The Great Indian Political Debate - 3

[acharya]

JwalaMukhi wrote:
In these "secular societies" there are two dimensions to religion, one purely about the question of belief and secondly the political power. < snip > This was acceptable since most of the people belong to within the group loosely, hence no offence is seen.

However some enlightened ones, identified the problem with the belief system and created an option that competing equally offensive competing religion can also be given space. So secularism meant tolerance of mutually offensive belief system to co-exist, along with the thought that rejects belief.

However, even the most die-hard atheists or agnotists or whatever else they may want to label themselves, are clear about the benefits one reaps from identifying and being within the political dimension of the religion. There is no or very little tolerance for mutually competing relgions to co-exist in politcal dimensions within such secular societies.

In Islamic societies, the two dimensions of the belief and politcal are rolled into one. Hence no tolerance for competing religions to co-exist period. With such a track record of the so called "secular" societies, the implications of grafting such a solution to a society with additional dharmic religion in the mix, can be guessed.


I would just like to add that the US/UK/France allow secularism in a basically Christian societal framework as SN Balagangadhara has eloquently described.

When everyone was Christian, some people (the political leaders) agreed to set aside religion if their workplace, because the religion was alive and healthy at home when they went home after work in the evening.

But whenever islamic and Christian societies mixed - one invariably ended up dominating or eliminating the other. This is especially true of Islam, but that may only be because "secularism" was invented some centuries ago in Chrsitian societies.

I wonder if it is possible at all that Islam would eventually have converted/eliminated all Hindus and covered all of India had the British not come in?

Forum opinion on this issue is ambiguous. On the one hand people insist that Islamic rulers were a spent force by the time the British came in because of the Sikhs and Marathas. On the other hand Islam is seen as continuously spreading by demography even today. We have both forum opinions posted on this board, but both cannot be correct.

If Islam is spreading "its tentacles" now - it means that the old Sikh and Maratha victories were a temporary aberration.

Was the entry of the British an interlude in which both Hindus and Muslims were suppressed and made to shut up by a unique "Secularism in a Christian framework" imposed by the British Raj.

But the end of that British Raj marked the end of that "Secularism in a Christian framework" and the division of India into Muslim Pakistan and a (largely) Hindu India.

I use use the words (largely) Hindu India deliberately. It is only a groups of Hindus who call themselves secular who insist that India should NOT be seen as "largely) Hindu India". All media references in the world and all world opinions tend to see India as "largely Hindu India".

Why do Indians insist on not seeing India like the rest of the world as a "largely Hindu India". I propose that this is confusion NOT ONLY among secular Hindus, but all Hindus at large about their own identity and status in this world.

When the entire outside world has been describing India as "Hindu", Indian Hindus have been insisting "We are not Hindu. We are Sanatana Dharmis". We are not a religion. We are a dharma"

And almost as an extension of that when the entire goddam world looks at India as "Largely Hindu" - we insist that we are not Hindu in character.

Hindus fight Hindus here. just look at the folly of Hindus

1) "Right wing" Hindus insist that India is not Hindu but "Sanatana Dharma" By doing this they may be telling the truth, but they are eroding the identity by which India is recognised in the world

2) "secular" Hindus resist the description of India as "Largely Hindu" and say "we are a mix of all religions" By doing that secular Hindus erode the identity by which India is recognised in the world.

But secular Hindus and Right wing Hindus hate each other. Seculars are called "Sickular" or "pseudosecular" right on this very forum. "Right wing Hindus" were called "murderers and bigots" right on this very forum.

But both groups do whatever they can to erode Hindu identity by refusing to accept the others view as a variant of Hindu opinion.

Is it any wonder that Hinduism can be eaten away at the edges when all Hindus are jokers of one variety or other?

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-acharya+Jan 17 2008, 08:35 AM-->QUOTE(acharya @ Jan 17 2008, 08:35 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->................

But both groups do whatever they can to erode Hindu identity by refusing to accept the others view as a variant of Hindu opinion.

Is it any wonder that Hinduism can be eaten away at the edges when all Hindus are jokers of one variety or other?
[right][snapback]77221[/snapback][/right]
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Obviously not being privy to the whole thread and context - What is Hindu Identity in the above message ? Are we to assume that it includes HINOs - "Hindus In Name only"? HINOs by default do not have to be secular (per indian definition), btw.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-k.ram+Jan 18 2008, 12:11 AM-->QUOTE(k.ram @ Jan 18 2008, 12:11 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--><!--QuoteBegin-acharya+Jan 17 2008, 08:35 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(acharya @ Jan 17 2008, 08:35 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->................

But both groups do whatever they can to erode Hindu identity by refusing to accept the others view as a variant of Hindu opinion.

Is it any wonder that Hinduism can be eaten away at the edges when all Hindus are jokers of one variety or other?
[right][snapback]77221[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Obviously not being privy to the whole thread and context - What is Hindu Identity in the above message (#41)? Are we to assume that it includes HINOs - "Hindus In Name only"? HINOs by default do not have to be secular (per indian definition), btw.
[right][snapback]77245[/snapback][/right]
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[acharya]

Sanskrit our culture
Sir—This refers to the article, “Secularism means anti-Indian” (January 22), by Indulata Das. The Hindi used in Government offices still draws heavily from Sanskrit. It is only in the private sector -— the media and entertainment industry -— that popular Hindi, deriving words from all sources, is used.

The Sanskrit words in Hindi are increasingly being replaced by Arabic and Persian words in the name of ‘simplification’. Should non-Hindi speakers, who are encouraged to learn Hindi, carry an Urdu dictionary as well? Sanskrit-based Hindi will find greater acceptance among non-Hindi-speaking Indians. Mr Subramanian Swamy said in a private gathering, “Let us so ‘Sanskritise’ Hindi that it becomes Sanskrit in the end.” Sanskrit is not merely a language but a culture as it is derived from sanskriti.
P Dutta
New Delhi

[acharya]

‘Science has a role in tackling communalism’

Special Correspondent

Monteiro for systematic use of science from the primary level of schooling

PANAJI: Vivek Monteiro, scientist and trade unionist, has called for a “systematic and scientific use” of science right from the primary level of schooling to undermine the influence of fundamentalism.

Delivering the last lecture on the topic of “Science is the cognition of necessity” in the four-lecture series of the D.D. Kosambi Festival of Ideas here on Thursday, Mr. Monteiro said that considering the fact that growth of communalism was one of the major problems confronting society today, undoubtedly science had to play a role by spreading scientific temper among people.

Elaborating on the role of science in combating communalism, Mr. Monteiro said, “It is not enough if intellectuals debate these issues in academic seminars. The real battle has to be fought and won in the minds of the common man.”

Analysing scientific writings of Kosambi, Mr. Monteiro expressed surprise that there seems to be no writing in Kosambi’s available works on the subject of communalism while there is evidence to suggest that he was active in post-riot relief works in Benares during his teaching days. Stating that Kosambi has written critically about the influence of religion on Indian people, including scientists, particularly in his articles on the subject of scientific attitude and religion, Mr. Monteiro said there was no discussion on communalism.

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Mr. Monteiro said that considering the fact that growth of communalism was one of the major problems confronting society today, undoubtedly science had to play a role by spreading scientific temper among people.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Create the problem and then offer an alien essence as the solution.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kosambi, Damodar Dharmanand (1907-1966)

Prof. D. D. Kosambi (as he was usually known) was an outstanding intellectual with a vast range of interests and expertise.

<b>His father was an eminent scholar of Buddhism. </b>After some initial schooling in India and then abroad, <b>young Kosambi was trained in Mathematics, History and Languages at the Harvard University, where his father had taken up a teaching assignment. </b>Subsequently he made his mark as a mathematician, statistician, geneticist, numismatist, Indologist, historian and political theorist and commentator – all rolled into one. He was also a polyglot and widely travelled.

