The recent news about the canonization of a nun from Kerala couldn’t have come at a better time. Piety aside, one cannot ignore the godsmack on the infidels- the ‘Bajrang Dal’ by embarrassed politicos in this case and the political furor in the aftermath of one single unfortunate event, again from this side of the world – that of an Indian nun’s modesty having been outraged. Forget about the apparent tactical despoliation of churches in South India or the controversial death of a Swami, just for the moment, that fuelled the holy wars. When I first learnt about the ‘shoes of the fisherman’ having bestowed one of the most sought after Oscar awards of the Roman Catholic world (apart from the papacy itself) upon “the” Keralite nun, from a brief glimpse of the morning news on TV one frantic morning, I couldn’t help but envy, of just how lucky the victim is, to have ‘saintly justice’ met out to her while she is still alive, even before she could barf out a testimony in court, while many of our Indian homicide victims, in all likelihood; languish in purgatorial wretchedness before proceeding to the hereafter, as a direct consequence of the delays in our justice system, in stark contrast. All gusto diminished, a few hours later, when to my chagrin, a more expatiated reading of the print media made it clear, that a different nun was extolled with the grand laurel though a very dead one, yet again, from Kerala.
A quick peek at how “making a saint” works from howstuffworks dot com, revealed that the basic raw ingredients for devout aspirants are that one needs to be a dead catholic with a history of “perfect virtue”, have a handful of loyal friends to dream you up, as a source of apparitional inspiration for their successful endeavours or in the alleviation of their woes(called miracles), people address you in past tense, present the “evidence” to a Pope, wait a few years and voila you are now a saint. Normally, you would hear of an advocatus diaboli’s incongruent supply of counter arguments, but like all religions, propping an opposition hoping it would use ‘religious logic’ to counter argue and verify the esoteric, is as analogous to the Meghalaya government initiated, fact finding missions on uranium mining desperately trying to prove how ‘fair’ the entire exercise is and therefore redundant, especially when you are both the ruling and the opposition, both on the same side of the religious fence. Besides, all this playacting in “The Devil’s Advocate” does become a bore with time, so out it goes, Pope John Paul II has concurred with that one and I couldn’t agree more.
Christians and more particularly the Roman Catholic world, are seething in rage and they have every good reason to – a female member of the fraternity has been wronged and not just an ordinary member at that. A member of the “order”. But for a lesser known nun from Kerala, to have outrun even the great Mother Theresa in the dog- eat-dog bid for catholic sainthood is profoundly risible. The Vatican’s precipitousness in upholding Saint Alphonso, as the apotheosis of modesty and humility, seems almost immaculately synced in with a faint retributive synchronicity that would oscillate in resonance with the vehement reverberations of Christians in India, incensed by the pillage that transpired in Kandhamal and Karnataka, a vindictive human frailty but in a violently non-violent way, that many could easily comprehend, under these circumstances.
On two late hour NDTV programs named ‘We the People’ and ‘The Big Fight’ in the evenings that followed both the rampage and the canonization, I could not help watch prominent Hindu and Christian defenders of the faiths, perform an amusing spine wrenching squirm dance on the studio floor as each God vied to outclass the other with arguments thrown out of the abstruse, that seemed destined from the beginning, to maunder into bigoted whirlpools of circular reasoning. But where NDTV’s host Barkha Dutt seems to move in circles herself, during the course of the heated dialogues was when she posed the same question several times over “ but what is the reason for this?” having been unconvinced by everybody’s retort at every point of the vexing sass, each defending his own belief in more astute ways than one. Well Ms.Dutt need wonder no more, as the elusive answer on everybody’s lips is revealed below.
