By Vivek Deshpande
However, was it aimed at making politics subservient to religion, as the RSS always seen to be doing (‘Dharmasatta ka rajasatta par ankush’ — ‘the moment when religious authority curbed political power’), or was that just a transient phase of trickery to capture political power and then milk religion to the hilt, to perpetually control political power without letting religion to gain a position of pre-eminence?
A careful look at many incidents during the past 11 years of Narendra Modi’s regime clearly exposes the Sangh Parivar’s real intent of using religion to grab and stay in power, and then make it subservient to the political elite.
RSS’s hypocritical stance
The ongoing face-off between Shankaracharya Avimukteshwaranand of Jyotish Peeth and the Uttar Pradesh government at Prayagraj over the former being prevented from taking a holy bath in the Ganga on the auspicious occasion of Mauni Amavasya, demonstrates the Sangh Parivar’s hypocritical non-adherence to its own stand on religion being a supreme institution to guide every activity in the nation’s life.
The manner in which the Swami was humiliated, and his supporters and disciples were roughed up, shows that the RSS itself doesn’t consider religion, sadhus and sants to be beyond or above the state’s legal authority and that such people of religion must submit to the authority of the state even in matters of religion.
And no less a person than a Shankaracharya, too, is not an exception to this pre-eminence of the state.
This story was originally published in thefederal.com. Read the full story here.
