Rising Religiosity in Secular India

As we enter the third decade of the 21^st century, India is swarming with millions of educated, relatively well-to-do men and women who devotedly participate in global networks of science and technology. The Indian economy is betting its fortunes, at least in part, on advanced research in biotechnology and service industry, whose very existence is verification for a thoroughly materialistic world. And yet, a vast majority of these middle-class beneficiaries of modern science and technology continue to believe in supernatural powers supposedly embodied in idols, divine men and women, stars and planets, rivers, trees, and sacred animals. By all indications, they treat supernatural beings and powers with utmost earnestness and reverence and go to great lengths to please them in the hope of achieving their desires. Indians and not just the Hindus are showing signs of growing religiosity.

The new religiosity of middle-class Indians is openly ritualistic, ostentatious, and nationalistic. Unlike the previous generations that grew up on a mixture of exhortations for cultivating scientific thinking and the neo-Vedantic preference for a more cerebral, philosophical Hinduism, the new Hindu elite and middle classes revel in ritualism, idol worship, fasts, pilgrimages, and other routines of popular, theistic Hinduism, sometimes mixed with new age spirituality. It is not that these more ritualistic expressions of popular Hinduism were entirely absent from the cultural milieu of the educated, middle to upper classes of the generations that came of age in the earlier, more ‘socialist’ and secular era. What has changed is that the ritualistic aspects have moved from the privacy of the home and family, to the public sphere, the domain of pride and prejudice, politics, and profits. What has also changed is that the educated elite don’t feel that they have to defend their practices and beliefs against secularist finger-wagging. There is a new, unapologetic, and open embrace of religiosity in India today which wasn’t there in, say, the first half of our seventy years as a republic.

Why is it so? There are no answers. Yet, there are educated guesses and expert opinions which seem to point towards the “secularism” the way it has been practised by the governments during the last four-five decades. While the Indian debate over secularism has been firmly stuck between the Gandhian pole of “sarva dharma samabhav” (equal respect for all religions) and the Nehruvian pole of “dharma nirpekshta” (equal indifference to all religions); the Indian Constitution is based entirely on a secular morality pertaining to this life, with no reference to religious conceptions like karma and dharma. Indian secularism offers its own peculiar twist to the idea of secularism: it does not erect a wall of separation between religion and the state. What makes the Indian state secular, instead, is its commitment to religious neutrality, which is, not having an official religion of the state and treating all religions with equal respect. The Indian Constitution, moreover, is completely ‘nastik’ (atheist).

BUT, is India truly secular? The Constitution’s promise of equal citizenship regardless of caste, creed, class, or gender meant a clean sweep of Hindu laws, taboos, and customs that had regulated socio-economic relationships for centuries. But, the same constitution did not provide equal citizenship for citizens of different religions. For instance, under section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, bigamy is an offence and a person, who contracts a second marriage while the first marriage is subsisting, is guilty of the offence. But this provision is in applicable to those people who can have more than one wife as per their religion. The very fact that operation of a penal provision is not alike among all people and that it is dependent on one’s religious faith tantamount to making a mockery of the very concept of secularism. Similarly, the enactment of the Muslim women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 with a view to circumvent the decision of the apex court in the ‘Shah Bano case’ and to treat the divorced Muslim women differently from their counterparts in other religious faiths cannot be termed as secular. To deny rights to Muslim women which are available to the women of other faiths is a violation of the provisions of the constitution that the state shall not discriminate against any citizens as grounds of religion. Although Article 15 of the constitution prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion, even today the rights and liabilities of people relating to maintenance, inheritance etc. differ according to their religion. This casts a shadow on our claim of being a truly secular nation.

Then there is this law enacted by different states which goes by the name of Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Act. While the purported inspiration is better administration of temples, the real motivation is to fill state coffers with ‘easy’ temple ‘money’. Fraud in a few temples does not make a case for takeover of all temples across the country by the government, and most importantly, no other religious community in India have to bear the brunt of such Acts to control their religious institutions. Do the state governments in India believe that Hindus have poorer & lower standards of ethics and values than Indians of other religious denominations? Or is it that in a ‘secular’ India religious minorities are unassailable while Hindu institutions (and the donation money they attract) are considered easier to be meddled with?

The conduct of the politicians in power and thus the government has however not been as secular as it was expected to be. Religious identities (taqiyah - skullcap) got politicized and religious rituals (roja-iftar – breaking of the Ramadan fast) became as much a part of political mobilisations as they were of weddings and funerals. Indian governance propagated the saga of minority appeasement, even if it came at the cost of majority, as secular; but, even a talk about any concern for the majority was tinted as communal.

Believers can be secularists. Believers may not be sceptics. But believers polarised by their government can be divisive and separatists. Appeasement has created a sense of entitlement among the minority and they started a public display of demand for such entitlements through hitherto unknown examples of conducting Friday Namaz in public places including roads and highways. Democratising the principles of ‘Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’, without simultaneously secularising education, has led to the creation of a less secular civil society. Such actions by the government and the minorities appear to have not only polarised the people but have outraged many from amongst the majority who have now chosen to put up a bigger and grandeur display of their religiosity.

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On not paying attention in history classes

Some of the comments made by the political leaders of India in the parliament during the debate on CAB have shown how hollow they are in their information and knowledge, while they strut and masquerade as the intellectuals and the educated, they say what they say; and the equally brilliant editors of the TV channels and newspapers construct “headlines” out of such nonsensical utterances.

One gentleman by the name Shashi Tharoor said something like, “Amit Shah the Home Minister was not paying attention in the history class as the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League were the only ones espousing the two-nation theory.”

“The foundation for the two-nation theory was laid by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and not the Congress” another gentleman by the name Manish Tewari senior party leader said besides alleging, “BJP was trying to undermine BR Ambedkar's legacy.”

I do not know about Amit Shah but I must confess that I was not paying much attention in the history classes taught to me by Shri H S Hiran and Shri D L Suredia; for which reason, I am forced to pay attention now.

For my kith and kin who would share my claim of much lower intellect than the shining stars of Indian political debates; here is what I can share. 

[Please click on the attachments and read them if you were not paying attention in the history class]

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