Religious violence drives India’s descent into deeper obscurantism
by Jawed Naqvi
(Dawn.com, September 01, 2008)
IT took the Pope 400 years to apologise to Galileo, who was excommunicated for inferring from his independent inquiry that it was the Earth that went round the Sun and not the other way as the Bible claimed. It is too early to count the decades if not centuries it will take India to recant, if ever, from its current headlong leap into obscurantism of diverse hues, which it is busy cultivating in a strange mélange it advertises as secularism.
Be it the orgy of violence unleashed by the Hindu right against Christian missionaries and their followers in Orissa --- in which both sides want greater access to the gullible and poor Dalits and tribes people to grant them spiritual salvation, moksha --- or be it the transformation of a separatist agenda of Kashmiris into a Hindu-Muslim standoff, or the ready use of Muslim ulema to canvass support against religious terrorism perpetrated by shadowy groups, the state has abdicated its secular responsibilities.
The fact that the ulema are leading their flock with the state’s encouragement ignores the reality that they are responsible in the first place for imparting hidebound religious prescriptions that interfere with the functioning of democratic choices usually available elsewhere to citizens of different faiths and beliefs under a secular dispensation. Many of the maulvis who have been thrust into the forefront of an overrated campaign to disown Muslim terrorists are themselves guilty of keeping their followers riveted to fear and mistrust on the basis of another citizen’s religious or other beliefs.
[. . .]
[Read Full Text]
|
