A Hindu government and the minorities

(India Facts & Hindu Human Rights, 30 March 2015)


The United Minorities are waging a no-holds-barred campaign against Narendra Modi or against whomever is or can be pictured as a pro-Hindu power-wielder. One of their lines of attack is the blackening of the ruling party, the BJP, in the eyes of public opinion and of the world. An impression is being created that the Hindu activists are out to oppress the minorities ruthlessly, and are already doing so to some extent.

Thus, though the frequent rapes of Hindu women in Pakistan and Bangladesh are never worth a single line, I learned of the recent rape of a Catholic nun in the news programme of state television in distant Belgium. While a newspaper may contain hundreds of news items, the TV news has only a few, so they select what is truly important. Journalists normally use the “dead man per mile” rule: they treat an item as more newsworthy if it is closer to home or if the victimization is more dramatic. That means a “mere” rape in distant India only makes headlines if some circumstance makes the event extremely important. So, it seems that the anti-Hindu forces in India are strong enough to position their poster girl for “resistance against oppressive majoritarianism” as exceedingly important.

The missionaries and secularists exploited the rape all they could to accuse the Hindus of terrorizing the minorities and demonize the Modi government across the world. Yet, from the beginning, the rape was known to be an extension of a burglary, suspicions of a “hate crime” were doubtful and nothing indicated the involvement of Hindu activism. When the investigation progressed and led to the arrest of some Bangladeshi illegal immigrants “belonging to a particular community”, most commentators fell silent. When pressed, they suddenly insisted that this was a common human crime with no connection to religion.

It was but one example in a long line of false accusations levelled against Hindu nationalism, and this poisonous disinformation in turn is only one battlefield in a multi-pronged war. In the circumstances, it is imperative that the ruling BJP comes clean on where it stands vis-à-vis the minorities.
First of all, it is necessary that it knows its own mind about this. The Hindu Nationalist policy towards the minorities should be crystal-clear, first of all among the Hindu Nationalists themselves. Once they know what to think, they can decide what to say towards Indian opinion at large, and what to do.

The secularist alliance

The iron fist of the attack (the Zarb-e-Mo’min, “strike of the faithful”, as the Pakistani Army once named one of its exercises) is furnished by Christianity and Islam, who mean to expand worldwide and in the process destroy all heathen religions. They have a positive goal, viz. perpetuating and propagating themselves, and their negative goal of digesting or annihilating Hinduism only follows therefrom. This way, they have a very good conscience in doing their work of destruction: it is only meant to clear the way for the true religion.

So, they have inner strength, but they also have outer strength: they are huge and very wealthy, being only the Indian arms of two worldwide movements. It is ridiculous that they are called “minorities” at all, yet they carefully cultivate that status, for in the present-day mentality, any majority is deemed overbearing and oppressive. Their foreign roots not only make them very resourceful, they also give them a head-start in developing a coherent strategy with sustainable long-term goals.

But this iron fist is clothed in a velvet glove: secularism. Knaves claim and fools believe that this is the Indian instance of the worldwide phenomenon of secularism (separation of religion and politics) originating in the West, but it is not. Thus, Islamic militants who in Arabia would abhor secularism (meaning separation of religion and politics, e.g. democratic law-making separate from what Islam prescribes), emphatically call themselves “secularists” in India. The reason is that in India, the word has a very different meaning: anything that is anti-Hindu. Islamic militants are anti-Hindu, so they indeed qualify as “secularists”. But what animates them is not this profile of secularism but their heartfelt commitment to Islam; and similarly with Christian missionaries, who can rightly call themselves secularists under the Indian definition, though their real commitment is to Christianity. So when we say “secularists”, we don’t usually mean them, we mean the Hindu-born secularists, who genuinely intend to define their uppermost commitment when they call themselves secularists.

At one time the Marxists formed the backbone of Indian secularism, and even now that Marxism is waning, a Marxist afterglow continues to condition the secularist conceptual framework. However, at present the forces of commercialization and consumerism are in the ascendant. The easiness of this transmogrification from Marxist to consumerist follows from the real definition of secularism: both Marxism and consumerism are anti-Hindu and can wean Hindus away from their Dharma, and that is what counts.

Finally, the anti-Hindu coalition can avail of the services of several useful idiots, Hindu-born but turned against Hinduism. These include the Ambedkarite section of the Scheduled Castes; a minor section of the Scheduled Tribes that has come to parrot the missionary claim that “tribals are not Hindus”; the Dravidianist movement, at one time genuinely anti-religion but now only anti-Hindu; and some “progressive” and “enlightened” sections of religious Hinduism that prefer to distance themselves from Hinduism, either out of self-interest (to escape the legal discriminations against Hinduism) or out of snobbery.

Caving in to aggressive minorityism

The reaction of the BJP and the Hindutva forces behind it is just that: a reaction. Even what little ideology they once had, viz. a general commitment to Hinduism, has made way for a mere craving of approval from the hegemonic opinion-makers, the secularists. You would think that finally the BJP is securely in power, but this is only formally the case. Ideologically, the BJP still looks up to the secularists as the real power-wielders. It does not analyse the discourse of the secularists from a vantage-point of its own, from an alternative pro-Hindu worldview; it merely reacts to what it perceives as an unassailable and omnipresent secularist opinion.
Thus, when the secularists clamoured against Ghar Wapasi, BJP Ministers hurried to assure everyone that they too were very much against its “divisive” effects. Ghar Wapasi is the best chance Hindus (when thinking farther than the next election, especially about their survival) have to prevent the hostile takeover of their country. For a supposedly “Hindu nationalist” party, that is not a bargaining chip but a fundamental concern. There is also no reason at all to get caught on the back foot over it, certainly not in a country where conversion is legal and has always been defended by the secularists.

