-Ravi Sinha
Far away from Peshawar five men and a woman sat in a physician’s waiting room in Lucknow. The television screen that ordinarily shows some Bollywood film or a cricket match had a news channel on. It was day after the slaughter of children. The assistant who maintains the waiting list of patients and collects the doctor’s fee said something very predictable, even if heart-felt, expressing his horror and revulsion. The matter would have passed as unremarkably as most things do most of the times, except for what an elderly gentleman waiting to see the doctor had to say in response.
In a feeble yet firm voice whose conviction and sincerity was unmistakable, he said – dhaarmikata ko badhaava doge to kattarta badhegi; kattarta badhegi to aatank upajega, haivaaniyat saamne aayegi.(If you will promote religiosity, fundamentalism will grow, and from that will emerge terror and barbarism.) After a pause he added – hamaare desh mein bhee yahee ho rahaa hai, haalaan ki abhee hum pehle daur mein hain, dhaarmikata badhaane ke daur mein. (Same thing is happening in our country too, although we are in the first phase so far – that of promoting religiosity.)
It was stunningly simple a statement with clear enunciation of a causal chain. No one spoke after that. Uncharacteristically, for Indians, no discussion followed and no rebuttals were made. The statement was surprising for a number of reasons. First of all it did not come from an atheist leftist. There are too few of them left in any case in this city of Majaz, Rashid Jahan and Sajjad Zaheer, and it would have been too much of a coincidence if both the patients waiting to see the doctor in that lean hour of the day belonged to this rare breed. (Others were either family members of the patients or the doctor’s assistants.)
The statement was surprising also because, despite widely held views to the contrary, it did not blame one particular religion for being more disposed than others to harbour and incite terrorism. Nor did it sing the usual song about true religiosity being antithetical to brutality and violence. If one were willing to honestly count all killings across millennia of human history, I have little doubt that religion will show up as the single biggest killer. There are those who deploy enormous erudition and scholarship in proving that it kills only when it becomes modern. There are others who would not tire of repeating that it kills only as a handmaiden of imperialism. Veracity of examples likely to be cited in support of such theses cannot be denied. And yet, the theses themselves are grievously mistaken. Religion kills for its own sake too. If others hire it frequently, they do so because it is extraordinarily effective at the job. Nobel winning physicist Steven Weinberg once said – … you have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But, for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
It does not take a great deal of erudition to know that the Thirty Year War in seventeenth century Europe had seen the biggest blood-bath before the world wars of the twentieth century broke that record. That can hardly be attributed to modernity or to imperialism. Nor did religion begin to kill children only in the modern times. The oldest of religious myths recount massacre of children. If one were to consider that the slaughter of all male children of Hebrew families at Egyptian Pharaoh’s orders is a story intended to portray the adversary in bad light, how does one interpret the same side reporting gleefully the extermination of all Egyptian firstborns in the last of the ten plagues unleashed by the Hebrew God on the Egyptians?
A mistaken view that seems to be widely held in this country considers Hinduism comparatively non-violent. The Hindutva brigade laments this. They would like to turn Hindus into ferocious warriors against other faiths. This sordid episode is currently in full bloom in the Indian society and polity. I do not fully agree with the gentleman in the clinic when he says that we are in the first phase of promoting religiosity that is yet to attain full-scale brutality and violence. Can one draw any such comfort after witnessing, for example, what happened during the Gujarat carnage of 2002?
If religion can kill even while preaching peace, compassion, brotherhood and spirituality, one can imagine the added ferocity when it openly preaches the virtues of violence. The current foreign minister of India has called upon the world to accept Gita as the global holy book. Honesty would demand that this appeal be accompanied with a disclaimer – this book is basically a call to arms and an incitement to violence. Lord Krishna went to great philosophical lengths to rid Arjun of the scruples the latter had about participating in the impending blood-bath of Mahabharat that would include killing his own cousins and relatives.
Speaking against religion is not a wise thing to do. It carries all kinds of dangers – exclusion and ridicule being among the more benign ones. It is not easy, therefore, to draw truthful lessons from histories and practices of religion. Nearly all of humanity that has lived so far has been religious and, by and large, it continues to be so. How does one criticize or evaluate the mode of living of the entire human race? How does one bring its core beliefs under dispassionate and fearless scrutiny? It is not surprising that thinkers and theorists have had to plumb great philosophical depths and weave intricate theories around this issue. Obvious observations and simple truths would simply not do.
