Repositioning God as a marketable product
The spiritual and ascetic in Hinduism has been replaced with the commercial and extravagant
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Marx missed the full picture when he described religion as an opiate of the masses. So did George Carlin when he claimed that God was fiction. For, today, neo-capitalism and right-wing fundamentalism have assigned God a new role and turned Him into an FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Good): far from being an opiate, He is now a stimulant for consumption on a gigantic scale, the driver for GDP and GST growth. If, along the Laffer curve, a few consumers die in a stampede or fire, that is acceptable collateral damage, a tax write-off where the public picks up the bill while the high priests of Mammon go chuckling to the bank. The Maha Kumbh, which the UP government claims will add Rs 2 lakh crore to the state’s GDP, is the apotheosis of this new divine role.
Hindu religion being one of the main pillars of the BJP’s very existence and power play, it has to be constantly glorified, burnished and made larger than life. As Yuval Noah Harari asserts, a religion is not just its deities but also the social functions it performs. The BJP’s aim is to ensure that one of these ‘social functions’ is legitimising and consolidating its power and narrow worldview. Given these high stakes, Hinduism can no longer be left to the tender mercies of the Shankaracharyas, Mahamandeleshwars, priests, purohits or the humble devotee and pilgrim in the villages. It must be ornamentalised, over-hyped and aggrandised, made a TV spectacle, a platform for projecting the party and the PM as its prime custodian.
This is a continuation of a medieval mindset we thought the modern world had left behind: did not the emperors and kings of that time build cathedrals, pyramids, gigantic statues, temples and monuments to perpetuate their own myths, dogmas and personalities, to remain in the public eye and memory? Were kings and pharaohs not considered embodiments of the divine power? Religion may be fiction, so it has to be dressed up, for the grander the fiction, the easier it is to get the public to swallow it.
It is in this backdrop that we must understand this government’s hostile takeover of religion, and its obsession with the Disneyfication of our religious places and the conversion of all major Hindu festivals into a Cecil DeMille type of Hollywood productions. A few recent instances will help to establish this point:
n The inauguration of the new Parliament building on May 28, 2023, was done with the splendour of a Roman coronation, complete with the Sengol substituting for a sceptre and a procession of high priests. A secular political function was transformed into a religious one.
n The consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, built at a reported cost of Rs 1,800 crore, was an even grander event, the tempo having been built up for weeks before, like some gladiatorial show at the Colosseum.
n The Kashi Vishwanath corridor, which will cost Rs 800 crore when all its phases are complete, was hyped up as the rebirth of Varanasi, another re-affirmation of a resurgent Hinduism; the destruction of hundreds of houses and private temples to make way for the corridors was, of course, acceptable collateral damage.
n The Char Dham Highway, ripping through the heart of the Himalayas and built against all environmental considerations, is again an emblem of religious revivalism, even though it is rationalised on strategic defence grounds. It will cost about Rs 12,000 crore.
n A dedicated and wholly unnecessary highway is being built for the Kanwariyas in UP at a cost of Rs 650 crore and a reported 33,000 trees, once again to project religion in a larger-than-life format and to milk religious sentiments.
n The exaggerated claims of the Maha Kumbh, its deafening publicity and 24x7 media coverage, the Guinness scale of infrastructure created at a reported cost of Rs 7,000 crore (and Rs 5,000 crore by the Railways) is again meant to amplify the same message.
It’s the same with festivals. The Kumbh has been celebrated since time immemorial, but the frenzy this year was unprecedented, with even Blinkit home-delivering sangam water, dips being offered online, and someone else taking a dip on your behalf for a nominal charge! I have lived in Delhi for 50 years, but have never witnessed occasions like Ganesh Chaturthi, Chhat Puja or Kanwariya yatras being magnified to the kind of spectacles we witness nowadays. This resurgence of a placid faith is clearly contrived, funded and Disneyfied with a purpose.
Somewhere along the way, the spiritual and ascetic in Hinduism has been replaced with the commercial and extravagant, to serve the ‘function’ of a political party. Which should not surprise anyone, because religion has always been a business and tool for power. As Prof Paul Seabright says in his extraordinary book, ‘The Divine Economy’, the divine science (religion) has always had a large element of the dismal science (economics) mixed with it. It offers a product (salvation), has a network of providers (priests) and well established distribution channels. There are many ‘products’ in the market (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc) and they all compete with each other for market share.
It should not surprise anyone, therefore, that the corporatisation of Hinduism now has a righteous, if not liturgical, angle to it, to serve a political purpose. It has become a bustling share market where the common investor gets returns in divine indulgence, and the new corporates in votes. And those who do not buy into this stock market are the new kafirs. Nietzsche famously said that God is dead. He was wrong — God has now been repositioned as a marketable product.
— The writer is a former IAS officer
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