Hindutva

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<b>What Is So Dangerous about Religious Secularism in India?</b>

<i>A preliminary reply by Dr. Koenraad Elst to Ms. Meera Nanda</i>

A certain Meera Nanda has recently been positioning herself in academic and Marxist media as some kind of expert on Hindu nationalism and its relation to various "postmodern" ideologies. As the topic is not without importance, I forthwith started to write a reply to her theses, partly to disagree but also partly to agree. Then again, as such abstract and abstruse themes are not a matter of urgency, I haven't exactly hurried to finish my paper, but hopefully you'll get to see it in a month or two. Meanwhile, my attention was drawn to several mentions of my own name in a recent installment of her continuing story. The claims she makes there are
factually wrong and are all too obviously based on what Prof.Meenakshi Jain (in her correction of Prof. J.S. Grewal's crass misrepresentation of her NCERT textbook of medieval history) has aptly called "the Marxist bush telegraph".

It is not contrived to describe Meera Nanda as a Marxist scholar. She works within a Marxist conceptual framework, relies on acknowledged and unacknowledged Marxist sources, and speaks of leftist authors as belonging to a collective "us" as opposed to a hated right-wing "them" (e.g. "we believe --correctly -- that our red-green goals are morally superior to their saffron ones"). And more simply: she starts her paper with a quote from the Communist fortnightly Frontline and ends with a call to "class-based collective action". No secrecy there. It's always interesting to receive morality lessons from someone who has no compunctions about associating with the biggest crime of the 20th century.

Oh, and the second item in that final call is "secularism". In principle, Marxists are supposed to be atheists. In India, the earlier
generations of Marxists were indeed atheists, though they followed the Stalinist strategy of a "common front" in forming an alliance with Christians and Muslims against the principal enemy, Hinduism. Recently, the international political weakening of Marxism has been accompanied by an intellectual softening, so that junior Marxists are forgetting that Islam and Christianity are "opiums of the people" as much as Hinduism, and have even started lapping up some now-fashionable claims propagated by Muslim or
Christian apologists. This way, their secularism is being infiltrated with religious elements. It is becoming a "religious secularism". We shall see some instances below.

In her paper "Dharmic ecology and the neo-Pagan international: the dangers of religious environmentalism in India", presented at panel no. 15 at the 18th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, 6-9 July 2004 in Lund, Sweden, Meera Nanda makes some interesting points. I hope to deal with them more in-depth later, but will already make a few observations on them now, by way of background to my comments on her attacks on me.



Ecology and religion

Ecology can perfectly exist without religion. A case in point is Nazi Germany, a secular state and the
pioneer of environmental policies. Its preservation of rare species, its first anti-smoking campaigns, its first
environmental-effect reports in preparation of new industrial initiatives, its tree-planting campaigns and other ecological measures: all these were given a purely secularist justification, mainly in terms of health and hygiene. The hard-headed Nazis were sceptical of the
religious-environmentalist belief that "reverence towards nature encourages wise use of nature", as Meera Nanda summarizes it while equally rejecting it. The Nazi motive to "take action on behalf of the trees, rivers and land" was "their interest in a better life
materially for themselves and their children", the same motive which Meera Nanda ascribes to "the poor people" in India. Nazism's proto-Green agriculture minister Walter Darré, though having learned his "bio-dynamic agriculture" from the
Christian (ex-Theosophist) esotericist Rudolf Steiner, adopted it not for romantic reasons but because he expected it to durably yield better harvests than the non-bio methods involving chemical pesticides etc. He was a post-religious secularist and the stated
justification for his policy choices was "science", just like he presented his hard-line racism, encapsulated in his slogan "blood and soil", as "racial science". Which is why at the same time, the Nazis also had this in common with India's poor that they were were "not
technology-averse", on the contrary. Distant camp-followers of the Nazis might have infused the rumours about Nazi environmentalism with more poetic motifs, but the down-to-earth Nazis were mostly interested in tangible results.

You could even say that this secularism is what made Nazi ecology dangerous. It was part of a reductionist worldview that reduced living beings including human beings to their material, biological dimension. That is why it was of one piece with Nazi racism. In the pre-secular past, people had certain ideas about racial traits and they often believed that there were statistical differences in character and aptitudes between, say, blacks and whites.

Yet, these assumed differences were kept in a certain proportion because men were deemed to have a deeper identity than their biological characteristics, loosely known as the soul. That is why the Catholic Church could intervene to mitigate the sufferings of the Amerindians under Spanish rule: whatever their alleged inferiority in aptitudes, they were entitled to a humane (though not, for that, an equal) treatment because they were endowed with souls. In the bio-materialist view adopted by the Nazis, by contrast, men's personalities entirely coincided with their genetic determinants.

One way of conceiving the soul was as an entity which could embody itself in a human body, but could also exist outside the body and later return to the physical world by incarnating in yet another body. This belief in reincarnation is central to Jainism and Buddhism, and it has also been adopted in Hinduism. The Vedic hymns had no notion of reincarnation yet,
but in the Upanishads we learn that the idea was borrowed from the warrior class, the class to which wandering ascetics like Mahavira Jina and Gautama the Buddha belonged. In the vast and variegated Hindu society, this belief
in reincarnation coexists with other notions of soul and afterlife. Personally, I don't know whether this widespread belief is true or
not, I am inclined to reject it, but then I also hesitate to say that seers of the Buddha's stature were all wrong.

At any rate, Marxists never wonder whether a theory is true or not, they only care about what class interests a theory may serve. Lenin despised a concern for universally valid truth as "bourgeois objectivity"; in this respect, he was the forerunner of postmodern relativism. So, I am not surprised to find Meera Nanda bypassing the truth question and merely expressing her ideological
disgust at "the obnoxious theory of reincarnation and karma" (which incidentally makes me wonder whether she would repeat this if her subject-matter was Buddhist rather than Hindu, for in secularist mythology, Buddhism is always depicted as a "revolt against Hinduism" and contrasted with it as good against evil). Well, she overlooks an important leftist use of that obnoxious theory, viz. its profoundly anti-racist implications. If the body with all its biological characteristics is only a coat which we put on at conception and lay off at death, as described in the Bhagavad-Gita, then someone's race is only a very temporary and non-essential aspect
of his personality. In this respect, the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain theory is poles apart with the racist view, which sees in race the key to all of history (thus Benjamin Disraeli), both collective and individual.Agreed,this is a bit of a detour to justify the rejection of the racist view of man, and one could reject racism without accepting reincarnation; but fact remains that the belief in reincarnation is deeply incompatible with the bio-materialistic presuppositions of racism.