When the missionaries started disinforming world opinion that churches were systematically targeted by Hindu militants for vandalism and robberies, the Government assured that it would crack down on these “church attacks”, instead of questioning the whole notion of communally-motivated church attacks. These were only ordinary, non-ideological crimes, far surpassed in number by the vandalism against and robberies in Hindu temples. The BJP always swallows and then reproduces the presuppositions spoon-fed to it by its enemies.

Yet a silver lining can be discerned. The BJP’s palpable concern of “keeping the pot boiling”, of keeping its Hindu vote-bank happy with empty gestures of Hindu feeling, may translate into a real concern for Hindu interests. At present, it is mostly a cynical electoral policy of the BJP secularists, a generation of politicians who have “emancipated” themselves from the pro-Hindu inspiration that spawned their party. They remember how the party was defeated in 2004, when in spite of huge economic successes under Atal Behari Vajpayee, it had completely alienated its Hindu-minded voters by not showing any concern at all for the Hindu agenda. They realize they are totally dependent on Hindu-minded party workers and campaign volunteers for the power positions they enjoy.
So, this time around they intend to keep these Hindus actively involved with some much-publicized gestures, such as televised temple visits in India and abroad, or award ceremonies for Vajpayee, LK Advani, Vamadeva Shastri and Swapan Dasgupta. A masterstroke is their support to State laws against cow-slaughter: many ordinary Hindus not attuned to the precise legal discrimination against Hinduism, but full of feeling for Mother Cow, will certainly appreciate this. That it is not an empty measure is demonstrated by the rise in beef prices in Bangladesh.

Even the nasty anti-minority statements by some loose cannon in the BJP, though deplored out of either tactical calculation or genuine pro-secularist sentiment, are nonetheless chalked up as pleasing a hot-blooded section of the Hindu electorate. A section of Hindu society without too much discernment is already happy with any utterance that sounds pro-Hindu. The only way to rally that section around a more positive pro-Hindu programme is to offer such a programme in the first place.

This is all not very deep nor very meaningful, but it might remind ruling party politicians of their Hindu roots. Maybe they suffer from Hanuman’s curse: when the gods became afraid of him witnessing his strength, they cursed him to forget his strength until someone reminded him. Indeed, they need a reminder of the immense strength resulting from a commitment to Dharma. Instead of whining about the hurdles the secularists may put in their way and using these as an excuse to remain on the safe ground of “development”, they ought to remember the slogan they themselves used to intone: Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah, “Righteousness, when protected, protects”. It is time to stand up for Dharma, and all will be well. If a party served by Hindu workers doesn’t serve Hinduism, it serves no purpose at all.

Dealing with aggressive minorityism

When we read the laws privileging the minorities, one thing that strikes us is the complete Hindu passivity in using these laws to their advantage. To be sure, those laws are unsecular as well as indefensible, but while they exist, Hindus could make the best of it. Thus, in several states and in many districts, Hindus as such are a minority. Moreover, the law also recognizes linguistic minorities, so Gujaratis in Tamil Nadu (etc.) could also demand minority privileges. As in other aspects of this problem, Hindus take it lying down.

There is also the dishonourable option of leaving the Hindu fold to fend for itself, and declaring oneself a non-Hindu minority. This is the usual Hindu disease of safeguarding one’s own little community at the expense of the whole. Rather than going around and telling these “ex”-Hindus just how contemptible their behaviour is, it is better and more effective to remove the temptation by restoring equality for the Hindus.

Even before amending the offending Articles, Hindu thinkers could question the very concept of “minority”. India consists only of minorities. Hinduism is a commonwealth of many communities, each a minority. One has to be very gullible (or so absorbed by “development”, as the present BJP team claims to be) to swallow this notion of “minority” with all the privileges that go with it.
Once they have fully understood the implicit definition and ramifications of “minority”, serious Hindu (and just secular) thinkers behind and ministers inside the government should proceed to scrap it from the laws and the Constitution. Or at least, unless those whiz kids discover anything unexpected, that would seem to be the logical conclusion. Down with the whole concept of minorities, starting with the Minorities Commission, an intrinsically anti-majority lobby-group with a legal status.

At the same time, though, one should be careful here: pampered and privileged communities might see the instauration of equality as a great injustice. For the time being, they are far better than the Hindus at selling their own view to the Indian public and to the world. So, they will shout that the minorities are being oppressed, that an overbearing Hindu majority is taking “rights” away from them, and all the other well-known whining and wailing. It is important to present the issue in terms of secularism and democracy, which constitute sufficient ground for equality, not in selfish terms of Hindu interests. Even then the other side can be expected to misrepresent the issue, so Hindus will need to be innocent as children and wise as snakes.

