The misuse of official media, All India Radio and Doordarshan, for propagating religion must stop. It has done immense harm by isolating communities further and putting the clock of scientific progress backwards. I attribute much of the blame for the resurgence of Hindu fundamentalism to serials on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The practice of religion must be restricted to places of worship and not imposed on others through public broadcasting means, loudspeakers, processions and holding samagams in public parks.
When we are face to face with communal passions, what are the preventive and punitive methods we should adopt? The most important preventive method is to strengthen our Intelligence. This has become a cliché but it is very important. Our Intelligence has been so poor that we hardly get a warning ahead of time that communal passions are building up. It is only after somebody has been stabbed or some houses burnt down that the police, as our newspapers say, swing into action.
We must also restructure our police force. We should adopt the simple principle that the minority communities should be overrepresented. If it is a Muslim area the police should be largely Hindu. If it is a Hindu area the police should be largely Muslim. This is necessary because it restores confidence in the minorities as it is the fears of the minority that you have to try and assuage. Care should be taken to see that sub-inspectors certainly belong to minority communities because they are the most important police officers who deal with the actual situation in any particular area.
When a riot really breaks out, what should we do? I have the following suggestions to make:
First, wherever a riot breaks out, the police officer in charge should automatically be suspended, because the breakdown of the law enforcing machinery is clear evidence of dereliction of duty; it is the police officer’s duty to know that tension was building up and he should have taken steps to defuse it. After a new police officer—preferably from outside the area—is put in charge, the entire administration of that particular locality should be placed in his or her hands. It is for the officer, along with the district magistrate, to impose curfew in the area and take whatever steps they want, to contain violence.
We must also provide for summary trials of mischief-makers. Perpetrators of communal riots are seldom brought to court. Rarely are communal killers punished, because nobody is willing to give evidence against them. Provisions should be made for summary trials on the spot where the incidents have taken place, and the magistrate should be empowered to impose collective fines on the area and to order public flogging of the people he feels were responsible.
Of course, none of this will work unless we unequivocally embrace the idea of secularism as defined in our Constitution and kick out any government that is even remotely communal. Otherwise we will have more governments like Modi’s which will transfer out police officers not for their failure to prevent riots but for their failure to engineer and encourage them. It is tragic that we have corrupted the meaning of secularism, given it alternative definitions that suit us. Some people have even suggested we should banish secularism from India. Some five years ago, speaking at an official welcome function organized by the then BJP government of Delhi, the Shankaracharya said that the word ‘secular’ should be expunged from the Constitution. He need not have laboured the point: for all practical purposes, barring the communists most of our political leaders have deleted secularism from their lexicons. The Lakshman Rekha between politics and religion no longer exists. Religion has invaded the domain of politics and completely swamped it. Thus we have driven the last nail in the coffin of secularism as envisaged by Pandit Nehru.
At the cost of repetition, let me refresh readers’ minds that secularism has two meanings: the Western concept makes a clear distinction between functions of the State which includes politics and functions of religion which are confined to places of worship, public or private. This is the concept that Nehru accepted, preached and practised. The other concept was equal respect for all religions. This was propagated and observed by men like Bapu Gandhi and Maulana Azad and lasted as long as the two men were alive. After that it deteriorated to a mere display of religiosity. If you were a devout Hindu you went to a Muslim dargah or threw an Iftar party to prove you were secular. If you were Muslim, you celebrated Diwali with your Hindu friends. Secularism was reduced to a sham display. Time has shown that as far as secularism is concerned, Nehru was right; Gandhi and Azad were wrong.
The need of our times is to revive the Nehruvian notion of secularism. People in politics or holding elected public offices must not publicly engage themselves in religious rituals. Nehru never did. He did not encourage godmen, sants or mullahs or priests, to intrude into affairs of the State. The slide began with his daughter Indira Gandhi. With her, people like Dhirendra Brahmachari became formidable figures. Astrologers and tantrics were included in decision-making circles. We had the likes of Buta Singh, Balram Jakhar and Rajiv Gandhi paying homage to Deoraha Baba. We had the likes of Chandraswamy and Satellite Baba performing yagnas in homes of ministers and chief ministers. The Congress even wooed the Shahi Imam for the Muslim vote. And then we had Sahib Singh Verma’s Delhi government and later the BJP-led NDA government inviting the Shankaracharya to be a State guest and to decide on legal issues of national import.
Religion is being brought into every aspect of life. This must stop; it is the road to madness. Sing your bhajans and shabads, say your namaaz and prayers as many times as you want, but in your home or your place of worship. That is for the salvation of your soul. Leave the soul of the nation to our Constitution and the law.
India Needs a New Religion
The ideal solution of course is for India to adopt a new religion. I know I am being unrealistic, but I would like to share this idea with my readers anyway. Perhaps a few of you will become converts to good sense and I will have done my bit to beat the ‘fundoos’.
