E mail FWD :
Are you a Secularist? Then please answer these questions,
1. There are nearly 52 Muslim countries. Show one Muslim country which provides Haj subsidy.
2. Show one Muslim country where Hindus are extended the special rights that Muslims are accorded in india?
3. Show one Muslim country which has a Non-Muslim as its President or Prime Minister.
4. Show one country where the 85% majority craves for the indulgence of the 15% minority.
5. Shoe one Mullah or Maulvi who has declared a 'fatwa' against terrorists.
6. Hindu-majority Maharashtra, Bihar, Kerala, Pondicherry, etc. have in the past elected Muslims as CMs; Can you ever imagine a Hindu becoming the CM of Muslim - majority J&K?
7. Today Hindus are 85%. If Hindus are intolerant, how come Masjids and Madrassas are thriving? How come Muslims are offering Namaz on the road? How come Muslims are proclaiming 5 times a day on loudspeakers that there is no God except Allah?
8. When Hindus gave to Muslims 30% of Bharat for a song, why should Hindus
now beg for their sacred places at Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi?
9. Why temple funds are spent for the welfare of Muslims and Christians, when they are free to spend their money in any way they like?
10. When uniform is made compulsory for school children, why there is no Uniform Civil Code for citizens?
11. In what way, J&K is different from Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu or Uttar Pradesh, to have article 370?
12. Why Gandhiji supported Khilafat Movement (nothing to do with our freedom movement) and what in turn he got?
13. Why Gandhiji objected to the decision of the cabinet and insisted that Somnath Temple should be reconstructed out of public fund, not government funds. When in January 1948 he presurrised Nehru and Patel to carry on renovation of the mosques of Delhi at government expenses?
14. If Muslims & Christians are minorities in Maharashtra, UP, Bihar etc.,are Hindus not minorities in J&K, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya etc? Why are Hindus denied minority rights in these states?
15. Do you admit that Hindus do have problems that need to be recognized. Or do you think that those who call themselves Hindus are themselves the problem?
16. Why post-Godhra is blown out of proportion, when no-one talks of the ethnic cleansing of 4 lakh Hindus from Kashmir?
17. In 1947, when India was partitioned, the Hindu population in Pakistan was about 24%. Today it is not even 1%. In 1947, the Hindu population in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was 30%. Today it is about 7%. What happened to the missing Hindus? Do Hindus have human rights?
\18. In contrast, in India, Muslim population has gone up from 10.4% in 1951 to about 14% today; whereas Hindu population has come down from 87.2% in 1951 to 85% in 1991. Do you still think that Hindus are undamentalists?
19. Do you consider that - Sanskrit is communal and Urdu is secular, Mandir is Communal and Masjid is Secular, Sadhu is Communal and Imam is Secular, BJP is communal and Muslim league is Secular, Dr. Praveen Bhai Togadia is ANTI-NATIONAL and Bhukari is Secular, Vande Matharam is communal and Allah-O-Akbar is secular, Shriman is communal and Mian is secular, Hinduism is Communal and Islam is Secular, Hindutva is communal and Jihadism is secular, and at last, Bharat is communal and Italy is Secular?
20. When Christian and Muslim schools can teach Bible and Quran, Why Hindus cannot teach Gita or Ramayan? Siddhi Vinayak Temple in Prabhadevi, Mumbai Can a Hindu - say Mulayam or Laloo - ever become a trustee of a Masjid or Madrassa?
22. Dr. Praveenbhai Togadia has been arrested many times on flimsy grounds. has the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid, Delhi, Ahmed Bhukari been arrested for
claiming to be an ISI agent and advocating partition of Bharat?
23. When Haj pilgrims are given subsidy, why Hindu pilgrims to Amarnath, Sabarimalai & Kailash Mansarovar are taxed?
A Muslim President, A Sikh Prime Minister running the affairs of the nation with a unity of purpose.
Can this happen anywhere, except in a HINDU NATION - BHARAT ?
Later on please forward it to as many Hindus - Indians as possible
Vandhe Matharam
This is a very interesting thread...
It is definitely true that there is much confusion about what Hindutva means...or even Hinduism.
We have various definitions by scholars...sympathetic to Hindutva/Hinduism and by scholars who are not.
However...I really don't think that should bother us much. Please remember that various "settled" isms..are still debated today...as to their real meanings.We have debates on what is Fascism...on what is Democracy...Communism...and so on..
In light of these facts...I think we can have certain measures..For instance..the record of these various systems..and how their leaders define or explain their programmes...in order to "judge" these systems..
While reading the articles posted...I sensed that we really are not listening to people who speak about their beliefs...Contrarily...we form opinions that support our prejudices and close our eyes and ears to what actually is..
More mischievous is the practice of "silence". We become so silent to our own weaknesses and wrongsdoings...
There is a lot being written about Hinduisms' evils. Caste...untouchability...etc. This is not disputed. And for those that think otherwise...let me explain further...I..as a Hindu...can and will denounce anybody..how so ever high and mighty..in Hindu society...if they justify these practices.And let me add...without fear of being hounded or killed.
This is being done today! There are so many people willing to smear Hinduism only because they know they will be safe. The Hindus themselves do this...and more so their enemies. There are no reprisals.
I have not seen such behaviour in the former Soviet Union, present China, any of the so called liberal Islamic countries..let nothing be said about Orthodox Islamic countries.
The BJP ruled this country for six years. What Fascism did anybody see??You say Gujarat? Even that would not have happended without Godhra.
What adverse opinions were crushed? What newspaper was banned?? What ridicule was not poured on the Hindus...even in those six years of "Hindu" rule??!
So...tell me about Fascism..
