Brahmanism and all its sub-Dharmas, and also Buddhism, Jainism and all assorted Dharmas, which had arisen in reaction to decadent Brahmanism- and embrace Bhagavatism, which is his Dharma. Rise up and fight as exhorted by him:

11:33-34: ‘Rise and obtain fame. Conquer the enemies and enjoy the unrivalled kingdom… Slay Drona, Bheeshma, Jayadratha, Karna and other brave warriors who are already doomed by me. Be not distressed with fear. Fight and you will conquer your enemies in battle!’ “

13. Confusion Reigns Supreme

Alas, this was not to be. By 10^th century, Shankaracharya’s fame had spread far and wide. Now Hindu kings, almost all of whom had been mesmerized by Shankaracharya’s teachings or that of thousands of his saffron-clad followers, had to decide what belief system to adopt in fighting their enemies. Brahmanic interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita either did not know, or they refused to acknowledge, that there were three distinct Gitas embedded in its text giving three contradictory messages to the warriors who looked upon the Gita as their guide in warfare.

Arjuna Vishada: “Do your duty helplessly as per your Rajas Guna, fight to gain wealth, or die fighting and gain heaven.”
Upanishadic Gita: As interpreted by Shankaracharya “Never, in any state of life whatsoever, should you crave for fruits of your works -this is the idea.” Why? “Well, because all Karmaphalam is sin and it leads to Samsara.”
Bhagavata Gita: As interpreted by Shankaracharya: “Give up all righteous and unrighteous Action.” Why? “Well, because when Krishna said ‘all Dharma,’ he meant ‘all Karma.’ ”

If one mixes up the above three contradictory messages, the listener is bound to become confused. This is like a father giving mixed messages to his son, “If the bully comes at you, boldly fight back and knock him down; but be indifferent to the outcome of your fight; and don’t indulge in righteous or unrighteous action.” The correct and unambiguous message should have been, “If the bully comes at you, beat the crap out of him and make sure he will never again bother you; you understand?”

Careful study of history of wars between Hindu kings and Islamic kings between 10^th and 16^th century reveals a change in the belief in the minds of Hindu warriors regarding the Code of the Warrior as evidenced by their altered behavior. Increasingly, there entered into their principles of warfare a streak of reckless fatalism, smug indifference to victory, hesitancy in killing Mlecchas (foreign-born outcastes), ambivalence about violence, cowardly retreat, beliefs in superstitions, and blind faith in god’s ability to save them from evil.

14. Decisive Debacle

Here is the brief story of one of the most decisive battles in the history of India in which Rajputs were routed by a much smaller force of Muhammad of Ghor in 1192, heralding the Islamic rule in India. Prathviraj Chahaman, the charismatic Rajput king put together the most formidable Rajput confederacy on record. He had beaten back Muhammad in an earlier war on the battlefield of Tarain. By any reckoning, he should have been able to rout Muhammad of Ghor again. Instead, apparently he sued for a truce. Muhammad agreed to a truce and tricked Prathviraj into believing that his enormous army intimidated him. Naively believing this, Prathviraj’s army was lulled into a “night of riots and revelry.” When the droopy-eyed Rajputs got up in the morning to go to the toilets, Muhammad’s formidable army surprised them. As Ferishta puts it:

”The disorder increased everywhere until at length the panic became general. The Muslims, as if they only now began to be in earnest, committed such havoc that Prathviraj’s prodigious army, once shaken, like a great building tottered to its fall and was lost in its ruins.”

Here is the tragedy of it all: For the first time in history, Prathviraj had succeeded in putting together a formidable army of united Rajputs, and yet, he decides to sue for peace, implicitly trusts Muhammad’s assurance, spends the night reveling and changes India’s history for the worse forever. Even when Rajputs had clear edge over the invaders, they failed to take the initiative and attack and destroy them. Gradually Muslim kings conquered one vacillating Hindu kingdom after another.

15. Muslim Rule Takes Roots And Ruins India

In the aftermath of the disastrous war, thousands of Hindus abandoned Hinduism to escape from stifling caste inequities and embraced egalitarian Islam. One such converted Hindu by the name of Malik Kafur led several raids into deep south, looted rich temples, destroyed ancient kingdoms, and returned to Delhi with, “612 elephants, twenty thousand horses, ninety six thousand mans of gold (241 tons), and countless boxes of jewels and pearls.” Delhi had never seen such loot in recorded history.

The fundamental policy of first Muslim rulers of India was to strip Hindus of all wealth to stifle any resistance to their rule. The cruelest of them all, Alau-d-din Khalji, declared:

”Be assured, then, that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they were reduced to poverty. I have therefore given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year of corn, milk and curds, but they shall not be allowed to accumulate hoards and property.”

Grinding poverty became the hallmark of India until just a decade ago. To this day, the vast majority of Indians live in dire poverty. Reflecting on the long-term effect of such economic and physical devastation of India by Islamic rulers, Will Durant observes:

”This is the secret of political history of modern India, Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued that both mastery and slavery were superficial delusions, and concluded that freedom of the body or the nation was hardly worth defending in so brief a life. The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.”

The British, who took full advantage of every weakness in Hindus as well as by now mellowed Muslim kings, ruled India for ninety years before Indians fought them with a united front. Ironically, independence was won not by the Code of the Warrior, which some naïve militant patriots recommended, but by militant nonviolence, a weapon developed by combining Jain philosophy of nonviolence and Jesus’s philosophy of love, self-suffering and forgiveness.

In the next article, we will study the legacy of caste system in modern India.

Is Richard Dawkins Arrogant? Ridicule, Passion And The ‘New Atheists’

Ajita Kamal — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 22:01:32 +0000

This article is developed from a post on the forums here.