Bernard Shaw once wrote that every intelligent man makes his own religion though there are a hundred versions of it. Evolving a personal religion for myself has been a lifelong quest. It was, as Allama Iqbal put it:
Dhoondta phirta hoon main, ai Iqbal, apney aap ko
Aap hee goya musafir, aap hee manzil hoon main
(O Iqbal, I go about everywhere looking for myself,
As if I were the wayfarer as well as the destination)
After many years of the study of the religion I was born into (Sikhism), studying the scriptures and lives of founders of other major religions of the world, and teaching comparative religions at American universities, I feel I am equipped to express myself on the need to evolve a new religion for Indians who have the courage to think for themselves. It is based on the assumption that most people need some kind of faith; that one’s emotional content is provided by the faith one is born into, the rituals of which formed an essential part of one’s upbringing. What is required today is the acceptance of what is basic in the religion of birth but removing from it the accretions of dead wood that have accumulated around it and which militate against reason and common sense. I present this for consideration and comment to my more enlightened countrymen.
I will first deal with five topics which are commonly regarded as the pillars of all religions: belief in God; reverence for avatars, prophets, messiahs and gurus who founded different religions; the place and use of religious scriptures; sanctity accorded to places for pilgrimage and worship; and the use of prayer and religious ritual. Since most of what I have to say on these topics may appear negatively critical, I will thereafter posit some items for positive acceptance.
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Every religion has its own concept and name for God. What all of them have in common are God’s attributes. God is the creator, preserver and destroyer; He is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful); He is just and benign but can also be wrathful against transgressors. When pondering over the concept of God we have to answer the questions that Adi Shankara posed to himself over a thousand years ago:
Kustwam? ko ham? kuta
h ayatah?
Ko mein janani? ko mein tatah?
(Who am I? Where did I come from and how? Who are my real father and mother?)
The basic questions which beg for answers are, where do we come from? Why? Where do we go when we die?
Different religions give different answers to these questions. The answers can be grouped into two: those given by the Judaic family of religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and those given by the Hindu family of religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism). The Judaic group will tell you that God created the world, sent Adam and Eve to propagate the human race and all other forms of life. According to this group, one day all life will end, there will be a day of judgement when people will rise from their graves to be judged for the good or evil they did in the world and be sent to heaven or hell accordingly. The Judaic-Christian-Muslim view of life is linear: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. According to the Hindu cyclical theory there is no beginning or end but a continuous unending cycle (samsara) of births, deaths and rebirths. There is no heaven or hell but reward or punishment in the form in which a person will be reborn. Its equivalent of heaven is release from samsara and union (yoga) with the divine. This is moksha, salvation.
However more complex or sophisticated the Hindu theory of samsara may appear when compared with the simplistic Judaic theory, there is as little evidence to support it as there is about Adam, Eve and the day of judgement. The stories of children remembering their earlier lives are figments of childish fantasy and largely confined to the Hindu family of religions. Every single case of parapsychology investigated by scientists has been found to be fraudulent. The simple truth is that we do not know where we come from and whether or not there is a divine purpose in our existence; we do not know where we go when we die. This is summed up beautifully in a couplet by Shaad Azimabadi:
Sunee hikayat-e-hastee to darmiyaan say sunee
Na ibtida kee khabar hai, noa intiha maaloom.
(All we’ve heard of the story of life is its middle.
We know not its beginning, we know not its end.)
Voltaire argued correctly when he said that he could scarcely believe that if there is a watch, there was no watchmaker. He went on to add ‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one.’ Search for God is a quest in futility. ‘Dare I say it?’ asked Joubert, ‘God may be easily known, only if it is not necessary to define him.’ Once again the sense of frustration is aptly put in Urdu verse:
Koee milney ko tera nishaan bhee hai?
Koee rehney ka tera makaan bhee hai?
Tera charcha jahaan kee zabaano peh hai,
Tera shore zamaney kay kaanon mein hai;
Magar aankhon say deykha to parda hasheen,
Kaheen too na mila, tera ghar no mila.
(Is there an address where I can find you?
Any home in which you reside?
Your name is on everyone’s tongue,
Your fame rings in the world’s ears;
But when I look for you, you are hid behind a veil
I sought you everywhere but did not find your abode.)
Aptly summing up the fruitless quest is another couplet:
Too dil mein to aataa hai, samajh mein nahin aataa,
Bus jaan gaya ke teri pahchan yahee hai.
(You come into my heart but I cannot understand you.
It’s enough that I know this is the only way to know you.)
We are on trickier ground when we describe God as omniscient, omnipotent, benign and just. There is so much injustice in the world, so much suffering imposed on the innocent and the god-fearing that it can scarcely be argued that there is a divine purpose behind it. When a child of seven going to school is crushed to death by a drunk truck driver who gets away with it, how can anyone ascribe it to a merciful and just God? Either He did not have the power to prevent the accident or was callous enough to inflict suffering on the child’s family. Where was God when evil-minded people planted a bomb in the Kanishka and sent hundreds of innocent men, women and children to a watery grave? Or when an earthquake destroys an entire village? Unless we can answer these questions rationally and not shelter behind explanations like ‘atoning for sins committed in previous births’ or being rewarded in heaven, it is better to keep silent.
