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Let Us Not Overdo this ‘Triumph of Faith’

religion
'Faith' in all its elaborateness is being deployed to distract the gullible Hindu from asking inconvenient questions about the emergence of an entrenched oligarchy, on the one hand, and the persistence of mass deprivations, on the other.
The Kumbh Mela 2025. Photo: X/@myogiadityanath.
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Thirty pilgrims were crushed to death at the Maha Kumbh on the occasion of Mauni Amavasaya. 

Only two days ago the captive media regaled the nation with images of a Union home minister performing the Kumbh rites, in the assorted company of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister and the ubiquitous Baba Ramdev. The Mauni Amavasya tragedy punctured the Bharatiya Janata Party establishment’s tableau of self-congratulation and self-preening as it has sought, for weeks and months, to milk a unique milestone in the great Hindu religious calendar for its political purposes. This kind of partisanship, of course, is now a familiar sleight of hand.

It was therefore entirely understandable, if not excusable, that the Uttar Pradesh administration should have tried to downplay the tragedy. It is Kumbh and tragedies have always happened whenever so many people congregate. A judicial inquiry was immediately announced; so, please, no blame-apportioning, no finger-pointing. A clever stratagem from a regime that is becoming rather good at cleaning up its mess.

What should be a matter of disquiet is the bogus intellectual argument being made in a section of the saffron eco-system: the loss of death is regrettable, but it should not distract us from celebrating the fact of the crores of unfazed and undeterred devotes going ahead with performing their enjoined religious rites and rituals at a Kumbh. It is a reaffirmation of a triumph of faith, and that blessing by itself overwhelmingly airbrushes the stench of dead bodies at the Sangam. The Mahakumbh is too momentous an occasion to be overshadowed by the loss of few lives. One could almost hear Dick Cheney, that ruthless conceptualiser of the 2003 invasion of Iraq whispering from behind: “Shit happens”.  

This is unadulterated regressive thinking; it is a return to the days of helpless fatalism that has for centuries weakened and exhausted the Hindu society and its civilisational vitality, allowing the “outsider” to overpower us. Popular narrative tells of a  barbaric marauder from Ghazni desecrating the Somnath Temple 17 times and yet no resistance was offered  because of the obsessive faith in the divine potency vested in the holy Shivalinga and that that divine efficacy was enough to defeat the design of any evil-merchant. 

That we remain uncured of this centuries-old faith in the curative power of (Hindu) faith – the undefinable, the mysterious Aastha – was brought home to us when a few years ago the prime minister asked us to bang the thalis from balconies and house-tops to ward off the COVID-19 virus; and, very many of us did climb the roof-tops in response to a demagogue’s call. It is not even a conscious rejection of the Nehruvian scientific temper, it is a subconscious faith in the abiding power of religious agency. Faith breeds patience and that patience gives us the fortitude to take unnatural loss of life in our stride. 

This vastly exaggerated exaltation of “faith” is, of course, the centre-piece of an unholy political stratagem, devised by self-assigned custodians of the Hindu samaj (society) and its religious and spiritual wealth.

“Faith” in all its elaborateness is being deployed to distract the gullible Hindu from asking inconvenient questions about the emergence of an entrenched oligarchy, on the one hand, and the persistence of mass deprivations, on the other.

“Faith” is being cynically marketed as an answer to deepening national despondency, aggravated by a self-centred regime. And, since the ruling coterie has already designated itself as the exclusive gate-keeper of all matters of “faith,” it alone gets to invoke the legitimacy of faith for its mis-governance. 

Intellectual shabbiness apart, this “triumph of faith”  is a dangerous argument to be made in the third decade of 21st century. To argue that more people die of cancer or Alzheimer’s than the number of devotees crushed in the stampede on Maun Amavasaya is to make a plea for the jettisoning of any notion of political accountability, a principle at the core of democratic governance.

To place the tragedy at the Maha Kumbh in the larger context of a litany of disasters, catastrophes, and calamities around the world is not only to trivialise loss of human life but is also an argument to institutionalise insensitivity as a national virtue. 

Not long ago a woman called “Nirbhaya” was degraded in the most horrible manner. For weeks all of us worked ourselves into a frenzy of disapproval and indignation. We expressed our outrage at the failure of the organised arrangements of “law and order” to protect a young life. “Nirbhaya” became a cause célèbre, a collective expression of solidarity with a helpless woman; her violation was felt personally by each one of us; she became us and us became her. Delhi got branded as the “rape capital” of the world. 

If the new argument of “context” was to be applied to “Nirbhaya,” then we could be ticked off for making too much of one woman’s violation when arguably lakhs and lakhs of other women were not molested. The argument of “context” can indeed  be deployed to explain away any breakdown in any matter of civic and public arrangement. If “context” is accepted as the new mantra, no official will ever need be held accountable for a railway accident or a plane crash. The concept of ministerial responsibility shall cease to have any meaning. 

A Maha Kumbh, occurring after 144 years, by itself, in its spiritual generosity bestows redemption on all followers of the faith, whether or not one takes a dip at the Sangam. But, let us not forget, that when all of us are done with performing the Kumbh rites, we shall still be a republic, with its own elaborate constitutional rites and rituals. And, the constitution has supremacy over all matters of “faith.”

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