AAP did use religion in an unexpected way in its recent Goa campaign, when it promised to send Goans on free pilgrimages to Ayodhya, Ajmer Sharif or Vailankanni, depending on their religion. It was, as commentators pointed out, a response to a demand that no one in Goa had felt the need to articulate before. Yet, the syncretic nature of the promise would seem to counter to the idea of it being a version of what the BJP might offer.
AAP has been accused of being opportunistic in its use of religion, but it’s hard to fault a political party for not using an opportunity, unless it’s ethically dubious. And this is what the detractors argue is the problem with mixing religion and politics: religion should be private and mixing it with politics only has negative outcomes. This argument ignores the fact that every effective elected party has used religion in some way.
Discomfort with parties using religion also seems to assume that it can only lead to divisions and intolerance. But this is short-sighted. The fact that political parties in India are using religion in exactly this way tends to obscure the opposite example, of Mahatma Gandhi, who had no problem openly speaking about religion, and using its appeal, but never to antagonise, exclude or victimise.
Gandhi’s religious views are usually taken for granted. They’re simplified as a matter of saintly universal faith, as depicted in the Raghupati Raghava hymn associated with him. They’re used to attack him, as a supporter of Muslims, or as a crypto-Christian converted by missionaries abroad, or as a defender of traditional Hinduism against Dr Ambedkar’s attacks, or a supporter of puritanical religious views. Such attacks rarely involve engaging with Gandhi’s actual involvement with religion, despite his extensive writings on the subject. Religion was personal for Gandhi, but he saw no reason to exclude it from his public life. Religion was part of personal development, to help with one’s public mission.
MN Srinivas, in an essay on ‘Gandhi’s Religion’ notes how the Gita was of great importance to him, yet he had no problem using a text that, in its larger context, helps a warrior accept his destiny of fighting, to derive support for his message of non-violence. “Gandhi decides that loyalty to the Gita entitles him to amend it. He often refused to be bound by “uncongenial texts, concepts and situations”. Gandhi discovered non-violence not only in the Gita, but in the Bible and Koran.”
Gandhi experimented with atheism as a student in London, but found it arid and unsatisfying. GR Rao, an atheist and Gandhian activist, later tried to engage him on the subject. Gandhi first put him off, then indulged him, but struggled to take Rao’s views seriously. Religion is important as a personal practice for development and motivation, and however Rao chooses to find that is up to him as long as his work is sincere and good.
Gandhi’s engagement with evangelical Christians in the UK and South Africa was deep, and in turn they were the first to recognise his charisma. Joseph Doke, a missionary in South Africa, wrote the first biography of him. Yet he always turned down entreaties to convert. Hinduism might be flawed, as they argued, but so were other religions in their own way, and it was best to stay with what one started with, but interrogate it, and other religions, to find one’s personal way forward.
Apart from avoiding the violence of confrontation and conversion, this view of religion had pragmatic benefits. Gandhi realised that uniting India would mean confronting the problem of caste, and this could only effectively be done from a sincerely Hindu position. It also gave him an effective language of communication to make the nationalist movement a truly populist one.
Gandhi’s public addresses started being called prayer meetings, and he used hymns and religious texts, which could be from the Bible as well as the Gita, but then spoke about wide ranging social and political issues, in a format that his audience could understand. While Indians could certainly use religion aggressively, to advance their interests, they could also respond to his view of it as form of personal advancement for the public good. As the AAP extends its appeal, it will be interesting to see if it will also follow Gandhi in its how it uses religion.