 

Satya about minority teachings

Towards the minorities, a policy is needed that could properly be called Gandhian. It does not mean being naïve and inconsistent, as students of the Partition might think. No, it means seriously applying the principles that Mahatma Gandhi talked about and remains associated with, though he himself failed to apply them. These are: satya/truth and ahimsa/non-violence.

Satya requires facing the truth concerning Christianity and Islam. This may require a mental leap for Hindus, who are not used to asking about the truth of a religion. When a Christian community was given asylum in Kerala, their Hindu hosts did not ask for the contents of their doctrine, let alone its degree of truth. Few people know the truth, and not many are even interested in it. Hindus were already satisfied if these newcomers lived in peace and respected certain basic norms such as not killing cows or Brahmins. It is not natural for Hindus to scrutinize religious doctrines.
In general, this is as it should be. However, this wilful ignorance should not arrogate to itself the pretence to somehow know these religions nonetheless. Gandhi, who was not a student of religious doctrines, claimed that all religions automatically deserve equal respect. While leaving undecided for now what he himself meant by it, the secularist sermonizers who venture to interpret his teachings for us, claim that it means the “equal truth of all religions”, and that “all religions lead to the same goal”. This, however, is blatantly untrue. One may refrain from judging the truth of a religion, but one should not speak untruth about religion, much less think it.

Anyone who is grown up and has the power of discrimination will have experienced that truth claims may be true or may be false, and that “1 + 1 = 2” is not equally true with “1 + 1 = 4”, nor do the two truth claims deserve equal respect. Someone who makes a false claim may deserve equal respect with someone who affirms a true statement (both equally deserve better than to be stoned or crucified), but it doesn’t follow that their statements deserve equal respect. Case in point: the core doctrines of Christianity are not true and deserve to be treated as mistakes. Extremely globalized mistakes by now, but still mistakes.

Oh, maybe some wily secularist or sentimental Hindu will now object that to say so or even to think critically of a belief held so dear by millions is a hate crime. Such a thing could only be opined by knaves and swallowed by fools. I have never heard a Hindu whine and wail because he himself was being considered as an errant soul, living a mistake, condemned to eternal hellfire, utterly doomed – yet that is what Christianity and Islam say and what billions of believers hold against him. Moreover, it is also what Christians think of Muslims and Muslims of Christians. It is no big deal if Hindus remain aloof from the superstitions at the core of Christian or Islamic doctrine.

Another objection, likely to be raised by politicians, is that it would be undiplomatic to say less than flattering things about Christianity or Islam. Many people never face the question of truth; when it distantly threatens to arise, they immediately disperse it or distract from it with the question in what company it might put them. That, for them, is far more important than an ivory-tower concern like the truth. Alright, thinking something is one thing, saying it is another. Holding an informed opinion is separate from voicing that opinion and facing the social consequences. I am well aware that politicians have to keep in mind power equations among the people and therefore have to adapt their utterances to what is socially feasible. Indeed, it is the genius of Hindu Dharma that it recognizes the differentiated duties of different groups. Intellectuals who settle for less than the truth are not living up to their duty, but politicians might have other interests to take into account.

 

In that case, let politicians say the desirable thing rather than the unpalatable truth, but let them at least realize the truth for and among themselves. There are two types of liars: the cynical or calculating ones who remain fully aware that they are shamelessly telling lies; and the more ordinary ones, who feel a pang of conscience when they hear themselves lying and who wish it would be otherwise – a discrepancy they resolve by bringing their false utterances and their intimate beliefs closer together by increasingly believing their own lies.

Among Hindutva stalwarts and BJP bigwigs, I have often seen this second tendency: interiorizing the beliefs that they think they have to voice in order to win that eagerly-desired yet ever-elusive pat on the back by the secularists.
 
Thus, they join the choir of secularist liars who confirm the Indian Christians in their belief that the Apostle Thomas had brought Christianity to India in 52 AD (a belief rejected by serious Christian historians and even by former Pope Benedict XVI), vainly thinking that this will win them the Christian electorate, but then they also start believing this sob-story and repeating it among themselves. Christians, by contrast, like Muslims and secularists, have never had any reservations about disparaging the belief in Rama’s birthplace and its temple, though these too were “dear to the hearts of millions”.

And consider again: why should Hindu politicians not say the unpalatable truth about things dear to the hearts of minority people? They are living in a fool’s paradise if they expect to get those minority votes (which some of them really do). But they have a more serious calculation: Hindus themselves, swayed by Gandhian upbringing or by secularist propaganda, are put off by a candidate whom the media label as “communal”. That attitude takes a long-term and cumulative remedy: making the Hindu masses used again to frankness and to independent judgment free from media bias. These are not half as brutal as the hostile thoughts which Christians and Muslims think, and also voice at least among themselves, about the Heathens.

But is there a strategic centre that oversees where Hindu interests lie and how they are best served? A centre that plans deeper and more distant evolutions instead of just winning the next election? The RSS flatters itself to be such a centre, but judging by the results – with a party that used to be Hindu-minded when in the opposition long ago but abhors being reminded of its “old-fashioned” Hindu roots when in government today, it is not very successful.

 

 

Ahimsa towards the minorities

While Christianity and Islam may be untrue in their basic beliefs, they themselves may believe these beliefs to be the truth and judge other religions as untrue. From this belief, they deduce a self-righteous privilege to persecute rivalling religions, though fortunately they oftentimes are less zealous about implementing this principle.

