THE LEADER ARTICLE: Faith and its Discontents: Righteous Brigade Puts Pontiff in the Dock

An old maxim in philosophy says if you want the right answers, never ask the wrong questions. But the temptation to ask wrong questions seems to be irresistible to journalists. Consider the charges of murder, malfeasance, sexual misconduct being heaped on Kanchi Sankaracharya Jayendra Saraswathi: Should he be shown preference because he is a religious head, ask the prattle-filled anchors of television news channels.Is he above the law? Is not everyone equal before the law? The questions are accompanied by an irrepressible simper. It seems that they are playing the democracy game to the hilt, where rudeness can pass off for the spirit of egalitarianism. And it is also a way of proving all over again how secular you can be.
And there are the wimps on the other side, wanting to derive as much political mileage out of the whole thing as possible. Enter the Bharatiya Janata Party and Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Never mind if they don''t know what they are defending. It''s time to go on to the streets. The wimps also say the arrest of Jayendra Saraswathi is an insult to Hinduism, without realising that he is not a representative of that mongrel construct called "Hinduism". Yes, he belongs to the tradition of Adi Sankara. But after that there is quite a bit of confusion.
And then there are those homespun Mandalites, who wait for every little opportunity to fume and fret about the Aryan cultural hegemony imposed by Manu. They see the arrest of Jayendra Saraswathi as one more nail in the coffin of Brahminical Hinduism, little realising that all the saffron-robed mendicants in the Hindu system renounce Brahminism by undergoing symbolic funeral rites. Jayendra Saraswathi by definition is not a Brahmin; to believe that tarnishing his image would be one more way of castrating Brahmins is perhaps another delusionary tactic of the social rebels.
These are but the footnotes of the case. The real issue hinges round the credibility of the legal machinery and the people who implement them. The laws may be reasonable — but this should only be an assumption. As St Augustine pointed out to his secular critics in the declining years of the Roman empire, laws made by human beings are far from perfect — they are also not always carried out in the spirit in which they were prescribed. The motives of the guardians of the law are always to be questioned, especially in India where the police and prosecution are the minions of the political executive. In far too many cases, this has been borne out and it would be a travesty of truth to argue that the police and the prosecution have no ulterior motive, and that they are merely carrying out their duties.
In the last decade, the Tamil Nadu police and prosecution had no option but to go after the "political opponent". It was DMK''s M Karunanidhi who prosecuted and humiliated AIADMK''s J Jayalalithaa. It seemed that the police had a perfect case against her. Once she returned to power, those cases vanished into thin air. And it was the turn of Jayalalithaa to misuse the police machinery to get back at her bete noire, which she did quite ruthlessly. Even those who had no sympathy for Karunanidhi''s wily politics were compelled to express sympathy for the old man. If this is the reputation of the Tamil Nadu police and prosecution, what credibility do they carry in the first place? They have none whatsoever, and it is indeed incumbent on them that they should be much more meticulous if they have to clean up their act. But there is nothing of the sort in the works. It has become pretty clear that the arrest of Jayendra Saraswathi is a result of the political falling out between Jayalalithaa and the pontiff. It took more than a week for the shrewd Karunanidhi to acknowledge this.
What is amazing is the credulity displayed by the media merlins, who accepted the police version as gospel truth, and they did not for once try to get at the real game being played out. They did not do so because in modern, secular India, the religious man is a greater suspect than the police who violate law with impunity, in some instances at the behest of their political masters, and in others due to their own arrogance arising out of brutal power. If Jayendra Saraswathi had been a common man, the police would have carried through the case without anyone raising eyebrows.
What accounts for the passivity of the media in this case? It is mere cowardice. It is an unwillingness to stand up for an unpopular but right issue. The basic proposition is that Jayendra Saraswathi is a good man. There is need to make this moral judgment beforehand, and then try to disprove it through hard evidence. The media is adopting the slothful way of suspecting the man, and demanding that he prove his innocence. Ironically, modern Indians are following the blighted Hindu legal presumption of guilt. The accused man has to prove his innocence in the old system, and he would undergo ordeals to prove his credentials. Modern Indians want Jayendra Saraswathi, and thousands of others like him, to bear ordeals to prove themselves. Who said barbarism is dead?