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Lord Meghnad Desai, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics.
What does spirituality mean to you?
It means nothing very much to me since I am an atheist. I do not believe in reincarnation or God or heaven, and I do not connect either morality or ethics or good conduct of life with spirituality. It is something completely alien to me and a lot of it should not be a matter of great pride. People emphasize the Upanishads and so on but how can a civilization believe in such great philosophical truths and treat people like shit? Hinduism is the only religion that even in theory does not believe in equality. It believes in being unequal at birth and forever. And that is very shocking. So while it may have high philosophical heights, its feet are not even of clay but of ashes since it is built on a tremendous rejection of people's equality. Therefore, my turning atheistic was also a rejection of a certain kind of India, the whole ritualistic superstitious part of India which breeds inequality.
When growing up under Nehru, I actually had the hope that India would abandon it and become modern but it did not happen. India has been modernized but it has taken several steps back in terms of true modernity. Caste and superstition have been strengthened and politicized and the rest of the world admires India precisely for the things that keep it backwards. Spirituality is a weapon for the exploitation of dalits, women and so on. There is no such thing as secularism anymore. Even the communist party is totally mired into religion, lost in a mish-mash of petty nationalism claiming to be anti-American, while believing it can peddle into some secular Hinduism, which is total nonsense. There is a tolerance of religions which can be so damaging, such as people dogmatically saying "let us be nice to Muslims": in doing so, a lot has been conceded to Muslim religious prejudices and no attempt has been made to modernize Muslim society, in particular for Muslim women who suffer from religious superstition and backwardness.
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