For those who speak lightly about caste atrocities and such like....I want to say this..Hindu society does not deny this injustice...and has and is making amends!
I also notice the fact that "lower" castes stand by their co religionists is not liked by some people...they wonder...what idiots!..How can they side with the wrethched Brahmins..and the other oppressers?? They must be insane..!
I say this...they will find their answers if they read Ambedkar. And use their common sense....*If the people were so unhappy with Brahmins...why did they all not convert to Islam when it was at its peak?? Why did so many of them in fact fight Islam when they could?? Shivaji's army was not upper caste...
Now...lets come to the point..
Where do our enemies stand....?
When they want to abuse Hindutva...they say...Hinduism is so nice and cultured..then...when scratched a little...we get to know that they hate Hinduism too!
They don't like the way Hinduism exists...they despise the Hindus and their culture...make no mistake...but listen..funnily..they don't like it when Hindus want to "change" it too....our enemies say we want to Semitise ourselves...now is that bad?? Wait...they say..Hinduism is bad as compared to other religions...and when we want to change and behave like others...they say...Look!! These scoundrels want to be Semitic!! This is bad!! * Well..the fact is Hinduism is not changing..*
They dislike our heroes...Vivekananda, Aurobindo..et all. But when we "appropriate" them...they come to our heroes defence! They say Vivekananda was secular..he was a good Hindu..!
This was always going to take the cake...The Uniform Civil Code is a secular agenda..yet our seculars and non seculars..(meaning anti Hindus)..say its communal! Personal Laws are Secular!
Art 30 is secular because it "protects" the minorities..their privileges.. it is surely communal to extend the same right to Hindus!
This class is silent when Hindus are hounded in Pakistan..and Bangladesh and a hundred other countries....but they want to mourn for Iraq...and Bangladeshi infiltrators! Do we even know that Hindu refujees in Rajasthan (From Pakistan) havn't even been granted citizenship in India yet?
The "upholders" of caste are given publicity...not those who work against caste! Any Hindu working against it is a conspirator...wanting to entrap the "lower" castes!
There are more examples...but I repeat what others have said..
So...should we listen to our enemies speak about us?? Should we not form our own opinions?
We should listen to them...and form our own opinions.
When I say enemies of Hinduism or the Hindus...I mean all those who by design want to undermine this society and the country it thrives in.
There is a lot of work ahead...and much learning.
All I would like our detractors to do is substantiate what they say...instead of parroting others...or plainly peddle lies!
<b>Should Portuguese names of Roads be changed?</b>
A few days back in the State of Goa, activists and freedom fighters belonging to the "Panaji Nagrik Kruti Samiti", armed with pick-axes and other equipment, forcibly removed a few name plates and name boards bearing Portuguese names and replaced them with Indian named ones. The activists virtually went on a rampage and didn't even spare residences on which tiled name-plates were fixed.
Interestingly, the fundamental duties of the citizens of India, as enshrined in the Constitution of the land(Article 51A) state: It shall be the duty of every citizens of India to (a) abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem; and (i) safeguard public property and to abjure violence.
In utter disregard to these duties, activists including the eminent freedom fighter Naguesh Karmali, in their "patriotic frenzy" and zeal, resorted to violent actions, showed scant respect to the democratic Institutions and damaged and destroyed Public property. It was chauvinist Nationalism and chauvinist patriotism at its best, nothing short of pure vandalism with democracy being converted into "Mobocracy" and Constitution of the land being thrown into the dustbins.
What was sad and appalling was that the entire district administration preferred to remain like mute spectators. The BJP Government, like the mighty Kumbhakaran, went into a deep slumber, where neither the fiery speeches nor the violent actions unleashed by the "super-patriots" woke them up. Forget about action not being taken, there was not even the token criticism against the samiti members. The Government decided to adapt a hands-off attitude, the "see-no-evil-hear-no-evil" kind of an attitude.
In a democracy, one does have a right to protest. But the protests should have been done in a democratic and non-violent manner. The actions of the activists of the Samiti should therefore be condemned in the harshest of manners. The Government must take action against them; otherwise it will send the wrong signals to the law-abiders and set a bad precedent for posterity.
Now the question is: Were the issues raised by the samiti members right?
To a certain extent, yes because the Portuguese rule was one of the bloodiest rules in the history of Goa. Historical facts would clearly demonstrate that the Portuguese regime was oppressive, fascist, extremely intolerant and brutal. Hundreds and thousands of Goans suffered genocide at the hands of the vicious Portuguese conquerors. Rights and properties of the Goans were snatched away from them. They tried to uproot and destroy the language of the people. They tried to wipe out the culture of the people. To cut the long story short, the Portuguese unleashed a reign of tyranny and terror on the indigenous local population, subjecting them to intense humiliation, cruelty and repression.
These signs of Goan humiliation and oppression at the hands of the Portuguese is present in many places; in the nomenclature of innumerable roads and cities, named after the very tyrants who sought to annihilate and uproot all traces of Goa's vast and ancient heritage and culture. Therefore it does make a lot of sense to change the names of roads named after brutal invaders like Afonso De Albuquerque and others. Issues raised by the activists of the Samiti are therefore partly right.
However, the activists should have drawn the distinguishing line between roads
named after the brutal Portuguese conquerors and roads simply bearing Portuguese names. For while it does make a lot of sense to change roads named after people who had unleashed a reign of terror, it makes very little sense to change the names like "Boca De Vaca" or "Fontainhas", simply because these are of Portuguese origin. After all, the name 'India' too is of foreign origin. So too is Goa. So too is the 'Taj Mahal', a name given by the Mughal Invaders. So too are numerous other names, across Goa and India. For that matter, even the word 'Hindu' is a foreign-given one. Should all these names also be changed, simply because they are not indigenous ones? And will such actions really help the
Indian cause?