Yet, the belief in reincarnation is also productive of its own type of environmentalism: since souls can incarnate in non-human beings, we had better treat even plants and animals with at least a measure of the respect which we as humans would expect from others. That is why the Dalai Lama and other spokesmen of reincarnatory doctrines have a point when they
claim an intrinsically ecological concern for their religions. Ms. Nanda has described how environmentalism in India is often clothed in Hindu language and symbolism. Thus, women trying to protect trees, tie rakhi-s (the auspicious red threads which sisters tie around their brothers' wrists on the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan) around these trees. As if the trees are their brothers, as if the Great Chain of Being is one family, our family. Oh, how abhorrent that the Indian people have never learned to separate religion from life, the way spoiled children fish out and put aside the pieces of a disliked vegetable from their meal.

And then it gets really bad: "Indian government funded in part the work of ISKCON (Hare Krishna)
in re-forestation of Vrindavan. Department of environment is supporting temples to maintain sacred groves. Ecological aspects of Sanatana dharma have been included in the school text books of at least one state, UP." Let's put this in perspective. Most
relevant secularist school textbooks, not only in UP, contain the highly disputable claim that Islam stands for "social equality"
(has Ms.Nanda ever protested against that?), but we are asked to feel scandalized that a similar claim is made for Hinduism and ecology. Christian and Muslim denominational schools which receive state funding under Art. 30 of the Constitution
(unlike Hindu denominational schools, which are excluded from this provision for not being "minority institutions"), mix their educational task with not just the exercise but also the propagation of religion. Yet Meera Nanda has no objection to that massive nationwide intrusion of religion into education at vast taxpayers' expense, all while inflaming her audience against
the participation of Hindu organizations in state-funded environmental policies.

However terrible all this may have sounded, now it gets even worse: "If you think this is bad, wait, it gets worse."

The problem with monotheism

On the road to hell, one of the last horrors one may encounter, is this: "In the hands of Hindutva's deep thinkers, notably Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, dharmic ecology takes an explicitly anti-monotheistic turn, aimed superficially at Christianity. Goel notably, but also many others like N. S. Rajaram and Koenrard Elst hold 'Semitic monotheism' responsible for
the crisis of modernity: they take the left's critique of the scientific revolution as disenchanting the world, but blame it on Christianity,
rather than on science per se. All the ills of modernity that the left and right both agree upon are pinned on to the monotheistic conception of God who stands outside nature, creating this split between man and nature."

Here, Meera Nanda's argumentation takes a truly strange turn. Why should the alleged "explicitly anti-monotheistic turn" be so much "worse"? Why should a declared secularist show such indignation at a theological quarrel about monotheism, merely one among several varieties of the "opium of the people"? Don't forget Karl Marx's word that "all criticism starts with criticism of religion". What is so bad if some people challenge a hegemonic religious doctrine, viz.monotheism?

What stake does Meera Nanda have in shielding the religious dogma of monotheism from criticism? I cannot look inside her head, so I cannot do more than speculate (and say so in advance). My best guess is that she has lapped up the Christian claim that some kind of moral superiority attaches to monotheism. No big deal, at the time of Anglo-Christian imperialism, even Hindus were overawed by
this Christian propaganda and interiorized it, most notably the Arya Samaj (°1875), which tried to straitjacket Hinduism into the monotheist mould. Still, a secularist has no business propagating the religious doctrine of monotheism.

And how would the critique of monotheism be only "superficially aimed at Christianity"? What "deeper" aim is being taken, and how would Meera Nanda know? Telepathy? Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel were witnesses to the untiring aggression against Hinduism by Christian missionaries, they deemed Christianity a serious problem, and so they took aim at Christianity. Not some mysterious force behind Christianity, but Christianity itself. They adopted the typically modern rejection of Christianity as exemplified
by Bertrand Russell's book "Why I Am Not a Christian". Their criticism focused mainly on three points:
(1) the irrational basis of Christian theology; (2) the largely fabricated basis of early Christianity's sacred history as related in the New Testament; (3) the intolerant and inhumane record of Christianity in history. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "postmodernism" but is purely and consistently the *modern* approach to the Christian belief system and Church, in the footstep of the criticisms
developed by Western secularists since the 18th century.

Incidentally, now that Meera Nanda uses the expression "deep thinkers", I would like to inform her that this was the sarcastic term which Goel used for all those authors who never believe the evidence of their own eyes but compulsively seek a reality "behind the appearances". In particular, the term applied to RSS softbrains who (in Mahatma Gandhi's footsteps) never believed a Muslim cleric when he made a fanatical statement against the infidels and therefore "corrected" him that the "real Islam" would "never condone such fanaticism". Since Ms. Nanda herself claims to see Goel's "true" intentions behind what is "superficially" a critique of Christianity, she too would have been classified as a "deep thinker" in his books.

Rarely have so many errors been squeezed into a single paragraph. Next case in point: Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel wrote in defence of Hinduism, never of "Hindutva". The latter term was launched by the Hindu Mahasabha and subsequently adopted by the RSS, organizations of which the said independent authors were never members nor camp-followers. Indeed, if Meera Nanda
had taken the trouble of reading them, she would have known that there has never been a fiercer critic of the RSS than Sita Ram Goel, vide e.g. the book he edited: "Time for Stock-Taking", a collection of pro-Hindu anti-RSS papers (incidentally, I myself have also devoted a book, "BJP vs. Hindu Resurgence", and a book chapter in "Decolonizing the Hindu Mind" to criticism of the
RSS Parivar). There is plenty of Hindu revivalism going on outside the RSS, and even before the RSS came into existence, but
"secularists" always try to reduce the former to a ploy of the latter. This in application of the Marxist penchant for conspiracy theories, very handy explanatory models which eliminate reality as a factor of human perception and agency. Thus, when Hindus complain of factual problems such as missionary subversion or Muslim terrorism, it is always convenient to portray this spontaneous and truthful perception as an artefact of "RSS propaganda".

