Patna: Ayodhya ‘godman’ Acharya Paramhansa’s promise of a Rs 10-crore reward to any one who chops off Bihar education minister Chandra Shekhar’s tongue if he is not removed from post has led to Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and cadres in Bihar launching an all-out attack against the minister.The state capital has witnessed saffron party workers burning the minister’s effigy since the ‘reward’ announcement. Bihar BJP chief Sanjay Jaiswal and leader of opposition in the state assembly Vijay Kumar Sinha have demanded that chief minister Nitish Kumar drop Chandra Shekhar from his council of ministers.So what has Chandra Shekhar done?Recently, he criticised the Manusmriti and certain verses of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas that he said presented the ‘lower’ castes and women in bad light. In a video circulating on social media, the minister is heard criticising those verses in the Ramcharitmanas that prescribe corporal punishment for both groups.The Uttar Pradesh ‘godman’ Paramhansa – who is also called ‘world leader’ or ‘jagatguru’ by his followers – had earlier threatened actor Shah Rukh Khan and Aam Aadmi Party minister and Dalit leader, Rajendra Pal Gautam. In the context of Shah Rukh-starrer Pathaan song ‘Besharam Rang,’ Paramhansa had said that he would “burn Shah Rukh Khan alive” if he meets him.He also announced a reward of Rs 10 lakh for killing Gautam. He had sought a BJP ticket from Ayodhya in the 2022 assembly polls and had threatened to take “jal-samadhi (watery grave)” in October 2021 over the fact that India had not been declared a “Hindu Rashtra” yet. A section of the media has joined the Sangh Parivar in questioning the minister and are calling his statement “irresponsible”.Meanwhile, lawyer Sudhir Kumar Ojha has filed a complaint at a Muzaffarpur MP/MLA court against Chandra Shekhar for “inciting people to cause riots and outrage Hindus’ sentiment”. Ojha has invoked sections 153, 295, 296 and 504 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). “The governments concerned should file such cases against Paramahansa and other such alleged ‘godmen’, issuing death warrants against minorities and non-BJP leaders. It was they who openly called for the genocide of minorities at a ‘Dharam Sansad’ ahead of elections in Uttar Pradesh,” said Prabhat Kumar, a lawyer who practices in the courts of Bihar and Jharkhand.Chandra Shekhar is a Rashtriya Janata Dal minister. He is a three term MLA from Madhepura, the home of B.P. Mandal, the architect of the Mandal Commission report. Madhepura is also part of the Lok Sabha seat that Lalu Prasad and the late Sharad Yadav represented. He was disaster management minister in the first Congress-Janata Dal (United)-RJD government, from 2015 to 17.Chandra Shekhar is a professor of Zoology at the B.N. Mandal University.“Chadra Shekhar has done nothing wrong. He has criticised certain verses which are objectionable. He has not attacked Ram. Most of us are Hindus. We are not supposed to learn lessons in Hinduism from Paramhansa and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,” said the state RJD president, Jagadanand Singh.Chandra Shekhar said that this was not that for the first time that he has criticised the Manusmriti. “Babasaheb B.R. Ambedkar led the burning of it [the Manusmriti] in 1927-28. Some verses of Ramcharitmanas carry a bias against the ‘lower’ castes and women,” he said, defending his words.Also read: The Laws of Manu and What They Would Mean for Citizens of the Hindu RashtraNature of critiqueCriticism of Manusmriti and Ramcharitmanas is not new.Scholar and historian of Hindi literature Dr Ram Ramchandra Shukla described the verses highlighted by Chandra Shekhar as an “aberration”. Hindi scholar Dr Ram Vilas Sharma too had criticised the objectionable verses while praising Ramcharitmanas as a whole, as “progressive literature” because in it, the hero Ram ate the fruits tasted by a woman represented as ‘untouchable’ and also led an army of underdogs against the mighty Ravan.Scholar in Vedic literature and Adwaita teacher Acharya Prashant has suggested that readers to adhere to the central facts given in the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagvad Gita rather than to the Smritis and Puranas which are full of confusing anecdotes. “Don’t get confused with myriad Smritis written in diverse regions and in different spans of time. Act in the perspective of the Vedanta,” the IIT-IIM alumnus says in one of his popular speeches. RJD Bihar executive member and PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jayant Jigyasu, has said, “Ours is a party of social justice. Shekhar ji’s ideas are rooted in the movement for social justice. The party is fully behind him as he has exposed obscurantism the religious texts”. Nalin Verma is a senior journalist, media educator and independent researcher in social anthropology.
