Skip to main content

Sectarian Virus

The latest statue in India
Image from Orissa Diary


“True religion is not talk, or doctrines, or theories, nor is it sectarianism. It is the relation between soul and God. Religion does not consist in erecting temples, or building churches, or attending public worship. It is not to be found in books, or in words, or in lectures, or in organizations. Religion consists in realization. We must realize God, feel God, see God, talk to God. That is religion.
Swami Vivekananda said that long ago. Sectarianism was a virus that ate into the Indian psyche in those days too. We choose to call it communalism. Communalism is the wrong word. The word ‘communal’ does not have a negative meaning in English except in India. What Indians mean by the word is actually ‘sectarian’, dividing people into factions, while ‘communal’ is about sharing and caring among members of a community.
“Class divide, Chauvinism, Social media validation, Alarming increase of criminals in politics, Lack of civic sense and so on.... there's something toxic everywhere around you. So what is that one toxic thing you want to get rid of?” This is the question raised by fellow blogger Amit Pattnaik at Indispire this week. Sectarianism is the most pernicious virus in India even today, I think.
If corruption was the hallmark of the Congress party, sectarianism is that of the BJP. Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of his state for 12 long years and now he has been the Prime Minister of the country for six years. 18 years of power. And what has he achieved? He still has to build tall and long walls to conceal the poverty and misery in his country as well as his state from a visiting foreign dignitary! [How dignified is that dignitary is a different question.] Obviously there’s something terribly wrong.
Sectarianism is that wrong.
Mr Modi has made India a much worse place than it ever was with his sectarian attitudes and vision. He wants to create a religious nation, a nation in which one particular religion has supremacy over others. For that he has played with the religious sentiments of 1.3 billion people. He continues to play with those sentiments. He will continue to do that until his vision is materialised or until he is evicted from his post, the latter of which isn’t anywhere near in sight. Millions of people have been hoodwinked by the pie in the sky that Mr Modi has been pointing at for a long time now. Those millions will hold him in his present position for years to come. India will continue to build walls, both literally and metaphorically.
We shall have a fair share of comic reliefs in between. Like some gargantuan statues whose feet alone can give shade to homeless wanderers. The Irish politician David Trimble spoke about a dark shadow that stretched across his country. He said it was the “shadow of the mountain behind – a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism.”
Religious sectarianism is the dark shadow that Mr Modi has gifted the nation. “We can leave it behind us if we wish,” as Trimble said again. If we don’t leave it behind, we are choosing degeneration and disintegration.

PS. Prompted by Indispire Edition 313: #ThrowAwayTheToxic

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia] One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion . A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.  That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How...

Anyone for a better world?

The above video was sent to me on WhatsApp by a friend who also asked me to write a blog post on the injustices of capitalism. The friend quoted Lenin: “Capitalism is going to give us the rope with which we are going to hang them.” I wasn’t particularly enthused by the message or the demand for a blog post because I am like Benjamin the donkey in Orwell’s Animal Farm . Benjamin is cynical when it comes to politics. He knows that no party or ideology is going to make any substantial difference as far as the common folk are concerned. What can be an alternative to capitalism, for instance? Socialism/Communism? Benign dictatorship? Theocracy? The video above shows the absolute heartlessness of capitalism. But has socialism/communism been any better in the erstwhile USSR, China, and present North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba? Dictatorship and theocracy are not economic systems, but have they saved any nation from injustices? I believe the problem is not with systems or ideologies . T...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Innards of Spirituality

When a huge concrete cross was being shattered with a demolition hammer, I laughed rather raucously. I was watching the breakfast news on TV as usual. Most of the time, breakfast news is depressing with news about drug addicts, rapists, murderers, and politicians. This video of a cross being brought down in a very unceremonious ritual officiated by revenue mandarins was unique in a country of people whose religious sentiments are more brittle than dry leaves in an Indian summer. Maggie was not amused at all by my laughter because she misunderstood that I was laughing at a religious leaf being crushed with a political hammer. “This is the same cross in front of which our X (I named a very close relative of ours) fell prostrate a couple of months back during their picnic to Parumthumpara,” I explained. “She is a very spiritual person and so she respected the cross, that’s all.” Maggie’s spirituality is more like a leaf in a storm: I am the satanic storm and she is the tenacious ...

Insecure Leaders

Yakshi in Pinterest In his book The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins argues that nationalism, religious bigotry, and other forms of zealotry are often the result of insecurity, a lack of self-confidence, or a deep-seated fear of insignificance. Quite many of today’s world leaders, who are all extremely and unwarrantedly belligerent, reminded me of Dawkins though I’m no fan of the man’s scientific extremism. Dawkins is only one among many thinkers who expressed similar ideas, however. Eric Hoffer says in The True Believer that mass movements, including religious and nationalist ones, attract individuals who seek to escape their own personal failures or anxieties by identifying with a larger cause. There are too many people suffering from personal insecurities in today’s world, it appears. There’s so much nationalism and even more unhealthy religious fervour. In India, both nationalism and religion have got mixed into a lethal concoction. M any Indian newspapers of today have give...