Ms. Nanda systematically misspells my Christian name as "Koenrard". Clearly, all while criticizing me, she has never read any publication of mine. And it shows. She imputes to me, along with a few others, certain objections against "Semitic monotheism", an expression which she herself puts in quote marks. Well, she can't be quoting me there, for I never use
that expression. On the contrary, I have repeatedly written out my reasons for rejecting the term "Semitic" as a religious category, effectively synonymous with "prophetic-monotheistic". I refer to my books "Decolonizing the Hindu Mind" and "The Saffron Swastika" for this, though I leave it to her to find the page numbers; after all it is *her* job to read the authors whom she wants to criticize.

But since she seems to find it beneath her dignity to actually read my publications, I will summarize the reasons right here. Firstly, to Western ears, but largely unknown to Hindus, the term "Semitic" has connotations with "anti-Semitism" and is rarely used in any other context, except by linguists when they refer to the language group chiefly comprising Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Amharic. Secondly and more importantly, there is nothing intrinsically monotheistic about the Semitic-speaking
peoples, vide the polytheism of the Babylonians or Phoenicians and even of the Israelites and Arabs before monotheism was violently imposed on them by Moses c.q. Mohammed, as per their own scriptures.


Three cheers for modern science

Neither Goel nor NS Rajaram nor myself hold monotheism responsible for an alleged "crisis of modernity". In fact, we're quite happy with modernity. It is in pre-modern societies that monotheist militancy has wrought many a crisis. For the late Goel, "postmodernism" came too late on the scene to even register in his worldview, while Dr. Rajaram, a professional mathematician, has mocked postmodernist fads repeatedly on various internet discussion lists. Modernity, by contrast, has been a liberating development which, among other things, broke the spell of dogmatic religions and created new intellectual tools for unmasking and debunking them. It is sheer invention on Ms. Nanda's part that any of us has adopted "the left's critique of the scientific revolution as disenchanting the world", let alone that we would "blame it on Christianity". We have nothing against the scientific revolution and we don't find it blameworthy.

In her earlier papers, Ms. Nanda has lambasted the tendency among Hindus to trace scientific developments to ancient (truly existing or merely purported) Vedic insights. Well, however wrong those Hindu chauvinists may be to claim the merits of science for their ancestors, at least their rhetoric presupposes a respect for science as such. It is only logical that Goel and Rajaram have
highlighted the contrast and struggle between science and Christianity, and that they have continued the Western secularists' critique of the anti-scientific impact of Christianity, which upon taking power in the Roman Empire stopped the Greco-Roman development of science for a thousand years.

To understand Meera Nanda's wholly erroneous presentation of the Hindu critique of Christianity, it is necessary to know a few things about recent Christian apologetics. The role of apologetics, an auxiliary discipline of theology, is in principle, to show the harmony between reason and the Christian faith; and in practice, to show the closeness between present-day intellectual fashions and the Christian faith. So, when science irresistably became the dominant paradigm, Christian apologists started inventing reasons why science must somehow owe its birth or at least its development to Christianity. One of these was that Christianity, or more
generally monotheism, had "disenchanted" the world, turning it into a dead object fit for scientific analysis. Apparently, Ms. Nanda has lapped up this claim, and at any rate she has projected it onto Hindu authors like Goel and Rajaram. But as I have shown in detail elsewhere ("The Saffron Swastika" and some other texts), this thesis of "disenchantment by monotheism" is totally contradicted by the facts. Thus, there is plenty of evidence that a non-disenchanted universe is open enough to scientific study, e.g. the science of astronomy was developed by the polytheistic Mesopotamians who worshipped the stars and planets as gods. There is also plenty of
evidence that monotheistic societies could live in a disenchanted world for centuries without producing any scientific insight whatsoever, e.g. most of the vast Muslim world between the 11th and 20th century.

As for "dharmic ecology", I cannot remember Ram Swarup or Sita Ram Goel ever using that term. Goel, at any rate, never wrote on ecology. Ram Swarup, though acknowledged by Goel as a more original thinker, did not have Goel's typical scepticism and sometimes went along with good-sounding ideas, one instance being the trend of identifying non-monotheistic religions as more ecological and also more woman-friendly. But he too never mixed up Christianity with science in his diagnosis of the reasons behind the environmental crisis. One remarkable contribution which Ram Swarup did make, was to bring a typically Hindu insight to the
debate on monotheism, viz. by transcending the doctrinal opposition between one God and many Gods. To him, the issue of one or many, raised by the monotheists, was altogether puerile and unbecoming of any mature conception of the Divine. As he
pointed out, Hinduism can see God both as one and as many. Monotheism is not so much untrue, it is first of all silly. It is much ado about nothing.

Finally, it is not true that "all the ills of modernity that the left and right both agree upon are pinned on to the monotheistic conception of God" by the Hindu authors (and myself as a non-Hindu author) mentioned. To these authors, modernity is the enemy of obscurantist monotheism. Modernity may have its ills, but these are not the same as the ills of Christianity or of other monotheistic
religions.



Anti-Paganism, the oldest hatred

"And this anti-Christian turn makes dharmic ecology very friendly to the anti-Christian, neo-pagan groups that are mushrooming in Europe, notably in mostly protestant countries such as England, Ireland, Germany, Iceland, Belgium, Lithuania, Norway and even in Russia. Western Neo-pagans are mostly disillusioned Christians. They reject the transcendent God of Abrahamic faiths, who created the natural order, but now stands outside nature. They are attracted to paganism which sees the sacred as manifested in
nature more rationally and aesthetically convincing."

I will not make an issue of Ms. Nanda's mischaracterizing Belgium and Ireland, which are historically frontline states of Catholicism,
as "mostly Protestant". To come to the point: there are more dimensions to Paganism than its real or purported ecology-minded attitude, and hence also rather more motives for people to trade in Christianity for a revived Paganism. Thus, to some people it is a matter of principle to undo the damage inflicted on the native traditions by an intrusive Christianity, even if it is impossible and after all the intervening centuries perhaps also nonsensical to revive the ancient traditions, which would at any rate have changed considerably in case of a natural development unimpeded by Christian interference. To many more, some form of religiosity is necessary to
make their lives meaningful or at least colourful, but Christianity cannot fiulfil that task anymore because its defining beliefs have been
rejected by philosophical reflection and scholarly discoveries, while Paganism doesn't tie itself down to dogmatic beliefs and hence accomodates the freewheeling modern attitude much better. However, it is true that most Pagan revivalist groups have embraced ecology as a fashionable selling point.

