Losing my religion

From a joint email recently received from a friend: “I have often wondered how one might leave the Hindu religion (i.e., cease to be called a Hindu, counted as one in the census, etc) without actually converting to another religion. Now I’m thinking: is drinking beer the solution?”

The reference is of course to the assault by Sri Ram Sene activists on girls in a

Mangalore pub, the provocation being that they were engaging in various nefarious things that went against Indian “culture” and “tradition”. Since those are the twin pretexts for hooliganism in this country, much beating and molesting followed.

 

There’s quite a discussion on at the

Express Buzz blog (http://tinyurl.com /bbtw7a). “No father would like his daughter going for night club or no brother would like or no husband would like,” drones a Neanderthal who I can only hope has made some sort of provision to donate his brain to medical research, “So they r not family girls. so who r they? they r prostitutes.” That’s a marvel of logical reasoning, but more worrisome is this comment from someone defending the assaulters: “For a minor incident, the congress-vatican-bribed indian media are busy maligning hindu majority. But they have not found any thing abnormal or terror-minded with the nude paintings of godes and godesses (sic) by a jehadi painter MF Hussain…”

Now see, that’s one of the many charming things about religion-driven madness. Causing physical harm to flesh-and-blood human beings — real people, capable of getting hurt — can be brushed off as a “minor incident”, but mocking invisible, all-powerful divinities — who, if they exist, are presumably capable of protecting themselves from puny artists without help from their devotees —becomes an unforgivable offence. (“These people should be fitted with the T-shirts that say Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime,” suggests another friend on email.)

It’s also tempting to point out that once we get into the delightful specificities of offence taking, the commenter above could be seen as insulting gods by spelling the word wrong. Of course, we all get deeply offended by different things; while obscene depictions of deities leave me unmoved, I’m liable to turn a deep red if someone puts Sachin Tendulkar down within my earshot.

But as Amit Varma puts it on his blog India Uncut (http://tinyurl.com/ ccr575), “Mobs in India e licence to do as they please if they do it under the banner of religion. If you and I vandalise a hotel lobby or beat up women in a bar, you can bet we’ll be thrown into jail, and rightfully so. But if we do it under the pretext of defending our culture or our religion, then anything goes. The rule of law, in such situations, is a joke.”

Meanwhile the litany of Things People are Not Supposed to Do (because they go against the supposed tenets of the religion that they happened to be born into) continues with the silly fatwa issued by an Islamic body in Indonesia, banning

Muslims from practising yoga. Muslims should not practise these things as it will erode their faith, explains the group’s chairman. On The Huffington Post (http://tinyurl.com/akpqfo), a commenter snappily retorts that “after a certain age, NOT practising these things will probably erode your physical state, and faith won’t matter much when that happens”.

Meanwhile, Ashok Gehlot’s call for outlawing pubs has spawned so much discussion that there are even traces of wit on Rediff. “If you remove ‘pub’ from ‘Republic’, you’re left with a ‘relic’,” says one poster. “Where’s the fun in fundamentalism?” grumbles another.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)