In modern India, they have largely been domesticated and their pursuit of their self-interests is channelled through institutional channels, so that it takes the form of cornering and then defending privileges in the Constitution, in legislation and day-to-day politics.

 

There are certainly elements in their conduct that come in for Hindu criticism, but that is not our concern in the present context. Here, we deal with the Hindu response to their challenge, particularly in situations where Hindus feel provoked to take the law into their own hands. Confrontation is sometimes inevitable, but a first solid precondition is that it should not be entered into lightly, viz. at one’s own initiative. If the other side opens hostilities, as frequently happens, the conflict can frequently be resolved through diplomatic means. Only when everything else has been tried, confrontation should be accepted as the only way forward. That is what Krishna did before accepting the Mahabharata war. That is the Hindu way.

While not advocating “turning the other cheek” and similar Gandhian extremism in non-violence (as when the Mahatma counselled Hindu refugees from Pakistan to go back and get killed), we should show reluctance in entering into hostilities. The beliefs of the minorities may not be ours, may be distasteful to us, but a certain magnanimity would be fitting. Hindus should indeed ensure that the minorities are safe in India, even if the distasteful secularists say just that. It doesn’t require secular moralizing, it is the normal way in Hinduism.

However, Hindus should not do that as a special favour to the minorities. This tolerance, this pluralism, should benefit a possible majority (which in India does not exist) as much as the minorities. Safety should be ensured for all communities. The minorities, if perforce we have to use that word, are just as much responsible for it.

So, of course a Hindu government means no harm to the minorities, and should not. As an old VHP slogan said: “Hindu India, secular India”. It is only secularist propaganda that claims an equivalence between Hindu activism and trouble for the minorities: the more Hinduism, the more oppression for the minorities. This is a false projection of the Pakistani situation: the more of the dominant religion, the more the Hindu minority suffers.

And that is why the word “minority” is so misleading: it might apply for the Protestants in Catholic France or the Catholics in Anglican England, who were second-class citizens, or to the Blacks in the US, who have a history of slavery, and for all those communities whose status of “minority” connotes misery and humiliation. Such is not the treatment the Hindus have ever given to the non-Hindu “minorities”. Ask the Parsis, the Jews, the Syrian Christians, the Armenians, the Tibetan Buddhists, even the Moplah Muslims: they all owe gratitude to Hindu society for its hospitality.

The Rajinder Sachar Committee (under PM Manmohan Singh) ruled that Muslims are entitled to huge privileges given their “minority” status, as if the Hindus have to compensate them for anything. These privileges would then solve the “exclusion” of the Muslim, as if this (to the extent that it exists) were the doing of the Hindus rather than of their own exclusionary theology. I am not in favour of historical entitlement, encashing compensations for what your grandfather suffered (didn’t the secularists in the Ayodhya controversy insist that Muslims should not pay for the guilt of their long-gone forefathers?); but if at all any compensation is to be paid, it is not the Hindu community that has a debt to service.

The only reason why the Muslim minority could feel done injustice to, is precisely that it is a “minority”: it wanted Pakistan because it wanted a state in which it could be a majority, and it still doesn’t like being a minority in India. The solution for being a “Muslim” in India is to become an “Indian” in India, not part of the 14% but part of the 100%. That would be real secularism, and it would take the (largely imaginary) threat of “violence against the minorities” completely away. True and profound non-violence would be: dropping the notion of “minorities” altogether, treating a Muslim simply as an Indian, giving him exactly the same rights and duties as Hindus.

From the secularists, the omnipresent “minorities” propaganda is to be expected, they will use any and every discourse that can put Hindus on the defensive. Not so expected is that many in and around the BJP have swallowed the notion of “minorities” hook, line and sinker, including even their entitlement to privileges. That is why they treat Hindu demands as “quaint” and denounce fellow party members who remember the Hindu roots of the party as “wackos”. That is why they argue that the abolition of the anti-Hindu discrimination is nothing but a hurdle in the way of “development”.
In reality, the abolition of discriminations is of one piece with the effort to combat corruption and red tape. It amounts to freeing up the public sphere and cleaning out artificial complications. It makes life a lot easier and lets the economy and the other dimensions of society flourish. A level playing field removes a constant source of friction. This way, simple equality contributes to social peace.

 

 

Time for action

The challenges before a Hindu government in the late-Nehruvian India are serious. Straightening out the Constitution by amending the anti-Hindu articles takes skill. First of all, it takes the will, which is not really in evidence. And once the proper motivation is found, the work only begins.

The time for waiting is over. The steps taken towards development, facilitation of investment and enterprise, and in the struggle against corruption, are already impressive. This proves that the Hindu activists can do it, even when they graduate to Cabinet posts. Slacking is of course possible, as the BJP ministers are proving regarding the Hindu agenda, but it is sure to exact a heavy price. As the oracle might have said: staying at home brings regret, crossing the great river brings good fortune. It is time to come clean on the challenge of the “minorities”.

Regarding such issues of principle, the Modi Government should get on Modi Time.

Read more!

