09-18-2007, 12:31 AM
A few Pioneer op-eds. 17 Sept., 2007
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Unabridged edition of secular extremism
Swapan Dasgupta
There are two obvious ways in which last week's controversy over the Archaeological Survey of India's affidavit on the Ram Setu or Adam's Bridge can be viewed.
The secular-modernist perception is that it was perfectly legitimate for the ASI to question the historicity of Lord Ram and that the BJP's protests were governed entirely by electoral considerations. The Government, they believe, must steadfastly oppose every attempt to inject issues of faith into economic policy calculations. India's path into the global economic powerhouse, or so the argument goes, must not be cluttered with cultural and religious baggage. The Hindus, they say, have every right to worship elephant and monkey Gods and believe in the Ramayan, but covertly and behind closed doors. After all, they tell us, that Wall Street should not get to know that Hindus regard Hanuman as their answer to Isambard Brunel.
I found an example of this mindless cosmopolitanism in the Style pages of a business newspaper. According to a woman CEO, the publication projected as the personification of corporate power: "People see you as their daughter not as someone who's in charge, if you're wearing a salwar kameez" (or, presumably, a saree). Consequently, "her work wardrobe is filled with jackets, pencil skirts, formal shirts and few shirt dresses."
The philosophy behind this advocacy of a sartorial makeover for aspiring Indians is quite startling: Deny your inheritance and nationality. It is underpinned on a profound sense of inferiority. Equally reprehensible are the protestations of ignorance: "We didn't realise this would offend people."
Yet, we should be grateful to the ASI affidavit for bringing into the open the average Indian's exasperation with such misplaced manifestations of secular fundamentalism. For months on end, a small group of people has been agitating against the demolition of the Ram Setu on the ground that it is a monument to Lord Ram. Others have objected to the route of the Sethusamudram project on ecological and environmental reasons. Neither of these objections received a hearing in the court of secular modernisers for the simple reason that they were not couched in the warped idiom of secularism.
The Government's initial disregard of the protests was based on both political calculation and a mindset. It was presumed that the issue would not have a political impact because the BJP was presumed to be in disarray and, in any case, there is no such thing as a Hindu votebank. Political calculations apart, the affidavit was based on a mindset based on the assumption that Hindus, being by and large non-dogmatic and internally divided, can easily be trampled upon - a luxury that organised minorities don't accord to decision-makers. If artistic and academic freedom can be invoked to defend the portrayal of Hindu deities in very disagreeable ways, the commitment to a scientific temper could be cited as the reason for debunking the entire Ramayan tradition. LK Advani may well be right in describing this phenomenon as the logical corollary of pseudo-secularism: Sado-secularism.
The furore over the ASI affidavit has forced the secularists to take note of Hindu outrage. It has, for example, triggered an amusing one-upmanship battle between the handlers of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh over who first directed the relevant department to withdraw the affidavit. Would such damage control measures have been initiated had the UPA's captain and non-playing captain not realised that there may be a high electoral price to be paid for being so utterly insensitive to Hindu feelings?
<b>If the Ram Setu controversy forces the custodians of the secular order to acknowledge the importance of even-handedness, it will be a giant step forward. For too long, rootless secularism has been allowed to run riot and trample over popular sensitivities.</b> The demolition in Ayodhya and the series of riots were a consequence of this mishandling. The time has come to bend the stick the other way, locate fraternity in a cultural context and restore the Indian component of secularism. In short, it is time to realise that mocking Hindus involves paying a political price.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
and
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu dharma humiliated
Sandhya Jain
Tulsidas's seminal rendition of the Ram story makes no mention of the Lakshman rekha in the episode dealing with Sita's abduction. The line surfaces only later, in distant Lanka, when Ravan's wife, Mandodri, advises him to give up his obstinacy and refrain from fighting the illustrious Raghus. She points out that Lakshman had drawn a protective line around Sita in the forest, which Ravan couldn't even cross! Sita could be abducted only after she was tricked into breaching it; the Lakshman rekha has since become the ethical standard of Hindu self-restraint, discipline, and sense of limit.
This moral dimension was shaken when a Union Government-approved affidavit claimed before the Supreme Court that there is no 'historic' or 'scientific' evidence of the existence of the maryada purushottam. This contemptuous attitude towards Hindu civilisation's greatest moral exemplar has caused shock all over the Hindu universe, from Jammu & Kashmir to Kanyakumari, to Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, Myanmar, Kampuchea, Indonesia, Bali, Malaysia, Nepal, Java, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand; regions whose national culture has been shaped by the benign presence of Lord Ram.
