Nirmukta » Meera Nanda

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.

Producing Priests (How Government Funded Educational Institutions Are Promoting Religion in India)

Meera Nanda — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:46:10 +0000

Note: This article first appeared in The Frontline as a cover story.

WHAT is good for the market is proving to be good for the gods in India. The more material acquisitions the middle classes make, the more pujas and homas they feel compelled to perform. Every vahan (vehicle) must have its puja, as must every tiny plot of bhoomi (land) before anything can be built upon it. Every puja, in turn, must have an astrologer or two and a vastu shastri, too. And then, every astrologer and vastu shastri worth his/her name must know how to work a computer, speak in English, and be “scientific” about it all.

Watching India’s thriving god market, one cannot help asking a simple question: where are all these seemingly modern pujaris, astrologers, vastu shastris and other retailers of rituals coming from? How does the supply of ritualists keep pace with the bottomless demand 21st century-Hindus have for religious rituals of all kinds?

Deemed universities have always served as crucial links in the supply chain that runs from traditional gurukuls and Vedic pathshalas to the homes, temples, offices, shops and even corporate boardrooms of the middle classes in India, going all the way to NRIs. The diplomas and degrees conferred by these universities, the majority of which are funded by taxpayers’ money, are actively “modernising” Hindu priestcraft and turning it into an economically comfortable middle-class occupation.

The University Grants Commission’s (UGC) infamous decision in 2001 to introduce jyotir vigyan and karma kanda into post-secondary education breathed a new life into the already existing Sanskrit institutions which had been deemed to be universities. In addition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance government created a new network of deemed universities which continue to provide direct and indirect support for training Hindu ritualists. Even if the BJP were to stay in political wilderness for years to come, its objective of promoting traditional Hindu sciences will be well taken care of by the institutional infrastructure it put in place when it was in power.

When the UGC in 2001 decided to introduce astrology courses in higher education, three national-level institutions well known for their jyotish and karma-kanda courses had already been deemed as universities. They are: Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth in New Delhi, Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth at Tirupati, and Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya in Haridwar.

These institutions specialise in shastric learning, which includes advanced courses in jyotish, purohitya and yoga, both as a part of the regular course of study in Ved-Vedang and for special diplomas and certificates. They saw considerable expansion after the UGC (and later the Supreme Court) gave the green light to astrology. Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, for example, bought new equipment for its Department of Jyotish and set up a horoscope bank during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period (2002-07). It also expanded its reach by starting part-time diploma and certificate courses for astrology and purohitya. But this was only the tip of the iceberg.

In May 2002, the New Delhi-based Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan (RSS) was deemed to be a university. This old and venerable institution (founded 1970), which for so long had taken care of old Sanskrit manuscripts and Sanskrit scholars, was given the authority to create new syllabi, offer new courses and confer degrees.

All 10 of its campuses (in Allahabad, Puri, Jammu, Trichur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Sringeri, Garli, Bhopal, Mumbai) are deemed as universities, meaning that each one of them is authorised to design new courses (within the already permissive UGC guidelines) and hand out degrees and diplomas. The Sansthan serves as the nodal body that coordinates all the various campuses, along with the activities of the two vidyapeeths in New Delhi and Tirupati mentioned above. It is a part of its mandate to give out grants and financial aid to non-governmental gurukuls and Vedic pathshalas. It also grants stipends and scholarships for vocational courses in jyotish and karma kanda meant to improve the employability of those with Sanskrit degrees.

To round up the story so far, mention must also be made of two institutions recently deemed to be “yoga universities” that are not directly involved in jyotish and karma kanda but are still relevant to maintaining an adequate supply of priests.

They are Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (SVYAS) in Bangalore, which was recognised by the UGC in 2001, and Bihar Yoga Bharati in Fort Munger, Bihar, which became a deemed university in 2000.

There are two more strands in this tangled web of priest-training institutions:

The Central government funds the Ujjain-based Maharishi Sandipani Rashtriya Veda Vidya Pratisthan, which acts as an accrediting and funding agency for non-governmental Vedic pathshalas and gurukuls that are cropping up all over the country. This agency is supposed to set the standards for gurukuls and conduct examinations for budding pujaris. Recognition from this agency has become a selling point for gurukuls.

The State-level UGC-approved universities, over and above the deemed universities mentioned earlier, form a category that includes well-known universities such as Mahesh Yogi’s university in Madhya Pradesh or the Kavi Kulguru Kalidas Sanskrit University in Ramtek, Maharashtra. These institutions do not have the status of university conferred upon them later by the UGC, but were established as full-fledged universities by their respective State legislatures and later granted recognition by the UGC.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Vedic Vishwavidyalaya was established by a unanimous vote of the Madhya Pradesh State Legislature under Congress Chief Minister Digvijay Singh in 1995. This was done to honour Mahesh Yogi as a native son of Madhya Pradesh. This institution has become one of the best-known sources of advanced degrees (including PhDs) in all kinds of Vedic sciences. Many of its graduates have gone on to establish profitable businesses and/or academies as vastu shastris, astrologers, gemmologists, and so on.

These State-level, UGC-recognised universities and yoga universities serve as finishing schools for smaller, less well-endowed gurukuls and Vedic pathshalas that are cropping up all over the country. Many of these priest-schools take in young indigent boys (girls are not allowed) and train them in traditional karma kanda. But since they do not have the authority to confer academic degrees, they channel their students into any of the deemed or accredited State universities that specialise in yogic or Vedic sciences - loosely defined to include everything from astrology to yoga. This improves the marketability of their students as pujaris and other ritualists in India or abroad.

It is true that Sanskrit education is deeply intertwined with the ritualistic aspects of Hinduism and the two are often hard to tease apart: learning to perform a yagna or a puja is only the practical, hands-on aspect of mastering Yajurveda for a degree in Sanskrit. But rather than try to draw lines between teaching the religious literature written in Sanskrit and teaching rituals, the Indian educational establishment has gone the other way: it is using the cover of teaching Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy to use public money and resources to promote Hindu rituals.

Can India really call itself a secular republic when it pours public resources into promoting the majority religion through deemed universities?

Meera Nanda’s new book, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu, will be published in August by Random House.

You can read all her previous posts on Nirmukta here.

When The Saints Go Marching In…

Meera Nanda — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:20:18 +0000

This article has appeared in The Telegraph.

BJP has worked hard to create the impression that it is not pursuing an aggressive Hindutva agenda in the 2009 Lok Sabha election. It has made good governance, development and security its election plank, and has promised to give us a majboot neta, nirnayak sarkar. Old Hindutva favorites like the Ram temple, Ram Sethu and the much- beloved “cow and its progeny” do make an appearance in the party’s manifesto, but they are clubbed together under the unobjectionable idea of “preserving our cultural heritage” and tacked at the very end.

But like a leopard can’t change its spots, the party of saffron can’t turn saffron, green and white without losing its very reason for being.

The truth is that in this election, the BJP has pursued a Hindu agenda which, in the long run, may prove to be far more radical than the hot-button issues that we are all familiar with. The new agenda can best be described as Hindukaran of voters, that is, making voters vote as Hindus First.

The work of Hindukaran is more subtle than the in-your-face Ram mandir agitation of 1990s. It is taking place through yagnas, kathas and yoga-shivirs held in temples, ashrams and public meetings, often presided over by popular and supposedly a-political gurus and “saints” whose spiritual discourses could well be lifted out of the writings of the Sangh Parivar. In many of these meetings, people are urged to take an oath to vote for the party that takes care of “Hindu interests.” This is not very different from what happened in the United States in 2000 and 2004 when evangelical preachers used their pulpits to urge their congregations to vote for the party of “traditional values,” whose representative was none other than George W. Bush.

No one can predict just yet if this so-called Hindu vote bank will come through for BJP. But whatever the outcome, election 2009 will be remembered as the first time when a serious coordinated attempt was made to create a Hindu vote bank. It is important, therefore, to create a public record of this phenomenon.

A good place to start would be the letter L.K. Advani wrote to 1,000 sadhu-sants within days of days of releasing BJP’s election manifesto. While the manifesto is lukewarm to Hindutva, Advani’s letter lays out the red carpet for the saints to come marching straight into the government. His letter promises to establish a permanent institutional mechanism for consulting the holy men/women to “guide politics, governance and other national affairs by the lofty ideals as enshrined in the concept of Ram Rajya.” In addition, Advani reaffirmed the promises made in the manifesto, namely, cleaning the Ganga, protecting the Ram Sethu and the cows, promoting spiritual tourism, and giving tax-exemption to all dharmic activities. So while the party promised good governance to the yuppie “Friends of the BJP,” it offered faith-based governance to its more traditional constituency.

