Theme of a discussion: religion is a personal matter. There are obviously other ways of putting this assertion/question: religion should be a personal matter; religion cannot be a personal matter; can religion ever be only a personal matter? Then, we could delve into the choice of the word, ‘religion’: do we mean only organised religion? Do we mean faith? Do we mean shraddha (which overlaps with faith but is not an exact translation)? Do we mean dharma or sanskar? Do we mean spirituality? We can add an auxiliary question to the first one: by extension, is religion a political matter? Does it always have to be? Or can we somehow imagine religion being not just personal but a collective thing without being in any way political? What about the understanding that the personal is always political and vice-versa, that the political is — at the end of the day — always personal, as in how any political arrangement always affects every body and mind subject to that arrangement? For, if we accept this, then we have to accept that matters of faith, no matter how intimate, will affect matters of State and, equally, that the workings of the State will have an impact on our most intimate thoughts and prayers.

For an avowed atheist like Javed Akhtar, the matter is simple. When his grandmother asked him, “Beta, since you don’t want to be Muslim which other religion would you rather follow?” Akhtar replied, “Grandma, that’s like asking me if you don’t want to commit suicide in this way, which other way do you want to kill yourself? I don’t particularly want to kill myself in any way!” For an avowed communist or Leftist atheist, it means you follow no religion, you subscribe to no belief system that suggests any kind of conscious life, any continuation of your being or individual self after this biological existence. (Moving away from Akhtarsahab, the fact that for some people faith in this or that tradition of Marxist-origin or communist thinking can become akin to a religion can lead to a sort of blind, unquestioning faith is another matter.)

For a certain kind of atheist, all religions, all ‘god-sellers’, are false and counter-revolutionary; to reach widespread happiness and peace, humankind needs to do away with these religion afflictions, the sooner the better. For them all, religion needs to retreat from public life like a cancerous tumour shrinking from wide metastasis to a negligible private lesion to be finally processed out of the body of society by the anti-carcinogen treatment of history.

That may well be the desire of a growing number of people across the world but in today’s India we find ourselves deep in a tropical jungle of co-existing, often warring, belief-systems, many of which are in robust health. Aside from the blatantly organised conflict between Hindutva politicisation and a myriad non-Hindu belief systems, there is a huge ongoing tussle within what we call Hinduism (for the want of a better word) between what one could call the organic, intimate traditions and the war-level marketing of stockpiled GM sanatanisation product. Put more simply, there are diverse ways of believing and worshipping that have thrived on this land for millennia (undented by Islam or Christianity) that are now under direct threat from the very modern, chemically-produced Hindutva, which takes its central programming code from the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia and the Christian fundamentalism of the southern United States.

Apologists for this ersatz import dismiss any critique from within Hinduism as the complaints of elitist Vedantics who fear losing their privileged position to ‘puranic’ traditions of the soil. Yet, it is the central agenda of Hindutva to — i) capture and militarise for political power all public, collective celebrations and ceremonies such as Ram Navami, Rathyatra, Holi, Ram Leela, Ganesh Chaturthi, Durga Puja; ii) homogenise a multiple-deity culture into a Western-style religion that worships a single male god with all other deities being subservient to it; iii) stamp down or corrupt every maverick local tradition into the service of its country-enslaving project.

As we know, this agenda is coupled with truly bizarre narratives of contrived archaeological ‘finds’ and ‘evidence’, the growing demographic ‘menace’ of minority birth-rates, railing against conversions, the dismissal of lynchings and targeted murders of minorities and intellectuals, rapes and rape-celebrations as minor blips that will settle down as ‘the nation as a whole moves smoothly towards huge prosperity’.

History, too, becomes a primary target because just as the Death Star of Hindutva cannot bear the light of small planets of diverse and alternative worship, the sangh parivar cannot bear the younger citizens of this country becoming aware of the raj-collaborator role played by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other Hindutva outfits, even as M.K. Gandhi’s Congress and other secular parties struggled to rid us of British rule. Instead, we have a series of obfuscatory public spectacles, all with one repetitive theme — The Great Hero Ruler with Changing Backdrop, whether that backdrop is a new Parliament, a temple, a highway, a railway station or an octopus’s garden. Once it’s gone, this regime will go down in history for bringing a kind of plasticised shine and cleanliness meant to dazzle a populace mired in poverty, in filth, in weaponised ignorance, in the simultaneous degradation of the spirit and the physical environment.

There is a symmetry in this as well: for every mass rally held by MKG, he participated in dozens of small prayer meetings, all deeply religious, most of them without loudspeakers. These were spartan meetings, the austerity reflecting the poverty Gandhi was aiming to alleviate, the hard yards he and the other leaders walked in the fields, a daily tribute to the hours Indian peasants and labourers spent in the sun. The prayers Gandhi and his Congress people participated in were always for the inner atma, the intimate personal god, that he insisted resides in each and every one of us. For some like MKG, the belief that religion is a personal matter would be a given — whether you believe in God or not, whether you call it atma or your deepest conscience, your core belief is both an intensely personal matter and something that links you to your fellow humans.