Of Pilgrims, Progress, Polemics and Politicians

There’s a reason true believers don’t sign contracts with god.

As we come to the end of another Gregorian calendar year, allow me to share a story. I live between India and Switzerland. In my little village in the Alpine nation, I often see pilgrims crisscrossing the streets and the countryside either going to or returning from Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Some walk bare-feet, others not, some carry their own food, others shop in towns and villages en route. There’s a refuge in the village where pilgrims can stay overnight or longer, simple places comparable to dharamshalas in India.

I run into them in the village and the storyteller in me seeks their stories. Why would a successful banker or an atheist undertake this arduous journey by foot? Or students, doctors, and mothers spend time with people they don’t know in search of something or someone no one has seen? Would a seat of prayer or a type of worship answer all their questions? Is such an all-encompassing question even possible and could science have posed it? Faith makes people do anything from immersing children in goat dung during an eclipse as happened in India this week to immersing them in freezing water as happens in Lourdes in France almost every day. Faith makes the world believe in Christianity’s Immaculate Conception and celebrate Hindu god Ganesha’s food coma. Google maps and iPads obviously don’t serve as a compass for the heart and the mind, much less faith.

Thank god for that – imagine a voice telling you that your destination is three kilometres away! Over the past few months, Indians have been drawn into spirited debates and discussions about gods and practices, jurisdiction and jurisprudence. The conversations involve the three Abrahamic or one-text religions Christianity, Islam and Judaism as well as Hinduism. There are those who believe faith and prayer are personal journeys while others say courts must

decide when people are in doubt as religious rights are human rights. Petitioners for state intervention have cited Article 25 of the Indian Constitution to make their case. According to it “all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion subject to public order, morality and health.” Human rights have been invoked in recent months especially with regards to health (environment, pollution, noise) being the most recent examples.

This vague framing is the reason I believe courts should stay out of all religions.

However, if the law itself can be interpreted, then religious texts must undergo the same process. What must guide any public display of religion is what the courts decide is compatible with the law of the land and expression of other faiths. Our individual freedoms cannot be unlimited and must be curtailed in favour of the greater good. This is easier said than done.

Do read the Constituent Assembly debates where women and men of learning could not decide what is practice and what is worship and parked it under Article 25. That debate is still unsettled because people lack the language to describe Hindu practices. What is Paddati, Sampradayam or a Roka? Each of us can find a religious text to express it, but most likely we’ll all differ. That’s why we have courts to give meaning to texts that are unclear.

The Indian judicial and legal system is based on Common Law with roots in Christianity. Our references are European or American because norms and standards in Hinduism have evolved differently as there is no one Hindu text to guide that progress. This is not a disadvantage except for the fact that many judges lack learning of Christian theology and Indic civilizational knowledge. Ignorance cannot fill in the gaps and the interpretation of Article 25 must evolve to reflect changing societies.

“These predicaments and situations are like formulae liberally scattered in our (Hindu) epics. How to deal with the dilemmas? The Dharmic treatment is a pointer to all structures laid down by our sages and thinkers,” says painter Keshav @keshav61.

“Somewhere our hearts seem to agree with the solutions“ he adds, suggesting a reading of Kamala Subramaniam’s Srimad Bhagavatam, especially the chapter on the last day of the battle in Kurukshetra where Lord Krishna and Arjuna fiercely debate right and wrong, duty and obligation, good and bad, dharma and absence of it. Rulers/leaders are expected to deliver justice to communities under their protection. The teachings of the Bhagavad Gita are not restricted to people of one community or religion. In fact, they are as universal as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that has its roots in Protestant philosophy and thought.

Similar predicaments and discussions are found in Greek mythology where belonging to one community – not necessarily a religious one – was central to one’s identity. In Plato’s Republic, the Similie of the Cave is a Kurukshetra where philosopher-rulers led. For Aristotle, the goal of human life was to find one’s place in society to live the life of a social and political animal. Belonging to a community thus became central to a person’s identity and relationships with other members of that society represented constitutive parts of this identity.

Human rights as framed by Western interpretations are individual rights that cannot be invoked by a community. They take the individual outside of his or her social fabric and the interwoven relationship between rights and obligations that is characteristic of any group interaction is lost. This is why the interpretation of laws must me seeped in context. Judges have the difficult job of something that is general and abstract (the law) and transposing it to something that is individual and concrete (the case). Any they don’t always get it right. Think of this in the context of Dharma, Article 25 and pilgrims’ progress.

Let us look at the generous sprinkling of human rights in this conversation on faith. In my view, it’s a crutch. Looking at the philosophical basis behind the UDHR will help us understand the normative structure behind these rights. The Protestant and related European strands of UDHR make it incompatible with legal systems.

The UDHR as the name implies “declares” human rights. It neither claims to define or discover these rights. They are stated thereby signaling that they exist outside legislative activity and we are expected to recognise their existence. In other words, they are not imposed by a superior authority and are not a top-down order like the commandments of God. Identifying these rights is the job of human beings who are endowed with reason and conscience. Since every human being possesses reason and human rights are discovered through reason it follows that every human being can discover his/her human rights without any state intervention.

There are legal minds and philosophers who believe that the British colonialists transformed Indian traditions to mean nothing. That priests, looking for patronage, found a mantra for a legal clause so as to fit into a system that neither represented ground realities nor did justice to a didactic religion where gods were neither infallible nor fearless.

There’s a reason true believers don’t sign contracts with gods. Hinduism as I know it has always evolved. The reason it has survived intellectual, political and social massacre is because it is neither primitive nor regressive. Let us not be swayed by politicians vying for our faith. The sooner we in India realise this, the better for us.

As for me, I continue to follow pilgrims and their progress in all its apparent incoherence and abundant faith.