Guest Lecture: Meera Nanda's State-Temple-Corporate complex
Here's bits from a guest lecture by prof. Meera Nanda that I attended in our centre. She talked of the 'Sate-Temple-Corporate complex' that she drew from her new book 'The God Market'. I haven't read it yet, so how do I know? Well, she was reading out from the book.
Here's how the nexus works. Anybody (profit/non profit) can set up educational institutions and get approved by the UGC. Therefore there is this mad rush for universities to get the 'deemed' status. Once you get the recognition, you can hire and fire at will, give your own degrees, fix your own fee structure, and no reservation is necessary. Other than the UGC, the State can also say to a university, 'we recognise you'. Once the university gets recognised, the corporate sector jumps in knowing that now, it is profitable for investment. The religious institutions benefit from this nexus and the business has grown. The use of public money (as all deemed universities get from the government) by hindu religious institutions to train priests, astrologers, vedic sciences began to emerge in a big way with the NDA government. Until 2000, there were only 21 such institutions. It rose to 50 in 2005 and now in 2009, we have 127. This excludes those recognised by the state; only UGC recognised figure here. The government gave Rs. 4000 million to Ramdev, 90 acres of land to Shri Shri ravi Shankar to set up their centre, and so on. 'Pujari' has become a good middle class profession and the demand for qualified (scientific) religion men is more than the supply. Why so much demand when with time, importance of religion seems to be on the wane? Not so, the resurgence of spiritualism is evident in most parts of the developed as well as the developing world. She (Prof Nanda) said that Indians are becoming more religious while the opposite seems to be happening in the west. But I don't think that's correct because even in the west, the increase in interest particularly in old eastern religions has been reported by many. She pointed out that in India, it is the middle and the upper class who are more religious. We have to look at the class, caste, education and equality in the society when looking at religion. The elites ostentatiously express their religiosity. The conclusion was not very clear. Maybe I wasn't attentive. However, as her topic was on privatisation of higher education, there's this good connection of the problem of diverting huge public money to educate priests. I have an assignment coming up; a term paper on communalisation and population. After that, maybe I'll make more sense.
“The God Market: How Globalization is making India more Hindu” Random House (in 2009) It is the thesis of this book that the growing liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy is not only compatible with, but is actually contributing to the growth of a virulent form of political Hinduism which is as wedded to the project of politicizing and universalizing a Hindu (or “Vedic”) worldview, as the Islamists and Christian fundamentalists are to maximizing the influence of their own respective faith traditions. Meera Nanda
Here's how the nexus works. Anybody (profit/non profit) can set up educational institutions and get approved by the UGC. Therefore there is this mad rush for universities to get the 'deemed' status. Once you get the recognition, you can hire and fire at will, give your own degrees, fix your own fee structure, and no reservation is necessary. Other than the UGC, the State can also say to a university, 'we recognise you'. Once the university gets recognised, the corporate sector jumps in knowing that now, it is profitable for investment. The religious institutions benefit from this nexus and the business has grown. The use of public money (as all deemed universities get from the government) by hindu religious institutions to train priests, astrologers, vedic sciences began to emerge in a big way with the NDA government. Until 2000, there were only 21 such institutions. It rose to 50 in 2005 and now in 2009, we have 127. This excludes those recognised by the state; only UGC recognised figure here. The government gave Rs. 4000 million to Ramdev, 90 acres of land to Shri Shri ravi Shankar to set up their centre, and so on. 'Pujari' has become a good middle class profession and the demand for qualified (scientific) religion men is more than the supply. Why so much demand when with time, importance of religion seems to be on the wane? Not so, the resurgence of spiritualism is evident in most parts of the developed as well as the developing world. She (Prof Nanda) said that Indians are becoming more religious while the opposite seems to be happening in the west. But I don't think that's correct because even in the west, the increase in interest particularly in old eastern religions has been reported by many. She pointed out that in India, it is the middle and the upper class who are more religious. We have to look at the class, caste, education and equality in the society when looking at religion. The elites ostentatiously express their religiosity. The conclusion was not very clear. Maybe I wasn't attentive. However, as her topic was on privatisation of higher education, there's this good connection of the problem of diverting huge public money to educate priests. I have an assignment coming up; a term paper on communalisation and population. After that, maybe I'll make more sense.
“The God Market: How Globalization is making India more Hindu” Random House (in 2009) It is the thesis of this book that the growing liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy is not only compatible with, but is actually contributing to the growth of a virulent form of political Hinduism which is as wedded to the project of politicizing and universalizing a Hindu (or “Vedic”) worldview, as the Islamists and Christian fundamentalists are to maximizing the influence of their own respective faith traditions. Meera Nanda
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