MARX fully recognised the palliative function of religion and it is in this sense that he made his widely (mis)quoted comment (“religion is the opium of the people”). This will be self evident when the short paragraph which ends with this comment is read in full. “... Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creatures, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” (From Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

Religion is thus seen, on the one hand, as an analgesic (this was the principal use of opium in Europe of Marx's time), a source of solace : and on the other hand as an expression of the agonies of the suffering humanity and a sort of protest. Has there ever been a more sympathetic understanding of religion? Or a better explanation as to why the appeal of religion tends to grow proportionately with the rise in human sufferings unless a more effective form of protest is readily available? But, in addition to being sympathetic, Marx had also to be scientific, to show that religion is false consciousness produced by a falsified world, where humankind knows not its real self, where right is wrong and wrong right : “… Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. … This stale, this society, produce religion, a reversed world-consciousness, because they are a reversed world.”

The source of religion is thus clarified. And Marx goes on. without a break : “Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality.”

It is against these sources, against this unjust, agonising world, that we Marxists have declared war. We are convinced that with victory in this struggle, with the elimination of the oppressive conditions which foster religion, the latter will “die a natural death” in the sense that people will no longer need it. We therefore do not impatiently indulge in a crude crusade against religion “and thereby help it to martyrdom and a prolonged lease of life.” (Engels in Anti-Duhring). Such crusades, in fact, have always been a prerogative not of Marxists, but of religious fanatics themselves.

Having arisen spontaneously, however, religion is given an organised shape and utilised very consciously by ruling classes and castes for making the oppressed people accept their sufferings as “fate” or “wish of God” and thereby keeping them away from the path of revolt. Today the opium of religion is not only freely available for people's consumption at will, it is administered in the social organism conspiratorially to numb the people and perpetuate oppression. So the working people's struggle for emancipation has to include freedom from this spiritual bondage too, and here the communists do help them by spreading a scientific, rational world view. And within the communist party every member is required to rise above religious consciousness, shun all idealism generally and firmly grasp the dialectical materialist outlook of Marxism.

This is not the place to discuss the Indian scene in any detail Suffice it to mention the Britishers' policy of “divide and rule” based on religion and the sinister role of present day fundamentalists and communalists. Against such machinations and abuses we communists certainly wage a direct and militant mass, struggle. And we demand total separation of politics and of stale administration from religion, which is a private affair of citizens — completely a mailer of individual freedom lo believe in this or that religion or not to believe at all.