Meera Nanda is right when she finds the ecological claims made for Pagan traditions overdone: "I will argue that sacredness of nature does not protect nature. Just because people venerate trees and rivers does not meant that they will take care of them." This is actually a point I myself have developed elsewhere, even before neo-Pagan audiences, partly just to pull their leg, partly
because it is indeed necessary to relativize this new orthodoxy that claims ecology as an explicit concern of the ancestral religions.
Whether men will mismanage nature depends less on their attitudes and beliefs than on their *understanding* of the workings of nature. I don't doubt that the Native Americans, always eagerly depicted as the highpriests of proto-environmentalism, did kind of
respect the mammoths they encountered when they entered America; but they exterminated them nonetheless, simply by killing one here and then another there, because in their hazy grasp of the world they didn't realize that the mammoth population was finite. Here too, it is science that liberates man from his ignorance in properly dealing with nature. Then again, ideological choices also matter, e.g. Soviet Communism swore by science and yet it was extremely irresponsible and destructive in its dealings with the environment.

However, Ms. Nanda is rather off the mark when she claims that "religious environmentalism has become the Trojan horse for Hindutva. Dharmic ecology of the right wing is indistinguishable from the anti-Enlightenment left." It is not clear which Troy has been
penetrated by any "Trojan horse" of Hindutva. The Hindutva movement has been uniquely unsuccessful in making friends anywhere outside its own natural constituency of born Hindus. I may have missed something, but I am not aware of any international
ecological (or other) organization that has changed one iota in its policies due to lobbying by Hindutva-oriented delegates or members.

Also, Ms. Nanda seems to be implying that an "anti-Enlightenment" position is the common ground between the alleged Hindu right-wing and an anti-Enlightenment section of the left. Though Hindutva and the SR Goel school of thought are two very different movements, the point I made about the latter's positive attitude to the Enlightenment applies, by and large, also to the former. At least I have never seen any pleas against science or the Enlightenment in the Organiser or other RSS publications. Sometimes
they may rail against Western consumerism or "materialism" (meaning consumerism, and distinct from the philosophical position of materialism, well-represented among the classical Hindu philosophies), but they never rail against the scientific worldview. On the contrary, they uphold the latter as somehow closer to the Hindu worldview than to Christianity and Islam. Rightly or
wrongly so, but that is at any rate their position, and it does presuppose a positive valuation of science and the Enlightenment.



Neo-Paganism and Nazism

But now Ms. Nanda gets really nasty: "Dharmic ecology of Hindutva right is emerging as the hub of a new neo-pagan International. Neo-paganism in Europe and America has deep and historic ties with Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups."

The claim about a non-monotheistic international may be embryonically correct, though it partly stems from a Marxist projection of its own working-style onto other movements. Today there is no such thing as a neo-Pagan international, but the meeting of the "World Council of the Elders of the Ancient Traditions and Cultures" in Mumbai in February 2003 (where most Hindu participants were just
Hindu, not "Hindutva") might, just might, be the beginning of such an international network. If so, we should wish this effort at cultural decolonization all the best. Judging from the papers read and the resolutions passed, the Elders' conference was a benign affair, and in case any neo-Nazi had sneaked his way in, the good vibrations would have influenced him towards more openness, more pluralism, more gentleness and more brotherhood with the rest of mankind, for such were the themes raised at the meeting. Nothing
evil has been decided or planned at that meeting, unless Ms. Nanda wants us to believe that the rejection of Christian proselytism (i.e. the planned destruction of religious traditions through the conversions of their practitioners) is somehow evil. She could of course take that position, but then that would reveal her to be a non-secularist agent of Christian proselytism herself, for a secularist would never be so judgmental about people's desire to be left alone by preaching busibodies.

Incidentally, such an Elders' network would be a Pagan rather than a neo-Pagan international, for the organizers' greatest achievement was to have brought together not just a few neo-Pagan hobbyists from Europe taking a holiday in India, but
revered elders from numerous genuinely traditional and ancient religions from around the globe, from Aboriginal to Sioux. Those elders could have told Ms. Nanda a thing or two about the destructive role of the Bible-toting and Doomsday-predicting and
Pagan-slandering missionaries in their respective societies.

But then she proceeds to associate neo-Paganism with Nazism, the perennial trump card in the rhetoric of leftists who have run out of positive ideas. If she wanted to link "dharmic ecology" with Nazism, she could have spared herself this trouble of bringing in the intermediary factor of "neo-Paganism", for ecology itself is already intensely associated with Nazism. There is simply no denying that Nazi Germany was the first state to pursue environmentalist policies. Indeed, if spokesmen for polluting industries or nuclear power plants find themselves in a tight corner because of ecologist criticism, they could always turn the tables by denouncing the
Green activists as "Hitler's heirs" or so. There's just no rebuttal to a "Nazi" smear, as Ms. Nanda clearly knows.

It is true that a few of the thousands of neo-Pagan groups in Europe and the USA have white racist (sloppily summarized as "neo-Nazi") ties; in my book "The Saffron Swastika", I have made a rather broader diagnosis of this problem than Ms. Nanda has done here. Though very marginal in scope, the problem is there, and I am on record as warning neo-Pagans against taking it lightly. What I must emphatically deny, however, is that these ties are "deep and historic".

As for "historic", let us not forget that in 1938, Hitler dissolved all unconventional religious groups including all neo-Pagan ones. In 1941, after the strange flight of Rudolf Hess, a kind of New-Ager who dabbled in Buddhism and veganism and had pacifist leanings which possibly motivated his "peace mission" to Britain, Hitler had the prominent characters of all eccentric religious groups arrested and locked up, along with assorted astrologers and such. Hitler correctly saw that most neo-Pagans were not the human material he needed in his regimented national-socialist state: many were anarchists, pacifists, regional particularists, and at any rate
undisciplined weirdoes with more imagination than military zeal. In his book "Mein Kampf", he had already derided the "wandering scholars" who were living with their heads in the clouds of a dim Germanic past, religious archaeologists who were trying to faithfully reconstruct the culture of their forefathers as if even a perfect imitation could have taken on life again and gained relevance in the modern world. Hitler himself, though formally a member of the Catholic Church till his death (just as Goebbels and Goering also remained members of their respective Christian Churches, and none of them was ever excommunicated), was a
down-to-earth nationalist who knew about the catastrophic role which religious divisions had played in German history and who
temperamentally disliked religious enthusiasts unless they submitted to his political project. He was a modern man who wanted to push back the hold of religious beliefs on the minds of the masses. Hitler was a secularist.

