The defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s last general elections in 2009 was greeted with relief by secularists and democrats everywhere. Not entirely unreasonably, many saw it as evidence that Indian voters have rejected the toxic idea of India as a Hindu nation peddled by the BJP and the rest of the Hindu right “family” (or the Sangh Parivar). The consensus among political pundits is that piety is no longer driving politics, as it did during the mass mobilizations through the 1990s that led to destruction of a 500-year-old mosque in Ayodhya and brought the BJP to power. The forces of secularism and communal harmony are said to have won the day, at least for now.
Market reforms and globalization are singled out as the stars of this saga. Both the friends and critics of the BJP have come to agree that the fervour for making money in India’s roaring economy has doused the flames of Hindu nationalism in the hearts of the middle-class voters who were the mainstay of Hindu nationalism in the past. The market economy, energized by global tie-ups and foreign investments, we are told, will not only rid India of the menace of communal violence, it will also dissolve caste and other hierarchies that have shackled it for ages.
The God Market challenges this gospel of globalization. Far from eroding the public presence and political power of religion, this book argues, globalization and neoliberalism in India are bringing the state and the business world closer to Hinduism, the religion of the majority. The state–temple–corporate complex is enabling a resurgence of popular religiosity that is brimming with majoritarian and nationalistic sentiments.
This extended introduction for the Monthly Review Press edition of The God Market is written with a hope that it will help international readers connect India’s story with worldwide trends. I have taken this opportunity to bring in new data and new political developments to update the basic argument of the book, which was first published in India in 2009.
Let us begin with India’s last general election in 2009, which was in progress when the Indian edition of The God Market went into print. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) lost votes, and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), with Manmohan Singh as the prime minister, came to power.
The story about how the markets defeated the BJP in these elections goes as follows: Hindutva (literally, Hinduness), the ideology of India as a Hindu nation, used to appeal to the urban middle classes and youth back in the bad-old days of the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the days when these groups were feeling beleaguered and angry due to the failures of Nehruvian socialism and “pseudosecularism,” which, in their view, gave undue privileges to the lower castes and Muslim and Christian minorities. But in the nearly two decades of economic liberalisation and foreign investments that began in the early1990s, India has witnessed a great burst of economic growth. As a result, the Hindu middle classes are angry no more. Far from feeling beleaguered and discriminated against, they have become more cosmopolitan, more self-confident, and more willing to take on global challenges and seek out global opportunities. Indeed, so confident is the Great Indian Middle Class that it has claimed the twenty-first century as India’s century. And so the critics ask: What use can such forward-looking people possibly have for the past glories of Hinduism that the stodgy old men in khaki shorts keep harping upon?
This explanation of why BJP lost has been articulated most forcibly by Swapan Dasgupta, a prominent center-right public intellectual.1 Dasgupta leads a new breed of conservative journalists and intellectuals who oppose whatever remains of the Nehru-Gandhi brand of socialism and secularism. They are keen on popularizing a strident defence of the virtues of capitalism within a socially conservative Hindu cultural matrix, which they accept as a way of life that binds the country together. They want the BJP to “drop the H-word,” since Hindutva has become too loaded with bigotry and has lost all appeal for the middle classes. They would like BJP to tone down the openly anti-minority rhetoric and turn Hindutva into a vaguely emotional idea without any concrete political demands. Only this, they believe, will enable BJP to evolve into a “normal” pro-market, pro-defence, anti-appeasement (of religious and caste minorities), socially conservative, right-of-center party.
By now, the notion that the ideology of Hindutva is passé, and that India has “moved on” to bigger and better things has become a standard trope in the mainstream media and public discourse. There are, of course, supporters of the Sangh Parivar who don’t buy this story. They think that BJP lost because it betrayed Hindutva, and that it was not “Hindu chauvinist enough.”2 This remains a minority view, popular among true believers, but not often heard in the mainstream.
A similar story about the liberating potential of neoliberalism is being told from the opposite end of the political spectrum, made up of ex-untouchable (or Dalit) intellectuals, most of whom are no friends of the BJP. Influential members of this circle, notably the journalist-activist Chandra Bhan Prasad, have claimed that economic liberalisation, fostered by globalization, is improving the living standards of Dalits, liberating them from the caste norms that consigned them to degrading work for generations.3 They derive their evidence exclusively from two districts of Uttar Pradesh that have access to labour markets for semiskilled work in Delhi, Lucknow, and other cities, while ignoring significant evidence that the incorporation of Dalits in the unorganised sector is taking place only on extremely exploitative terms, without any legal protection to speak of. The markets’ blow against caste norms in employment is naturally seen as a victory for secularism, because by destroying the material conditions of caste hierarchy, the markets are seen as loosening the hold of Brahminical justifications for caste. Thus at least some friends of Dalits, like the friends of BJP, have come to embrace the gospel of globalised markets in the name of upward mobility and annihilation of caste barriers.
India is not the only country where the global spread of market capitalism is supposed to be exorcising the demons of religion- inspired fanaticism and retrograde, time-worn traditions.
The globalization of Islam, along with the globalization of democratic aspirations and new technologies, is said to have ushered in the Arab Spring, the movement for democratic rights and economic justice that is sweeping through the Arab world. The largely secular nature of the Arab Spring and the relative marginalization of al-Qaeda and radical Islamic parties in the mass demonstrations are seen as evidence that a new “global generation” has emerged in the Arab world that is more interested in living under Islamic laws than in creating an Islamic state.4 Global movements of people, ideas, and markets are credited with defeating political Islam, while energizing a more personalized, less dogmatic, and more experiential version of Islam in the civil society. This new popular Islam accepts the legitimacy of secular states and limits itself to the personal and cultural realms alone. This thesis of “post-Islamism” is advocated most energetically by the renowned French scholar Olivier Roy in his influential books including Globalized Islam and the more recent, Holy Ignorance. (Notice the parallels between Roy’s post-Islamism and the post-Hindutva argument described above.)