<b>Prof. Kosambi is, however, best known as the pioneering, and arguably the most eminent, Marxist to apply Historical Materialism to the analysis of ancient Indian civilisations and societies.
</b>
His contributions as a truly ‘independent’ and outstanding Marxist analyst of contemporary India – both pre-Independence and post-Independence, have, however, gone somewhat unnoticed. His role as a prominent peace-activist, long before peace-activism gained any significant currency in India, drawing attention to the uniqueness of nuclear threat to the whole of humanity also deserves far greater attention. Of his numerous publications, the following are the more important ones dealing with his social concerns and engagement with Indian history and contemporary realities:

    * Science Society and Peace
    * An Introduction to the Study of Indian History
    * History and Society: Problems of Interpretations
    * The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline
    * Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture
    * Exasperating Essays: Exercise in the Dialectical Method
    * Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<b>AP to give Christians subsidy to visit Israel</b>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->12 Feb 2008, 0241 hrs IST,TNN

HYDERABAD: Always eager to offer sops to minorities, the Andhra Pradesh government of chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy on Monday decided to dole out subsidies, on the lines of the Haj scheme, for Christians who want to visit holy sites in Israel. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->
<b>India and her problem of Secularism</b>
Today Secularism is the fashion in India. It is the "in" brand. It is the brand to give oneself, lest one be called "communal". Many Hindus who are born in Hindu families, who carry the seeds of their Sanatana Dharma in their blood and their consciousness, have become ardent and vocal secularists. This article is addressed to the Secular Hindus, and is an effort to engage their minds, in the hope that some of them may be open to a fresh evaluation.

First of all there are two kinds of Secular Hindus.

1. Type A - Those who think that all religions are equally valid – "Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava" kind.

2. Type B - Those who think that all religions are equally invalid – The Atheist, Anti-religious, Anti-Spiritual kind

Let us look at each one in turn. The first kind of (Type A) Secular does believe in religion, at least in his own Hindu religion, and values it. He believes in the dharmic values that the Hindu religion, inculcates in him, and he recognizes the place of Spirituality in human life. He may himself be a deeply devout, and spiritual person. He most likely goes to temples occasionally, performs some form of puja, bhajan or yoga or other devotional activity; he may even have studied the Bhagvad Gita or some other Hindu scriptures to an extent; But he has not done any serious study of the world's other religions. He has not done any deep research on the Bible or the Koran, and cannot distinguish clearly the major distinctions between them and his own Dharma. So he naively believes that all religions are the same; they lead to the same goal; they are all different paths to the same end. He may have even been told by some well meaning Gurus and Acharyas that this is indeed so. So having reached this "secular' position, he then proceeds to condemn as "Hindutva" and "Communalism" anyone who makes distinctions between the religions, and thereby raises a warning regarding the future of Hindu society.

The second kind of Secular (Type B) does not believe in Religion of any kind. He abhors and disdains them all equally and regards them as the superstitious by-product of humankind of a bygone era. He is modern, and does not need any religion, either his own or another's. Thus having begun his inquiry into the subject with this prejudice, he then proceeds to ignore all scriptural study altogether. His acquaintance with his religion is therefore very cursory, and he does not feel the need to study this any further. He identifies himself, with a rational and scientific view of the world, easily gets carried away with modern western scholarship, which proposes all kinds of new philosophies, (like Marxism, Communism, Capitalism, Materialism etc.) which he deems adequate for his purpose. Not only does he not study other religions, he doesn't even study his own. He most likely loathes "Swami's" and "Gurus" and avoids them. Because he is a Hindu by birth, he is compelled to profess that he does not practice it, he does not believe in it, and he goes out of his way to condemn his own religion . He is deeply ashamed of his own religion, and keeps criticizing it at every turn. A few of them also take to studying the Hindu religion, but specifically for the purpose of criticizing it – The intention is not to learn, but to condemn. So there are legions of scholars, who pick up topics such as Caste, Sati, Idol worship, Brahmins and heap volumes of criticism on their own religion of origin.

The Type A Secularist is someone we can call the Gandhian Secularist. Mahatma Gandhi deeply and sincerely believed in the possibility of unity amongst Hindus and Muslims in India. Whether we agree with him or not, this was his stand, and he brought the great strength of his spiritual and moral force to bear upon this possibility. He hoped and wished that he could forge a unity between Hindus and Muslims that would allow the two communities to co-exist peacefully in Independent India. Whatever Mahatma Gandhi was, he was not ignorant. He took very studied positions on almost all issues. He saw that India's Muslims were mostly Hindus in prior generations, perhaps long past, but nevertheless they carried the Hindu culture with them in some small measure. They had converted under the relentless pressure of Islamic rulers, and frequent threat of violence. But this was all long past. He saw that Hindus and Muslims were now cast together in this country, to weave a common destiny and they cannot be separated easily. He in fact may have been the one who created the slogan "Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava". This is an inclusive Secularism, that believes that we must treat all religions equally, all people equally regardless of their religion etc. Even today there are many Gurus and Acharyas who say this – they even quote a Rig Vedic verse called Ekam sat vipraha bahauda vadanti and apply this verse to prove that all "Dharma's" must be looked upon equally.

The Partition of India both on its left and right, (picture Bharat Mata with her two hands cut off) delivered Gandhian Secularism a decisive blow, and rendered the possibility of unity amongst Hindus and Muslims, as almost an utopian fantasy. The Partition was brought upon India, because the Muslim leadership decided that it was impossible for them to live in a Hindu majority India, and they needed their own Islamic State. The Hindus kept on saying that we can all be friends – Hindu-Muslim Bhai Bhai etc., and held out the hope that we can be one country. The Muslim leadership said – No; that is not possible. The matter is really simple – If in a relationship between a man and a woman, if the woman or the man decide that a relationship is no longer possible, then the relationship breaks down; it matters little whether the other person keeps saying "No, we can still be in a relationship". Similar is the case with Hindus and Muslims – Only the Hindus keep saying "all religions are the same; we can all live peacefully together "; The Muslims laugh at the naivety of the Hindus, and say – "No Islam is special and different. We can all live peacefully together but only if you convert to Islam first". So now we have unfriendly states on either side of India which have actively decimated the Hindu population within their respective countries, and are supportive of terrorists who have the most evil designs on India.

The Type B Secularist is someone we can call the Nehruvian Secularist. Jawaharlal Nehru believed that religion itself was irrelevant and somewhat backward and superstitious. With his western education and temperament, he was attracted to Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin and the Russian experiment. These were all "Godless" and "Unspiritual" ideologies. It did not matter to Nehru, that the Communist experiment in Russia had resulted in the massacre of millions of people under the regime of Josef Stalin. He ignored that, (by what logic he justified this in his own mind remains to be discovered) and allied himself and our country closely with Russia and the Socialist way of life. Nehru thought that the primary ill of Indian society was its poverty and lack of development, and he committed himself energetically to India's modernization, albeit driven by the State. In doing this he and his people fashioned a Secular State out of India, which ignored its Hindu Dharma, its Dharmic institutions, and Dharmic education.

Nehruvian Secularism has also been dealt a mortal blow in more ways than one. Communism is dying all over the world – Only in India it seems to have some left over momentum. Socialism has given way to Capitalism all over the world; In 1991, in India, a Congress Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh presided over the reversal of the trajectory that Nehru had set for India. India is rapidly demonstrating that left alone, people develop themselves. Development need not be moderated and regulated by the State. Power when concentrated in the hands of a few, ultimately corrupts people – Indira Gandhi and her Emergency was a demonstration of that. But as much as she loved staying in power, even she could not cross the line as Joseph Stalin did – through dictatorship and murder on a vast scale. This can be attributed to the essential dharma of our land. Russian communism had no dharma at all – It was pure Adharma. Pakistan has no Dharma at all – It's leaders have no regard for its own constitution. They amend it left and right to suit their private needs. Most of their transitions of power have been through murder and bloodshed, which is an essentially Islamic tradition. (lets see current one)

But what is indeed strikingly common to both kinds of Secularists (both Type A and Type B) is that they don't apply themselves and study the major religions and scriptures of the world, nor the history of major civilizations. Because even a cursory study of the Bible and Islam, will reveal how violent they are towards unbelievers and kafirs . Every religion has to deal with the ethics of human behavior – both amongst the followers of their religion, as well as between the followers of their tradition and those who do not follow their tradition. Equality, Tolerance and commitment to Peace, is good not only for the believers, but also necessary between believers of a particular faith, and those who subscribe to a different faith. In this latter characteristic, Hinduism is vastly different and has an infinitely superior record compared to both Islam and Christianity. While Hinduism is inherently pluralistic, and it allows many traditions to co-exist peacefully, Christianity and Islam are very severe towards the non-believers. While Hinduism is inherently Dharmic towards all people independent of what they believe in, Christianity and Islam offer their protection and allegiance to you, only if you convert to their creed. They prescribe the worst form of violence towards the kafirs and unbelievers – And this is borne out both by their scripture as well as their history. It only takes a cursory study of their scripture and their history, to find the patterns and correlations emerging. Their history is consistent with their ideology as embedded in their scripture, and their scripture contains the kernels of their ambitions and conquests, in the past, present and future . Christianity and Islam are fundamentally organized to be in a state of permanent conflict with the world of non-believers and kafirs. Whatever rudimentary notion of Dharma they may have, when it comes to their interactions with unbelievers, they are 100% Adharmic, even Asuric.

