Asaram Bapu's moment of reckoning

Dileep Padgaonkar in the Times of India

Every murky controversy that involves a self-appointed dispenser of cures for all physical, psychic and societal ailments sheds a harsh light on two on developments that have surfaced across the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the rise of blind faith at a personal level and of politics rooted in religious radicalism. Both seek to provide an anchor to individuals and communities trapped in a maelstrom of unprecedented change spear-headed by technological innovations and the globalised economy.

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These are perceived as threats to cultures and ways of life, to deeply-entrenched religious beliefs and to moral certitudes. And the riposte of ordinary folk to such threats is to repose their trust in those who claim to have a privileged access to God. Indeed, even when such individuals are caught with, so to speak, their pants down, the faithful are willing to overlook their trespasses. The yawning gap between what they preach – austerity, abstinence, altruism – and what they practice – an opulent life-style, sexual promiscuity and a no-holds-barred acquisitiveness – is of little concern to them.

The case of Asumal Harpalani aka Asaram Bapu is significant in this regard. Ever since he was accused of molesting a minor girl, the media have unveiled his trajectory from his birth in a family of modest means in the Sindh province of British India to one of the country’s most prosperous and influential ‘spiritual’ gurus. It tells a fascinating story of the transformation of a bootlegger – whose family arrived in Ahmedabad after Partition -into a figure who has built an empire that is conservatively estimated to be worth more than Rs. 10,000 crores and who, according to his official website, has twenty million followers in India and abroad. 

These followers have apparently not turned hostile to Asaram despite the contrasts between what he preaches and what he practices. He owns a posse of expensive cars, travels business class, ensures that he isn’t frisked by security at airports and continues to expand his real estate empire. Neither the cases of land-grabbing nor the cases of four youths who ‘disappeared’ in his institutions – the mutilated bodies of two of them were later found on the banks of the Sabarmati – have diminished his appeal.

That explains why most politicians take care not to rub him the wrong way. To take him to task is to alienate a sizeable section of the Hindu vote. Or so they reckon.  Congress leaders have yet to pull him up for his alleged sexual assault on a minor girl. But it is the BJP that takes the cake. Leaders like Uma Bharati and Pravin Togadia have rushed to his defence. In videos that have gone viral on Youtube other worthies of the Sangh Parivar have hailed him as a genuine saint. And the ‘saint’ himself has called the latest allegations a political conspiracy to frame him while son and presumptive heir has dubbed the minor girl as ‘mentally deranged.’

Armed with this support, Asaram has been able to defy law enforcers with impunity. On the grounds that he was engaged in meditation, he kept police waiting for several hours before he deigned to receive a summons to appear for questioning. He then grandly declared that he would not appear before the concerned authorities right away since he has a busy schedule until September 18. And he has continued to visit his scores of ashrams and educational institutions, address the faithful, heap scorn of the media and denounce his critics in a language that suits not a spiritual leader but, well, a clandestine seller of adulterated spirits. Such are the methods of the proponents of a Hindu Rashtra – the very ones that are dear to the proponents of a strident, Islamic rule in Muslim-majority countries or to literalist Christian evangelists in many parts of the world.

The only hope in this sordid saga is that the girl who has accused Asaram of molesting her will stick, along with her parents, to her courageous stand to expose him for what he is: a charlatan who tarnishes the uplifting traditions of Hinduism with his questionable conduct. Should the police do their job and arrest him without delay and haul him up before the courts, the victim would be vindicated.

The parties that swear by the rule of law will then fall in line while those who place their religious faith above the law and the Constitution will be shamed to follow suit. By and by, his blind devotees, too, would realise that the ‘saint’ they venerate is a man of straw. Keep your fingers crossed.

The Need for Roots brought home the modern era's disconnection with the past and the loss of community

Having recently moved to a Himalayan village, I felt Simone Weil's focus on uprootedness spoke directly to me

• 
• • Pankaj Mishra
  • The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013 15.02 BST

An idol of the Hindu god Ganesh. ‘A rare European thinker who was as curious about Hindu and Buddhist traditions as about the Cathars, Weil despised colonialism as well as nationalism.’ Photograph: Sanjeev Gupta/EPA

There has rarely been a day since I first read The Need for Roots, nearly two decades ago, that I haven't thought of Simone Weil – one of my earliest heroines along with Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg. It was the title that initially attracted me more than the contents. Having recently moved to a Himalayan village after a peripatetic life in the plains, I had begun to feel rooted for the first time, connected to a stable community which, living off the land, neither poor nor rich, and low rather than upper caste, was marked above all by dignity – remarkable in a country where villages had become synonymous with destitution. And when Weil asserted that the central event of the modern era was uprootedness – the disconnection from the past and the loss of community – she seemed to speak directly to my experience.

