All through my childhood, I fell asleep in a world filled with elephant gods, monkey armies, and eight-handed goddesses. Earlier than mattress, my grandmother would inform me tales from historic Hindu epics as I snuggled in opposition to her mushy cotton sari. My favourite was the Ramayana, the story of an exiled prince named Ram who goes on a journey to avoid wasting his spouse and defeat an evil empire earlier than returning residence to say his rightful throne. Like tens of millions of Indian youngsters, I noticed Ram’s love, righteousness, and tolerance as a mannequin for my very own life.
Right now, Indians are being proven a model of Ram that’s nothing just like the determine I bear in mind. Over the previous decade, I’ve watched Prime Minister Narendra Modi render the deity as an avatar of violent nationalism. In his telling, Ram isn’t a broad-minded king however a wrathful avenger, able to punish Muslims for his or her supposed offenses in opposition to India’s Hindu majority. Officers in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Social gathering (BJP) submit pictures of Ram with six-pack abs, drawing his bow and arrow—a far cry from the Ram in my grandmother’s temple, who smiles beside his household. The politicization of Ram culminated earlier this 12 months, when Modi consecrated a temple to the god on the identical spot the place Hindu radicals as soon as demolished a centuries-old mosque. This was meant to incite Modi’s base of Hindu nationalists, whose devotion is a key purpose Modi received a 3rd consecutive time period yesterday, even because the BJP appears to have misplaced a big variety of seats in Parliament.
Modi’s transformation of Ram is a part of a decades-long try by India’s proper wing to “Hinduize” one of the religiously various international locations on this planet—the birthplace of not solely Hinduism but in addition Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Modi presents India’s 200 million Muslims as “infiltrators” and means that Ram can subdue them. However utilizing Ram as a political weapon defiles the nice achievement of recent India: non secular tolerance. It defiles Hinduism, too, by undermining one in all its elementary teachings—nonviolence—and turning its hero right into a monster.
Hindu mythology maintains that when Ram grew to become king, he established a utopian society outlined by social concord, justice, and noncoercion (ahimsa)—values that may affect Mahatma Gandhi and assist enshrine nonviolence as a cultural superb in postcolonial India. Modi has now made Ram a mascot for the destruction of those self same values, as Hindu nationalists have assaulted Sikhs and Muslims, torched an Islamic library, and lynched minorities. The perpetrators of assaults corresponding to these have chanted “Jai Shri Ram”—“Victory to Lord Ram”—a rallying cry for nationalists across the nation.
No one has corrupted Ram’s picture like Modi has, however he isn’t the primary to alter it. Because the Ramayana was composed, some 2,500 years in the past, it has been instructed and retold, every time a little bit otherwise. Like different enduring epics, it bought folded into native customs because it traveled. India’s Ramayana could be very totally different from the one in Indonesia, the place the story made room for Javanese gods. Politics have modified the Ramayana too. Based on Ankur Barua, a scholar of Hinduism on the College of Cambridge, Hindus began to depict a extra militaristic Ram in the course of the British occupation of India, when imperial troopers often confirmed up in iconography as bloodied victims or vanquished demons.
India’s Muslims grew to become central characters in Ram’s story in December 1992. In Ayodhya, the place Modi lately consecrated his temple, Hindus stormed a mosque that was inbuilt 1528, spurring protests that killed almost 2,000 folks, largely Muslims. The Hindu mob thought that the mosque stood on the location of Ram’s delivery, a perception that had impressed antagonism between Hindus and Muslims for greater than a century. After the mosque was destroyed, a brand new period in Indian politics started. The BJP’s affect expanded because it pledged to switch the Ayodhya mosque with a Ram temple. An extended authorized dispute ensued over whether or not such a temple may very well be constructed, placing Ram on the middle of a nationalist marketing campaign that pitted Hindus in opposition to Muslims. Modi took workplace in 2014; 5 years later, a verdict from India’s supreme court docket cleared the best way for him to meet his celebration’s promise. In an echo of 1992, the latest consecration additionally prompted violence in opposition to Muslims, although on a smaller scale.
Indian regulation prohibits politicians from making non secular appeals to voters, however the brand new Ram temple options frequently in Modi’s speeches in addition to in BJP’s manifesto. Its consecration—equal components reelection bid and spiritual spectacle—was a transparent violation of India’s secular democratic norms: In India, temples are consecrated by monks, not prime ministers. Just about each information channel broadcast Modi’s election-year stunt. The federal government declared a nationwide vacation, closing banks, courts, and hospitals throughout the nation. Final month, Modi went again to Ayodhya and staged a political rally. By associating himself with Ram and taking over the mantle of Hindu nationalism—even telling supporters that he was chosen by God—Modi has tried to distract from the excessive unemployment, rising costs, and starvation disaster which have marked his tenure as prime minister.
However in reworking Ram, Modi has carried out way more than advance his personal political ends. As tales such because the Ramayana are retold, they protect their tradition’s traditions and distill its values. They supply heroes, that means, and classes that stay helpful throughout time. Now one in all India’s most vital tales—one which embodies the sort of tolerance that the fashionable structure guarantees—is being changed with a cooked-up story of resentment and bigotry. It presumes that India is a Hindu nation, and that attaining peace and unity is just a matter of subjugating, or expelling, the Muslims who stay right here.
As a Hindu, I discover that story not solely repugnant but in addition absurd. Earlier than my grandmother died, she taught me that Hinduism loses nothing by tolerating different religions. Her Hinduism was not threatened by Muslims praying in public, consuming meat in their very own home, or marrying individuals who don’t share their religion. Her Hinduism was gentle sufficient to hold in her reminiscence, preserved by the tales that she was instructed as a child and that she used to inform me. When these tales are misplaced, so is religion—not simply non secular religion, however religion within the sort of society they describe.
The BJP’s poor exhibiting yesterday, which included shedding the constituency that homes the Ram temple, means that Indians are starting to see by Modi’s nationalist delusion. They’ve a possibility to reclaim the tales that helped type the nation’s beliefs—and that may now assist save them. As violence and prejudice have turn into persistent, India’s youngsters want these tales greater than ever.
