by MEERA NANDA
Worship the nation
If we look at religious nationalism through a wider-angle lens, however, without reducing it to mere communalism, the picture changes entirely. Suddenly, globalisation and its parallel neoliberal economic policies appear as allies, not enemies, of religious nationalism. Indeed, globalisation is turning out to be good for the gods everywhere. This is nowhere more so than in India, where, aided by what can be thought of as the ‘state-temple-corporate complex’, a new Hindu religiosity is getting more deeply embedded in everyday life, in both the private and public spheres. At least for now, growing economic prosperity seems to have weaned the Indian middle classes from the extremist elements of the Hindu right, who incite animosity against Muslims, Christians and the pub-going Westernised elite. But the rising prosperity has definitely not turned Indians against the more subtle ways in which Hinduism is becoming the de-facto religion of the ‘secular’ Indian state.
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