As for "deep", only very shallow minds can fail to notice the deep divergence between the Pagan religions and Nazism. Mind you, unlike neo-Pagan romantics, I am not into idealizing the ancient European Pagans, for I know that they practised sati (widows following deceased husbands into death), that they didn't feel bound by the Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva
Convention, that those dreamy wise Druids practised human sacrifice, etc. All the same, the admitted faults of the Pagans were radically different from those of the Nazis. This is even true of Odinism, the Germanic religion which Ms. Nanda identifies most strongly with Nazism. Far from being "deep", the connection between Odinism and Nazism hardly extends beyond the mere
word "Germanic". Consider three essential traits of Nazism: racism, anti-Semitism and authoritarianism.

Odinism had no concept of anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism, a central and defining trait of Christianity (which claims to be
the "new Israel" replacing the old one). It never interfered with other people's religions and didn't think twice about treating Judaism as simply one of the many existing ethnic religions. No Jew was ever killed in the name of Odin, and the recent wave of anti-Jewish violence in Europe is of course not the doing of neo-Odinists, but of Muslims. If Hindu networking with neo-Pagans is so worrying to Ms.Nanda, would she have the consistency to denounce the RSS/BJP's emphatic overtures to the Muslims as even more worrying? As for other Pagan religions, we know that individual Romans like Cicero have said unkind things about the Jews,
but the Roman religion had no notion of anti-Semitism either, and the Roman state only cracked down on the Jewish people when they staged an armed political uprising, but otherwise left them in peace with the status of "religiolicita" and openly favoured them over the upstart new cult of Christianity. It is only after the Christianization of the Roman Empire that anti-Jewish policies were enacted.

Odinism was anything but authoritarian. Odinists were typically individualistic or clannish and hence hostile to centralized
authority; they practised sovereignty of their own clan or town. In higher political councils, their delegates jealously defended their local autonomy and put checks on the central ruler's ambitions. The oldest still-existing parliament in Europe was constituted in Odinic Iceland in the 10th century.US founding father Thomas Jefferson wrote that his republican system was essentially but a revival of ancient Saxon Law, which dates back to pre-Christian Odinic times. Next to the Roman heritage, it is the Germanic heritage which contained the germs of Europe's systems of representative democracy, rule of law and equitable judicial procedure. The third and
best-known source of democracy is of course the direct democracy of the Greek city-states, and they too were pre-Christian and Pagan. By contrast, Christianity opposed democracy in principle, and this well into the 20th century. The christianization of the
Odinic lands was largely effected through a deal between power-hungry noblemen and the Church: the latter promised the former the
legitimation of their concentration of powers (kingship by Divine Right) in exchange for the imposition of Christianity on the population. If Christianity later, in its Protestant form, adopted more democratic structures (what Protestants call "sovereignty in one's own circle", though still sharply limited by elements of Bible-centred theocracy), it is no coincidence that this took place in the Germanic lands where some of the ancient checks and balances in the power structure were still in force.

Odinism was certainly not racist. Germanic settlers in new lands, such as the Franks in France, the Longobards in Italy or
the Vikings in Normandy or Sicily, always intermarried with locals and adopted the local language and religion within at most two
generations. Preservation of their racial and cultural identity was the least of their concerns. Likewise in their mythology, the different categories of their gods (Aesir, Vanir, Giants) intermarried, e.g. Odin himself was the offspring of a mixed Ase-Giant union. For obsessions with racial purity, few religions would be more unfit than Odinism.

Then how come that some Odinic revivalists in the 19th and 20th century have been racists? Well, for the same reason many Christians and atheists of that period adopted racist views: these were part of the intellectual fashions of the day. In its early phases, the budding science of evolutionary biology made much of the race concept, accepted the idea of racial inequality and valued racial
purity. It is from this secular post-Enlightenment source that people belonging to all kinds of religious tendencies borrowed racist ideas, which some of them tried to integrate into their respective religions. But there is absolutely no intrinsic connection between Odinism and racism.

That is why, now that biology has outgrown this racism, most Odinists (i.e. minus a handful of mentally impaired individuals), like most others, have followed suit; and why many Odinist websites now carry explicit disclaimers that they will reject or expel any members found to mix their religion with racism. Those Odinists have chosen the difficult and thankless road of purifying their chosen religion from its distortive recent accretions all while having to function under an unrelenting bombardment with slanderous amalgamations such as the one relayed by Meera Nanda.


Nazi religious policy

It is a myth that Odinism was promoted by the Nazi regime. Hitler's followers, even those who were actively anti-Christian, didn't replace Christian items with Pagan ones, but with secular ones. You could say that they were forging a quasi-religion centred around secular icons: the Führer and the National-Socialist State. At oath-swearing ceremonies, they replaced the Bible not with the Edda, but with Mein Kampf. In greeting people, they replaced the religious salute "Grüss Gott" not with "Grüss Odin" or "Grüss Wotan" or so, but with "Heil Hitler". To confirm a neophyte as a Nazi, he had to touch not some Odinic religious object, but an object
from Nazi party history, viz. the "blood flag" (Blutfahne), a textile witness to the martyrdom of some young Nazis during the failed coup in Munich in 1923. In Nazi school programmes, the slot usually reserved for Christian religion was not filled with Odinic religion, but with secular courses of "racial science".

Some Hindutva polemicists have adopted the thesis that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope", but that is nonsense. The Catholic Church greatly feared the religion-related developments in Nazi Germany, even more so than the brutal oppression of religion in the
Soviet Union. What it feared in Germany was not the rise of the long-defunct Odinic religion, an eccentrics' hobby which nobody took seriously at that point, but a successful secularization policy. While long experience showed that brutal oppression could provoke a pro-Christian reaction ("the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith"), the Nazi policy was to gradually wean the youth away from Christianity. For example, the Nazis didn't persecute priests as such, but when priests were put on trial for child abuse, they gave the scandal maximum publicity, just as secularist papers in the West still do today, because that is a better way of undermining the moral authority of the Church.

