The Vatican's reiteration,
in the wake of the recent UN Summit of World Religious Leaders, that its real
agenda is to convert every person in the world to the Roman Catholic variant of
Christianity, is a sharp reminder of the divergence between the world-views of
Western and Eastern civilisations.
On the one hand, the Roman
Catholic Church has retracted from the summit's basic premise that all religions
are equal and entitled to the right to exist in peace and dignity. On the other,
its adherents in India are aggressively hawking the fallacious notion that their
constitutional right to practice their faith without let or hindrance is
tantamount to a carte blanche to press ahead with conversions. They are
pretending that the Hindu community's resistance to conversions is an
infringement of their right to practice and propagate their faith.
What is truly disturbing in
this scenario is that, notwithstanding the unfortunate tension this position has
generated across the country, a number of intellectuals and political leaders
have adopted a stand at variance with the sensitivities of the majority
community. It is true that in esoteric matters, it is exceedingly difficult to
decide which side is right. Nevertheless, a comprehensive elucidation of the
Hindu position on both religion and religious freedom, could enable discerning
citizens and scholars to appreciate that the community, too, has a case. A
legitimate one at that.
India has existed for
several millennia; it is rooted in history and enshrined and encompassed by a
civilisational ethos based on the attainment of Consciousness (self-realisation).
India s ancient religion, Hinduism, is not a codified creed in the manner of
other world religions. Properly known as the Sanatan Dharma or the Eternal
Tradition, it is simultaneously a religion and a living civilisation or way of
life, and is inspired by the ideal of universal welfare of all beings, both
human and other creatures. Dharma is natural (cosmic) law. As Hinduism, it takes
on a formal structure, creed and ritual; yet it is never the captive of
absolutism. The sanatan dharma recognises even the atheist as morally valid, and
does not deny him space in the religious-spiritual spectrum. This is because
sanatan dharma is all-embracing: it is righteousness, duty, and the eternal law
that is not fixed (in time or space) but eternally renews itself in response to
changing times and provides for as many paths to salvation as there are
individual souls who seek it.
Dharma demands that all
faiths be treated with respect and courtesy, as they are all attempts to attain
Godhead. Its quintessential argument is that each soul must chart its own
evolutionary course, and that it is not given to any human agency to arbitrate a
final truth for all mankind. Hindus do believe that the Vedas are the revealed
truth that was heard by the Vedic rishis (Sruti). But that is no reason that
they should be imposed upon the world by human regents who claim to be sole
prophets of the only true revelation. This is the reason why, despite the belief
in One Supreme Being, non-monotheism has been the hallmark of all Indic
religions. Our polity and innate secularism has flowed naturally from these
values; it is not for nothing that Aristotle observed that the Hindus were the
only people to have successfully made dharma the basis of their public life
(Politics).
Being a living civilisation,
Hinduism is by definition multi-dimensional, multi-layered. It is inherently
distrustful of the one-dimensional approach towards religion, and does not
perceive other faiths as alien, threatening or unacceptable.
This natural respect for all
faiths has traditionally made India the perfect nurturer of all. When the small
Parsi community fled Persia, they were not only offered protection by local
Indian rulers, but invited to build a Fire Temple for their worship and rituals,
so that they could observe and preserve their unique culture. This courtesy was
extended to the Dalai Lama and his followers when they arrived in India some
decades ago, and India now has a very substantial Tibetan refugee population.
More recently, when the Bahai community fled persecution in Iran, India again
upheld dharma. The Bahai s world-famous Lotus Temple in New Delhi bears eloquent
testimony to the grandeur of India s universalist vision and its embodiment in
the flowering of a foreign religion. Christian and Muslim communities
established themselves in India hundreds of years ago, as did the Jews.
Indian political culture has
been similarly sensitive to the need to accommodate all groups. When the wounds
of Partition were still fresh and refugees were pouring in from both borders,
the very first Cabinet of independent India included Maulana Azad and Dr BR
Ambedkar. Christians were represented through Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and John
Mathai. One has only to consider that despite the formidable power of American
Jewry, the United States has taken more than 200 years to have a Jewish
running-mate for President, in order to appreciate that this is not a small
achievement.
What is noteworthy is that
because the sanatan dharma permeates the whole culture, India is comfortable
with the idea of co-existence with ethnic, racial and religious groups that do
not desire assimilation to its unique civilisational-cultural ethos, but desire
political space while maintaining a distinct identity on the plea of preserving
their special culture. This is something that the West is only just beginning to
learn under pressure from immigrant groups of different racial and religious
composition.
The spirit of the sanatan
dharma is to respect identity, but avoid fixing rigid lines of division. As Prof
Arvind Sharma, Birks Professor of Comparative Religion, McGill University,
argued before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the notion
that one can belong to only one religion at a time, and that one s dominant
identity derives from such affiliation, is an entirely Western concept.
Perceptions are markedly different among Eastern peoples. For instance, in
contemporary Japan, the 1985 census showed that 95 per cent of the population
declared itself as Shinto, while 76 per cent of the same population
simultaneously declared itself as Buddhist.
Hindu tradition similarly
permits multiple religious participation and affiliation. The Indic religions
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism are not perceived as mutually exclusive,
and freely overlap across the country. If Indian census-takers did not persist
with the colonial fallacy that citizens declare adherence to only one religion,
Indian religious statistics could well resemble the Japanese. The merit of this
argument can be seen from the experience of the Bombay Census Superintendent in
1911, who felt harassed by the `inextricable combination of multiple practices,
beliefs, and even self-definitions' among the 35,000-strong community of Hindu-Muhammadans
in Gujarat. Pulled up sharply by Census Commissioner EA Gait, he was ordered to
locate the persons concerned to one or other as best as he could.
The Indian reality was thus
falsified to conform to a notion that belonging to a religion implies exclusive
adherence to it. The lived experience of Indians, however, has been different.
Most Indians are probably unaware that ordinary Muslims in the countryside
functioned within the orbit of the Hindu worldview upto the eighteenth century,
when Shah Waliullah, followed by Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi in the nineteenth century,
launched the project of purging Indian Islam of its Hindu elements. Indian
Christians also lived quite non-aggressively, until the perceived political
fortunes of an individual co-religionist, coupled with resurgent evangelism
emanating from both the Vatican and Protestant missionary groups, provoked them
to up the ante.
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