I’M sure many Indians — specially the doctors at the Mumbai hospital where the Indian prime minister spoke about advances his country had made in plastic surgery centuries ago — cringed when he made this claim.

In his recent tongue-in-cheek column in this newspaper on Mr Modi’s statement about Lord Ganesh, Jawed Naqvi compared it with ancient Egypt and its many deities. As far as I am concerned, Mr Modi is perfectly entitled to his personal beliefs. According to the Guardian, he once wrote that the Hindu god Ram flew the first aeroplane thousands of years ago, and that stem cell research was known in ancient India.

As long as such ideas and beliefs remain confined to individuals, it is entirely their business. However, when these views form part of a major political party’s ideology, as they do with India’s RSS, problems can arise. As we have seen all too often, politics based on the literal understanding of a faith are generally rigid and uncompromising.

In fact, the most successful countries today are free of ideology: a list of prosperous, progressive and creative states is refreshingly free of a religious worldview they seek to impose on others. However, it is certainly true that during the Cold War, communism and capitalism, both materialistic models, battled for supremacy on the world stage.

Even now, Western leaders would like to see the spread of democratic principles and free markets. Given the success of these ideas, not many would argue with them.

But when religion is the basis of a national ideology, then there is a tendency to assume that just as a believer’s god is more powerful than another’s, so too is a country’s ideology better than its neighbour’s. We are all conditioned since childhood to believe that our faith is more valid than everybody else’s, and over the centuries, this certitude has probably led to more bloodshed than any other single cause.

It is curious that a country that has demonstrated great scientific prowess by successfully sending a rocket to orbit Mars should also be home to such curious beliefs at the highest level. But India is not alone in its adherence to archaic ideas: witness the barbaric so-called Islamic punishments inflicted in Saudi Arabia. In Pakistan, scores of non-Muslims have been murdered in the name of our blasphemy laws.

And millions of evangelists in the United States are convinced that Judgement Day will arrive when Jews return to their Promised Land. The Chosen will then be lifted up to heaven, while the Jews, as well as the billions of others who don’t make the cut, will stay behind. This belief explains the support Israeli occupation policies in Palestine enjoy among many Christians in the US.

The White House was not immune to belief in the supernatural: Nancy Reagan, the American first lady from 1981 to 1989, consulted an astrologer, and a Reagan cabinet member claimed that the president’s trips were cleared by his wife’s horoscope adviser. He also received advice on policy matters based on astrology.

Closer to home, Asif Zardari, our ex-president, is reputed to have had a black goat slaughtered at the presidency every day during his occupancy. And in her two stints as prime minister, Benazir Bhutto is supposed to have consulted a holy man. Nawaz Sharif, too, sought the blessings and advice of a pir during his curtailed two terms in the 1990s.

The Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, makes no major political move without consulting Buddhist astrologers. Election dates as well as his trips are fixed only after a careful reading of the position of the stars.

In truth, we South Asians are a superstitious bunch, and believe strongly in supernatural forces. Indeed, Islamic texts contain many references to jinns as elemental beings. So powerful is our belief that in the international conference on Islamic miracles held in Islamabad in the Eighties under Zia, one Pakistani ‘scientist’ read a paper arguing that we should harness the energy of jinns to overcome our never-ending power crisis. Actually, that might have been a better solution than the ones provided by any of Zia’s successors.

Seriously, though, much of the world is caught up in some form of superstition: witness the popularity of horoscope columns in newspapers and magazines. Audiences continue to flock to movies about the supernatural, and the scarier the better. Palmists and astrologists make a good living, whether they are in Delhi or Dublin.

Despite the advances science and reason have made, we continue to believe in powerful dark forces. In the popular imagination, benign and malign beings battle in the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness. Ghost stories are popular across the world, sending shivers up our spines at parties. In this sense, we have not progressed all that much from the days when we huddled by campfires, praying to the gods to keep us safe from the evil spirits that stalk the unwary at night.

Against this backdrop, what harm does Mr Modi cause by stating publicly that he believes Lord Ganesh to have been a real being who had an elephant’s head grafted on to his shoulders? While we ourselves might have odd beliefs, we like our leaders to be sane, rational people who will take sane, rational decisions. Let’s hope the Indian prime minister can separate private belief from public policy.

Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2014