You have probably heard the claim that Dawkins is arrogant. Usually this claim is directed at him from believers. But ever so often one hears it from other freethinkers, in the context of representing science and reason. The claim often is that Dawkins’ “arrogance” is actually counter-productive to the cause. Here is the video that has been quoted multiple times to make the case:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most people who hear Dawkins say the words “Fuck Off” let their minds go blank as to the context. Multiple times I’ve had other atheists tell me that Dawkins sounds so “mean” when he dismisses people like that. But Dawkins is quoting someone else here! To anyone actually paying attention, its clear that Dawkins quotes the editor of New Scientist, to actually make the opposite point- that he is “not the worst”. Yet those intent on criticizing him for his logical and yet undoubtedly sharp criticism of religion latch onto such video clips to justify their intuitive dislike of Dawkins himself.

But this is an issue that is greater than just Dawkins. This concerns the entire freethought movement. What kinds of strategies should we take up when promoting science, critical thinking, naturalism and atheism?

I submit that we must adopt a pluralistic strategy.

Any single advocate for atheism cannot influence every type of individual who believes in the supernatural. This is obvious if you take into account how vastly different people are in their thinking.

That having said, there is absolutely no doubt that few (none, in my opinion) have been as influential as Dawkins has been in promoting reason and atheism in modern times. Time after time I have come across individuals for whom reading one or the other of his books was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

It is easy today to look at Dawkins from a critical standpoint, forgetting all the gains that atheists have made over the past 2 decades. But if we step back and take a look at how the modern atheist rights movement was born and has evolved, the role that he played becomes more apparent. Back in the 1970s and 80s, RD was a lone voice among the scientific community. His books, even back then, were tinged with arguments for a naturalistic epistemology, deriding the supernatural. I read The Selfish Gene in high school in the 90s. Hundreds of thousands of others were already “converts” by then.

There is a very important role that anger, ridicule and passion play in any social movement. While intellectual understanding is key to a movement that is well-grounded, it is the primary emotions that provide the impetus for social organization. Without this, atheism would simply remain an idea to be discussed in academia and in private settings.

Let me give you an example. Secular Humanism has been around for more than a century. Humanists often deride the ‘New Atheists’ for their bitterness. In fact, the argument from many humanists has been that their tactics are more effective! But how many people knew about secular humanism before the ‘New Atheists’? Their whole movement was an academic one, restricted to an elite group of people who had the time and inclination for such intellectualisms. While the humanists were debating about human rights and ethics for over a century, atheists continued to remain in the shadows, in a cultural environment where they were unable to realize many of their fundamental rights. The only community that was available to most atheists was society at large. As you may well know, one of the most important functions of religion is to provide a common cultural ground to enable a common morality and social code to bring together people and form a functioning and content community. We atheists did not have this- not until a few years ago. It is easy to ignore the freedoms (from the point of view of social acceptance) we have gained towards expressing our beliefs in public and for gathering in the name of reason. It is easy to forget that millions of atheists crave the kind of social contact that religions have traditionally provided. It is even more easy to forget the role that anger, ridicule and passion have played in creating this global community of freethinkers. Without the ‘new atheists’, secular humanism would have remained irrelevant in the public sphere. Today we can meaningfully talk about replacing religion with a secular morality derived from humanistic principles only because of the social impetus that the ‘New Atheists’ like Dawkins have provided humanity with.

It is a false assumption that to convince a believer about the validity of atheism (or rather, the absurdity of religion) one needs to be gentle and defensive. That is complete bull. It may work in a few cases, but it is generally a long term strategy applicable only to a tiny segment of people, the ones who are genuinely interested in exploring the truth regardless of their personal emotional intuitions. The vast majority of religious people are absolutely reticent to question their own beliefs and instead will attack atheism blindly. Most people who have become atheists have done so because at some point they began to question their own beliefs. Contrary to the general assumption, this sort of questioning does not come naturally to everyone. It does not come simply because we present logical arguments defending atheism. It often comes because at some point, someone else questioned their ridiculous religious beliefs. Often because someone ridiculed those beliefs. Throughout history, this is how revolutionary ideas have dispersed through culture. Society does not work on the same principles of science, in that evidence and proof do not determine what the majority will believe. Ideas die in a culture when it becomes embarrassing to hold on to them. Social conformity is achieved not through intellectual discourse as much as through the need to belong. If your ridiculous beliefs are laughed at, you begin to question them. This may not apply to you or me or many in this group, assuming that we are more evidence-based on our thinking, but this certainly applies to the majority of people on earth.

Do not think that I am advocating personal attacks. I am talking about ridiculing irrational beliefs, not people.

In fact, I do not engage in debate with believers any more. At least, I try not to. This is the least effective strategy for someone like myself, since many religious folk seem to be unable to make the distinction between personal attacks and criticism of ideas. I think that what really works is for atheists to be visible to the community at large. If religious people actually see that atheists are a happy, moral and well-organized community, obtaining the same social benefits from cooperation and emotional fulfillment that religious people do, that is more effective in making them question their own beliefs. In the process, let’s have some fun laughing at absurd and false beliefs, even as we expose them for the dangers that they represent.

My Name is Swami Baba and I am Not a Fraud

Siddharth Singh — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:50:44 +0000

“There is no such thing as a good Muslim or a bad Muslim, and a good Hindu or a bad Hindu; there are only good people and bad people”.

These lines are from the recent super hit Hindi film My Name is Khan starring Shah Rukh Khan, and were spoken by the mother of the lead character to him when he was young. These words have been hailed by moderates among Hindus and Muslims alike.

As a humanist and an atheist, I personally think this is a positive statement, and hopefully it will seep into the popular culture of India enough to unite moderates across the spectrum. After all, only when the moderates unite can the fanatic fringe be restrained.

However, this statement grossly simplifies a multifaceted issue. It is true that people are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, regardless of whether they are of one religion or the other, or of no religion at all. Atheists too can be ‘good’ and ‘bad’, for we are human beings too. In fact, one of the arguments that religious apologists often give is, “Mao and Lenin Were Atheists too, and they killed millions”.

Why then, do atheists criticize religion? Why do we propagate a society based on reason rather than faith? Aren’t there always going to be ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people, regardless of whether there is religion or not?

The System

The foremost reason why religion is detrimental to the society is that it creates a ‘system’ that enables the ‘bad’ amongst us to exploit the people above and beyond anything possible in a society based on freethought. To help you understand what I mean by this, allow me to illustrate how a ‘system’ can alter outcomes drastically, even though the mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people remains unchanged.

