"The founder of my religion" and the wisdom of crowds

(The question of what sources of religious insight are valid, comes up whenever you meet people of various religions who take the truth claims of their own tradition seriously. Is the authority of the founder or prophet sufficient as reason for accepting his truth claims? What follows is the text of my speech at the Ahmadiya interreligious colloquium of May 2009 in the Basilica of Koekelberg, a borough of Brussels. The Ahmadiyas are the sect founded ca. 1900 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, mentioned near the end.)



When an official of the Indian Embassy in Brussels told me he was looking for someone who could speak on Hinduism at the present colloquium on the theme of "The Founder of My Religion", I told him that among the numerous Westerners who do Hindu things (and this includes myself), he would not find anyone willing to self-identify as a Hindu. The word "Hindu" has a connection with the geographical unit India, and is in that sense irrelevant to anyone who does not have this connection. But more importantly, it is, just like "Christian", a label on a box. The type of people involved in the Western discovery of Hindu wisdom tend to reject labels of religious membership. Indeed, it is usually this very refusal to be boxed into a single religion that predisposed them towards attraction to Hinduism. They believe that, in contrast with Christian Christ-centric monolatry, there are numerous teachers who embody the Way, the Truth and the Life; which is what Hindus have understood all along.

I am a member of the largest faith community in Belgium, viz. the ex-Catholics. That is not a community with a sense of unity and structures of its own, like the Catholic Church. As the former EU commissioner Karel Van Miert, ex-Catholic and a leading unbeliever in Belgium, once said (quoting from memory): “No, freethinkers don’t need structures of their own. It’s not because diabetics get together in their own self-help group, that non-diabetics should likewise get together.” So, I have not been mandated to represent the millions who fall in the category of ex-Catholics, I am only representative in the sense that I am a typical case. I am an apostate, I no longer espouse the beliefs I was brought up with.

An earlier generation of ex-Catholics, when they were still a small minority of the Belgian population, often became anti-Catholic, anti-Christian and anti-religious with a vengeance. Today’s far more numerous ex-Catholics no longer have serious accounts to settle with the Church of their childhood. They, i.e. we, are simply skeptical of its defining beliefs. No hereditary sin of Adam and Eve, no virgin birth of Jesus, no resurrection.

Not that we reject everything about Jesus. He’s still popular for some of his sayings, especially when he was being anti-authoritarian like ourselves, when he went against the stifling weight of tradition and prejudice. But Son of God, no, most baptized Belgians don’t believe this anymore. That defining belief of Christianity is doubted now even by many of those who still go to church on Sundays. I understand that Muslims likewise venerate Jesus but reject his divine status. This at least proves that it is possible to be religious and yet not believe in Jesus as the divine Saviour. Which is the position where numerous ex-Christians have now landed themselves, viz. belief in "Something" but not in Jesus as the resurrected Saviour.

One component that recurs in many though not all religions, is God. People who have had bad experiences with a tough and authoritarian religion, tend towards a wholesale rejection of religion, including and especially God. They find something heroic in atheism, like standing on top of a mountain with no one above you. Or as John Lennon used to sing: “Above us only sky.” To assert human freedom, they would find it a crucial point to reject God. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “Si Dieu existe, l’homme est un néant. Si l’homme existe, Dieu n’existe pas.” ("If God exists, man is a nothing. If man exists, God does not exist.") Among ex-Muslims, this is still common, e.g. Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her discovery of atheism as a liberation. By contrast, now that Catholicism has lost its teeth, most ex-Catholics don’t bother to rebrand themselves as atheists or God-deniers anymore.

The anti-authoritarian generation dislikes the idea of a monarch in the sky, but then He can be redefined as something hazier, genderless, faceless, a mere “something”. We are the Something-ists. If you ask us whether we believe in God, we say: “It depends on how you define God.” Tongue-in-cheek, God is still okay, though the old expression “the fear of God” can now only be used in an ironical sense. Conversely, long-standing atheists have lately explored the idea of an “atheist religiosity”. Their rejection of the Pope and of Biblical authority need no longer imply a wholesale rejection of religion. Or “spirituality” as some insist on calling it, with studied vagueness.

