The Self-Sealing System of Cultic Politics

In the game of votes, a leader that promises the citizens their safety of religious idiosyncrasies will emerge as a father figure relentlessly upholding the tenets of the religion.

In the last 48 hours, I have subjected myself to the research of cults and the who’s who of charismatic cult leaders, in large part, thanks to Zoe Heller’s article in the New Yorker – “What Makes a Cult a Cult?” The literatures and psychological evaluations of distraught survivors are aplenty: but what piqued my interest was the father figure in all these cults – the all-knowing, benevolent, selfless purported-to-be-the-closest-to-God omnipresent narrator of our spiritual destines.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has long discovered his security in numbers. 80% of our nation-state’s population is Hindu – whether they practice the rituals of the religion or live by its tenets in solitude, is picayune. The belief in a higher, divine power is not exclusive to the religions kneaded in India; that our human soul lives on even after its physical death is a universal solace. There is Heaven and Hell, Swarg aur Nark, Jannat aur Jahannam. The judgement of our morality on Earth will be calculated by a divine being who can, for all intents and purposes, transcend temporal reality. Like abacus beads agitating on wooden pillars, the scores of our bodily morality will settle on the destinies of our afterlife. Across the world, whenever there is social disturbance, alternative forms of meanings open portals for religious interludes. Humans are storytellers by evolution’s design – we are hardwired to seek, tell, and repeat the stories of our origins. Nearly all cultures of the world look up to the night sky and watch the stars to experience a oneness with the cosmos – and by extension, we experience a oneness with each other, even though we are separated by oceans and mountains. The night sky is unclaimed territory and so, the stars that we see when we look up to the heavens belong to all of us - sublime, celestial entities of ancestral knowledge and twinkling receptacles for our questions to which there are no objective answers.

The organisation of religion into footnotes of principles, customs, and beliefs ensconces its disciples in a safe cocoon of belonging and security. And when this search for a higher meaning that underlines our human existence: or spiritual hunger, collides with modern day loneliness, we leave ourselves vulnerable to be manipulated, exploited, cheated. This is not to say that every individual in the physical and spiritual radius of a cult will be susceptible to conversion. Neither does this mean that all cults operate through the modus operandi of physical seclusion alone. However, Modi’s India is paving the way for a Hindu Rashtra, and all like successful cults, the cipher of loyalty lies in its devotion to an authoritarian father figure. The loyalty isn’t necessarily to the country, but the promise of what is to come, that the Hindus will emerge as the warriors they once were, fiercely protecting the mother stead.
Before I am chased by pitchforks dripping with saffron, it is interesting to me how our understanding of cults has been informed by the many documentaries we’ve seen on the white population and their naïveté in electing godmen as foretokens of their spiritual fortune. Another misconception that informs our comprehension of these socially insulated groups is that they live in secluded areas, far removed from modern civilisation, therefore as detached physical entities of mirthful cultures of their own. Now, as we move to digital pacifiers on our nightstands and streaming movies on Netflix instead of sliding in DVDs into trays, cults don’t need a physical space to suppurate and multiply. The messengers of spiritual awakening are taking to platforms like YouTube to recruit new members. In modern day India, our society has regressed to the comfort of other-ing for personal safety, the expressly reiterated identification of Hindus as not-Muslims, or like Yogi Adityanath says, “We aren't the biryani-eating people.”

While marginalised groups need the security of lingual and geographical seclusion to protect themselves from the evils of systemic oppression, what happens when the majority population believes that its very sense of self is under attack?
In the game of votes, a leader that promises the citizens their safety of religious idiosyncrasies will emerge as a father figure relentlessly upholding the tenets of the religion in the face of imagined or unimagined danger. Much like a cult, the leader promises a family – an unconditional sense of belonging pillared by dogmatism. Zoe Heller in the New Yorker provides a befitting, paradoxical terminology for the willingness of the cult members to follow their leaders to their literal deaths, or to the death of their enemies. She calls this “coerced consent.” Heller also posits that we all hold certain beliefs for which there is “no compelling evidence.” This disclaimer is to preface the individuals who fall prey to these pyramid schemes of sexual and financial exploitation with a human comprehension of vulnerability. Why do cults surface in periods of intense emotional and social distress? People who have managed to leave cults, or are still in the throes of its invisible praxis, tout the reasons of loneliness, feeling like an outsider, frustration with the corporate world, sudden grief, or the lack of a safe childhood with protective family members. The cult will replace the feelings of isolation with feelings of acceptance, ironically enough by sometimes physically separating the members from their living family to serve God as an expedited, exploratory journey to spiritual enlightenment. In India, while the Hindus are separated by geography, caste, language, and even Gods, the conductive thread reveals itself in protecting the entirety of the religion and its sanctity through self-sealing. That is, being cut off from the globalised world. In this scenario, much like Scientology, there are levels of devotion – from applauding the installation of the Ram Mandir to actively participating in the killings and lynchings of minorities to remaining woefully silent, like horses with blinders on. Interestingly, the patterns of communal violence in India are mandated by geography above anything else. As with the Delhi pogrom in 2020, the cult-like devotion to the Hindu Rashtra that is observed now draws its life force from the seat of power in the capital city of India. The proximity to the leader of the nation is a powerful connection between the fanatics and their protector. Similarly, Uttar Pradesh carries within its state lines a blood-soaked history of communal violence, the most visceral of which was observed in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The state of Uttar Pradesh now is governed by Yogi Adityanath, who in an organisation of a cult would be regarded as Modi’s second-in-command, spreading the gospel of Hindutva, and pledging allegiance to austerity by way of saffron robes and a shaven head.

In a multi-vocal nation-state like India, one must be able to discern the groups formed for the protection of minorities amongst their own ranks, and the groups that seek to coerce consent by attacking these smaller factions for existing in a chiefly Hindu nation.

This essay was published in the Kashmir Times, Jammu in July 2021.