An Illustration

Take the case of the bureaucracy; specifically that of a department working for a certain ministry in the government. Say 3 out of the 10 people in the department are ‘bad’ (the kind who would use their positions to amass wealth and power, and wouldn’t work if given a choice), and the rest are ‘good’ (fairly efficient people who just want to do their work and get on with life as ethically as possible).

Case 1

The department where they work is such that there is no accountability and no deadlines. There are no rewards for good performance, and there is no punishment for failure. Everyone has a job for life, whether they work or not.

The work output of such a department would be fairly predictable. The 3 of the 10 can hold the ministry to ransom. They may amass wealth, harass the common man/woman, and delay regular work. If files are to pass through each of the 10 people, the 3 can hamper the working of the whole department. Hence most of the people who deal with this department would be harassed, even though 7 are doing their work well.

Case 2

Now imagine instead a department that has a carrot and stick policy in place, with accountability and an enforceable deadline for every task delegated to it. The bosses have the power to fire anyone who doesn’t perform, or is corrupt. The boss is herself monitored for performance. Even though there still are 3 people who are ‘bad’, we can imagine how efficiently such a department would work. Work would be completed faster, there would be negligible corruption, and the morale of the ‘good’ people would probably be higher. The output is drastically different from the previous case even though the composition of workers assumed is the same.

The System, as we see, is the differentiating factor. It can create enabling conditions that can radically change outcomes, ceteris paribus.

Applying this Method of Inquiry to God-men, Yoga ‘Gurus’, and Religion

Let us assume a certain Sri Swami Baba is a yoga, lifestyle and spirituality ‘guru’. For the sake of this essay, let us assume that this God-man is ‘good’ at heart, and only wants to see you happy and wants world peace. He preaches that ‘God’ loves you and he wants you to pray to ‘Him’. He tells you how prayer can be effective, and also about the harmless but effective traditional medicine and yoga techniques that can cure you of certain diseases. Money isn’t his concern, and he pumps a large part of the money donated to him by his bhakts into philanthropic activity. He does not aim to acquire political power either.

Is there any reason why such a person would be detrimental to the society? The answer is a resounding yes.

The problem isn’t Sri Swami Baba himself, but the System that he promotes and legitimizes. Because Baba is a ‘good’ man, and people perceive him to have a ‘positive’ impact on the society, God-men, Yoga Gurus, etc, in general gain legitimacy and are conceived to be good for the society by the people at large. Such gurus are welcomed into the daily lives of the bhakts, monetary donations are made possible and full unflinching trust by the followers is ensured. Blind, unquestioning faith is encouraged, and fiction gets masqueraded as fact. People are made to believe that there are ‘forces out there’ beyond the comprehension of science that for some peculiar reason these God-men understand very well. The society begins to accept that such God-men are a way to attain success and happiness.

Ripe conditions are hence created for anyone to exploit for his or her own benefit. Such trust and faith in spiritual religious gurus can be made full use of by anyone willing to do so. When God-men are caught doing something wrong, people dismiss them as aberrations that deviate from the ‘norm’. But in fact, there is no deviation from any norm; it is built into the system. The ‘bad’ people can exploit such unquestioning trust by the people at large for their own aims (power, money and sex) because the ‘good’ ones, such as our Sri Swami Baba, have legitimized it.

Such exploits would not be possible if the social consciousness of the people encouraged critical thinking and reason. If healthy skepticism was encouraged and no one was trusted blindly unless he or she made sense to the individual, such ‘bad’ people would never be able to make use of the society at large for their nefarious purposes to such an effect. People would then begin to treat individual claims on their own merit, and wouldn’t have to defend something they don’t agree with just because they ascribe to a particular label.

Certain ‘gurus’ exploit the common man and the neo-rich alike. In India, followers of such gurus show unflinching support even when a scandal comes to light indicting them of several misdeeds. They are able to get away because of their political connections and by using their wealth, which they are able to amass from their supporters. This has been seen in the case of several God-men, the most famous case being that of Puttaparthy Sai Baba. This is also a consequence of the system that is held together by the ‘good’.

This is not to say, however, that ‘good’ God-men cannot have a positive impact on the society. They most certainly can instigate social change for the positive. There have been instances of God-men working towards causes such as curbing female infanticide. Social change, however, can be lasting only when it is instigated by reason, science, empathy and humanism, and not because of inherent claims made in the name of religion or ‘God’. Promoting more superstition to curb a practice is terrible for the long term, because it only gets rid of one problem, and completely ignores the root cause which is the substance that superstition is made of. However, such short term solutions are essential towards ending much imminent suffering, until the long term solutions such as education and women’s empowerment can begin to take effect.

In a society, beliefs about ‘God’, ‘morals’, etc are organised to form religion. Religion too is a system. The masses are trained to have blind and unquestioning faith in religious leaders. Perversions such as the above hence emerge from the nature of religion itself and not only because ‘bad’ people exist in any population sample. This is true of all religious systems, although some religions, such as Islam, demand more unquestioning faith than others, such as Buddhism. When such blind faith of the populace is secured, it becomes easier to exploit this power for personal benefits or political mileage. If coupled with violent scriptures, it becomes a perfect recipe for war and bloodshed.

Mao and Stalin Were Atheists

Analysed this way, we see why the fact that atheists such as Mao and Stalin were involved in the killings of millions of people does not point to such cases occurring in a purely freethinking society: Mao and Stalin were a part of a system in which they were unquestioned leaders of their ideological parties. The violence resulted from their attempts to secure political hegemony, and not because they disbelieved in the concept of god. This is different from a religious extremist killing in the name of the god and religion.

A freethinking society would reject any ideology where a ‘leader’ asks for blind faith and unquestioning support. The so called ‘New Atheist’ movement is out to promote a society based on pure reason and humanism. It is not a political and economic movement.

