
The latest incident of the death of hundreds of devotees in a stampede in Hathras in Uttar Pradesh in the course of a public demonstration of their faith in their god man, once again shows how past obscurantist religious practices are being allowed to revive and flourish by the Modi government. The stampede was caused by the rush of over one lakh followers of a self-styled guru, known as `Bhole Baba.’ They wanted to touch the `Baba’s’ feet and take the dust off them, which they considered sacred. (Re: Times of India. July 3). It’s significant that till now Bhole Baba has not been hauled up as an accused by the UP BJP government’s police.
The Hathras tragedy is not an isolated instance of the irresponsible behavior of the religious heads and their institutions which organize these gatherings. In January 2022, twelve people were killed in a stampede at Mata Vaishno Devi shrine due to a heavy rush of devotees. In March 2023, 36 people died when a slab of an old tem.ple in Indore fell on them – due to the failure of the temple heads to repair the dilapidating roof. Every time such events happen, Opposition politicians as well as social activists complain about the lack of security provided by the administration to protect the pilgrims, and demand more effective measures to control the crowd.
Moving beyond the issue of security failure
While the requirement of better security measures is a just demand, I would like to raise a few fundamental questions ? To start with, why devotees of a particular deity, or followers of a god man, get into a frenzy to pay respects to their respective objects of devotion, and create chaos in public space ? Why do they continue to defend god men who have earned notoriety as sexual predators – like Asharam Bapu, Ram Rahim, Nityananda, Swami Premananda , all accused of raping their female disciples, and some serving sentences in jail ? Why even after all these exposures, women persist in flocking to such god men ? Is it blind faith born of perverse irrational impulses that drives these devotees to sleep walk into the trap of these religious charlatans ? As for Hindu males, their religious faith has turned into the aphrodisiac of Viagra that arouses their virility to rape Muslim women and assures them of immunity against persecution. The acquittal of those accused in the Bilkis Bano case further reassures them of the effectiveness of the Viagra of Hindutva as well as its protective shelter.
Is this trend of revival of obscurantism and reinforcement of misogynist values and practices due to the failure of our state and civil society to educate our people along the lines of the spirit of our Constitution ?
While our Constitution guarantees the fundamental Right to Freedom of Religion, allowing all religious communities of different denominations to preach their respective religious doctrines (Article 25), it also entrusts us with the fundamental duty of .developing “ scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform ,” under Article 51A of Part IV A. Yet, all over the past decades, the successive governments, whether run by the Congress, or coalition of secular political parties, or the BJP, have leant in favour of Article 25 while ignoring the obligations that they were required to carry out under the Fundamental Rights chapter (Part IV A). Thus, they allowed all sorts of acts of religious obscurantistic preaching and practices, sometimes even bordering on violence, on the plea of adhering to Article 25. But they failed to train the people in the `scientific temper’ that could have helped them to resist those religious beliefs and practices that violated human rights.
Legacy of governmental patronage of violent religious gatherings and obscurantist practices
Let us remember, it was under the Congress regime that Hindu militants got. away even when they clandestinely placed an image of Ram inside the Babri Masjid in December 1949. It was again the Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who allowed the opening of the locks of Babri Masjid in 1986, thus permitting the Hindu fanatics to claim possession. Simultaneously, the same year Rajiv Gandhi appeased the Muslim fanatic clergy by passing a law that emboldened their patriarchal control over their women. By enacting the Muslim (Protection on Divorce Act) in 1986, he overturned a 1985 Supreme Court judgment that curbed their power. Known as the Shah Bano case, it related to a verdict passed by the apex court which ruled that Muslim husbands should provide maintenance to aggrieved wives whom they divorced unilaterally under the triple talaq, all through their lives. The new law enacted by Rajiv Gandhi enabled the hard core Muslim patriarchy to bypass that verdict. It freed the recalcitrant Muslim husbands from their responsibility (that was imposed upon them by the Supreme Court), by allowing them to provide maintenance for the divorced wives only during the period of `iddat’ – till 90 days after divorce. Rajiv Gandhi’s decision evoked protests from Muslim liberal sections, as evidenced from the resignation of the Congress leader Arif Mohammad Khan.
