If the temple issue attracts, it also repels. It polarises and divides. By no means will it be a major issue in the Lok Sabha election
The run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 has begun. A question that is being increasingly asked at this stage is: What will be the electoral impact of a ramping up of the Ram temple issue? The answer is that it will have some impact — mainly in the form of rallying the faithful — but not a determining one. More, its impact is likely to decline progressively with time.
India is now in the grip of a market economy and a consumer culture spread by advertising. Asked what they want the most, an overwhelming majority of respondents would mention a consumer item they had been lusting after, a good meal at a classy restaurant, a vacation in an enchanting place or something else related to consumption. A very small number of people — if any at all — is likely to say spontaneously that it is the Ram mandir at Ayodhya. This does not mean that they have stopped venerating Ram or do not want a temple for his worship in Ayodhya but that it is not at the top of their priorities. It is fine if the temple is built, but quotidian life would hardly be derailed if it is not.
This is nothing surprising. Generally speaking, the rise of capitalism — and the consequent emphasis on economic activity and individual consumption — leads to a waning of the authority of religion. British history provides an example. RH Tawney writes in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism which remains the defining work in the subject despite the decades: “When the age of reformation begins [in the 16th century], economics is still a branch of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activities are treated as falling within a single scheme, whose character is determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind; the appeal of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of economic transaction is tried by reference, less to the movements of the market, than to the moral standards derived from the traditional teachings of the Christian Church; the Church itself is a society wielding theoretical, and, sometimes practical, authority in social affairs.”
All this had changed dramatically by the middle of the 17th century, thanks to the reformation which split Christendom between the Roman Catholic and the various denominations of the Protestant faith, and undermined the Church’s authority. It led to the secularisation of the State and the attribution of the latter’s legitimacy to social contract and not the divine right of kings. According to Tawney, the conflict between the new social and economic forces demanding the recognition of their legitimacy and the traditional doctrines of the Church, was suspended by a truce. Under the latter, politics, business and spiritual exercises, each assumed a “separate and independent vitality” and obeyed its own laws. The social functions matured within the Church and long identified with it, were “transferred to the State”, which in turn was “idolised as the dispenser of prosperity and the guardian of civilisation.” Religion took “as its province the individual soul”, while economic ambitions claimed the domain “of the intercourse of man with his fellows in the activities of business and affairs of society.” Peace was assured provided each kept to its territory.
While the intervention of human will sets limits to the working of historical determinism, economic development does have its own dynamics that produces social and cultural consequences. Hence, it is legitimate to draw a parallel, albeit in very broad strokes, between the consequences of the rise of capitalism in the West and of the same process in India, where it is causing a decline in religiosity and an increase in secularisation.
One can contend that the appeal of neither the Ram temple nor militant Hindutva has declined. Witness the huge number of people that the temple movement attracts. The argument does not hold. According to Erich Fromm in Fear of Freedom, the search for security is the most powerful factor drawing people to militant mass movements. An increasing feeling of insecurity haunts one as one grows up from infancy and becomes an individual, increasingly aware of the myriad dangers and uncertainties that life holds.
The ideal way of overcoming this is by relating spontaneously with the world “through love and work, in the genuine expression of one’s emotional, sensuous and intellectual capacities.” Most people are unable to do this. They overcome their feeling of insecurity through a masochistic surrender to a superior entity — for example, an individual or an organisation — and deriving a sense of security from the process. One can also do so by resorting to sadism, the essence of which lies in obtaining a feeling of power and security by exercising total control over the mind or body of another individual, or the destiny of an organisation, completely subordinating his/her or it to one’s will.
Fromm writes, “Both tendencies are the outcomes of one basic need, springing from the inability to bear the isolation and weakness of one’s self.” In The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer identifies an impulse similar to masochistic submission when he says, “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but from the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves — and it does so by enfolding and absorbing them into a close-knit and exultant corporate whole.”
Hinduism may well be a common bond among those wanting a Ram temple in Ayodhya but does not by itself explain why multitudes join the movement for its construction. Besides, a vast multitude of Hindus is indifferent to it; some are opposed because they feel it may lead to communal tension and ignite violence, the fear of which has been aggravated by the emergence of murderous lynch mobs. While they are targeting Muslims, many Hindus fear that they themselves may be set upon in the future by such mobs on grounds of caste, region or language.
If the temple issue attracts, it also repels. It polarises and divides. By no means the issue determining the outcome of the recent Assembly elections, it will not be so in the Lok Sabha elections.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
