Situating Religion in its Place: The Indian Secular Project after Sabarimala

Lakhs of Ayyappa devotees witnessed the Makara Jyothi in the evening of January 14 this year at the Sabarimala Temple. According to newspaper reports, the event was also attended by the Devaswom minister of Kerala government, members of the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), and its executive and administrative officers. Makara Jyothi is the culmination of a two-day ritual procession with a box containing a diamond crown, golden bracelets, necklaces and a sword. After the procession arrives at the temple, priests perform arathi and adorn the deity with these ornaments, which actually are the private property of the royal family of Pandalam. Processions of this kind are fairly common in the religious geography of Hinduism, as in the Kullu Dusshera and the Chharhi Mubarak procession to the Amarnath cave.

However, at the Ayyappa temple something exceptional happens at the end of the procession, when the deity receives the royal jewels. According to the official website of the TDB, “At the same moment a brilliant light of amazing magnificence appears in the north-eastern side to the temple at the opposite mountain in a place called Kantamala (the home of devas and rishis). It is believed that this brilliant flame of light is the arathi performed by the rishis and the devas.” This is the famous Makara Jyothi, whose short-lived sighting is the divine boon for lakhs of devotees, who engage in months-long penance, and travel hundreds of kilometres for this one benediction. Except that this sacred light is actually a man-made affair, a fire lit by forest officials of the state government at Poonabalamedu, a mountaintop a few kilometres away. This was publicly acknowledged by the chairman of the TDB in 2011.  In a newspaper report he was quoted as saying, “It is known to everybody that Makara Jyothi is a fire lit by men at Ponnabalamedu and TDB also recognises this. The Board will, however, not run a campaign to propagate it as man-made as there is a religious belief behind it into which the temple board does not intend to interfere.”

One hundred and two devotees had died in a stampede during the Makara Jyothi celebrations that year. The nature of Makara Jyothi had become an issue of public interest after the Kerala High Court enquired about it. 

The Makara Jyothi of Sabarimala, perceived as divine by devotees but lit by a department of the Government of Kerala, is an example of the entangled relationship between religious faith and a supposedly secular state in contemporary India.

Another instance of this entanglement are the travails of Kanakadurga, who was one of the two women to visit the Ayyappa temple under police protection after the ban on women aged between 10 and 50 years was declared illegal by the Supreme Court. Durga was thrown out of her house by her family for exercising a legal right, which was sacrilege for her family members. According to some reports, she has taken the help of village court to get back to her house.

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The two instances manifest different aspects of the strained relationship between the state and religion in the country. If the first shows state to be supportive of even ‘irrational’ beliefs of the faithful, in the second it seems to be the last resort for someone to gain her secular domestic rights against her ‘religious’ family. The contradiction is present in the split 2-1 decision of the Supreme Court too, regarding Sabarimala, which shows how two diametrically opposite conclusions can be derived from the same constitutional principles.

The ethical and political foundations of a modern, democratic secular state are very different from religion. All the principles of a democratic start - rights of citizenship granted equally to all citizens, the requirement that rulers should be accountable to the body of citizens, or that the criminal justice system and the exercise of state power in practical matters should follow evidence based rational procedures are considered autonomous principles requiring no separate metaphysical or religious support. The secularity of the state resides in the requirement that if any conflict emerges between these principles and a religious belief or practice, then the former get precedence. No secular polity can live with confusion at this level of basic principles.

Religious Reform and the Indian Secular Compact

The recent events with regard to Sabarimala indicate problems at another level. These are related to the changed nature of religion in contemporary India. Popular discourses on Indian secularism tend to see it primarily in terms of the protection of minority rights. While minority rights indeed need protection from majoritarian demands, a majority-minority framework is misleading. A polity can remain secular only as long as the majority of its citizens, irrespective of their religious or community affiliations, accept a minimum set of secular imperatives. Secularism cannot exist outside the social world of citizens. And if the majority of Indians are religious, then Indian secularism should be best understood as a compact between democratic aspirations of ordinary Indians and their religious sensibilities.

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A key condition for this compact, which emerged during the freedom movement, was the presence of internal reform within religion. The impulse for religious reform subjected at least some of the religious beliefs and practices to scrutiny, and tried to create awareness against iniquitous practices and irrational belief systems. This meant that religion could, at least asymptomatically be imagined to be getting closer to the world view of a democratic state.

A number of leaders from the Hindu community like Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Dayanand Saraswati, Gokhale, Gandhi and Ambedkar- the last one before his decision to leave Hinduism in 1935- made internal reform of Hinduism an important part of their religious, social and political agendas. Even while Ambedkar renounced Hinduism, he kept himself within the framework of reform, as he found a reformed Buddhism most consistent with the principles of a democratic society. Such currents were present in other religions too. Only the Self Respect movement of Periyar, revolutionary terrorist currents following Bhagat Singh and the Communist movement placed themselves completely outside the religious terrain.

There is no denying that in parallel, and often in opposition to the reformist and avowedly atheistic currents, there were also fundamentalist currents, associated partly with Tilak, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, and similar currents in other religions, which did not consider internal reform to be important.