That the Goan culture, its heritage, its art, its cuisine, its literature and its way of life is today a blend of influences of various kinds-- including the Portuguese ones-- cannot be denied. It is a historical reality that we will all need to accept and learn to live with. In fact, the Portuguese culture has added to the beauty of the rich and plural culture of Goa and India. In suggesting that all Portuguese names ought to be changed as it reminds us of the Portuguese rule, freedom fighters/activists of the "Panaji Nagrik Kruti Samiti" have clearly stretched the degrees of patriotism a bit too far. And in doing so, they have challenged the rich composite heritage of Goa, its pluralistic nationalism and religious and cultural diversity.
Let me finally conclude by posting the views of a Catholic from Goa Orlando
deMelo, who seems to have hit the nail right on its head:
"I always took pride in my Indian heritage, the culture and the serenity of the
religion. India has always been a place that people all over world look upon for
tolerance and inner peace. I do not know which section of our culture these
PNKS's come from but they are definitely foreign to us and do not have a place
in our society. Their actions only suggest that they are a bunch of thugs doing
what they do best. If they are real Indians and freedom fighters they should
take a moment to ponder on the consequences of their actions."
Sandeep Heble
Panaji-Goa
<!--QuoteBegin-acharya+Jun 18 2004, 01:46 AM-->QUOTE(acharya @ Jun 18 2004, 01:46 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> Hyper-secularism actually took Hindu away from themselves, in effect "de-Indianised" them. And that is the special tragedy. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Tragedy, if and when you realize it. But how many do realize it ?
Hindutva, as defined in Oxford dictionary <!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The BJP might call Hindutva a way of life but that's not how the new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) defines it. Instead, Hindutva, as a noun, is explained as "<b>a very strong sense of Hindu identity, seeking the creation of a Hindu state</b>".<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--> <!--emo&:o--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ohmy.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ohmy.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Thats pretty sloppy. Look at the other words.
Angrez -> Foreigner ?
Adda -> Long sessions of chatting ?
There were four news headlines in a couple of days which, though not connected with each other, signify something, that can be loosely interpreted as the definition for what is Hindutva forgetting what the Sangh Parivar tries to project or their âsecularâ critics try to reject. 1. Nayanarâs ashes get Hindu rites, 2. A 9-year old Jain Sadhviâs fate, 3.Muslim Personal Law Board to ban triple talaq as unislamic, and 4. A Dalit collector an untouchable in his village.
Let us take Nayanar first. The veteran communist leaderâs ashes were immersed in Kanyakumari to the accompaniment of traditional Hindu rites. Nayanarâs wife, sons and their families took part in the religious ceremony that was held in a sanctified spot. According to the news report, the family that stayed in the Kerala House in Kanyakumari, also conducted puja of the urn which contained the late Communist leaderâs ashes. A priest oversaw all the rites. Not surprisingly, the fact that the family had carried out all the traditional Hindu rites in the first few days after Nayanarâs death had embarrassed the CPI-M.
Here was a leader who sincerely believed in communist ideology, denounced religion, professed rank atheism as a practicing communist and preached political ideology, how alien it could have been to Indian culture and ethos, to his cadre with all the commitment he could command. None can doubt his integrity as a communist. But could he make his close family circles share his thoughts and ideology? It is not correct to say either that his family defied him nor disrespected his belief or rather disbelief when they followed certain Hindu rituals. They could not have even thought for a moment that they were betraying his beliefs. They must have certainly cooperated with him in his political struggle. When it came to personal faith and sentiments, they adopted Hindu tradition despite the fact that the family has been breathing communism, eating communism, and sleeping communism.
This reminds me of a colleague of mine who is no more. He was also a communist, but a great authority on Indian culture, epics and sastras. Professing to be a social reformer, he might have performed hundreds of inter-caste marriages, not following any rituals, but lengthy discourses quoting from Marx and Lenin. It was quite a scene to see him when he performed his own daughterâs marriage. Being a Brahmin, he wore sacred thread over his half-naked body, wore panchi(traditional way of wearing dhoti), recited all the mantras required for the occasion and did the kanyadan. I confronted him immediately after the muhurat and his reply was âwhat can I do, this is what the family wants and I have to go by their sentimentsâ. I asked him âwhat about the sentiments of those parents for whose children you conducted marriages in a reformist fashionâ. Pat came the reply âThat is what my party wanted me to doâ.
Here are two incidents. One is full of sorrow and the other brimming with joy. On both the occasions, it is your cultural roots that overtook all your other sentiments â personal, political or social. Is this not cultural nationalism? You may quarrel with Sangh parivar if they call it Hindutva, but the underlying national ethos cannot be obliterated by any number of secular pundits or left intellectuals.
The second story pertains to a 9-year old Jain girl who became a sadhvi in Pune. An NGO, Balprafulta, took her case to the Child Welfare Committee that takes care of children needing protection. Naturally, the Jain monks resisted this move and the girl also refused to go back to her parents. What prompted her to take to diksha (initiation)? Two years ago, Priyalâs(child sadhvi) mother took her to a discourse by a senior Jain monk who spoke of the need to abandon the life of sin and violence. According to the monks, these words made her want to become a sadhvi. The NGO wants to fight out this case as an issue of childâs rights versus religion. Forgetting the â rightsâ aspect for a moment, let us contrast this case with earlier two incidents involving communist brethren who spent their lifetime in spreading values against Indian tradition and ethos, but ultimately failed when it came to their close family circles. But here is a child who did not need any series of discourses or brainwashing to take to the path of renunciation. She is not a Hindu though Jainism may be an offshoot of Hinduism. What is the link between the sentiments of Nayanarâs family and the spirit of Priyal cutting across religious barriers? Cultural nationalism and Indian ethos!