Others single out neoliberal economic policies for defeating political Islam. Parts of the Islamic world— Dubai, Turkey, Malaysia, and even Egypt and Iran—are cited to support the proposition that “global capitalism is the single best hope for combating Islamic extremism,” as the American-Iranian author Vali Nasr put it in his recent book, The Forces of Fortune. Nasr holds up Turkey under the Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) as the model for the rest of the Islamic world. The secret of Turkey’s success, in Nasr’s opinion, lies in its embrace of IMF-imposed market reforms back in the 1980s. The opening up of markets found great support from the deeply pious and deeply capitalist-minded middle-class entrepreneurs from small towns. It is thanks to these “Islamic Calvinists” that the ruling AKP has been able to embrace a soft Islam, a middle path between the extremes of radical secularism and radical Islamism. Nasr believes that a greater opening of the entire Arab world to global markets, combined with the dismantling of command economies, is the key to fighting Islamic extremism. (Nasr completely ignores the fact that it is the failure of IMF-imposed market reforms, especially the corruption and inequities left in their wake, that have fuelled the Arab Spring.) In a reversal of the idea that McWorld begets jihad, as put forth by Benjamin Barber in his well-known 1995 book Jihad vs McWorld, Nasr hails the charms of McWorld for seducing potential jihadis into shopping malls.
Those who believe in the moderating powers of markets assure us, as the political scientist Alan Wolfe did in a 2008 essay, that “religion’s priority of belief and secularism’s commitment to individual rights are not in opposition,” as most religions are adapting to the capitalist world by becoming “prosperity religions.”5 The aim of these prosperity religions is not to question the morality of acquiring wealth, but rather to bless the believers into thinking that they can become rich as well by the grace of god. Thus, Wolfe assures us, the rising religious fervour in many parts of the world is nothing to worry about, as it safely feeds into the fervour for making money and getting rich.
The new evangelists of prosperity religions cheer the fact that, from China to Russia to Turkey, God Is Back, as the title of a 2009 book by two writers for The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, declares. The same two forces—namely, competition and choice—that have let loose a “hurricane of capitalism” upon the world are also creating conditions where more and more people are “taking cover under the canopy of religion.” Those turning to religions are not the meek and the desperate who are seeking “the heart in a heartless world” of oppression and soulless commerce, as Karl Marx had predicted. Rather, even the most successful and prosperous are choosing to embrace religions as “a go-ahead thing to do.” The old secular pieties about modernization leading to secularization have been rendered obsolete by the force of markets and competition, as organized religions have adopted the competitive ethos of the markets and individual choice, and as people have learned to blend their spiritual and material aspirations. Gods and organized religions that celebrate them, Micklethwait and Wooldridge insist, are perfectly compatible with modernity, as long as they are freely chosen and as long as they don’t get mixed up with politics and state power. The authors admire greatly the American genius for creating a right balance between freedom of religion and freedom from religion. They welcome the global spread of American style capitalism as a force for universalizing the American style securlarism, with its religion-friendly public sphere.6
A similar theme of celebration is struck by Timothy Shah and Monica Toft in their 2006 Foreign Policy essay, “Why God Is Winning.” They look at the resurgence of religiosity around the world as a sign of “global expansion of freedom” showing that whenever and wherever “people get a voice, they want to talk about God.” They acknowledge that the growth in religiosity is not without significant political influence on all levels of politics, from voting choices, welfare, and health policies at home, to issues of war and peace abroad. But this, they believe, is as it should be: democracies should reflect people’s values, including their religious beliefs.7
Others, such as Robert Wright, the author of The Evolution of God, go even further, proclaiming that globalization is carrying out the expansion of moral imagination that was kick-started by the Abrahamic God. Just as Christianity and Islam learned to assimilate pagan gods and tribes, global economy is setting up “non-zero-sum games” that allow people to include distant strangers in faraway lands in their circle of moral concern.8 So, according to this line of thought, when the whole world becomes interlinked through trade, we will all learn to become more tolerant, and a great concord of civilisations will ensue. Globalization, in other words, is doing God’s work. (This celebration of global tolerance fails to account for the fact that globalization is not a non-zero-sum game: it produces very clear winners and losers.)
From this very brief overview, one can safely surmise that most observers of contemporary religions tend to converge on the following two propositions:
• One, that the current round of globalization is accompanied with a resurgence of religions all around the world. The world today is practically bubbling with religious passions, which have put all existing secularisms on the defensive.
• Two, that this religious revival is politically benign. The resurgence of religiosity worldwide is not a threat to secular democracies because most organized religions are learning to adapt to—and exploit—the new institutional opportunities created by modern democratic capitalism and modern communication technologies for their own self-propagation. As Harvey Cox, the well-known Harvard scholar of religion put it, in this era when the market has taken on the attributes of God, “traditional religions seem content to become its acolytes or to be absorbed into its pantheon, much as the old Nordic deities … eventually settled for a diminished but secure status as Christian saints.”9
This process of adaptation to the markets and popular culture is seen as de-politicizing religions, reconciling them with secular states and consumer cultures. So, even if globalization is bringing about a resurgence of religions, it is also able to tame them.
The God Market challenges this celebratory perspective on God and globalization, as it applies to India.
It acknowledges that in India, too, as in most of the world, secularism is retreating, the “gods are back” in ever greater force in the private and public spheres, and that “globalization is making India more Hindu” as the subtitle of the book declares. Using recent facts and figures, this book illustrates how the new, largely Hindu middle classes are successfully blending their religiosity with growing appetites for wealth and profits. It grants the proposition that neoliberal globalization is indeed proving to be good for the gods in India.