Originally a dispute over a sand and coral formation uniting the Indian mainland with its island neighbour, Ram Setu has catapulted into a bridge of India's Hindu identity and nationhood, straddling centuries of collective sloth and amnesia. The Tamil Kings of Jaffna (13th to 16th centuries AD) once called themselves "Sethu Kavalar", protectors of Rameshwaram and the surrounding seas; south India principally reveres Lord Ram as Kodanda-Rama, deity with the bow.
The military career of this armed god, born to defeat the forces of darkness and tyranny and uphold dharma, was a saga of successive triumphs. He was invincible before the Rakshas and Asurs who were inimical to Vedic dharma. Even prior to the first century BC, Lord Krishna identified Lord Ram as the highest example of a warrior (Bhagavad Gita, X 31).
Significantly, of the multifarious roles of this divinity - ideal son, ideal brother, ideal husband, ideal human being - post-independence India has most valued the ideal king! This is precisely what is sought to be demeaned by the Archaeological Survey of India's audacious affidavit, duly vetted by the Union Law Ministry, declaring Lord Ram a non-historic figure. For Lord Ram was a king deeply concerned with his subjects' judgement of his way of living, and anxious to measure up to their expectations of him.
The backlash over the Ram Setu affidavit may yet teach modern India's foreign-born and native-secular rulers that in the Hindu civilisational ethos, rajdharma (duty of the king) means embracing and upholding the dharma of the people. There are no exemptions; Ashok's decision to make Buddhism the state religion and propagate it through state-appointed missionaries is perceived as an undesirable aberration. The quest for Ram rajya is the search for an ideal realm where people are happy, prosperous, well-behaved and contented; poverty and social ills are rare. India is thus the only country in the world where a ruler may not impose his dharma upon the people (convert them); he must honour the dharma of the people.
Even if Lord Ram was a figment of the collective Hindu imagination, he cast an enduring spell over subsequent epochs. The Harivamsa, a second-third century AD work on Lord Krishna, lauds Lord Ram's rule as the most righteous age on earth. The Vayu Puran, dated not later than fifth century AD, says Lord Ram had a long reign and in his kingdom the chants of the Rig, Yajur, and Sam Ved were heard ceaselessly and people gave and ate to their hearts content. Kalidas, himself a Shaiva, honed his poetic skills glorifying the Iksvakus and Lord Ram. The Gurjar-Pratihars who worsted the Arabs in the ninth century AD, trace their genealogy to Lakshman, brother of Lord Ram, as revealed by the Gwalior Prasasti of Mihir Bhoj, seventh king of the dynasty. Tukaram extolled Shivaji's reign as Ram rajya in which ruler and subjects were all equal and there was all-round welfare.
Interestingly, the first tsunami of 2004 came soon after the arrest of the Kanchi Shankaracharya on specious grounds of conspiracy to murder. The second warning, when the ocean literally growled and tremors measured eight on the Richter scale, came within hours of the Centre declaring there was no historic evidence of Lord Ram and the Setu was a mere sandbank.
Retreat was equally swift. With mid-term election looming threateningly on the horizon, the official dogma reinvented itself: Certainly there is Lord Ram. Till recently a mythological hero, the god metamorphosed into "an integral part of Hindu faith" whose existence can never be doubted. In the three months reprieve sought to 'study' the feasibility of the canal, there may finally be a Ram Setu as well. Popular belief (astha) is nothing; but popular vote surely counts!
The tsunami warning is not a secular matter of environmental degradation. For Hindus, also at stake is our panch-tatva (debt) to the panch-tatva that make the universe: Earth, water, fire, air, ether, and all creatures within. Contrary to the Western world-view, man alone is not the measure of all things, and we have no right to desecrate nature. The Gulf of Mannar is an indivisible water body which impacts the coasts of India and Sri Lanka. Any dredging here can trigger the fault-lines and the heat-flow zone, causing incalculable damage to the coast and aquatic resources. Yet, tsunami effects and tsunami protection measures were not included in the Sethusamundram Shipping Channel Project report, though this affects coastline security. Hopefully, this lacuna will be addressed in the three month review period.
At stake is a rich and endangered marine life and the sensitive ecosystem in the Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar, including Dugong sea turtles, dolphins and sea horses that thrive in the coral reefs. Under UNESCO's Man and Biosphere Programme, the Gulf of Mannar environs were notified as a Marine Biosphere Reserve by the Government of India. The 10,500 sq km area, with 21 islands with continuous stretches of coral reef, is home to over 3,600 rare species of flora and fauna. Five coastal districts depend upon this marine resource.
