Many of us harbour stubborn doubts about commercial airlines that offer ritual prayers before the take-off. It is a bit vague when or why the ritual of prayer was made mandatory for Pakistani commercial aeroplanes.

On the other hand, there are some equally robust Muslim countries, which do not provide for a public display of divine intervention in tasks involving some degree of risk.

Two reasons come to mind for a less intrusive approach to matters of faith. One, religion is strictly a private matter and need not be inflicted on everyone by an arbitrary fiat. Two, why should any single belief be imposed on travellers who may belong to other faiths or be atheists?

On the other hand, a country like India, which likes to call itself secular and boasts of ‘unity in diversity,’ now runs the serious risk of ‘disunity in diversity.’

The problem of accommodating belligerent religious, regional and ethnic sensitivities — or should we say insensitivities — has become a serious threat.

Filmmakers, writers, academics and journalists have to weave their way through an obstacle race in which Hindu chauvinists, Marathi chauvinists, Muslim fundamentalists, Sikh and Christian religious bodies and caste organisations are all lying in wait with their offended ‘sentiments,’ waiting to make political capital out of some real or imagined offence.

It is as though there is a shadow censor board which has a representative of every caste, region, religion and ethnicity as a member (the number would run into hundreds) looking out to see whether his or her community has been shown in a ‘proper light.’ A nightmare of political correctness, it is ironic in a society in which nationalism borders on fascism and casteism is a form of apartheid.

India today is a high-risk zone, a mass of bristling fundamentalisms where religious revivalism is masked as nationalism. It makes aircraft landing a risky business.

An 80-foot statue of Lord Shiva overlooks Delhi airport’s busiest runway. Presumably it has all the government clearances it needs. And now there is a proposal to make a 50-foot high replica of Lord Buddha on the airport perimeter. They are not making life easier for pilots.

The Shiva statue has already rendered one-third of Delhi’s Runway 29-11 — inaugurated recently as one of Asia’s longest tarmacs — useless. Lest they be subjected to divine retribution for challenging matters of faith, officials only grudgingly admit that planes cannot land from the direction of the statues, so “a per centage” of the operations is affected. A per centage indeed.

So why would any government allow an imposing statue to be located in the funnel area of a landing — the point from where an aircraft begins to descend? Why should anyone permit the abbreviation of any runway by a whopping 2,443 metres out of the 4,430 metres that could be otherwise used?

The Shiva statue has been an obstruction for pilots approaching the runway from the east as the planes have to keep the statue on their radar before beginning the final descent for touchdown at Delhi.

Some of the most absurd compromises with (misplaced) religious sensitivities pass as government policy in the Indian capital. For a long time it was a matter of ecological faith that the banks of the Yamuna River would not be permitted for any construction activity. Then suddenly, the thousands of people who lived in unauthorised settlements on the river bank were evicted and thrown out of the city. A grand Hindu temple, a veritable mini-city that violated all the municipal bye-laws, came to be constructed. It towers over the Yamuna now, a monument to the new India’s new Hindu nationalism.

What happened next was bizarre. When the Delhi government gave the Commonwealth Games authorities a chunk of land next to the temple, the temple priests objected to the proposed height of the sports complex because it was slightly higher than the temple dome.

The government agreed. The proposed height of the sports complex was lowered. Of course this kind of thing is worth noting only because India claims it is a secular democracy where religion and state are separated. In countries that do not have this conceit, these things would be accepted as a matter of course.

I was in the UAE in the 1980s when a peculiar problem erupted over some Indian school textbooks carrying the popular nursery rhyme about three little pigs going to town. The book was banned as the mention of pigs was seen as insulting to Muslims. (What Indian textbooks were doing with European cultural motifs is another matter altogether). But oddly enough Miss Piggy of the Muppet Show survived the censor’s scalpel in many Gulf states.

We seem to have had a more agreeable past when major religions encountered and accepted, even encouraged scientific temper. Dalit intellectual Kancha Ilaiah has noted how early scientific discoveries took place in the Buddhist world — China and Japan. The compass, gunpowder, paper and printing press were discovered by Chinese Buddhists.

In the initial days the Catholic church was not willing to accept the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, in fact it tried to suppress these scientists. Gradually the Christian view of the flat world fell apart, and Christianity reworked its faith to suit the science of the earth being round. In the eras that followed the Christian world went on a spree of scientific discoveries — electricity, radio, aeroplanes, computers. The Islamic world led the field in scientific temper, the questioning spirit.

Jawaharlal Nehru once described the country’s mega dam projects as temples of modern India. Mega dams have got themselves a bad reputation now, and their proponents tend to keep quiet about Nehru’s own change of heart about them. But now in the Manmohan Singh era, we find that it is temples and mosques that drive politics, not Nehru’s secular vision.

India’s courts too have kept pace with the denouement. They have banned industrial workers from carrying out street protests because they are believed to disrupt public life. But the same courts have given a free hand to religious processions to take over the streets as and when they wish to.

They say that a secular state divorces religion from politics. The fact is that in countries like India, in a manner of speaking, we have to keep our seatbelts loosely fastened all the time, because the polity has little or no will to tame the menace of unsafe landing rites.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com