Hinduism and Paganism: (1) The Christian challenge

 

 

Numerous British and more largely Western neo-Pagans seek contact with Hinduism. They recognize a similarity, both positively and negatively, both in their own religion’s characteristics and in the misfortunes that have befallen it. The extermination in summer 2014 of all the Yezidis (Kurdish Pagans) on whom the Islamic State could lay its hands has reminded many Pagans as well as many Hindus of what their own ancestors have had to suffer. We will start with a major negative experience of western Pagans of Hindus, viz. the challenge of Christianity, before addressing the similarities in contents.

 

Extermination of Paganism

European Paganism was exterminated by Christianity. The result was more thorough than in the case of the partial Islamization of South Asia, but far less violent. Initially, the Christians were a small and vulnerable community in the mighty Roman Empire. They had no real option but to adapt to the prevailing religious pluralism and to the Law of the Land. They have no separate systems of laws like Islam and ancient Judaism. So they didn’t have a law system to impose and could leave a society intact all while subverting its religion.

Rather than overthrowing a polity, they chose to work through its established authorities. All conversions were welcome, but the most promising ones were those of the king and his confidants. In Rome, the conversion of emperor Constantine changed history, turning a minority religion into the official and ultimately the only permitted religion. In the case of England, for instance, Pope Gregory the Great decided on a mass conversion after he saw some handsome young British slaves at the slave market in Christian Rome. (Slaves in Christian Rome? A modern line of apologetics is that Christianity was disliked by the elites because it wanted to abolish slavery. Not true at all, though it limited slave-taking to the remaining Pagan populations. The nearest were  the Balkanic Slavs, hence the very word “slave”.) So he sent missionaries to work among the British elites and the royal court. Once enough of them were converted, or were at least turned favourable to the missionary effort, they in turn loaded the dice in favour of Christianity. Part of the deal in many countries concerned was that the Church would support the king against unsubmissive nobles, thus encouraging the centralization of power, or champion the ambitions of whichever nobles were most amenable to accepting the Christian message.

A very powerful factor was the monopoly on education which the first monasteries came to enjoy. This must ring a bell among present-day Hindus, considering the role of Jesuit and other Christian schools among the Indian elite. Another was the prestige of the Roman empire as more civilized and more advanced than what the Pagans could muster. Before and during the conquest of the Roman empire by the Goths, they embraced Christianity thinking this was an integral part in their advancement. That the Romans, for instance, built in stone rather than wood counted as an impressive innovation, but had nothing to do with Christianity. A similar thing is seen today: numerous Chinese and Koreans who migrate to the United States become Protestant overnight because they assume that this is a central element in becoming a real American. Among some Indian tribals, modern medicine passes as “Jesus medicine”, meaning “medicine coming from the same West as the missionaries”, though Jesus himself was an old-fashioned faith-healer who never used medicine. So, Christianity profited and still profits maximally from “merit by association”.

 

Christian subversion

One has to give it to the Christians that they were clever. They outwitted their opponents just as they are outwitting Hindus today. Thus, in the conversion of the masses, they made it a point not to destroy existing shrines: they replaced the central God-statue with a crucifix, but otherwise they allowed the masses to keep on visiting their old shrine, so that they would gradually attach to Jesus the aura of sacredness that they used to associate with their own gods. Many cathedrals were built on Pagan temples or open-air sacred places, but fairly rarely have Christians destroyed temples; only the “idols” in them. They adopted holidays and celebrations but gave them a new Christian meaning. They turned old Gods into Christian saints. They Christianized the procession, originally the triumphal march of a Pagan God, now a display in the streets of the sacred Wafer representing Jesus. They accommodated the idea of pilgrimage, mostly to a purported relic of Jesus or a saint, eventhough the Christian view made nonsense of the idea that you can go on pilgrimage to the Omnipresent One. Like today in India, they used inculturation as a mission strategy.

And it worked. At the elite level, Pagan religion disappeared. It is common nowadays to bewail the injustice to the Jews because they were forced to live in ghettoes; but the Jews were at least tolerated as a standing witness to the “truth of the Old Testament”. By contrast, there were not even ghettoes for worshippers of Zeus, Venus or Thor.

As the Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Everything of value is vulnerable.”  When a body dies, one of the first thing to degenerate and disappear is the brain, while the bones can last for centuries. The fabled secret traditions of the Druids were killed off by Christianity and remain forever unknown, but many popular practices and indeed also superstitions have survived till recently. The Middle Ages, though Christian at the elite level, saw the survival of numerous Pagan institutions and practices especially among the rural folk (both Latinate Pagan and Germanic Heathen mean “rural, rustic”). The Reformation in the 16^th century delivered a body blow to the remaining Paganism, as Protestants started weeding out everything that was not Biblical, while the Catholics saw themselves forced to purify Catholicism and eliminate a number of practices that had come about as compromises with Paganism. A final blow was the Industrial Revolution, which saw the rise of an anti-religious mentality: it hurt European Christianity badly but it also flushed out the remaining Pagan practices among the common people.    