We learn that Buddhism and some lesser-known Asian tradition also fall into this category of “religion without God”. That’s why the Buddha is so popular in modern culture: he reputedly doesn’t want you to submit to some omnipotent authority in heaven. At the same time, the millions of modern Westerners who do Buddhist things, like practising “mindfulness”, don’t become card-carrying Buddhists. They don’t want to put all their eggs into a single basket.

It is like in science. Everybody accepts that many pioneers have contributed to the present state of our scientific knowledge. Nobody swears by only one of them, nor denies the importance of all the others. Everybody knows that Aristotle’s work was, by all accounts, path-breaking, yet his knowledge was tentative and often clumsy. Both these facts, glorifying as well as belittling Aristotle, are equally true, and uncontroversial. Of course his work was a tremendous contribution to science, and of course it was very incomplete, in need of improvement by others who came after him. Nobody faults him for the immaturity of his theories, because everybody knows a single man couldn’t have created the whole edifice of science. Nobody says that Aristotle was the science god's only-begotten son, nor that he was the seal of the scientists, never to be equalled.

A poet has said that after Isaac Newton, “all was light”, so decisive was his breakthrough in physics. Yet to those who would dismiss the preceding generations of thinkers and researchers as merely caught in darkness, Newton admonished that he could only see as far as he did because he stood on the shoulders of giants, meaning his predecessors in thought and research. No scientist would ever say that he received the whole of scientific knowledge in a flash, devoid of any prehistory nor in need of any additions or improvements.

In the experience of most moderns, the same is true in religion. Earlier, a very monarchical view of religion prevailed: one founder, a single leader with a single book, and the rest are either devout and obedient followers, or outsiders to and enemies of the religion. Today, we are evolving towards a more democratic view of religion. It is open-ended on all sides.

It is open-ended in a geographical sense: valid religious teachings have originated in many parts of the world. In the colonial age, Christian travellers were puzzled to find noble people in China, in Arabia, in Africa and other heathen countries: “How can they be so good and not be Christian?” And they had qualms of conscience: “How sad that this Chinese new friend of mine, this thoroughly good man, will have to go to hell because he wasn’t baptized!” Today, ex-Christians and quite a few Christians are confident that even God hasn’t put all his eggs in a single basket: non-Christians had been provided with their own Zarathustra, their own Yajñavalkya, Confucius, Bodhidharma, or Shankara. Post-Christian people quote from Jesus, Laozi, Kabir or Jalaluddin Rumi with equal respect.

It is open-ended towards the past. Every teacher was a pupil once. Everyone has a navel as visible proof that he was born from a mother and is indebted to earlier generations. The Buddha, who is often venerated by Buddhists as totally unique and original, acknowledged that he had merely walked the path that all the earlier Buddhas before him had walked. After him, his tradition spawned equally important masters like Nagarjuna, Bodhidharma, Huineng or Dogen. Mahavira Jina, the supposed founder of Jainism, saw himself as the 24th of a lineage of "ford-makers" (tirthankara-s) stretching back into prehistory. The leading lights of Daoism and Confucianism in the 6th-3rd century BC traced their own vision back to ancient sages like Fu Xi, Huang Di (the Yellow Emperor), Yu the Great or king Wen. They had no notion of "Jahiliya", the Age of Ignorance preceding the arrival of the Prophet.

Evolutionary psychology shows that the germs of religion go back very far. We now know that a sense of morality, of altruism and fellow-feeling, which religious teachers usually claim as a special merit of religion, is present already in the higher animal species. Apes already have an (admittedly very embryonic) sense of religion. Some of you may have seen the documentary in which a gorilla flares up in anger against a burst of lightning and throwing a bone into the sky: he is filmed in the act of inventing a personal god behind the phenomenon of thunder and lightning. Right there, he just thought up a thunder god, like Jupiter or Indra or Thor. Later mankind has discarded this belief in personal agents behind the natural phenomena, but it was a step on the way forward and upward. While it is still controversial here and there to say we are the descendents of apes, I dare say that we are, moreover, the pupils of apes. But we did them the honour of not remaining their pupils forever.