Indian secularism is largely an agreement between two parts of popular Hindu social consciousness. The nominally democratic state claiming to represent all Indians took on the role of pushing reform within Hinduism, to make it increasingly consistent with the demands of a democratic society. In the bargain, Hinduism and other religions got significant state support for festivals, pilgrimages and the public administrators of shrines like the TDB of Kerala. Religions not only retained their space in the public sphere, but its intensity and scale even increased with time. The latter development was not anticipated by Indian secularists, but that is how it panned out.

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The abolition of untouchability and opening of religious places to erstwhile untouchables, the Hindu Code Bill and the 1965 decision of the Supreme Court outlawing the ban on dalits by the Swami Narayan Sect from its temples (the sect which runs Akshardham temples), were some of the landmark moments of post-independence Indian secularism. However, an honest appraisal of its tenure must also take note of its dark underbelly. While the Indian state granted reservations in jobs and public offices to erstwhile untouchables to help them overcome effects of religion sanctioned persecution, this very step also ensured that they will be reluctant to leave the Hindu fold.

It is little noted in the ‘social justice’ discourse on reservations, that dalits who followed Ambedkar into Buddhism actually forsook all reservation benefits. Dalit Buddhists were out of reservation net till about few decades ago. In effect, a Hindu dalit does not enjoy a ‘free’ right of conscience, as they perforce forego all reservation benefits when converting to Christianity or Islam. Another failure of the Indian law was the continuing use of the colonial law banning books etc. for supposedly ‘hurting’ religious sentiments. Indian constitution makers also allowed cow protection under the guise of secular idea of scientific improvement of livestock.

Hindutva and the New Religiosity

Indian secularism is fraying because religion is no longer what it was when its compact came into being. Hindutva mobilisations have played a great role in it. The destruction of Babri Mosque in an open and public attack by mobs organised by Hindutva groups, and the inactivity of all organs of the Indian state during those crucial hours, was the nadir of the Indian secular state. This, however, came about because a number of popular practices associated with Hindu religion had changed over preceding decades.

Hindutva actually rode a wave of increasing religiosity of Hindus, and managed to give it a form most suitable for its political ends. One consequence is the absence of any internal reform and the refusal to submit religion to public scrutiny or reasoned debate. Instead, a blind faith in the superiority of religious virtue over public morality has come to dominate the moral economy of the religious. Illegal occupation of public resources for religion is rampant, as is the aggressive occupation of public space for innumerable pilgrimages that dot the religious calendar in different parts of the country. Subtle changes have also occurred in how the practices and beliefs of the faithful are related to other parts of their personal lives. Religious acts are often driven by considerations of the self, of personal gains or worries, rather than flowing out of a sacred world view. Hence, adherence to new practices, deities, sects, babas and gurus is fairly common.

It is also fruitful to relate the character of religious faith in contemporary India to other trends in the public lives of Indians. Take the case Makara Jyothi believed to be divine by Ayyappa followers, but is actually organised and lit by the forest officials and the TDB of the Kerala government. Rationalists often consider such phenomenon to be the handiwork of scheming charlatans, who dupe the gullible faithful for monetary or other gain. This rationalist explanation does not match with the complexity of the conditions which lead humans to their eligious beliefs. Would the Ayyappa faithful discard their belief in the divinity of Makara Jyothi if they become aware of its truth? Assuming that they would readily disabuse themselves of a false belief, misses the whole point of religiosity.

Gandhi did claim that his spirituality is related to truth. There can be multiple meanings of truth, and it is clear that the ethical dimension which Gandhi attached to truth won’t be accepted by most rationalists. However, there is little to be debated about obvious falsehoods. And often, people believing, or spreading falsehoods actually are aware of it. When Narendra Modi declared in an election rally in Gujarat in 2017 that former PM Manmohan Singh and others were conspiring with the ISI of the Pakistan to get him removed, he pretty much knew, or should have known from his access to country’s intelligence agencies, that his claim was a blatant lie. He persisted with it because his aim was not truth, but something else. The same can be said about fake news, or trolling on the social media, and about what passes off as religious belief. The faithful want to believe, not because what they believe is true, but due to other things they gain from it. Truth or falsehood is not a criterion for them.

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The Indian secular bargain is not working because one of the parties does not believe it is worth the sacrifice. The old secularism has run its course. Yet, if Hindutva assault on minorities and democratic institutions of the country has to be warded off, Indian state has to remain secular. It is in this context that alternative paths to secularism need to be seriously explored. For example, it needs to be questioned if the state sponsored reform of religion serves any purpose anymore.

An open and public debate among the faithful and others about undemocratic and disdainful aspects of religious beliefs and practices may be more conducive for the development of secular values, than courtroom arguments and legislative diktats. Simultaneously, a serious debate needs to be started on the state support to public presence of religion. Who among the so called faithful gain from it, and at whose cost? It is also essential to expand the availability of secular spaces to individuals. If religious communities oppose the reform of family codes, provisions of civil marriage need to be given larger publicity and their use made easy.

Finally, instead of focusing on single issue demands, the secular critique of existing religious practices needs to forge an umbilical unity with wider movements for the democratisation of society and state. Secularism can gain traction only when the movements against caste, patriarchy, oppression of minorities, adivasis and regional identities, and for workers’ rights understand secularism as essential for their project of building a better India. Only then it can be hoped that internal reform within religions will gain sufficient impetus to come to a new secular compact.

Sanjay Kumar teaches Physics at St. Stephen’s College, and is associated with the People’s Alliance for Democracy and Secularism. The views are personal.