Praying for rain won’t help India. Problem is man-made, why pray to god asked Dabholkar
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Praying for rain won’t help India. Problem is man-made, why pray to god asked Dabholkar

Maharashtra’s governor in 1992 asked citizens to pray for rain. Rationalist Narendra Dabholkar wrote why we must be scientific not superstitious.

   
Narendra Dabholkar | File photo: Commons

Narendra Dabholkar | File photo: Commons

Some questions keep whirling around as you work towards the eradication of superstition: ‘Explain the difference between faith and superstition.’ ‘Your scientism does have limits, doesn’t it?’ ‘Are you trying to abolish the gods?’ Some of these theoretical debates were played out in the real world, thanks to a governor. In 1992, the monsoons had evaded Maharashtra. People were distraught. In the midst of all this, the governor made an appeal. On a particular day at 11 a.m., everyone was to pray for rain. Because it was the governor’s wish, directions were issued left and right. Pictures of people praying were splashed across newspapers: from district collectors to labourers, from school principals to young students. Then a whirlwind of accusations and counter-accusations began: was this naïve superstition, or a powerful prayer to the universe?

I sensed two deficiencies in this whole discourse. One, the main point was lost. Two, the discussion had a delicious relevance to it. The Constitution upholds scientific temper as a guiding principle for society and the new education policy calls for inculcation of scientific thinking. Yet, unscientific and superstitious beliefs and practices abound in the country. There ought to have been a greater hue and cry about this matter. The nation faces many serious problems today, so why not publish a calendar scheduling mass prayers to counter the terrorist threat in Punjab, Assam and Kashmir, or to tackle price rise, bad loans and corruption? Most people did not like such questions being raised. They felt it denigrated their faith and were convinced that we were out to eradicate that faith. Their argument was, all the problems stated above are man-made. Drought is a natural phenomenon. What is wrong with praying to God for rain when there is a drought?


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It is a natural human tendency to seek refuge in an external power when the situation is out of control. But it is also a human virtue to maintain rational thinking in society, even amidst adversity. What the governor and all other praying officials had forgotten (perhaps conveniently) is that the lack of rain is not the main cause of the drought in Maharashtra. The state uses its water resources with zero planning and in extremely unscientific ways. This disaster is not natural; it is man-made. And therefore the solution to it cannot be prayer. At the outset, it must be understood that drought is the lack of water for drinking and for agriculture. Its relation to rainfall is not as straightforward as it seems. Otherwise, why would drought conditions persist in Marathwada and Vidarbha for the past three years despite above-average rainfall? Let us look at the numbers.

The average annual rainfall in Maharashtra, 1,200 mm, is enough to keep drought at bay with adequate planning. Even accounting for variations in rainfall with time and place, there would be sufficient water for one crop, fodder and drinking, with just 402–500 mm of rain. This has been proven at the state, national and international levels. Even when inadequate rainfall is a natural phenomenon, human beings, that is to say, the lack of planning and state inaction, cause drought. In other words, if Maharashtra stores and uses its rainwater properly, it can permanently eradicate drought. But because Maharashtra’s irrigation system is in poor health, its water storage system is also ad-hoc, and this in turn affects irrigation adversely. The dams of Jayakadwadi and Ujani cannot even help irrigate the land on which they are built. Is there any point in spending 10,000 crores to build more projects like those?


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As of today, only 2.5–3 per cent of the cultivated area in Maharashtra is used to grow sugarcane. And yet sugarcane takes 60 per cent of the water used for irrigation in the state. If we do not realise that 60 per cent of the state’s water supply is being used on just 3 per cent of the land, the water scarcity in Maharashtra will become acute, leading to the destruction of the land and its produce as well. With better management of resources, we can double the sugarcane yield while halving the amount of water used for irrigation. All this is known to us, but steps are not being taken to make it a reality. Who will think of tomorrow when water and electricity are free or sold at nominal rates today? This is not a question of what farmers do or don’t, but of how laws are framed and policies are implemented. Why is there such an acute scarcity of drinking water in rural India when the rainfall has been ample for the past three years? The simple answer is: over-extraction of ground water. Currently, seventeen lakh electric pumps are used to extract many times more groundwater than can be naturally replenished. There is a race to dig deeper and deeper wells to reach more groundwater, and this will accelerate the crisis. Attention is not being paid to replenishing groundwater supply, and the resultant imbalance between extraction and replenishment is the chief cause of drought. We need to realise that we spend nearly 800–900 crores every year on water supply and water storage.

Without a law that regulates groundwater extraction and replenishment, this madness will not stop. What do the arguments raised in favour of prayer and against scientific temper in this context mean—the worth of pleading to God, showing sympathy for the common people, the observation that it rained after the prayer, the place of spontaneous emotion in human life and so on—all expressing the inability to register any form of dissent? Where is the line between faith and superstition? This was the second part of the discussion. There is inherent value in prayer. It is the one thing that makes human life bearable. Prayer is part of the religious life of societies across the world. Everyone prayed when the Pope was ill. Even scientific-minded Britishers sing ‘God save the King’. Why must you anti-superstition activists unnecessarily create a racket? At worst, our prayers are harmless; just ignore them. What is wrong with indulging in a little naïveté for the good of the people? Your superstition eradication work is good. But limit it to eradicating spells and frauds. Raise your voice against the killing of innocent animals. Insulting a well-meaning prayer is equivalent to belittling the faith of many. If you peddlers of science don’t like any kind of prayer, just stay away. Even modern doctors ask people to pray for the sick! This is how the proponents of prayer demarcated the line between faith and superstition.

The commotion grew so loud that even the governor’s justification (‘It was a prayer to nature’) was not needed. Many insisted it was a prayer to God, and believed that the rain which followed was evidence of His pleasure. We must carefully examine the forceful claim that there is inherent value in prayer. Setting aside the emotional support aspect, what has been our experience with the actual effectiveness of prayer? The Goddess who was supposed to be so powerful that She could afflict people with smallpox now seems to have lost all Her power. No one, even in the smallest villages of India, now tries to cure cholera with divine remedies. They understand the need to keep water germ-free. There is no longer any question of praying to Indra to spare us his lightning bolts. Small devices on tall buildings do the job quite well.


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Prayer is not effective in any of these cases, and the same conclusion applies to praying for rainfall, too. Understanding this is a simple function of scientific temper. Shouldn’t the governor, who is the chancellor of all the universities in the state, perceive this? Is that too much to expect? The advice to limit the work of the anti-superstition movement to the eradication of animal sacrifice, spells and the use of incense is self-centred. Why should we view only these practices as superstitious? Because so-called forward castes believe that these practices are undertaken by economically and socially backward castes? When objections are raised to animal slaughter during yatras, the Dhangar people ask: why do you disrespect our practices? Why do you want to deprive us of our happiness in the communal meal after the animals are slaughtered? A woman who uses incense often does so in conjunction with medical treatment because she is being pressured to produce a male child. The people who resort to spells are ignorant about mental illnesses. They are afraid of external magical influences. Often, psychiatric care is unavailable or unaffordable. In short, the practices that prayer-sympathisers think are ripe for eradication have their own defendants or justifications. Actually, all these practices as well as the practice of praying for rain are superstitions. But the truth is that one person’s superstition is another’s devout faith. The definitions of faith and superstition change with time, and are relative to the believer; thus confusions and misunderstandings abound.

This excerpt from Please Think by Narendra Dabholkar and translated by Jai Vipra has been published with permission from Westland Publications.