Religion versus Constitution

I remember reading that only devoted followers of a religion might become good citizens, and the writer was not referring to a theocratic state. Perhaps the author had in mind a small core of shared values—kindness, charity, avoiding greed—that religions promote to build cohesion. Yet the full picture makes this claim seem distant from reality.  

Modern democracies are secular, and their constitutions rest first and foremost on equality, such as equality before the law and between genders.  All religions reveal violations of these values. All religions discriminate against and do not treat outsiders as equals; they rarely grant to them the same rights as to their own members, and some even permit violence against them. Beyond this, certain faiths divide their own followers by race or caste and give them different rights.  Thus, if you follow your religion completely, as a good follower should, you clash with constitutional foundations.  

Again, all religions are misogynistic. They treat men and women as unequal, giving men more rights and women more duties, treating womenfolk as second class members. As noted, gender equality is also a core value in modern constitutions.  

Thus, claiming that committed believers make good citizens is plainly wrong. Only those who treat religion lightly can be good citizens in a modern democracy.  

During my time at college, social circles debated civilisation—what measures its level? Several answers arose, many quite amusing. Some suggested soap consumption, others energy use, and some even wine and cigars. In today’s context, my answer would be how peacefully you can coexist with a minority that does not share your belief system or any belief system. That, and not the degree of your commitment to your religion, also shows how suited you are to live in a liberal democracy.

Politics, Religion and Secularism

The Real Threat to Hinduism Comes from Within

I am inclined to think that a perceived threat to Hinduism forms the bedrock of support for the current political regime, and that the supporters who subscribe to this view are predominantly upper-caste Hindus. I agree with them to the extent that there is indeed a threat to Hinduism as it is practiced today, but not with their diagnosis that the threat comes from Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism.

The threat - which they tend to deny vehemently - comes from within. Our unwillingness to unequivocally discard the caste and Varna systems as anachronisms, coupled with the pretense that such divisions no longer exist, is the foremost reason. This is the push factor. The pull factor comes from the reality that no other major religion maintains a similar hierarchical structure for its followers. While denial can mildly alleviate the push factor, the pull factor is met with reactionary measures: legislation against conversion, vigilantism, and the systematic maligning of other faiths.

The Burden of the Caste System and the Rise of Offshoots

Hinduism has historically clung to the caste system with all its might. In contrast, its own offshoots - Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and more recently, Lingayatism - explicitly rejected the caste system while retaining philosophical roots in Hinduism, particularly the Upanishads and post-Vedic literature. These offshoots generally deprecate the Varna system, excessive idolatry, and elaborate karmakand (ritualism). To take Buddhism as an example: while it features statues of the Buddha, practitioners do not treat them as living entities requiring bathing, feeding, and resting.

Because upper castes have been reluctant to dilute their privileged status, mainstream Hinduism - which was once progressive and gradually shedding its archaic practices - began viewing these reformist offshoots as a threat. To distance itself, it turned regressive and atavistic, adopting the label Sanatan (the eternal dharma). The word "eternal" implies an unchanging nature, signaling a refusal to evolve. This underlies Hinduism's historical antagonism toward Buddhism, even while paradoxically treating the Buddha as an avatar of Lord Vishnu.

The Political Alignment and Internal Polarization

The RSS and its political ally, the BJP, champion this traditionalist form of Hinduism, making them the natural refuge for threatened caste Hindus, who will go to any length to support them regardless of the cost. Ironically, this demographic likely also contains the largest concentration of secular-minded individuals simply because it is the most educated and exposed to diverse ideas. This duality frequently manifests as deep polarization within families.

Adherence to the Varna hierarchy is also reflected within the organizational wings of these political entities:

• The Student Wing (ABVP): Membership is drawn predominantly from the upper castes.
• Militant Wings (Bajrang Dal, Sri Ram Sena, etc.): Membership is heavily composed of OBC and SC/ST groups.
• The IT Cell: Tellingly headed by a Brahmin. When it comes to crafting narratives to justify a cause, Brahmins have historically been prolific, a skill put to effective use in modern digital operations.

Reactions Across Social Strata

How do groups outside the upper castes react to this rigid stratification?

• OBCs: Less inclined to convert to other religions, OBCs primarily struggle for parity with the upper castes. Having made significant strides in education and financial standing, they generally avoid the overt social degradation faced by the less fortunate.
• SC/STs: As the most oppressed group, they are far less averse to religious conversion if it offers a way to cast off the yoke of a detested lower-caste identity. Politically, they are also most likely to align with Muslims, as many former members of their communities have converted to Islam or Christianity.

This flight from the fold is the real threat Hinduism faces is driven not by aggressive proselytizing from outside, but by its own internal discriminatory practices.

Redefining Secularism and the Path Forward

Reforming a religion is squarely the task of its followers. The state's role is simply to govern in a strictly secular manner. I feel that "secularism" has been incorrectly defined as equal respect for all religions; instead, it should mean equal indifference to all religion by the state.

To achieve this, the government should:

1. Ensure free, secular education for all children up to the 12th standard while refraining from financial aid to madrasas or any institutions imparting religious instruction.
2. Implement a Uniform Civil Code based on modern values of equality and free from gender bias. Those who wish to follow distinct personal laws could be permitted to do so unless challenged in a court of law, with the judiciary refraining from taking suo motu action. This measured approach would help assuage apprehensions regarding the UCC.