The Congress tradition of appeasing and accommodating religious prejudices found its worst manifestation in 1992, when under the benevolent gaze of a Congress Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, Hindu fanatic mobs were allowed to gather in thousands and demolish the Babri Masjid. He failed to live up to the spirit that his name invoked – `Narasimha’ meaning a man `nara,’ who should act like a `simha,’ meaning a lion. In all these cases, the Congress rulers violated the constitutional obligation (under the FUNDAMENTAL DUTIES section) to “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities…” and to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. ”
Even before the happenings of 1992, when the Congress government permitted the infamous Ratha Yatra led by the BJP leader Advani that left a trail of communal riots in its wake, the Congress had started treading the path of soft Hindutva by turning a blind eye to inhuman practices followed by orthodox Hindus. To give an instance, some forty cases of Sati (burning of Hindu widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres) were reported in post-Independence India. (Re: Sati in Modern India. A Report by K. Sangari and K. Vaid in Economic and Political Weekly, August 1, 1981). Matters came to a head in September, 1987 with the wide publicity given to the incident of an 18-year old Rup Kanwar committing Sati in Rajasthan, which also drew worldwide attention. Under pressure from social activists, the Congress government enacted the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987. In the midst of all the praise showered upon the government for passing the Act, it was forgotten that more than half a century ago, a similar legislation banning Sati (then spelt as `suttee) was passed by the British governor-general of India Lord William Bentinck in 1828. All through British rule, attempts at Sati were prevented and the male in-laws of the widows who were found to be forcing them were prosecuted. As a result, few incidents of Sati were reported during British rule. It was only after Independence, that the heinous custom raised its head again.
The BJP rulers who have succeeded the Congress, are carrying on the same policy of encouraging obscurantist religious beliefs and practices – this time with a vengeance, emboldening their Hindu followers who organize mass gatherings to observe some religious occasion, or celebrate the birthday of some guru or politician. They attract blind devotees, many of whom pay the price for their devotion by being crushed under a stampede, as happened in Hathras, and in the latest incident in Odisha on July 7, when two were killed and 130 people were injured during Jagannath Yatra there. Whether these Hindu devotees who flock at gatherings to pay respect to some divinity, or compete with each other to collect dust from the feet of their guru (as happened in Hathras, where the god man Bhole Baba asked his followers to touch his feet), leading to a stampede, or the Indian Muslim devotees who gather at Mecca to pay homage to their Prophet, and end up with some of them dying in a stampede or from the heat wave – all of them choose to keep their intelligence at bay, and replace it with faith (born out of emotional attachment to some irrational beliefs), even at the risk of losing their lives.
Violation of obligations under the FUNDAMENTAL DUTIES chapter
All these incidents expose the failure of .the Indian state, irrespective of the political parties which rule it, to carry out its constitutional obligation to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” among the people. A training of our people on these lines could have prevented a mass gathering of superstitious believers in a god man that led to the Hathras tragedy.
But Prime Minister Modi has surpassed the record of his predecessors . While the earlier prime ministers could be accused of turning a blind eye to cases of violation of Fundamental Duties (as cited above), the present prime minister himself unabashedly violates those duties. He has publicly paraded his superstitious beliefs by announcing that he was born not out of any biological source, but was conceived by God ! He further extended his unscientific and obscurantist belief-system in the public sphere by spreading hate messages against religious minorities during his election campaign. Under his blessings, the BJP-RSS vigilantes and other Hindu fanatical outfits are on a spree of lynching Muslims and crushing all social activists who are trying to develop `scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’ among the masses. Rationalists who preach those values are being eliminated one by one. Gauri Lankesh, Dr. Narendra Dhabolkar and Professor M.M. Kalburgi were killed. Their assassins were traced to one orthodox Hindu organization, known as Sanatan Sanstha based in Goa. It is under the BJP government that such organizations are being allowed to propagate their anti-Constitution views, and operate with impunity, being assured that they will not be punished, thanks to the patronage and protection that they get from their BJP leaders. Their obscurantist views are being incorporated in school text books (prepared by the National Council of Education, Research and Training) and in undergraduate teaching courses in Delhi University’s Faculty of Law by attempts to introduce Manusmriti, the ancient jurisprudential text that extols and reinforces social, economic and gender inequalities.
