A Letter To Society: "Men, Politics, and Religion- The Holy Trinity."

Dear Society,

There was a time before you learned the language of law and throne, before you put godhead and governance in the same mouth. Back then, the measure of a life was the weather, the harvest, the neighbour who came with an extra portion of grain. We moved to seasons, not to statutes. Rituals were small, local — not yet carved into hierarchies — and stories were told to make sense of thunder and birth, not to crown someone above another.

Women were not an afterthought in those stories. They were the midwives of knowledge: who knew which root eased the fever, which seed kept the children alive that winter, who carried the line of memory in their hands. The social order was less about public power and more about shared survival; influence came from skill, age, reciprocity — not anointed office or priestly robe. This is important to remember, because it tells us that many of the structures we now call “natural” — the ones that put men at the centre — are inventions, not inevitabilities.

And then the pivot happened. Sedentary life, stored grain, and surplus made land worth owning. Surplus invited protection. Protection needed rules. Rules made permanence of advantage possible — family lines, property, inheritance. The village that once pooled and shared began to fence and document. Where care had been practical, it became contractual. Rituals — those tender practices that once stitched community together — were given temples, hierarchies, and priesthood. Politics, in the modern sense, was born not out of malice but out of logistics: how to keep order when there was more to lose.

With institutions came storytelling that justified the new order. Myths that had been fluid hardened into law. The spirits of the field were replaced, in many places, by fathers in crowns. The gods that looked like mothers grew quieter, and gods in the image of rulers grew louder. It is a long arc — but not an accident. As things accumulated, so did the incentive to control inheritance, marriage, lineage — and that control often travelled through men.

Religion and political authority began to braid into one another. Righteousness and governance fed each other; the temple legitimised the king, the king protected the temple. Where earlier life had allowed multiple forms of influence, the institutional era centralized them — and men, by design and practice, sat at the centre of these cages.

Once intertwined, religion and politics became a conservator of hierarchy rather than a vehicle for the sacred. Sacred stories were pressed into service: to teach obedience, to sanctify property arrangements, to make “natural” what was in fact social engineering. The code that reads “honour” and “purity” often became the language to police women’s bodies and choices. Men who controlled the pulpit and the palace could call dignity by a name that happened to benefit them. This knot is visible in headlines and in lanes. It shows up as laws that speak like ethics, as ritual that looks like statecraft. It shows up when prayers become proofs of patriotism and when political rallies borrow the cadence of the pulpit. And because public power still predominantly flows through men, these knots tighten most easily around women’s freedoms — what they wear, whom they love, where they move, what they earn.

Society, you have carried this knot for centuries. Men dominate the conversation, whether in the panchayat, the parliament, or the temple courtyard. Religion and politics intertwine like two vines strangling the same tree. And where are women? Too often, silent, or reduced to symbols — of honor, purity, community pride. Rarely participants, almost always pawns.

Ever since independence, the dark clouds of separation have never really lifted. Yes, there were brief rays — friendships across faiths, communities that thrived together. I remember attending the first Iftaari of a friend’s daughter, followed by all of us — Hindu, Muslim, in-laws, neighbors — going to watch Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. A film about bonds of family and love. Today, that same title feels like a bitter question: Who are we to each other anymore?

By 2018, the divides were impossible to ignore. Women dismissed househelps overnight because they were Muslim. Vendors who had fed families for years were boycotted. A friend’s mother let go of a trusted worker because suspicion had become the new loyalty. My friend stayed silent, calling it “her mother’s space.” But silence, too, is complicity.

This, Society, is what breaks me: watching good people swallow poison in the name of patriotism. Nationalism dressed in saffron or green, as if love for one’s land belongs to one faith alone. Yet migration has always been our story — people moving, mixing, uprooting, resettling. Land belongs to no man. Man belongs to the land.

And yet you convinced us otherwise. Lovers turned into traitors. Marriages became battlegrounds. A Hindu man dating a Muslim woman is celebrated as conquest; a Muslim man dating a Hindu woman is branded a threat. In both cases, it is the woman who pays the price. When women are raped, it is not seen as violence against her body but as humiliation of her community. Her suffering disappears under the weight of men’s fragile egos.

Patriarchy, politics, and religion — the unholy trinity. Together, they have dismissed women’s wisdom, erased their voices, and made them the most vulnerable victims of every war, riot, and law passed in the name of faith.

And when I look beyond my own country, the pattern repeats. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Palestine — different geographies, same story. Men at the center of politics. Men at the center of religion. Men declaring what is holy, what is lawful, what is patriotism. And women, always, carrying the heaviest cost.

So, Society, I ask you: how did we let the practical needs of survival become a permanent theology of exclusion? Since when did the land of sadhus and sadhanas, of seekers and song, become a battlefield of men’s insecurities? Were men always this ruthless, or did power corrupt them over time? And why have women — equal pillars of this world — lost their voices in these stories you keep writing?

It breaks my heart that communities who once knew how to live with difference are now taught to fear it. That families who once celebrated across faiths are now trained to divide. That women who once carried wisdom are now reduced to silence.

And it breaks my heart, Society, that you refuse to see the truth: men, politics, and religion — bound together — have stolen too much from us all.

Love, Afrah