Why I am a Hindu

by Shashi Tharoor

He propagated the idea that ‘the divine, the absolute, exists within all human beings regardless of social status’.

He preached that ‘seeing the divine as the essence of others will promote love and social harmony’, but he had no illusions about how prevalent such attitudes were. He was furious about those who claimed their beliefs were superior to anyone else’s.

‘Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, that is the way great spiritual giants are produced’.

‘sarva dharma sambhava’—all religions are equally worthy of respect—is, in fact, the kind of Hinduism practised by the vast majority of India’s Hindus, whose instinctive acceptance of other faiths and forms of worship has long been the distinctive hallmark of Indianness, not merely in a narrow religious sense, but in a broader cultural and spiritual sense

too.

Gandhiji noted that there is ample religious literature, both in the astika and nastika religious traditions, that supports a pluralistic approach to religious and cultural diversity.

Gandhiji often expressed the view that the spirit of synthesis was the essential hallmark of Indian civilization. This led him to declare once, in response to being classified a Hindu: ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Parsi, a Jew’. (To which the Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah tartly riposted: ‘Only a Hindu could say that.’)

‘secularism’ is a misnomer in the Indian context of profuse religiosity, and what we should be talking about is ‘pluralism’.

Hindutva, he declared, ‘is so varied and so rich, so powerful and so subtle, so elusive and yet so vivid’59 that it defied such definition.

Golwalkar and the RSS became passionate advocates of ‘cultural nationalism’.70 This, of course, is directly opposed to the civic nationalism enshrined in the Constitution of India.

For Golwalkar, therefore, salvation lies not in Indian democracy, but in the historian Manu S. Pillai’s words, ‘in embracing Hindu dharmocracy’.

Though the Hindutvavadis would not welcome the comparison, Golwalkar’s conception of Hindu India is not very different from the prevailing ideology of a Muslim Pakistan.

Upadhyaya’s writings and speeches on the principles and policies of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, his philosophy of ‘Integral Humanism’ and his vision for the rise of modern India, constitute the most comprehensive articulation of what might be described as a BJP ideology. The reverence in which he is held by those in power today and the near-deification of the man give him an intellectual status within the Hindutva movement second to none.

He rejected the notion that Hindu Rashtra would have to mean ‘a theocratic State propagating the Hindu religion’.

his Hindu Rashtra was not based on hatred against any community, nor was it reactionary. Rather, his Hinduism would be inclusive.

Upadhyaya dissected what he saw as the failings of other prevailing systems before affirming the integral humanism of Bharatiya culture, which provided a unified view of the universe.

In a resolution adopted officially at Palampur in 1989, it declared Hindutva as its ideology—while claiming that Hindutva represents ‘cultural nationalism’ and embodies ‘Indian nationhood,’ rather than a religious or theological concept.

The BJP became the first governing party in the history of independent India to come to power without a single elected Muslim member of the Lok Sabha;

The French concept keeps religion out of governmental institutions like schools

and government out of religious institutions in turn, whereas Indian secularism cheerfully embraces financial support to religious schools and the persistence of ‘personal law’ for different religious communities.

Hindus are regular worshippers at Christian shrines like the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health in Velankanni

Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practised by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives.

Survival is the best revenge, rather than reprisal; undoing the wrongs of a different era through new wrongs in a different context only compounds the original sin (‘an eye for an eye,’ as Mahatma Gandhi famously said, ‘makes the whole world blind’).

Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, when the Pakistani leadership was foolish enough to proclaim a jihad against the Hindu unbelievers, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal, later Air Chief Marshal, I. H. Latif); the army commander was a Parsi (General, later Field Marshal, S. H. F. J. Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (General J. S. Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish (Major-General J. F. R. Jacob). They led the armed forces of an overwhelmingly Hindu country. That is India.

An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us.

Section 295(a) of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes insults to religious sentiments, though the intent was only to outlaw inflammatory writings published with deliberate and malicious intent.

The politicization of culture is truly complete under the country’s Hindutva government.

Delhi High Court Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul (later elevated to the Supreme Court) authored a magisterial judgment in 2007 disposing of several of these cases in a learned, closely-argued and meticulously-footnoted ruling that bears detailed reading and extensive citation.

many asked why Husain has not depicted figures of other faiths, including his own, undressed. (He had once painted the Prophet’s wife as a fully clad woman in a sari which even covered her head.)

My late father, Chandran Tharoor, used to tell me more than five decades ago that India is not just the world’s largest democracy, it is also the world’s largest hypocrisy.

The irony is that, as a commentator on the Dharmashastras points out, though the cow was sacred in Vedic times, it was this that allowed for beef to be consumed. 155. There are references in the Rig Veda, in the Dharmashastric literature, the Taittiriya Brahmana (‘Verily, the cow is food’) and the Vajasaneyi Samhita that support the contention of beef being eaten at the time.156 The historian D. N. Jha has pointed out dozens of examples to prove that the Rig Veda is full of allusions to the slaughter and consumption of cows. Ancient lawgivers, Manu included, appear to grant sanction for the slaughter and consumption of cow meat.

Surely freedom of belief is any Indian’s fundamental right under our democratic constitution, however ill-founded his belief might be.

Hinduism has never claimed a monopoly on spiritual wisdom; that is what has made it so attractive to seekers from around the world. Its eclecticism is its strength.

A reader bearing a Christian name wrote to tell me that when his brother was getting married to a Hindu girl, the Hindu priest made a point of saying to him before the ceremony words to the effect of: ‘When I say god, I don’t mean a particular god.’ As this reader commented: ‘it’s at moments like that that I can’t help but feel proud to be Indian and to be moved by its religiosity—even though I’m an atheist.’

Religion lies at the heart of Indian culture, but not necessarily as a source of division; religious myths like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata provide a common idiom, a shared matrix of reference, to all Indians, and it was not surprising that when Doordarshan broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim, Dr Rahi Masoom Raza.

If we want religion to stop feeding fanaticism, terror and ethnic wars, we must find other ways of satisfying the need for identity.

the fundamental thing about Hinduism is that it is a religion without fundamentals.

From time all beings emerge From time they advance and grow In time, too, they come to rest. Time is embodied and also bodiless.

The Vedas do not ask why we suffer; they take human sorrow as a given, an infliction to be dealt with and overcome. The Upanishads are more questioning of suffering; they use a word, dukha, sadness and existential distress, a word not found in the Vedas. Ideally one must be detached from such suffering, as the Gita teaches, and by eliminating sorrow in oneself through self-realization, help remove it from others.