Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Of religion, myths, food as ‘New’ India flexes muscles

To start with it wasn’t clear precisely what Mr Mohan Yadav, Madhya Pradesh’s new chief minister, meant when he announced that “after the implementation of the food safety rules, guidelines have been issued by the Government of India on the sale of meat and fish in the open”.

Confining such sales to closed shops would certainly be welcome because despite “Swachh Bharat”, open bazaars are notoriously filthy. But the lurking suspicion was that he might have had more traditional motives given orthodoxy’s preference for vegetarianism. The added injunction on restricting the use of loudspeakers reinforced fears of majoritarian muscle-flexing.

Not only are certain meats taboo (although not barred by the Hindu scriptures) but those who consume them (or are accused of doing so) are frequently persecuted. The day after Mr Yadav’s swearing-in, for instance, bulldozers razed to the ground the allegedly illegal houses of five men accused of wounding a Bharatiya Janata Party worker.

Illegal constructions are the bane of all Indian towns but, significantly, the five accused had not been tried in any court. Even more significant, their names were unmistakably Muslim. This is where loudspeakers came in, for non-Muslims sometimes find the call to Islamic prayers broadcast five times daily quite disturbing.

Like periodic reports of gangs of men in some states attacking those who eat beef or are accused of doing so, usually without any evidence, this must also be seen in the context of the widening communal gulf to which the controversy over Article 370 has drawn attention at home and abroad. As Ernest Mawrie, Meghalaya’s BJP chief, no less, pointed out recently, there is “no restriction on beef eating”. But neither factual niceties nor the US department of agriculture’s revelation that India has rapidly become the world’s biggest exporter of beef, accounting for 20 per cent of the global trade, inhibits goondas masquerading as gau-rakshaks for whom any stick is good enough to beat Muslims.

India’s semi-literate multitude, even those among them who flaunt impressive paper qualifications, is often a prisoner of inherited prejudice. The blind belief in 33, or 33 million or even 330 million gods and goddesses is one instance of the stranglehold of an ignorant past. Another is the conviction that their pioneering ancestors had zoomed through space in jet engines or glided in submarines through the ocean’s depths 5,000 years before Jesus Christ. Some are convinced that those heroic ancients mastered the artificial conception of babies as well as genetic science and plastic surgery and could graft an elephant’s head on a human body.

Uneducated, unemployed and under-nourished folk are not alone in swallowing these tales. Present distress is possibly one reason for the poor seeking solace from past grandeur but the well-endowed and politically powerful leaders of society also nurse similar myths.

As a result, India is in the happy position of rich and poor, rulers and ruled, elite and hoi-polloi often being joined in blissful union as the rath trundles on its yatra to regain lost glories.

The ornate Ram temple at Ayodhya with its 12 gates, layered canopies and 161-ft tower sprawling over nearly three acres, costing a mind-boggling Rs 1,800 crores that could have been better spent on medical care or education, is the symbol of their dreamland. It is said to stand where Ram was born. But was Vishnu’s seventh avatar and the most popular of the ten born like any common or garden mortal? Ram was also the king of Ayodhya, who conquered Sri Lanka and vanquished Ravan, the personification of evil. His most valid credential for many Hindus is that like Achilles in Homer’s Illiad or Ulysses in the Odyssey, he was the valiant saviour for whom mankind yearns.

Nor have scientists found any proof that a Hindu place of worship had ever existed at his supposed birthplace. What did exist was the 16th century Babri Masjid, which no longer functioned as a mosque. That didn’t deter an army of fanatics led by BJP stalwarts like the veteran Lal Krishna Advani from storming the mosque and pulling it down in December 1992. I was stranded in Singapore at the time (with flights to India suspended) and remember the outrage of my elderly Chinese taxi driver who professed no religion at all. “Shocking!” he exclaimed. “The UN should bomb India!”

The UN didn’t, but violence and bloodshed swept across the country. Out of that conflict in which thousands of lives, mainly Muslim, were lost arose a rejuvenated BJP and a leader representing the zeitgeist. Indira Gandhi’s faithful principal lieutenant, Pranab Mukherjee, acknowledged in his diary Narendra Modi’s “ability to feel the pulse of the people so acutely and accurately”.

Television coverage of a resplendently attired Mr Modi prostrating himself on the ground during the rituals inaugurating the temple’s construction like a monarch humbling himself before the gods highlighted the sacerdotal role in which the secular political office of Prime Minister, won at the hurly burly of the hustings, has been recast. New Delhi’s Central Vista Project (another Rs 20,000 crores that might have been used more constructively to improve living conditions) might confuse the simple whether this or Sir Edwin Lutyens’ stately red-brick architecture honours the real “Kaiser-i-Hind”, a title that was formally abolished on June 22, 1948.
Familiar place names have gone or are going. School curricula have been turned topsy turvy. New motifs are insinuating themselves into the crests of venerable old institutions. Clio’s face-lift means that history is dismissed as colonial, and mythology elevated as our national history. India -- sorry, Bharat -- is all set to regain a rich and rewarding “Ram Rajya” after “twelve hundred years of slavery”.

It took Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew 35 years -- from 1965 to 2000 --- to travel From Third World to the First, the title of the first volume of his autobiography. If Raghuram Rajan is to be believed, Indians can accomplish that journey in reverse in a mere three hours -- by road from Noida or Gurgaon to Delhi and a flight to Kolkata. Meanwhile, a 25-year plan promises to transform India into a $5 trillion or $10 trillion economy. Without quibbling over a mere $5-trillion difference, people may wonder which of India’s 796 millionaires will profit the most from the world’s third biggest economy.

All this remains true. But having now re-read Mr Mohan Yadav’s small print, I see that his warning referred to covering the meat and fish on sale. Cleanliness being next to godliness, the order, if properly enforced, might serve a more useful purpose than a lavish temple.