India and Hinduism

7 min readJan 17, 2021

India and Hinduism

I was 6 years old when the Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya, a thousand miles from my home. Not that I knew of it at the time. My concerns were more immediate, like not being dragged to the temple by my religious mother. Or chocolate. My first memory of religion is a sticker that was pasted on our kitchen entrance. It read, ‘Garv se kaho hum hindu hain’, which translates to ‘Say with pride that we are Hindu’. I thought pride was a person’s name, and so misunderstood the phrase as, ‘Go tell Pride, that we are Hindu’. That seems a stupid ask, I wondered every time I went past the kitchen. Why should I go around telling people that I am Hindu? Why would they want to know?

Growing up, visiting temples all over India was a holiday activity for me- decreed so by my mother. My father didn’t care much for religion, but went along to keep the peace. Some of these places were wonderful; beautiful buildings a few hundred years old, with not much human traffic. The calmness and peace were soothing, and bearing witness to others’ faith was uplifting. Others were an endless chaos, bristling with dirt, sweat, noise and human bodies. As time went by, the latter seemed to become more common than the former, and my visits became less frequent.

When I was 16 years old, riots in Gujarat killed more than a thousand people- mostly Muslims. This was again a thousand miles from where I was, but this time I learnt of it in real time, through our history teacher- Mr. J. With his aquiline nose and bursts of rage, we were all fearful of Mr. J. And not just his wrath, for Mr. J was poetic enough in his verbal outpour, that his words became a source of mirth for those watching from the sidelines. Oh, the shame. One day, he angrily walked into the classroom and slammed the books he was carrying on to the desk, exclaiming, ‘What is going on in Gujarat? It’s TWO days of rioting, and the state is sitting on its haunches. People are killing each other in the name of religion, and we are bearing silent witness. What a disgrace!’ The next day, ‘It’s been THREE days since the riots started, and there’s NO END IN SIGHT. What has happened to us? It seems we’ve gone MAD.’ Eventually, the riots were controlled, and Mr. J’s anger subsided.

I grew up, became a doctor and moved to the US for further training in 2013. By this time, I had developed a strong interest in improving public health in India, and thought that rigorous training in the US would prepare me well towards that goal. In 2014, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat during the 2002 riots, became the prime minister of the country. High hopes were pinned on him by the country, with the 2002 riots being declared ‘old news’, and an issue that was no longer relevant. People wanted to look ahead, and welcome ‘acche din’- good days.

Fast forward to 2019, and the Indian growth story had come to a screeching halt. The havoc of demonetization (2016), the burden of a new, complex tax regime (2017), coupled with centralization of political decision making derailed the wheels of economic growth. ‘Acche din’ was now only a slogan, and prosperity was only for those already prosperous. But none of it mattered, as the BJP won the elections by an even bigger margin than 2014. What mattered was the larger than life personality of the prime minister, and the fact that India and Pakistan had a border skirmish right before the election- creating a fervent nationalism that culminated in a decisive victory for the BJP.

The decisive victory resulted in more centralization of political power, and less scrutiny of those who wielded it. The Supreme Court of the country, unwilling to take a different line from the government, ‘resolved’ the Ayodhya dispute by giving the land to the people that had demolished the mosque, essentially saying ‘might is right’.(1)

With the sudden rush of a pandemic, the economy has been thrown into chaos. A lockdown was announced by the prime minister, without so much as informing chief ministers across the country. With widespread unemployment, hunger and a healthcare system in disarray- prospects for most people in India look increasingly bleak. But in a replay of an old trick, with much fanfare, the foundation stone was laid for a grand temple on Babri Masjid’s ruins on 5th August. We need to move on, to focus on the ‘positive news’, instead of ‘negative news’. After all, we have ‘solved’ a decades old problem.

But reality is stubborn. It cannot be moved at our will. Facts march to their own rhythm. And what are they? In November, 1949, B.R. Ambedkar- the chief architect of India’s constitution, remarked before the constituent assembly,

‘On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?’

Evidently, for a very long time. Caste identities continue to be strong in India, with the length of your life (amongst other things) closely related to the caste you are born in.(2) The vision was to evolve from political to social & economic democracy, instead, we have regressed from social & economic inequality to political inequality- where one socio-economic identity, the wealthy Hindu, wields more political power than any other identity.

Ambedkar goes on to say in his speech that we must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment, a task at which India has miserably failed. The consequences of this failure is not hard to see. Indian women, Muslims and disadvantaged caste Indians have some of the lowest educational attainment in the world, and suffer from the highest rates of disease and suffering.(3) (4) These three groups are not a minority, and make up 70% of India’s population, with Muslims and disadvantaged castes (referred to as scheduled castes and tribes in the Indian constitution) alone constituting 40% of India’s population. Is it possible to progress as a nation when the majority of its people are systematically disadvantaged? When most of the human potential in a country is laid to waste, how can a society develop?

Modern human society started with bands, which evolved to tribes, followed by chiefdoms, and eventually the state. Given their size, states needed a shared imagination to rally around, a task that was well served by religion- which was able to connect a vast number of people. However, this progress came at a cost, as states created societies that were stratified, centralized in their decision making and

often practiced slavery on a large scale. As states became more modern, these costs were lowered, as decision making became more decentralized, slavery became outlawed and efforts were made to create a less stratified and more equal society. All of this resulted in more prosperity for more people. This transition to a modern state usually happened when the source of a state’s legitimacy shifted from religion to a constitution.

So where is India in this transition? Genetic evidence shows that the caste system in India started around 2000 years ago. The system was legitimized by religious Hindu texts as the Indian subcontinent transitioned to being governed by large states. In 1936, Ambedkar argued that if we are to annihilate caste, we must ‘destroy the religious notions on which caste is founded’, writing that ‘…the acts of the people are merely the results of their beliefs inculcated in their minds by the Shastras, and that people will not change their conduct until they cease to believe in the sanctity of the Shastras on which their conduct is founded’. He goes on to write, ‘What is your ideal society if you do not want caste… If you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. And why not?’(5) The opportunity to replace caste and religion with a modern constitution arose in 1950, but the act of replacing words in books did not erase the sanctity of the Shastras in people’s hearts. And what better evidence than the nation’s highest arbiter of the constitution, the Supreme Court, which in its ruling on Ayodhya in 2019, said that the core question in the case is ‘whether the disputed structure is (the) holy birthplace of Lord Ram as per the faith, trust and belief of Hindus’.

Every time we try to ‘forget’ and move on- whether from the destruction of a mosque, a riot, a mismanaged economy or a mismanaged pandemic, we only move in circles, because we refuse to erase the sanctity of the Hindu religion on which these misadventures rest. The progress of disadvantaged castes, Muslims and women in India are intertwined, because the source of their lack of empowerment is the same- the Hindu religion. Without the progress of these three groups, 70% of India’s population, there cannot be any meaningful progress in India. They ARE India. The same cannot be said of Hinduism.

Written by Aditya Khetan