Caught in a shadowy time between tradition and globalisation, post liberalised India’s fascination for godmen continues.
My first instinct was to laugh. Only in India would a seer dream of a long dead king telling him about buried gold.
Only in India would this be taken seriously enough to send the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) scurrying off to unearth hidden treasure in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh. Only in India would this set off a frenzy of treasure seekers who reportedly hold two priests at gunpoint while they dig a temple and a fort in an adjoining village looking for the yellow metal.
One week and a whole lot of mud later, culture minister Chandresh Kumari Katoch has now said the ASI is not looking for gold at all but weapons used by Indians in 1857. Indeed.
Caught in a shadowy time between tradition and globalisation, post liberalised India’s fascination for godmen continues. Namita Bhandare writes.
My first instinct was to laugh. Only in India would a seer dream of a long dead king telling him about buried gold.
Only in India would this be taken seriously enough to send the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) scurrying off to unearth hidden treasure in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh. Only in India would this set off a frenzy of treasure seekers who reportedly hold two priests at gunpoint while they dig a temple and a fort in an adjoining village looking for the yellow metal.
One week and a whole lot of mud later, culture minister Chandresh Kumari Katoch has now said the ASI is not looking for gold at all but weapons used by Indians in 1857. Indeed.
The story has already begun to die down and in another week will, in all likelihood, be relegated to yet another amusing footnote in India’s enduring fascination with godmen and their ‘miracles’.
It’s a fascination that is not limited to villages in Uttar Pradesh. The seer, Shobhan Sarkar is said to have a fairly large following including the BJP’s national president Rajnath Singh.
The BJP’s prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi first lambasted the UPA government saying, “The whole world is making fun of us” and then, after being snubbed by the swami, clarified that he saluted his sacrifices.
Elsewhere, Asaram Bapu, currently in jail on sexual assault charges, has found such vocal defenders as BJP leader Uma Bharti who has declared that he is being ‘punished’ for being anti-Congress.
What is faith for one person is superstition or blind faith for another. Followers of the late Sathya Sai Baba believe he was not a godman but a living God. His funeral in 2011 had nearly half a million people in attendance including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
When a supposedly secular State confers any degree of importance to one self-styled godman, it confers legitimacy to those who are charlatans. India’s politicians have every right to follow the faith or godman or superstitious belief of their choosing.
But that devotion must remain private. Middlemen like Chandraswami or Dhirendra Brahmachari have no place in the public realm. When a minister can order an ASI excavation on the basis of a swami’s dream, what results is not only a misuse of public funds but it also sends the wrong signal in a country awash in the sort of gullibility that has turned the swami business into a lucrative empire.
Modern, globalised India seems to have lost none of its obsession with godmen. When chief ministers look for ‘auspicious’ swearing-in dates, Bollywood producers seek ‘good’ dates for muhurats and well-off Indians speed dial astrologers with fingers sprouting ‘lucky’ stones before constructing vaastu-compliant homes, you could laugh these off as individual eccentricities.
Unfortunately and tragically, they find resonance in a vast swathe of India where parents flock to mercenary gurus for cures for ailments from cancer to epilepsy, women and the elderly are denied proper healthcare and taken to quacks instead and vulnerable children are abused by predatory godmen.
It is when the poorest and most vulnerable become prey to exploitation that we need to worry. In the past decade, dozens of women have been tortured and killed for being witches in states like Jharkhand. This is why Narendra Dabholkar campaigned against superstition for 18 years before being assassinated on August 20.
Caught in a shadowy time between tradition and globalisation, post liberalised India’s fascination for godmen continues. Partly this has been made easier with made-for-TV swamis that have made it possible for a Baba Ramdev to build a reportedly Rs 1,500 crore empire.
Partly it’s because it brings an easily digestible religion straight into living rooms. And partly it helps assuage any residual guilt at becoming increasingly acquisitive in a material world.