Modern religiosity is open-ended towards the future. More teachers are bound to come, equal in rank with the ancient teachers. Nobody is the last prophet. We’ve heard that after Mohammed, some Muslims had a Baha’ullah or a Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. Without going into the merits of these specific individuals, we can generally say that most people influenced by modernity agree that renewals are called for once in a while, and that even in religion, progress can be made. In the post-Christian religious scene in particular, nobody is credited with a monopoly on the road to truth or salvation.

This approach has always prevailed in Hindu civilization. It has no founder, yet it has many founders of tributaries to its mainstream. The Vedas were composed by a whole constellation of seers, whose names are practically unknown to non-Hindus and even to numerous Hindus. Have you heard of Bhrgu, Vishvamitra, Jamadagni or Dirghatamas?

Realistiscally, you cannot expect guidance in every field from a single human being, no matter how saintly or wise. The Buddha was an outstanding organizer of a monastic order that made its mark on all of Asia, and more importantly, he developed or at any rate practised and taught a highly effective meditation technique, Vipassana or "Mindfulness". And yet, on family values he was a disaster. He had no way of honourably integrating the indispensible functions of marriage and child-rearing into his vision. Shall we renounce the Buddha then? The whole and indivisible Buddha, perhaps. But not the Buddha who matters, the meditation teacher. For family values, we can simply look elsewhere.

It is always a funny sight, religious people trying to find guidance in their scriptures for typically modern questions. The exercise may be interesting and may sharpen our wits: trying to churn or shake a modern message out of an ancient scripture. And interesting it remains even if we don't (as I don't) accept the believers' assumption that their scripture contains the words of the omniscient and prescient God, who must have foreseen the modern problems centuries or millennia ago when his words were recorded. But it is only an exercise.

Hinduism looks up to the accumulated wisdom of numerous sages. The possible excesses of one among them are outweighed and neutralized by the input of all the others. None of them was totally the first, or the absolute authority. Even before the dawn of mankind, Hindu tradition envisions divine incarnations in the shape of the Fish, the Tortoise, the Boar, the Hobbit... There are ancient sages, but no founder-sage, and no chosen people, no only-begotten son or final prophet.

In Hinduism, authority rests with a vast array of scriptures: the Veda-s and the Bhagavad-Gita most famously, but also in the Agama-s or doctrinal scriptures of all the various sects, such as the Nanak Panth (= Sikhism)'s Guru Granth. But more importantly, it rests with every enlightened master, everyone who visibly embodies the sacred. It rests with your parents and personal teachers, and ultimately also with yourself. Your own common sense and intuition are the most important guide in your life's choices, informed by the plethora of Hindu sources of light, and not excluding even the non-Hindu sources. Living Hinduism is an application to the religious sphere of "the wisdom of crowds", the principle the combined insights of many provide a more accurate guide than the insights of an individual, be he prophet or messiah. I note with satisfaction that the Ahmadiya movement has incorporated a bit of this Hindu attitude by acknowledging Krishna and the Buddha as legitimate religious teachers.

May all beings in the Universe be happy.

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The NCERT’s denial of Islamic iconoclasm’s uniqueness

  

(Pragyata, March 2017) 

During the Rama Janmabhumi commotion ca. 1990, it was the done thing for secularists to deny that Muslims had ever committed destruction of Hindu sacred buildings and statues. This even became the official position worldwide, for practically all Indologists and India-watchers interiorized it and zealously condemned any acknowledgment of Islamic iconoclasm as stemming from “Hindu fanaticism”. However, this position is hard to sustain, because it is so obviously untrue. Therefore, they have recently refined their propaganda strategy, in two ways.

First, they now minimize Islamic iconoclasm, but admit some of it. Not that they would concede the Islamic motivation for this Mandir-and-Murti destruction, but alright, some Muslims had done it. That, after all, is what human beings do, Hindus included, see? As long as Islam remains out of the picture, they are willing to admit a little bit of destruction for the sake of salvaging their own credibility.

Second, they now try to make Hinduism guilty of the crimes of Islam, viz. by providing the inspiration through its own example. Muslims destroyed Hindu temples because Hindus had destroyed Hindu temples. Provincials like our secularists and their foreign imitators try to lead you by the nose towards whatever happened within India’s borders, and never ask, nor want you to ask, what the record of Islam outside India is, including in the period before it entered India. They don’t want you to realize that Islam’s behaviour in India was only a continuation of its behavior in West Asia and around the Mediterranean, starting with Mohammed’s own model behaviour in Arabia.

