Ram Madhav
February 1, 2025

Religion isn’t Opium

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(The article was originally published in Indian Express on February 01, 2025 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)

I was at an Indian community event in Dubai recently where a prominent business leader was being felicitated for a prestigious award he won. During the interaction, one of his friends asked an interesting question. He reminded that they used to be neighbours eight years ago, before the businessman moved to another part of Dubai. “I notice that you got your ears pierced and wearing earrings now. It was not there before. What is special?”, the gentleman asked. The business leader was a bit hesitant to answer but finally admitted that he started taking his cultural roots seriously and began wearing earrings since last few years. He also pointed to his son who too was having rings to his ears. The pan-Indian diaspora audience applauded appreciatively to the honest confession of one of the elite NRI patriarchs in UAE.

His answer prompted me to think what changed for the gentleman, in his sixties now, to suddenly see worth in his cultural identity and decide to wear it on his sleeves? Not just he, thousands of such high and mighty people today find their religious and cultural roots to be “cool” to display. Gone were the days of pseudo-secular hesitations. There is pride now, not only in one’s cultural inheritance but also in displaying it publicly.

That is one of the biggest transformations that the Modi Government has brought about in the last one decade, inadvertently or intentionally. One witnessed it a year ago when the Ram Temple was inaugurated at Ayodhya in January 2024. Practically who is who of the Indian elite were present on that day, many coming by their own charter planes. Situation was such that some charters had to be parked at as far off places as Kolkata since there was no parking space available at any other airport nearby. One can see a similar thing happening at the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj.

“Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes” – Religion is the opiate of the masses – wrote Karl Marx in 1843. “Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses”, he wrote. A century later, Mao said the same thing to Dalai Lama in 1952, but what he meant was that it served as a tool for social control by those in power.

What we witness in India today can hardly be called opium. From the man on the street to men in high places, every Indian is displaying the spirit of religiosity today. Classical liberals in the West considered three elements as defining features of liberalism – freedom from fear, hunger, and oppressive social norms. It is that spiritual freedom, a true liberalism, that these followers of Sanatana Dharma experience.

Hindu religious and cultural practices like Kumbh Mela symbolise that freedom. The tragedy that struck the Mela few days ago was most unfortunate. When loss of life happens, there will be criticism that one should take in one’s stride. The Uttar Pradesh government has made best possible arrangements. Incidentally, on the day of the tragedy, I was in Lucknow with the Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath. He didn’t sleep that entire night. I saw him hauling up the administration and calling up saints in Prayagraj with the request that they delayed their holy dip and allowed the general public to have it first. Prime Minister Modi too repeatedly called him to enquire about the safety of the pilgrims. Chief Minister told me that on all the five sacred days of holy dip during the Kumbh, no VIP movement was being allowed so that people could go about their religious chores without any hindrance. He even requested highest constitutional authorities in Delhi to not chose those days for their visit to the Kumbh Mela. In spite of all this, tragedy struck.

When the first Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj after independence was held in 1954, the godfather of Indian secularism, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was there to personally oversee the arrangements. He even took a dip at the Sangam, but later clarified that it was just a dip, not a “holy dip”. In front of Nehru’s own eyes, stampede occurred and almost 1,000 people lost their lives. Shaken by that incident, Nehru insisted that VIPs shouldn’t be allowed at the Mela.

However, Nehru did not outrightly reject the Mela or such customs in Hindu tradition.  He insisted that “It is the quality of thought and not its object which determines its sources and allows us to decide whether or not it emanates from religion. If it turns fearlessly towards the search for truth at all costs with single minded sincerity for any sacrifice, I should call it religious; for it presupposes faith in an end to human effort higher than the life of existing society and even higher than the life of humanity as a whole. In this sense skepticism can also join the march of the Grand Army of the religious soul”, and sheepishly admitted that “I am prepared to be a humble camp-follower of the Grand Army”.

Nehru was a skeptic, torn between his true soul that Gandhi sought to rekindle and the imbibed European false notions. He imposed that skepticism on generations of elite Indians which Modi successfully tried to erase. This skepticism can be seen in the politics of Nehru’s current heirs. But it also appears to have become a conviction with leaders like Mallikharjun Kharge, who question the very faith of Indians, and ridicule practises like the holy dip.

For millions of Indians there is no such skepticism anymore. That’s why, despite tragedy, Mela numbers are going up. When Nehru went seven decades ago, there were four million at the Mela. India’s population quadrupled since then, but Mela is expected to witness 100 times higher footfall this year. For those millions, it is not political tourism, but a liberating spiritual journey of the “Chiti” – awakened inner soul. Wearing a slavish political lens, one can never get it.

Published by Ram Madhav

Member, Board of Governors, India Foundation

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