But this book does not celebrate the growing visibility of Hinduism in the Public Square, or the blending of piety and capitalism. Instead, it questions the naïve faith that market fundamentalism can and will tame religious fundamentalism. It challenges the complacent idea that the “return” of faith in public life will revive the traditional sources of tolerance, community, and belonging that secularism is said to have driven out. It raises critical questions about the appropriateness of a Public Square saturated with the sacred signs and symbols of the majority religion in a country as multi-religious as India.
The God Market demonstrates that neoliberal globalization is, in fact, creating an institutional matrix that is enabling Hindu nationalism to embed itself deeper into the pores of the civil society, the state, and the business sector. Despite the recent electoral setback, neoliberalism and globalization are friends of Hindu nationalism, and not its foes, as is often made out by some.
The main theses of the book can be summed up in three simple propositions:
• First, the demand for religious services—from worship ceremonies at home and in public, visits to temples, pilgrimages, etc.—is growing, especially among the urban, educated, and largely Hindu middle classes who are benefitting the most from neoliberalism and globalization.
• Second, the supply of these religious services that cater to the majority community is being facilitated by the neoliberal policies of the state. The pro-market reforms have brought the state and the corporate sector in a closer collaboration with the religious establishment, giving a great boost to the already thriving God market. Economic liberalization, in other words, is altering state-religion relations in a way that is making India less secular.
• Third, the net result of this is the mindset of majoritarianism, which identifies the national culture of India with Hinduism. Gods and goddesses sacred to Hindus have come to stand for the nation itself, while the line between political and religious rituals is being eroded. An uncritical adoration of Hindu heritage, along with barely concealed contempt for non-Hindu minorities, especially Muslims, has become the norm in public culture. Hindu nationalism, this book argues, is becoming a banal, everyday affair in the public life of the country.
This is not to say that neoliberal reforms and globalization are creating these circuits of demand and supply where none existed before. The process of domesticating and Hinduizing modernity did not begin with the current phase of globalization: it goes back to the Hindu Renaissance that started in the nineteenth century. The mixing up of Hindu idiom and political mobilizations is nothing new either: Mahatma Gandhi himself refused to recognize any wall separating his faith from his politics. The middle-class religiosity that revels in ritualism, idolworship, fasts, pilgrimage, and other routines of popular theistic Hinduism was by no means absent from the cultural milieu of the educated middle and upper classes that came of age in the more “socialist” and “secular” era that was ended by market-friendly reforms in the early 1990s.
So, all these aspects of contemporary Hinduism that The God Market describes existed before the market reforms. However, market reforms have opened up more spaces in the public sphere into which popular and nationalistic expressions of Hinduism and traditional Hindu “sciences” can penetrate. Contemporary Hinduism, both in its more spiritualist and more devotional forms, can thus be seen to have adapted quite well to the new consumer lifestyles, exploiting the new institutional spaces opened up by the public-private partnerships in higher education, tourism, and health and welfare schemes. It is this synergy between a nationalistic Hinduism, capitalism, and globalization that this book aims to capture.
The rest of this introduction briefly summarizes the four myths about India’s much vaunted democratic secularism that this book challenges.
First, let us look at the myth of Hindutva’s decline.
Has Hindu nationalism been defeated by the new cosmopolitanism ushered in by global markets? Is the Sangh Parivar really ready and willing to bid farewell to the “H-word”? If Hindutva is really a dying ideology, should Indian secularists learn to love neoliberalism as a friend and ally?
Well, it depends. It depends upon what we mean by religious nationalism in the Indian context.
If we see Hindu nationalism primarily through the prism of communalism—that is, mutual antagonism between religious communities which has historically expressed itself in violent riots—then the answer to above question is a qualified “yes.” Overt, large-scale rioting on the streets, the kind that erupted in Mumbai after the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, or in Gujarat after the train-burning in Godhara in 2002, has decidedly gone down. Even serious provocations like the Pakistan-backed terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008 failed to provoke Hindu-Muslim violence. Indeed, social scientists predict that “with rising politics of aspirations, which India is beginning to see as it moves economically forward … communal riots will be a matter of India’s past, not its future. It will be a great surprise if communal riots return to India in a big way, as the nation rises up the income ladder.”10
Any overt violence that leads to a breakdown of law and order is not good for business, and no one knows that better than those who make a living through business. Thus those upwardly mobile Indians who are benefiting from offshored, information-technology jobs and the expanded consumer choices made possible by foreign investment and trade definitely do not want to create an impression of religious bigotry and political volatility in India. Little wonder, then, that the largely Hindu middle classes deserted the BJP in the last election: they do not want to risk bloody riots in Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi, and other centres of commerce by flogging the dead horse of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, or by getting exercised over a dargah in Karnataka or Christian-versus-Hindu issues elsewhere. That is the reason that even those who admire Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi—which includes captains of Indian industry, well-known journalists, Bollywood stars, and even Gandhian activists like Anna Hazare—advise him to showcase his state’s economic development but tone down his anti-Muslim invective. That is the reason why the business press cheered when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition won in 2009.
But as any careful India-watcher will be able to ascertain, the decline of large-scale mass violence has not ruled out smaller-scale acts of violence, and even acts of terrorism planned and carried out by small gangs hidden from the public view. For example, barely within a month of Congress winning all the seven parliamentary seats from Delhi in May 2009, handing BJP one of its worst defeats from India’s capital, Hindus came out in large numbers to violently oppose the construction of a mosque in a middle-class suburb of Delhi.11 Sporadic attacks on churches, too, have continued in Delhi, Karnataka, and other parts of the country.
