In India, Religion and Neoliberal Individualism Have Converged Ajay Gudavarthy 27 Apr 2022 https://www.newsclick.in/India-Religion-Neoliberal-Individualism-Converged
Neoliberal Hindutva is riding on a convergence of religion and market, that is fuelling a push for individualistic self-realisation.
The aggressive mobilisation of the BJP involves instrumentalising religion and weaponising the free market. Postcolonial scholars had vociferously argued that the sacred would militate against instrumental market value. The spiritual domain was supposed to involve a collective investment in otherworldly pursuits that shun crude materialism. ..
This convergence of the individual ethic of religion and the market seems to be driving the current drive to combine religious mobilisation with neoliberalism. Both direct us towards self-realisation and self-oriented success. Over the last five decades, privatisation and neo-liberal reforms have broken the legitimacy of a shared ethos. All welfare is appeasement or patronage, demanding hateful exclusion or faithful loyalty. To exclude and profess loyalty are the new guarantees of security. One must exclude the ‘otherised’ Muslim, and to do this, one has to remain loyal to those pursuing it on your behalf. Outside this frame stands the sheer individual, exposed to the vagaries of chance, luck and greed.
Merely drawing the wedge between Hindutva and Hinduism is not disturbing this sense of reality. It isn’t making the majority rethink the voluntary consent they have lent to the current regime. Secularism as separation of religion and politics has become unacceptable, but even combining religion and politics for spiritual self-realisation is under stress. We have an instrumentalised version of faith whose roots lie in the neo-liberal marketisation of social life.
Comment: While the description of the mobilisation is on the ball, the conflation of spirituality and religion ethics, individual ethics of religion, markets values, self actualisation.. and Faith with inability to get rid of doubt is one of the old errors of the old materialistic vanguard. In fact, the Right wing has been able to characterise pockets of privilege like lutyens, or artiist or intellectuals as the 'elite' whose civil liberties must be curtailed by the majority. And they have been portrayed as the real reason for prevention of "grandiose development" be it 5 trillion, or Bullet train, or central avenue!