Mandir politics, Palestine and Israel: When did religion lose its compassion?
Religion has lost its love and become yet another form of manipulative politics; priests and mullahs have replaced seekers and wanderers; the bricks and stones of temples have become more important than our inner poetry
Does it make sense if you quote from the Sermon on the Mount while your missiles kill the children of Palestine? (File) Living in contemporary India, it seems, is like experiencing the outer manifestations of religion everywhere — from the loud assertion of politically engineered and triumphant Hinduism (or Hindutva) to the inflated desire of many “believers” to articulate their social/cultural identities and even “nationalist” sentiments through the symbolism of the mandir politics. Yet, despite this intense excitement and euphoria in a heavily polarised social milieu filled with all sorts of binaries (secular/modernist “arrogance” vs “legitimate” cultural pride; or, “morally bankrupt” atheists/Marxists/liberals vs “sanatani” Hindus), some of us need to be aesthetically and spiritually contemplative, meditative and reflexive to converse with these “believers” as well as nihilistic “secularists”, and make them see that what is being practised as religion today has no resemblance with the religiosity of love and compassion. Moreover, the aggression implicit in a politicised religion like Hindutva cannot be justified simply because non-reflexive and fundamentalist traits can also be seen in other organised religions like Islam and Christianity. In fact, the “uniform” the followers of Hindutva have been persuaded to wear to demonstrate their religion, the slogans they have been encouraged to utter, and the “enemies” they have been told to identify and eliminate take them away from the authentic spiritual and existential quest — say, the search for a meaning of existence amid death, impermanence, pain and suffering.
Before we begin to reflect on this quest, it is important to acknowledge that we have often been conditioned by organised religions and associated priestcraft, with their grammar of rituals and other practices, to think and behave like “Hindus”, “Muslims”, “Sikhs”, “Jews” or “Christians”. And this conditioning or this thought that one is a “Hindu” or a “Muslim”, as a wanderer like Jiddu Krishnamurti repeatedly reminded us, causes duality, division and violence. It prevents us from experiencing the world — the inner as well as the outer — with freshness and mindfulness. Instead, we transform ourselves into a crowd of “followers”— “followers” of Ram, “followers” of Krishna, Jesus, or Mohammad. While it gives us a false sense of security, it fails to fill the void inside. No wonder, we behave like parrots; we keep repeating the mantras or quoting from the scriptures without any deep realisation.
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