u/singhularitea

adding link to full song in comments. do share your views on this.

Sanatan Dharma is possibly the only ideology in human history that housed atheism and devotion under the same roof and called it a feature, not a contradiction. The Charvaka school which argued there is no soul, no afterlife, no cosmic order, just matter and the certainty of death was considered part of the tradition. Not heresy. Counter-arguments were offered, and the debate continued for centuries.

That is what we lost. Not in any fire but through a much quieter process.

The original structure:

Sanatan Dharma was not a religion. It was a civilization's attempt to answer every question simultaneously. The six philosophical schools alone contain positions so contradictory they should not logically coexist. Charvaka said no soul. Advaita said you are the universal soul. Samkhya split reality into consciousness and matter in a way that anticipates debates Western philosophy wouldn't formally arrive at for another two millennia. The Nyaya school built an entire epistemological framework about how do we know what we know, and how do we know we know it.

These schools didn't just coexist. They argued. Formally, viciously, publicly, for centuries. Adi Shankaracharya walked across India in the 8th century specifically to defeat other philosophers in open debate. He put his entire ideology on the line and invited people to prove him wrong.

Then Bhakti movement arrived. Kabir, Mirabai, Tulsidas did not simplify this complexity but democratized it. Kabir's dohas are not simple. They contain the full philosophical weight of Nirguna Brahma siting inside two lines of Awadhi that an illiterate weaver could feel without losing the density.

What replaced it:

The Guru-Shishya parampara is one of the most elegant knowledge transmission systems ever designed built on the understanding that certain things can't be transferred through text, that the presence of someone who has genuinely done the work is irreplaceable.

The problem: legitimacy, once it attaches to a category, becomes that category's most exploitable resource.

The modern babas figured out they don't need to have done the work. They just need to look like the person who has. Saffron. Tilak. Sanskrit deployed at intervals precise enough to signal authority but sparse enough to avoid being tested. A controlled vocabulary, karma, chakra, dharma, used with enough confidence that followers assume depth where there is decoration.

Baba Ramdev is the least hidden about this. He started with yog, genuinely useful, genuinely reaching people. Then somewhere between the yoga mat and the Patanjali empire, a transaction occurred. The spiritual authority became collateral for the business enterprise. And just like that Sanatan was turned into a product.

The sincere ones:

Here is where it gets complicated. Because the genuinely problematic babas, the convicted ones, the frauds, are easy to dismiss. The harder conversation is about the ones who are, by every available measure, sincere.

Premanand Maharaj of Vrindavan does not run a consumer goods empire. He does not claim supernatural powers. He has complete kidney failure and undergoes dialysis regularly. When a university offered him an honorary PhD, he refused, not with false modesty but with the theological position that any title bestowed upon a sage is inadequate. When a man told him he was attracted to men, he said: don't deceive a woman into marriage, be honest with your parents. Internet called it progressive. (We're apparently praising common decency now).

This is a man who, at least on the surface, has done something real.

And yet.

His entire philosophical architecture routes every question, failing career, broken relationship, family pressure, existential confusion, back to a single answer: Naam Jap. Chant. Surrender. Love God. His Bhajan Marg platform, his daily Q&A sessions, his viral clips: the instruction is consistent. Engage your mind in thinking of Shyama Shyam. Do not get swayed by materialistic needs.

These are not wrong instructions. Within the Saguna Bhakti tradition they are coherent and serious. The problem is what they leave out.

What does He actually offer a young person in Delhi with a failing career, a body that doesn't feel like home, a family extracting more than it gives? But the Nyaya school has an answer. The Yog Sutras have an answer with a rigorous psychological framework for understanding why the mind does what it does. The Arthashastra has an answer.

None of that is what the satsang delivers. The satsang delivers one answer to every question. Which is not what the Sanatan was. The Bhakti movement sure was always the most emotionally accessible entry point into a vast philosophical system but when it becomes the entire system on discount, its soul gets lost.

Then there's Bageshwar Dham:

Dhirendra Krishna Shastri, born 1996 shot to fame through televised Divya Darbars where he claimed to read minds, diagnose illness without tests, and perform miracles. When an anti-superstition organization challenged him to demonstrate these powers in Nagpur, his event ended two days early and he relocated. He later clarified he doesn't actually have special powers and that he is just a follower of Bageshwar Balaji.

One time, he advised a devotee's ailing mother to drink cow urine as a cure for cancer.