Why do Hindus reach their "Secular" positions and conclusions without proper inquiry? This is what is called "Avichara Siddhi" – A conclusion reached without much thought or research. It is like a conclusion "The sun goes round the earth". Well it is obvious - We can see it go round and round, yet it takes some inquiry (Vichara) before we can say, No – The earth is spinning on its axis, and that merely creates the impression of the sun going around the earth. Why have Hindus become so lazy intellectually, that we will not apply ourselves to the proper study of these topics? Why do we jump to some conclusion first, without appropriate research and then keep repeating our position, ad nauseum? Why have we become mere sloganeers shouting ourselves hoarse with our position, which has not been properly thought out and formulated in the first place? Lastly in our hurry to embrace Secularism, we have thrown the baby out with the bath water, we have abandoned our Dharma altogether. Today, we find secularists everywhere – on TV, in the Radio, in the news magazines; in the universities; in politics. It has become our new creed. To falsify the Secular creed is to invite the worst form of counter attack and slander.

Today India is developing fast. Our economy is growing. A section of our society is becoming affluent. But corruption is also rampant in every walk of life. The politicians are leading the nation in being self serving and corrupt. The concept of Dharma, Ethical Values, a sense of Sacrifice and Service that Swami Vivekananda talked about has not permeated our public life. Will modernization solve all our problems? Is it sufficient to modernize without a corresponding effort to establish Dharma in the land? Corruption is Adharmic. Capitalism generates great wealth alright, but it distributes this wealth in a very uneven way. What are the rich of our land going to do with their riches? Will they use their riches in service of the poor? Capitalism is Adharmic too – in that it engenders no value system. What do the affluent do for their society – during their leisure? If we were to follow the inspiring example of the west – we know the answer. The great fruit of capitalism is mindless entertainment, endless pleasure seeking and non-stop shopping.

Can the task of caring for the poor be left in private hands, or do we socialize it and give it to our politicians? We need to resurrect Dharma into the center of our lives. How are we going to do it, if we keep on swearing by secularism? Hindu Dharma emphasized people's duties and responsibilities. Not their rights . Today, we have only a screaming group of casteists and castes, who are ever more shrilly demanding what is due to them i.e. their rights. There is no possibility of Dharma in this. A secular education does not guarantee an adequate appreciation of ethical values, duties, responsibilities and a deeply imbibed sense of discernment between right and wrong action. How do we give our children a matrix of moral values and norms, if we ignore our own Hindu Dharma in our secular schools and colleges? How do we inculcate in our next generation, a value for Dharma and Moksha which are indeed the unique civilizational characteristics of our Hindu society, if we don't even address these in our educational institutions? This is the unsolved problem of our time. We sowed seeds of "Godless" ideologies drawn from the west, and we are harvesting a rich bounty of corruption across the length and breadth of our land.

So, we appeal to our secular brothers and sisters – Please think first; study your own scripture first; then study the other's scripture; then study the history of all the religions; See the correlations and correspondences for yourself. Then let us see if you continue to be secular. You may discover that it is only in the comforting cocoons of ignorance, illiteracy and mindlessness that secularism can flourish. You may find that Secularism cannot stand even the most rudimentary intellectual scrutiny. But please do not defend your Secular value system on the foundation of your unwillingness to study these subjects; Please do not say – I won't read my scripture; I don't have time; I won't read history; I don't have time for that; I will not attempt to read the scriptures of other religions; I have even less time for that; But I know I am a secular Hindu; and I know I am right and all the rest of you are communal.

Kalyan Viswanathan
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[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-"Tim"+-->QUOTE("Tim")<!--QuoteEBegin-->Multatuli -

"...the US has a ruling elite that is extremely well educated and knows what they are doing."

But what are they educated in?  Very few know anything about India or the region.  Look at the course offerings at major universities, and the numbers of students who take courses on the region.  Look at the major conferences that are offered - the University of Wisconsin, for example, offers a very large conference on South Asian Studies every October.  There are hundreds of panels, and tens of thousands of books available - and almost none are on modern history or contemporary politics. 

It's easy to get a good education in an awful lot of things in the US.  It's not easy to get a good education on India, or regional affairs. 

Tim<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

They dont need to learn about Indians since they can hire Indians in sociology and South Asian Studies dept to get the expertise. from the colonial days UK and then later US has cultivated a large groups of Indians who are informers for the west. They keep a steady flow of Information about India and Indian society to the west year round.
West dont have to study modern history since they have control/influence over the Indian media and an Indian elite which copies and tries hard to act like Americans and westerners.
Indian political philosophy is heavily influenced by western ideas and thoughts with many political/religious strategists living in the west. Indian secularism is widely used as the base for Indian statehood
Indian education and history is Euro centric and westernized for the comfort of western elite.

[Capt M Kumar]

<!--emo&:argue--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/argue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='argue.gif' /><!--endemo--> Combative Manmohan takes on Advani, NDA
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.as...umentid=1274599
New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday accused the opposition of wrecking the lives of farmers and failing to weed out terrorism when it was in power until 2004.

A combative Manmohan Singh pointedly named opposition leader L.K. Advani in his speech, leading to a walkout by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies.

Speaking in the Lok Sabha, he accused the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) of failing to boost farm production and controlling inflation and also meeting the challenges of internal security.
"I cannot forget the dark days when the parliament was attacked by terrorists," he said, referring to the armed assault on the building in the heart of the capital in December 2001 that almost caused an India-Pakistan war.

"I don't want to score points. But it was a shameful sight that our external affairs minister accompanied the terrorists," He was referring to BJP's Jaswant Singh who was the then external affairs minister who had gone to Afghanistan with three Pakistani terrorists who India was forced to free after terrorists hijacked an Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to New Delhi.

Manmohan Singh also lampooned the opposition for shedding tears for the farming community.

"Today they are talking about farmers. I would like to see what did they do during their time (in power)?"

Reeling off statistics, the prime minister accused the BJP-led government that ruled India from 1998 to 2004 of increasing procurement prices by "a pittance".

"This government," he said, speaking about the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) he heads, "has increased it by 33 percent in rice and 56 percent in wheat".

"NDA was anti-farmer, anti-agriculture sector. We have finally removed the burden on farmers that the NDA government had put. We will not rest until the tears of all the farmers are wiped away."

The treasury benches loudly cheered the prime minister's unusually aggressive tone, which came days after Finance Minister P. Chidambaram unveiled widely welcomed huge sops for millions of farmers as well as the middle class.

Manmohan Singh also accused Advani of "communal overtones" and stoutly defended his government's decision to empower minorities.

"I don't plead guilty to that charge. This is a process of empowerment. The time has come to pay attention to the minorities' education and development."

N.N. Krishnadas of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) was one of the first to applaud Manmohan Singh as MPs trooped out of the house.

"The PM has torn Advani to pieces," Krishnadas told IANS.

Source: Indo-Asian News Service

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Stop using word 'secularism', says BJP to Congress </b>
Pioneer News Service | New Delhi
Always on the receiving end of Congress' stick on the issue of 'secularism', <b>the BJP on Sunday asked the Government to stop the use of Hindi word dharmanirpeksha for 'secular'.</b>

Different theories were floated about the timing behind raking up the issue, party chief Rajnath Singh said, "We will never use the word Dharmanirpeksh and the Government should also issue a directive prohibiting the constitutional use of the word so that from the Prime Minister to the common man no one constitutionally uses this term."

<b>Taking up the issue, elaborately in his speech, Rajnath reiterated 'secular' has been defined as Panthnirpeksh in the official Hindi translation of the Preamble of the Constitution, which is also a public document.</b>

<b>"Therefore, if Dharma is present in the National Emblem, National Flag, and in the supreme seat of Parliament then how can the entire establishment of India be neutral to Dharma or be Dharmanirpeksh?" </b>the party has asked.