An even more dangerous development is that of Hindutva terrorism aimed at Muslim shrines, mosques and residential areas that has been gaining momentum through the last decade or so—the glory days of “India Shining” when radical Hindu nationalism is supposed to have lost momentum. With the arrest of bomb-makers and activists drawn from the ranks of Hindu holy-men and women, ex-servicemen, and radical Hindus, it is clear that Hindutva is by no means renouncing its heritage of communal violence.12 Yet, such is the power of stereotypes that pervade the public consciousness in India— “All terrorists are Muslims,” “Hinduism is a religion of peace,” and “Hindu terrorism is an oxymoron”—that Muslims are held responsible for attacking their own mosques and neighbourhoods! There are always ready-made answers for why Muslims would bomb their own communities—they could be Pakistani agents trying to foment communal riots, they could be Wahabi purists who hate India’s tolerant Islam, and so on. Scores of Muslim youth have had their lives ruined on these flimsy grounds for crimes that were later found to have been the handiwork of Hindu terrorists.
The God Market takes the view, however, that communal violence, whether overt or covert, is not an adequate measure of Hindu nationalism. Hindu nationalism is a much bigger project, which is not exhausted by communalism, even though it provides the soil in which the communal virus grows. Hindu nationalism can continue to gain ground, even when it is not openly channelled into religious violence. It is when Hindu nationalism is seen through a wide-angle lens, this book argues, that globalization and neoliberalism appear as its allies and enablers.
What is the wide-angle view of Hindu nationalism that this book offers? Here Hindu nationalism is understood not primarily, or solely, as a political or a religious project, but rather as a cultural project. The primary aim of Hindutva is to Hinduize the public culture, to embed a “modern” understanding of Hinduism (derived largely from the nineteenth-century anti-Enlightenment, Theosophical, and Orientalist perspectives) into the pores of the state and civil society, without directly overturning the secular democratic laws enshrined in the Constitution of India. It is cultural hegemony at home, and recognition of India as a spiritual, economic, and military “superpower” abroad, that the Hindu nationalists seek: electoral victories, religio-political mobilizations (the many yatras or pilgrimages, fasts-unto-deaths, yoga camps, and such) are merely means to that end.
Hindu nationalism understood as a project for cultural hegemony has two enduring features that are finding great resonance with globalization. One, to make the majority religion the basis of the nation’s collective identity and the source of its ultimate values and purposes; and two, to allow the institutional space of the majority religion—the networks of temples, ashrams, religious schools, universities, and gurukuls, charitable hospitals, etc.—to take on the public functions of the state, while retaining their distinctive religious nature. The idea is to erase the line between the ritual and political spaces, or to remove any distinction between the worship of gods and the worship of the nation.
These features of religious nationalism depend upon the institutional arrangements between the state, religions, and other dominant institutions of the society, including, of course, the amorphous domain of the market. A major thesis of The God Market is that liberalization is changing the state-temple relations and aligning both of them with businesses and corporate interests. Chapter 3 in this book describes many instances of how Hindu places of worship and Hindu educational institutions that propagate more “secular” Hindu traditions such as Vedic astrology, priest-craft, yoga, Ayurveda, and such, are aided by public subsidies and corporate sponsorship. This book refers to this three-sided relationship as the “state-temple-corporate complex.”
Hindu nationalism in the wider sense used in this book, complete with the state-temple-corporate complex, was on display in the recent anti-corruption campaigns that rocked the UPA government through much of 2011. A group calling itself “India Against Corruption,” whose inner circle was made up largely of lawyers and middle-class professionals, managed to launch a nationwide movement demanding stricter legislation against corruption. IAC turned to two men to rally support for their cause—Baba Ramdev, a prominent tele-yogi and Ayurvedic healer with millions of admirers, especially among the lower-middle classes in small towns, and Anna Hazare, the Gandhian ex-army man turned social reformer, whose core support came from urban middle classes and idealistic youth. Both men exemplify how smoothly and almost imperceptibly religion blends with politics and business in India these days.
Baba Ramdev’s proximity to the Sangh Parivar was so obvious that the leadership of IAC got nervous about turning off their “apolitical” constituency and quickly replaced him with Anna Hazare.13 Anna Hazare, a veteran of many “fasts unto death,” went on two fasts through the summer of 2011 to force the government to pass his version of the anti-corruption law, which contains many anti-democratic elements. The mainstream English media, Bollywood stars, and Twitter and Facebook–savvy professionals all gravitated more toward the Gandhian Hazare than the rustic, Hindi-speaking Ramdev.
While Hazare tried to maintain a distance from the organized Hindu Right, his saffron slip kept showing: His campaign freely used slogans and images, including the highly divisive image of Bharat Mata (literally, Mother India).
Bharat Mata is no ordinary mother, but revered as an avatar of the Goddess, or Devi. The traditional Bharat Mata image superimposes the body of the Goddess— imagined as a sari-clad woman with all the traditional divine insignia—on the map of “Greater India,” which includes all of Kashmir and even the rest of the subcontinent. This literal sacralization of the nation has been a staple of Hindu nationalism from the early years of the twentieth century when the extremist nationalists led by Sri Aurobindo and Bipin Chandra Pal popularized the idea originally derived from a popular novel (Anandmath) written by the Bengali man of letters, Bankim Chandra Chattopadyaya.14
Hazare opened his first fast with the Bharat Mata image as the backdrop to where he was fasting. (The closest equivalent in the United States would be a Christian cross painted red, white, and blue—a visual representation of wrapping the cross in the flag that is quite popular among the Christian nationalists. Yet it is hard to imagine the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been compared to Hazare’s anti-corruption drive by some, adopting the flag-draped cross as its insignia.15) In his second fast, this image was replaced with an image of Gandhi, but the slogans invoking Bharat Mata continued throughout both fasts. Many secularists, Muslims, and others refused to join Hazare’s campaign at least in part because of these Hindu nationalist motifs.16
Ramdev and Hazare exemplify the workings of what this book describes as the state-temple-corporate complex. Ramdev built his multimillion-dollar empire through his ashram complex, helped along by generous land-grants and tax breaks from various state governments, and accreditation for his Divya brand of medicines, many of highly dubious quality, from the central government and the medical establishment.17 What the first edition of The God Market missed, and what became apparent during Ramdev’s role in the anti-corruption agitation, are the many new ways that businesses, large and small, have come to underwrite his Hindu nationalist agenda. It appears that the huge cost of Ramdev’s popular yoga camps and his yoga cruises, which cater to the very rich Indians and NRIs or nonresident Indians, are borne by pious businessmen who see it as an act of piety, or dharma. Likewise, it is the devout businesses that pay hefty sums to have their gurus and godmen appear on religious TV channels, including Aastha, India’s most well-known and lucrative spiritual channel, which is owned by none other than Ramdev’s proxies.18
Despite his Gandhian aura, Anna Hazare, the other mascot of the anti-corruption movement, is not without corporate supporters either. According to Arundhati Roy, India Against Corruption has received funds from “Indian companies and foundations that own aluminium plants, build ports and SEZs and run real estate businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run financial empires that run into thousands of crores [one crore is 10 million] of rupees.”19 That is perhaps why the anti-corruption bill pushed by Hazare exempts private businesses and nongovernmental organizations from the scrutiny of an otherwise omnipotent ombudsman.