Irreligion: from a ‘Luxury’ to a ‘Necessity’

The unfortunate socio-economic, political and geographic realities of our society have led to a world where a vast majority live in heartless conditions. In spite of toiling in order to make ends meet, people have to deal with insecurity, exploitation, family problems and other issues. People hence understandably are quick to turn to religion for succor. The well-off also feel the need of religion to give them the comfort of ‘security’, economic and otherwise. That religion is fed to an individual right from birth and it is difficult to break out of this bubble is a different matter.

Irreligion, and in particular ‘atheism’, requires inquiry into history, science and philosophy, which in turn requires time, capacity to study, and patience. Freethought is hence a ‘luxury’ to most people in India and indeed the world for obvious reasons.

However, we see that religion itself contributes to the misery of the people at large, although the victims themselves do not realise it. Individual factors are blamed, but the structure itself goes unquestioned. This is a vicious cycle where misery is turning people to religion, which is adding to the further misery. Religion hides behind the smokescreen of ‘morals’, ‘values’, ‘peace’, etc, but gives rise to a behemoth due to the nature of its very structure.

It is hence imperative that this structure, or system, is transformed and replaced by one where humanism, and “atheistic spirituality” (for the lack of a better word), become the guiding philosophies in order to lead ethical and fulfilling lives.

God And The Gospel Of Globalisation: Against All Hope, Secularism Remains A Myth

Meera Nanda — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:28:05 +0000

This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Himal Magazine.

The defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s general elections last year was greeted with relief by secularists and democrats everywhere. Not entirely unreasonably: they read the fact that the BJP lost a solid 3.4 percent of its previous poll share as evidence that Indian voters had rejected the majoritarian politics of Hindu pride and prejudice, peddled by the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar. The general consensus is that the ideology of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has lost its appeal among the urban youth and middle classes - that secularism has won and “God has left politics,” to borrow the elegant title of a recent essay by Delhi journalist Hartosh Singh Bal. Market reforms and globalisation emerge as the stars of this saga. Both the friends and critics of the BJP agree that it is the fervour for making money in India’s roaring economy that doused the flames of Hindu nationalism from the hearts of the middle classes. But that is not all. The ‘free’ market, we are told by a section of influential Dalit intellectuals, will not only free India from the menace of communal violence, but will also lift the curse of caste oppression. It is fair to say that the gospel of globalisation is gaining ground in India.

The story about how the markets defeated the BJP goes as follows. Hindutva appealed to the middle classes and youth back in the bad-old-days of the 1980s and 1990s, when these groups were feeling beleaguered and angry due to the failures of Nehruvian socialism and ‘pseudo-secularism’, which, in their view, gave undue preference to Muslim and Christian minorities. But in the nearly two decades of economic liberalisation and foreign investments that began in the early 1990s, India has witnessed a great burst of economic growth. As a result, the Hindu middle classes are angry no more. Far from feeling beleaguered and discriminated against, they have become more cosmopolitan, more self-confident, and more willing to take on global challenges and seek out global opportunities. Indeed, so confident is the Great Indian Middle Class that it has claimed the 21st century as India’s Century. And so the critics ask: What use can such forward-looking people possibly have for the past glories of Hinduism, about which the stodgy old men in khaki shorts keep harping? This story has found great favour among the self-proclaimed Friends of the BJP, who want the party to drop Hindutva altogether, or at least to make it sound less communal, and emerge as a ‘normal’ pro-market, pro-defence, anti-’minority-appeasement’, right-of-centre party.

A similar story is being told from the opposite end of the political spectrum, made up of Dalit intellectuals, most of whom are no friends of the BJP. Influential members of this circle, notably the journalist-activist Chandra Bhan Prasad and the economist and Planning Commission member Narendra Jadhav, have claimed that economic liberalisation, fostered by globalisation, is improving the living standards of Dalits, liberating them from the caste norms that consigned them to degrading work for generations. They derive their evidence exclusively from two districts of Uttar Pradesh that have access to labour markets for semi-skilled work in Delhi, Lucknow and other cities, while ignoring significant evidence that the incorporation of Dalits in the unorganised sector is taking place only on extremely exploitative terms, without any legal protection to speak of. Yet such thinkers remain convinced of the powers of the market, and are pushing to bring affirmative-action policies into the private sector, which they say will open the doors for Dalits to enter the modern, hi-tech economy. The markets’ blow against caste norms in employment is naturally seen as a victory for secularism, because by destroying the material conditions of caste hierarchy the markets are seen as loosening the hold of Brahminical justifications for caste. Thus, at least some friends of Dalits, like the friends of the BJP, have come to embrace the gospel of globalised markets in the name of upward mobility for Dalits.

India is not the only country where markets are supposed to be exorcising the demons of religiously inspired fanaticism, patriarchy and other sources of oppression. Parts of the Islamic world - Dubai, Turkey, Malaysia, and even Egypt and Iran - are cited to support the proposition that “global capitalism is the single best hope for combating Islamic extremism,” as the American-Iranian author Vali Nasar put it in his new book, The Forces of Fortune. Nasr and others refer warmly to Turkey, where the deeply pious and deeply capitalist-minded middle-class entrepreneurs from small towns have been able to moderate the Islamist instincts of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In a reversal of the idea that ‘McWorld’ breeds jihad, as put forth by the US journalist Benjamin Barber in his well-known 1995 book Jihad vs McWorld, the charms of ‘McWorld’ are now being hailed for aborting jihad by seducing the actual and potential jihadis into shopping malls.

Those who believe in the moderating powers of markets assure us, as the political scientist Alan Wolfe did in a 2008 essay, that “religion’s priority of belief and secularism’s commitment to individual rights are not in opposition,” as most religions are adapting to the capitalist world by becoming “prosperity religions”. The aim of these prosperity religions is not to question the morality of acquiring wealth, but rather to bless the believers into thinking that they can become rich as well by the grace of god. Thus, Wolfe assures us, the rising religious fervour in many parts of the world is nothing to worry about, as this safely feeds into fervour for making money and getting rich. Thus, the new evangelists of prosperity religions cheer the fact that, from China to Russia to Turkey, ‘God is back’, as the title of a recent book by the British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge would have it. They suggest that if the entire world were to erect a US-style wall of separation between state and religion, there would be no reason to worry about jihad or fundamentalist religious extremism, because then all religions would learn to embrace both democracy and capitalism and thus metamorphose into prosperity religions, as they apparently have in the United States. Such a celebration of American secularism, of course, fails to account for the fact that this country has an active and very influential Christian-fundamentalist movement.