Who are these raj-gurus-in-waiting that the BJP is so eagerly courting? What role are they being asked to play in electoral politics? This is where the plot begins to thicken.

The 1,000 sadhu-sants who received Advani’s pledge of allegiance were chosen from a hand-picked list put together by VHP. While the complete list remains a secret, we know that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Swami Ramdev received the letter, as did many other members of Dharma Raksha Manch, a VHP-managed forum that held its inaugural meeting in January 2009 in Mumbai.

Dharma Raksha Manch is the culmination of VHP’s dream of converting the vast majority of Hindus who are religious into a Hindu vote bank. The idea was first put forward in the 1980’s by Swami Chinmayananda, and later taken up with great gusto by Praveen Togadia, the current general secretary of VHP.

Creation of Hindu vote bank required a two-step action plan which was hammered out in various dharam sansads held over the last five years or so. Step One was to put forth a Hindu Charter of demands and get a political party to formally accept it. Step Two called for organizing grass-root campaigns in which at least 50,000 voters in each Lok Sabha constitutency were to take an oath to vote for only that party that accepts the Hindu Charter. The action plan also called for unleashing the power of popular gurus and kathakars who have a mass following among the moderate middle classes who may be turned off by communal issues, but who may yet still be mobilized to vote for their “Hindu interests” in say, propagation of yoga, cleaning the Ganga, preserving the Ram Sethu, defeating “Islamic terrorism” etc.

The Sangh Parviar has executed this plan to the very last dot in this election. In late January, VHP and RSS organized the Dharma Raksha Manch in Mumbai which gave the pride of place to popular gurus including Swami Ramdev, Rameshbhai Oza, Sadhavi Rithambara and Asaram Bapu. In March, the Manch came out with an 11-point Hindu charter. Within days, BJP announced that it had included all the 11 demands in its manifesto. This was followed by Advani’s fawning letter to 1,000 sadhu-sants for which he won great praise from Swami Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and other Sangh Parivar representatives.

All this set the stage for the Step Two. VHP’s Ashok Singhal declared that since BJP is the only party that has accepted the demands of the saints, the saints will henceforth “educate the voters by touring even the remote villages to vote for the BJP.”

And that is precisely what the “saints” have been doing, especially in the communally sensitive areas of Karnataka and Orissa. In mid-March, Mangalore, the home-turf of Sri Ram Sene, saw a huge samajotsva ( a social festival) organized by Dharma Raksha Vedike, with full support from the state where participants were asked to take an oath to only vote for pro-Hindu candidates/party (read BJP). As the elections approached and public rallies became difficult to organize, oath-taking moved inside temples: at least 100 yagnas were organized by temples all across the state where the presiding priests administered the oath to vote as Hindus. Yagnas were also the ritual of choice for Ashok Sahu in Orissa, BJP’s candidate for Kandhamal, the site of anti-Christian riots last year: before he was arrested (and released on bail), Sahu went village to village conducting mahayagyas.

For their part, the supposedly a-political gurus have been on the same page as the Dharma Raksah Manch. Swami Ramdev, for example, has started his Bharat Swabhiman Andolan which has taken up BJP’s call for 100% voting and bringing back the Indian money stowed away in Swiss banks. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has long been active in Hindutva causes having to do with conversion and the state oversight of temples. These gurus with mass appeal have been a major conduit for mainstreaming the Hindutva agenda.

How effective has been this strategy of Hindukaran? We will know the answer shortly when the complete elections results are in.

Meera Nanda is the acclaimed author of several books on the growth of the Hindutva movement in India. Her previous blog posts can be found here.

Introduction to “The God Market: How Globalization is making India more Hindu”

Meera Nanda — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:33:41 +0000

Update: The title of Meera Nanda’s upcoming book will be “The God Market: How Globalization is making India more Hindu” and not “God and Globalization in India” as previously reported. The book will be published by Random House later this year. This post contains the full text of the introduction, except for the chapter outline and personal notes.

Introduction: God and Globalization in India

Meera Nanda

India had its own “why do they hate us?” moment after the city of Mumbai came under attack in late November 2008 by a bunch of gunmen with links to terrorist outfits based in Pakistan. Many in India answered the question much the same way George Bush famously explained the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States: Islamic terrorists hate us because we are good and they are evil; we are free and democratic and they hate freedom and democracy. Some took this rhetoric even further and argued that we are good, free and democratic because we are a Hindu nation, and the Islamists hate us because we are Hindus.

This us-them divide was further linked to globalization, a word that got bandied about a great deal in the aftermath of Mumbai attack. Pakistanis hate us, many argued in India, because we are winning in the global economy, while they are a bunch of sore losers bent upon dimming the bright glow of our economic miracle. The terror attacks were seen as a conspiracy meant to destroy the confidence of global investors, slow down or even reverse the outsourcing of IT and other jobs to India, and stop the foreign tourists from coming.

Not only is India seen as winning the globalization race on the economic front, but on the civilizational front as well. As Robert Kaplan, a well-known foreign policy expert wrote in The New York Times shortly after the Mumbai attacks, globalization has led Indians to rediscover their glorious Hindu civilization, supposedly the source of its “vibrantly free” democracy, while Muslims of India and Pakistan are re-discovering their Islamic culture which has only encouraged them to withdraw into “beards, skull-caps and burkas.” This sentiment was echoed in India as well. As M.V. Kamath, a commentator well-known for his Hindu Right views wrote in The Organiser, while the “indestructible, incredible India, so cheerful and forgiving,” is busy sending rockets to the moon, its “sick” Muslim neighbor and many Indian Muslims are bent upon isolating themselves by “wearing skull-caps.. forcing women to wear burkas and otherwise refusing to join the mainstream.” In both cases, the excesses of the Taliban and allied extremists are being made to stand for all of Islam, while the accomplishments of India - but none of its failings — happily claimed for the glory of Hinduism.

In this narrative, India with its Hindu civilization is presented as the bright, forward-facing side of globalization, while Pakistan — and indeed, Islam itself - is made to stand for its dark, demonic and backward-facing underside. The world gets divided into two: the winners who have the right kind of civilizational resources to play and win in the global economy, and the rest who are deemed to be laggards, if not total losers.

India has joined this game of civilizational one-upmanship with great gusto. Out of the four BRIC countries that are projected to emerge as global economic powers by the middle of this century - Brazil, Russia, India and China - India is most aggressive about projecting its civilizational virtues in its quest for a Great Power status. Quite like the United States, India sees itself as the outpost of democratic capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance in a world full of religious zealots and terrorists.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

This book questions this narrative that pits a virtuous, victorious and Hindu India against the evil designs of Islamic terrorists - or rather, to use the language of Hindu nationalists, the evil designs of all those who follow the “criminal Semitic creeds” including not just Islam, but Christianity as well. It is the thesis of this book that the growing liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy is not only compatible with, but is actually contributing to the growth of a virulent form of political Hinduism which is as wedded to the project of politicizing and universalizing a Hindu (or “Vedic”) worldview, as the Islamists and Christian fundamentalists are to maximizing the influence of their own respective faith traditions. The “us” is not the virtuous opposite of “them,” but rather a twin, who differs only in appearance and rhetoric, but not in ambitions and methods.

This book will show that underneath the rhetoric of free markets, democracy and secularism, India is undergoing a sea change in its political economy and political culture - a change that is being hastened and encouraged by the forces of globalization. We will examine the evidence for the emergence of what we will call the “state-temple-corporate complex” in India that is dissolving the pre-existing boundaries (such as they were) between the Hindu religious establishment, the machinery of the state in matters relating to education, the media, health etc. and the interests of big businesses and corporations, both Indian and multinational. (A note to the reader: since Hindus make up the vast majority of the people of India, it is Hinduism that will be sole focus of this book. Changes in the rest of the many religions of India will be acknowledged, but not investigated in any detail.)

Aided by this state-temple-corporate complex, a very ordinary, ritualistic - but very nationalistic — Hinduism is growing in the pores of the Indian society. Unlike most post-9/11 books that concentrate on the extremist or fundamentalist movements, this book focuses on the everyday Hinduism of ordinary Indians, especially those belonging to the new middle classes whose lifestyles, consumer tastes and aspirations are defined by the global consumer culture. The changing religious culture of the new middle-classes is important to understand for the simple reason they have been most receptive to global capitalism on the one hand, and to the siren songs of Hindu nationalism on the other.