It is best to accept Darwin’s theory of the origins of life on earth. At least it takes us back to the amoeba. Not even scientists are able to discover who created the amoeba, the sun, the moon and the galaxy of stars. Neither have scientists or spiritualists yet been able to probe beyond the mysteries of death or evidence of a life hereafter. Under the circumstances the only honest answer an intelligent person can give to the question ‘Is there a God?’ is to say, ‘I do not know.’
The important thing to remember is that belief in God has nothing to do with being good or bad. You can be a saintly person without believing in God and a detestable villain believing in Him. In my religion God has no place.
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In every religion the founder is more revered than God for the simple reason that people know a little more about their prophets, avatars, messiahs or gurus than they know about God. They were human beings with superhuman powers with which they were able to sway the masses. Inevitably, with the passage of years, their admirers created so many legends about them that they ceased to be human! They became reincarnations of God, His progeny, His specially chosen messengers, and invariably with direct access to Him. The truth of the matter is that we have hardly any hard, reliable evidence on what kind of human beings they were. In dehumanizing them, we have done them injustice, making them incomparably good and therefore beyond human striving. We can see the process of deification taking place in the Indians’ perception of Mahatma Gandhi. Here we had as great a man as any the world has seen, but also full of human frailties. Not one of his four sons got on with him; one even embraced Islam to spite him. He was vain, took offence at the slightest remark against him, and a fad-ist who made nubile girls lie naked next to him to make sure that he had overcome his libidinous desires. All these failings which make him human and down to earth and yet hold him up as a shining example of a human being for all of mankind are being lost thanks to our putting him on a pedestal and worshipping him. It is time we learnt to give avatars and prophets their proper places as important historical personalities who did good to humanity. No more than that.
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All religious scriptures are held in awe either as words of God or divinely inspired utterances. I have read all of them, many times. Without exception they are unscientific (one can’t blame their authors as at the time science was little advanced), repetitive and tediously boring. Those that enshrined codes of conduct and ethics undoubtedly served a useful purpose and many passages have a literary quality. I often quote the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads and the Granth Sahib. These are works of literature that cannot be compared with the great classics of Kalidas, Shakespeare, Goethe, Tolstoy, Ghalib, Tagore or Iqbal.
However, this is my personal view of holy texts and is not shared by anyone I have met. Most people are deeply moved by scriptural revelations. So who am I to tell them that their response is conditioned by continuous indoctrination? But they cannot fault me when I maintain that scriptures for whatever they are worth should be read and understood and not worshipped. In this context the most difficult phenomenon to explain is the way Sikhs, who others boast of not being idol worshippers, treat their sacred book. They put it to bed at night, rouse it in the morning, drape it in expensive raiment, have elaborate canopies over it, wave fly whisks while reading it, take it out in massive processions. They organize non-stop readings of it (akhand path) that last for two days and nights by a relay of readers (often hired at different rates for different purposes), and believe that its recitation, even when they are asleep in another room, does them good. I often wonder what the gurus whose works are compiled in the Granth Sahib would have had to say of their followers, few of whom even try to understand their messag
e.
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I believe that the only legitimate place of worship is the home. However, there are religions like Islam which emphasize congregational namaaz in a public mosque as a religious obligation; Christianity which enjoins attendance at masses; there are temples and gurudwaras without which kirtans and kathas (sermons) would lose their impact. In a country which has few diversions like clubs, pubs and picture houses, places of worship provide free, harmless entertainment and the company of like-minded people. But in recent years, places of worship have been turned into arenas of contention and have been misused to propagate ideas other than those religious. Some years ago the Kaaba was the scene of a pitched battle; the Golden Temple, particularly the Akal Takht, had been under the control of gun-toting men spouting hate rather than spreading the message of love that their gurus preached. And of course there has been plenty of bad blood over the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute. The government should, as a matter of policy, forbid the building of any more places of worship. We have more than enough of them. The government should never permit the use of public parks or open spaces for religious gathering, and if a place of worship becomes a bone of contention or happens to be misused by undesirable elements, it should simply take it over.
A Punjabi Sufi poet reflects my sentiments on the subject:
Masjid dhaa dey, mandir dhaa dey, dhaa dey jo kuchh dhainda:
Ikk kisay da dil na dhaaven,
Rab dilaan vicch rehnda.
(Break the mosque, break the temple, break whatever besides;
But break not a human heart because that’s where God resides.)
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It cannot be disputed that we Indians, whether we be Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs or Parsees, spend more time on religious ritual than any other people in the world. The Hindi adage ‘saat vaar aur aath teohaar (there are seven days in the week but eight religious festivals)’ is not an overstatement. Count the number of religious holidays we have in a year. Then add up the number of hours people spend saying their prayers, going to places of worship, on pilgrimages, attending satsangs, listening to pravachans, kirtans, bhajans, qawwalis etc. It comes to a staggering total. Ask yourself if a developing nation like India can afford to expend so much time in pursuits that produce no material benefits. Also ask yourself, does strict adherence to the routine of prayer or telling beads of the rosary make someone a better person? Is it not true that even dacoits pray for the success of their mission before they set out on it, and that the worst black marketers and tax evaders are often very devout?
THE END OF INDIA Page 6