Others, such as Richard Wright, the author of The Evolution of God (2009), go even further, proclaiming that globalisation is carrying out the expansion of moral imagination that was kick-started by the Abrahamic God. Just as Christianity and Islam learned to see other tribes as brothers under the God of Abraham, global economy is setting up ‘non-zero-sum games’ that allow people to include distant strangers in faraway lands in their circle of moral concern. So, according to this line of thought, when the whole world becomes interlinked through trade, we will all learn to become more tolerant, and a great concord of civilisations will ensue - just as the Abrahamic God intended. Globalisation, in other words, is doing God’s work. Again, however, this celebration of global tolerance fails to account for the fact that globalisation is not a non-zero-sum game: it produces very clear winners and losers.

Worship the nation
How believable is this gospel of globalisation? Is globalisation really the antidote to religious nationalism? Can market fundamentalism drive out religious fundamentalism? Are multinational enterprises the unwitting (or witting) vehicles of religious moderation? If so, should not secularists learn to love the corporate world as a friend and ally? Well, it depends. Most importantly, it depends upon what we mean by religious nationalism, which is the form that rightwing religious movements tend to take through much of the postcolonial world, including in this region. If we reduce ‘religious nationalism’ to street violence or terror in the name of god, then the answer is ‘yes’ to all the above questions.

Any overt violence is not good for business, and no one knows that better than those who make a living through business. Thus, those upwardly mobile Indians who are benefiting from off-shored information-technology jobs and the expanded consumer choices made possible by foreign investment and trade definitely do not want to create an impression of religious bigotry and political volatility in India. As such, there should be little wonder that the largely Hindu middle classes deserted the BJP in the last election: they do not want to risk bloody riots in Bombay, Ahmadabad, Delhi and other centres of commerce by flogging the dead horse of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, or by getting exercised over a dargah in Karnataka or Christian-versus-Hindu issues elsewhere. That is the reason that even those who admire Gujarat’s chief minister, Narendra Modi - which includes captains of Indian industry, well-known journalists and Amitabh Bachchan - advise him to showcase his state’s economic development but tone down his anti-Muslim invective. That is also the reason why the business press cheered when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition won in 2009.

If we look at religious nationalism through a wider-angle lens, however, without reducing it to mere communalism, the picture changes entirely. Suddenly, globalisation and its parallel neoliberal economic policies appear as allies, not enemies, of religious nationalism. Indeed, globalisation is turning out to be good for the gods everywhere. This is nowhere more so than in India, where, aided by what can be thought of as the ’state-temple-corporate complex’, a new Hindu religiosity is getting more deeply embedded in everyday life, in both the private and public spheres. At least for now, growing economic prosperity seems to have weaned the Indian middle classes from the extremist elements of the Hindu right, who incite animosity against Muslims, Christians and the pub-going Westernised elite. But the rising prosperity has definitely not turned Indians against the more subtle ways in which Hinduism is becoming the de-facto religion of the ’secular’ Indian state.

In India, Hinduism, the religion of the majority, is becoming more, not less, entrenched in the routine, everyday conduct of statecraft. Meanwhile, it is also being celebrated in the public sphere as the real fount of spiritual-cum-’scientific’ values that are supposed to turn India into the 21st-century superpower. There is a widespread belief, for example, that India’s success in information technology comes from the ‘Hindu mind’, which thinks in abstractions and is good at breaking codes, and that India can be trusted with nuclear weapons because of its culture of non-violence that has Hindu roots. If India were a homogenous Hindu society, such blending of faith and modernity would be problematic only for the tiny (and much neglected) minority of diehard nonbelievers and principled secularists, who want to create a new culture that does not need to invoke supernatural powers and who want the state to have nothing whatsoever to do with any religion. But considering that India is a multi-religious society, home to the second-largest Muslim population in the world and to a considerable number of Christians and Sikhs, the constant conflation of Indian culture with Hindu gods, goddesses and rituals is obviously problematic.

Since there has been an endless debate in India about who really is a Hindu, and what exactly secularism means, it is useful to indicate how these terms are being used in this essay. For all practical purposes, this essay assumes that a Hindu is as a Hindu does. That is, all those people around the world who say they are Hindus - including (but not solely) all the men and women who offer pujas to Hindu gods and goddesses in their homes, and/or line up outside temples, and/or undertake pilgrimages on days considered auspicious on the Hindu calendar, and all those who observe Hindu rituals at the time of birth, marriage and death - are counted as Hindus. Their rituals, gods and goddesses, and ways of worship do differ along caste, class, gender, age and regional lines, but they are nevertheless unified by a set of metaphysical beliefs about god, nature and human beings that are distinctively Hindu. Insofar as secularism has any meaning in India, it means equal distance between the state and all the various religions of Indian people, just as there is an equal distance between the hub and rim of a wheel. So, in this essay, when the Indian state is held accountable for betraying its secular principles, it means the state has betrayed this principle of equal distance by being partial to the religion of the majority - ie, Hinduism - over and against the religion of the minorities.

Around the world, the deep embedding of religious faith into the pores of the state and the civil society is what religious nationalism is all about. Communalism is a terrible but still largely accidental feature of religious nationalism, and can wax and wane depending upon the political context. Yet religious nationalism has two far more enduring purposes that go beyond communalism: one, to make the majority religion the basis of the nation’s collective identity and the source of its ultimate values and purposes; and two, to allow the institutional space of the majority religion - the networks of temples, ashrams, religious schools or gurukuls, charitable hospitals, etc - to take on the welfare functions of the state, while retaining their distinctive religious nature. The idea is to erase the line between the ritual and political spaces, or to remove any distinction between the worship of gods and the worship of the nation. These features of religious nationalism depend upon the institutional arrangements between the state, religions and other dominant institutions of the society, including of course the amorphous domain of the market. These institutional arrangements are not etched in stone, but rather evolve and change with the changing political and economic context.