This emphasis on everyday Hinduism stems from the fundamental assumption this book is based upon, namely, popular Hinduism is the soil in which the tree of Hindu nationalism is rooted, and Hindu gods, rituals and sacred texts are the nutrients that keep it growing. Hindu gods, myths and rituals by themselves have no necessary or inherent link to nationalism, or any -ism at all, including Hinduism itself, which some have argued is a modern invention. But they serve as readily available and dearly cherished cultural resources for mobilizing Hindu supremacist passions among the masses. As the national history, culture and destiny of India gets to be told and ritually enacted — over and over again, everyday — through the medium of Hindu gods and goddesses, the line between the worship of God and the worship of the nation is getting fainter by the day. India is not only witnessing a resurgence of popular religiosity, this religiosity is becoming indistinct from national and even civilizational self-glorification that openly demonizes Muslims and Christians and often verges on hubris. Backed by nuclear bombs and an ever-growing arsenal of sophisticated weapons, this hubris can spell disaster for the entire subcontinent.

The adoption of neo-liberal economic policies at home, and the growing linkages with corporate capital abroad, is aiding and abetting this fusion of faith with jingoism — this thesis lies at the heart of this book. In other words, Hindu nationalism does not exist in the realm of ideas alone, but is embedded in the dominant political-economic institutions of India Inc., the new India that dreams superpower dreams.

At the institutional level, popular Hinduism is riding on the coattails of the so-called “public-private partnerships” that are filling in the space vacated by the public sector as India comes under the sway of market reforms. The book will provide concrete evidence for the growing Hinduization of a whole variety of institutions run by the four-sided public-private collaboration we call the state-temple-corporate complex (or STCC for short). The four collaborators include: first and foremost, the elected representatives of the people along with the machinery of the government; two, the corporate sector, both Indian and foreign; three, the country’s dominant religious sector, made up of a loose network of Hindu temples (some of them stupendously wealthy), their management committees with powerful government and business representatives on their boards and the many well-connected gurus, yogis and swamis; and last but not the least, the representatives of political Hinduism, or Hindutva, who maintain fraternal relations with the Hindu establishment on the one hand and with the corporate players on the other.

This four-sided collaboration, this book will show, is responsible for openly or covertly smuggling in a jingoistic and yet deeply superstitious and socially conservative Hindu agenda into private and government-aided institutions of higher learning. In addition, public money for tourism and infrastructure projects is flowing into promoting pilgrimage to Hindu temples and other holy places, renovating and even directly subsidizing the building of new temples, ashrams and priest-training schools.

So pervasive and so utterly taken-for-granted is this institutional support for propagating Hinduism in the guise of promoting “Indian culture,” that even the formally secular agencies of the state openly indulge in it at tax-payers’ expense — and hardly anyone asks any questions. If “they” have their fanatical mullahs, “we” have the eager cooperation of the four main pillars of society, backed by the enthusiastic consent of ordinary people.

At the ideological level, globalization is fuelling the dreams of making India an economic and spiritual superpower - a science and technology superstar and world guru (or jagat-guru) rolled in one. Elated by India’s success in the global economy (such as it is), many players of the state-temple-corporate complex, along with influential opinion-makers in the media, have bought into the dreams of superpower-dom. A new self-image is being fashioned in which Indians are the Chosen People who have the “innate ability” to see and hear the Divine, and who are therefore endowed with superior reason and intelligence. This race of spiritual and intellectual giants, the myth goes, has long been besieged by dwarfs who believe in the Semitic conception of God which has been the source of all the evils in the world. The 21^st century is supposed to be the Indian century, when India will awaken to its destiny and take its “rightful place” as a great civilization and a great power. Elements of this new mythology have already seeped into the public sphere and can be easily identified in conversations with educated, middle-class Indians, in media commentaries and in the religious discourses of popular gurus.

This Chosen People-Great Power myth is not a pipedream, but has real world consequences. This cultural narcissism is very much on display in the eagerness with which India has joined the US-led “axis of the enlightened” nations against the “axis of evil” nations which are mostly Islamic and therefore assumed to be fundamentally unenlightened and violent.

This entire arc of development - starting from India’s deepening links with the global economy, the increasing religiosity of the Hindu majority, the growing inter-penetration of popular Hinduism and the public sphere, all the way to Hinduism’s purported superiority over “Semitic monotheistic” civilizations and the prospects of secularism under the conditions of globalization — is the subject of this book.

GLOBALIZATION AND RESURGENCE OF RELIGION

On the surface, our thesis strains plausibility. For a great many years, notable social theorists have been predicting a decline - if not the death - of organized religions, nation-states and nationalistic feelings in the global village interconnected by markets, the internet and communication satellites. We, on the other hand, are asserting not only that popular religiosity and nationalism are growing in India as the country is getting more integrated into the world markets, but that the two are merging into each other and stoking the flames of intolerance — and even terrorism — against non-Hindu minorities.

At first glance, it does seem counter-intuitive that a closer integration with the rest of the world should encourage the kind of burst of religiosity and nationalism that India is experiencing. Wasn’t the global spread of free-markets and democracy supposed to “end history” by “replacing irrational desire of nations to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire be recognized as equal”? That was certainly the gist of Francis Fukuyama’s bestseller The End of History which caused a great stir when it was first published in 1992. The self-correcting logic of the global market was supposed to replace the interest-driven and often corruption-laden policies of individual nation-states, and eventually purge the world of nationalism itself. National identities were supposed to give way either to supra-national identities (like the European Union), or to gently transmute into a postmodern “pastiche sensibility” that values a variety of life-style choices borrowed from all over the world, with no special attachment to any one national culture. What is more, global markets were supposed to moderate and secularize traditional religions, turning them into gentle “prosperity religions” whose role, as Alan Wolfe, a well-known American sociologist of religion put it recently, is “not to question the modern world’s riches but to bring them within the reach of everyone.” A world-wide outbreak of liberal democracy, pluralism, respect for difference, secularism, prosperity and international peace - that was the original promise of globalization.

What is happening in India shows that market forces do not necessarily secularize societies, or to put it other words, modernization and development do not necessarily lessen the hold of religious beliefs and practices on the lives of individuals, culture and social institutions. Even the supposedly secularized “prosperity religions” can happily co-exist with - and actively encourage - religionization of national identities.

Indeed, India offers a good example of how globalization promotes not secularization, but rather de-secularization of society, and how new technologies and institutional arrangements provide new opportunities for traditional religions to modernize themselves and penetrate deeper into the pores of the society. Despite the rhetoric of Timeless and Eternal Truth, Hindu dharma, like all other religions, is constantly adapting to the changing society and in the process, influencing the direction of change. What is noteworthy about Hinduism’s adaptation to India’s growing integration into the global market economy is how the Hindu establishment has given its blessings to - and in turn, benefited handsomely from — a highly rapacious form of corporate capitalism, while feeding a sense of innate Hindu superiority over the rest of the world.

It is, of course, too soon to foreclose the possibility that the logic of the marketplace may yet help to moderate the Frankenstein of political Hinduism that the markets themselves are aiding and abetting. It clear that large-scale and violent self-assertion of religious identity (as over the issue of the Ram temple in Aydodhya), or massacre of innocents of the “wrong” religion (as in Godhara, Gujarat) is not good for the country’s global image and foreign investments. Since no one knowingly kills the goose that lays golden eggs, Hindu extremist parties and their supporters among the upper-crust may well learn to moderate their rhetoric and actions in the interest of maintaining the image of India as a place of peace and harmony. So far, however, the chances of moderation do not look good: Hindu-led violence is not declining but only being outsourced to local dals and senas, the many armies of this or that god or goddess, whose activities do not get the kind of international media attention that the attacks on Mumbai received.

All said and done, India is like a tightrope walker these days: one false step can throw the entire country and its economy can fall in utter chaos. The ever growing merger of Hinduism and nationalist sentiments increases the possibility of just such a false step.

THREE PARADOXES

There are three paradoxes of the growing Hinduization of the Indian polity that this book seeks to explore in fuller details.

The first paradox is that the state-temple ties are deepening in a country that takes pride in its secular democracy where the state is supposed to have no official religion of its own. India with its Godless Constitution is indeed an exception in South Asia, a region made up entirely of faith-based nation-states, including Islamic sates like Pakistan and Bangladesh, Buddhist states like Sri Lanka and Bhutan, and until recently, a Hindu state like Nepal. This naturally makes one wonder why and how India’s public sphere, including the agencies of the state, have come to be saturated with overtly Hindu symbols and rituals?

This book explains this paradox by focusing on the machinations of the state-temple-corporate complex that is filling the space left vacant as the state has begun to withdraw from its public-sector obligations.