In many ways, Nazi secularization policy ran parallel to that of other militantly secular states, such as Mexico and the
French Third Republic. But the Nazi state was more thorough: it tried to anchor the Germans' new commitment to the modern
secular ideology of National-Socialism deeper into their minds by channelling their subconscious religious instincts through quasi-
religious ceremonies, most impressively the party reunions at Nuremberg. These were a more elaborate version of the secular substitute rituals in other secular states, e.g. the replacement of morning prayer with a salute to the flag. It is very superficial to describe this quasi-religious imagery, such as the Nuremberg light shows, as a return to the pre-Christian religion; and simply false to call it Odinism.

In the SS research department Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), a few individuals were employed to study ancient religions. They were either overspecialized bookworms or emotionally unstable eccentrics (hence a few puzzling suicides), and they were far
removed from Nazi policy-making centres. When you study their record, you find once more that there was nothing "deep" about the Nazi relation with Pagan religions, on the contrary. Consider e.g. Christopher Hale's recent book about the rumoured Nazi infatuation with Tibet: "Himmler's Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet". For some four hundred pages, the reader is given good surveys of Nazi history, Tibetan history, the English-Tibetan-Chinese diplomatic interaction, the day-to-day
progress of the German travellers in Tibet and their meetings with Tibetan citizens, with a few sexual asides. But in spite of the book's initial promises, he is waiting and waiting in vain for the first revelation about those mystical insights which the SS researchers
sought or found in Tibet. What Tantric-Buddhist secret powers did they acquire? There was simply no such thing. At the end of their trip, they were elated to have seen so many swastikas around them on Tibetan walls, and to have discovered a Nordic streak in the specimens of the Tibetan aristocracy whose skulls they had measured. Just some racist old hat, nothing profound, nothing even remotely esoteric.

This, incidentally, does not keep some contemporary Christian preachers in Germany, where Buddhism is making big inroads, from claiming that the Buddha was one of the evil influences on Hitler. Nor does it keep pro-Chinese Communists from alleging that the Dalai Lama is a Nazi stooge. Imagined or inflated Nazi connections are the perfect stick with which to beat any chosen hate object. Ms. Nanda's discourse follows a well-established pattern.



Friends, foes, and the Aryan invasion debate

To be sure, in polemical practice, any refutation of the amalgamation of neo-Paganism with racism or Nazism is beside the point. When smear artists (and I don't know if Ms.Nanda is one, she may just be mindlessly copying a line of rhetoric so common in her circle that she doesn't even realize how damaging it is) introduce Nazi associations into their story, their point is not to convince anyone by rational argument, merely to create a subliminal association which will exclude the targeted person or group from society. Once the N-word has fallen, all rationality goes out the door and hysteria takes over. Which is one of the reasons why self-respecting
academic forums such as the one in Lund where Ms. Nanda read her paper, should subject such allegations to the most stringent standards of proof before allowing them to be read out at all.

By dropping the N-word, you don't just stop the thinking processes in most of your audience; if you're not careful, you also stop your own mind from functioning. This is apparently what has happened to Ms. Nanda when she launched her diatribe against the cleverly constructed chain Hinduism-Paganism-Nazism. First of all, that chain of links wouldn't prove a Hindu-Nazi connection purely in logical terms. Secondly, once she had posited this link, this terribly "worse" thing she had promised to reveal to her audience, she ought to have reflected on what this would mean in practice. How should a connection between Hindus and "neo-Nazis" work
out? Would Hindus now join the "dot-busters", white racist thugs in New Jersey who attack Hindus identifiable by the tilak ("dot") between their eyebrows? Would neo-Nazis now join the Hindutva brigade in denouncing the political ambitions of "white elephant" Sonia Maino-Gandhi, daughter of an Italian fascist militant?

Unlike neo-Pagans, neo-Druids, neo-Witches, neo-Odinists and such people, the neo-Nazis aren't too interested in religion as such or in Hinduism specifically. It is *race* that makes them tick. Now, Hindus are brown-skinned, they make up part of the immigrant population in Europe and North America, and as such they are very much disliked by neo-Nazis. There is only one possible item that might endear Hindus to neo-Nazis: the theory that the "Aryan race" migrated from Europe into India and set up a racial apartheid system there, the caste system. This theory was a cornerstone of the racist worldview incorporated into the Nazi ideology.

Unfortunately, it is this very theory which many Hindus including the accursed Hindutva activists have been polemicizing *against* for the last decade or so. They insist that the caste system doesn't have a racial basis, that "Arya" never meant a race, that it purely referred to Vedic culture, that Vedic culture is native to India, that there never was an Aryan invasion. I don't know if they are right, but that certainly is their position. Indeed, from Ms. Nanda's earlier papers, I gathered the impression that she herself includes this Aryan non-invasion theory among the items of crank science put out by those hare-brained Hindutvavadis.

After the Aryan invasion debate became a big issue in the mid-1990s, the next development was an illustration of an old law of life: opinions are not accepted or rejected because of whether they are true or not, but because of the company with
which they associate us, and the company from which they separate us. In the anti-Hindu common front led by the Marxists, very few people have the scholarly competence to judge the question of the Aryan invasion or non-invasion; but since the non-invasion theory is popular among the Hindu bad guys, all the "secularists" have fiercely united around the opposite theory. So, if the neo-Nazis want to make friends in India, they should address the Marxists and the Mullahs and the Missionaries, for it is they who fiercely uphold the cherished theory of the Aryan intrusion from Europe into India.



Universalism

Ms. Nanda insinuates the Pagan-Nazi connection repeatedly: "What worry me are three things. The long history of the Nazi and neo-Nazi involvement with occult and paganism. Most people don't realize that the Nazism was a revolt against
universalistic and secular elements of Christianity which the Nazis ascribed to the influence of the Jews."

It is true that crackpot authors have made good money by propagating "the occult roots of Nazism". The secret Nazi base in Antarctica, Nazi UFOs, Nazi instrumentalization of the energy in the spear which wounded Christ on the cross, all that
and many other wonders fill the pages of their bestsellers. And it is equally true that various ideological groups including the Christian mission have deemed it in their own interest to pick up this line of propaganda, though in a trimmed and streamlined form to make it palatable to more serious audiences. Through this medium, the myth of Nazi occultism is now finding a place even
in academic papers such as Ms. Nanda's. But that doesn't make it any more factual.