The anti-corruption movement exemplifies what this book is about, namely, the growing banalization, or the everydayness, of Hindu nationalism in polite society. Corruption per se is not a communal issue—not even the most rabid Hindu extremists are suggesting that corruption is the handiwork of Muslims, or that there is “foreign hand” behind it. Yet Hindu nationalist motifs with a terrible history of communal divisions and Hindu-traditionalist discourse of ancient and forthcoming glories of Bharat Mata managed to take center stage. The same segments of high-tech savvy, market-friendly global Indians who are supposed to have turned their backs on BJP are quite at home with the symbols and idiom of Hindu nationalism. It is almost as if these symbols and idioms make up their unexamined political unconscious.
The second myth that this book examines is the myth of the prosperous non-believer, the idea that religiosity declines with the existential security that economic prosperity provides.
The modernists among India’s founding fathers, especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Bhimrao Ambedkar, believed in the inevitable decline of religion that modernization would bring. The Constitution they helped write includes provisions that try to limit the sway of religion on the social and intellectual life of the country. India’s doctrine of secularism is a valiant attempt to balance freedom of religion with reform and rationalization of religion through democratic means.
Indian Constitution-makers were hardly alone: the idea of the inevitable decline of religion with modernization has constituted the central plank of nearly all the major theories of modernization. It is only in the waning years of the twentieth century that secularization has come under serious challenge. The details of the rise and fall of secularization theory, however, do not concern us at this point. (The interested reader can turn to the final chapter of this book, which connects the Indian debates on secularism to social-scientific theories.)
The classic secularization theory, to put it simply, predicted that growing prosperity and existential security would make people less concerned with God and otherworldly matters. On a macro level, when different countries with different levels of economic prosperity and social welfare are compared, the inverse relationship between prosperity and religiosity still seems to hold true. A well-known study by two Harvard sociologists, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, of nineteen countries covering most of Europe, North America, Brazil, and Japan, showed clearly that the level of religiosity declined more sharply in those societies that were less unequal and provided greater “existential security” through better welfare measures. They explain the exceptionally high religiosity in the United States as a consequence of it “being the most unequal post-industrial society under comparison. … Americans face far greater anxieties than citizens of other advanced industrialized countries” about medical insurance, job security, and balancing work with family life. What is even more interesting is that the inverse correlation between income inequality and religiosity shows up not just across different countries, but within each country as well: in all of the nineteen countries they studied, Norris and Inglehart found that the poor are nearly twice as religious than the rich. In the United States, for example, two-thirds (66 percent) of the least well-off attend church regularly, compared to 47 percent of the higher income groups.20
One of the themes of The God Market is how India complicates what social sciences tell us about the connections among poverty, prosperity, and religiosity. Following the logic of Norris and Inglehart’s cross-country study, one would expect a country like India—with its high levels of inequality and its mass poverty, with almost no social-safety net—to have high levels of religiosity. But the Indian data turn the other part of the picture on its head: it is not the poor but the rich in India who are more religious, and those who get richer are likely to become more, not less, religious.
India, it turns out, is not alone in posing a challenge to the trends predicted by Norris and Inglehart, and by the classical secularization theory more generally. Studies from other newly emerging market economies—especially China, Brazil, Turkey, and other Islamic countries—also show that growing prosperity under the current round of globalization seems to be making people more religious. The authors of God Is Back seem to have it right when they say, “The growth in faith has coincided with a growth in prosperity. … In much of the world, it is exactly the sort of upwardly mobile, educated middle classes that Marx and Weber presumed would shed such superstitions who are driving this expansion of faith.”21 There is no agreement why rising levels of prosperity, education, and exposure to the rest of the world should encourage religiosity: causal explanations are bound to vary with the nature and history of religions and their relationship with the state in different countries. But the fact of the growing de-secularization of the world under the current economic regime is hard to ignore.
The Indian edition of The God Market provides plenty of data and case studies to show that it was the growing ranks of the new-rich middle classes who were experiencing the “rush hour of the gods” (chapter 2). It describes the growth of popular Hindu devotionalism, of murti-pujas (idol worship), temples, and pilgrimages, and the time-honoured passion for miracle-working god-men and -women, all combined with the growing craze (and market) for yagnas (fire sacrifices), astrology, palmistry, and other occult arts among the middle classes. It describes how the statues of popular gods are getting taller, temples are becoming grander, and the lines of well-heeled devotees outside temples and ashrams in posh suburbs are getting longer.
