In God's name

I remember a scene from 'Merchant of Venice' where Antonio, an altruist, castigates Shylock, a mean money lender for justifying his soulless and savage conditions by invoking religious scriptures. So many times in history religion has been used as a tool to achieve ulterior motives.

Be it Osama Bin Laden or closer home Mr. Jinnah or closer in time Varun Gandhi. However, it is not that religion is always used to achieve political gains. In Pakistan blasphemy laws have been blatantly abused to acquire properties of minority communities. In India as this editorial shows they are proving to be hindrance in infrastructure development.

It is appalling that we have more 'places of worship' than 'places of learning'. I am not saying that one does not learns anything in places of worship. In fact if we follow teachings of our respective religions in proper manner this bird named 'Utopia' would be found on earth. But what we have done is that some people planning to grab lands and other properties, public or private, are able to do so defying law in name of religion. We have 60,000 such illegal structures in New Delhi alone. Some of these obstruct construction of roads. You must have noticed worship places in middle of road. The demands of economy say that we must develop our infrastructure quickly if we want to be one of the developed nations in the world. These obstacles slow the pace of development and in the process increase the cost of project. I know religious sentiments must not be hurt for blind development but no one demolishes these structures. They are relocated. It is up to you to view it as demolition or relocation.

Let us put our country first. Don't be a drag in our nation's progress.