“Hindutva” and India’s democracy
The recently concluded Dismantling Global Hindutva conference, organized virtually for three days by academics of Indian origin, may be seen as a significant event in the struggle to save democracy in India.
Here are links to two of several telling contributions at this DGH conference, one from the award-winning maker of documentary films, Anand Patwardhan, the other from Sunita Viswanath, co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights.
https://scroll.in/article/1005320/opinion-why-i-feel-the-need-to-bring-my-hinduism-to-the-streets
Scores of scholars in fields including history, religious studies, economics, women’s studies, anthropology, and literature shared their understanding of the ominous nature of what “Hindutva” has come to signify. Some others also wishing to contribute were evidently dissuaded at the last minute by threats of trolling and worse.
In many parts of today’s America, it is easy to forget that the currently discredited but by no means toothless Ku Klux Klan was once a mainstream force, its members celebrating hearth and home, patriotic nationalism, and a white America. The Klan stood for “one hundred percent Americanism” and claimed to represent protestant Christianity.
Then as now, the American flag, the cross, and the gun were the three-in-one symbols of this nationalist and racial Christianity, just as the trishul (trident), the belligerently voiced slogan Jai Shri Ram (Victory to Shri Ram), and the religio-political bhagwa flag, saffron in colour, now seem to symbolize militant Hindu nationalism.
The slogan Jai Shri Ram came to the fore as part of the successful drive, launched in the 1980s, for the removal of Ayodhya’s Babri Mosque, which was forcibly demolished by mobs in December 1992, and its replacement by a temple for Lord Ram (or Rama), now under construction. According to the much-loved epic Ramayana, the birth of Ram had occurred at some point in remote antiquity in the town of Ayodhya.
In his presentation to the DGH conference, Patwardhan referred to Hindu Nationalism’s principal ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), the man who coined the term “Hindutva” and wrote a book with that title in the 1920s. According to Patwardhan, “Savarkar claimed the deepest antiquity for Hinduism [and] treated the Ramayana as actual history.”
Most Hindus venerate the Ramayana. Episodes from the epic stir the Hindu masses. Incidents from the Ramayana story convey moral lessons. In that story, to keep a pledge he had once given to his father, Ram renounces his rightful throne and submits to exile in forests. In Ram, compassion for the supposedly low-born overflows. In Ram’s half-brother Bharat, love for Ram triumphs over a tempting throne. Sita’s chastity prevails against Ravan, the arrogant titan who had abducted her. Vibhishan, Ravan’s brother, chooses the noble Ram over his tyrannical brother. And so forth.
It is hard to know how many Hindus treat the Ramayana as actual history. A number of devout Hindus have asserted that the Ram they worship is to be found in the heart and in heaven, not in history. When Hindus carrying a body for cremation chant, “Raam Naam Satya Hai” (“The Name of Ram is the Truth”), they appear to recall not the epic’s prince but the creator of life and death.
Ram (or Raam or Rama) was Gandhi’s favourite name for God. In February 1947, a year before he was killed, Gandhi said that his “Rama was the same as God. His Rama was before, is now, and would be for all time. He was Unborn and Uncreated.” (Collected Works 86, p. 427)
In a celebrated passage in the epic’s most popular version, Tulsidas’s 16th-century Ramcharitmanas, Rama responds thus to Vibhishan’s lament that Rama lacked a chariot for his climactic battle with Ravan:
“Listen, friend, the chariot that leads to victory is of another kind. Valour and fortitude are its wheels; truthfulness and virtuous conduct are its banner; strength, discretion, self-restraint and benevolence are its four horses, harnessed with the cords of forgiveness, compassion and equanimity… Whoever has this righteous chariot, has no enemy to conquer anywhere.”
Lines like these spell out Hinduism’s principles for life’s daily challenges. They are very different from the project of Hindutva or Hindu Nationalism.
We see bullying by whites as the antithesis of the life of Jesus, and the persecution in “Buddhist” Myanmar of Muslims, Christians, and tribals as a rejection of the Buddha. The All-Compassionate and Most Merciful God, so described 114 times in the Qur’an, seems mocked whenever a helpless non-Muslim or a defenceless woman is assaulted in an Islamic nation. Denial of equality and autonomy to Palestine’s Arabs is seen as defiling Judaic justice.
Likewise, Hinduism and “Hindutva”, the latter by now synonymous with Hindu Nationalism, should be seen as two very different things. In India and across the globe, Hindus have to choose between the chariot of Rama described above and the tank of aggressive ethnonationalism.