So, Christianization was mostly effected through subversion and mass psychology. Instances of the threat of violence included the forced baptism of the Frankish king Clovis’ soldiers (“head off or head under [the baptismal water]”), or the threats by the king of Norway which convinced the Icelanders to adopt Christianity. Instances of effective violence include the lynching of the Neoplatonist scholar Hypatia or the slaughter of thousands of Saxon nobles by Charlemagne. These were smaller affairs than the wars between Catholics and Christian “heretics”, such as that in the 5^th-6^th century between the Byzantine Catholics and the Gothic votaries of Arian Christianity, and in the 17^th century the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants. One serious case of a Christian holy war against Pagans was the subjection of the Baltic area by the Teutonic Order in the 13^th-14^th century; but that was after Christians had developed the concept of Crusade mirroring the older Islamic concept of Jihad.

 

Christian strategic acumen

The practical impact of this assessment is that it won’t get you very far to remind your audience of the violent element in Christian history, such as the burning of maybe 50.000 witches in the 16^th-17^th century. That violence was certainly there, but not enough to explain Christianity’s conquest of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Even the Native Americans, who had so much to reproach the Christians for, turned Christian in large numbers. (Indians do well to remember that the fate of the American “Indians” was in fact meant for the people of the continent the Conquistadores had set out to reach, viz. “India”.) You will have to take into account other factors, such as:

(1) “merit by association”, viz. Christianity’s piggy-backing on a literate and materially more advanced culture, then in Europe like more recently in Asia; to which should now be added the propaganda linking Christianity with social causes and human rights;

(2) Christianity’s self-righteousness due to a belief in being the sole possessors of the truth, and the consequent contempt for non-Christians, a far more negative attitude than anything the Pagans could muster; or in other words, the unmatched power of hatred; as well as the consequent importance they attach to religious identity, which means the pressure to convert in a mixed marriage is usually on the Pagan partner;

(3) The Christian care to distinguish between Pagans and Paganism, which gave them a good conscience and strong motivation, because they believed they were loving the Pagans all while hating and demonizing Paganism, and that the effort to convert the Pagans was the supreme form of expressing their love for them;

(4) the Christian development of a sophisticated missionary strategy emanating from a goal-oriented strategic centre.

By contrast, Pagans have mostly been in retreat because:

(1) they have been on the defensive in material and “soft power” respects (though even where this applies less and less, such as in the Indian elite and in China, there are now numerous conversions to Christianity due to the other factors) and have successfully been demonized in matters of human rights;

(2) they don’t think of religion in terms of truth, so that Christianity might be a nuisance but not a “false” religion; believe in the good things claimed for Christianity; and don’t make sharp distinctions between the secondary aspects of the religion (which may be innocent or even laudable and are often borrowed from Paganism anyway) and its core truth claims, which are patently false; so that they consider conversion to Christianity as only a minor change which may often be justified;

(3) since they have comparatively little theological schooling and no catechism, they fail to distinguish between Christians and Christianity, and are easily duped by the existence of some fine Christians into thinking that the Christian truth claims must be innocent as well;

(4) the confused, unorganized, “me too”-imitative, uninformed and amateurish nature of their self-defence.

It happened to my European ancestors long ago, and I see it happening today in India. The Christian plan is to make the same destruction of Paganism happen all over India as well as the rest of the world. However, the rediscovery of the indigenous Pagan heritage among the natives of Latin America as well as those of Europe threatens to jeopardize their project, though as yet only marginally. They have a more acute fear of Islam, in spite of (or, on the contrary, proven by) their numerous gestures of reconciliation with Islam, such as the Pope’s apology for the Crusades, contrasting with their lack of apologies to the heirs of the far more unjustly treated Pagans.  

 

What to do after Christianity?

In Europe, at least, and to my knowledge also in Latin America, there is no direct or imminent threat of Christian violence. The battle can be won by consciousness-raising, which already happens automatically though it would benefit from a sharpening of its focus. Since the democratization of knowledge and of the scientific outlook, people have left the Churches in droves because they just cannot bring themselves to believing Christianity’s defining dogmas anymore. These ex-Christians (the majority of my own generation in the formerly very Catholic Flemish part of Belgium) are rarely tempted to turn back to the faith of their childhood, even on their deathbeds. Some Christian apologists find hope in demographics, asserting that the remaining Christian couples have more children (viz. just above the reproduction level) than the ex-Christian couples. True, but even of these born-again Christian couples, many children when growing up are just as susceptible to the temptation of scepticism as my generation was. After all, we have been there before: in the decades when Christianity decisively lost its majority, both the Christian birth-rate and the differential with the secularized minority were even bigger than now. I, for one, born in 1959, am the second of five siblings. Of my staunchly Catholic parents’ fourteen grandchildren, only six have been baptized – and that too is only a formality which doesn’t mean that they will be Catholics as adults. The last real hope of the Churches is the inflow of immigrants. In my country, the remaining Catholic churches are mostly filled with Polish or Congolese “new Belgians”. But there again, after a while many tend to conform to their ex-Christian environment. So, very much in contrast to India, where Christianity is making impressive gains, in Europe Christianity is largely a thing of the past.

That doesn’t mean these ex-Christians have lost the feeling for the higher things and immersed themselves in consumerism and sheer animality, as Christians tend to think. Nor are they without morality, which had unjustly been identified with being a Christian. But neither religiosity nor morals can be deduced from or made dependent on the defining dogmas of Christianity, which have been pin-pricked as delusional. Belief in Salvation through Jesus’ Resurrection cannot be revived, but that doesn’t mean the subtler dimensions have died. So now our job is to oversee the development of a new worldview and a different way of life, punctured by old-new rituals and celebrations. It is here that renascent Paganism in Europe seeks inspiration from Hinduism as the biggest and most developed surviving Pagan civilization.