Explaining the 'big difference' between Dharmanirpeksh and Panthnirpeksh, Rajnath said Panth or sect symbolises devotion towards any specific belief, specific way of prayer and specific form of God, but Dharma symbolises absolute and eternal values which can never be changed like law or nature.
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[acharya]

Page: 15/41

Home > 2008 Issues > June 15, 2008
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=241&page=15


News Analysis
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Rajnath is right. Secularism has become communal
By Shyam Khosla
<span style='color:blue'>
Two other concepts—Socialist and Secular—were added to the Preamble during the hated Emergency by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment that came into force on January 3, 1977.</span>

How irrationally even knowledgeable persons react to innocuous suggestions because of political compulsions and ideological confusion is borne out by Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi’s and CPM leader Sitaram Yahcuri’s response to BJP President’s remark that the correct Hindi translation of secular was panthnirpeksh and not dharamnirpeksh that is often perceived to be the synonym of the concept. Yachuri’s comment that it was Sangh’s terminology to underline its belief that Hinduism is a religion and other religions like Christianity and Islam are sects, betrays the Communist leader’s gross ignorance of the RSS thinking and Hindu ethos. He will do well to come out of his Marxist shell and make some effort to at least understand rival viewpoints.

One, however, can’t ignore the galling observations made by Congress leader giving his knowledge of our cultural values and the Constitution. He is well aware that the authorised Hindi translation of the Constitution talks of panthnirpeksh and not dharamnirpeksh. It is outright absurd on his part to suggest Singh’s observations that words secular and socialist were unnecessarily inserted in the Preamble to the Constitution in 1976-77 amounted to the subversion of the basic tenets of the Constitution and negation of its soul. The fact remains that these terms were inserted to meet political exigencies at the fag end of the Emergency. Socialism is a political philosophy with which a vast majority of Indians are not comfortable and our Constitution was no less secular before the insertion of the term in the Preamble. BJP President committed no crime by asking his colleagues and the Government to stick to the correct terminology. Why is the aging party protesting too much? Isn’t it yet another gimmick to mislead minorities?

The founding fathers of our Constitution had wisely adopted the Preamble that solemnly resolved to constitute India into a Sovereign Democratic Republic. Two other concepts—Socialist and Secular—were added to the Preamble during the hated Emergency by the 42nd Constitutional Amendment that came into force on January 3, 1977 . The Preamble is a vision statement through which the Constitution Assembly expressed its intent. Can this intent be amended subsequently? More importantly, is such an exercise morally and politically correct?

Interestingly the Supreme Court had in one of its landmark judgments laid down the concept of basic structure and while doing so underlined the importance of the Preamble to the Constitution. That judgment came long before the 42nd amendment which inserted two additional concepts. These were inserted into the all-important Preamble when democracy was under siege with a large number of parliamentarians were rotting in jails, press had lost its freedom and even the judiciary was under tremendous pressure. It is high time that there is an in-depth public debate on the political and moral desirability of retaining these two words in the Preamble. Nothing will be lost if these two concepts are removed from the Preamble of the Constitution.

Much of the confusion in public mind is caused by the flawed belief that religion and dharma are synonyms. As a result, characteristics of a narrow religion are automatically attributed to the concept of dharma. Religion means a creed or a sect. Longman English Dictionary defines religion as a system of beliefs and practices relating to the sacred and uniting its adherent in a community. Religion, thus, is a comparatively narrow concept that believes in one sacred book, a messenger and a God likes the ones in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These religions believe that there is only one path to the achievement of the highest spiritual goal—whatever it may be called. Hindu Dharma, on the other hand, is a vastly wider concept that is concerned with all aspects of human life. The fundamental principles of dharma are eternal and universal. It transcends religions and holds that all paths lead to the same goal. This concept is beautifully expressed in the Vedic maxim: Ekam Sadvipraha Bahudha Vadanti (Truth is one, savants tell them variously). Fundamental laws of human nature that decides the propriety of human behaviour is dharma. M.V. Nadkarni in his work, Hinduism—A Gandhian Perspective, points out that the traditional term for Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma. He argues that it doesn’t connote fixed, let alone stagnant. The dictionary meaning of Sanatana is eternal. The secret of Hinduism’s perpetuity is that it is not fixed for all times but refreshes itself every now and then, adjusting to new circumstances, incorporating new and noble values. Sanatana, he insists, also doesn’t mean orthodox or conservative. The secret of its endurance for millennia is its dynamism. Shri Basaveshwara says, “What is standing fixed perishes, but not one which is dynamic”. The quality of dynamism is very closely related to tolerance for pluralism, for diversity, for inclusiveness and, thus, to liberalism in its purest form. That is why Arnold Toynbee called Hinduism a “live and let-live religion”. Question may be asked if dharma is eternal and applicable to all times and all climes and races, why call it Hindu Dharma. The fact of the matter is that since times immemorial, it was called Sanatana Dharma—eternal law. However, in the course of history, it began to be called Hindu Dharma. Somehow, the word Hindu stuck and is now more popularly used than Sanatana Dharma.

“Secularists” refuse to see reason. They persist with their hidden agenda by projecting Hinduism in a narrow context that is rationally and historically flawed. In the political sense, secularism requires separation of the state from any particular religious order. Nobel Laureate Amritya Sen, who by no stretch of imagination is “communal”, in his Argumentative Indian says secularism can be interpreted in at least two different ways. The first view argues that secularism demands that the state be equidistant from all religions refusing to take sides and having a neutral attitude towards them. The second—more severe—view insists that the state must not have any relation at all with any religion. The equidistance must take the form, then, of being altogether removed from each other. In both interpretations, secularism goes against giving any religion a privileged position in the activities of the state. Calling himself an “unreformed secularist”, Sen, goes on to admit that the former—broader interpretation of secularism—is the dominant approach to secularism in India. He insists that the state must maintain a basic symmetry to all religious groups. Unfortunately, the concept has been taken to absurd lengths by certain elements by extending certain rights to a particular minority that are not available to majority community not necessarily out of commitment to secularism but for petty partisan gains. Since secularism demands basic symmetry to all religious groups, any attempt to favour a particular religious group amounts to distorting the concept inviting ridicule. This distorted version of secularism has been aptly dubbed as pseudo-secularism.

Theocracy has no place in our value system and secularism as a value—justice to all and discrimination against none—is an integral part of the Indian value system and national psyche. This land has been a great melting pot that has assimilated people of countless religious faiths and races that made this country their home. The shared cultural outlook and civilisation that evolved in this land for millennia have produced such a cohesion—a homogenous identity—that is one of the essential attributes of nationhood. Muslims and Christians rulers who held sway over large parts of the country for about 800 years were, of course, non-secular. They discriminated against religious groups and bestowed huge favours on persons belonging to their respective faiths. There were exceptions in the long and glorious history of this land that never discriminated against people on the basis of their religious faith or race.
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[ramana]

The fundamental problem at the root of most of the problems facing India is the fact that the Well-Off Modern Indians, who are also secular do not believe in the idea of India. This causes their indecision when faced with critical choices that advance Indian interests. What they push for, are sectarian or group interests. So while China races forward these folks stall and styme any moves that could advance Indian interests. Take an example of how PRC is marching ahead coralling resources in Africa and next stop will be South America.

[acharya]

The Dilemma of a Liberal Hindu
By
Gurcharan Das

You do me honor by inviting me to speak at this wonderful conference, amidst such distinguished people. I am not an academic, and to make up for this disadvantage I thought I would speak from experience and offer a personal account of the inner life of a liberal and secular Indian. I shall focus on one theme primarily, which is my fear of the loss of tradition, and my feeble attempts to recapture it. I shall wake up Edmund Burke from the 18th century to be my worthy companion in the dilemma that I lay before you.

My Fear of the Loss of Tradition

A few months ago the confident and handsome friend of our son’s gave a telling reply to a visiting Englishwoman in Khan Market in Delhi. “I am a Hindu, but …”, he said, and he went into a winding reply about his beliefs. He hastily added that he was an Indian first. It was a perfectly honest answer, and any other person might have given a similar one about Islam or Christianity. But I sensed an unhappy defensiveness–the ‘but’ betrayed that he might be ashamed of being Hindu.

This happened two weeks after I got a call from one of Delhi’s best private schools, asking me to speak to its students. “Oh good!” I replied on the phone. “I have been reading the Mahabharata, and in that case I shall speak about dharma and the moral dilemmas in the epic.”

The principal’s horrified reaction was, “Oh don’t, please! There are important secularists on our governing board, and I don’t want controversy about teaching religion.”

“But surely the Mahabharata is a literary epic”, I protested, “And dharma is about right and wrong”. But my remonstration was to no avail. She was adamant and scared.

