SAFFRON STROKES
The recently concluded Indian Science Congress, which Nobel Prize winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan called a “circus”, didn’t fail to disappoint, discussing topics such as the health benefits of blowing a shankh (conch) and “Lord Shiva as a greatest environmentalist in the world”. As a full circle, back to where it all started in the 1980s, news broke on Tuesday that Delhi University will allow a far-right organisation to hold a seminar on the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya on the campus. On its website, the organisation argues that since “For a great majority of Indians, Lord Shri Rama is central not only to their spiritual life but also their physical being”, a temple at Ayodhya needs to be built.
Starting from politics in the
1980s, faith has now even entered India’s premier colleges.
Shoaib Daniyal · Today · 09:15 am
In 1947, India’s ruling elite
set out a development blueprint for the nation that was surprisingly rational
for the country’s income levels. Ravaged by two centuries of colonialism, while
India was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1947, its Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of technology and progress. Nehru even coined the term
“scientific temper”, which would be a goal of the Indian state in this new age.
The prime minister was an agnostic writing to Gandhi in 1933 that he had
“drifted away” from faith and his personal rationalism it seems, set the bar
for independent India. The Indian state’s new “temples” would be dams,
institutes of technology and science. The messiness of religion, both as
ideology and communal identify was sought to be hidden away.
Even in the Nehruvian age,
though, while the narrative in Delhi was all about science and rationality, the
states were already jostling to use faith as driver. For example, starting from
just after Nehru’s death, state governments started to pass laws which restricted the freedom
of Hindus to adopt other faiths, injecting a theocratic agenda into matters of
administration. By the 1980s, the old Nehruvian agenda had been weakened enough
for this theocratic agenda to start to target the Centre.
The Bharatiya Janata Party
started its massive agitation for a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid.
Overturning Nehruvianism, the BJP explicitly grounded its politics in faith.
The religious faith of lakhs of Indians would overturn any legal process, claimed senior party leader Lal Krishna Advani.
By 2014, the Hindutva movement had delivered its greatest success: under
Narendra Modi, the BJP had been able to garner a Lok Sabha majority. This also
meant a new low for the Nehruvian agenda of rationalism and scientific temper.
Modi set the bar
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
himself set the ball rolling with
amazing claims that cosmetic surgery and genetic sciences existed in ancient
India. A minister from Goa wanted to “cure” people of homosexuality and in
Rajasthan, rape accused “godman” Asaram Bapu is featured as a saint in a
Class III textbook endorsed by the state government. While religion in politics
has, to some extent, always been there, the new dynamics post May 2014 are even
pushing it into higher academia which has, till now, been insulated from this
sort of irrationality.
The new BJP government kicked
things off with history, appointing Yellapragada Sudershan Rao the chairman of
the Indian Council of Historical Research. Not only was Rao unknown as a
historian but he also thought that the caste system was a good thing and considered the epics, the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, to be literally true. Given that the ICHR was a
funding body for historians, it was quite clear the direction in which academia
was now turning. In October, 2015, Delhi University organised a seminar where flying chariots and
televisions sets from the Mahabharat were discussed in all seriousness.
Ramdev in JNU
A fortnight ago, Baba Ramdev,
the television yoga guru who now also runs a pharmaceutical company, was asked to be the keynote
speaker at the valedictory ceremony of the 22nd International Vedanta Congress
at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Now Ramdev might be a good televangelist, but
to lecture to scholars on theology is a bit much. After all, he holds views
which suggest that yoga is a cure for AIDS and thinks that homosexuality
is a reflection of “criminality and sick mentality”. While Ramdev’s invitation
to JNU was cancelled as outraged students protested, this tweet did ensure that
most right-thinking people won’t be inviting him back as a scholar of theology
any time soon.
The recently concluded Indian Science Congress, which Nobel Prize winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan called a “circus”, didn’t fail to disappoint, discussing topics such as the health benefits of blowing a shankh (conch) and “Lord Shiva as a greatest environmentalist in the world”. As a full circle, back to where it all started in the 1980s, news broke on Tuesday that Delhi University will allow a far-right organisation to hold a seminar on the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya on the campus. On its website, the organisation argues that since “For a great majority of Indians, Lord Shri Rama is central not only to their spiritual life but also their physical being”, a temple at Ayodhya needs to be built.
Retreat of rationalism
This retreat of
rationalisation from the academic space is an especially dangerous development.
While letting in people with less than academic views into campuses is often
spun as an issue of free speech, that is a false, if common, argument used by
the religious right across the world. Creationists in the United States have
argued that not letting Intelligent Design be taught in schools is a violation
of free speech, a specious argument that has been struck down by US courts. Freedom of expression is a right
to be allowed to say or think what one wants; it is not a right to be allowed
into a particular campus or textbook.
In many ways, of course, views
such as these have existed in India for a long time, but have only now been
given this sort of elite exposure. This, though, is hugely troubling
development because by giving these kooky ideas an official stamp of
legitimacy, it will encourage their rapid spread. To get an idea of the harm
that legitimising such ideas can do, one only needs to peek across India’s
western border where Islamist dictator Zia-ul-Haq kicked off proceedings by
organising conferences on “scientific miracles” in the 1970s. The apogee of
this sort of complete devaluation of rationalism is that Sultan Bashiruddin
Mahmood, a top Pakistani nuclear engineer, has published papers proposing
that djinns be tapped to generate energy.
This might seem hilarious –
and it is – but India needs to use this as a dark example. Already, we have the
somewhat odd sight of the chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation
publicly going to a temple to have space mission being blessed by a deity. It does
not bode well that our elite classes today present faith and not rationality as
a virtue to be emulated.
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