Couple years later, Prime Minister Modi laid the foundation stone for a cancer hospital at Bageshwar Dham.

Sometimes the joke writes itself.

What Shastri offers isn't even Bhakti in the serious sense Premanand Maharaj represents it. It's Sanatan as spectacle. People come with problems, the baba demonstrates supernatural access to their private information, pronounces a resolution, and the devotee leaves not with a tool for thinking but with a completed transaction. The largely rural and economically precarious audience, who've exhausted other options, comes away having exchanged whatever critical capacity they arrived with for the comfort of having been seen.

The Upanishads were specifically hostile to this very thing. They insisted no external agent, no guru, no god, no ritual, could do the inner work for you. Sanatan's most honest feature was always: you have to do it yourself. The baba economy's most profitable feature is the opposite.

What actually happened

DMK's Udhayanidhi Stalin called for the eradication of Sanatan Dharma in 2023, comparing it to dengue. BJP called it a call for genocide. Both interpretations were politically useful and neither was philosophically honest.

The tradition is getting crushed between two groups who both need it to be simple, one to condemn it entirely, one to weaponize it electorally. The Charvaka atheism that was always inside this house, the Bhakti saints who rejected every institutional feature their opponents are currently fighting over, the rigorous epistemological schools, all of it becomes unusable to either political project and disappears from the conversation.

What fills the gap is the baba. Because the baba is the only figure currently producing Sanatan content at scale. The philosophers are in universities. The sadhus are in forests and don't have Instagram. The tradition's public representation is the saffron economy, TV gurus, WhatsApp wisdom, Dharma Sansad speeches that sound more like war cries than anything Swami Vivekananda would have recognized as a philosophical gathering.

This is what modern Hinduism is doing to Sanatan Dharma: making a very large, very loud, very political argument that it represents the tradition, while hollowing out every feature that made the tradition worth representing.

The babas moved into the space Sanatan left when its genuine practitioners stopped showing up to defend it in public.

Those babas aren't very keen on accuracy.

But accurate stories are harder to eradicate than the comfortable ones.

I wrote a longer version of this argument as an essay if anyone wants the full thing: The Franchise Problem

There is a number the Indian government does not put on billboards. It sits in a PLFS quarterly bulletin nobody reads. The number is ₹3,900. That is the minimum monthly income of the bottom 10% of India's workforce.

I went through PLFS 2023-24, DGFASLI reports, the Safe in India Foundation's Crushed 2024, ITUC Global Rights Index, ASI data, and a few other sources to put together a full picture. Here is what it looks like:

Wages The National Floor Level Minimum Wage is ₹178/day. Unchanged since 2019. Rural women in casual labour average ₹289-306/day. The bottom 10% of earners have grown their income at 3.35% CAGR since 2017, the lowest of any group. The top 1% grew at 6.99%.

Working Hours The Factories Act says 48 hours/week. In automobile supply chains, 80% of workers exceed that, and 70% cross 60 hours/week (Crushed 2024). The average auto sector worker logs 62 hours weekly. Gig workers on delivery platforms also average 62 hours for ₹75.3/hour net, after fuel and maintenance eat 32% of their gross. They have no overtime, no sick leave, no PF, because technically they are 'entrepreneurs'.

Informality 58% of regular salaried workers have no written job contract. 53.4% are ineligible for any social security. Contract workers in organized manufacturing went from 38% to 42% of the workforce between 2019-20 and 2023-24 (ASI 2023-24). Net value added per worker grew in the same period. More productivity, less security.

Enforcement In Maharashtra, 8.04% of registered factories were inspected in 2021. Between 2018 and 2020, over 3,300 deaths were recorded in Indian factories. 14 individuals were imprisoned. That is a conviction-to-death ratio of 0.4%. The "Inspector" has also been renamed "Inspector-cum-Facilitator" under the new Labour Codes. An inspector enforces. A facilitator advises. Make of that what you will.

The macro picture Labour's share of India's NDP has fallen from 63.9% in 1990 to 53.3% in 2023. Capital's share rose from 36.4% to 46.7% (WID Data). India bypassed labour-intensive industrialization entirely and went straight to capital-intensive services. Agriculture employs 43% of the workforce and contributes 15% of GDP. The IT sector employs roughly 5 million people in a workforce of 643 million.

The ITUC rates India a 5 on its Global Rights Index that is "no guarantee of rights." Same category as Bangladesh.

Full Essay