In this deeper, more fundamental sense, religious nationalism is able not only to survive but actually to thrive under the current regime of neoliberal globalisation. It would be foolish to try to lay down universal laws of cause and effect for something as history- and culture-dependent as religion and nationalism. But certain trends can be seen to be favourable to a wider role for religion in the public sphere under neo-liberalism, fostered by globalisation. As nation states open up those social functions that used to be performed by public-sector enterprises to so-called public-private partnerships, it becomes easier for religious institutions, often aided by public funds and supported by corporate donations, to establish a greater presence in the public sphere. Indeed, in the US this is exactly how ‘faith-based initiatives’ were able to punch holes through the much-celebrated ‘wall of separation’ between the church and the state under the neoliberal presidencies of both Bill Clinton and George W Bush. As US-style capitalism spreads around the world, it is not entirely unreasonable to look at how the changing equation between the state and businesses is affecting the fortunes of religious enterprises.

In a recent book called The God Market, I reported on precisely such institutional arrangements between the Indian state, the loose assortment of Hindu temples, ashrams, gurukuls, pilgrimage centres, etc, and the business sector. Using evidence culled from reliable media reports, budgetary data from government documents, reports of state-level temple-management agencies and the websites of prominent temples and ashrams, the book looks at how neoliberal economic policies are affecting the fortunes of Hinduism. It concentrates largely on two domains most relevant to religious affairs: the establishment of ‘deemed universities’, which specialise in ‘Vedic sciences’, and religious tourism.

My main theses in that book can be summed up in three simple propositions. First, the demand for religious services in India is currently growing, especially among the urban, educated and largely Hindu middle classes who are benefitting the most from globalisation. Second, the supply of these religious services, which cater to the majority community, is being facilitated by the neoliberal policies of the state. And third, the net result of this is the mindset of Hindu majoritarianism, which accepts the ever-deeper but often invisible (because it is taken for granted) identification of the national culture of India with the religion of the Hindu majority.

This is not to say that neoliberal reforms and globalisation are creating these circuits of demand and supply where none existed before - the process of domesticating and ‘Hinduising’ modernity did not start with the current phase of globalisation. After all, the very idea of neo-Hinduism has more than 150 years of history. Further, the middle-class religiosity that revels in ritualism, idol-worship, fasting, pilgrimage and other routines of popular theistic Hinduism was not entirely absent from the cultural milieu of the educated middle-upper classes that came of age in the more ’socialist’ or secular era.

As such, the new market economy did not create the religious market, as India always had plenty of choices when it came to gods, faiths and modes of worship. Instead, what the new economy has opened up is more spaces in the public sphere into which religion can penetrate. Contemporary Hinduism, both in its more spiritualist and more devotional forms, can thus be seen to have adapted quite well to the new consumer lifestyles, exploiting the new institutional spaces opened up by the public-private partnerships made possible by privatisation drives in higher education.

Four secular myths
One feature that seems to hold true across the world in this age of global capitalism is simply this: The demand for religion is growing all over the world, though, ironically, not in the most religious of all industrially advanced countries, the United States. (There, the number of nonbelievers has doubled over the last decade, to 15 percent of the population.) In the rest of the world, globalisation seems to have brought about a global Great Awakening in its wake. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge put it in God Is Back, “growth in faith has coincided with a growth in prosperity … In much of the world, it is exactly the sort of upwardly mobile, educated middle classes that Marx and Weber presumed would shed such superstitions who are driving this expansion of faith.” This phenomenon of the upwardly mobile, urban middle classes turning to faith in increasingly larger numbers has been well recorded in formerly atheistic countries such as China and Russia, which are currently undergoing rapid economic development. The wildfire of Christian evangelicalism, especially Pentecostalism, is spreading all across the developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But what is less well known is that a new breed of evangelical Islam is currently spreading in parts of West Asia, which is also learning to package traditional Islamic virtues in new language of prosperity and individualism.

India is no exception to this worldwide trend, with the population that is prospering simultaneously becoming the most religious. Anyone familiar with India can attest to the growth of popular Hindu devotionalism of murti-pujas (idol worship), temples and pilgrimages, and the time-honoured passion for miracle-working god-men and -women, all combined with the growing craze (and market) for yagnas, astrology, palmistry and other occult arts. Visible signs of growing religiosity can be found everywhere in modern metropolises, where the statues of popular gods are getting taller, temples are becoming grander, and the lines of well-heeled devotees outside temples and ashrams in posh suburbs are increasing in length.

The rising religiosity in India is demolishing four of the most cherished myth of secularisation theory. Let us look at these myths in the light of Indian evidence: First, the myth of the prosperous non-believer. Classic secularisation theory was based on the assumption that growing prosperity and existential security would make people less concerned with god and otherworldly matters. On a macro level, when different countries with different levels of economic prosperity and social welfare are compared, the relationship still holds true. A well-known 2004 study by two Harvard sociologists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, of 19 countries covering most of Europe, North America, Brazil and Japan showed clearly that the level of religiosity declined in those societies, which provided greater ‘existential security’ through better welfare measures (though some of even these countries, like Brazil and parts of Europe, have also showed resurgence of religiosity in recent years). Within each society, those in higher income levels were found to pray less frequently than those in lower-income brackets. Overall, the poor were found to be twice as religious as the rich, when measured by how often they prayed.

The data from India, as provided by the National Election Survey in 2004 and 2009, turns this picture on its head. In contrast to other countries, the rich, the upper castes and the educated in India are significantly more religious than the poor, the lower castes and those who are less educated. When in 2004 the National Election Survey asked a representative sample of the Indian population how often they prayed, 60 percent of the rich and middle-class Hindus said they offered puja everyday in temples or in family shrines, while only 34 percent of the very poor and 42 percent of the poor did so. This trend held up across caste and educational level. The ‘twice-born’ castes were the most religious, with 58 percent doing puja daily, while Dalits and Adivasis were found to be the least religious, with only 35 percent of each category reporting the habit of daily pujas. When the data is mapped on educational levels, those with college degrees are more given to daily pujas (at 53 percent) than those who are illiterate (38 percent) or with only a primary education (46 percent).