The ASI affidavit was a shameful attempt to humiliate Hindu dharma by belittling a defining feature of Hindu tradition. Unsurprisingly, this flagrant violation of the Lakshman rekha roused the languorous Hindu elephant to protest. Let it now trumpet the regime's fall.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Unabridged edition of secular extremism
Swapan Dasgupta
There are two obvious ways in which last week's controversy over the Archaeological Survey of India's affidavit on the Ram Setu or Adam's Bridge can be viewed.
The secular-modernist perception is that it was perfectly legitimate for the ASI to question the historicity of Lord Ram and that the BJP's protests were governed entirely by electoral considerations. The Government, they believe, must steadfastly oppose every attempt to inject issues of faith into economic policy calculations. India's path into the global economic powerhouse, or so the argument goes, must not be cluttered with cultural and religious baggage. The Hindus, they say, have every right to worship elephant and monkey Gods and believe in the Ramayan, but covertly and behind closed doors. After all, they tell us, that Wall Street should not get to know that Hindus regard Hanuman as their answer to Isambard Brunel.
I found an example of this mindless cosmopolitanism in the Style pages of a business newspaper. According to a woman CEO, the publication projected as the personification of corporate power: "People see you as their daughter not as someone who's in charge, if you're wearing a salwar kameez" (or, presumably, a saree). Consequently, "her work wardrobe is filled with jackets, pencil skirts, formal shirts and few shirt dresses."
The philosophy behind this advocacy of a sartorial makeover for aspiring Indians is quite startling: Deny your inheritance and nationality. It is underpinned on a profound sense of inferiority. Equally reprehensible are the protestations of ignorance: "We didn't realise this would offend people."
Yet, we should be grateful to the ASI affidavit for bringing into the open the average Indian's exasperation with such misplaced manifestations of secular fundamentalism. For months on end, a small group of people has been agitating against the demolition of the Ram Setu on the ground that it is a monument to Lord Ram. Others have objected to the route of the Sethusamudram project on ecological and environmental reasons. Neither of these objections received a hearing in the court of secular modernisers for the simple reason that they were not couched in the warped idiom of secularism.
The Government's initial disregard of the protests was based on both political calculation and a mindset. It was presumed that the issue would not have a political impact because the BJP was presumed to be in disarray and, in any case, there is no such thing as a Hindu votebank. Political calculations apart, the affidavit was based on a mindset based on the assumption that Hindus, being by and large non-dogmatic and internally divided, can easily be trampled upon - a luxury that organised minorities don't accord to decision-makers. If artistic and academic freedom can be invoked to defend the portrayal of Hindu deities in very disagreeable ways, the commitment to a scientific temper could be cited as the reason for debunking the entire Ramayan tradition. LK Advani may well be right in describing this phenomenon as the logical corollary of pseudo-secularism: Sado-secularism.
The furore over the ASI affidavit has forced the secularists to take note of Hindu outrage. It has, for example, triggered an amusing one-upmanship battle between the handlers of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh over who first directed the relevant department to withdraw the affidavit. Would such damage control measures have been initiated had the UPA's captain and non-playing captain not realised that there may be a high electoral price to be paid for being so utterly insensitive to Hindu feelings?
<b>If the Ram Setu controversy forces the custodians of the secular order to acknowledge the importance of even-handedness, it will be a giant step forward. For too long, rootless secularism has been allowed to run riot and trample over popular sensitivities.</b> The demolition in Ayodhya and the series of riots were a consequence of this mishandling. The time has come to bend the stick the other way, locate fraternity in a cultural context and restore the Indian component of secularism. In short, it is time to realise that mocking Hindus involves paying a political price.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
and
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu dharma humiliated
Sandhya Jain
Tulsidas's seminal rendition of the Ram story makes no mention of the Lakshman rekha in the episode dealing with Sita's abduction. The line surfaces only later, in distant Lanka, when Ravan's wife, Mandodri, advises him to give up his obstinacy and refrain from fighting the illustrious Raghus. She points out that Lakshman had drawn a protective line around Sita in the forest, which Ravan couldn't even cross! Sita could be abducted only after she was tricked into breaching it; the Lakshman rekha has since become the ethical standard of Hindu self-restraint, discipline, and sense of limit.
This moral dimension was shaken when a Union Government-approved affidavit claimed before the Supreme Court that there is no 'historic' or 'scientific' evidence of the existence of the maryada purushottam. This contemptuous attitude towards Hindu civilisation's greatest moral exemplar has caused shock all over the Hindu universe, from Jammu & Kashmir to Kanyakumari, to Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, Myanmar, Kampuchea, Indonesia, Bali, Malaysia, Nepal, Java, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand; regions whose national culture has been shaped by the benign presence of Lord Ram.
