We live in the era of false equivalences where we often like to pit two things together saying if A was allowed why not B.
The latest victim of the said logical fallacy is the Puri Rath Yatra which many Twitter users of the liberal-secular persuasion are comparing to the Tablighi Jamaat event in February and March.
The usual outraged tweet goes: “When will Indian media condemn the Puri Rath Yatra.”
Much like Davinder Singh’s ‘bail’, the facts appear to be of little import.
Tablighi Jamaat event vs Rath Yatra
Comparing the two affairs is like comparing apples and oranges.
For starters, the Rath Yatra in Puri was only allowed after the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead. Should the Supreme Court of a secular republic be deciding the matters of faith?
Looking at any article of religion through the prism of rationality is always problematic, as Justice Indu Malhotra noted in her dissent note on Sabarimala.
But that is a different debate, beyond the scope of this article.
Personally, the author believes there was no need for the Rath Yatra to be held this year. The event goes against the spirit of social distancing that has set in as an after-effect of the Unlock 1.0 guidelines.
The ruling suggests that faith will always be an exception, even while staying away from educational institutions, gyms, cinema halls and other mass gatherings. While it might be tempting to compare it with the scaled-back Hajj 2020, India is supposed to be a secular state, while Saudi Arabia is not.
But the Supreme Court allowed the event.
It did so without any devotees. It gave strict guidelines on how the event is to be held. No locals were allowed to participate in the event. The Odisha authorities claim that there was a strict lockdown for 41 hours.
This was the first time the Rath Yatra of Lord Jagannath was held in Puri without the congregation of devotees.
Before the event, all servitors of the Jagannath Temple were tested. One servitor, out of 1,143 servitors tested positive on Monday night and wasn’t allowed to participate.
While CM Naveen Patnaik visits the event every year, this year he had to do with seeing it on the big screen.
Also, unlike the Tablighi Jamaat event, there were no foreigners involved.
The Centre was more or less a willing accomplice in this event while it looked the other way during the Tablighi Jamaat event. If the Puri event turn out to be a 'super-spreader', the Centre can’t be absolved of responsibility.
Several question marks remain over the Tablighi Jamaat event which the current dispensation still hasn’t answered.
For starters, it is the MEA who hands out visas to foreigners as they did to members of the Tablighi Jamaat.
NSA Doval personally met Maulana Saad to convince him that the Markaz congregation needed to be tested and quarantined.
That the Tablighi Jamaat chief managed to abscond after meeting the NSA is an embarrassment. According to a report in Zee News, the Delhi Police are waiting for a green light from the Ministry of Home Affairs before taking any action against Maulana Saad.
While the current dispensation takes great pleasure in vilifying Muslims, it would appear to be equally reluctant to act.
A Coomi Kapoor column in Indian Express pointed out that both the Centre and Kejriwal government wanted to avoid a confrontation with the influential leader.
Kapoor’s column states that the Modi government did not want to tangle with the Maulana who has deep connections in the Middle-East and South-East Asian establishments.
That said, the coverage of the Tablighi Jamaat event by mainstream media channels was downright disgusting, with phrases like ‘corona jihad’ thrown around. It was used, as channels are wont to do, to suggest that the entire community was responsible for the spreading coronavirus or that Muslims were spreading the disease intentionally.
In contrast, none of the media headings covering the Rath Yatra focussed on the social distancing, suggesting how one’s religion might prevent one from covering an event with rationality.
The Muslim Conundrum
The contrasting reactions to either the Tablighi Jamaat event or the Rath Yatra point to a disturbing divergence in our discourse which one likes to call the Muslim Conundrum.
While it exists on a global scale – given that Muslims often ally with other minorities as allies in liberal politics in democracies – it’s the India connection that concerns us.
For the left-wing, this means bending over backwards to justify any sort of activity because they believe they are being ‘truly liberal’ by justifying intolerance within a minority community.
For the right-wing, this means going hammer-and-tongs when they discover that a Muslim is the perpetrator and the act is extrapolated to show the entire community in a bad light.
This was amply demonstrated when several right-wing handles used a spliced video to claim a Muslim TikTok user was promoting acid attacks.
This then was used to paint the entire community as misogynist even though crass, misogynist videos have long existed on TikTok, from members of all faiths.
The Rath Yatra comments by the liberal literati are a mirror image of the same sort of denigration, where one feels the need to disparage anything related to the Hindu faith without even examining the facts.
In 1968, to the great delight of secularists (French definition not the Indian one), Peter Beger had claimed that the ‘21st Century would see religious believers to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture’. He recanted his statement in the 1990s, and rightly so, because organised religion is here to stay.
Nirmalya Dutta is the Web Editor of The Free Press Journal. The views expressed are personal.