When measured again after a gap of five years - five years of market growth and ‘India Shining’ - the trends held up. The rich, the upper castes and the more educated continued to pray more often than other social groups. But there was one surprising result: Dalits and Adivasis seem to be praying more than they used to do. In the 2009 NES survey, 40 percent of Dalits and 43 percent of Adivasis said they offered daily pujas, a significant jump from the 2004 survey. (These trends can be compared since the two surveys followed the same methodology and were carried out by the same team of researchers from Lokniti, a research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.)
It is not entirely clear how this rise in religiosity of the ’subaltern’ classes came about. It could be related to rising living standards: there are reports that Dalits who are trying to break out of their caste ghettos and improve their standards of living are beginning to undertake ostentatious religious rituals such as kathas and jagratas in order to ‘pass’ as upper castes in their neighbourhoods. If true, this recourse to showy Hindu rituals would be a sad commentary on the prevalence of casteist attitudes in the larger society. Yet however one explains the rising religiosity among Dalits, it belies the expectations that rising economic prosperity of those at the bottom of the heap will break the hold of caste-ism and secularise the Indian society. Even if there is some economic trickledown in places, as the advocates of ‘Dalit capitalism’ have been claiming, economic betterment is accompanied by a growth of religiosity - rather than a decline, as predicted by secularisation theory.

Second, then, is the myth of privatisation of faith. Those who believe in secularisation theory expect that as societies become modern, religion will recede from the public sphere into private lives. But the reality has belied this expectation. In fact, religions all over the world are becoming less private, more visible in the public sphere and more influential on policies on everything from medical research, women’s reproductive choices and sexuality to the environment, terrorism and armed conflicts. In India, too, there is sufficient evidence of the growing presence of religion in the public sphere. Many of the rituals and pujas that used to be simpler domestic affairs are now becoming more public and more ostentatious. Indeed, many of these public rituals are becoming full-blown political events, where holy men and political figures join forces. It is common for campaigning politicians to organise ‘political darshans‘, using public money, and representatives of all parties seem to think nothing of using the state machinery for organising large-scale Hindu rituals for political gain. The Congress party’s Digvijay Singh’s order to hold public prayers and yagnas for his victory in the 2003 elections in Madhya Pradesh was more than a match for the BJP chief minister of Karnataka, B S Yediyurappa, who used up INR 1.1 million in just five months for his pilgrimages to temples. Even the communist government in West Bengal thought nothing of doing a bhoomi puja for the land it wanted to gift to the Tatas for the Nano car factory.

Participation in public rituals like kathas, kirtans and satsangs is also growing among ordinary people - or, rather, these events and rituals are moving out of the family and into the public square, while also becoming more ostentatious and expensive affairs. The trends for engagement in public religious activities, again as measured by the National Election Surveys in 2004 and 2009, are following the trends for private pujas, with the wealthy, the upper castes and the educated leading the way. Close to 30 percent of upper-caste and wealthy respondents were found to have a high level of participation in public rituals, with Dalits and Adivasis generally falling around 16 percent. In recent years, both the upper castes and Dalits have shown an increase in public religious events, with 18 percent of Dalits reporting higher participation in 2009, as compared to 16 percent in 2004.

Third is the myth of ‘de-ritualisation’. The classical theorists of secularisation, from Karl Marx to Max Weber, believed that modernity would “melt all that is solid” (in Marx’s words), including belief in supernatural powers. The basic idea is that, as the general sense of human powers increase, the scope of ‘god’s will’, or fate, will diminish. To some extent this has happened, with people around the world increasingly accepting naturalistic explanations for natural disasters. But this process seems to have hit its limits already, and religions are learning to use the tools of technology and markets to celebrate god’s powers.

India provides a treasure trove of examples of this phenomenon, from the growing trend of ‘e-pujas’, remote darshans and computer-generated horoscopes, to Disney-like theme parks cropping up inside temples. But even at a more basic level, which may or may not deploy modern technology, the belief in the efficacy of prayer and ritual (like yagna) to change the course of events in the natural world is growing. This belies the hopes of 19th-century neo-Hindu reformers from Ram Mohan Roy of the Brahmo Samaj, Dayananda Saraswati of Arya Samaj to Swami Vivekananda, who stressed the textual and spiritual elements of the Vedas and Vedanta over the more ritualistic practices.

And fourth, the myth of rationalism and ’scientific temper’. The expectation that religions will learn to scale down their claims about the ‘truth’ in the face of the growth of scientific knowledge has been belied. In fact, the language of science is now used to justify religious beliefs. Modern Hindu gurus have finessed the art of justifying the spirit-centred metaphysics of Brahminical Hinduism in modern, scientific terms. This ’scientistic’ Hinduism sells better among those urban sophisticates who make a living in scientific and technological fields.

This growing religiosity of the well-heeled is often dismissed by intellectuals as somehow not authentic enough, as mere ‘consumerism’ or just one more experience the rich can spend their disposable income on and feel good doing it. But this disdain is unwarranted. Consuming religion is not like, say, consuming a new brand of beer or buying a new pair of shoes. Rather, consuming religion means participating in its rituals, living by divinely ordained prescriptions and generally sharing the sacredness of the experience - activities that shape people’s fundamental orientation of the world, and which give definition both to their view of themselves and that of those who are ‘different’. This does not mean that all religious activities lead to narrow-minded identities, or that all those who are more religious end up becoming intolerant - there are obviously many deeply religious Hindus who are not communal and many terribly communal people who are not religious at all. Rather, all this means is that religious activities shape identities, which in certain political contexts can become partisan.

Because it is so foundational for shaping identities and beliefs, widespread religiosity is a necessary precondition for religious nationalism. Only in those societies where old-style religion is sufficiently alive and well can the symbols derived from that religion serve to mobilise believers in the quest for national glory. When a sufficiently large number of people believe in the efficacy of religious rituals - say, the power of a yagna to bring a monsoon or to produce a son instead of a daughter - they do not consider it an illegitimate use of taxpayer money when elected representatives organise political yagnas. When a sufficiently large number of people believe that all that is good and creative about India comes from the country’s Vedic ‘golden age’, they will not complain much when the government gives out land grants and other subsidies to institutions specialising in ‘Vedic sciences’; or when preachers and politicians alike link India’s success in the global economy to the need to revive sanatan dharma (claimed by its adherents to be the original teachings) - as popular Hindu evangelicals such as Swami Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravishankar routinely do.

