By Kollengode S Venkataraman Written in July 2003
I am a practicing agnostic Hindu. But I believe that faith, either in an external Being or in one’s own Self or self, has the potential to help individuals to make some sense of the roller coaster ride of life and manage life’s aggravations. But faiths, when organised into religions, often lose their spiritual underpinnings and become empty shells of rituals and trite catechisms seemingly based on high-sounding theology. Don’t get me wrong. Rituals and catechisms are often necessary in the early stages of one’s spiritual development, like temporary scaffolding necessary for building permanent structures. However, in organized religions, they often become ends in themselves, or worse still, means towards a more sinister end. When religions get organised into mass movements, their virulence often becomes deadly in dealing with nonconformists within the faith, and dealing with people of other faiths. Histories of all religions bear testimony to this.
Now to the rise of Hindu assertiveness in India that goes by several pejorative terms in the Indian English media — Saffron brigade, Sangh Parivar, Moditva, and Hindutva being the most common ones.
Let us for now ignore the critics of Hindu assertiveness among those with strong Christian and Muslim theological grooming. Let’s also ignore that these critics have no problem in being assertive in their faiths.
The other critics of Hindu assertiveness in India are mostly in the Indian English media. Many of them converts to Marxism and the Western media, having been educated and trained to see Indian through the Western lenses. They intentionally and disingenuously look at Hindu activism in isolation, as if it is something new originating from India. The rise of strong religious fundamentalism started decades earlier outside India. India is only responding and reacting to this as it was affecting India also.
Rise of religious fundamentalism in the US
All societies, Western democracies included, always had, and always will have, fringes of religious extremists. India is no exception.
In the 1970s, to combat communism, the US never hesitated to use the Christian faith — Catholic, traditional Protestant and more aggressive Southern Baptist, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and others — to solidify its masses against communism.
In the US, Ronald Reagan rode to power on the horse of Christian fundamentalists. Remember Jerry Falwell and company’s crusades in the 1970s in the name of Traditional Family Values? These were coded words for the fundamentalists’ Judeo-Christian view, not only of what the U.S. to be, but also how the world at large should look like.
During the Cold War, the US never hesitated to use the Vatican, a hierarchical, rigid, and intolerant religious organization, in its war against the equally intolerant communist evil Empire. Remember Lech Wałęsa of Poland’s Solidarity being used by the U.S. through Pope John Paul to fight the Soviet evil empire?
Even in his war against terrorism, George W Bush goes out of his way to appeal to Christian conservatives and invokes Evil, which has theological undertones in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Axis Of evil Includes Iran and Iraq (Muslim), North Korea (Communist). Bush’s political operatives know well that the idea of an enemy full of Evil resonates well with Judeo-Christian conservatives. The US electronic media and most of the US print media, not to speak of Indian English media, never made an issue of it. If Vajpayee calls for Dharma Yudh against terrorism, God forbid against Pakistan, imagine how the Western media and the Indian English media would characterise it. US presidents routinely invoke expressions from the Bible in their addresses to nations more to appease their religious conservatives than to inspire citizens.
Islamic fundamentalism in Asia
In the 1970s, Ayatollah Rohullah Khomeini rode the Shiite fundamentalist wave and overthrew the Shah of Iran, then a stable ally of the US against communism. Iranians thought of the Shah differently. They thought the Shah was trying to modernize — read, westernize — Iran too much, too fast without actually democratising it. Iranians saw the Shah as hedonistic. He was also despotic and let loose his US-trained secret police, Savak, on his citizens. The mullahs only exploited Iranians’ seething anger.
At the same time, in neighboring Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq appeased the Pakistani mullahs by making Pakistan an Islamic Republic with Sharia, the medieval Islamic laws, becoming the law of the land. Zia’s Pakistan was contrary to what the founder of Pakistan, Qaid Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had in mind. In Jinnah’s vision, Pakistan would be a liberal, secular democracy rooted in the enlightened Islamic idea of ijtihad, a country in which “Muslims can go to their mosques, Hindu to their temples, Christian to their churches,” as Jinnah said on August 11, 1947, just days before Partition.
With the Arabian Peninsula overflowing in petrodollars in the 1970’s and the 80s, countries such as Saudi Arabia were in no mood to liberalise their society. After all, Saudi Arabia literally means Arabia of the Souds, with the House of Souds having over 1000 Princes.
Saudi Arabia brought peace with the orthodox Wahhabi Sunni clerics by funding thousands of madrasas in poorer countries in Africa and South Asia. In India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, these madrasas recruited youngsters from poorer rural families to an education program with heavy emphasis on learning Quran by rote and indoctrination against not only infidels like Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhist, Jains and Sikhs, but also against other Muslims like Shias, Sufis, Ahmadiyas, who do not conform to the Wahabi view of Islam.
One must acknowledge that in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the mushrooming of madrasas was possible only because governments there abdicated their responsibility towards quality primary and secondary education for all children, particularly in the countryside. The madrasas have only filled the void.
In the last quarter of a century, the US from Pakistani soil staged its war against the Soviet-supported Afghanistan. In this war, the US recklessly used the Islamic card to recruit mercenaries from the Arab world. Completing the mission of crushing the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the US simply walked away, leaving the area to become infested with narco traffic and a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.