The third headline relates to triple talaq, the most sensitive subject, the very mention of which will raise the hackles of minority leaders â political or religious. Though some womenâs organizations were taking up this issue that was causing untold misery to innumerable Muslim women for centuries, they could not succeed against the Muslim orthodoxy. Now, the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board has decided to ban this practice and ratify a new model talaqnama. The Islamic clerics obviously relied on Shariat to impose this practice on lakhs of hapless minority women all these centuries. Well, this is not to say that Hindu women were not subjected to such cruelties. Hindu widows were disfigured, they could not remarry, satian obnoxious practice, was in vogue and the list is endless. But the reforms came from within. The Indian tradition has imbibed a process that is self-evolving and reforming. Now, it has caught up with the most rigid religion when it comes to reforms. This is the influence of Indian ethos on other religions. You may call it Indianness or Hinduness or by whatever phrase.
The fourth one is in sharp contrast to the earlier three instances. It only shows the dark side of the Hinduness that has to be fought by the very same forces that swear by Indian ethos and cultural nationalism. Rajan Priyadarshi is an l980 batch IPS officer and a Dalit. He rose to the rank of Inspector General. All his colleagues and those who seek his support and help stand before him with folded hands. But when he goes to his native village in Gujrat (Donât worry, nothing to do with Narendra Modi), he canât buy a house in the upper caste area of the village. He continues to have a house in the Dalitwada. Another Dalit IAS officer, who retired as Commissioner of Fisheries, organized a social gathering in his native village in the same Gujrat state. The person to whom he gave the cooking contract refused to wash the vessels. The point is even senior bureaucrats face social ostracisation in their native villages. Is this also part of cultural nationalism? Secularists isolate such issues and indulge in wholesale condemnation of whatever stands for Hinduness. Admittedly, this is an ugly side of Hinduness. Not that such an aberration was not in existence in other civilizations and culture. But, do we accept this as part of cultural nationalism and thus give a big handle to the critics of Hindutva to condemn the whole concept of Indian ethos and nationalism as obscurantism and communalism?
related text
Hindutva, as defined in Oxford dictionary
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The BJP might call Hindutva a way of life but that's not how the new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) defines it. Instead, Hindutva, as a noun, is explained as "a very strong sense of Hindu identity, seeking the creation of a Hindu state".<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>Perverse secularism and India's future</b>
BY M.V.Kamath
No subject is dearer to the secular heart in India than what it is pleased to call "Moditva" or "jihadi Hindutva". The secularist makes no honest attempt to understand Hindutva, since that would mean making an effort to trace the origins of Hindu-Muslim tensions down the decades if not centuries. It is easier to give the Hindutva dog a bad name. To hand it Hindutva did not begin with Modi or for that matter with the RSS.
Anybody with the slightest sense of history will go back centuries to appreciate both the Muslim and the Hindu psyches. It is difficult to pinpoint when Hindu self-assertion began to show up. In his book on Hindutva, Jyothirmaya Sharma mentions Maharashi Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as the four main thinkers who sought to marshall a Hindu identity in the service of Indian nationalism.
In her book `Indian Cultural Nationalism', Purnima Singh names Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Rajpat Rai on one hand and Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee on the other as the harbingers of cultural nationalism. These are revered names but no one associates them with extremism. And yet all of them stood up for the Hindu resurgence with marked determination. Why did they do so? To put it more bluntly what is the root cause of Hindu anger? And how come that even after India was trifurcated at the time of Independence there has been no peace in the country?
What was the strength of the Hindu population in what then was West Pakistan prior to 1947 and what is it now? And what was the strength of the Hindu population in what then was East Pakistan and what is it now? To this day the Hindu population in Bangladesh lives in terror, even after it has been reduced to less than half of the pre-Independence times. It the fifty years since independence there have been riot after riot in India. How come this tendency has not even been contained, let alone stopped? And in those first fifty years the party in sole power in Delhi was the Congress. What did it do to reconcile Hindus to Muslims? A study of riots in India conducted by a former senior Intelligence Bureau officer makes significant reading.
In March and April 1950 there were 468 cases of rioting. In 1952 there were 23 cases. In 1953 there were eight. In 1954 there were 14 cases and in 1955, in UPalone there were eleven cases. The next year the U.P. government registered twenty six riots in places like Aligarh, Bulundshahr Jallon, Allahabad (home of Jawaharlal Nehru), Bijnore, Azamgarh, Agra, Etawah, Bareilly, Piliphit, Rampur, Gonda and Lucknow.
The list of riots is endless. All manner of reasons have been adduced for the communal riots. Once, it was claimed, a book called `Religious Leaders' contained disparaging remarks about the Prophet. On another occasion the cause was a love affair between a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy. Other reasons mention the slaughter of a cow, the publication of a picture of the Prophet, a dispute over a business transaction, attack on a Ganapathi procession by Muslims, playing of music in front of a mosque, criminal assault by two Muslim youths on a Hindu girl, a scuffle between two wrestlers belonging to two different communities, a tirade against Hindus by a Muslim organisation and so on.
Riots have been taking place at the slightest provocation and sometimes with no provocation at all. In Kaira, Gujarat, whose Muslim population is hardly 9 per cent, riots broke out in 1979 because loudspeakers were used for azans (Muslim call for prayer) and because a mosque and a muzafir khana were constructed on an unauthorised piece of land.