 

 

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An Indian skeptic

 

On 5 June 2014 in Brussels, the Flemish skeptics’ society SKEPP  hosted a lecture by Dinesh Mishra, an eye doctor from the State Chattisgarh’s capital Raipur, since 1995 founder-president of the Andh Shraddha Nirmulan Samiti, or “Committee for Eradication of Superstition” (and Social Evils). He brought a positive message, testifying of a very necessary but generally successful struggle against backwardness.

From his profession, one might deduce that Dr. Mishra focuses on the instances of medical superstition. Many illiterate people in the backward villages of Chattisgarh forego taking their cases of illness to a far-away clinic but instead go to the exorcist (baiga) around the corner. These pretend to provide a cure by driving out the spirit who has caused the disease. Moreover, they play a trick on their clients by “proving” that they really have driven the spirit out by letting him bleed – producing a blood-like substance by mixing a chemical with water. It is, thus, needed to inform the common people of the irrationality at work behind this ordinary trick but mostly behind the belief that diseases are caused by spirits. What complicates matters is that even a “conversion” to real medicine need not end the superstitious attitude, e.g. the unnecessary reliance on antibiotics against all manner of ailments, causing the microbes’ increasing immunity to antibiotics. Another danger is the tendency to relapse into bad habits unless the commitment against superstition is regularly reinvigorated.  

The most important work Mishra’s association does, however, is protecting women against allegations of witchcraft and the ensuing “punishments”. A video was shown of testimonies by women who had suffered witchcraft allegations, or by murdered women’s next of kin. It appears that in Chattisgarh and the surrounding states, dozens of women are killed every year because they are suspected to have cursed someone and caused a misfortune that befell him. Thus, a woman had taken a bath in a kund, a bathing-pond. After that, a group of visitors had taken a swim, and the villagers who took a bath after that, contracted diarrhoea. Therefore, she was accused of having bewitched the well and caused the epidemic. So, it is a matter of life and death to expose and neutralize the superstitious assumptions behind these witchcraft allegation. Fortunately, Dr. Mishra’s and similar associations can claim quite a few successes where critical situations were prevented from coming to the worst.

Perhaps due to the limitations on his English, the doctor did not go into the wider cultural background of this problem. I would like to contribute the observation that the belief in witchcraft is not taken out just for the fun of persecuting these women, but is present throughout these backward sections of society, even among the affected women themselves. I have to emphasize this point against the tendency among Western and secularist Indian commenters who take a very naîve black-and-white view of this problem, as also against the skeptics’ typical prejudice that unscientific “healers” are only deliberate deceivers. This is not about wily charlatans versus hapless victims. Many of these exorcists genuinely believe that their initiation and training has given them real power to control disease-inducing spirits; deliberate deceivers are a small minority compared to self-deluded people. And more to the point in this discussion: many of the affected women, though entirely innocent of the misfortunes allegedly caused by their spells, do indeed believe in witchcraft. As a social worker once told me: if you give these illiterate people a little money, men will spend it right away on drink – and women on witchcraft.

One very commendable thing about Dr. Mishra’s work is that it is genuine. It is really directed towards saving women’s lives and eradicating superstition, and not a front for other agendas. It does not take money from foreign or internal sponsors. In particular, when Indians declare themselves skeptics (“rationalists”), they either really are, often as a corollary of their commitment to Marxism, or they are agents of the Christian mission, resolved to turn the sceptical plank against Hinduism: they highlight superstitions among the Hindu populace, link these for the gullible Western public with Hinduism, and keep the Christian superstitions out of view. These Christian superstitions are not just the belief in a bleeding Mary statue, though India does have its share of these too. Neither are they just the miracle healings staged during mass meetings by Christian preachers such as the visiting American televangelist Benny Hinn. The core itself of Christian belief, the Resurrection with its salvific effect on sinning mankind, is very much an untenable belief, criticized no end by the skeptical movement in the West. So, none of this improper use of skepticism for religious agendas here.

Dr. Mishra also had some Hindi booklets with him detailing different parts of his work. One of them is indeed a reasoned plea against the belief that some particular woman is guilty of some calamity by having pronounced a curse. Another is against the belief that solar and lunar eclipses are events caused by a heavenly monster. Already fifteen centuries ago, Indian astronomers gave the scientific explanations of how sun-earth-moon alignments cause eclipses, yet millions of villagers still treat eclipses like irregular events and bad omens. There, he really gives a positive message to these unnecessarily panicky people: take it easy, folks, there’s nothing to worry about!   

 

 

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The Hindu Republic of Nepal?

 

“Upcoming elections in Nepal. The rule of law for a democratic and peaceful process”: on 13 November 2013, the Brussels-based European Institute for Asian Studies held a conference to prepare us for the second elections for a Constituent Assembly in Nepal. In 2008, the Nepalese people had already elected a first Constituent Assembly, but it did not succeed in working out a Constitution acceptable to the required majority of its members. After five years, the Supreme Court demanded its dissolution and subjection to a renewed popular vote. So, on 19 November, the citizenry of Nepal gets another shot at creating a successful Constituent Assembly.