After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in 1980s, Pakistan used these terrorists to infiltrate into India’s Kashmir in pursuit of its very cost-effective policy of slowly “bleeding India to death.” Islamic terrorists, trained in Pakistan with U.S. taxpayer money, from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other nations infiltrated into Jammu and Kashmir and murdered thousands of civilians, including older people, women and children, mostly Hindu and Sikh. These Pakistan-supported infiltrators also terrorised the Kashmiri Pandits and drove them out of Kashmir, making them refugees in their own country. This was one of the early instances of ethnic cleansing, before the phrase even became common.
Till September 11, even though the US establishment knew about Islamic militants breeding in Pakistan, it ignored it. The very same Islamic terrorists brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001, plunging the US into anger, anxiety, and fear towards the Islamic terrorists. Then everything changed.
Christian fundamentalism in India
1500 years before European missionaries set for set their foot in India in the 16th century, India already had a Christian population in pockets. These later European missionaries, in their Eurocentric view of the world, believed that they were the first ones to bring Christ to India’s idol-worshipping pagans and heathens. When the European missionary saw the brown-skinned natives practicing their own version of Christianity, which was by now fully assimilated into the Indian ethos, the European missionary considered the native Christians heretics.
But in the last one hundred years, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Southern Baptist Fundamentalists, and Jehovah’s Witness from the US are active in India seeking to “save souls.” These are the fire-and-brimstone preachers we see in rural America in revival tents in summer, guaranteeing you heaven if you heed their particular version of Christianity, and condemning you to eternal hell if you don’t. They are an embarrassment to many traditional mainstream Christians in India.
In India they shout in street corners and close to Hindu temples — and they avoid mosques — using aggressive tactics, often using virulent and vitriolic language in describing local religious traditions. How do I know? As a teenager I have seen them, listened to them, and even occasionally picked up rhetorical discussions with them, when walking along poorer neighborhoods in Chennai where I gree up.
I wonder how people here in the US would react if, say Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist preachers, scream in front of their churches, peddling their faith and putting down the highly evolved Christian traditions using languages like the virulent and Christian missionaries in India. Looking back after living in the US for over two decades, I’m glad that as a teenager I confronted then missionaries in India.
All beliefs being trans-rational, if not irrational, how can anyone’s system of belief claim exclusive rights to Truth and for man’s salvation in the life after his death, when most of man’s struggles are here and now. Arrogance in matters of spiritual matters is the biggest impediment in man’s spiritual growth. This applies to Hindus as well.
Could it be possible that the Hindu assertiveness in India did not spring forth in isolation from nowhere, but came as a reaction to the Islamist terrorism and the virulent evangelism of many of the latter-day Christian missionaries in India? Simply blaming Hindu fundamentalists or calling them names is unlikely to tame the phenomenon.
During the 45-year Congress party rule, secular historians, many of them Marxists, held patronage jobs in government departments and universities. These Marxist historians, while presenting the history of the entry of Islam in India, only highlighted the good things that Islam brought to India. They glossed over the brutality of Islam in India, the details of which are well documented not by Hindu writers of that era, but by Islamic historians of the era themselves.
Indian secular historians similarly gloss over historical facts on the unholy alliance among the European missionaries, European scholars, and British administrators in India to consolidate the imperial power over India. See the references at the end.
But when cultures and faiths meet, they influence each other in ways both good and bad. Simply emphasizing the good and glossing over the bad is intellectually dishonest. Indian Marxist historians have no embarrassment for blatantly distorting Indian history just to make it fit into their Marxist view of the world.
But despite Indian secular Marxist historians sugar-coating historical events, they live in India in people’s consciousness. (Guru Gobind Singh, Shivaji and Aurangzeb), in Indian folklores, (Jhansi Ki Rani, Mohammad Ghazni and Somnath, Malik Kafurr, Raj Deo Singh), and in the ruins of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples across the Indian subcontinent, as in the 15th century Hampi ruins in Karnataka. After all, Islamic Fundamentalists destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in the 21st century in the full glare of international audiovisual media.
As a society we can grow not by glossing over history, but only by coming to terms with both good and the bad in history. The US came to terms with itself in its bad race relations with Blacks by acknowledging them, and the country has become that much stronger. The race relations in the US is still a Work in Progress. India is coming to terms with these injustices of caste system and to that extent, it is becoming stronger.
But in India, the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists have not come to terms with India’s spiritual, cultural, literary, intellectual, and artistic ethos, and the vicious circumstances of their interactions with the local traditions. If you listen to the versions of Indian history as told by the Hindu, Muslim, Christian orthodoxies, you wonder if they are even telling the history of the same land mass.
In this context, Indian secular Marxist historians are not helping either. Having distorted history, their credibility is questioned now. They use shrill rhetoric to put all the blame on the Hindu fundamentalists, themselves becoming in the process, “secular” fundamentalists. There is a lesson for all of us here. If we hate our enemy intensely and irrationally, we run the risk of unconsciously internalizing some of the very traits for which we hate them. Unless we come to terms with history, how can you move on?
References.
1. Eminent Historians, Their Technology, Their Line and Their Fraud by Arun Shourie, Harper Collins Publishers in India. ISBN number 81722335581919. 98 to 270 pages.
Missionaries in India continually. Continuities, Changes and Dilemmas, by Arun Shourie. Harper Collins Publishers in India. ISBN 8172232751994. 293 pages.