In one sense, the existence of STCC is nothing new. The supposedly secular state of India has never shied away from celebrating Hindu religious symbols in the public sphere - all in the name of propagating “Indian culture.” Merchants and business houses, too, have a long history, going back many centuries, of sponsoring temples and monasteries devoted to their own chosen God or gurus.

But the current neo-liberal economic regime, this book will argue, is bringing the state, the business/industrial elite and the religious establishment in a much closer relationship than ever before. As the Indian state is withdrawing from its public-sector obligations, it is actively seeking partnership with the private sector and the Hindu establishment to run schools, universities, hospitals, tourist facilities and other social services. As a result, public funds earmarked for creating public goods are increasingly being diverted into facilitating the work of these private charitable institutions which bear a distinctly Hindu traditionalist bias. This, in turn, is helping to “modernize” Hinduism: many of the newly minted, English-speaking and computer-savvy priests, astrologers, vastu shastris and yoga teachers who service the middle-classes’ insatiable appetite for religious ritual, are products of this nexus between the sate, the corporate sector and the temples.

The second paradox that this book explores is apparent “liberalism,” and the post-modernist eclecticism and hybridity of Hindu nationalism. The kind of political Hinduism that has become the new normal in India differs from the much-derided “Islamofascism,” or the garden-variety Christian fundamentalism in the US in one significant detail: there are no equivalents of fatwa-issuing mullahs or Bible-thumping preachers among the more popular and influential figures of Hindu nationalists. Of course, Fatwa-like death threats, Taliban-style moral policing, terrorist attacks on Muslim and Christian communities, Vedic literalism in the guise of “Vedic science” and forced conversions all go on in India, but they are mostly outsourced to fringe and lumpen groups. The mainstream of political Hinduism, unlike the mainstream of political Islam, consistently presents its agenda in the liberal language of “real” secularism, democracy and tolerance, all of which are claimed to be Hinduism’s gift to the world.

By and large, the modern-day preachers of Hinduism are far too sophisticated to resort to the far cruder methods of mullahs and Bible-thumping ministers. Like a virus that replicates itself by using the biological machinery of the host cell, Hindu nationalism installs itself in the minds and hearts of ordinary people by using their deeply-held religious beliefs, dearly-loved rituals and festivals, and fondly-remembered myths, hymns and songs. What is even more insidious is how modern Hinduism has learned to present its deeply unjust, hierarchical and mystical worldview as the epitome of “integral” humanism, democracy and science. This shallow but shiny gloss of liberal-sounding vocabulary is how modern Hinduism is sold to the IT-workers, financial-sector employees and other white-collar service providers who make up the bulk of the new middle-class.

This kind of pseudo-modern Hinduism thrives on a strikingly post-modernist style of thinking which draws wild and unwarranted equivalences and analogies between pre-modern and modern conceptions of liberal democracy, tolerance, science etc. This great interpretive flexibility and hybridity of Hinduism is routinely admired by intellectuals and ideologues alike as a source of India’s purported tolerance and openness to modern ideas.

But this book will argue that this eclecticism has served not to liberalize or modernize, but to deepen the hold of Hindu religious culture on the secular aspects of Indian society, including education, government administration, business enterprises and even the judiciary. Hindu eclecticism excels in transferring the attitudes of reverence, faith and enthusiasm typical of religious experience to secular institutions and ideas. The rituals of Hindu puja, for example, are transferred to the Indian nation which is literally represented as a Hindu goddess, Bharat Mata. The attitude of reverence reserved for religious teachers is transferred to scientific teaching and learning to the point that laboratories are treated as temples and temples as “occult laboratories”. The all-pervasive atman, or shakti of Hinduism becomes the “energy” of quantum physics and so on. Dominant ideas, ways of thinking and political projects give the appearance of being modern, but they retain the core of traditional Hindu worldview.

The third paradox has to do with the manufacture of consent for privatization and trickle-down economics. The results of the 2004 elections clearly showed that the majority of voters who did not share in the gains of the new economy were turned off by the hoopla about “India Shining” and threw out the Hindu-nationalist led government. In a country where more than 700 million people still live on less than two US dollars a day and where the majority is seeing a worsening of whatever little there was in the name of public services like schools and hospitals, it is not easy to convince the masses of the virtues of free markets.

This raises the following question which this book tries to answer: How are the economic policies which require dispossession of the poor but give them precious little in return being sold to the electorate? What, in other words, are the ideological legitimations for the new economy which can make it acceptable to even those who are not benefiting materially from it?

The answer lies in what this book calls “superpower swadeshi” (lit. one’s own country, swa “one’s own,” and deshi, “country”.) India has performed a linguistic sleight of hand straight out of Orwell’s 1984: the Gandhian meaning of swadeshi as self-reliance and economic nationalism has been redefined as whatever will make India powerful on the world stage, or whatever will make India into a “superpower.”

The idea of India as a superpower in science and technology, an economic powerhouse and at the same time, a great spiritual guru to the whole world mobilizes the patriotic and even religious passions of even those who are actually losing out in the rush to privatize. After the long history of colonial humiliation, there is a great hunger among ordinary Indians to be respected — and even feared — by the rest of the world. The promise of superpowerdom seems to satisfy this hunger.

This “dream” of becoming a superpower, this book will argue, not only sells market reforms, but also promotes Hindu chauvinism which is openly targeted at Muslim and Christian minorities. Hindu chauvinism is built into superpower swadeshi because Hinduism plays a huge role in defining and glorifying what is swadeshi. The idea that Hinduism is “innately” more spiritual, more rational (even innately more computer savvy!), and more liberal than other religions is quite deeply ingrained in the Indian psyche. The Hindu Right parties actively promote these ideas of Hindu superiority in their attempt to project India as the victor in the global clash of civilizations.

Overall, then, the aim is to look below the surface of the shiny but thin veneer of modernity represented by new shopping malls, fashion boutiques, car-dealerships, IT-parks and special economic zones cropping up all over the country. Underneath the gloss of globalization, there is a bubbling cauldron of faith, politics and big money creating a society with a deeply politicized religion and an equally religionized politics. In this society, age-old resentments against non-Hindu Indians, and age-old ambitions of dominating the outside world are finding a new, more self-confident - but potentially more dangerous - expression. It is this culture and its material foundations that this book has tried to describe.

Witness To A Kidnapping

Meera Nanda — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:39:59 +0000

Editor’s Note: Meera Nanda is spending a year in Delhi at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. During this time she will be contributing stories of her experiences in the capital city.

This first of her entries from Delhi comes in the aftermath of some of the ugliest “moral policing” by the right-wing Hindu nationalists. A few days before Valentine’s Day this year a group of activists from the fringe group Sri Ram Sena attacked young women who were drinking at a pub in Mangalore. This incident was reported widely and it provoked young people all over the country to protest the attacks. One group, the Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women, with over 50,000 members on facebook, decided to send Pink Chaddis (pink underwear) as a form of protest to the leaders of the extremist Hindu groups.

The civil court building happens to be barely five minutes walk from my parental home in Chandigarh. Outside this house of justice, I witnessed the kidnapping of a young woman who had come there seeking justice.

The violence of the act - and how it was accepted by so many as natural, just and “for her own good” - revealed the ugliness of the City Beautiful. What I saw is very much on mind as I think about the recent protests to defend women’s right to go to pubs. I wonder if all the pink chaddis the protestors sent to shame the hoodlums of the Hindu right have anything meaningful to offer to that poor woman in Chandigarh.

It was early February when I came to Chandigarh for a short visit. I was walking past the high court building on my way to the market around midday. A woman was walking in my direction. I would have passed her by without noticing her, but suddenly I heard her scream. Before I could figure out what was the matter, she began to run in the opposite direction. Just then I saw a huge white van stop by the curb. Burly young men- four or five of them - stepped out, and began to run after the woman. Within a matter of seconds, they had grabbed hold of the woman who was screaming and struggling. I saw them drag her by her hair into the van. Before I could unfreeze myself and try to take down the license number, they were gone.

Soon a crowd gathered. One of us discovered the woman’s handbag that had fallen off in the scuffle. The bag contained a cell phone which was dead, an attested copy of her school-leaving certificate (which put her around 20 years of age), some money and few knickknacks. We decided that we should take the bag to the police station near by.

Then a middle-aged Sikh man who was in the crowd spoke up. He told us that it was all right, it was all a ghar ki baat and nothing bad was going to happen to the woman. He claimed that he was her father and it was her brothers and cousins who had “taken her home.”

“How can you allow your own daughter to be treated like this? What kind of a father are you? Have you no shame?” I asked.

