If Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has his way, environment ministers' conference will begin with a prayer to Lord Indra, health ministers' conference with a prayer to Dhanvantri and finance ministers' conference with a prayer to Goddess Lakshmi. Fortunately, the Hindu pantheon is so large and varied that Joshi will have little difficulty in choosing a god or goddess for every conceivable occasion. And if anybody findsfault with the practice on the ground that it does not square with the scientific temperament that the Constitution expects the nation to foster, his party can go to polls saying Hinduism is in danger.

The fears on this ground are not unfounded. In Uttar Pradesh the BJP government has made Saraswati Vandana and Vande Mataram compulsory for the students of primary and junior high schools. Under the new scheme, the morning session would commence with Vandana and conclude with Vande Mataram, while the day would finally end with Janaganamana. Funds meant for Operation Blackboard have been diverted to provide harmoniums and tablas to all such schools to make the renditions melodious.

What will ultimately happen to such forced prayers is not difficult to foresee. Immediately after Independence the government, in a sudden bout of patriotism, decreed that after every cinema show, a record of the national anthem should be played. An overwhelming majority of filmgoers did not show the patience to stand and waittill the anthem was completed, forcing it in due course to withdraw the order and end the national ignominy.

Of course, the cane the teacher wields will prevent pupils from trooping out of school when it is time for prayers. But how will this benefit them? If anything, it will only strengthen ritualism, which is increasingly being mistaken for spiritualism. The ultimate objective of religion is to reform man and instill in him abiding values of tolerance, love and brotherhood.

But far from that, the state and every organised religion have been encouraging ritualistic forms of worship and pilgrimages. In the wave of pseudo-religiosity now gripping the nation, the number of pilgrims going to places like Sabarimala, Velan-kanni and Mecca has been increasing by leaps and bounds, much to the delight of businessmen and transport operators, when all they need to do is look inward to see God.

It was ritualism at its worst, coupled with the tyranny of the priests that discredited Hinduism and allowed Buddhismto grow till Sankara surfaced on the scene to arrest the trend. But it is precisely back to the Vedic age that the BJP ideologues want to take India. They want the hallowed Vedas and Upanishads to form an integral part of the school curriculum, to be taught in Sanskrit. Again, few can oppose free study of the Vedas or Sanskrit for they are unbounded treasures of wisdom. The objection comes when the BJP wants to force them down the throats of unwilling students.

After years of discussion and debate, the three-language formula has been accepted as national policy. Under this, pupils in the South study their mother tongue besides Hindi and English. In states where the mother tongue is Hindi, they have the option of learning Sanskrit. If the BJP's plan works, students in the South will have to learn four languages. Is there any country in the world which forces students to learn so many language? In a majority of schools, neither pupils nor teachers pay much attention to the teaching of Sanskrit with the resultthat an average South Indian, who never learnt Sanskrit in a formal way, knows more Sanskrit than an average student in the North who studies the language. This is because South Indian languages draw heavily on Sanskrit.

It is for this reason that complaints that the Akashvani-type of Hindi is unintelligible are not heard in the South. To say that Sanskrit is a great language or the mother of all languages is to state the obvious. But that does not mean that it should be made a compulsory subject. There are reasons why Sanskrit died as a language of everyday use.

There are now 6,000 languages spoken in the world out of which half will become extinct in a few decades. Sanskrit's association with the priestly class, who propagated the myth that it was God's own language, played no insignificant role in its slow death. Even with the best of intentions and the resources the BJP can raise after meeting the demands of the nuclear industry, it will take centuries to elevate Sanskrit to the level of a nationallanguage, spoken from Kanyakumari to Ladakh. But the BJP thinks it is as easy as compelling its ministers to take their oaths in Sanskrit.

The study of Sanskrit needs to be encouraged. It was Max Mueller, who never visited India, who virtually found the Vedas for us. His Sacred Books of the East still remains the most authoritative translation of the great works of the Vedic period that were passed on to succeeding generations by word of mouth. It is no longer necessary to learn Sanskrit to unravel the mysteries of the great epics of the period. But it requires teaching the illiterate millions to read and write some language, a task the BJP should immediately address itself to before it can make them polyglots.

One reason why Valmiki's Ramayana became so popular was its translation into the colloquial language by Tulsidas. He did not insist that Hindus should learn Sanskrit to savour the beauty of the epic. That is how religions have always spread. Jesus spoke a language called Armaic in which some of thebooks in the Bible were written but today nobody speaks this language. The fate of Christianity would have been different if the Apostles went about teaching Armaic to let people read the gospel, the folly the BJP is committing in the 20th century. The essence of Hinduism and all other great religions can be taught without the aid of the languages of their origin. At the mundane level let the BJP leaders ask whether their cadres want to learn Sanskrit or the binary language that the computer understands?