Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and the impossible promise of modernity

Today saw an another episode in what has been the biggest story in India for the last week. After declaring Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan, leader of the social and religious Dera Sacha Sauda sect, guilty of two counts of rape on August 25, a court in Panchkula in Haryana sentenced him to 20 years in prison. The days since the judgment was passed have seen Haryana racked by large-scale collective violence carried out by the followers of the sect, resulting in 38 dead, nearly 300 injured, and massive damage to property. On the day of the judgment, Ram Rahim Singh was brought to court in a 200-car cavalcade and taken to jail by chopper with state officials serenading him. Today, the guru was reduced to tears, sobbing in court on receiving news of his sentence.

The discussions in the Indian and international media and in public media spaces have proceeded along a few distinct lines. On social media, journalists Sankarshan Thakur and Barkha Dutt rightly drew attention to the dismaying fact that there had been no similar mass outrage over the deaths of scores of children in Uttar Pradesh in Gorakhpur recently. The heroism of the rape survivors (and of other alleged victims of the powerful guru) and their lawyers who fought a hard and lonely battle for 15 years has been lauded. People have also paid tribute to the courage of journalist Ram Chander Chhatrapati who had broken the story about the rapes in 2002, only to be murdered shortly after. Accustomed to cases in which wealthy and powerful defendants walk free by subverting Indian institutions or intimidating witnesses, the dispensation of justice, even if slow, has been welcomed by the Indian public.

Along with these reactions, there have been the usual clichéd takes, with predictable laments about the gullibility of Indians to religious charlatanry. Ram Rahim Singh’s followers have been painted as a mass of crazed hysterics in the throes of a charismatic cult leader. Ram Rahim Singh’s sexual deviance has been implicitly linked to his inauthenticity as a spiritual figure. Yet, as the writer and journalist Raghu Karnad noted, we need to think through the ‘subaltern angle’ to the riots. Karnad here is drawing attention to the fact that the Dera and Singh spoke to the aspirations of those who were condemned to the bottom of the caste hierarchy that exists in practice, if not in theory, in every Indian religious community. The Dera, as is well known, draws large numbers of followers from Dalit Sikhs, who are discriminated against despite the professed egalitarianism of Sikhism.

Using Karnad’s important question as a point of departure, Singh and the Dera also represent a broader social and historical phenomenon. It is myopic to see them either in terms of cheap Orientalist cliches about India as a land of snakecharmers and gurus or as reflective of an endemic Indian irrationality that is opposed to a modern mindset. Rather, Singh and the Dera represent something crucial about the nature of social and political modernity itself: namely, the gap between its promise and reality and the inability of modernity to address aspirations of dignity and the yearning for spiritual fulfilment.

In his famous formulation, the great German sociologist Max Weber spoke to the ‘disenchantment’ that inevitably characterised modern and secular (in the sense of non-religiously oriented) existence. With social life progressively subject to bureaucraticised, rationalised, and scientific processes, the magical, romantic, and spiritual aspects of collective life had been lost, relegated to the private sphere of the individual. Technological and bureaucratic rationality had replaced both traditional social authority and the charismatic authority of individual leaders. One way to understand the Ram Rahim Singh phenomenon—as indeed fascism and Nazism, any cult leader in Western or non-Western societies, or evangelicals in the American South—is to see it as an expression of the repressed desire for a world of enchantment: of promises of salvation, of a universe in which miracles can happen, and, most crucially, that can promise the miracle of hope. In this regard, as Sanjay Srivastava has written, the followers of Ram Rahim Singh are not one whit different from the well-heeled elites who adore Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

The other side of the bargain with modernity, however, lies in its egalitarian promises: in its claims to provide equality, justice, and dignity to all. As Ashis Nandy has suggested in his seminal work, The Intimate Enemy, this promise was in part why Indians granted some degree of legtimacy to colonial rule, even as colonialism was itself premised on the racial inferiority of Indians. To those who were ‘cornered’ by the traditional inequities of Indian society, modernity, even if it came wrapped in colonial guise, promised a better alternative.

Of the founders of the modern Indian republic, Nehru in particular had hoped that our own postcolonial modernity would help realise the promise of social and individual equality and dignity. Gandhi held steadfast not as an advocate of an antimodernity but of a nonmodernity, while Ambedkar, disillusioned by the failure of caste Hindu society to reform its attitudes, held—presciently, one may note—that such a goal could never be achieved without a radical transformation of Hinduism itself. Yet, in 70 years of independence, for all of the gains we have made in India, that promise is nowhere close to being fulfilled. Indian modernity, whether we see it as a distinctly postcolonial phenomenon or as a manifestation of a universal phenomenon, has not increased the life-chances of vast numbers of Indians, nor the simple and most basic human desire for recognition and respect. It is that desire that led large numbers of people to follow a figure like Ram Rahim and,  in part, to engage in the kind of shocking violence Haryana saw in the last few days.

Ram Rahim Singh has rightly been found guilty, as should those of his followers who carried out his orders. Those Dera members who engaged in violence following the court judgement should also be held accountable for their actions. Along with that, perhaps we should also consider indicting an Indian state and society that compels people to seek hope in a figure like Ram Rahim Singh. Otherwise, despite this Ram Rahim Singh Insan going to jail, a hundred others like him will follow.