In an attempt to say something serious on this questionable basis, Ms. Nanda claims that "Nazism was a revolt against
universalistic and secular elements of Christianity". This is another case of "deep thinking", for Nazism defined itself as something simpler and more straightforward, viz. as a way of reviving Germany after the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and the financial crisis through a strong state, nationalistic policies (at the expense of non-German peoples), and socialism. Orthodox Marxists would agree that Nazism was the result of socio-economic forces, not of occult mumbo-jumbo nor of metaphysical disputes. But let that pass and let's focus on Ms. Nanda's "revolt". Now that associating Paganism with the Devil doesn't scare people anymore, Hitler is employed as the new Devil and a lot is invested in connecting him with Paganism. In this case, Christianity is presented
as universalistic (disregarding the deep cleavage between saved Christians and hell-bound unbelievers, a profounder and more consequential division of mankind than anything taught by those accursed Pagans), Hitler and Paganism as anti-universalistic.
Universalism, by which is meant in this context the unity of the human race and the assumption that equal norms and equal rights apply to all men, predates Christianity, vide e.g. Stoic philosophy, and was revived in its non-Christian form by the Enlightenment. Contrary to appearances, it was also widely present in Pagan religions, which were ethnic in fact but often universalistic in principle, i.e. they assumed the oneness of the human race but their ritiuals and symbolism didn't extend beyond a national or linguistic community for merely practical reasons. Typically, they recognized their own gods in other peoples' pantheons, vide e.g. the "interpretatio Romana" of the Greek gods:

Zeus = Jupiter, Athena = Minerva etc. To the extent that Christianity was universalistic, as distinct from the ethnocentrism of its parent religion Judaism, it was due to the influence from the ambient cosmopolitan Pagan-Hellenistic culture. So, universalism didn't need Christianity and was a broader presence than Christianity. If at all the Nazis revolted against the dominant assumption of universalism, it was universalism they revolted against, not just its alleged Christian instance.

So let's not get caught in this wily attempt to present Christianity and Nazism as opposite poles, universalistic vs. ethnic, one of
the new lines of Christian apologetics, though propagated here under the guise of "secularism". It is, for that matter, unclear what is meant by "secular elements of Christianity", for the Christian religion is by definition a non- secular doctrine. Ms. Nanda says that Hitler ascribed this "secular element in Christianity" to the Jews, yet another "deep-thinking" attempt to present Nazism and Christianity as polar opposites: when Hitler "superficially" railed against his Jewish arch-enemy, what he "really" targeted was
Christianity with its "secular" elements.

But to do justice to Mrs. Nanda's efforts, we might as well make a mental effort of our own to imagine what "secular elements of Christianity" she might be meaning. Apparently, she is tapping into a new line of Christian apologetics, parallel to the one outlined above on the monotheistic "disenchantment of nature" which supposedly generated science. According to this new doctrine, Nazism was anti-egalitarian while Christianity or its monotheism was the source of modern egalitarianism (the same argument is used in India
for Islam). This, again, is contradicted by the facts. Saint Paul emphatically affirmed the inequality of man and woman;
this is of course nothing typically Christian, but it shows that modern notions of equality were lost on him. When he said that slaves and freemen, Jews and Greeks were all one in Christ, he didn't deduce that this supernatural oneness should translate into a merger of Greeks and Jews or a freeing of the slaves, on the contrary: the worldly differences lose their importance and can therefore be accepted all the better, so the slaves should draw consolation from this oneness in Christ all while obeying their masters.
The Church Fathers never questioned the institution of slavery, and Christians practised slavery for most of their history, as did the
fellow monotheists of Judaism and Islam, along with most Pagan societies. Slavery and racial inequality were justified with reference to the Bible and to Church teachings well into the 19th (US South) and even the 20th century (South African Apartheid). At the dawn of the modern age, *some* Christians switched over to egalitarianism and abolitionism, but that was clearly under other influences than Christianity itself, which had been comfortable with feudalism, slavery and other inequalities as long as it
reigned supreme.



Religion and hubris

Ms. Nanda promises to deliver us the answer to the question "why this attraction for the occult and paganism", an attraction which she imputes to Nazism. And the answer is: "Local gods are more blood and soil gods. Nature religions allow their adherents a great deal of hubris."

To start with the "blood and soil gods": no god could ever be more "blood and soil"- minded than the Biblical Jahweh, who gave His chosen people the soil of other people's land, which they then were told to appropriate by means of the most complete genocide (apologists now claim that this episode is unhistorical, but that would imply the Bible's untrustworthiness, and it only
removes the "genocidal God" from history but not from Biblical theology). He also prohibited them from intermarrying and ordained
the repudiation of foreign spouses and mixed progeny, all in order to keep their "blood" pure. No Jupiter or Odin or Shiva ever matched Jahweh in this regard. And no contemporary "blood and soil"-minded politician would dare to propose anything this radical.

And how do "nature religions allow their adherents a great deal of hubris"? The term "hubris" stems from the Greek Pagan religion, where it was the cardinal sin, illustrated in several myths about people struck by hubris and then meeting their doom. Christianity likewise considers hubris the cardinal sin, in fact the original sin committed by Eve when she accepted the Snake's tempting
offer of "becoming equal to God"; so there we seem to find some common ground between Christianity and Paganism. However, Christianity and Islam tell their adherents that they are the keepers of the One True Exclusive Revelation and that unlike everyone else, they are entitled to an eternal paradise in the afterlife. Islam moreover tells the Muslims that they are entitled to worldly rule in this life, relegating all unbelievers to a submissive second-class status at best. How should nature religions manage to impart even more hubris than that?

Here's how: "They feel they are acting in accord with nature itself and don't have to obey either the positive law of
the land, or the traditional ethics, all of which they see as merelyman-made law."

