Thread. The only mentionable alumnus of my alma mater, Government Medical College, Miraj (Sangli district, Maharashtra) was shot once in the head, twice in the chest, both obviously his peccant parts. On the kerb of Omkareshwar bridge near Shanivar Peth, Pune, 20 Aug 2013.

He was found there bent over slightly, prostrate, quiet, like a sleeping beggar, not like someone who had floundered and flailed before his last guttering splutters, ruched red blood spreading under him. Punished publicly for teaching children the seaminess of miracles.

For telling the great unwashed and unlettered people of Maharashtra, in their own language, with much levity and mirth, about Occam’s razor and David Hume and Article 51 A (h) of the Indian Constitution.

And telling the Varkari people of Pandharpur, the devotees of Vithoba, that empirical claims must be substantiated by empirical evidence.

But most of all, for the authorship, in 2003, of a proposed law on superstition. And turning into a carnival barker for it thereafter. A barker who never raised his voice though.

Narendra Dabholkar’s children, Mukta and Hamid, after lighting their father’s pyre in a wordless secular service proceeded, without getting too moist, to the waiting TV crews where they were asked to platitudinize about his life and about the contentious bill still in abeyance.

Within twenty-eight hours of Dabholkar’s slaying, the Maharashtra government approved that bill as an ordinance.

The Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Bill 2013 was subsequently introduced in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly on 11 December 2013 and passed by both houses within a week.

It is now, in the state of Maharashtra, a cognizable and non-bailable offence, to be tried in no court inferior to that of a Metropolitan Magistrate or Judicial Magistrate (First Class), to commit, promote, propagate or practice;

Or cause to promote, propagate or practice human sacrifice and other inhuman, evil and aghori practices and black magic such as the following (12 clauses, 6 mentioned below):

1) Assault, forced ingestion of urine or stool, forced sexual acts, branding etc. on the pretext of exorcising ghosts from an allegedly possessed person. 2) Claiming to make miracles and defrauding or terrorizing people.

3) Carrying out or encouraging acts which endanger life or cause grievous injury in order to gain supernatural blessing. 4) Carrying out or encouraging inhuman acts or human sacrifice in quest of some bounty or reward.

5) Creating the impression that a person has supernatural powers and compelling people to follow his/her orders.
6) Claiming to invoke ghosts, creating the impression of possession, preventing the person from seeking medical treatment, and compelling him/her to inhuman acts.

For something that was always billed as the anti-superstition bill, the act has no mention of the word superstition. In its wake, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti and the Sanatani Sanstha continued their rants about how the act was practically rigged to trap the Hindu religion.

Narendra Dabholkar and Shyam Manav, the chief authors of the bill, had always had a sense of the fantastic forcefulness of opinion ranged against it and they had responded by stating that the bill does not mention God or religion and that it only targets fraudulent practices.

Now, even a cursory examination will tell us that the principal doctrines of most religions would involve an assertion of at least one of the twelve clauses on the schedule of the act (six of them mentioned above), particularly the one on miracles.

If a miracle can be described as a violation of a law of nature, consider the following:

The Old Testament is an agglutination of about 67 major and multiple minor miracles. The pillar of salt, the burning bush, Aaron’s rod, the plagues of Egypt, the waters of Marah sweetened, the Syrian army blinded, then unblinded, the dead revived etc.

Ditto for the New T: approximately 37 attributed to Christ. The withered hand, the raising of the widow’s son, Jairus’ daughter, Lazarus, the healing of Malchus, of sundry blind men, sundry lepers, the deaf and the dumb, His own resurrection, ascension to heaven etc.

The narration of the Quran by Jibril farishta to the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad's mystic travel to the seventh heaven on a steed called Al-Buraq.

A profusion of miracles in each of the 18 Mahapuranas. Miracles are the warp and woof of the lives of Hindu Gods, an absolute banality in Hindu scriptures.

As regards saints living in the clear light of history, the following may be cited: Dnyaneshwar and the flying wall, the divine assignments of the infant Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Akkalkot Maharaj, Sai baba etc.

Additionally, in a certain strain of Sanatani Hindu theology, a Siddhar is one who has attained Siddhi. There is a taxonomy of miracles performed by siddhars:

From Anima (the power of becoming the size of an atom and entering into the smallest form of life) to Ishithvam (having control over the sun, moon and the elements; includes the power to resurrect the dead).

Dabholkar et al (in the bill) don’t raise the epistemological question or get into the business of adjudicating miracles. That would make it deeply problematic. The only way one can judge between two empirical claims is by weighing the evidence.

The degree to which we believe one claim over another is proportional to the degree by which the evidence for one outweighs the evidence for the other. The weight of evidence is a function of such factors as the reliability, manner, and number of witnesses.

The Salem witchcraft trial, for instance, had much stronger evidence favouring it than the resurrection of Christ. What Dabholkar’s law does in the matter is to render all miracles performed prior to Aug 26 2013 (the day the Governor signed the ordinance) exempt from arraignment.

Falsity cannot infect what has gone before. We’d like to believe that the law effectively avers that the age of miracles is firmly in our past. The propagation of Satyanarayan’s pooja is therefore not a criminal offence.

But the law does not automatically indicate that we are now in the age of conjuring. Shyam Manav, the other author of the bill has explained that it’s not a crime to perform miracles. It is a crime if you defraud or terrorize someone based on those miracles.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan’s (Dera Sacha Sauda) miracles are not punishable only because they are contemporary. They might be (in Maharashtra) if it can be established that he has used them to compel people to follow him or cheat them or exert undue influence over them.

It was from Dabholkar that I first learnt of the whole passage (the one that has been completely perverted by its truncated form) from Marx that appears in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of Right :

"Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions."

"The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion."

"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower."

Dabholkar’s bill (now act), for a people mired in the stews of wretchedness or avarice or both, wasn’t meant to pluck the living flower. Fin