India’s state, Hindu nationalism and prayer

India is famous for its glut of temples everywhere and for amount of public prayers, their length too. No one denies that Indians pray a great deal – very much more than Western Europeans, without doubt. One might well say they have all reason, so difficult are the lives of the majority of them. India is beset by enormous problems of lacking social welfare, health care, nutrition, security for disabled or the aged, primitive labour conditions, many having to live on the pittance of ca. $1 per day and so on and so on. So Sai Baba’s exhortation to pray is not working for most people in India, while in Europe most people are doing better and better. Prayer has always served to empower the priesthood and religions generally and it serves to empower Sai Baba (many pray only to him!). Yet it also disempowers devotees who believe it will lead to help with their problems by distracting them from practical remedies, making them into beggars for boons. Because we all know they can, at best, only somehow solve things otherwise.

Sathya Sai teaching on the effectiveness of prayer is bogus
It defies all common sense and reason… we can see how so many pray for years without result. As soon as something good happens, such believers will probably impute it to the one they prayed to, so they remain trapped in the delusion. But consider the example of the Tibetans who, collectively, surely prayed more than any known people in recent times… until the Chinese invaded and everything they cared for was destroyed and those who escaped death were dispossessed and exiled, the country usurped. Were their prayers answered, then? Sathya Sai Baba has also said that God often answers your prayers with other things than you want or expect, but with what is best for you (especially also sufferings “for your own good”). See the duplicitous and completely self-defeating nature of prayer in that? To get what you didn’t pray for! What then of Sai Baba’s “There is nothing in the world that cannot be achieved by prayer”? That little or nothing can be achieved is far more likely (admitted, prayer can sometimes have a temporary psychological effect on the supplicant).

Believers may think that India’s economic surge, which increases living standards for the still small but growing middle class, is due to pujas, yagnas and temple visits? Still, acceptable standards of social care, health care and other social services common in rich countries are non-existent for tens of millions of Indias. Technological improvements are available to those with money, but is otherwise mostly of a very low level. According to international organisations, the country has somewhere in the region of 20 million child labourers, there are countless beggars, sick people and heavily handicapped persons living on the streets and camping out on pavements in most cities in absolute penury and many lepers (treated as ‘untouchables’ and isolated in primitive colonies). Corruption of all kinds has for decades been so endemic at all levels of society that most people there have lost all belief that it can ever be stamped out, it seems. Added to all these well-known weaknesses is a huge educational gap, plus a media information gap due to excessive top-down control of information. “God Incarnate” in Puttaparthi would control what his devotees can learn or discover (especially about himself)… so he advises praying, and even stopping all thought (more on this soon). This can only serve to hinder the growth of knowledge and awareness needed to combat India’s problems.