This abysmal record of the BJP government – set by both Narendra Modi’s public announcement of his own superstitious belief about his birth, and encouragement of obscurantist religious practices that lead to Hathras-like tragedies – has reinforced the very regressive socio-religious trends in our society that are sought to be eliminated under the Fundamental Duties of our Constitution. All these are being justified in the name of decolonization and emancipating India from the legacy of the British empire. But in its zeal to abandon the old English road names and penal laws and replace them with unpronounceable Sanskritized terms, the Modi government is also bent on reversing some of the major reforms that were enacted by the British rulers.
Indian reformers and rationalists under British colonial rule
While certainly condemning the atrocities under British rulers, we at the same time cannot deny that they allowed some space for Indian rationalists to campaign for reforms in our society, who pressurized the colonial administration to enact laws that put an end to inhuman Hindu religious practices. It was Rammohan Roy who, after years of agitation (in the face of fierce opposite.on from Hindu orthodox leaders) compelled the then British Governor, Lord William Bentinck to introduce laws prohibiting `suttee’ (the infamous practice of forcing Hindu widows to burn themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands) and female infanticide in 1829. It was again the social reformer Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar who campaigned for the rights of Hindu widows to remarry, and persuaded the British government to enact a law legalizing such marriages. Similarly, under pressures from Indian reformers the colonial administration enacted laws prohibiting child marriage, abolishing slavery (under Charter Act of 1833), and banning practices of casteism and untouchability under the Caste Disabilities Removal Act XXI of 1850. It also banned the prevalent heinous Hindu practice of female infanticide (drowning just-born girls, as they were considered as burdens by their parents), under Bengal Regulation VI of 1802. This law criminalized that practice as punishable by death. Ironically, after more than two hundred years, today in India we are witnessing a revival of that anti-female bias among couples (husband-ruled) who while expecting a birth, go in for a sex-determination test to find out whether the little one in the embryo is male or female. If found to be female, the mother resorts to abortion (whether voluntarily or under pressure from the husband). Thus, the ancient Hindu practice of drowning girls has now been replaced by the more sophisticated and scientific method of killing them even before they are born.
The British administration banned child marriage and convicted those accused of it. Under Modi’s rule in India, at least 3,863 cases of child marriages have been reported in 2018-2022. Conviction rate in these cases was just 11%. (Re: National Crimes Record Bureau and National Family Health Survey – 5 (2019-21). Judging by the data released by these agencies, over 4,000 child marriages are taking place every day, with three girls being forced into marriage every minute ! Modi is thus patronizing the revival of an old obscurantist Hindu practice of gender discrimination.
Under British rule, rationalists like Rammohan, Vidyasagar, M.G. Ranade, K.T. Telang, Virasilingam, K.N. Natarajan, Behramji Malabari and others in different parts of India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were allowed space to fight against obscurantist anti-human religious practices in their own society. The colonial administration also adhered to their demands for reforms by enacting the laws mentioned above.
In sharp contrast to that environment of state encouragement of rationalists who brought about reforms in British-ruled India, today in Modi’s India, the state is dragging us back to a primitive era of intolerance of any expression of rationality. The Modi government is bent on reversing all the reforms that were brought about in the past. Today, those social activists who are following in the footsteps of Rammohan, Vidyasagar, Ranade, Behramji and other illustrious reformers of the past, are being persecuted by the Modi government which is implicating them in false cases, or are being killed by his party’s henchmen (as evident from the assassination of Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dhabolkar and M.M. Kalburgi).
Modi’s dual malevolent strategy of de-colonization and re-colonization
Narendra Modi is playing a malevolent role in restructuring Indian society and the legal system. In the name of de-colonizing he is subverting the social reforms that were brought about under British colonial rule, by allowing the revival of superstitious customs and religious rituals, as evident from the gatherings at the ashrams of religious charlatans who pose as god men. On the other hand, he is resorting to re-colonization by enacting laws that reinforce the old British colonial penal system, but this time in a more draconian shape, as evident from the enactment of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and his proposal to reconstruct the three old British colonial penal laws along more repressive lines.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).