Most of the reasons can be said to be trivial, but riots break out not because of the reason stated but because of something deeply embedded in the psyche of the Hindu. This calls for probing. In 1989 mafia gangs had taken over Bihar state and they enjoyed political patronage. Riots started in Bhagalpur on 24 October and did not totally subside even by the next fortnight. Why? Tatarpur locality of Bhagalpur town was the centre of communal activities.
The Muslims who dominated the area would not let a Hindu procession to pass through it, even though the main road passed right through the area. What all the riots suggest is failure of the two communities to get emotionally integrated. And if one wants to prevent riots one must address oneself to this fundamental question: what is it that prevents this integration? What are the wounds in the psyches of both communities that have remained unhealed? No party so far has addressed itself to this question in a serious manner. There may be an occasional meeting between a Shankaracharya and a Muslim cleric accompanied by a lot of fanfare but there the matter ends.
The angers are temporarily covered with ashes but the embers remain alive. There would have been no riots in Gujarat in 2002 if there was no Godhra. But our secular press skips over the Godhra episode during which 58 Hindu women and children were roasted alive in the most barbarous manner and concentrates on what followed. It merely serves to infuriate even apolitical Hindus further. It may be Hindu high-mindedness to forget Godhra and to concentrate on Best Bakery but it doesn't help to resolve tensions.
On the contrary the manner in which Narendra Modi is demonised worsens the situation. Consider again the attempt by secular forces to give a wholly partisan colour to the recent killing of four alleged terrorists in an encounter with the Gujarat police. It was suggested in secularist quarter that the killings were masterminded by a diabolic Modi in order to stave off the threat of his removal as chief minister of Gujarat. Not one paper has given thought to what would have happened and what may still happen if Modi had been killed by terrorists. Does anyone remember what happened when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards?
<b>As many as 2,733 Sikhs were killed in the riots that followed. And a similar killing can yet come to pass should Modi be killed. It is in the interests of the country Modi is protected if for no other reason thanthat it could lead to riots beating all previous records. By constantly sniping at Modi as the root of all evil the secularists are giving indirect encouragement to Muslim terrorists to attempt murder. Even worse, secularists are dividing the Hindu community right down the middle. </b>
There would have been ghastly riots in Gujarat even if there was no Modi as Chief Minister. Modi was not the Chief Minister in 1969. The Chief Minister of Gujarat then as Hitendra Desai, a Congressman. Why hasn't Hitendra Desai been demonised? In his book `Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India', Ashutosh Varshney writes: "When the riots broke out in September 1969 Congressmen were nowhere to be seen. (They were nowhere to be seen in 2002 either). Neither the leaders nor the cadres were active in containing communal violence."
<b>Another writer, Nagindas Sanghavi noted that the riots left behind "a toll of 1,500 victims and strained the social fabric as also the administrative machinery to almost breaking point"0. Significantly, the Jagmohan Reddy Enquiry Commission absolved the the Jan Sangh and the RSS from charges of participation in the riots. Our secular press has a way of forgetting what is convenient to it. According to N. S. Saxena and S. K. Ghosh, 600 persons were killed of whom 80% happened to be Muslims while over 30,000 Muslims became refugees. Nearly ten districts were affected of which the maximum number of incidents recorded were from Baroda (138), Araira (100) and Mehsana (65).
What ism did Hitendra Desai practise? Was it Congress-ism? The saddest part of it all is that the September 7, 1969 riots in Baroda took place when a huge procession of 10,000 Muslims protested against the desecration of the Al Aqsa mosque in, of all places, Jerusalem! This had nothing to do with Hindus in India and yet the processionists raised slogans saying: Joh humse takrayega woh mitti mein mil jayega (whoever comes in conflict with us will be reduced to ashes). </b>
At some point in time our leaders political, spiritual and, yes, secular must put their heads together to hammer out a way whereby Hindus and Muslims can live together in peace, without taking recourse to violence. Making Narendra Modi a scapegoat may be a convenient way of ducking responsibilities but that doesn't prevent future rioting.
Narendra Modi was not responsible for the torching of two railway coaches at Godhra. Then why should he be held responsible for what followed? Has Hitendra Desai been charged with fomenting riots in 1969? Why not? For that matter was Rajiv Gandhi ever charged with fomenting riots in Delhi after his mother was assassinated? More Sikhs were killed in those riots than were killed in Gujarat.
<b>The holier-than-thou attitude of the secular press and of the Congress Party vis-a-vis Modi and the BJP (or the RSS) hasn't helped. It never will. It has only so far served to divide the nation. The secularists must be warned of the damage they are doing to the essential unity of the nation. </b>
Perverse secularism has been the bane of India in the last five decades. In his foreword to R. N. P. Singh's book on `Islam and Religious Riots, K. P. Gill states bluntly: "Much of the `secular' discourse in India has been based on a `politically correct' refusal to confront the nature of religious communities and institutions, and their past and present activities, and on the fiction that `all religions are equal'... but it cannot even begin to address the sources of historical conflagrations. The truth is, unless communities acknowledge reality warts and all and recognise the transgressions of their own history within a constructive context, no real solution to the issues of communal polarisation and violence in India can be brought about''. That said, all is said.
There has been too much pandering to minority communalism than is good for the minority itself. The time has come for the entire country to examine the communal issue freely, frankly, constructively and without bias. Mud-slinging at Modi has to stop. In recent times there has been too much of it for our own good, even though Modi himself couldn't care less.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5983_...430005.htm
'Hindutva as coined to mean does not apply to British Hindus' Jaimin Patel
London, July 19
The BJP might call Hindutva a way of life but that's not how the new edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) defines it. Instead, Hindutva, as a noun, is explained as "a very strong sense of Hindu identity, seeking the creation of a Hindu state". The word Hindutva is one of the 900 words of Indian, largely Hindi, origin that have made an entry into the 11th edition of the dictionary.
