Another terror attack has claimed 44 lives of our armed personnel. Justifiably, we are angry. We want the perpetrators to be punished. Unjustifiably, some among us want innocents who share the religion of the terrorist who blew himself up in a fit of fanatic madness to be punished. We are falling into the trap set by the terrorists. As it is an election year, the possibility of political parties exploiting religious passions and milking the vote banks based on mutual hatred is high.
The easiest way to power in India is through riots. A polarised society absolves the politician from responsibilities such as providing proper governance, having a honest public life and other such niceties. He needs only to belong to the community of most voters in his constituency. Once he has made enough inflammatory speeches and has convinced his vote bank about the evilness of the other and instilled fear and insecurity in their minds, winning election is a walk in the park.
It is easier than hacking the voting machine, if that is possible, or the old-fashioned booth capturing tactics. Such politicians follow the blueprint of religion to achieve success. Religions are simple to understand. They work on two factors—fear and temptation. The communal politician also acts the same way. He will first instill fear in the voter’s mind about others. Then he will promise a bright future, akin to heaven with rivers of wine and virgins, a place by the side of the sky daddy God or moksha, once he is elected. The good days are always in the perpetual future. Religion is another way of attaining power. Politics is the religion of power.
In short, religion and politics is a deadly concoction. Not understanding this fact is the reason for the muddled reaction by many self-proclaimed intellectuals. A typical reaction of the ‘intellectual’ is to say terror has no religion. By absolving religion from its responsibility of generating terrorists and fanatics, they are contributing to the growth of religious madness. The only thing the terrorist has is religion. He doesn’t have anything that forms a part of our day-to-day life, like art, music, sports, science, friends, parties, career, ambition and such mundane things that make life worth living.
He believes in some books written or revealed to someone or some group of people in the remote past, when human reasoning and science were in their infancy. He isn’t ready to accept the world has changed and what is written in his holy book might have been hallucinations of some poor soul, who imagined sky and clouds speaking to him in a language that is spoken in his vicinity. He isn’t ready to accept what could have been arguably relevant those days could become irrelevant now.
Many argue that it is because of the wrong interpretation of religious verses that people turn to fanaticism. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Anyone reading any religion’s holy books with a rational mind can see that they are full of absurdities, prejudices, racial hatred, misogyny and laughably ridiculous scientific knowledge. An elementary school science text is enough to counter most religious arguments about geography, astronomy, chemistry, biology or physics.
How could holy books that got even the basic facts like whether earth is round or flat, or whether earth revolves around the sun or vice versa wrong be revealed by an omniscient God, unless the God wanted to play a prank at the poor souls who were receiving one revelation after another. And how could such books—of any religion—be faultless when they have got even elementary facts wrong?
This being the fact, it needs a systematic brainwashing for a modern young man to believe that he would swim in rivers of wine and have 72 virgins in heaven if he blows himself up and kills a few others who believe in a different, but equally absurd stories. It is the less religious who dares to interpret the verses to suit the modern era. Those who read the verses without trying hard to find some meaning suited for modern living in these verses, would end up being fanatics.
The cow bhakts who roam around the dusty plains of North India are more religious than an average Indian. When they barge into someone’s kitchen to check his refrigerator to see whether he has eaten beef, and then lynch him on mere suspicion, the cow bhakt is being truer to his books and not less so. The medieval European kings who bathed the world in rivers of blood during crusades were more religious than any of us.
So were the priests who burned pagans in stakes and conducted brutal inquisitions. They were being truer to their books. It was those who believed in the holy book of Marxism and class struggle, perpetuated violent crimes on humanity. Communism is also a religion and those who read its holy literature tend to be as violent as those who read and believe everything written in the holy books of any other religion.
Those who didn’t allow a huge chunk of their population into their temples, those who poured molten lead into the ears of the downtrodden, those who burned widows as Sati, were truer to the words written in their holy books. It was not by reforming Manu Smriti that India broke free from the clutches of medieval literature of revelations and remembrance. It was by adopting a modern Constitution and the Hindu Code Bill, that the society progressed, at least to some extent.
There is a correlation between how much religious education one gets in childhood and how much fanatic and closed one’s mind becomes. The communities that give lesser years of systematic religious education become broader minded and less rigid. How Europe changed after it broke away from compulsory church attendance is a prime example. If we continue to impart religious education to children, we shall have fanatics who are ready to die and kill.
Anand Neelakantan
Author, columnist, speaker
mail@asura.co.in