This is what he offered as the way of explanation: His daughter was having an affair with a Muslim man and that was not acceptable to him. She was a bright girl, he said, an engineering student, but this Muslim man was ruining her life. He said something garbled about a lawsuit the couple had filed against the family. It appears that she had come to the court in connection with the lawsuit and the family had been waiting for her.

It seemed to me that many in the crowd cooled down after they heard this “explanation.” But there were four-five young men who agreed with me that we have to take this man to the police station and report the kidnapping.

We narrated what we had seen to the policemen on duty. Then the old man started talking about the affair with the Muslim man, as if it were a crime. To show that he was not narrow-minded, he said that he would have had no objection to a chura chamar (an untouchable) but he could not accept the idea of his daughter marrying a Muslim.

His story had an immediate and a dramatic effect. The policemen were far more interested in the old man’s travails over this supposedly wayward daughter than the violence she had been subjected to. My pleas that the victim was past the age of consent and had the full right to choose her partner were met with total incomprehension. Madam, you don’t understand these matters, the cops told me. How can this poor man let his daughter marry a Muslim? Would I let such a thing happen to my daughter, they asked, without heeding my affirmative answer.

It was self-evident to these guardians of law-and-order that respectable women from Sikh and Hindu families should not marry Muslim men. In their eyes, the old man did the right thing by having her daughter nabbed.

It was also self-evident that these cops were not going to do anything to help. I insisted that they take me to their boss. By now, our group of eye-witnesses had dwindled to just two: myself and a young man. I pleaded with the inspector that for all we know, this kidnapping could be the first step toward an honour killing. I threatened to get the media involved if the police did not make all efforts to find the woman and to ensure that no harm came to her. After receiving assurances of action, I took down the inspector’s phone number and left.

Later that day, the police inspector called to tell me that the woman wanted to stay with her family out of her own free will. He put her on the phone to me: she dutifully told me that the misunderstanding had been cleared, her family was treating her well and that she wanted to stay with her family. I gave her my cell phone number and asked her to call if she needed any help.

I can’t get this young woman out of my mind as I watch the recent wave of protests against the spate of violence against women unleashed by Rama Sene and other hoodlums in Mangalore and elsewhere. While I fully support their right to choose to go to a pub and make other life-style choices, I worry that they are defining their freedoms way too narrowly.

Why, I wonder, did it take this ugly incidence in a pub in Mangalore to create a sense of crisis that is bringing women and men into the streets in defense of personal freedom? Is it only when violence comes knocking at middle-class watering holes that we will take notice? After all, far deadlier crimes against women are taking place everyday. It has been well-established - and well reported in the media - that honour killings are on the rise throughout Northern India. Nearly one tenth of all murders that take place in Punjab and Haryana involve family members who kill their own kin who dare to break the bounds of caste and creed. Majority of the victims are women.

Another thing that worries me is the soaring popularity of arranged marriages among the same hip crowd that is so protective (and rightly so) of their right to go to a pub and hold hands in public without the moral police keeping an eye on them.

Mangalore Pub Attacks

Most of them, I am sure, will condemn the Chandigarh abduction in no uncertain terms. But I am not sure where they will stand when it comes right down to the heart of the matter - namely, the right of individuals to defy family and community and choose to marry someone from a different caste or creed, especially Islam which is so little understood and so aggressively condemned these days. Will they stand with the woman, or will they stand with the father, not so much to condone the violence but to “understand” why he had to stop the marriage?

I am afraid that the principle that it is the right of the individual to make such fundamental choices like marriage has not found much favor with the seemingly modern youth. Their idea of freedom of choice seems to stop outside the institution of marriage where the principle of the-family-knows-best seems to prevail. Surveys show that fairly large majorities - between 60-75 percent - of modern urban middle classes, including IT workers, prefer to have their parents find a mate for them. After enjoying the personal freedoms which an average young person takes for granted in the United States and Europe, many enthusiastically go through the most extravagant weddings, complete with incomprehensible rituals and inexcusable dowries.

As long as they accept that marriages are family affairs, why would they care to fight against honour killings or honour abductions, as in the Chandigarh case? After all, wasn’t the father in this case acting on the principle of father-knows-best? Yes, he carried it farther than the hip set would like, but the underlying idea remains the same.

The unsung hero in this is the young woman who was so badly treated by her family. She had the courage to follow her heart. I am quite sure she did not send pink underwear to the pub-smashing hoodlums: most probably, she does not condone the idea of women going to pubs. But at the same time, her idea of personal freedom is thicker and her battle is much harder and lonelier.

My thoughts and best wishes are with her.

Further Thoughts on Why I Criticize Hinduism

Meera Nanda — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:16:04 +0000

This post is inspired by T.V. Manoj’s earlier post “Why I Criticize Hinduism the Most.”

Like Manoj and other Indian rationalists, I have often been chided by fellow Indians - fairly mainstream, middle-class bhadralok, most of them — for picking on Hinduism. I am asked if I am so concerned about irrationalities and pseudo-sciences, why don’t I take on Islam and Christianity? Aren’t they full of faith-based nonsense? Hinduism, my critics tell me, is far more rational and “scientific” than these other “Semitic” religions in which you have to take the revelation purely on faith, no questions asked. I am often told rather gleefully that all my labors are wasted because they I am not aiming my rationalism against Christians and Muslims. Some go even further and assume that because I am critical of Hinduism, I must be a secret Christian, and I must be working for “the proselytizers”! Apparently, no one born a Hindu can legitimately raise questions about the “Eternal Truths” of the faith.

On reading Manoj’s very cogent defense of why he believes that internal criticism of Hinduism is perfectly legitimate and even necessary, I thought it might be worthwhile to share my own take on it.

I’m presently working on a book manuscript in which I defend the old Nehruvian imperative of cultivating “scientific temper.” ( I call this book Tryst with Destiny: Scientific Temper and Secularization of India. The book is very nearly done, and if all goes well, it should appear in print by mid-2009.)

I copy below a section titled “Three Caveats” from the introduction to the book. Here I anticipate the kind of criticism that I know will be heaped upon me, and try to meet the critics head-on. Here is what I say:

Three Caveats

Three caveats must be noticed about the style, intentions and the scope of this book.

The first caveat has to do with the fact that this book deals only with the conflicts between modern science and Hinduism. It does not examine the many flagrant irrationalities and fanaticisms that exist in Islam and Christianity, to say nothing of the many folk expressions of Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism. This exclusive focus on Hinduism is a result of many factors.

First, and most obviously, Hinduism is the religion of the majority; close to 85 percent of Indians describe themselves as Hindus. Secondly, it is a matter of historical fact that the proponents of scientific rationalism in India in the 20th century, whose ideas are explored at length here, came from a Hindu background and were engaged with issues relating to the Hindu metaphysical justifications for caste and gender inequalities. Thirdly, Hinduism has avoided a serious house-cleaning by drawing far-fetched and ad hoc analogies with modern science. It has succeeded in selling itself around the world as the only and the ultimate “religion of reason,” while redefining reason itself to conform to the Hindu ideal of spiritual or Gnostic knowledge. Finally, I must acknowledge my own background. My own atheism emerged out of a critical back-and- forth with Hinduism, the faith I was born into, and the faith I took quite earnestly when I was younger. Among all the religions of India, it is the popular Hinduism of Ramayana, Bhagvat Gita and the Puranas that I have a fair amount of first-hand experience of. As an atheist of Hindu origin, and as a secularist concerned with the growth of Hindu nationalist politics, I take a rational critique of Hinduism to be a matter of great urgency.

It is for these reasons that this book is focused on the record of secularization and rationalization - mostly the lack of it - of Hinduism. But this Hindu-centrism should not be read as a back-handed approval of, or partiality for, any other religion. No religious faith is free from highly improbable and objectively false beliefs about matters of empirically verifiable facts. Indian Christians are as fond of their miracles and faith-healing as the devout Hindus who lined up to offer milk to the milk-drinking idols of Ganesha; Indian Muslims can be as literalist in the matter of Koran and Sharia as any Christian fundamentalist anywhere in the world. The principles of scientific rationality cut across all faith traditions and all conceptions of the supernatural, personal or impersonal, one or many, transcendent or immanent. Science is an equal-opportunity debunker, or a broad-spectrum weed-killer, if you will.

But let us weed our own gardens, I say, for those are the gardens and the weeds that we are most familiar with. Even though I have no desire whatsoever to step back into the Hindu garden of my childhood and youth, I insist on weeding it nevertheless, so that others who come after me can live in it (if they still choose to) without losing their minds and their consciences.