The conference was chaired by the EIAS’s vice-chairman Dick Gupwell, and featured a number of human rights-minded Eurocrats. However, all eyes were on Ms. Mandira Sharma of the Advocacy Forum (AF) of Nepal, who has worked for democracy in Nepal for decades, and should at last be approaching her goal. She described the political situation in her country, dominated by two major political parties, the Maoists and the Congress. A fringe group splintered off from the Maoists calls on the voters to boycott the upcoming elections and even promised to sabotage them by using violence.

In 1959, Parliamentary democracy was briefly tried, but called off after a year. Instead came Panchayati Raj, rule by the village councils. This sounded like a good indigenous alternative to “Western” democracy, but in fact it had the same flaws as the Parliamentary system. The village councils elected a single person to the district council, which then elected a single person to the national level, so contact with the grassroots was lost, and effectively, the autocratic king could do as he pleased. However, the aura of the king Birendra as a supposed incarnation of Vishnu was shattered when his son Dipendra killed the whole royal family during a dinner party in 2001. His brother Gyanendra tried to revive autocratic rule, but untimately had to hand over power to the politicians including the Maoists.

The major problem, according to the Nepalese people, is not famines or defective infrastructure. It is not any problem that can be solved by a policy, but is the lack of trustworthy and competent politicians. The incapability of reaching a consensus about a Constitution is but symptomatic for the fissiparous mentality among the political class. Then there is the corruption, a familiar problem to Indians, with convicted criminals as election candidates. The AF lays a special stress on cleaning the election process by eliminating these rotten apples. Specific for the Nepalese situation are the veterans of the guerrilla struggle with a record of human rights violations. The Maoists want immunity for them, i.e. impunity for the crimes they have committed in the service of the “people’s war”.

Maoist leader and former Prime Minister Prachanda (Pushpa Kamal Dahal, r.2008-09) declared during the armed struggle: “I hate revisionists”, i.e. non-revolutionary Marxists, who have “strayed” from the revolutionary path. Yet it seems that he has no qualms with having become a revisionist himself. He agrees that multi-party elections are the only viable way for Nepal.

 None of the speakers at the conference mentioned religion, eventhough this had been a central issue during the political take-over. Until 2008, Nepal welcomed visitors to “the only Hindu Kingdom in the world”. The Hindu state religion was abolished along with the monarchy.

When I enquired about religion, I was told that it is not much of an issue anymore. It may seem like that to campaigners focused on corruption and democratic institutions. Or those who engineered the removal of Hinduism from its official position may have had an interest in making uninformed Westerners believe that it was no longer an issue. At any rate, for the powers behind this conference, it seemed to be very important, as there is more here than meets the eye. Of the 8 organizing NGO’s in the Nepal Dialogue Forum for Peace and Human Rights, 3 are already recognizable as missionary outfits by their very name, while two others may have the same agenda and at any rate have names that knowledgeable people will immediately recognize as anti-Hindu. Thus, “Adivasi Coordination Germany” contains the tell-tale word Adivasi, “Aboriginal”. This term was coined in the British colonial period as a pseudo-indigenous term conveying that the tribal populations are “aboriginal” – and hence the non-tribals are not. This is an utterly dishonest projection of the American situation, with Amerindian “natives” and European settlers, onto South Asia; and much beloved of Maoists and missionaries. The dreamy people attracted to human rights campaigns wouldn’t know the real agenda of those who smuggle such words into the discourse, and can safely be employed as useful idiots. Another word the anti-Hindu forces like to propagate, and that is not so innocent in their mouths, is that they want Nepal to be a “secular” democracy.

According to a poll in 2011, 63% of the Nepalese people were in favour of a “Hindu democracy”, 34% wanted a “secular democracy”. (Insights South Asia. Nepal Survey 2011 Results, SADP/Gallup, presented by one of the speakers) That is a very clear majority in favour of a Hindu democracy. If Nepal is going to be a democracy, the first test will be whether it will get its democratically desired Hindu state.

I bet it won’t, because the Nepali Hindus are not organized as such, while their enemies are. And if at all the Hindu opposition proves insurmountable, it will be bought off with a token concession, since its leaders (if they come forward at all) do not know the difference between mere words and tangible power. For decades they have sleepwalked into this situation, and there is no sign that they have awoken yet. Ms. Sharma informed us that one political party “wants the King back”. The monarchy cannot and should not be saved; it was all along a big mistake to tie Hinduism to the person of the King, and even to venerate him as an incarnation of Vishnu. There was no movement thinking through a viable Hindu alternative to this feudal hold-over, and there still isn’t one.

Like in the case of the California textbooks case (2005-09), I will get some hate-mail from Hindu activists for daring to state the fact of the massive Hindu defeat in Nepal. They insist on fooling themselves that they are going from victory to victory, when in fact they have been stumbling from defeat to ignominious defeat. If ever you hope to score a victory, the first  thing to do is to acknowledge your shortcomings, the defects on which you have to improve.

The one consolation is that Hinduism is still present within the dominant parties. Also, a religion promoted by the state will become weak, as witnessed by the state of Hinduism after centuries of royal patronage. So, it may revive its inner strength during the coming long years of non-Hindu rule. 

(14 November 2013, published in Centre Right India and in Hindu Human Rights)

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