Undoubtedly there are things in the world about which precious little can be done. There are problems about which the best one can do is to go around them. And yet one learns about them not only because one is curious but also because one is always trying to cope with the world and make it better. One cannot do anything to gravity, and yet one keeps learning about it. In the process one does find newer ways to cope with it. Religion, unfortunately, is much like gravity. Lessons drawn from its history may invariably be impossible lessons, but even impossible lessons have their uses.
The poetically inspired moment in which Marx coined the phrase – opium of the people – has been the bane of every Marxist’s life. They have been mercilessly beaten up with this phrase and endlessly ridiculed for being juvenile. Hardly anyone reads the passage in the Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right from which the phrase gets plucked. It almost reads like an ode to religion when he says – Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. One wonders what Marx would say about religion after the slaughter of children in Peshawar. Would he say that it did the killing at the behest of imperialism? Would he say that seeds of a ferocious religious culture were sown in the Swat valley and elsewhere so that harvest of slaughters would feed the powers that rule over the planet, control its oil and own its wealth?
Anger and ridicule should be directed not towards what someone might say about religion. They should be directed towards what religion actually does. Its deeds are so grim and stark that even its sympathetic theorists are forced to raise questions about its conduct. Take for example the communitarian-idealist philosopher Charles Taylor who is famous for deploying exceptional intellect and erudition in making sense of the likes of Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and later Wittgenstein. In 2007 he came out with a 900-pages long book on the role of religion in history and civilization. The approach of this book, which he called The Secular Age, is too nuanced and its conclusions are too complex to be summarized here. While wrestling with the riddles of human thought and deeds in the dark alleys of history, myth and psyche with little light from the lamps of science and certainty reaching those alleys, Taylor emerges occasionally as if to catch a breath on the surface of manageable questions and simpler conclusions. I am tempted to quote from him, despite the risk of doing injustice to him and of exposing my own pretentiousness, in the hope that rational scrutiny of religion can be seen as a worthy enterprise.
Sources of primal frenzy, wild sexuality and plain slaughter have been debated within religious discourses themselves. More modern and humanist interpretations of religion have often castigated the primordial and naturalist versions for holding a view as if “all religion is ultimately Moloch drinking blood from the skulls of the slain” (The Secular Age, p. 648). I wonder if there have been similar debates within Hinduism where Kali and Shiva are reprimanded for such conduct. In any case, through an anthropocentric cleansing of ancient religions, at least in the west, it was hoped that religion would be rid of evil and frenzy, sex and slaughter,
“… in this anthropocentric climate, where we keep any idea of the spiritual, it must be totally constructive, positive. It can’t accommodate Kali, and is less and less able to allow for a God who punishes. The wrath of God disappears, leaving only His love…On the older view, wrath had to be part of the package…some people fry in Hell; and the others are only saved because Christ offered “satisfaction” for them. This was the heart of the juridical-penal understanding of the atonement. But in the anthropocentric climate, this no longer makes sense, and indeed, appears monstrous.” (The Secular Age, p. 649)
The question, however, remains. Why then, despite modernity, religion remains a prime instigator of bestiality and slaughter? Taylor discusses the question at various levels – biological, meta-biological, metaphysical, psycho-social, political and historical. Given his theoretical and ideological dispositions, he is inclined towards metaphysical explanations. Wading through complex arguments he arrives at a conclusion that puts part of the blame at modernity’s door. Modernity turns out in this account to be as self-righteous as religion. Citing examples of modern and non-religious violence, from the French Revolution to the War on Terror and Abu Ghraib, he accords equivalent status to Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin and George Bush.
I have put Taylor on display as an illustrative example. The point is to recognize the intrinsic relationship between religion and violence. If we have to understand our own specific predicament, we may have to step away from Taylor and go beyond his conclusions. After all, Peshawar and Gujarat happen here and not in Canada or Sweden. There must be some reason if religious slaughters and other barbarities of the present age tend to cluster in some parts of the world and not others.
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