The second caveat has to do with the place of religion in social life. This book’s plea for combating superstitions and pseudoscience should not be read as a militant rejection of religion per se, even though all religions, without exception, have served as incubators of irrational beliefs. The idea is rather to set limits on what functions religions can legitimately perform in the 21st century. Applying critical inquiry to religious doctrines means only this: Insofar as religions invoke supernatural forces (whether a personal God or the impersonal but conscious shakti, or spiritual energy) in order to make factual claims about the natural world, they have an obligation to meet the same standards of evidence that apply to scientific explanations in the relevant domain of the natural world. In other words, if religions want to assert factual truths about the universe, or if they want to convince us of the actual existence of the beings and powers they claim exist in the universe, they cannot fall back upon the authority of ancient books or mystical “seers” gifted with divine powers to see what is not perceptible to ordinary mortals. If and when religions step into the turf of natural science and social sciences (including of course, history and archeology) which deal with empirically testable matters, they have to play by the rules of accepted science and adjust their picture of the world accordingly.

But as long as religions refrain from stepping into the turf of science, and learn to interpret the supernatural powers and phenomena as myths, allegories and poetic metaphors, they need not worry about scientific demonstrability, for scientific validity is not the correct criterion for measuring the value of poetry. Religion as hope-renewing poetry, myth or parable has — and perhaps will always have - an important place in the modern world. But religion will have to cede the function of explaining the natural and social world to science.

For many reasons having to do with Hindu theology and India’s entanglement in European romantic counter-Enlightenment, this separation between expressive and explanatory functions of religion has been particularly slow in coming in India. Contemporary Hinduism makes a number of factual claims about the cosmological order. A brief list of such claims will include the following: that the entire universe is filled with conscious spiritual energy that animates everything; that a soul capable of conscious awareness and memories can exist apart from the brain and the body; that this soul enters the embryo of a species chosen as a result of the souls’ karmic account from the previous birth; that different species of living beings represent different stages of the evolution of the soul; that morally good or bad deeds (punya or papa) from past births influence the innate qualities, gunas or “substance code” of different species, castes and genders that the soul is born into; the macrocosm (planets and stars) corresponds to and influences the microcosm (human affairs) and so on. Whatever else they are, all of them are simultaneously claims about the nature of the material world of particles, bodies, birth and evolution. Because these claims involve the material world, they are open to serious empirical inquiry using the standard methods of modern biology, physics, cosmology and neurobiology of consciousness. All of these claims need to be critically assessed based upon advances in scientific knowledge in these domains.

Avatars of Vishnu

But rather than open its cosmological claims to critical scrutiny - and reject the many falsified elements — modern Hinduism has adopted the strategy of co-opting the vocabulary of modern science to legitimize its spirit-centered worldview. To take just one example, important Hindu philosophers, from Keshub Chandra, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo have interpreted Vishnu’s ten avatars as foreshadowing the Darwinian theory of evolution and have interpreted the Hindu idea of the presence of consciousness in nature as an actual component (called “involution”) of the process of biological evolution. Rather than provide metaphorical interpretation of the spiritual teachings, neo-Hindu “reformists” have gone out of their way to defend them as if they are condoned by modern science. It is this abuse of modern science to prop up the outdated and objectively false assumptions about this world that is the target of this book.

The final caveat has to do with the use of the word “superstition.” This book will use the label “superstition,” when warranted, to describe irrational practices that have doctrinal support from religious texts. This term has fallen out of academic favor because it has come to reek of totalitarian persecution of religious believers, Soviet or Chinese style. Calling someone’s belief or practice “superstitious” is seen as tantamount to labeling that group deficient in the ability to reason and imposing your own standards of rationality on them: I have personally encountered many otherwise liberal and progressive intellectuals who take umbrage at me referring to elements of popular Hinduism as superstitions. Critics also point to the utter futility of it all. Don’t modern societies create their own superstitions? Isn’t it true that societies at the pinnacle of enlightened modernity - not just the US but the more secularized Western Europe as well - remain rife with old and New Age superstitions?

There are good reasons why pseudoscience and superstitions will always be with us for, to quote Carl Sagan:

[Superstitions] speak to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. it caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack. it offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death is not the end. It assures us that ..we are hooked up and tied to the Universe (Sagan, 1995: 14).

But persistence of superstition should be no reason to throw in the towel. On the contrary, persistent fallacies demand equally persistent critique. Indeed, those who rightly object to political persecution of groups marked “superstitious” (the persecution of Falun Gong in China, for example) should welcome open debate and demand for evidence, because debate is the best guarantor of an open society.

What is not acceptable is to sweep superstitions under the rug out of political correctness, for these will come back to haunt us. After all, what is a superstition? In the immortal words of Robert Ingersoll, one of America’s best known agnostics:

Superstition is:

To believe in spite of evidence or without evidence.

To account for one mystery by another.

To believe that the world is governed by chance or caprice.

To disregard the true relation between cause and effect.

To put thought, intention and design back of nature.

To believe that mind created and controls matter.

To believe in force apart from substance, or in substance apart from force.

To believe in miracles, spells and charms, in dreams and prophecies.

To believe in the supernatural.

The foundation of superstition is ignorance, the superstructure is faith and the dome is a vain hope. Superstition is the child of ignorance and the mother of misery. (Ingersoll, 1898, emphasis added).

Regardless of the content of the superstition (whether it has to do with astrology and crystals or “higher” more “subtle” readings of quantum physics), what is troubling about superstitions is how these beliefs are arrived at. What is troubling is the tendency to “believe in spite of [falsifying] evidence or without [affirming or positive] evidence,” to “disregard the true relationship between cause and effect,” and to “put thought intention and design back in nature.“

These styles of thinking are always unwholesome and sometimes downright dangerous. Individually and by themselves, they appear to cause no long-lasting harm, apart from the fact that they most often lead to false conclusions. After all, how does it matter if people read their horoscopes, if it brings them some hope in this chaotic and unpredictable world? The same logic applies to belief in miracles and the power of prayers to bring them about: people need consolation and hope.

Ridding the world completely of all irrationalities is a quixotic task, indeed. As long as long as they cause no real harm, one can learn to live with irrationalities of one’s fellow citizens. But more often than not, superstitions do real harm. To begin with, they exact a cost from the poorest and the most helpless members of the society who end up wasting scarce resources on charlatans and holy frauds. But what makes superstitious thinking dangerous for the society in the long term is that it cultivates a habit of believing without adequate evidence, of accepting ideas on faith alone. This paves the way for false prophets and dictators.

It is for this reason that secular democracies must learn to balance the freedom of belief with an obligation to constantly push against irrationally held beliefs with demands for evidence that can be systematically tested. There is simply no other option.

***

Meera Nanda is the author of several books including Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essaysand Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India. The above article is an excerpt from her upcoming bookTryst with Destiny: Scientific Temper and Secularization of India.

The God Delusion in Action: My Indian travelogue.

Meera Nanda — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:30:44 +0000

“New cars smell the same in India as they do in the US,” was the first thought that came to my mind as I took my seat in my nephew’s new Hyundai sedan in which he had come to pick me up from the Chandigarh airport. It was the first of August and I had just arrived in India for a short visit. My home-town was my first stop.

New cars in India may have the same leathery-plasticky smell as new cars everywhere, but they look like nothing else in the world. The car that I was riding in, like the tens of thousands that roll out of auto-showrooms everyday all over India, was bedecked in red ribbons and had a garland of fresh marigolds strung around the number-plates. The top of the front window had two swastikas and an “Om” painted on it in red color. The driving-wheel had the “auspicious” red string tied to it. The Ganesh idol on the dashboard had the residue of burnt incense in front of it.

My nephew told me that he was coming straight from the temple where he had taken his car for a “vahan puja,” a brand new Hindu ritual invented to bless the new vehicles that are clogging the Indian roads these days.

This being his first car- and the object of his loving devotion, at least for now - my nephew told me that he wanted to do something really, really, special for it. That is why, he told me, he took it to the temple where he had to shell out some serious cash for the ceremony, instead of getting a free puja which his dealership had offered as a part of the incentive package.

“What”? My ears pricked up. I must have sounded incredulous: ”Car dealers offer free pujas? Do they have pundits on their staff now? Car dealerships have become new temples or what?”

My nephew looked at me as if to ask where I had been all these years?! This is nothing new, he said. Knowing how popular vahan pujas are, more innovative car-dealers throw in free pujas for their customers. They hire full-time pujaris, who along with their helpers, do all the required rituals: break a coconut for auspiciousness, make you drive over limes to ward off evil spirits, while they recite Sanskrit mantras whose meaning even they don’t know. They give you prasad to take home with you. They even take a picture of the ceremony on your digital camera that you can email your friends and relatives all around the world. A puja in a car-dealership feels just like a puja in a temple, really. But he still prefers a real temple and that is why he decided to forgo the freebie - my nephew told me this, all in one breathless monologue.

