TIMES VIEW Keep off the business of faith Who said the government is insensitive to the needs of the public? Keeping in mind the religious sentiments of many Hindus, post offices in Ghaziabad have started to sell bottled Ganga water. They will earn a commission on each bottle sold. A private company and Garhwal Vikas Mandal, a government body, are responsible for procurement and packaging of the water sourced from Gaumukh in the Himalayas. There may be a mass market for Gangajal, but is it the business of a government-run entity to market it? Ours is a secular country. Yes, our secularism, unlike say the French version, is porous in theory and practice. There is no firm separation of state and church, and, more importantly, the Constitution allows the government to facilitate religious practices. Government subsidies for Haj pilgrims and management of Hindu temples would not have been possible but for this peculiar character of Indian secularism. In the Indian social context, active government intervention may even be necessary. But there is an urgent need to draw a line, somewhere. It is not the job of the government to peddle faith. The Gangajal promotion is clearly an attempt to make money by exploiting a religious superstition. People do value superstitions here. The government can't help that, of course. But surely it need not promote superstition. There is demand for black magic, witchcraft, faith healing and astrology. Would the government now open counters to help believers access these? People have the right to believe in these in their private spaces. The government has no business to promote faith through public utilities. The postal department is also exposing itself to legal hassles by entering the retail business. Every retailer is responsible under the law for the products on offer in the shop. Can a post office vouchsafe for the Gangajal sold through its counter? By all means, let post offices expand their services and make profits in a range of new areas, but please keep off the faith business. There are enough private enterprises to do that. COUNTER VIEW Post offices can dispense public service Swagato Ganguly Across the world, it's common practice for post offices to sell products that have nothing to do with postal services. This model is particularly relevant to India where remote areas have little infrastructure and the post office network can be used to vend all sorts of services. Public service beyond purely postal activity is the rationale, for instance, of the post office administering high interest-bearing savings deposits of investors. Can public service be extended to religious services such as dispensing Gangajal? Probably not under a hardline interpretation of secularism, as it's adopted in nations such as France and Turkey. But the Indian view of secularism is poles apart from the French or Turkish model, under which no official institution will countenance anything religious. Here we have different personal laws, which regulate such secular matters as marriage, divorce and inheritance, based on the religious denomination of people it's applicable to. The government administers temple trusts and offers subsidised flights to Haj pilgrims. It goes to the extent of building separate terminals at airports in order to cater to the rush of Haj pilgrims. In that context, surely there can't be anything wrong if post offices are used to dispense Gangajal. As a matter of fact, having the post office endorse them might just ensure that a standardised and hygienic product is sold to users. Should post offices endorse a product seen by some people as having merely superstitiou value? That's a loaded judgment we shouldn't get into. In practice, my religion might seem genuine to me while another person's religion looks like a crock of superstition. If we are to practise tolerance, however, that's a judgment we must keep in abeyance. One can make such a judgment in private argument, when one is arguing for the superiority of one's religion over another. But it can't be the basis of public policy. Indian secularism does set a lot of store by religious sentiments. By that token, Gangajal at post offices shouldn't ring alarm bells.