 Hello, and welcome to NewsClick. The Karnataka Cabinet has finally adopted the bill, popularly known as the Anti-Superstition Bill, but formally called the Bill Against Inhuman Evil Practices and Black Magic. However, the bill clearly involves many compromises and several aspects such as astrology, vastu shastra and other such beliefs and practices have been excluded from the purview of the bill. To discuss these and related issues, we have with us today Professor Narendra Naik, who is President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations. Professor Naik, welcome to NewsClick. Thank you, sir. How do you view the adoption of this bill, the compromises that have gone into it and what do you think are the steps which are going to follow? Put it in one single sentence. Something is better than nothing because so far there has been absolutely no legislation about these things. So there is a beginning. Well this beginning I hope will be the foundation for a good, strong anti-superstition movement in our state and all over the country. So I am just hoping for that because once people start questioning, the questioning process will go on and on and on and finally we may reach a stage where the people start questioning all their superstitious practices and probably evolve into a better society as years roll by. So in a sense what you are saying is that the legislation is an enabling provision based on which movements can raise issues and challenge superstitious beliefs etc. And it's therefore prepares the ground for such a thing. Yes, that's what I feel, that's what I hope. That's right, that's right. Professor Naik, since you're the president of the rationalists associations, let me ask you there's little doubt that the rationalist movement has made big strides against various specific superstitions and beliefs. In your case for example, you have been actively involved in exposing this business about blind folded reading and so on. At the same time you are also acutely aware that in India today society is rife with superstitious beliefs etc. So what do you think are the strengths and the weaknesses of the anti superstition campaigns? When you want to teach people to question, you take up those issues which have the maximum negative impact on people. For example, you took the most recent example of my campaign against something called as mid-brain activation. It was first promoted as something coming from Japan. One Makoto Shichirida, he was supposed to be the originator of that. And then people here picked it up, one Nityananda of Karnataka picked it up, one Ravishankar's gang picked it up and they started giving it a color of some Vedic or Indian or ancient Puranibhav Samskritiwala and things like that and they started exploiting it. And once our campaign took off, some people discreetly withdrew from it but the others are continuing and some people gave it a more allegedly modern scientific background saying that we are balancing the left and right brains as if there are two pieces of lumps or something, piece cut here and put there and cut there and put here. Obviously the people don't even realize that the left and right brains are connected by the corpus callosum. So they are constantly in communication with each other. You don't need this blindfolded stupid thing for people to show that the brains are going to be balanced or something like that. So you pick up the most rampant of such things and you make it an example to the people so that the thinking process in their mind starts. I have seen people who come to us with one or two issues and later on joined our movement too. That is because when you see an issue that affects you, your child or your family where you do not get any support from anybody, you naturally come to the rationalist and once you come to us, you come to know what we are. You overcome your all previous inhibitions and the preconceived notions that you have about us and join us. The rationalists have been at this game for a long time now and yet you would be the first to admit I think that our society is still full of superstitions. So where do you think a problem lies? What more do you think requires to be done or is this something that is just waiting for momentum to catch up? See the momentum has caught on in certain issues. For example, people got the courage to speak up about this, got men, some got the courage to complain, some got the courage to go to court and they have been prosecuted for it. That probably came through the rationalist movement. Though we are not officially something which likes to take the credit for something, we say that our campaigns have made people think, question and realize about these things. So our strength is there. Our weakness is there in this, that we do not have the adequate manpower, I should say the people power because I do not want to be sexist and say manpower. We should have more people who are involved, we should have more people who are capable of communicating to the people challenging such claims. So in a sense what you are saying is the rationalist movement in doing anti-superstition campaigns is not just promoting another magic show if you like but what it wants to do is to promote critical thinking and a scientific outlook. That is why we call it Miracle Exposure Program, it is just a beginning into the pathway to rational thinking. When you want to make somebody think rationally, you pick up those examples. For example, if somebody asks you the origin of the universe, you say big bank, okay fine. Then how does life originate, evolution. Then finally that man will come to this, that our bugle ke gali me, there is one who is dipping his hands into boiling oil, so that time when you try to explain it, he is not satisfied. He said you do it and show, that is why we started doing these things and that is how the campaign picked up, that is how it became a Miracle Exposure Program. Let me now turn to another aspect, historically the rationalist movement and atheist movements in our country have had much in common with each other. The late Narendra Dabholkar however took a rather nuanced position with regard to religion and felt that a frontal attack on religion is not worth the effort and that it may alienate people etc. What is your view and approach towards this? If you look at Narendra Dabholkar, Narendra Dabholkar mainly came from social movements. He was an atheist alright, he was working more for social movements, he joined the rationalist movement when he saw Premanence Program doing this Miracle Exposure and that is when he joined us, of course that is quite a long back and then it picked up like that, of course some splits and all came anyway. And when it picked up, he took a stand that if we go all out and out against these things people will just shut their minds to us. So we will concentrate on the most blatant things, for example the social boycott he has taken up, then he took up this anti superstition bill again, anti black magic and agori practices in Maharashtra. He was struggling for a decade, every time I meet him he will say I have to meet this minister or that MLA or something like that, they managed to get it passed in the Legislative Assembly then it got blocked in the Legislative Council and it took nearly a decade and the sacrifice of one of our biggest activists to make that bill into law. Perhaps if Dabholkar was not killed, very sorry to say that it would not have become a law. Right. Professor Naik, there are many strands of the rationalist movement as you yourself said with Darendra Dabholkar, they were splits and splinters and so on, but there are many strands of the rationalist movement, there is the people science movement, there are movements to promote critical thinking and so on. What do you think it will take to create a common platform of all these groups working towards a common goal? As it is I should say we have a common platform, we all attend each other's meetings, we have programs at each other's meetings, when there is a protest everybody joins in. So I think we are all together in that aspect that we stand for certain basic values, say secularism, humanism, equality, all that. But maybe we work in our own fields of specialization more and more, for example somebody working for the people science movement, if he or she sees a miracle person I should say doing some miracle, they know that it is nonsense, but they do not have the opportunity where we dull to reproduce it, expose it or even teach people how to do it. That is what we come in. So that is the way we all work together. In fact, Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations is a federation of around 80 groups, various humanist, atheist, secular rationalist groups who believe in one common thing that we all should have scientific temper and we should all work for a secular society in which all human beings are equal. Prof. Naik, thank you very much. I think this has been an illuminating discussion and thrown light, not only on a rationalist approach, but also on the utility if you like of the rationalist movement towards creating a critical thinking and a scientific outlook in our country. We wish you all the best in your work and hope that the passage of this bill in Karnataka will provide a real Philip to the movements and that movements can take advantage of this moment in our history. Thank you, Prof. Naik.