Car-dealerships with in-house pujaris! What a fancy idea, I thought, and how typical of Hinduism to cash in on this new opportunity to adapt and thrive in these times of globalization. The pujaris are happy as they can make more money sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of car-dealerships than in your average neighborhood mandir, I am sure. Car-buyers are happy, for they can cross out “puja” from their to-do list without any extra money and time. Happiness and contentment all around !! I bet even the coconut sellers are laughing all the way to the bank. (Regular coconut deliveries to auto showrooms?! Only in India.)

What is not to like about this Brahman-bania business model? Isn’t this simply a creative re-enactment of the eternal partnership between god and mammon?

Why, then, do I feel a wave of dismay sweep over my heart? Why do I feel sad at the idea of so many educated young people like my dear sweet nephew - who I love dearly, and who is so touchingly proud of his first new car - believing that puja adds anything of value to their new vahans?

I felt that something is amiss in the way this generation of “modern” Indians is encountering the products of modern science and technology with an utterly medieval or even pre-medieval worldview. While they seek out and revel in every gadget and every creature-comfort created by a purely materialistic and rational understanding of nature, they seem to experience the world as if it is literally crawling with gods who have power of life and death over our lives. God is as much a part of their taken-for-granted reality as stones, trees - and, indeed, their precious vahans - are. A prayer to the gods is the ultimate insurance policy against any accidents and mishaps.

Of course, my nephew is worldly-wise enough to buy a real insurance policy. But why does he think he needs the puja over and above the certificate of insurance lying in the glove compartments of his brand new car? I wondered if he wonders who or what is this protective power he is bowing to, as he breaks those coconuts and burns the incense? Has too much praying blunted his capacity to wonder and to ask questions? If he can bow to an invisible power purely on faith without asking any questions, will this young man ask too many questions from other authority figures he will be asked to bow his head to in the rest of his life?

***

“There you go again!”, an old friend remarked when I shared this bit about free vahan pujas with him when we met in one of the many canteens that dot the Punjab University campus in Chandigarh. He is quite godless himself, but thinks that intellectuals must respect people’s religiosity and not presume to be more “enlightened” than them. That way, he fears, lies avant-guardism of the Bolshevik kind.

He went on: “Don’t you and people like you in America - all claiming to be so modern and secular - have your own superstitions? Tell me honestly: have you never worn your “lucky” dress for a job interview? Haven’t you ever avoided, say, going over a crack in the pavement? So why do you get so upset over harmless little quirks of Indians? Let them do their pujas, if it brings them comfort in this harsh and cruel society that we are creating. A puja is not harming anyone, is it? Besides, don’t you realize that you are replicating the prejudices of English sahibs’ toward the natives? Are you not behaving like those Christian missionaries who labeled us as superstitious idolaters? If you want to reach ordinary people, you have to respect their faith and not look down upon them - like you often do.”

Ouch! I have lost count of how many times I have heard such “friendly” advice to take my hat off, so to say, when speaking of religion. But no matter how many times I hear it, this idea of “respecting” other people’s faith will never sit well with me.

I happen to believe that indulging people’s irrational beliefs - like a parent puts up with a child’s follies - does not add up to “respect.” In my rulebook, the best way to respect people you care about is to treat them as worthy conversation partners who can be persuaded by reason (or who may persuade you with better arguments and evidence). The way I see it, engaging people in an honest and open dialogue about the matters of ultimate concern is to pay them the highest grade of respect that there is.

Besides, I have never been able to understand why my otherwise progressive friends bend over backwards to make exceptions for “the people’s” faith. My progressive friends actually take the lead when it comes to demanding good reasons and evidence when politicians, government bureaucrats, corporate CEOs or the “West” try to sell us some phony idea or products. But their critical faculties seem to desert them when it comes to challenging the religious faith of “the people,” even if that faith ends up causing so much unnecessary suffering all around. When it comes to popular Indian religiosity - be it Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Chrisitan or whatever - secular and progressive Indian intellectuals tend to behave more like caretakers rather than critics, even though they themselves are quite devoid of any serious religious conviction.

My secularist friends, for example, are on the forefront of the struggle against Hindu extremists - and I respect them greatly for that. But I am also puzzled at their hand-off approach toward Hinduism itself. I have lost count of how many times I have heard them proclaim with all seriousness that “Hinduism has nothing to do with Hindu nationalism.” Why is that? How do they justify their position? Hinduism, they say, is a matter of “faith” (and therefore good) while Hindu nationalism is a “political ideology” (and therefore bad).

But I am afraid this raises more questions than it answers. Is it really the case that religious faith and ideology have nothing to do with each other? When has faith not served as ideology? Isn’t the story of Ramayana simultaneously faith and an ideology of a patriarchal and a caste society? Do my good secularist friends really believe that faith is like a pair of chappals that people leave outside the door marked “politics”? Religious beliefs, or faith, have always supplied the commonsense understanding of the world which ideologies mobilize. A consistent secularist has no choice but to challenge both the commonsense worldview derived from faith, and the political ideologies that resonate with this commonsense.

I have yet another bone to pick with those insist that we must “respect” people’s religious beliefs. Why should we respect beliefs that defy all possible evidence, which thumb their nose at all the accumulated knowledge about how nature works and which have played such a reactionary role throughout India’s history? Just because some beliefs come wrapped up in piety and tradition does not make them worthy of respect.

All these thoughts were racing in my head as I sat there under a tree. But I bit my tongue and did not say anything: I was enjoying my visit to the campus where I was once a student, and did not want a debate just then.

Thankfully, the chai-wallah (a young lad who should have been in school) came just then. We got busy with our chai and bread-pakoras.

One good new: the junk food of my student days still tastes as good as I remembered it. Some traditions definitely do need to be preserved!

***

I was still mulling over my friend’s words next morning when the local newspaper ( I read The Tribune when I am in Chandigarh) arrived.

The headlines announced: “146 die in Naina Devi Stampede“.

Naina Devi is a popular temple, about 100 km up north of Chandigarh in the foothills of the Himalayas. The temple is supposed to mark the “exact” spot where goddess’s eyes (or “naina”) fell when her body, reconstituted by her husband god Shiva after she had committed sati was blown into smithereens by the god Vishnu - a double dose of mayhem, you may say. (What is so holy about this act of violence, escapes me entirely). Incidentally, there are at least two other so-called shakti-peeths, one in Pakistan, which claim the eyes of the goddess. There are at least 50 other such temples all over south Asian which lay claim to bits of the goddess’s decimated body. I wonder: how do they know that the right big toe, or the upper eye-tooth of the goddess fell exactly at the spot where the temple stands, I wondered. No one knows. Besides, it is not appropriate to ask such questions for these beliefs are based upon faith and therefore beyond reason. But wait: the same faith-based claims get trotted out as empirical facts backed by pseudoscience when government-run tourism departments want to promote these sites, or when Hindu nationalists want to lay claim on Ramsethu or the Babri mosque. The faithful want it - and have it - both ways in the good old secular democratic republic that is India. )

But I am rambling. Let me go back to the great stampede of August 2008. Here is the clipping I saved from The Tribune, Aug. 4:

More than 146 persons, most of them women and children, were killed in a stampede in the Naina Devi shrine in Himachal Pradesh. More than 200 persons were injured, some of them critically.

Since it was the Shravan Ashtami mela on the second day of the Navratras and a Sunday, the crowd of devotees, an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 persons, thronged the popular hilltop shrine. The shrine has little space for such a huge congregation that waited in a serpentine queue to pay obeisance to the deity.

So many lives snuffed out so tragically…

My mind flashed back to what my friend had said yesterday: “harmless little quirks” is how he had described popular Hindu prayers to gods and goddesses. Well, it did not turn out to be all that harmless for these poor souls, I thought. I understand, of course, that stampedes can happen anywhere and at any event - from rock-concerts in the US to political rallies in India - without adequate attention to crowd-management. Yet, there was something so sad about so many people dying precisely when they had come all the way to ask for divine blessings for happier and longer lives.

A footnote: Even as I sit here, back in my home in Connecticut, USA, writing about the Great Temple Stampede of August 2008, the National Public Radio brings me the news of the Great Temple Stampede of September 2008. On September 29, nearly 200 pilgrims gathered at Chamunda Mata temple in the state of Rajasthan lost their lives in a stampede.

One more goddess, one more temple, one more stampede.

