by Nirmala Carvalho

Jairam Ramesh, India's Rural Development Minister, has launched an awareness campaign about health and sanitation. Hindu nationalists react immediately, accusing him of insulting Hinduism. For Ram Puniyani, an intellectual and activist, nationalists defend religion only for political purposes.

Mumbai (AsiaNews) - Bathrooms is more important in India than temples, Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh said as he inaugurated a yatra (procession or pilgrimage) that will travel from state to state to raise awareness about sanitation. As sound as such words may be in a nation where almost everyone has a mobile phone but only half of the population has an indoor water closet, they were too much for activists from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal who accused the minister of insulting Hinduism.

Unfazed, the minister, who is a Hindu, dismissed the reactions, saying "No matter how many temples we go to, we are not going to get salvation. We need to give priority to the toilets and cleanliness."

In launching his campaign, Ramesh stressed the ill effects of open defecation, a practice very common in rural areas and city slums, where sanitation facilities are poor or non-existent, but temples aplenty. For the minister, open defecation was the main reason for hygiene-related health problems and that the country had more temples than toilets.

Although Ramesh's remarks are a no-brainer, only Sulabh International came out on his side. Playing it safe, a spokesperson for the ruling Congress party said that it respected all religions.

"A pity," said Ram Puniyani, a well-known Indian intellectual and activist. "What a shame that the basic point Ramesh is making is undermined by most and is being taken as an insult to Hindu religion," he told AsiaNews.

When minister refers to places of worship and the money spent on "their construction and upkeep," he is suggesting that core social issues are being taken too lightly.

That temples should dominate in India "is very obvious." However, "our sanitation system suffers from gross neglect". In the "last few decades, many grand temples have come up along with other small ones".

Daily practices "like breaking coconuts or turning on a lamp" are seen as mere "routine". But when the temple is used in general terms "to draw attention to deeper social issues," defenders of the faith are "deafening".

For groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, temples are an issue of identity to be preserved in the name of religion.

"The dichotomy between identity and real problems" goes back a long way. Independent India's first prime minister, "Jawarlhal Nehru resisted pressures from conservatives who wanted the state to pay for repairs to the Somnath temple, and focused instead on bread and butter issues like housing and employment. Even back then, nationalists were talking about identity and protecting sacred cows."

"For most fundamentalists,' Puniyani notes, "the temple, mosque or church represents a political issue, whilst hunger, lack of basic necessities and the violation of the human rights of the weakest can be relegated to the margins. Professional politicians stand by the temple in name of religion; those who are denied fundamental structures to survive and those who fight for them are on the side of sanitation."

• india
• fundamentalists
• sanitation
• facilities