Since the Indian edition appeared in 2009, new data on religiosity based upon the National Election Survey (NES) carried out during the 2009 and 2004 general elections have been released.22 Conducted by the highly regarded data-gathering group, Lokniti, at the Center for Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, NES is considered the most authoritative survey of Indian voters. These data confirm the findings of The God Market that the rich, the upper castes, and the educated in India are significantly more religious than the poor, the lower castes, and those who are less educated.
When in 2004 the National Election Survey asked a representative sample of the Indian population how often they prayed, 60 percent of rich and middle-class Hindus said they offered puja every day in temples or in family shrines, while only 34 percent of the very poor and 42 percent of the poor did so. This trend held up across caste and educational level. The “twice-born” castes were the most religious, with 58 percent doing puja daily, while Dalits and Adivasis were found to be the least religious, with only 35 percent of each category reporting the habit of daily pujas. When the data are mapped onto educational levels, those with college degrees are more given to daily pujas (at 53 percent) than those who are illiterate (38 percent) or with only a primary education (46 percent). The higher the income levels, the caste status, and education, the greater the religiosity— this seems to be the trend.
When measured again in 2009, the trend has held up. The rich, the upper castes, and the more educated continued to pray more often than other social groups. But there was one surprising result: Dalits and Adivasis seem to be praying more than they used to do. In the 2009 NES survey, 40 percent of Dalits and 43 percent of Adivasis said they offered daily pujas, a significant jump from the 2004 survey.23
It is not entirely clear how this rise in religiosity of the subaltern castes and groups has come about. It could be related to rising living standards: there are reports (cited in the book) that suggest that Dalits who are trying to break out of their caste ghettos are beginning to undertake ostentatious religious rituals such as kathas and jagratas in order to “pass” as upper castes in their neighbourhoods. If true, this recourse to showy Hindu rituals would be a sad commentary on the prevalence of caste-ist prejudices in the larger society. Even if there is some economic trickle-down in places, as the advocates of “Dalit capitalism” have claimed, economic betterment is not weakening the hold of the beliefs that justify caste hierarchies.
The book explores yet another myth that is proving to be false in the contemporary God-drenched world, namely, the myth of privatisation of faith.
Those who believe in secularisation theory expect that as societies become modern, religion will recede from the public sphere into private lives. But the reality has belied this expectation. In fact, religions all over the world are becoming less private, more visible in the public sphere, and more influential on policies on everything from medical research, women’s reproductive choices, and sexuality to environment, terrorism, and armed conflicts.
In India, too, there is sufficient evidence of the growing presence of religion in the public sphere. The God Market describes how many rituals and pujas that used to be simple domestic affairs are now becoming more public and more ostentatious. Indeed, many of these public rituals are becoming full-blown political events, where holy men and political figures join forces. It is common for campaigning politicians to organise “political darshans,” using public money, and representatives of all parties seem to think nothing of using the state machinery for organising large-scale Hindu rituals for political gain. The Congress party’s Digvijay Singh’s order to hold public prayers and yagnas for his victory in the 2003 elections in Madhya Pradesh was more than a match for the BJP chief minister of Karnataka, B. S. Yediyurappa, who used up INR 1.1 million in just five months for his pilgrimages to temples. Even the communist government in West Bengal thought nothing of ritually worshipping the land (bhoomi puja) it wanted to gift to the Tata industrial group for the Nano car factory.
Participation in public rituals like kathas, kirtans, and satsangs is also growing among ordinary people—or rather, these events and rituals are moving out of the family and into the public square, while also becoming more ostentatious and expensive affairs. The trends for engagement in public religious activities, again as measured by the National Election Surveys in 2004 and 2009, are following the trends for private pujas, with the wealthy, the upper castes, and the educated leading the way. Close to 30 percent of upper-caste and wealthy respondents were found to have a high level of participation in public rituals, with Dalits and Adivasis generally falling around 16 percent. In recent years, both the upper castes and Dalits have shown an increase in public religious events, with 18 percent of Dalits reporting higher participation in 2009, as compared to 16 percent in 2004.24
Privatization of religion, it must be pointed out, was never on the horizon of possibilities in India. Even though liberal-minded secularists cherish it as an ideal, modern Indian secularism is not premised upon a “wall” that would separate religion from public life. In part this has to do with the nature of Hindu religion itself. Hinduism, famously, is not a religion primarily of beliefs or faith, but of rituals. Many rituals that used to be performed at home or in neighbourhood temples were turned into public spectacles during the freedom movement with an express intention of nationalizing the masses. The connection with anti-colonial nationalism has sanctified the public expression of religiosity, which shows no signs of abating.
Finally, this book examines the decline and near-death of the secularist hope for the spread of scientific temper and disenchantment of worldviews. The classical theorists of secularisation believed that modernity would “melt all that is solid” (Marx) and remove mystery from the world, leaving it disenchanted (Weber). The basic idea is that as the stock of scientific knowledge grows, the scope of “god’s will,” or fate, will diminish. To some extent this has happened, with people around the world increasingly accepting naturalistic explanations for natural disasters. But this process seems to have hit its limits already, and religions are learning to use the language of science and tools of technology and markets to celebrate god’s powers.
The expectation that religions will learn to scale down their claims about their “timeless Truth” in the face of the growth of scientific knowledge has been belied. In fact, the language of science is now used to justify religious beliefs. Modern Hindu gurus have finessed the art of justifying the spirit-centred metaphysics of Brahminical Hinduism in modern, scientific terms. This “scientistic” Hinduism sells better among those urban sophisticates who make a living in scientific and technological fields.
India provides a treasure trove of examples of this phenomenon, from the growing trend of “e-pujas,” remote darshans, and computer-generated horoscopes, to Disney-like theme parks cropping up inside temples. But even at a more basic level, which may or may not deploy modern technology, the belief in the efficacy of prayer and ritual (like yagna) to change the course of events in the natural world is growing—and to add insult to injury, such superstitions are claimed to be explicable through laws of modern science! This belies the hopes of nineteenth-century neo-Hindu reformers from Ram Mohan Roy of the Brahmo Samaj and Dayananda Saraswati of Arya Samaj to Swami Vivekananda, who stressed the textual and spiritual elements of the Vedas and Vedanta over the more ritualistic practices.
