Sabarimala and more: Indian keepers of morality and the temples of doom

Mere mention of the word 'religion' instantly trips everyone's northern grid

(Strong, stable voice): Good news, o people of India! For years and years we have been doing the difficult, painstaking work of making sure that a simple mention of the word ‘religion’ instantly trips everyone’s northern grid. We step into the vacuum created by frontal lobe failure, and strongly, stably, take charge. This is not work for wusses. It takes strength, stability, determination, and many pints of blood in the street. But we who live to serve God because God serves us, play a long game, and we are pleased to report that we are making very good headway.

As we speak, a large number of people’s heads are on fire because of the Supreme Court judgment that says that all women, even women of a menstruating age, can worship at the Sabarimala temple, where Lord Ayyappa is trying to stay off sex. This judgment is clearly madness. Women are polluting and tempting, and if they show up, boom, the place will turn into a ‘sex tourism’ hotspot.

It is common knowledge that a woman is not a person, but a conveyance device for a uterus that’s going wink wink, nudge nudge at unsuspecting men.Say no to public orgies!

Okay, o people of India, I can’t do that voice anymore.

Religion raises the temperature so much that you temporarily forget the many other daily fires

Some of those defending the Sabarimala protesters and scolding the Supreme Court are, naturally, politicians and fundamentalists who make a career out of colonising frontal lobes; but others simply see themselves as accommodating of tradition. The trouble is that ‘tradition’ is another word for ‘status quo’, and sanctions regressiveness. Some of the same people who strongly oppose temples refusing to admit lower castes, have no such resistance to the idea of a temple refusing to admit women. Caste discrimination=bigotry, gender discrimination=normalcy. That’s mainstream patriarchy for ya.

There are two or three big things going on here. One is the obvious ploy to paint women’s sexuality as threatening, and their physiology as weak. Boring old misogyny, yawn.

The second is the show of strength from those who use the word religion to cause aforementioned frontal lobotomies. In a case of irony hanging itself from the ceiling fan out of low esteem, National Security Advisor Doval is begging for another ten years of 56-inch government, which he says is based on strongly enforced rule of law—excuse me for snorting tea through my nose—even as the same politics is miming, to state, court, andpopulation, that invoking religious sentiment should grant de facto immunity from law. How much do you want to bet that as far as lawlessness goes, Sabarimala will look like the picture of peaceful rationality compared to that temple, as yet unbuilt, in Ayodhya? Recent statements by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its fellow-creatures suggest that the powers that be will shrug their shoulders and say, ‘How unfortunate, but we told you so.’

Petulant aside: It’s very annoying to be an atheist when you see how easily people let believers have their way.

The third big thing going on is that religion sucks up all the oxygen in the room, so it’s the card to pull whenever things get too hot elsewhere. Religion raises the temperature so much that you temporarily forget the many other daily fires: unemployment, farmer distress, the Rafale deal, the banking crisis, the Aadhaar mess, shameless cronyism, lynchings, the PM who never stops talking but never has an answer, caste atrocities, the throttling of dissent, the media-turned-PR machine, the vulnerabilities of the courts, gender crime, the evisceration of institutions, fake news, state-funded pseudo-nationalism, and the daily subversion of democracy.
 

But you can’t ignore any of these fires away, o people of India—they’ll just grow. 

Remember that in 2019.

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com