In India, the more corrupt and deviant a person is, the more pious he or she appears.
Temples are built on bribes, ashrams thrive on black money, and spiritual gurus offer blessings in exchange for silence. The irony is staggering: the same hands that loot the nation fold in prayer, the same tongues that lie chant mantras, and the same minds that hatch scams sponsor pilgrimages and feed the poor — all in the name of dharma.
We are a land where guilt takes the shape of godliness.
You steal from the people? Build a temple.
You cheat your partners? Organize a yagna.
You silence dissent? Take a dip in the Ganga.
You go to jail? Come out with a tilak on your forehead and be welcomed with garlands.
In India, religiosity is not a reflection of one’s inner purity — it is often a mask worn by the impure. The bigger the crime, the more dramatic the performance of devotion. And we, as a society, applaud the drama. We forgive the sinner if he feeds the saints. We re-elect the thief if he bows at the shrine. We forget the fraud if she sings a bhajan.
Why?
Because we’ve replaced truth with ritual. We’ve made God a bargaining chip. We’ve turned spirituality into a PR stunt.
The honest atheist is mistrusted. The quiet secularist is seen as “foreign.” But the scamster who donates to a temple becomes a “dharmic soul.” The criminal who funds a religious procession is praised as “God-fearing.”
This is not devotion. This is damage control.
This is how religion, in the hands of the corrupt, ceases to be a path to self-realization and becomes a tool for self-preservation.
And as long as we worship the piety of the deviant, we remain complicit in the decay of both religion and society.
In India, it’s not the gods who forgive the corrupt — it’s the people. And that’s the real tragedy.