The God Market provides many examples of the re-ritualization and scientization of contemporary Hinduism.25
To conclude this extended introduction, we return to the fundamental question from which we started out: Is Hindu resurgence benign as long as it does not translate into communal violence, or into votes for the Hindu nationalists?
There are those who see no connection between the explosion of mass religiosity and religious nationalism, and hold up “true” religiosity as an enemy of religious nationalism. In the same vein as Olivier Roy, who celebrates the growth of popular Islam defeating political Islam, India’s best-known public intellectual, Ashis Nandy (2009), has argued that “the BJP’s electoral defeat is a sign that Hinduism has probably defeated Hindutva.”26 What he means is that the “true” Hinduism of the traditional masses has defeated the “laptop Hinduism” of the middle classes, which they share with the Hindu right. Traditional Hinduism, from this perspective, is tolerant, pluralistic, and deeply embedded in a way of life, whereas the neo-Hinduism of English-educated middle classes is homogenized, decontextualized, and nationalistic. For Nandy and other postcolonial intellectuals, the modern, nationalistic expressions of Hinduism are products of Nehruvian secularism, which (supposedly) delegitimized religion in public life to such an extent that it took the pathological form of fanaticism and bigotry. But now that the Nehruvian project has lost its prestige and there is no more secular finger-wagging, the Indian masses are going back to their original “good Hinduism.” And that is what has defeated “bad Hindutva.”
Drawing such hard and fast distinctions between Hinduism and Hindutva and between traditional and modern Hinduism, simply will not do. Modern manifestations of Hinduism are not created out of nothing: they gain their emotional content from reverence for the symbols of traditional Hinduism.
It is easy to scoff at the religiosity of the middle classes as inauthentic and shallow, as portable as a laptop, because it is not connected to any tradition or history worth its name. This turns traditional, premodern Hinduism into a sacred fossil, denying it the right to evolve. All the later stages of Hinduism’s evolution, the many adaptations it has made through its long and sustained coexistence with Islam, its encounter with British colonialism and its integration into the modern world of science, technology, and markets are discredited as somehow lacking in authenticity and integrity.
This idealization of old-style religion overlooks one simple fact, namely, all religions change all the time. For all their claims to “eternal and timeless Truth,” adaptation to changed circumstances and new social contexts is as basic to religions as it is to any other social institution. Hinduism, in particular, has shown an exceptional flexibility in accommodating to modernity and globalization. Its eagerness to deny and cover up glaring contradictions with modern science, for example, is a part of its attempt to maintain its plausibility and relevance in the modern era. These adaptations do not make today’s Hinduism any less emotionally and spiritually satisfying to modern-day believers than the traditional Hinduism was in its own time.
Likewise, the good-Hinduism, bad-Hindutva distinction does not hold up to closer scrutiny. Hindu militants choose their symbols, rituals, and even their history and cosmology from the traditional stock. For these symbols to work, they must be held in reverence by a sufficient number of people. Everyday religiosity creates a common sense, a political unconscious, which can become readily available for nationalistic and communal causes when it encounters sacred sounds, sights, and stories mobilized in religio-political campaigns. It is at this gut-level, which is beyond words, reason, and evidence, that popular religiosity serves the ends of religious extremism. In the aforementioned case of Bharat Mata, for example, it is the deep reverence Hindus—modern as well as the traditional—hold for the figure of the Devi, the goddess, that spills over into reverence for the landmass of India. No one has to openly declare that India is a Hindu land, or that Muslims and Christians are not fully Indians—the image of Bharat Mata says all there is to be said. Thus to welcome the unchecked growth of popular Hinduism as an antidote to Hindu extremism, as Nandy does, is simply disingenuous.
There is an even more direct connection between popular religiosity and political choices. Just as in the United States, where the degree of religiosity is the surest predictor of his or her political affiliation, in India, too, a similar co-relation can be established. According to National Election Study data, up until 2004, there was a clear correlation between religiosity and voting behaviour: those Hindus who participated in public religious activities more frequently tended to vote for the BJP (38 percent) over the Congress (25 percent). In the 2009 elections, this relationship broke down, and this category of the highly religious showed the greatest decline (11 percent) in support for the BJP. According to Sanjay Kumar of Lokniti, one of the authors of the National Election Study, part of the reason why the more religious Hindus deserted the BJP in 2009 was because the party failed to assert strong Hindutva positions: the more religious Hindu voters were not embracing secularism when they did not vote for BJP; they were looking for more rabid Hindutva, not less.27 This gives some support to the Hindu militants’ own explanation for why BJP was defeated.28
Even more troublesome is that those who are more strongly and openly religious are also more majoritarian in their thinking. The God Market provides ample evidence of the growing majoritarianism in India today. Such individuals believe that Hinduism is not just a religion, but rather the soul or the life force of the nation itself, a “way of life” for all Indians—a position that clearly overlaps with that propagated by the Sangh Parivar. It appears that the more ardent Hindus, such as those who pray more often and who participate in religious rituals more often, are twice as likely as others to hold the belief that India is a Hindu country. Thus even though Hindu nationalist parties are not always able to win the Hindu votes—or “harvest the Hindu souls,” as one commentator put it after the 2009 elections—a shared ground of understanding does exist between Hindu religiosity and Hindutva politics.