"Having read the above extract from the HindustanTimes.com website,there was a momentary spark of anger and irritation. But then I decided to dig out the origins of the word. It must be new as it relates to 'Hindu' which in itself is a recent term, since the invasion of Bharatmata," says Jaimin Patel.
Patel pointed out that the word Hindutva was invented by Swatantrya Veer Savarkar in the 1920s. A commemoration volume on his life published by Savarkar Darshan Pratishtan (Trust) (1989) notes that "Apart from the religious aspect involved in the conception of the words 'Hindu' and 'Hinduism' Veer Savarkar had to coin some new words such as 'Hindutva', 'Hinduness', 'Hindudom' to express totality of the cultural, historical, and above all the national aspects along with the religious one, which mark out the Hindus as a whole".
"The definition is not consequently meant to be a definition of Hindu religion. It is a definition of 'Hindutva' 'Hinduness'. It is essentially national in its outlook and comprehends the Hindus as a Hind-Rashtra".
Patel says: "Perhaps there is some truth in the Oxford dictionary translation after all. So then why is that feeling of agitation when the definition is put to print in a modern dictionary? <b>Perhaps it is time to stand tall and agree with the creation of a Hindu state."</b>
"There can be no harm in that at all. After all we have Christian states, Islamic states then why not a Hindu state! The world will have us believe that it is wrong, but could it be that they are afraid owing to the power that may emanate from just such a state? A Hindu state would be much better than a secular state. India as a secular state is ironical. The whole culture of the Hindu people, who incidentally are a majority in India, is based on a religious platform. The religion for want of a better world, becomes a way of life. Secular denotes that which relates to worldly things as opposed to religious and hence at the outset is at odds with the 'way of life' of the majority in Bharat."
"<b>Sadly, as Francois Gautier recently wrote on rediff.com that the so-called intellectuals, Marxists and Muslims in India who have, and continue to do so, prevent a Hindu majority to come to power by whatever means possible are shooting themselves in the foot. Where else do Muslims get the more than fair treatment that they get in India? Not even in Islamic states. </b>Apart from India, name one other nation that pays individuals for their pilgrimage to Mecca? Do the Hindus get such luxuries for their pilgrimages? Where else can the Marxists get to spread their gospel, as it were, but in India. Even China is embracing capitalism."
In fact their quivering will stop for once and all in a Hindu state, for where else in World do they believe in Vasudaiva Kutumbakam (the whole world is one family)? It is when there is constant injustice towards the majority that there is friction. Give them a fair share and see them become the best of all. Dare the minorities take the chance? Nay, there is far greater an inferiority complex embalmed into their minds and hence feel insecure to allow the most peaceful of all religions to lead them.
"So what of it here, in Britain. Well we are British and we are Hindus. <b>Hindutva concerns us only because India is the land of our heritage, a rich heritage that astounds the whole world. Preservation of that land is the salvation of the world. </b>But we owe our nationalist tendencies to Britain and not India. Our children are born here and are to grow up here and know this land better than India, it is our duty to teach them to be patriotic to Britain. Their duties as defined by Atithi Yagna and Bhoot Yagna should fall within the realms of the UK first before going abroad. Fulfilling responsibilities on the Pitri Yagna aspect may take them to Bharat, and so it should.
"Hence British first, as Anil Bhanot, General Secretary of Hindu Council UK, so eloquently put it in a recent Inter-Faith conference. We should be proud to call ourselves British Hindus but Hindutva as the word was coined to mean does not apply to us British, perhaps we should just stick to Hinduism. Or does it in reality apply to us here also, at least in spirit as a united Hindu, especially in the light of the threatened conversions of our vulnerable young?"
07-31-2004, 05:05 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-31-2004, 05:07 AM by acharya.)
HINDU NATIONALISM AND INDIAN POLITICS [with an introduction by Pratap Bahnu Mehta]. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2004.
THE upsurge of Hindu nationalism has been among the most marked feature of post-Ayodhya Indian politics. The omnibus under review brings together three meticulously researched and authoritative texts written over the last half a decade that taken together provide the reader an opportunity to undertake an academic journey into the ideology, strategy and social and organizational bases of Hindu nationalism in a comparative mode. In the endeavour the reader is ably guided by an incisive introduction by Mehta who situates the three scholarly works in the present context of Hindutva politics.
Significantly, the three books complement each other. While Zavos ably traces the evolution of the idea of Hindutva in the early 20th century period focusing on the different political idioms and organizational strategies it employed, Hansen relates them in the modern context and also reflects on the relationship between Hindu nationalism and other forms of nationalism in contemporary Indian democracy. <b>The edited venture of Hansen and Jafferlot brings together the essays with an empirical focus that analyzes Hindutva politics in terms of the electoral strategies employed by the BJP, the vanguard part of the Hindutva organizations, at both the national and state level.</b>
A dispassionate analysis of the BJP remains indispensable for an understanding of the socio-cultural causes of the growth of Hindu nationalism. <b>Albeit in a subtler form, the BJP led Hindutva forces have been able to impart a definitive rightist slant to Indian politics during their last six years in power. The effort to bring about a cultural transformation of the civil society in a structural sense was evidenced in the attempt at effecting a ban on cow slaughter, reconfiguration of Indian education, anti-conversion legislation, marginalization of Muslim politics â to recall just a few measures</b>. One may also refer to the BJP in its belligerent episodic avatars in our recent history reflective of its core ideology, i.e. its campaign for the sacred sites like the liberation of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi in Ayodhaya or rath yatras/gaurav yatras taken up by Joshi, Advani, Modi and their ilk.