As I think about these two incidents, I ask myself, why should these two highly successful, young professionals be embarrassed of their heritage? Something seems to have clearly gone wrong. My fear is that modern, liberal Indians, and especially those at the helm of our private and public enterprises, may not have any use for their past, and they will abdicate our wonderful traditions to the narrow, closed minds of fanatical Hindu nationalists. In part, this is due to ignorance. Our children do not grow up reading our ancient classics in school or college with a critical mind as works of literature and philosophy as young Americans, for example, read the Western classics in their first year of college as a part of their “core curriculum”. Some are lucky to acquire some acquaintance with them from their grandmothers or an older relative, who tell them stories from the epics and the Puranas. They might read the tales in Amar Chitra Katha comics or watch them in second-rate serials on Sunday morning television. Meanwhile, the Sangh Parivar steps into the vacuum with its shrunken, defensive, and inaccurate version of our history and happily appropriates the empty space. And the richness of tradition is lost to this generation.

If Italian children can proudly read Dante’s Divine Comedy in school, or English children can read Milton, and Greek children can read the Iliad, why should “secularist” Indians be ambivalent about the Mahabharata? Indeed, English children also read the King James Bible as a text in school–“text” is the operative word, for they are encouraged to read it and interrogate it. So, why then should our epic be “untouchable” for a sensitive, modern and liberal school principal? It is true that the Mahabharata has lots of gods in it, and in particular that elusive divinity, Krishna, who is up to all manner of devious activity. But so are Dante, Milton, and Homer filled with God or gods, and if the Italians, the English and the Greeks can read the texts of their heritage, why can’t Indians?

With the rise in religious fundamentalism, it seems to me that it is increasingly difficult to talk about one’s deepest beliefs. Liberal Hindus are reluctant to admit being Hindu for fear they will be automatically linked to the RSS. They are not alone in this. Liberal Christians and liberal Muslims, I am sure, have experienced the same misgivings. One can easily imagine hearing: “I am Christian, but…” or “I am Muslim, but…” In India, I blame Hindutva nationalists who have appropriated our culture and tradition and made it a political agenda. But equally, I blame many of our secularists who behave no better than fundamentalists in their callous antipathy to tradition.

We ought to view Hindutva’s rise in the context of religious revivalism with a political bent around the world. Laurie Goodstein wrote in the New York Times on January 15, 2005: “Almost anywhere you look around the world…religion is now a rising force. Former communist countries are crowded with mosque builders, Christian missionaries and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs of every persuasion…” Philip Jenkins’ insightful book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, describes this in the America of George W. Bush. This growth in fundamentalism around the globe makes one wonder if the secular agenda is threatened everywhere. And is it the project of modernity, as some think, that has contributed to this vicious, political religiosity?

No one reads Edmund Burke these days, but he exercised considerable influence on 18th century minds. He is relevant, I think, to some of our discontents with secularism today. His critique of the French revolution was based primarily on his fear of the loss of tradition–killing off the church and the aristocracy, he felt, would cut off links with the past. He spoke about “custom, community and natural feeling”, and he felt that continuity with the past was necessary to realize our full human potential. The challenge before modern, decent Indians today, it seems to me, is essentially the same. It is the one that Ram Mohan Roy faced in the early 19th century and Mahatma Gandhi in the early 20th century: how to grow up mentally healthy, integrated Indians? How do we combine our liberal modernity with our traditions in order to fully realize our potential?

As a liberal and secular Hindu, I oppose the entry of religion into the public domain, and its mingling with government or public school education. I deeply appreciate the “wall” which both the U.S. and our own founding fathers built. For this reason, I admire France and Turkey who seem to have the strongest “walls”. But what does one do when the great literary classics of one’s country are “religious” or “semi-religious”? Dante practically “created” the Italian language with his masterpiece, but his great poem is also a deeply religious work–possibly the most religious in all Christianity. I don’t know how Italians handle Dante in their schools, and I wonder what the Italian Left feels about it, say in a Leftish city like Bologna.

In India, we do have a problem and I don’t think there are easy answers. Many Indians regard our great Sanskrit classics as religious texts. To the extent that they are religious, we are committed by our “wall” to keep them out of our schools. Hence, I do sympathize with the principal of the school in Delhi. At the same time, unless our children are exposed to the Sanskrit classics and unless these are “discussed” in a secular environment our children will grow up impoverished in the way Edmund Burke worried about. Clearly, something has gone terribly wrong with contemporary Indian education when our most influential schools churn out deracinated products, who know little about their own culture but a great deal about the West.

There are some in India who think that the answer lies in providing compulsory knowledge of all religions, and this will engender, what Emperor Ashoka called, a “respect for all creeds”. But this too is a dangerous path. For how do you teach religion without worrying about some teacher somewhere who will wittingly or unwittingly denigrate or hurt the sensitivities of the some follower of the religion being taught? And before you realize it, you will have a riot on your hands. So, we do have a genuine moral dilemma here, a dharmasamkata or dharma-vikalpa, the kind of thing that the Mahabharata delights in.

I was born a Hindu

I was born a Hindu, had a normal Hindu upbringing, and like many in the middle class I went to an English medium school that gave me a “modern education”. Both my grandfathers belonged to the Arya Samaj, a reformist sect of Hinduism that came up in 19th century Punjab. It advocated a return to the Vedas, a diminished role for Brahmins and vigorous social reform of the caste system among other social evils. My father, however, decided to take a different path. When he was studying to be an engineer, he was drawn to a kindly Guru, who taught him the power and glory of direct union with God through meditation. The Guru would quote from Kabir, Nanak, Rumi, and Mirabai, and was a Radhasoami sant in the syncretic, bhakti tradition.

The striking thing about growing up Hindu was a chaotic atmosphere of tolerance in our home in Lyallpur. My grandmother would visit the Sikh gurdwara on Mondays and Wednesdays and a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays; she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses of holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between she made time for lots of Arya Samaj ceremonies when anyone was born, married, or died. My grandfather used to jest that she would also have also called in at the Muslim mosque in her busy schedule had they allowed her in, but my more practical uncle thought that she was merely taking out enough insurance, in the manner of Pascal, and someone up there might hear her.

Despite this religious background, I grew up agnostic, which is a luxury of being Hindu. I have a liberal attitude that is a mixture of skepticism and sympathy towards my tradition. I have also come to believe that our most cherished ends in life are not political. Religion is one of these and it gets demeaned when it enters public life. Hence, religion and the state must be kept separate, and to believe this is be secular. I have a mild distaste for the sort of nationalism that can so quickly become chauvinism. Hence, I do not vote for the BJP. At the same time I feel Indian and I value my “Indian-ness”, whatever that may be. This means that I value my past and I wish to cultivate it, and like Edmund Burke, I feel my past is important to me for living a flourishing life. This is a past that contains the influence of Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, and even Christianity.

I think it must have been difficult for my Hindu ancestors in the Punjab, who did not have the living memory of a political heritage of their own. Having lived under non-Hindu rulers since the 13th century, they must have thought of political life as filled with deprivation and fear. After Muslims had come the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh. With its collapse around 1850 came the powerful British, with Christian missionaries in tow. Hence, three powerful, professedly egalitarian and proselytizing religions surrounded them—Islam, Sikhism and Christianity. No wonder, they were eager to receive Dayananda Saraswati when he came to the Punjab in 1877. And not surprisingly, he succeeded beyond his dreams in establishing the Arya Samaj in the Punjab.

“Every writer needs an address”, wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer. That is a fine way of expressing what I have been trying to. All human beings need local roots, an identity, and a link with a unique identifiable past. A writer needs it even more, I think, because a writer aspires to speak universally about life.

“You haven’t turned Hindutva, have you?”In the spring of 2002 I decided to take an academic holiday. My wife thought it a strange resolve. She was familiar with our usual holidays, when we armed ourselves with hats, and blue and green guides, and trudged up and down over piles of temple stones in places like Khajuraho or Ankor Wat. But she was puzzled by an ‘academic holiday’. I explained to her that in college I had read Aristotle, Euripides, Dante, Marx and other classics of western civilization, but I had always yearned to read the Indian classics and had never had the chance. The closest I had come was Professor Ingalls’ difficult Sanskrit class at Harvard when I was an undergraduate. So, now forty years later I wished to read the texts of classical India, if not in the original, at least with a scholar of Sanskrit. It was my Proustian search for lost time in order to reclaim my tradition, appropriately in the vanaprastha ashrama of my life.

My wife gave me a skeptical look, and after a pause she said, “It’s a little late in the day for a mid-life crisis, isn’t it? Let’s go instead on a cruise of the Greek islands”.

