EDINBURGH: Mahatma Gandhi's grandson and former governor of West Bengal — Gopal Krishna Gandhi has warned of the rising trend of religious minorities forming political outfits on the basis of religion — a retrograde development as "democracies are meant to be about policy choices, not prejudice choices." Delivering the first India day lecture in front of a packed house at the University of Edinburgh, Gandhi who is known for his candid flair warned that the "mutation, through the sanctification of the ballot box of electoral options into religious polarizations can bring a secular democracy to the doorstep of a majoritarian theocracy".
According to him, this "will only be a fruit of the democratic tree but an unrecognizable mutant, wholly alienated from India in its vision and in its methods".
The lecture was attended by hordes of students from Scottish universities besides the Indian diaspora at large.
Gandhi also expressed his deep sense of worry over the "real possibility of the political majority" getting "fused and confused with its ethnic-religious majority" in modern day India even though a "political majority has nothing to do with India's ethnic majority, its linguistic or religious majority".
Gandhi also took a pot shot at India's modern generation — the upwardly mobile middle classes with designer footwear and swanky mobile phones. He said that even as modern technology grows and enters the lives of average citizens, old superstitions have tightened their hold on the Indian mind.
Gandhi said, "If a billion men and women wear watches and carry cell-phones, they also now, much more than their ancestors did, wear strings and rings, charms and totem-bits on their persons, propitiating old deities and new voodoo obsessions. Many here would have heard of vastu, a force governing buildings. Vastu is said to be a super-natural energy governing the fate of built structures and thereby determining the welfare of its occupants. You will find the most modern, internationally-travelled persons in India today drawing plans for their houses in ways that are vastu-cleared even before they are cleared by the town planner."
According to the former director of the Nehru Centre in London, "India yesterday, poor as it was, less educated than it is now, was moving away from superstition. India today, linked in to the fastest technologies, using fast moving vehicles, listening to fast music, eating fast foods, is fast-forwarded and — re-winded. If any country in the world can zoom forward and lunge backward, in real time, India can and is doing."
Calling India a nation of paradoxes, Gandhi said, "India today has men and women re-spelling their names with impossible multiple vowels and consonants to conform to the nostrums of numerology. Vehicles' registration numbers are also often chosen or requisitioned with reference to auspiciousness. It is another matter that the owner of the divinely approved number plate is a horrendous offender of traffic rules."