So it goes …

***

Within a week of Naina Devi tragedy, there was another case of utterly unnecessary and perfectly avoidable death and mayhem, this time in the streets and the highways of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Starting on August 11, and lasting for at least a week, there were daily reports of tens of thousand people from all parts of Kashmir marching toward Muzzafarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir, demanding “azadi” or independence, from India. The protestors were trying to defy the economic blockade engineered against Kashmir by Hindu-right affiliated groups based in Jammu. Scores died in indiscriminate police firing and many hundreds were seriously wounded.

This fresh round of political unrest in Kashmir was sparked by religious enthusiasm for an ice stalagmite resembling Shiva’s lingam in the famed Amarnath shrine. Incredibly daft though it may appear considering Kashmir’s status as the “world’s most dangerous place,” Hindu pilgrimage to Amarnath temple has been actively promoted by a bunch of state functionaries committed to advancing Hindu interests in this Muslim majority state. The current row was sparked by an attempted land-grab of some 400 acres of forest land by Amarnath temple’s management board which, by statute, is headed by the governor of the state (but only if s/he is a Hindu). After the Muslims protested, the land-transfer order was revoked. The revocation of land-transfer, in turn, provoked counter-protests among Hindus who demanded that the land be “restored” to the shrine. Hindu groups, most of them aligned with Hindu nationalist parties, blockaded the trade routes linking Kashmir to the rest of India, provoking the call for “azadi” among Kashmiris who began their march to Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. It was this throng of Kashmiri protestors who had come under fire from the security forces, leading to so many deaths and injuries.

It appears that wherever you find political strife in India these days, you are bound to find religion lurking in the shadows. Religious enthusiasm is to Indian politics what a virus is to pneumonia.

These twin tragedies in the hills got me musing.

I began to see the connections between the relatively harmless (not counting the harm it does to the faculty of critical thought) middle-class rite of vahan puja, the tragic fate of pilgrims to Naina Devi and Chamunda Mata temples, and the politically disastrous outcome of government-encouraged Hindu pilgrimage in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. I began to see, more clearly than ever before, how the same worldview and beliefs of ordinary Hindus that makes them have pujas for their cars and undertake arduous and often life-threatening pilgrimages, also makes them sympathize with - and indeed actively demand - the open, state-sponsored Hinduization of India that has been going on in recent years.

This led me to see the folly of my secularist friends’ argument that popular Hinduism has “nothing” to do with Hindu nationalism. Or to put it differently, Hinduism has no organic - that is, cognitive, aesthetic and moral - connections with Hindu nationalism, and that “bad” Hindu nationalism has “hijacked,” “distorted” or “Semitized” the “good,” “tolerant” and “harmless” Hinduism of the masses. I began to see more clearly than ever before that we cannot fight the faith-based politics of Hindu nationalists and the faith-based initiatives of the Indian state, unless we question and combat the very foundations of faith-based beliefs and rituals of popular Hinduism itself. We cannot go on “respecting” people’s faith, but then turn around and start questioning them when they actually act upon that faith.

What is happening in Kashmir over the land-transfer issue is a perfect illustration of what I mean when I say that secularists cannot continue to “respect” faith while, at the same time, fight against faith-based politics. Let us suppose that out of “respect” we do not question the popular Hindu myth - which is endlessly repeated not just by priests but by the agencies of the supposedly “secular” state as well - that the naturally formed ice stalagmite in the Amarnath cave is “really” Shiva’s lingam (or phallus) and that God Shiva actually revealed the secrets of the universe at this spot to his wife, goddess Parvati. If we grant all that, then on what grounds do we turn around and start criticizing the mass mobilizations of Hindus that are taking place not just in Jammu but all over the country demanding that land be given to Amarnath temple so that more and more Hindu pilgrims can witness the “miracle” of the ice-lingam? Sure, we can criticize political parties and the temple management for their attempted land-grab for a temple in such an ecologically and politically sensitive area. But if we grant that people’s faith - even it if confuses a natural phenomenon with a divine lingam - is to be “respected,” then why should we not respect their right to demand more land to build better facilities so that they can exercise their freedom of religion?

I am convinced that as long as we don’t challenge the worldview, the background assumptions, the explicit and tacit beliefs that animate popular Hindu rituals and practices, we will be fighting against the menace of Hindutva with one hand tied behind our backs. For then, we will only allow ourselves to challenge the material and political interests of Hindu nationalist parties. But we will be no position to challenge and change the mentalities, or the habits-of-the-heart, of the millions of ordinary people that incline them to support Hindutva politics, enthusiastically (by joining the many rath-yatras, pujas and other religio-political spectacles organized by the Hindu Right), or passively (through the ballot box only). Unless we question the basis of faith critically, rationally and scientifically, we will not succeed in stemming the popular support for faith-based politics. There can be no viable secular politics in India without a secularization of consciousness and conscience of Indian people.

***

In the middle of all this rather dismal news, I found the time to take care of the main purpose that had brought me to India: I handed over the completed manuscript of one of my forthcoming books, God and Globalization in India to S. Anand of Navayana who has agreed to bring out the Indian edition of this book.

It gives me no pleasure to report that what I saw in India this summer fully confirmed the thesis of my forthcoming book.

Time Magazine Cover

My nephew’s freshly prayed-over car confirmed one part of my thesis which states that the new middle classes are turning out to be more religious than the middle classes of the previous (aka “the Nehruvian”) generation. I argue in this book that contrary to the expectations of the classical secularization theory, economic and political modernization is leading not to greater secularization but to invention of new rituals, gentrification of gods/goddesses, and to a perverse kind of scientism in which Hindu metaphysics which teaches pan-psychism (i.e., consciousness is a fundamental quality of even the smallest unit of matter) and vitalism (i.e. there is a special “life-force,” or “prana” that accounts of life) is being sold as if it is supported by modern science. The emerging middle classes, I argue, are “modern” only insofar as they have become more or less savvy consumers of global brand-names. These material accouterments exist amidst the mental furniture which harkens back to a world full of disembodied atman or shakti, which either roams free or gets “embodied” in idols.

The tragic events in Naina Devi and Amarnath in the month of August confirmed the other part of my thesis which argues that a “state-temple-corporate complex” (my term) is emerging to fill the space left behind by the neoliberal state which is retreating from its public sector obligations, especially in education. In the name of promoting economic development, this STC is openly promoting “temple tourism”; in the name of promoting “Indian culture,” it is promoting Hindu symbols, rituals and practices; and in the promoting “values education,” it is promoting pseudo-sciences like astrology, Ayurveda-yoga and vastu. Globalization is turning out to be great for the gods in India.

Take this case of pilgrimage to Naina Devi which ended in such tragedy. It would be wrong to see the rush of pilgrims as an index of the “natural” religiosity of Indian people, for this religiosity has been actively fostered by the supposedly “secular” Indian state. Just last year, the state of Himachal Pradesh where Naina Devi is located, received a grand sum of 71 million rupees from the central government for promotion of tourism. An unspecified but a large enough chunk of it was assigned to “promote temple tourism in a big way,” to quote the relevant minister of the state. Tax-payers’ money was used to promote the state as the “land of Gods,” complete with the Puranic legends of Naina Devi as one of the Shakti-peeth temples - an idea that completely defies all reason. Such promotion of superstitions makes a complete mockery of the state’s constitutional obligation to promote “scientific temper” among the citizens. Not only that, state bureaucrats on the government payroll acted as advertising and booking agents for would-be pilgrims. The supposedly secular government put more of its resources in promoting a Hindu yatra than in actually preparing for the rush of pilgrims. Why are we so surprised that there was such a deadly stampede at the temple?

What happened in Amarnath is even more appalling. For years, the state governor, S.K. Sinha, actively and routinely participated in Hindu yagnas and darshans bringing the prestige and the power of his office to the Vaishno Devi and Amarnath temples. In his capacity as the ex-officio head of the management trusts for these two most well-known temples/pilgrimage spots, the governor acted more as a Hindu activist than as the head of the state which is supposed to have no religion. Tax-payers’ money was used not just to provide facilities for the pilgrims but to actively promote pilgrimage by organizing cultural festivals including dance, drama, food and handicrafts. Why are we so surprised at the communal rift that has opened up afresh in such a geo-politically sensitive state as Jammu and Kashmir?

All that I saw and read in the one month that I was in India this summer confirmed my thesis that globalization and market economy are proving to be a god-send for the many gods in India.

***

Well, after about a month in India, I came back to the United States where I have lived for many years.

I happened to attend a music concert in the Hindu Temple in Middletown, Connecticut. There, among other notices, the list of “religious services” caught my attention. Among priestly services for wedding and funerals, I found the following:

“Vahan Pooja: $ 31.”

Well, why not? When Indians move from one god-crazed country to another, that is what they do.

So it goes…