In a milieu as ours where religious sentiments are constitutionally ensconced within a seemingly fragile nest of ambiguity called ‘secularism’, the killing fields of Kandhamal if we should call it that and the gratuitous plunder of Christian churches in Karnataka, should not surprise our freethinking egalitarian lot, who may perceive the events as a spillover of religious laissez faire gone awry. Scrimmages over control of market-shares of the arcane such as these, should therefore not be surprising, as such religious ‘truths’ are usually revealed to those mildly endowed with critical thinking, as diverse philosophical viewpoints and to the rabble sheep, as fairy tale realms, with political differences in the background, that have a catalyzing effect which uptil now, are held back in duplicitous, diplomatic ‘respect’ gesturing.
If there is anything that needs urgent mending in India’s current plight of rendering religious freedoms, it is in fresh legislation and its enforcement that ought to provide ample legroom for the regulation of the ‘merchants of faith’ in the conduct of their business. Given the elusive though realistic “lucre” hypothesis presented here, that we have all been hypocritically trying to avoid, the enactment of a homogeneous “Monopolies & Restrictive Trade Practices Act”(MRTPA) for the religious, should therefore constitute a more forthright gesticulation in both Hindu and Christian majority Indian states or by Parliament, to facilitate a replacement of their otherwise suave, anti conversion legislation that barks the curt “don’t mess on my Hindu turf” caveat in subtler shades. Legislation such as the MRTPA on religion, could mean abundant control by the government in the exercising of fair ‘trade’ practices among faith peddlers from the most devout, thronging the Hindu temples of Mt.Abu to the Christian soup kitchens of South India and the north east among others. Of course I am not implying that pecuniary gain is always a motivation for religious conversion, but is an important and lethal ingredient in the mix as well, spurring among other things, fundamentalism and inspiring the cause of terrorism. That’s not to say that terrorists themselves, are motivated to massacre their victims in all cases, by sheer religious differences alone, as Richard Dawkins rightly said and I quote:-“How can I say that religion is to blame? Do I really imagine that, when a terrorist kills, he is motivated by a theological disagreement with his victim? Do I really think the Northern Ireland pub bomber says to himself "Take that, Tridentine Transubstantiationist bastards!" Of course I don't think anything of the kind. Theology is the last thing on the minds of such people. They are not killing because of religion itself, but because of political grievances, often justified. They are killing because the other lot killed their fathers. Or because the other lot drove their great grandfathers off their land. Or because the other lot oppressed our lot economically for centuries”.
Likewise, does Barkha Dutt really think that Hindus and Christians hate one another for the inconclusive reasons spouted out by both panel and studio audience during these TV programs? I think not. It’s obvious to all that the hate emanates from a real world problem - the insecurity in the loss of market share. But NO. For the sake of diplomacy and not hurting the religious sensibilities of the other side, we’ll call it a loss of Hindu “believers” to Christians not a “market” or a “consumer” base. The harsh reality is that Hindus haven’t been kind enough to their kind, what with the caste system and the rest, and this is where Christians have been able to fill in to the gaping demand for love, mercy, charity and all the do-goody virtues, packed and sweet as candy, all bundled together with an eye catching glitter paper and a card that reads “EQUALITY TO ALL ASSURED” in bold. It doesn’t matter to the willfully blind, whether they should worship a piece of rock or a sky daddy in the process. Its time to call a spade a spade. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and if religions can’t figure a way to upgrade their marketing skills with goodies like love, charity, free sex, the works, or anything in majority demand then they’re destined for oblivion. Apparently religion like business does not want to live shackled in Neanderthal business principles. More so when they are passé. That’s not to mean that Christianity has any greater affinity with the latest B-school mantra straight out from the American ivy league. Relative to Hinduism, it might be safer to assume that Christianity has evolved more in the western world as far as business strategy is concerned, what with crafty evangelists cleverly reconciling science with it, in the form of Christian Creationism, to pseudo corroborate the assertion that its 2000 year old ancient fairy tales from the Textus Receptus or Alexandra scrolls, are as equally relevant as any scientific absolute, post Age of Enlightenment.
