Blog: Religion for Priests, Politics for Politicians

The MMM's uniformising instinct cannot situate the role of politics in religious ceremonies politicians attend on special invitation as chief guests. The conventional divide between the sacred and the secular seems to ostracise politicians from their role as potential champions of their faith. It is true that Hindu faith differs from both Islam and Christianity because it is not a hierarchic, prophet-led religion.

Because Hinduism is a philosophy of life, and not a religion in the traditional sense, the mixture of the secular and the sacred becomes all too natural among Hindus.

What is the rationale behind Obeegadoo's plea to the PM to propose a legislation that will banish politicians from the dais reserved to speakers on the occasion of religious ceremonies? The Catholic Church publishes its 'lettre pastorale' in which its head makes reference to the current social and political landscape to raise public awareness on important moral issues.

The Anglican Church recently made harsh structures against widespread corruption in the country, and the Mauritian population received these thoughts with equanimity because God and religion cannot be treated as privileged pariahs of our society who must be restricted to territories inaccessible to laymen.

It is true that when religion mixes with secular and mundane activities, it tends to give an exaggerated reinforcement to the latter without an essential rational corrective. The filter of reason is an essential rational corrective.

The filter of reason is suspended and faith overwhelms. The politician's intention wins easy approval because he is drawing from a reservoir of ideas that are not contested. The MMM feels more comfortable in the world of hard logic, common sense and rationalisation.

The Labour Party represents a traditional folk-oriented culture where the emotional, the affective, the millennial, the traditional and reality meet to make the whole man.

In fact in the seventies there was a renaissance of reason as opposed to emotion, a rebirth of a world of fact as opposed to feeling. The MMM brought into politics the vocabulary of Fanon, Marx, hard economics, real native virtues like Kreol. It is in the light of Labour's defeat that emerged a Navin Ramgoolam who represented a blend of the traditional and the modern.

He is the only politician today who still uses religion to illustrate political behaviour while he can juggle with the most modern thoughts in political science, economics and sociology. Berenger lacks that religious dimension, being a product of May 68 and being atavistically suspicious of whatever is religious and scriptural.

Will Labour's image be what it is if it deliberately sacrifices the religious literature and confines itself to the hard fact of political reality? Here we notice the tendency of Navin Ramgoolam electorate to touch his feet when he passes by. Ramgoolam is gradually gaining the aura of a living myth, a living legend and it is his seeming knowledge of religion that gives him this aura. A politician must ride the crest of the waves within the cultural framework of the people he leads. An Obeegadoo belongs to a generation that cannot understand the meaning of religious emotions, having probably been brought up in an atmosphere that believes that religion is the opium of the people.

Being a person who worships Berenger as his political father, he cannot but breathe the absence of a faith that involves trust in the mystery of life.

There are many intellectuals that are anathema to the view that beyond the phenomenon of seen and sensorially felt reality is a world that nourishes the spiritual being of man.

The narrowly Western, Christian context that provides fodder to the minds of certain pseudo-intellectuals is itself eclipsed by the development of Hindu thought across the world. Hindu spirituality is at the very base of Einstein's physics, but many feel safe in a world of hard rationality.

The Labour conscience cannot banish the religious from the secular though it makes a difference between them in State regulated activities.

What separates Obeegadoo from the Labour generation is the vision of man. The MMM which believes that man should be at the centre of development means economic growth, access to fundamental needs, human rights in so far as they guarantee freedom of opinion, expression, association even if freedom of worship does not occupy an important place in their hierarchy of needs. There is a poetry of existence that the MMM mocks at because it does not feed man. If art is important it should serve the quest for economic fairness. What do politicians gain by addressing the audience during religious ceremonies? They are able to assert their communal being. When we realise that Resistance and Alternativ is urging for the definition of the Mauritian as one whose religious identity is a private concern ,that has no place in public life, we can understand the move of Obeegadoo to intensify the opacity of the MP's religious identity.

In fact we are facing two opposite views of the role of the Mauritian in shaping public life. It is unfortunate that the real debate is avoided to give way to a volley of invectives hurled at each other like two illiterate rustics.