There is a difference between opinion and knowledge, between casual provocation and informed reflection. In recent days, actor Prakash Raj has blurred this line to dangerous absurdity. His now-viral quip that Indonesia, with 11,000 temples and a Muslim majority, suffers no communal strife “because the RSS does not exist there,” is less a statement than a caricature of ignorance. It deserves not applause but correction.

Indonesia is not a singular landmass but the world’s largest archipelago – over 17,000 islands scattered like emeralds across two oceans. Within this vast geography lies Bali, the solitary Hindu-majority province. Hindus are indeed a minority in the Indonesian republic, amounting to barely 1.6–1.7 percent of its 270 million people. But on Bali, they constitute nearly 86 percent.

To speak of “2% Hindus and 11,000 temples” without mentioning Bali is like describing the Himalayas without acknowledging Everest. The temples in question are primarily Balinese pura, embedded in a culture that resisted Islamization when the Majapahit empire retreated from Java. To portray this as a national phenomenon is not just misleading – it is historically illiterate.

Prakash Raj bandies about “11,000 temples” as if they are evenly strewn across the republic. In truth, Bali alone is temple-dense, a living museum of Hindu-Buddhist syncretism. The “Mother Temple” at Besakih commands spiritual reverence; the Subak water temples are UNESCO heritage.

Meanwhile, the ninth-century Borobudur and Prambanan complexes – Buddhist and Hindu respectively – stand not on Bali but on Java.

Nor is the economic significance trivial. Bali’s temples are not inert ruins but the beating heart of a tourism economy that contributes upwards of 70 percent of the island’s GDP. To reduce them to a communal prop in a half-baked sermon is to........

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