If only Hindu god men had the wily inclination to use metaphorical representations of their avatars that could convince its neo ‘thinking’ lot of how right Hinduism is, as Christians have, I’m sure Hinduism could far surpass Christanity in that area. More so when the Samkhya and Mimasa Hindu Schools of thought, already seem to exhibit a rational mind at work amidst the incalculable hooey of sky daddys (and mummys) of the great Hindu pantheon. Probably just the reason why the British ran over India so easily. That ecstatic rapturous feeling of know-all contentment, that there is nothing else to discover and that beef grease must not save us.
Back in Shillong where I live, we have our own share of the peeved. The Seng Khihlang comprising of the Seng Khasi and its animist sister the Sein Raij, have of late, apparently been at odds with those who have been robbing them of their market-share of believers and culture. The profound disdain for the cross is more evident in the Seng Khihlang’s vitriolic mix of rhetoric and street processions that seem to have become less and less benign with the passing years, bolstered at times, only by the smell of saffron permeating the local political air. Again, Christianity gets brownie points here, for the proselytizing process in the past two centuries in Meghalaya(or Assam), offering a wide range of pie in the sky bonuses to converts - paradise and the fear of perdition and in the real world - incentives spanning from free education, orphanages, charity goodies, economic upliftment packages, to subsidized or even free health care. On the other hand let us peek into what our friendly neighbourhood animist clubs have in store for us? Other than their earnest endeavour in the preservation of culture mish mashed with religion, (although having failed to preserve that part of our culture when we inhabited dingy caves, covered ourselves in papyrus weed and bobbed around totems, way back in Yunnan, circa 23 AD) there seems to be a gaping void in the charity, education and exculpation department. Go serenading your own cousin, or prance around a distant relative of the opposite sex from Yunnan, that your family hasn’t known, since the last millennia, whose DNA fingerprint vaguely matches yours but rather more to a bar code stickered to a block of Amul butter in a mall and they’d probably shove you in the brig, signed and stamped “Nong leh sang”, albeit Mendelian nuptial endorsement. That’s if they haven’t got their smugly virtuous hands, on your person first, to perform the famous “Khi lai nuid” artwork on your pretty little cranium, a common Khasi practice from the upper Pleistocence epoch of Northern Manchuria before arriving at Yunnan – ‘jest’ my guess.
Jest aside; it is time for people of “reason” in India vis-à-vis people of “faith” to say enough is enough. Let the 21st century be one where any positive impact by an imaginary sky daddy, (or mummy) as religions have violently posited in the history of mankind’s metamorphosis, be quantifiably nullified by its own violent history of intellectual enslavement, overwhelmed totally at the end by all the desirable qualities of secular humanism. The latter, though ingrained in the principles of running political states seem to elude the hoi polloi for want of a ‘right’ education, of which religious education, emanating chiefly from political interests at the root, is the impediment.
Rather than succumb to the primeval cravings of our “selfish gene” for more material resources and territory to buttress phenotype propagation; to the next epoch of human history, there is yet another way by which the selfish effect of the gene could be counterpoised or eliminated completely. If belief in evolution is anything to be believed, the ruse lies in legislation and in the process, honing civilities gradually to tend towards absolute altruism; with its result in 10 million AD. Nonetheless, many of us wouldn’t be around to see the leaf change, but can take solace and pride in the fact, that a ball has been set rolling. But perhaps, that is not the desirable effect that many would seek. Perhaps we are destined to fight for survival, in much the same way as the slither of a boa, constricting life out of its helpless prey, or the bone crushing mastication of a lioness as it negotiates occiput out of fleeing gazelle, in the vast expanses of the African Veld. Perhaps the fact that religion too, transmogrifies into useful armament, in the outright emasculation of weaker minorities; is there to stay, both by way of a deadly evolutionary trait, designed by nature to control organism congestion; in the eco-system, an extension of the "survival of the fittest" and by the popular mandate of a diversity abundant India, doomed from conception by its own rich religio-cultural motif, working in tandem. The recent wave of events against Christians in India was no exception and therefore not surprising.
Praise the Indian constitution and its vague ‘secularism’ for all that and more. In which case, one shouldn’t be whining.
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