Is India a Moral Engine and Social Ideal to Emulate?

     

The statement that Bharat (i.e India) is the engine that alone is capable of drawing all other countries after it towards a moral world is among the least convincing of Sathya Sai Baba’s many wild prophesies. It expresses a chauvinistic nationalism of a kind like ‘India Uber Alles’, but it absurdly bases this (in the above quotation) entirely on the fact that the decline in the practices of sacred rituals (yagnas and yagas) is the main cause of all the troubles of humanity. Anyone can see that this is definitely not a winning formula, not least because surely at least 90% of the world’s population who are not very traditional Hindus will simply ignore it. To emphasize strictly Hindu rituals as the key to world regeneration is hardly a way to spread ‘universal religion’, as Sathya Sai claims to do. On this day, the 60th anniversary of Partition, Muslims can hardly be enthused by this religiously-divisive claim, which may well have contributed ideologically to the eventual tearing down of the Ayodhya mosque and the agitation to replace it with a Hindu temple.

How could a Country with so many well-known social and ethical failings guide the world?
For decades I admired much about India and its people, which I still partly do. But I became more and more aware – through personal experience and learning about India that I had been badly misled by all the propaganda of its rulers and politicians, and not least also that spread by Sai Baba as a confidence builder for India (in which I rather wanted to believe and hoped was true). I now say that, had India been the original home of democracy, human rights, women’s rights, social justice, equality, fraternity and liberty, then this would have been credible. But it is falling down on every one of these precepts. The non-violence movement of Mahatma Gandhi was truly admirable, but it was a flash in the pan which passed away with him while millions of Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other in the late 40s. The intensity and number of massive wars of the most brutal and destructive nature which India has undergone speaks against the claim that it has ever been any kind of Utopia. This is known to have been so ever since the time of Krishna, when the Mahabharata war was no picnic but a vast killing field. There were gigantic ravages under Emperor Ashok – literal mass genocide until there was hardly anyone left to kill. India was then subject to the ghastly horrors of the Mughal invasion which destroyed much Hindu culture in the north. In the wake of all this, wars between local kingdoms continued until the British subjugated much of the sub-continent. From Independence onwards, India has fought wars against Pakistan (also China and Tamils) and there had been continuous internal strife between Hindus and Muslims, the State and indigenous peoples and minorities of all kinds to this day. As almost every visitor to India soon discovers, criminality and corruption are rife today, which is often so in societies where there is large scale extreme poverty.

Yagnas and yagas have so far failed India
India has evidently not improved because of the practice of ritual prayer and offerings (Yagnas and Yagas…). It is generally regarded today the world over as a mad idea of fanatical religionists that a countries’ ills are due to non-observance of Divine will, prayers and sacrifices etc.!  India has declined morally, according to Sathya Sai Baba’s repeated harangues in many discourses. He sets up the same old story of India having been the cradle of mankind as a place of harmony and light (indicated by the ancient name ‘Bharat’).  But there is simply no evidence of there having been a ‘Golden Age’ in India, except in the imaginings of priests and moralists and in texts similar to the Bible’s Garden of Eden myth. That India once was the perfect spiritual land – a moral paradise – as Sai Baba preaches – is a kind of deception based on wishful thinking more than any historical fact that has survived. India has no doubt ever had all the problems that have plagued humanity since time immemorial, but which modern civilisation has at last begun to defeat.

It can be confidently concluded that Sathya Sai Baba suffers from a variant of serious cognitive derangement that can fitly be called ‘mythomania’. As to the current state of affairs on humanitarian morals in India, I have already briefly summarised some of the dire calamities which prevail there. (See here)