At a time when aspirational India wants desperately to be cosmopolitan and yet retain a sense of pride in its culture, the appeal of godmen to the elite and unlettered alike shows no sign of waning. And unlike the goings-on in Unnao, there’s nothing funny about this.
The national conversation, dominated by temples, toilets, has no patience for stories of Dalit women who face humiliation daily. Given the measly media coverage, their stories cause no outrage. Namita Bhandare writes.
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The national conversation, dominated by temples, toilets, has no patience for stories of Dalit women who face humiliation daily. Given the measly media coverage, their stories cause no outrage. Complicit in this are the police, loath to file FIRs against politically connected and rich criminals.
Away from the din of ‘dehati aurat’ and ‘escape velocity’, 45 Dalit women are talking about the daily humiliation that is their life. The women and, in some cases men who are deposing on their behalf, have come to Delhi from eight states across the country, and to them it doesn’t matter if it’s the Congress or the BJP or a regional party or some new-fangled alliance that is in power. For them the story never changes.
From East Champaran, Bihar, not far from where Mahatma Gandhi launched satyagraha, a landless labourer tells of how his wife was beaten to death for asking for Rs 400 that was due to her as daily wages. From district Dausa, Rajasthan an educated Dalit woman, an elected member of her village’s panchayat, tells of how she was not allowed to sit on a chair on a podium during a Republic Day function because ‘upper caste women in the audience were sitting on the ground’.
From district Patna, Bihar, a husband talks of a squabble between two nine-year-old boys, one Dalit and the other upper caste, and its consequences when the family of the upper caste boy decides to ‘teach them a lesson’. They do this by stripping the mother and dragging her through the village.
When the grandmother and younger daughter intervene, they are thrashed. The mother runs from house to house, naked, begging for help. Nobody comes forward; they are too frightened. Finally, the village sarpanch steps in and a bystander offers the woman her shawl. A first information report (FIR) is registered, but the accused get bail. “My wife lives in the village, knowing that her tormentors are free, that nobody helped her and that they have all witnessed her shame. But what choice does she have?” asks the husband.
In Gujarat’s Mehsana district, cooperatives won’t buy milk from women who own ‘Dalit’ cows. In Bihar, a young bride is beaten up by priests after being denied entry into a temple. And in Haryana the gang-rape of minor Dalit girls by upper caste men is now so routine that in some districts girls are being pulled out of school and kept home.
Rural Dalit women face a double whammy: discriminated by caste as well as patriarchy; poor and illiterate; ignored by city-based feminists and non-government organisations; often singled out for rape by upper caste men as a way to ‘humiliate’ the entire community and keep it in its ‘place’.
If they try to assert themselves by going to school or asking for wages or contesting panchayat elections, they become vulnerable to what Asha Kowtal of the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM) calls ‘backlash violence’.
The national conversation, dominated by temples, toilets, has no patience for these stories. Given measly column centimetres, if at all, in newspapers, they cause no outrage or candlelight processions. Complicit in this conspiracy of silence are the police, loath to file FIRs against politically connected and economically influential criminals. The legal system grinds along with notorious delays.
Medical reports are botched up by compliant doctors. And victims of the worst crimes are liable to ‘compromise’ since they depend on the dominant castes for their livelihood.
To come forward and fight a system so loaded against you requires incredible, boundless courage. Seated in the audience is a young girl. When we get talking she tells me she was raped last year in August by 12 upper-caste Jat men in village Dabra, Haryana.
The police filed an FIR only after her father committed suicide.
She tells me that four of the 12 were never arrested while another four have been acquitted. Still she fights on. A year after she was raped, the girl from Dabra is doing her BA, studying music, art and Sanskrit and says she wants to become a lawyer.
“I am the first Dalit girl to fight against the upper castes in my village,” she says. “And I will fight for all the other girls so that this never happens again.”
At stake is not financial compensation or vengeance but dignity.
