Fooled by faith

Gadfly

With a ‘fringe’ element’s outburst, and the horror that played out in Udaipur later, our vasudaiva kutmbakam was at it again, with individuals belonging to organised faiths further disrupting our feeble social unity. One wonders why there wasn’t an uproar from religious heads over the ransacking of their respective faiths by said people. Though there were gestures calling for amity from religious moderates, the silence of prominent religious heads was galling. Most religions profess commitment to peace and tolerance for other faiths. One upshot of the last eight years is that that ethic looks poor enough to seem a delusion. It also makes us question our sense of the past prior to those eight years.

From a certain vantage, this hyper-religiosity in India and the wider subcontinent is sickening for non-believers and those seeking a materially better future based on constitutional values and public reasonableness. A confident society, even if a multi-religious one, is one where faith matters little. We can say we are a traditional society and so religion matters to us, but it is time to ask, are our religions building our sense of self or are they damaging us beyond repair?

The inordinate attention given to faith takes away national focus from inflation, education, health, employment, gender disparity, environment. These are matters over which India’s standards have nosedived. A progressive polity would keep those on the radar all the time. Particularly when, despite the over-consideration that our faiths get every day from citizens and in public discourse, they have failed to create a happier, equitable society.

Our faiths have been granted the kind of love that global capitalism got elsewhere. The latter produced periods of unequal growth and watershed levels of depression and recession, and yet influential pockets of people who hold disproportionate levels of power over democratic systems lobbied for its continuance. Both organised religion and global capitalism thrive, notwithstanding their blotted CVs. People of the Indian subcontinent must envisage a more reasonable, less religious, present and future. Imagine a day when a majority of Indians voluntarily say ‘no, thank you’ to notions of God and faith.

The other matter is, subjects such as the economy, health, employment, education, environmental sustainability, are harder to explain to almost any electorate anywhere. They test the quality and depth of leaders and their commitment to meaningful governance. The wider subcontinental society naturally gravitates toward faith more than reason. This is extremely troubling, especially for an India that is celebrating 75 years of freedom and a famous freedom movement preceding it. Today, citizens are constantly being forced to confront religion instead of governance. Not good.

Conversely, religious societies had movements that advocated reason and rationality. Ancient Hindu India celebrated atheists; Buddhism grew as it put individual critical thought front and centre over blind faith; the medieval Arab world’s thinkers expanded the scope of subjects such as algebra; the famous clash-and-compromise between Christianity and Science in Europe through the Dark Ages set off forces that heralded the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Surely, religious societies can do with doses of irreligiosity the way deeply secular societies can do with doses of faith.

Historians are divided over a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln. He apparently said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Today’s over-religious India appears to be an exception to it.