Somewhat to my annoyance, my “academic holiday” became the subject of animated discussion at a dinner party in Delhi the following week. Our hostess was a snob. She was famous in Delhi’s society for cultivating the famous and the powerful. She had ignored us for years but this had changed in the past two, and we had become regulars at her brilliant dinners. I thought her friendly but my wife reminded me that her warmth was in direct proportion to my recent success as a columnist and writer. She always introduced me as ‘an old friend’, but I don’t think she had a clue about what the word meant.

“So, what is this I hear about you wanting to go away to read Sanskrit texts?” she suddenly turned to me accusingly. “Don’t tell me you are going to turn religious on us?”

Two women in exquisite silk sarees, one from Kanchipuram and another from Benares, now came in and joined us. One had a string of pearls around her neck and the other lovely diamonds on her neck and her wrists. Both had heavily mascaraed eyelashes, painted lips, and rouged cheeks, and it was apparent how much their lives consisted in a desperate struggle to keep their faded charms. They began to speak in loud, metallic voices without a moment’s pause, as though they were afraid that if they stopped they might not be able to start again. They were accompanied by a diplomat, who had once been Indira Gandhi’s favorite.

“But tell us, what books you are planning to read?” asked the diplomat casually, as though he were referring to the latest features in a Korean dishwasher in Khan Market.

I admitted somewhat reluctantly that I had been thinking of texts like the Mahabharata, the Manusmriti, the Kathopanishad….

“Good lord, man!” he exclaimed. “You haven’t turned Hindutva, have you?”

I think his remark was made in jest, but it upset me. I asked myself, what sort of secularism have we created in our country that has appropriated my claim to my intellectual heritage? I found it disturbing that I had to fear the intolerance of my ‘secular friends’, who seemed to identify any association with Hinduism or its culture as a political act. The pain did not go away easily, even though I realized that it was a pain shared by others. I was reminded of a casual remark by a Westernized woman in Chennai during the launch of my book, The Elephant Paradigm. She mentioned that she had always visited the Shiva temple near her home, but lately she had begun to hide this from those among her friends who proclaimed that they were ‘secular’. She feared they might pounce on her, quick to brand her extremist or superstitious.

Does the conservative temper offer an answer?

When I was growing up in post-Independence India in the 1950s and 1960s, the word ‘conservative’ was as a term of abuse in the vocabulary of most Indian intellectuals (and many English and American ones, I suppose). We passionately believed in Nehru’s dream of a modern and just India. We likened his midnight speech at Independence about our ‘Tryst with destiny’ to Wordsworth’s famous lines on the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”. I have tried to capture this mood at some length in my book, India Unbound. We laughed at Rajaji and Masani, who founded the conservative Swatantra Party in the late 1950s, and even dismissed Sardar Patel, who was the second most powerful man in India at Independence, after Nehru. Charles James Fox had laughed at Edmund Burke in the same way. Like many Englishmen of his day, Fox thought the revolution in France was an immensely liberating step forward, saying that it was the greatest event that ever happened in the world. In denouncing the French revolution, Burke was not expressing an opinion popular among thinking Englishmen; he was going against the tide.

To be a conservative in Nehru’s India was the same. It meant that one was on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, and spontaneity against life. But how times have changed! Now, more that fifty years later, it is the old progressives who have become ‘old’, who look back nostalgically to a socialist past. They are the ones who oppose the reforms and continue to have a touching faith in rent-seeking statism, even when it has been discredited as “Licence Raj”. They condemn too hastily the young of today, painting them uniformly in the colors of greed.

Even after we get over the easy polarities of the mind, “conservative” is an unhappy word for what I am seeking. It conjures up in too many minds the image of what the British mathematician, G.H Hardy, called a “wide bottomed member of the Anglican Church establishment”. But there is more to the problem. The difficulty arises from the nature of the thing. What I am advocating is a reverence for the past, and that is less a political doctrine than a habit of mind, a way of living and feeling. Like Burke, I think society is not a collection of loosely related individuals, nor a mechanism with interchangeable parts, but a living organism, and anything that affects the well being of one affects the whole. It is for this reason that Burke had cautioned against pulling down edifices which had met society’s needs for generations.

We have had too much ideology in the 20th century and are frankly tired of it. We have had too much of what Burke called variously “speculation,” or “metaphysics,” or “theoretical reasoning” as applied to social and political questions. Some of my ambivalence about India’s Leftist secularists is not unlike Burke’s fear of the revolutionaries in France who seriously believed that they would construct the world from scratch by the application of general and abstract principles, and who even wanted to introduce a new calendar to mark the beginning of that new world. Part of the reason that the sensible idea of secularism is having so much difficulty in finding a home in India, I think, is that the most vocal and intellectual advocates of secularism were once Marxists. Not only do they not believe in God, they actually hate God. They literally follow Marx’s dictum that “Criticism of religion is the prelude to all criticism”. As rationalists they can only see the dark side of religion–intolerance, murderous wars and nationalism, and do not empathize with the everyday life of the common Indian to whom religion gives meaning to every moment of life and has done so since civilization’s dawn. Because secularists speak a language alien to the vast majority, they are only able to condemn communal violence but not to stop it, as Mahatma Gandhi could, in East Bengal in 1947.

Over the past fifty years we have realized in India that political activity is infinitely complex and difficult. Our caste system is unpredictable, intractable, and incomprehensible. There are many things at work, and the ways they relate to each other is complex. Politicians, unlike academics, have to act in concrete, discrete situations, not in general or abstract terms. Burke also cautioned about this complexity. So, when we address religion’s place in the Indian polity Burke would have us take account of the infinite circumstances of one billion believers and not insist always on the rational, secular principle of consistency. There are also unintended consequences because of the interconnectedness of things. Hence, when initiating change we ought to heed Burke’s caution about the “lamentable consequences of plausible schemes”. We have learned this lesson painfully over the past fifty years as we lived through Jawaharlal Nehru’s well-intended socialism which ended in becoming an ugly statism of the “License Raj”.

In thinking about our secularism project in India, Burke would have us be humble in recognizing the complexity of society and to be careful of radical and rapid change. He would ask us to be skeptical about the role of reason in human affairs. Like many contemporary post-modernists, he had reservations about the Enlightenment’s view of man as a predominantly rational, logical and calculating person. His rational side exists, he felt, but it is a small part of his total make-up. He would have us rely more on practical knowledge that is gained through experience rather than through abstract reasoning. He would have us pay attention to people’s habits, instincts, customs, and their prejudices. A generation earlier, David Hume, the illustrious Scottish philosopher, had also emphasized the importance of habit and custom.

Another of Burke’s lessons, useful especially in a rapidly globalizing world, is to pay attention to the local and the particular. We speak too often about India’s diversity, but we act as though only New Delhi matters. Burke would have us think of the Rights of Man, not in the abstract but of existing rights that people actually possess and enjoy, which they have inherited in the context of their particular situations. However, I disagree with Burke in his conception of the state that has to implement these rights. He was an orthodox Christian and he thought of society as the handiwork of God, a “Divine tactick”, he called it. He regarded the state as “inherently and inalienably sacred”, and although I share his passion for good government, I would worry about his “consecrated” state according “to one Divine plan”. I regard the spiritual and the temporal as two distinct orders, and I find his conception too readily lends itself to the dangerous idea that some particular human will or wills should direct the course of social life. This would not only be oppressive, but fatal to human liberty.

Burke’s life teaches that to be conservative is not to become an apologist for the current order. He defended the American Revolution; he raised his voice for the emancipation of Catholics and for removal of trade barriers with Ireland; he spoke loudly for abolishing slavery and the trade in slaves; and even louder against the privileges and excesses of the rule of the East India Company. Many of us in India remember him not only for instigating the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor general, but for drafting the East India Bill, which led to the reform of the East India Company. Although Hastings was acquitted, Burke’s speeches created new awareness in England of the responsibilities of empire and the injustices perpetrated in India.

Overall, I think, Burke would have approved of the gradual flow of India’s contemporary history. Unlike the French Revolution (which he condemned because it was a sharp break with the past) and unlike the violent histories of China, Russia and so many countries in the 20th century, India won its freedom from Britain peacefully. This is why Andre Malraux was moved to say that India was created by saints and this happened in the shadows of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Not only did we escape the World Wars, but we became free without shedding much blood, thanks to Mahatma Gandhi. Yes, half a million died in the Partition riots, but it was not state sponsored violence. After Independence, Nehru built our polity based on many institutions of colonial rule, and this represented a Burkeian continuity. Our addiction to peace might be one of the reasons why we created so easily the world’s largest democracy.