A final evidence of why a religion-soaked public culture is detrimental to a good society came last year in a legal judgment over the disputed structure in Ayodhya where a sixteenth-century mosque was destroyed on the pretext that it stood on the exact spot where the Hindu god Rama was supposedly born, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. On September 30, 2010, the High Court in Allahabad granted two-thirds of the disputed land to Hindus, leaving the rest to Muslims, even though the Muslim Wakf Board was the original owner. This was a very complex lawsuit involving more than thirty different issues, the details of which do not concern us here. What was most stunning about this judgment was how it disregarded evidence and legal reasoning in favour of the faith of the Hindus. It was clear even to the presiding judges that it was “an impossible task” to decide if Lord Ram was born on the disputed spot. Rather than dismiss the case as an “impossible task,” the judges simply changed the question to whether “the property in suit is the site of birth of Sri Ramchandraji according to tradition, belief and faith of Hindus in general.”29 Furthermore, invoking the faith and tradition of Hindus, the judges declared not just the idol of baby Ram stealthily installed in the mosque in 1949, but even the site where the idols were installed, the status of legal persons and admitted them as parties to the dispute.30 This judgement is currently under review with the Supreme Court.
That the judicial system could so effortlessly—and not for the first time—substitute faith for evidence is a sign of the cultural dominance of faith in modern India. How this faith-based legislation subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of all before law regardless of their faith is obvious: the court simply accepted the presumed faith of the majority community at its face value, while completely ignoring the faith of the Muslims in this dispute.
It is true that markets might be able to save us from violent religious extremism, and that is part of the reason for why the middle classes deserted the Hindu nationalist BJP and its allies in 2009. But the markets also deepen the reach of religion into the institutional spaces of society. The only real response to religious nationalism is to actively cultivate a secular culture that can displace the majority faith as the national culture. This would require an active demolition of the truth claims of all faith-based ways of thinking—including the faith in the gospel of globalization and “free” markets.
1. Swapan Dasgupta, “A change of priorities,” Times of India, June 4, 2009; and Dasgupta, “A ‘dying’ party?” Seminar, no. 605, 2010.
2. Koenraad Elst, “BJP apes Congress, fails,” Daily Pioneer, May 19, 2009.
3. Chandra Bhan Prasad, “Markets and Manu: Economic reforms and its impact on caste in India,” CASI (Center for Advanced Study of India) Working Paper, 2008; available at http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/system/files/Markets+and+Manu+-+Chandra+Bhan+Prasad.pdf.
4. Olivier Roy, “The paradoxes of the re-Islamization of Muslim societies,” 2011; available at http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/the-paradoxes-of-the-re-islamization-of-muslim-societies/.
5. Alan Wolfe, “And the winner is… The coming religious peace,” The Atlantic, March 2008.
6. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back (London: Penguin Press, 2009).
7. Timothy Shah and Monica Toft, “Why God Is Winning, Foreign Policy, June 9, 2006.
8. Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).
9. Harvey Cox, “The Market as God: Living under the new dispensation,” The Atlantic, March 1999.
10. Ashutosh Varshney, “Rethink the communal violence bill,” Indian Express, July 16, 2011.
11. Subhash Gatade, “Hindu Rashtra in Delhi?” Mainstream, September 19, 2009.
12. Praveen Swami, “The Rise of Hindutva Terrorism,” Outlook, May 11, 2010; Christophe Jaffrelot, “Abhinav Bharat, the Malegaon blast and Hindu Nationalism: Resisting and emulating Islamic terrorism,” Economic and Political Weekly, Sept. 4, 2010.
13. Mehboob Jeelani, “The Insurgent,” The Caravan, August 2011.
14. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “The Goddess and the Nation: Subterfuges of Antiquity, the Cunning of Modernity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Barbara Southard, “The political strategy of Aurobindo Ghosh: The utilization of Hindu religious symbolism and the problem of political mobilization in Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 14, 1980: 353–76.
15. Hari Bapuji and Suhaib Riaz. “Occupy Wall Street: What businesses need to know,” Harvard Business Review blog, October 14, 2011, available at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/occupy_wall_street_what_business.html.
16. For more details on the convergence between the IAC and the Hindu right, see Bhanwar Megwanshi, “The communal character of Anna Hazare’s movement,” trans. Yoginder Sikand, 2011, available at http://www.sacw.net/article2266.html; and Rohini Hensman, “Converging agendas: Team Anna and the Indian Right,” Perspective, Sept. 19, 2011.
17. Meera Nanda, “Ayurveda under the scanner,” Frontline, April 8, 2006.
18. Supriya Menon, “Press Button, change religion,” Tehelka, July 3, 2011; Rahul Bhatia, “Origins of Ramdev,” Open, July 2, 2011.
19. Arundati Roy, “I’d rather not be Anna,” The hindu, August 21, 2011.
20. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
21. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, God Is Back, 16, 18.
22. National Election Study, Economic and Political Weekly, special issue, Sept. 26, 2009; Sanjay Kumar, “Religious practices among Indian Hindus: Does that influence their political choices?” Japanese Journal of Political Science 10/3, 2009: 313–32.
23. All figures are from Kumar, “Religious practices among Indian Hindus.”
24. Ibid.
25. For more recent work on these themes, see Meera Nanda, “Madame Blavatsky’s Children: Modern Hindu Encounters with Darwinism,” in Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science, ed. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Lieden: Brill, 2010), 279–344; and in the same volume, Kathinka Frøystad, “From Analogies to Narrative Entanglement: Invoking Scientific Authority in Indian New Age Spirituality,” 41–66.
26. Ashis Nandy, “Defeat of an Idea.” Tehelka, June 2009, (see note 2).
27. Kumar, “Religious practices among Indian Hindus.”
28. See Elst, “BJP apes Congress, fails.”
29. Anupam Gupta, “Dissecting the Ayodhya Judgment.” Economic and Political Weekly, Dec. 11, 2010. Emphasis added.
30. Gautam Patel, “Idols in Law,” Economic and Political Weekly, Dec. 11, 2010.