There is actually an even more direct connection between religiosity and political choices. Up until 2004, there was a clear correlation between religiosity and voting behaviour: those Hindus who participated in public religious activities more frequently tended to vote for the BJP (38 percent) over the Congress (25 percent). In the 2009 elections, this relationship broke down, and this category of the highly religious showed the greatest decline (11 percent) in support for the BJP. According to Sanjay Kumar of Lokniti, who is involved with NES surveys, part of the reason why the more-religious Hindus deserted the BJP was because the party failed to assert strong Hindutva positions. Even more troublesome is the fact that those who are more strongly and more openly religious also are more majoritarian in their thinking. Such individuals believe that Hinduism is not just a religion, but rather a ‘way of life’ for all Indians - a position that clearly overlaps with that propagated by the Sangh Parivar. It appears that the more ardent Hindus, such as those who pray more often and who participate in religious rituals more often, are twice as likely as others to hold the belief that India is a Hindu country.

Thus, even though Hindu nationalist parties are not always able to win the Hindu vote - or “harvest the Hindu souls”, as one commentator put it after the 2009 elections - a shared ground of understanding does exist between Hindu religiosity and Hindutva politics. Intellectuals and all-purpose commentators such the Delhi political scientist Ashis Nandy, who confidently proclaim that Hinduism has nothing to do with Hindutva, are simply ignoring the available evidence. Popular religiosity is the soil in which religious nationalism strikes its roots. It is for this reason that secularist forces have to pay attention not just to violence in the name of religion, but to popular religiosity itself.

Consumerist mayajaal
Most observers of social trends will grant that popular religiosity is on the rise in societies undergoing rapid economic change under the current conditions of globalisation. But there is very little agreement on what globalisation per se has to do with it. The most common connection with globalisation and religiosity is drawn at the social-psychological level. Globalisation and the growing reign of labour flexibility involve layoffs and outsourcing to outside contractors, thus heightening the uncertainties and insecurities of middle classes. The insecurities are percolating into family relations and often challenging the old mores that valued simplicity and frugality as virtues. The nouveau riche are seeking a way to balance their newfound wealth with the ’spirituality’ and ’simplicity’ they think they are losing by getting caught up in the mayajaal, or illusion, of consumerism. This is a socio-psychological explanation for the Indian trends that this author has offered in her previous work. In this, India resembles the dynamic described by the authors of God Is Back in the Christian context of the US and Britain, where “many religious people see religion not so much as the enemy of capitalism but as a necessary counterbalance to it … Religion provides a way to enjoy the fruits of capitalism while protecting from the thorns.”
At the same time, there is a more direct political-economic link between god and globalisation. As globalisation forces the nation state to privatise more of its social functions, it creates more opportunities for faith-based institutions to take over these functions. This link cannot be generalised, as the state-market-religion relations vary in different societies. But there is ample evidence of faith-based institutions benefiting from the cut-the-government-to-size drives in the US, especially under the presidency of George W Bush.

In India, too, the Hindu establishment is benefiting from the recent de-regulatory changes that favour private enterprise, especially in the area of higher education. (Both the ’secular’ Congress-led UPA and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance support these measures for disinvestment and privatisation of education, health and other social services.) The same privatisation drive that has allowed for-profit ‘deemed universities’ to crop up all over the county has also opened the door for Hindu gurus and temple endowments to set up their own universities, which either specialise in ‘Vedic sciences’ such as astrology, vastu and karmakanda, or offer secular education, mostly in management and engineering, with a traditionalist slant. Once such institutions come into existence - with full credentials to confer degrees, and often with hefty land grants from the state governments - they attract donations and patronage from business houses. Almost all the stars of the guru business in India, from the late Mahesh Yogi to Sri Sri Ravishankar and Swami Ramdev, have enjoyed state largesse in setting up their own universities, as have numerous gurukuls that have cropped up to train young boys to become Hindu priests.

The other sector into which the Indian government is pouring money is the promotion of pilgrimage to countless Hindu holy spots - a cosy relationship within the state-temple-corporate complex. ‘Soft’ Hindutva, which unabashedly celebrates Hinduism as the national culture of India, is not a monopoly of the BJP and Sangh Parivar; indeed, all the great anti-communal forces routinely indulge in public celebrations of Hinduism for political gains. But more than just public celebrations, they are known to bend state policies to suit Hindu interests, as happened in the construction of the Akshardham temple complex in New Delhi on the banks of the Yamuna, which critics allege is environmentally unsound; and in the dispute over the land grab for the Amarnath yatra in Kashmir recently.

Any purported ‘ambivalence’ the corporate sector might have toward the BJP extends only to its ‘hard’ Hindutva politics, which has the potential for unleashing communal violence. But there is not much ambivalence when it comes to the promotion of explicitly religious aspects of Hindu culture as ‘Indian culture’ more generally. ‘Soft’ Hindutva has thus become de-facto state policy, regardless of which party is in power, and has the support of the corporate sector as well. Moreover, the concept of the state-temple-corporate complex is not meant to suggest a permanent power grab that has foreclosed all sites of struggle for secularism, but rather to suggest a loose, informal nexus that is using the new enthusiasm for the markets to tilt the balance toward the majority faith in India.

So, what is the answer to the question we started from - namely, can secularists trust globalisation and free markets? It is true that markets might be able to save us from violent religious extremism, and that is part of the reason for why the middle classes deserted the BJP and its allies in 2009. But the markets also deepen the reach of religion into the institutional spaces of society. The only real response to religious nationalism is to actively cultivate a secular culture that can displace the majority faith as the national culture. This would require a purposeful demolition of the truth claims of all faith-based ways of thinking - including the faith in the gospel of globalisation and ‘free’ markets.