Violent Elimination of a Rationalist
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
19 August
2022
Every year since August 20, 2013, I feel terribly sad and anguished on this day, remembering the violent death of the rationalist Dr Narendra Dabholkar.
Dr Narendra Dabholkar
----
He was gunned down by Hindu extremists for his relentless crusade against all irrational beliefs and superstitions. He once told me in Poona that he always believed in the famous statement of Edmund Burke that superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Immediately
after his violent death, Kalburgi, Pansare and Gauri Lankesh were also shot
dead for similar views and fearless rationality. Yet, Mysore-based rationalist
K S Bhagawan and Poona-based Rajan Khan refuse to buckle under any pressure or
threats from the religionists.
I wrote to
the then CM of Maharashtra and the PM of India to declare August 20 as The Day
of Reason. Alas, my entreaties and requests fell on deaf years.
At this
juncture, when the followers of all religions, particularly Islam and Hinduism,
are neck-deep in the quagmire of all sorts of religious superstitions and
meaningless beliefs, the relevance of people like Dr Dabholkar and Kalburgi
increases manifold.
Reason is
forever at loggerheads with superstition. Sir Carveth Reid wrote, '
Superstitions are the illegitimate offspring of a religion, ' in his Magnum
Opus ' Man and his superstitions, ' though he later removed the word '
illegitimate'.
I once met
a very educated Muslim gentleman at the office of Dr Dabholkar. In spite of his
unflinching faith in Allah, he never offered namaaz or observed roza. He also
never went for Haj. That gentleman told me that he required none, not even
Muhammad and Qur'an to come in between his commune and connect with Allah.
" All others are insignificant, " his words still echo in my mind. He
never blew his own trumpet, despite his sincere involvement and association
with numerous welfare activities for all people sans their faiths. I call him
Momin ( a true Muslim).
Social
reformer of Maharashtra, Hamid Umar Dalwai also said the same thing, though he
was an atheist and had no belief in Allah. Apropos, Dabholkar named his son
Hamid after this great reformer Hamid Dalwai. This also shows the magnanimity
and breadth of Dabholkar's vision that he gave his son a ' Muslim' name.
Otherwise, we're so damn backward that even an 'educated' Hindu will not
christen his or her son as Tariq, Aslam or Ghulam....ohhhh, Muslim names! And
no Muslim will call his daughter Rachna or son, Sumit.
Sociologist
Jagannath Banerjee stated in his Doctoral thesis on the growing religious
superstitions across the world, esp. in India, that the basic religious
sacraments often break into three S: Superstitions, Shenanigans and
Shibboleths. All these terms are originally related to the decadence in
religion.
Spirituality
worsens into religion. Religion degenerates into rituals. Rituals slip into
superstitions and horrific as well as discriminatory practices like a
menstruating woman being impure or sacrificing an innocent animal to appease
some blood-thirsty deity or a sadistic and sanguinary Allah who doesn't send
down a ' revelation' that killing animals in his name is unIslamic or inhuman.
Alas, there's no Muhammad to receive Allah's 'divine' messages in these rotten
times!
Whenever a
reformer raises these uncomfortable questions, he or she is targeted by the
fanatics.
But the
question is: How long will the society be able to throttle the voice of reason
and logic?
May the
sane people, who're actually few and far between, like the slain rationalists
Dabholkar, Gauri Lankesh and the likes of them, come together and bring about a
tectonic, nay cataclysmic, change by pulling the society out of the cesspool of
obscurantism. I'm waiting for that day before getting killed by a random
zealot, guided and intoxicated by his scripture, god and faith.
-----
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to world's premier publications in several languages
including Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/current-affairs/dabholkar-rationalist-religionists/d/127745
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