Hindutva

[acharya]

http://www.cpsindia.org/art_kinectic.html

Articles —
Hindutva: the kinetic effect of Hindu Dharma
by S. Gurumurthy

Introduction

Hindu Dharma is a relatively new name for what has been timelessly known as Sanatana Dharma. Hindu Dharma is geographically Indian, or Bharatiya, but it is universally valid because, unlike other schools of thought, it accepts all other and diverse thoughts without rejecting any. This all-inclusive school of thought was a nameless philosophy that did not need to distinguish itself from others, as there was no other thought system from which it needed to be distinguished. It was a thought that did not need an identity different from other thoughts as it accepted all other thoughts as valid. It is only when exclusive schools of thoughts emanated from the Abrahamic stable, which rejected the validity of all thoughts other than those of the concerned Abrahamic school, Sanatana Dharma needed to distinguish itself form the exclusive Abrahamic thoughts. It is not Hindu Dharma which rejected the Abrahamic thoughts, but it is the Abrahamic thoughts which rejected the Hindu Dharma. With the result that the Sanatana Dharma had to acquire and accept a name to distinguish itself; not because it was an exclusive thought but because it was an inclusive thought and all other thoughts exclusive. This is how the word Hindu evolved to distinguish the exclusive Abrahamic thoughts from Hindu Dharma or Sanatana Dharma. The name was meant not so much to distinguish Hindu Dharma from others as it was to distinguish the newly emerged exclusive thoughts from the inclusive Hindu Dharma.


Conclusion

What follows from this discussion is that Hindutva is the kinetic form of Hindu Dharma. This form is an evolution dictated by the absence of organised strength in Hindu Dharma. Its evolution was necessitated by the fact that Hindu Dharma had no conflict with other religions and therefore it was non-combative in character. Since Hindu Dharma was non-conflicting and non-combative in nature, it lacked the aggression needed to face the aggressive Semitic faiths that had a global mission to convert the whole world to their faiths. Since Hindu Dharma accepted the validity of all faiths, it could not deny that validity and legitimacy to the Semitic faiths also, despite the fact that they denied not just validity to Hindu dharma, but also theologically denied it the right to exist as a religion.

With these structural weaknesses arising out of its inclusiveness, the adherents of Hindu Dharma evolved over centuries a facet of Hindu Dharma that responded to the onslaught of others; that is how the kinetic form of Hindu Dharma, namely Hindutva, was born. The entire freedom movement was in substance powered by the implicit kinetics of Hindutva.

But free and Independent India, which was hijacked by those who believed in the secularism practised in Christendom, turned the secular Indian allergic to Hindu Dharma. This distortion confounded the mind and polity of India for over four decades.

The Ayodhya movement evolved as a corrective to this distortion and brought balance to the polity of India. Now the kinetic form of Hindu Dharma, Hindutva, is the mainline thought despite the fact that the political idiom of India remains secularist; but the secularism that was practised for the first four decades is not the secularism that is being practiced now. What was once understood as ‘dharmanirapekshata’ or neutrality of the state towards religious faith, which approximated to the Christendom’s view of secularism, is now recognised as ‘sarvapantha samabhava’ or equal protection to all religions, which is the very essence of Hindu Dharma. So the kinetic form of Hindu Dharma, that is Hindutva, has forced a reinterpretation of secularism to make it consistent with the Hindu Dharma.