Opinion: When ritual becomes moral evasion, political tool and spectacle of power

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The spectacle earlier this month of thousands of litres of milk being poured into a river as a religious offering perfectly encapsulates the deep pathologies of our current religious and civic imagination. It is a moment that demands we ask uncomfortable questions about the nature of our piety, the abdication of the state and our collective loss of a grip on reality.

To critique this practice is not to be anti-religion. In fact even a deeply religious Hindu would want to rescue his religion from thoughtless, mechanical distortions.

The first issue at stake is the reduction of faith to an act of conspicuous, competitive consumption. In traditions like Bhakti, religion was an instrument of ethical transformation, a means of transcending the ego and recognising the divine in the world.

What we are witnessing now is the exact opposite. Ritual has become a hollow performance of excess, a public display that signals a comfort with overwhelming concentrations of power and wealth, even in our most sacred spaces.

The sheer scale of the waste – milk flowing into waters already choked by industrial effluent and untreated sewage – suggests a religious imagination that has entirely severed the link between the right and the good.