<b>What is Hindu nationalism? It is an ideology that aims at the creation of an awareness among all the people classified as Hindus of their Hindu identity irrespective of their internal social, cultural and regional distinctions.</b> Drawing inference from Savarkarâs vision of India in a civilizational form, the proponents of Hindutva mobilize the people by invoking the commonness of ethnicity, race, religion, territory, history and culture that encompasses all other differences. The search for an integrated Hindu identity, Zavos argues, results in the assertion of cultural and spiritual superiority of Hinduism in âa highly politicized contextâ. Attention is drawn towards its pluralism, compositeness and tolerance. Referring to the colonial context, Hansen suggests that Hindu nationalism, as a powerful idiom was but âone of the several contingent outcomes of a protracted struggle over the definition of Indian nationhood.â
<b>Besides the above strategy of benchmarking Indian identity, Hindu nationalism also creates âa common narrative of subjugationâ as Mehta puts it. In this narrative, Hindus have for centuries been victim of onslaught from âothersâ â Muslims and Christians. Hindutva thus represents an effort to come to terms with a history of subjugation, âan assertion of the will that will finally put Hindus in charge of their own destiny.â</b> Both Zavos and Hansen suggest that Hindu nationalism is primarily a political creation of agents like RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and like minded organizations. On the basis of their study of the BJP, the political face of Hindu nationalism and its electoral politics, Hansen and Jafferlot make two significant observations. First, that there is no real contradiction between ideological purity and the political pragmatism shown by the BJP in a coalition era as both serve as an instrument of other. Second, in order to broaden its social and spatial base, BJPâs strategy has been to âadapt to the characteristics of regional politics and local social equations.â
Ashutosh Kumar
* An omnibus comprising of John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India; Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave; Christophe Jafferlot and Thomas Blom Hansen, eds., The BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India.
2004
http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?m...pd3%2Etxt\
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Vivekananda and Hindutva
Bulbul Roy Mishra
The word "Hindutva", etymologically as also judicially construed by the Supreme
Court, means Hinduism. Nevertheless, it has been assigned the following
pejorative meaning in the latest edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary: "A
very strong sense of Hindu identity, seeking the creation of a Hindu state." In
defining Hindutva, the COD has obviously been influenced by political
propagandists, which has led it to ignore the court's decision, as also the
tenets of Hindu philosophy that speak of the unity and identity of souls and not
division.
To ensure that such disinformation does not stretch any further, it is time to
understand Hindutva in the light of the thoughts of its greatest exponent in
modern time, Swami Vivekananda.
"The greatest name man ever gave to God is truth," said Swami Vivekananda.
"Truth is the fruit of realisation; therefore, seek it within the soul." Man's
search for the ultimate truth, according to Swamiji, was like the chemist's
resolution to find the one element from which all elements had derived. As
chemistry will become perfect after reaching that single source-element, so is
the case with religion. Once we reach the ultimate source of creativity, we
discover the perfect unity of humanity, the summum bonum of Hindu religion. Only
after realising that ultimate source of unity could the Vedantic sage exclaim
"Tat tvam asi" (thou art that).
To Vivekananda, Hindutva taught self-abnegation. "Religion comes with intense
self-sacrifice. Desire nothing for yourself. Do all for others." The secret of
liberation was not to be bound by anything, not even good deeds. "Therefore,"
wrote Swamiji, "be not bound by good deeds or by desire for name and fame. Those
who know this secret pass beyond this round of birth and death and become
immortal."
Languages make Indian nationalism unique: theorist
By Our Staff Reporter
HYDERABAD, AUG. 6 . The third day of the Commonwealth Writers' Triennial began with the noted theorist, Aijaz Ahmad, speaking on `Nation in the Age of Empire,' continued with paper presentations and concluded in an evening of readings by Girish Karnad, Jayanta Mahapatra and K. Satchidanandan.
Drew Hayden Taylor, a Canadian `native' Indian, regaled the audience with readings from his comedies and other works.
Prof. Ahmad stressed on the uniqueness of Indian nationalism, saying India was perhaps the only nation in the world that had no single language and was at ease with the multiplicity of languages within its boundaries. "I tremble with excitement at the sheer audacity of the project to move towards modern industrialised nationhood with about two dozen linguistic groups," he said.
He argued that despite its proven dominance, Brahmanism never became a hegemonic force in India as its language, Sanskrit, remained out of bounds for women and lower castes. "Sanskrit, therefore, was no one's mother-tongue and the father-tongue of only upper caste men," he said.
He said non-Sanskrit languages became vehicles of communication for those who periodically rose against brahmanical dominance, Indian civilisation thus developing a multitude of languages.
It was this historical context that enabled Indian nationalism, as it emerged during and in contest with British colonialism, to be so plural and inclusive, he said.
Religious nationalism
Prof. Ahmad divided the different forms nationalism takes into two broad categories -- those that foreground common citizenship as the basis of the nation, and those that foreground a common cultural identity. Despite India's largely successful experiment with secular, citizen-based nationalism, religious nationalism has been a constant presence and threat, he said.
On the reasons behind religious and cultural chauvinism in India taking on the garb of nationalism, Prof. Ahmad said that part of the ambiguity was due to the use of the word `India' to connote both an ancient civilisation and a modern nation.
Topics of discussion
Sessions on Friday included discussions on gender and women in the nation, the challenges of publishing literary journals, "ghostly metaphors in post-colonial cultures," films and the media in national culture, globalisation, and alternative sexualities.