The range of her admirers – from TS Eliot to Albert Camus – attest to the difficulty of describing Weil. She was a bourgeois Jewish intellectual from France who, in a viciously antisemitic climate, rejected both Judaism and Zionism. A youthful Marxist who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war she, after an immersion in the "icy pandemonium of industrial life", came to believe that "it is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people". A devoted Hellenist, she despised the Roman empire, implicating it with an oppressive tradition of the authoritarian state in Europe that culminated in Nazi Germany.

A rare European thinker who was as curious about Hindu and Buddhist traditions as about the Cathars, Weil despised colonialism as well as nationalism. "When one takes upon oneself, as France did in 1789, the function of thinking on behalf of the world, of defining justice for the world, one may not become an owner of human flesh and blood." She possessed an ironic view of historians – how they buttress the ideological claims of the hyper-power of the day: "If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilised Europe."

Freed of the popular intellectual's obligation to boost national or imperial egos, she could point out something that was obvious to many Asian sufferers of European colonialism: the shocking nature of Nazi racism lay, she wrote, "in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race, generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination".

In The Need for Roots she distilled everything she had learned from her intellectual struggles with the ideologies of socialism and liberalism, her experience of working-class conditions and the plight of the Vietnamese in France.

In different ways, Marx, Nietzsche and Max Weber had described how human relationships had shifted dramatically in societies built around commerce, industrial capitalism and the colonisation of vast tracts of the world. Life had lost its old moorings in a world where technology greatly enhanced the power of large abstract entities, such as the state and nationalism. Weil brought a different intensity to this sober diagnosis of the human condition.

Uprootedness was a sickness of the soul, a spiritual malaise, but with far-reaching political consequences that left no one unaffected. As Weil wrote: "Hitler would be inconceivable without modern technique and the existence of millions of uprooted men."

Material affluence and political stability in recent decades has rendered less toxic the extensive deracination that began in Europe in the 19th century. Today, it is people from countries such as India, Iran and Egypt who will immediately recognise Weil's insight that the modern promise of individual development, which was realised through the destruction of old bonds, can leave people dangerously adrift and vulnerable to demagogues.

As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi. Working in sweatshops and living in equally degrading conditions, the promise of the modern world had turned sour for them. These were the men whose disaffection had traditionally seeded militant ideologies or random violence against those weaker than them.

Recent history shows that the social turmoil provoked by large-scale uprootings helps authoritarians more than progressives. In any case, revolution was both undesirable and unrealisable, since technology and industry were unstoppable. What, then, could be done?

Weil aimed at the rehumanisation of the workplace and, by extension, the larger society. As she put it somewhat melodramatically, a civilisation that did not recognise the spiritual nature of work was doomed.

This was not all abstract speculation. Policymakers can draw much from The Need for Roots: such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education.

But her most original move was to abandon the language of rights – the claims of possessive individuals against others that had provided political philosophy with its syntax since Hobbes and Locke. Instead, she talked of needs, duties and obligations as the basis of a good society – something that would be immediately familiar to Buddhist philosophers but remains marginal in the western tradition of political theory.

As she wrote, "If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 'What you are doing to me is not just', you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like 'I have the right' … or 'you have no right to … ' They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides."

As she saw it, the original advocacy of rights had served the expansion of commerce and a contract-based society in western Europe. But a free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve, or to let them lapse into destitution.

It should be noted that Weil was not a liberal. For her, there can be no such thing as absolute freedom of expression at a time when "journalism becomes indistinguishable from organised lying", and its consumers don't have the time or leisure to sift truth from falsehood. "There ought to be," she wrote, looking ahead to the age of Leveson, special courts to monitor communications network that are "guilty of too frequent a distortion of the truth".

Indeed, what makes The Need for Roots particularly pertinent today is its critique of the ethic of liberalism that had originally emerged to serve the needs of a commercial society – individuals with highly self-regarding conceptions of their rights. As Weil saw, and we recognise very well in 2013, the extension of the marketplace into the realm of values has severely constrained our moral imagination.

It is easy to criticise some Weil's ideas for being too impractical and occasionally draconian. There is something too sanguine about her view of human nature. As a friend scolded her, shortly before she died of self-induced starvation in Kent in 1943 at the age of only 34: "Man is not pure but a 'sinner'. And the sinner must stink a bit, at the least." Perhaps. But you can only marvel, as Orwell did about Gandhi, at how clean a smell she managed to leave behind.