Ole! Such relief, this new race in India on who is the better Hindu. The second most popular man in the country furnished proof on how baiting and bashing Muslims placed you on the ‘right’ side of Hindutva. Now all that seems to hang by the length of a ‘dhaj’. Shankarsinh Vaghela offered a 52-yard dhaj at the memorial of Bhatiji, a Kshatriya, who died preventing cow slaughter. Vaghela contends that it makes him a better Hindu.That cows are carelessly shoved on to the streets to be slaughtered by other means is not the issue. That happens behind our backs and, anyway, we are not really asking for it to happen. And ‘reducing the BJP into ashes (sic)’ is a superior Hindu act. What is good for the goose, then, is not so good for the gander. The gander must do one better. He must carry a long dhaj on his visit to shrines. It promotes his upward spiritual mobility.Then there is the question of reducing a political party to ashes. And how do you go about obliterating a party? And remaining a better Hindu as well? Cook its members on a slow fire? Use a tandoor? Or natural gas? What if the party were to rise, phoenix-like? Have a go at it again?And what of those distinctions I have yet to learn to make: puja at a sati temple (no glorification of sati). But a mela? No way! An aarti is for the devout brethren — we worship the cult of sati mata, who plays the role of making us feel humble, gives us reason to pray more ardently: the brave, gutsy woman who died (we knew her mind, she had so badly wanted to die!) so that our faith may be rekindled, so that we may deify and feel pleased by our own devotion. And so she goes to her release, surrounded by the awestruck and the admiring. The mela, I presume, is about eating, drinking, commerce. She just may not have approved of these fun and games in her memory.Q.E.D.: The good Hindu is he who waits as the widow moves to the pyre, he who looks on (he must think it’s so painless and easy) as she is consumed (into ashes) and then waits again in a queue to enter the temple built in her honour. They also, alas, serve who only abstain and wait. The bad Hindu, is he who would go to a mela in her name.My otherwise devout, god-fearing grand-aunt-in-law must have made a very poor Hindu indeed. Widowed at 13, this thin, short (4 feet, 8 inches) woman returned to her maternal home and spent the next 70-odd years of her life flitting from one nephew to another niece. In the classic Hindu joint family way, she gave her services — cooked, cleaned, nurtured babies — and, to the extent possible, removed herself from people’s view. The good Hindu woman. But on the occasion of temple visits, she rose to her full height. Alternately, she prayed, wept and reproached the who’s who in heaven for her fate. She never referred to her karma; and if her dharma was to serve people, she did it, she claimed, because she had no choice in the matter.Pity she did not offer a dhaj. Would have soothed her tormented soul.