Ultimately, we must recognize that a theological or sectarian government has never benefited any society; progress belongs to secular nations or those that keep religion in its proper place. At one time, it was believed that the tolerant Hindu majority could gracefully accommodate other faiths and foster a robust secular state. It hurts to see that assumption proven wrong.

Rise of the Right

I am not a historian. As a layman, here are my views on the worldwide rise of the right presented for comments by those who have a better perspective of history:

Humans have a need and tendency to organise themselves into larger and larger groups. These have to be hierarchical as is evident from the very fact that the word anarchy has come to mean the opposite of organisation.  Hierarchy implies graduated disparity of power which becomes immense between the top and the bottom.  Also power essentially means the capacity to do harm or good.  This is because the highest coercive powers as well as the treasury belong to the topmost level.

Thus for continued existence of the group and to alleviate suffering that such concentration of coercive powers may bring about in people at the top, a group needs checks and balances.  This may be done by a spiritual guru or a council of ministers.  These may have gradually weakened over time and ceased to be effective. Their breakdown led to revolutions that replaced monarchies with democracies in which people themselves could directly exercise a measure of control over the rulers in the top echelon.

Then came along the Indutrial Revolution. It once again disturbed the rather unstable equilibrium that had been attained.  Mass production of goods at affordable prices brought about unprecedented wealth.  But most of it was concentrated in the hands of owners of factories with only minimal amounts trickling down to the large workforce.  This unprecedented accumulated wealth in the hands of a few has given them the power to manipulate the masses and the democratic process itself.  This is done in collusion with callous politicians and / or religious heads who never before had the support of such power ever before simply because such wealth never earlier existed in the history of mankind. And it has become possible for them to abuse this power because unfortunately the collective wisdom of humans has not grown proportionately to be able to withstand the temptations and threats posed to them through this money power.

And this seems to be the reason behind the tempestuous growth of right wing politics all over the world.

Reflections On Two Recent Debates

Recently the Lallantop channel on YouTube hosted a debate between Javed Akhtar, an atheist, and a Mufti on the topic of Existence of God.  Some time back a similar debate had taken place between Zakir Naik and Dhruv Rathee.

This post is inspired by some reflections after watching the two debates.

Physics started out with what is now known as Classical Physics which dealt mostly with terrestrial objects in a, more or less, uniform gravitational field, close to each other in space and time and moving at speeds that are negligible compared to speed of light - that great constant in all frames of reference.  This is our immediate world that we experience with our senses directly and incessantly.

In this immediate world, Classical Physics came out with laws that seemed immutable and provided us with a sense of certainty, where given the initial state a later state could be figured out with compoete certainty.  This sense of certainty and absolute knowledge got shaken when Physics was required to accommodate the fact that the speed of light was an absolute constant in all frames of reference even though they may be moving relative to each other.  This gave rise to Special Theory of Relativity which was soon followed by the General Theory of Relativity where space, time and even mass all got mixed up.  

The turbulence got intensified as physics widened its ambit to subatomic particles on one hand and the immense vastness of universe on the other.  Some fairly bizarre phenomenon came to our notice for which the classical physics failed to be the correct model.  The sense of certainty vanished as probability took centre stage prompting Einstein to famously protest that God didn't play dice with us.  As Quantum and Astro Physics progressed, strange things emerged when developing models for the observable world on the very small scale on one hand, and very vast on the other.  Quantum physicists found that time disappeared altogether in their advanced equations!   Further, Quantum phenomenon, mostly probabilistic, seemed to crystallise into certainty in the presence of an "observer" - called collapse of the probabilistic wave function!  And to top it all, entanglement of particles in this strange Quantum world enables information to travel instantaneously, faster than light!

The world at the quantum level is far from mundane, it is mystical.  So mystical that many religious philosophies like Vedanta seek and claim to find a parallel for their tenets here.

While quantum physics concerned itself with very small, another branch, Astrophysics, found itself in an universe where Classical Physics faltered again.  In an attempt to model it,  Astrophysics came up with a Big Bang origin of the universe.  Again, time, which vanishes in the quantum world, is said to be non-existent before the Big Bang:  Space too.  It also had to accept existence of dark matter and dark energy to explain some of the observed phenomenon.  In a debate between the Islamic evangelist Zakir Naik and Dhru Rathee, Naik claimed that a certain aayat in Quran talks about Big Bang and this makes Islam the most scientific religion!  He probably forgot that science treats Big Bang as a theory, a model that is open to peer review and revision, or even abandonment, if alternate models can better predict the observed facts.  In fact, in science everything is open to review and being challenged if any experiments so suggest.

Even as physics was making these strides, and technologists were starting to find ways of putting to use the weird quantum phenomenon,  Information Technology too made rapid strides and achieved the most fascinating neural network and Artificial Intelligence.  The machines have finally passed the Turing Test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, much earlier than what was thought possible!  This has added fuel to the debate around the hard question of "consciousness."  This has become a free-for-all activity where religion tries to find a turf where it hopes to have an edge over science.

Ultimately what distinguishes science from non-science is what Javed Akhtar said in the recent debate.  It was to the effect that religion asserts definitive answers to every question and those answers must be taken as final, whereas science has the humility to accept what it still doesn't comprehend fully.  And then again, because science is open to being questioned and contradicted if observed phenomenon don't agree with the model in vogue, there is only one science all over the world.  Religions are numerous and the reason is obvious.