Religion as an instrument of global realpolitik

In January 1857, a Brahmin sepoy from a British regiment stationed in Dum Dum, five miles north of Calcutta, the capital of Britain's Indian empire, ran into a khalasi, a low-caste sepoy. The khalasi asked the Brahmin for a drink of water from his lota. The Brahmin refused, saying: "I have scoured my lota, you will defile it with your touch." Deeply affronted, the low-caste sepoy replied with some vengeful delight: "You think much of your caste, but wait a little, the sahib-log (Englishmen) will make you bite cartridges soaked in cow and pork fat and then where will your caste be?"

The Brahmin sepoy, reduced to smouldering silence, quickly carried the news to his comrades in the 34th NI British regiment. The rumour spread like wildfire. Both high-caste Hindus and Muslims were aghast. To touch by one's teeth the fat of the cow and the pig violated the most deeply-held religious beliefs of the two communities. 

For Brahmins, the cow is sacred and biting gum cartridges greased with the lard of a cow or ox would be sacrilegious. It would also almost instantly cause them to be ostracised. The seeds of the mutiny were sown.

Between January and May 1857, anger swelled. Brahmin sepoys began the revolt slowly. Those attached to the 34th NI stationed in Barrackpore refused on 26 February 1857 to receive their percussion caps for the rifle parade the next morning as they suspected that the cartridges were greased with cow and pork fat. 

Gradually, the revolt spread. At the 34th NI, where it had all started, the feelings were particularly intense. A sepoy named Mangal Pandey was the leader of the revolt. He called upon his fellow-soldiers to "join him to defend and die for their religion and caste".

Pandey of course was tried and executed. The 34th NI was disbanded. The British thought they had contained the revolt. They were grievously wrong. The incidents of Barrackpore were repeated at Ambala towards the end of March 1857 and at Lakhanau (Lucknow) in May 1857.

Nearly 158 years later, religion remains a potent weapon in the hands of the powerful to divide and rule communities. The Protestant British used religion with both finesse and brutality during their occupation of India. Unlike the more artless Catholic Portugese and Spanish, they did not bother to proselytise. That is why the vast majority of Indian Christians today are Catholics, not Protestants. Territorial conquest and the power it brought, not conversions, were uppermost in British minds.

But the British ensured that divisions between religious groups deepened. It was an essential tool in their strategy to stay in power in densely populated but divided India with its three tiers: villages, princely states and cities. Even sport was not spared. The British promoted the Pentangular cricket tournament between 1912 and 1936, setting religious groups against one another - Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and Europeans - dismissing Mahatma Gandhi's objections at this attempt to create religion-based schisms in Indian society.

Fast-forward to the present. Religion today is a sharp-edged tool in the hands of politicians. US President Barack Obama has been speaking passionately and frequently about religious tolerance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, recently made a powerful statement underlining the right of every Indian to practise his or her faith.

Last week, Obama told a US-led summit in Washington on countering terrorism that the notion the West is "at war with Islam" is "an ugly lie". ISIS does not represent Islam, the President said. What Obama did not say was this: ISIS kills in the name of Islam. No other non-Islamic terrorist organisation - Sri Lanka's LTTE and Spain's ETA, for example - has used religion exclusively as the basis of their terror attacks. Islamist terrorism is unique in this respect. The taint is deepened by the relative silence of Islam's clerical elite in Saudi Arabia.

Obama and Modi, though, have more in common than it appears. Both come from modest economic backgrounds. Both were outsiders to their political systems. Both are self-made. Both have been accused of religious bigotry.

American Republicans accuse Barack Hussein Obama (stressing his middle name) of being against "American values" - code for white Christian America. Obama has had to repeatedly prove his nationality ("I was born in the US") and his faith ("I am not a Muslim. I am a Christian"). 

Modi too has had to continuously prove that he is not communal ("My government will not allow any religious group, majority or minority, to incite hatred") and that India's civilisational ethos has embraced all faiths for centuries ("The principle of equal respect has been part of India's ethos for thousands of years").

While countries use the realpolitik of religion to keep competing nations in their place, faith is also abused by two very different kinds of organisations. NGOs with international funding raise questions (often correctly, sometimes falsely) over human rights and freedom of expression. The case of Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai is especially curious. The government was wrong to stop her going to London to depose before British MPs. A better approach would have been to counter her position factually. In addition, India could invite Western NGOs and evangelists to depose before Indian MPs on issues of racism, religious profiling, trade inequities and broken Western promises over climate change funding. Reciprocity, not repression, as well as genuine self examination, is the answer to the issues Pillai raises. 

Terrorists are the other organised group which use religion as an instrument to recruit and kill. ISIS and al-Qaeda are only the latest in a line of terrorist organisations which have won territory, power and profit in the name of Islam. 

During the crusades, Christians too engaged in unspeakable atrocities - as did their Ottoman Muslim rivals - as they fought each other across Europe and Asia. Colonialism, the slave trade, and the genocide of indigenous Indians in the US and of Aborigines in Australia by invading Anglo-Saxons was again justified on the basis of race and religion: the "duty" of Christendom to civilise barbarian pagans. The methods used - mass murder, rape, kidnapping and torture - were themselves, of course, utterly barbaric. 

When Obama and Modi talk of religious tolerance being necessary for a country's progress, they do so from a sense of history and personal experience. Both have suffered criticism on account of their faith: Obama for not being sufficiently "Christian", Modi for not being sufficiently "secular". Both criticisms, as recent events have borne out, lie in the realm of realpolitik, not reality - as Mangal Pandey would doubtless have understood.