SHOULD RELIGION BE MIXED WITH POLITICS?
That is a dangerous mix as both Swamiji and Netaji have affirmed and forewarned future Indians from taking recourse to such a political path. Gandhiji adopted it and that led to catastrophic consequences as we all know. Partition, perhaps, would have been more difficult to precipitate had the early Congress leaders like Tilak and Aurobindo Ghosh and, thereafter, the Mahatma, from the very first refrained from mixing religion with politics to bolster popular support that allowed them to achieve the immediate objective of initiating a mass movement. However, in the end it led to horrendous consequences which is why, from the very beginning of and throughout his political career, Subhas Chandra Bose and then Netaji carefully kept the two elements apart from their otherwise explosive mix.
The same catastrophic fate awaits us in the near or in the not-so-distant future if we fail to separate religion from public life and, so, fail to achieve our secular constitutional objectives despite our spiritual heritage, the latter compulsion of maintenance of heritage being the standard argument afforded by religious revivalists.
Religion must be kept apart from the public sphere in so far as the state in its official capacity runs, for that is the one way different communities, with their past baggage dating to ancient and medieval ancestry, can effectively combine and coalesce into a nation where the rule of law governs and religion is kept to personal and even organisational spiritual pursuits. This is the historical experience of the nation states of Europe and the federal state of America. Wherever they have strayed from the strict adherence of this golden principle and resorted to appeasement of the minority for electoral reasons or forcing majoritarianism on the minority, they have come to grief.
Religion in its practised political mode is archaic and relatively of little use in serving the interests of a fast-developing modern nation state, and it is science and economics that the state must cater to in order to function harmoniously for the common weal. This is my submission from my meditations on this contentious political and social issue, and this is in accordance with the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and a host of other national and international luminaries who ought to know better about these matters than I do or, perhaps, even you do.
Jai Hind !
Written by Sugata Bose
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