In Islam, there certainly is a powerful tendency which rejects all "man-made law" in favour of the Shari'a, deemed to have been imparted by Allah Himself through His final prophet. But in "nature religions"? What on earth is she talking about?! From the Stoics to the Daoists, numerous Pagan religions have taught the art of "living in accordance with nature". Indeed, the "laws of nature" (Chinese *Dao*, Vedic *Rta*, Sanskrit *Dharma*, Avestan *Arta*, etc.) are a central concept to the ethics of most Pagan traditions, where people are expected to live in conformity with them. Saint Thomas Aquinas adopted this concept of "natural law" into Christian theology, though Bible purists reject is as an innovation of Pagan origin. But it is total news to me that the Confucians or the Zoroastrians or any serious Pagans I can think of, lived in defiance of "the law of the land" and of "the traditional ethics". By Jove, it was they themselves who upheld the traditional ethics. Even among modern neo-Pagan eccentrics, admittedly a scene where anyone can set up his own shop and make any wild claim, such offensive anarchism must be the exception rather than the rule.



Pro domo

From wild claims about religions, Ms. Nanda moves effortlessly towards making wild claims about individuals: "It is this pagan connection that has brought people like Koenrard Elst, David Frawley and many others in close collaboration with Hindu
nationalists."

This is a plain lie. It may not be Meera Nanda's own lie, she may well have borrowed it from some hearsay source which she chose to trust on no better basis than ideological proximity. But since it is she herself who has chosen to repeat this lie in an academic forum and then propagate it worldwide through the internet, she certainly must take responsibility for it. She should now apologize, not just to Frawley and to myself, but also to the organizers and participants in the Lund conference, for she has wasted their valuable time and damaged the academic standing of the gathering by presenting a paper marred by slander, political ulterior motives and a false claim of expertise.

David Frawley has explained his ideological itinerary in detail in his book "How I Became a Hindu", easily available, where Meera Nanda could have read for herself that "neo-Paganism" as defined by her played no role at all in Frawley's discovery of Hinduism and of the school of thought of Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel. In fact, Frawley followed the then-typical path from parental Christianity through leftist hippyism to Hinduism. He has devoted a paper to showing how the so-called Hindu Right actually takes many
positions which in the West are associated with the Left.

My own story is very similar in its essentials. It is also available in cold print, though not as neatly summarized in one book, but
dispersed over various interviews, papers and introductory book chapters. It is of course not my job to provide Ms. Nanda with a bibliography here: if she thinks she has to criticize me, it is up to her to locate and read my relevant sayings and writings. But to spare her the trouble, I will briefly provide the information here.

Like Frawley, and like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel decades earlier, I too have gone through a leftist phase. This has its uses, for it leaves a certain familiarity with the dominant discourse and a certain immunity to being fooled by late-Marxist moralizers; I can see through all their tricks. Then I moved on to the New Age scene, which Christians might denounce as "Pagan" but which was
ideologically a very different world from what is usually called neo-Paganism: globalistic vs. ethnic, futuristic vs. archaeological.
It was formally apolitical but implicitly camp-follower leftist, e.g.my friends and I participated in the demonstrations against the
placement of American missiles in Europe in 1981-84. By age 26, in 1985, I had had enough of the superficiality and flakiness of that scene, particularly of the sloppy thinking behind such concepts as "the profound unity between quantum physics and Eastern
mysticism", which has provoked Meera Nanda's ire too, and the "essential unity of all religions". That is a large part of the reason why I went back to university (I had dropped out earlier) to explore the sources and earn degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. So, it was not from any New Age leanings, but in reaction *against* them, that I decided to study more solid traditions such as Hinduism.

A visit to India was the next logical step, and when I arrived, the Indian papers were full of the controversy over the ban on Salman Rushdie's book *The Satanic Verses*. To my surprise, many so-called "secularists", such as Khushwant Singh and M.J. Akbar,
supported the ban, which had been declared by the "secularist" Congress government. The more I learned about this Indian "secularism", the more it became clear to me that it was often the very opposite of what we in the West in genuinely secular states call "secularism".

Indeed, over the years I have had many a good laugh at the pompous moralism and blatant dishonesty of India's so-called secularists. Thus, in the run-up to the Pope's visit to Delhi in 1999, the secularists fell over each other trying to be the loudest and shrillest in denying the "vicious Hindutva propaganda" that the Catholic Church has as its stated goal to convert the whole of
India (and the world) to its own belief system. Having been brought up in a Catholic family and Catholic schools, with missionaries in my family and among my parents' friends, I of course *knew* that all the social and educational work proudly shown off by the missionaries and praised by their secularist allies is intended to aid the process of conversion. So, once in Delhi, the Pope himself
declared in so many words that the christianization of Asia was "an absolute priority" and that he wanted to "reap a rich harvest of faith" in India. He confirmed every Hindu suspicion and badly let his secularist fans down. In Europe, the Pope is the scapegoat par excellence of militant secularists and atheists, but in India he is counted among the "secular" alliance, for he is anti-Hindu and
that's the only qualification you need to earn the label "secularist". To the RSS, the secularists are accomplices of the anti-national
forces, of Pakistan and the terrorists. That is not incorrect, but to me, they are first of all a bunch of clowns.

Once I had seen through the secularists, it was only logical that I would go and make my acquaintance with the people whom they always denounced with such holy indignation. To see for myself if those ugly Hindu monsters were really all that ugly. After reading the book "History of Hindu-Christian Encounters", I sought out its author, and that's how I met Sita Ram Goel. Come to mention him, I found that in moral stature and depth of scholarship, he completely dwarfed the Stalinist "eminent historians" and other icons of "secularism". Which is why I frown when I see ignorant upstarts like Meera Nanda berate a towering personality like Goel.

In any case, by the time I discovered Hindu revivalism, in autumn 1989, I had had no contact with any form of neo-Paganism at all. It is only in the mid- 1990s that I took an interest in European neo-Paganism, partly on Ram Swarup's advice. It was clear to me from
day one that I was never going to take the Pagan revivalist project very seriously, at least less so than the continuous ancient traditions still flourishing in India and other Asian countries. To be sure, I accept the principle that religions which have been murdered deserve a second chance; it's only that the actual result didn't impress me very much. They are still very young and only time will tell what their hoped-for thinkers and seers will make of them, but for now at least, I found them lacking a dimension of systematic spiritual practice, as anyone will notice who can contrast them with Daoism, Buddhism or Hinduism. So I limited my involvement to contributing articles to some neo-Pagan papers, for writing happens to be what I do.

This included pieces on pre-Islamic Arab Paganism, on attempts by the Berbers to shake off the Arab-Islamic imposition, on Zoroastrian