Originally a dispute over a sand and coral formation uniting the Indian mainland with its island neighbour, Ram Setu has catapulted into a bridge of India's Hindu identity and nationhood, straddling centuries of collective sloth and amnesia. The Tamil Kings of Jaffna (13th to 16th centuries AD) once called themselves "Sethu Kavalar", protectors of Rameshwaram and the surrounding seas; south India principally reveres Lord Ram as Kodanda-Rama, deity with the bow.
The military career of this armed god, born to defeat the forces of darkness and tyranny and uphold dharma, was a saga of successive triumphs. He was invincible before the Rakshas and Asurs who were inimical to Vedic dharma. Even prior to the first century BC, Lord Krishna identified Lord Ram as the highest example of a warrior (Bhagavad Gita, X 31).
Significantly, of the multifarious roles of this divinity - ideal son, ideal brother, ideal husband, ideal human being - post-independence India has most valued the ideal king! This is precisely what is sought to be demeaned by the Archaeological Survey of India's audacious affidavit, duly vetted by the Union Law Ministry, declaring Lord Ram a non-historic figure. For Lord Ram was a king deeply concerned with his subjects' judgement of his way of living, and anxious to measure up to their expectations of him.
The backlash over the Ram Setu affidavit may yet teach modern India's foreign-born and native-secular rulers that in the Hindu civilisational ethos, rajdharma (duty of the king) means embracing and upholding the dharma of the people. There are no exemptions; Ashok's decision to make Buddhism the state religion and propagate it through state-appointed missionaries is perceived as an undesirable aberration. The quest for Ram rajya is the search for an ideal realm where people are happy, prosperous, well-behaved and contented; poverty and social ills are rare. India is thus the only country in the world where a ruler may not impose his dharma upon the people (convert them); he must honour the dharma of the people.
Even if Lord Ram was a figment of the collective Hindu imagination, he cast an enduring spell over subsequent epochs. The Harivamsa, a second-third century AD work on Lord Krishna, lauds Lord Ram's rule as the most righteous age on earth. The Vayu Puran, dated not later than fifth century AD, says Lord Ram had a long reign and in his kingdom the chants of the Rig, Yajur, and Sam Ved were heard ceaselessly and people gave and ate to their hearts content. Kalidas, himself a Shaiva, honed his poetic skills glorifying the Iksvakus and Lord Ram. The Gurjar-Pratihars who worsted the Arabs in the ninth century AD, trace their genealogy to Lakshman, brother of Lord Ram, as revealed by the Gwalior Prasasti of Mihir Bhoj, seventh king of the dynasty. Tukaram extolled Shivaji's reign as Ram rajya in which ruler and subjects were all equal and there was all-round welfare.
Interestingly, the first tsunami of 2004 came soon after the arrest of the Kanchi Shankaracharya on specious grounds of conspiracy to murder. The second warning, when the ocean literally growled and tremors measured eight on the Richter scale, came within hours of the Centre declaring there was no historic evidence of Lord Ram and the Setu was a mere sandbank.
Retreat was equally swift. With mid-term election looming threateningly on the horizon, the official dogma reinvented itself: Certainly there is Lord Ram. Till recently a mythological hero, the god metamorphosed into "an integral part of Hindu faith" whose existence can never be doubted. In the three months reprieve sought to 'study' the feasibility of the canal, there may finally be a Ram Setu as well. Popular belief (astha) is nothing; but popular vote surely counts!
The tsunami warning is not a secular matter of environmental degradation. For Hindus, also at stake is our panch-tatva (debt) to the panch-tatva that make the universe: Earth, water, fire, air, ether, and all creatures within. Contrary to the Western world-view, man alone is not the measure of all things, and we have no right to desecrate nature. The Gulf of Mannar is an indivisible water body which impacts the coasts of India and Sri Lanka. Any dredging here can trigger the fault-lines and the heat-flow zone, causing incalculable damage to the coast and aquatic resources. Yet, tsunami effects and tsunami protection measures were not included in the Sethusamundram Shipping Channel Project report, though this affects coastline security. Hopefully, this lacuna will be addressed in the three month review period.
At stake is a rich and endangered marine life and the sensitive ecosystem in the Palk Bay and Gulf of Mannar, including Dugong sea turtles, dolphins and sea horses that thrive in the coral reefs. Under UNESCO's Man and Biosphere Programme, the Gulf of Mannar environs were notified as a Marine Biosphere Reserve by the Government of India. The 10,500 sq km area, with 21 islands with continuous stretches of coral reef, is home to over 3,600 rare species of flora and fauna. Five coastal districts depend upon this marine resource.
The ASI affidavit was a shameful attempt to humiliate Hindu dharma by belittling a defining feature of Hindu tradition. Unsurprisingly, this flagrant violation of the Lakshman rekha roused the languorous Hindu elephant to protest. Let it now trumpet the regime's fall.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->