Recently, I was at an Indian community event in Dubai where a prominent business leader was being felicitated for winning a prestigious award. During the interaction, a gentleman who used to be his neighbour noticed that he’d got his ears pierced and was wearing earrings, and asked about it. The business leader was a bit hesitant to answer but finally admitted that he’d started taking his cultural roots seriously and begun wearing earrings in the past few years. He pointed to his son, who also had earrings on. The pan-Indian diaspora audience applauded this honest confession by one of the elite NRI patriarchs in the UAE.
His answer prompted me to think about what had changed for the gentleman, in his sixties now, to suddenly see worth in his cultural identity and decide to wear it on his sleeve? It’s not just him — thousands of such elite people today find it “cool” to display their religious and cultural roots. There’s pride now, not only in one’s cultural inheritance but also in displaying it publicly.
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That is one of the biggest transformations that the Narendra Modi government has brought about in the last one decade, inadvertently or intentionally. One witnessed it a year ago when the Ram temple was inaugurated in Ayodhya in January 2024. The who’s who of the Indian elite was there, many coming by their own charter planes — some of which had to be parked in places as far off as Kolkata due to the lack of space. One can see a similar thing happening at the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj.
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses,” wrote Karl Marx in 1843. A century later, in 1955, Mao Zedong said the same thing to the Dalai Lama, but what he meant was that it served as a tool for social control by those in power.
What we witness in India today can hardly be called opium. From the man on the street to those in high places, every Indian is displaying the spirit of religiosity today. Classical liberals in the West considered three elements to be defining features of liberalism — freedom from fear, hunger and oppressive social norms. It is that spiritual freedom, a true liberalism, that these followers of Sanatan Dharma experience.
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Hindu religious and cultural practices like the Kumbh Mela symbolise that freedom. The tragedy that struck the Mela a few days ago was most unfortunate. When loss of life happens, there will be criticism that one should take in one’s stride. The Uttar Pradesh government has made the best possible arrangements. Incidentally, on the day of the tragedy, I was in Lucknow with the Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath. He didn’t sleep that entire night. I saw him hauling up the administration and calling up saints in Prayagraj with the request that they delay their holy dip and allow the general public to have it first. Prime Minister Modi, too, repeatedly called him to enquire about the safety of the pilgrims. The Chief Minister told me that on all five sacred days of the holy dip during the Kumbh, no VIP movement was being allowed so that people could go about their religious chores without any hindrance. He even requested the highest constitutional authorities in Delhi not to choose those days for their visit to the Kumbh Mela. Despite all this, tragedy struck.
When the first Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj after Independence was held in 1954, the godfather of Indian secularism, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was there to personally oversee the arrangements. However, a stampede occurred and almost 1,000 people lost their lives. Shaken by that incident, Nehru insisted that VIPs shouldn’t be allowed at the Mela.
However, Nehru did not outright reject the Mela or such customs in Hindu tradition. He quoted Romain Rolland, who said, “It is the quality of thought and not its object which determines its sources and allows us to decide whether or not it emanates from religion. If it turns fearlessly towards the search for truth at all costs with single-minded sincerity for any sacrifice, I should call it religious; for it presupposes faith in an end to human effort higher than the life of existing society, and even higher than the life of humanity as a whole. Scepticism itself, when it proceeds from vigorous natures true to the core, when it is an expression of strength and not of weakness, joins in the march of the Grand Army of the
religious Soul.”
Nehru added: “I cannot presume to fulfil the conditions laid down by Romain Rolland, but on these terms I am prepared to be a humble camp-follower of the Grand Army.”
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Nehru was a sceptic, torn between his true soul that Gandhi sought to rekindle and the imbibed European false notions. He imposed that scepticism on generations of elite Indians, which Modi has successfully tried to erase. This scepticism can be seen in the politics of Nehru’s current heirs. But it also appears to have become a conviction with leaders like Mallikarjun Kharge, who question the very faith of Indians, and criticise practices like the holy dip.
For millions of Indians, there is no such scepticism anymore. That’s why, despite tragedies, Mela numbers are going up. When Nehru went seven decades ago, there were four million at the Mela. India’s population has quadrupled since then, but the Mela is expected to witness a footfall that’s 100 times higher this year. For those millions, it is not political tourism, but a liberating spiritual journey of the chiti — the awakened inner soul. Wearing a slavish political lens, one can never get it.
The writer, president, India Foundation, is with the BJP. Views are personal