Nehru’s socialism, followed by Indira Gandhi’s “dark decades”, did slow us down for almost forty years, but it did not wipe out our private economy with its invaluable institutions of banks, corporate laws, and the stock market. So, when we broke free from our socialist shackles in 1991, we had this advantage over China. Many Indians (and I include myself in this) are impressed with China’s dramatic progress today, and feel impatient and even depressed at the slow pace of our economic reforms. We feel frustrated by the missed opportunities from a higher growth rate. But Burke would have consoled us, telling us that even slow reforms add up. He would say that it is better to grow prosperous with continuity and democracy, albeit more slowly.

Gandhi too would have understood this dilemma

Burke expressed his understanding of society famously as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. That is to say, the present is not the property of the living, to make of it whatever they will. It is an estate held in trust. Those who hold it have a responsibility to pass it on in good condition. The French revolutionaries were in the process of wounding this trust, and we in India are guilty of this as well. Mahatma Gandhi understood this and cautioned the Congress leaders about overturning in the name of reason, liberty, and equality the many historical continuities and institutions of the past. For this reason his secularism also resonated with the people. It was grounded in the belief that the ordinary Indian was religious and traditional. He thus showed respect for “other”. This is not true, alas, for many of today’s champions of secularism, and this is why no one listens to them. This, combined with the way our political class has exploited the word in a naked quest for power, is why the sensible idea of secularism has acquired a bad odor in today’s India.

Gandhi, like Burke, has frequently been dubbed a reactionary. Burke did not defend an exclusive aristocratic or monarchic order–he approved of the mixed system that existed in the Britain of his day, which was a combination of aristocratic, commercial, oligarchic, and democratic elements. Just as Burke preferred prudent and incremental reform, so did Gandhi. Hence, Ambedkar called him reactionary and too tolerant of the caste system. However, Gandhi was a realist. Much as he abhorred untouchability and caste, he did not think one could merely legislate them away. And in the end, Gandhi probably did more than any human being to make Indians aware of caste’s iniquity. What Ambedkar did not appreciate is that Gandhi’s respect for the historical process did not mean that he evaded the responsibility to criticize the past. In fact, he criticized it relentlessly. But he also respected community and continuity. Hence, he would have taught us that secularism will only succeed in India if it does not undermine tradition, but reinforces our “custom, community and natural feeling” in Burke’s language.

I suspect Gandhi would have immediately understood the dilemma about teaching the Mahabharata in our schools and he would have agonized over the lack of easy answers. He instinctively grasped the place of the epic in Indian lives, and he would have approved of what V.S. Sukhtankar, the editor of the Poona Critical Edition of the epic, wrote: “The Mahabharata is the content of our collective unconscious …. We must therefore grasp this great book with both hands and face it squarely. Then we shall recognize that it is our past which has prolonged itself into the present. We are it.” If we are it, surely it is important to teach it to the young so that they may understand and value who we are–this would have been Gandhi’s response, I believe.

The debate on teaching the Mahabharata in our schools is relevant for another reason, which I found upon reading Michael Oakeshott. It is the idea that there are things to be enjoyed, but that enjoyment is almost heightened by one’s awareness that what one is enjoying is in danger of being lost. It is the combination of enjoyment and fear that stimulates conservative thoughts. The epic has given me so much enjoyment in the past three years, that I have become a Mahabharata addict. I feel deeply sad that many young boys and girls in India are growing up rootless, and they will never have access to these forbidden fruits of pleasure. This dilemma has a personal dimension, you see, and it has led me to tread conservative paths. It seems to me conservatism is unlike other ideologies for it does not offer the vision of an ideal society, as Samuel Huntington wrote in an article called ‘Conservatism as an Ideology,” published in 1957. There is no conservative Utopia because it is concerned, not with content but with process, with stability, with continuity and prudence. It is the opposite of radicalism, which expresses enthusiasm over the boldness in embracing change. My fears of the loss of tradition may appear exaggerated. Perhaps, they are. Certainly in the villages of India, where the vast majority of Indians live, the Mahabharata is well and alive in the oral traditions. But the future of India does not lie in the villages of India but in the cities. It is there, especially with the powerful onslaught of the global culture, we have to be concerned to preserve continuity with the past.

Let me close with a true story, which I think goes to the heart of the secular temper. A few years ago, I visited the Madras Museum in Egmore. While I was admiring a Chola bronze, a middle aged South Indian woman came behind me, and without self-consciousness, placed a vermilion mark on the Shiva Nataraja. I was appalled. Slowly however, I realized, that we lived in two different worlds. Mine was secular; hers was sacred. Both of us stood before the bronze statue with very different expectations. For me, it was a nine hundred year old object of beauty; for her, it was God. Mine was an aesthetic pleasure; hers was divine darshana.

She did not see what I saw, a brilliant work in bronze by an early Chola artist. I admired the weightless joy of the dancer, so skillfully captured by the sculptor. I moved along, passing by other bronzes, and I got irritated that the bronzes were dusty, ill lit, poorly spaced and badly presented. Suddenly, I felt embarrassed by my petty, niggling concerns. I turned around to look for her. She was still there, absorbed by her light-footed, tireless dancing god, whose dance actually brings the universe into being, and without missing a beat, and in the fullness of time, dances it out of existence. I was struck by the contrast of our lives–the fecund richness of her sacred world versus the poverty of my weary, feeble, skeptical and secular existence.

I felt drawn to her and to her god. For someone who is carrying out such a momentous mission in this universe, I find that her god looks cool, athletic and even debonair. This is where our empty secularism has gone awry. Modern, liberal, English educated Indians are fast losing the holy dimension in their lives. They will never know the depth and opulence of her life. They are quick to brand her superstitious, illiterate, and casteist. She is, in fact, probably far more tolerant and accepting of diversity because she is capable of seeing God everywhere. It is in her rich world that the BJP and our Hindu nationalists ought to learn the true significance of Hindutva and the Congress Party and our secularists ought to learn the real meaning of secularism.

In my world of museums, concert halls, and bookstores, there is plenty of search for beauty, but there is no place for the holy. We are lost in a desacralized world of petty, middle-class concerns. Our secularism has robbed us of Kant’s “moral condition”. Partly, it is the fault of traditional religion, which has overlaid and trivialized the original inspiration. The fundamentalists of the VHP and Islam have alienated us further. The answer for an authentic life, I think, lies with the woman in Madras in whose attitude lies the possibility of a fullness and wholeness of being. Thanks to millions like her, India will take a long time to become a sanitized American suburb.

I return to the main Shiva Nataraja at the entrance. He still looks unperturbed and absorbed in the serious task of creating and destroying the universe. But there is something new. Under his raised left leg, there is a marigold flower! So, the next time the world gets too much for you, do what I do—go visit the Madras museum, and if you do not experience eternity, you might learn a modest lesson in implementing pluralism in a democracy, the theme of this wonderful conference. It is not only her attitude, but it is the outlook of the narrator, which is one of respect for the “other”, for her alien, sacred worldview. Secularism will only find a comfortable home in India if one respects the sensibilities of a deeply traditional and religious people.

As we think about sowing the seeds of secularism in India, we have to go beyond the easy polarities of the mind. The question is of the “how” and not of the “what”. You cannot just divide Indians between communalists and secularists. That would be too easy. The average person is decent and is caught in the middle. John Rawls, I think, may have offered a way out when he distinguished between “public reason” and “secular reason”. Public reason limits itself to political and civic principles while secular reason is broader and concerns itself with a secular person’s first philosophy. In the same vein, Martha Nussbaum distinguished between political and comprehensive liberalism. Advocates of secularism must not forget this distinction and they must refrain from introducing “comprehensive liberalism” and “secular reason” into public debate. In a recent lecture in Poland, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, Habermas spoke about the commendable idea of toleration, which is the foundation of modern democratic culture. He called it a two-way street. Not only must believers tolerate each others’ beliefs, but also the atheism of nonbelievers. Disbelieving secularists, similarly, must value the convictions of religious citizens. And amongst religions, only those that can suspend the temptation of narcissism–the conviction that my religion alone provides the path to salvation–are truly welcome in our rapidly world.

Note

As this is not an academic paper, I have deliberately not cluttered it with footnotes. However, those who wish to read some more of Edmund Burke, I would recommend the following books, which have given me such pleasure in preparing for this paper:

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, 181.

2. Edmund Burke, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs in The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 7th ed., Vol. IV (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1881), 143.

