Whenever religion moves beyond private worship to the public space this happens. Thousands of Indians have died in riots caused by religion, India was divided because religion was allowed to intervene in matters that should have been restricted to politics and still we appear to have learned no lessons. We make no objections to our political leaders consorting with religious men who range from the dangerous to the bizarre.

Remember that Baba from Mathura whose blessings came in the form of a kick on the head of visiting dignitaries? Remember the dignitaries who lined up to be kicked? One of them was India’s home minister. Unusually for a religious person the kicking Baba seems to have had a secret sense of humour.

My aversion to religion being allowed to occupy the public arena is also because it brings forth a particularly loathsome type of righteous person. The sort of person who believes he has the divine right to become arbiter of public morals by using violence and intimidation if necessary. The Indian state is easily brought to its knees by this kind of ‘righteousness’ and films and books have been banned on account of it, but the real laboratory of loathsome righteousness is Narenda Modi’s Gujarat.

We saw it in action at the M.S . University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Vadodara, in the Chandramohan incident. Instead of locking up the busybody who went poking his nose into other people’s paintings, the Modi government arrested the student whose painting the busybody found offensive.

... contd.