India as a civilizational entity
ADVERTISEMENT
This book review which questions the indian civilizational identity
should be of interest to members.
There are two questions: 1. Indian religionists; 2. term 'India'
1. Is it okay to use the term 'Indian religionists' as distinct from
muslims and christians?
2. Is there a problem in identifying a civilizational area and using
the term 'India': "The authors have convinced themselves that India
was a "homogenous civilizational area... ... .anchored in sanatana
dharma" . Their complaint is that "Islamic Rulers consciously and
conscientiously, resisted acculturation into the timeless
civilizational and religious milieu of India". The second problem,
equally serious, is with the term "India". As the authors
say "throughout our analysis, we employ the term `India' for the
geographical and historical India that encompasses the three
countries into which India was partitioned in the course of the 20th
Century. In short, the authors do not accept the Partition of India
but opt for "Akhand Bharat " in 2003. Why could they not use terms
like pre-Partition India and Indian Union or post-Partition India?"
Kalyan
RELIGIOUS DEMOGRAPHY OF INDIA: A.P. Joshi, M.D. Srinivas, J.K.
Bajaj; Centre for Policy Studies, 27, Rajasekharan Street, Chennai-
600004. Rs. 800.
THIS BOOK contains massive data on the religious composition of
India's population, based on census data from 1881 to 1991 (2001
census data on religion are not yet available).
A special feature of this publication is the comprehensive
collection of data on religion for all continents and countries of
the world. It also gives detailed data for India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh. Its focus is on areas of Muslim and Christian
concentration in different regions of India.
There are maps for states giving district wise data on the religious
composition of population. The book does reflect serious and
sustained work in the field of social demography and it would have
been very useful to scholars, planners, policymakers and
administrators but unfortunately, the interpretation of the data and
the methodology of analysis cannot stand close scrutiny.
It seems that the book has a hidden message, which is spelt out at
several places and sometimes hidden in mathematical projections
(which are faulty), graphs and charts. The message, to put it
bluntly is: "Beware of Muslim population growth, otherwise India
will become Pakistan." The importance of religion cannot be ignored.
The Partition of India in 1947 was entirely based on census data on
religion.
There are a few districts in Assam and West Bengal where Muslims are
in a majority (because of the impact of undocumented migration from
Bangladesh). And it is a fact that the practice of family planning
among Muslims is much lower than in other communities. As several
technical demographers have demonstrated, even after controlling
education, occupation, and income, Muslim fertility is higher than
that of non-Muslims. There is no doubt that this differential growth
rate has political ramifications like seats in state assemblies and
demographic characteristics of constituencies. Nevertheless, are
scholars entitled to manipulate census statistics in the way these
unknown scholars from an unknown institute (which is not to be mixed
up with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi) have done?
The entire classification scheme evolved by the authors is suspect.
In the Indian census, there is no category called "Indian
Religionists" (as the book puts it), apart from the fact
that "religionists" is not an English word. Indian religionists,
according to the authors, comprise "Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and
Tribal" population . The Indian census uses the term "other
religious persuasions" to include only those minor religions which
are not covered by main religions like Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs,
Christians, Jains but the book under review means by "other
religionists" Muslim, Christian, Parsi and Jewish communities (the
late J.R.D.Tata, would have found it difficult to accept that he was
not a pucca Indian). The only statistical advantage in clubbing
Hindus with allied religions is to jack up the proportion of Hindus,
which we consider totally unnecessary. Over 82 per cent of India's
population is Hindu. And what exactly is the motive in classifying
Muslims and Christians as "other religionists"?. Are Muslims and
Christians not Indian citizens? If some illegal migrants are
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, find out who they are.
Technical demographers can estimate the extent of migration (legal
or illegal) by detailed analysis of census data for India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh at the district level. Should the ICSSR have given
financial assistance to novices in the field of social demography
for publication of the book? The ICSSR's sponsorship of this book
was unnecessary.
The authors have convinced themselves that India was a "homogenous
civilizational area... ... .anchored in sanatana dharma" . Their
complaint is that "Islamic Rulers consciously and conscientiously,
resisted acculturation into the timeless civilizational and
religious milieu of India".
The second problem, equally serious, is with the term "India". As
the authors say "throughout our analysis, we employ the term `India'
for the geographical and historical India that encompasses the three
countries into which India was partitioned in the course of the 20th
Century.
In short, the authors do not accept the Partition of India but opt
for "Akhand Bharat " in 2003. Why could they not use terms like pre-
Partition India and Indian Union or post-Partition India?
The lay reader of this book will be totally confused by numerous
tables on "Indian religionists" and "other religionists" and
also "India" and "Indian Union". The crucial figure (2.1 per cent
growth trends of Indian and other religionists in India, 1901-2071)
shows that by 2061 the proportion of Muslims and Indian religionists
(read Hindu) will be the same and by 2071 it will be doomsday! But
the figures refer to India (i.e. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh).
Mathematically speaking, one should not be surprised if
predominantly Muslim Pakistan and Bangladesh grow faster than the
Hindu population in India. Indian census data since 1951 indicate
that in every decade, there is an increase of only one per cent
point in the Muslim population. If it is 13 per cent in 2001, at
this rate, it should take 370 years for India to become Pakistan!
I would beg to disagree with Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, who
quotes Augustus Comte, a 19th Century French philosopher, to
say "demography is destiny". My footnote is: past trend is not
destiny. I am proud of multi-religious India and the rich cultural
diversity. Muslims and Christians must have the same place as Hindus
in India. We don't want to be Pakistan.
ASHISH BOSE
http://www.hindu.com/br/2003/11/11/stories...11100150300.htm
<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
From the above article..
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->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.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Is this true ?
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