3. Peter J. Stanlis, “Edmund Burke in the Twentieth Century,” in Peter J. Stanlis, ed. The Relevance of Edmund Burke, New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1964.
——————-
Paper Presented at a Conference at the university of Chicago ‘India : Implementing Plularism and Democracy’ on November 11 - 13, 2005. Forthcoming in a volume edited by Martha Naussbaum.

[Husky]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I have a liberal attitude that is a mixture of skepticism and sympathy towards my tradition. I have also come to believe that our most cherished ends in life are not political. Religion is one of these and it gets demeaned when it enters public life. Hence, religion and the state must be kept separate, and to believe this is be secular. I have a mild distaste for the sort of nationalism that can so quickly become chauvinism. Hence, I do not vote for the BJP. At the same time I feel Indian and I value my “Indian-ness”, whatever that may be.
(He doesn't know. English education has silenced him completely. He thinks, but he's lost touch of himself. Floundering.)
This means that I value my past and I wish to cultivate it, and like Edmund Burke, I feel my past is important to me for living a flourishing life. This is a past that contains the influence of Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, and even Christianity.
(Yes, a past of massacres by christianism and islamism.)
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->How cute. This semi-psecular, mostly westernized and quite christo-conditioned writer has its own thoughts and occasionally even dares to draw its own lines on the extent of psecularism (only when it imposes on him):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->I asked myself, what sort of secularism have we created in our country that has appropriated my claim to my intellectual heritage? I found it disturbing that I had to fear the intolerance of my ‘secular friends’, who seemed to identify any association with Hinduism or its culture as a political act. The pain did not go away easily, even though I realized that it was a pain shared by others.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
One's choice of friends and acquaintances says something about oneself... His friends - the people he chooses to associate with (see post above) - are perfectly suited to him, I'd have thought (certainly no one twisted his arm to spend time with them, including the snob hostess, "the fashion-oriented women and the one embarassed to mention that she goes to temple"). Why is he complaining for being made fun of? He makes fun of his grandmother and will believe ridiculous things of her without even getting to know what makes her tick:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->My grandmother would visit the Sikh gurdwara on Mondays and Wednesdays and a Hindu temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays; she saved Saturdays and Sundays for discourses of holy men, including Muslim pirs, who were forever visiting our town. In between she made time for lots of Arya Samaj ceremonies when anyone was born, married, or died. My grandfather used to jest that she would also have also called in at the Muslim mosque in her busy schedule had they allowed her in, but my more practical uncle thought that she was merely taking out enough insurance, in the manner of Pascal, and someone up there might hear her.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Might have felt sorry for him for being picked on by his pathetic circle of friends (consisting of the lamest people ever), if he wasn't such a hypocrite. He doesn't even realise how psecularly anti-Hindu he's being towards other Hindus.

[Bodhi]

but it underlines another trend I have noticed. Seeing the tide of Hindu resurgence over last one decade, that they have failed to suppress, seculars are growingly co-opting for pseudu-Hinduism. (just like christist missionaries are doing)

[dhu]

<b>All that hullabaloo over a 'secular' drop</b>
Dina Nath Mishra (Pioneer)
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The political world has another sensitive lexicon: 'Secular'. Adverse comments have flown in from all opposing quarters after BJP heavyweight Rajnath Singh said he wanted 'secular' dropped from the Constitution. While Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari, commented: "Rajnath Singh's statement is not an attack on secularism; it is an attack on the idea of India; it shows that he does not understand anything about India and that there is a district level mindset at work," CPI Secretary, D Raja spurned him stating, "secularism is the basic character of our democracy. Rajnath Singh's demand shows that BJP poses a serious threat to the secular character of India." Even advocate Prashant Bhushan said Singh does not understand the Indian Constitution.

What Rajnath Singh said is not at all flawed. From the first day of the Constitution till it was inserted in the Preamble, the word 'secular' did not exist. It was a gift of dictatorship of Indira Gandhi. The spirit of secularism was present even without a mention in the Preamble.

As per rules, a Constitution may be amended but not the Preamble. Does it mean that for over a quarter of a century, i.e. till the word 'secular' was added in the Preamble, India was not a secular State? In fact, India has been secular for thousands of years. Addition of the word 'secular' in the Preamble did not add an iota to the constitutional value. The evolution of the western concept of secularism was the result of struggle between the Papal authority and the King. Bloody wars were fought. The gradual reduction of Papal authority continued for nearly 200 years and then the western concept of secularism evolved.

India was never a theocratic State. Other religions were not only tolerated but were respected too. Christians, Muslims, Jews and Parsis were all welcomed. Kings gave them land. Barring Muslims all religions accept this truth. When a State's king invaded another, he went to the local temple to pray. In most cases, the tyrant king was removed and one of his relations was crowned. It was like a tradition. There was not even an iota of religious intolerance. The problem of secularism arises because there was no concept of dharma outside cultural India and also there was no tradition of Sematic religion in India which was prevailing and fighting in the name of religion.

In Christianity, Islam and Judaism, one book, one God, one Paigambar has been the matter of faith. In India, there are thousands of Gods, books and messengers and everybody has the liberty to choose, or not. The word religion and dharma are conceptually poles apart. One is the way of life, the other is individual's relationship with God. But, during the last century, Indian intellectuals made us understand and express religion and dharma as being synonymous.

That is the root of confusion relating to secularism that did not exist even during freedom struggle. For example, the core ideas adopted by various institutions emphatically establishes Hindu heritage: viz. the Government of India -- Satyameva Jayate, Lok Sabha -- Dharmachakra, Supreme Court -- Yato Dharmastato Jayah, All India Radio -- Bahujanhitaya, Doordarshan -- Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Indian Army -- Seva Asmakam Dharmah, Indian Navy -- Shan No Varunah, Indian Air Force -- Nabhah Sprisham Diptam, Delhi University -- Nistha Dhriti Satyam, Life Insurance Corporation of India -- Yogakshemam Vahamyaham.

This is not unintentional.

The original copy of the constitution contains pre-Muslim line sketches by Nandlal Bose. A few examples are Mohanjodaro seals, Vedic Ashram, Rama's victory over Ravan, Shri Krishna's propounding Gita updesh to Arjuna, Buddha delivering sermons, a scene from Bhagwan Mahavir's life preaching dharma in India and abroad, depiction of Hanuman, court of King Vikramaditya, seal of the university of Nalanda, a Hindu sculpture from Orissa, bronze image of Shiva Nataraj, Holy Ganges river. From Muslim period there are three line sketches that are of Akbar, Shivaji and Guru Gobind Singh. Apart from this the Parliament bears prominent reminders of Hindu heritage from Mahabharata, Panchatantra, Chhandogya Upanishad and Manusmriti. Had the Constitution been made today, all these would not have found place; for today's secularism would not have allowed it to happen.

What's the confusion about 'secular'? There are three main reasons. Nehruvian secularism had contempt for all religions; you may say non-discriminatory rejection of all religions. But, the vote bank politics tilted it in favour of Muslim and anti-Hindu. Secondly, religion plays quite an important role in the society. In U.S.A. the presidents from both the parties, Democrats and Republicans, visibly affirm Christianity. Articles 25 to 30 resulted in reverse discrimination against Hindus.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

Gurcharan's entire essay seems like a pained attempt to introduce some fogey Burke to the Indians. Apparently, Burke was Churchill's chum, and so Savarakar and Vivekanada are just Indian versions of Churchill.

[ramana]

Dhu, I see it as a return of the native while still in Macaulayite garb. Still a return. Will try to get him to read this thread.

[acharya]

Promote Islamic banking in India, says Rahman Khan

New Delhi (PTI): India should promote Islamic banking as a participative investment option, taking cues from the UK, Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairman K Rahman Khan said on Saturday.

Rahman said India should start Islamic investment on the lines of Bank of England, which has brought a regulatory mechanism for such ethical investment.

He was speaking here at a seminar on 'emergence of ethical investment' organised by the Institute of Objective Studies and the Indo-Arab Economic Co-operation Forum.

Ethical investment lay emphasis on moral considerations following Islamic rules. According to the Islam, earning of interests is regarded as unethical.

Present on the occasion was former SEBI Deputy Chairman D R Mehta who held that ethical investments should be promoted in the country.

"Ethical investment goes on to develop the society. It can help in promoting the interests of the underprivileged people in the community," Mehta said.

Mehta also pointed out that giant business leaders should come out and float products on lines of Islamic laws.

IT major Infosys has already launched an 'Islamic Banking Solution' for markets in Europe, and the Middle East to meet the requirements of Islamic law known as 'Shariah', he said.

However, taking a count of 1,000 NSE listed companies, only 335 companies are qualified on Shariah parameters.