The secularist narrative is now being propagated everywhere and inserted into the textbooks of history, including in the projected new textbooks mulled over by the National Centre for Educational Research and Training (NCERT). As per the official procedure, there is a provision for feedback from the public. A friend of mine sent in an objection to the NCERT’s scenario. What follows is the NCERT’s response, interspersed with my comments.

Bluff

“The objection to the cited passage – that temples demonstrated the power and resources of the kings who built them and that is the reason why medieval rulers targeted the temples of rival rulers -- can be substantiated by innumerable references.”

This is sheer bluff. The two examples given do of course not amount to the "innumerable" cases which they mendaciously claim to have. Nor have such numbers of cases been mentioned elsewhere. Yet, given the strong motive the NCERT secularists have to overrule the straightforward narrative of Islamic iconoclasm, they would by now certainly have published a book full of such evidence, and made sure it was quoted in every relevant paper and editorial – if it existed.

Sheer bluff, we said, but in the real world, there is nothing “sheer” about bluff. On the contrary, bluff is a mighty weapon that can produce impressive results. Take the Rama Janmabhumi controversy. The secularists suddenly claimed that all the Muslims and Hindus and Europeans who had unitedly assumed that a Rama temple had stood at the disputed site on which the Babri Masjid had been imposed, had all been wrong. They offered no evidence whatsoever for their proposed scenario (say, a sales contract in which a landlord sold Babar a piece of empty real estate to build a mosque on), and denied the evidence on the opposite side which had existed all along and which accumulated further once the challenge to bring more evidence had been raised.

Though their behaviour was that of conspiracy-mongers, their shrill bluff carried authoritative public opinion with it. They managed to make the Government abandon its plans for a negotiated settlement, they managed to have national and state governments toppled, they managed to trigger a number of bloodbaths, all through “sheer bluff”. Even when they collapsed one after another when questioned in Court, even when their bluff had been exposed (though the media did all they could to hide this development from you), they have never apologized, never publicly admitted how wrong they had been. Bluff can get you very far in life, so the NCERT tries more of it. 

Even the evidential value of their “evidence” is bluff. No matter how many cases of Hindu idol abduction they manage to find, it will never amount to proof for the hypothesis they really want to push: that Muslim conquerors and rulers did what they did because Hindus had inspired them to do it. These conquerors mostly didn’t even know the record of Hindu kings, and at any rate they didn’t care. They would never have wanted to be seen imitating the idolaters and instead invoked the solid justification for iconoclasm within their own tradition. Mohammed himself had set the example, and in his wake came the conquerors of West Asia and the Mediterranean, unaffected by Hindu examples.

Power of discrimination

“Consider the gold statue of Vishnu which was once in the Lakshmana temple of Khajuraho. The statue actually belonged to the rulers of Kangra, it was taken by the Pratiharas and finally by the Candella ruler Yasovarman just before 950 CE (and a near contemporary of Mahmud Ghazni). The inscription in the foundation stone of the Khajuraho Laksmana temple commemorated these events and stated – “With his troops of elephants and horses, Herambapala (Pratihara, ruler of Kanauj) seized it form [the king of Kangra]. Obtaining it from his son, the (Pratihara) prince Devapala, the illustrious (Candella) king Yasovarman – an ornament among kings and a crusher of enemies – performed the ritual establishment of [Vishnu] Vaikuntha [in the Laksmana temple at Khajuraho]”. See, F. Kielhorn. “Inscriptions from Khajuraho”, Epigraphica Indica, vol. 1 (1892), p. 192.”

This example is a beautiful illustration precisely of how Hindu idol-kidnapping differs radically from Islamic idol-breaking. According to the NCERT itself, the Vishnu statue from Khajuraho was abducted not once but twice, and ended up (not walled into a lavatory or underfoot, nor smashed to pieces, but) consecrated as a prominent Murti in a Vaishnava temple, exactly where it belonged. What was abducted, was merely an object of art, duly consecrated. There was no destruction of the religion behind the Murti. It was used for Vaishnava worship in its original site, after it was abducted, and again after Yasovarman abducted it. Further, the worship at the temples robbed of their Murtis, was perfectly allowed to continue, though they would have to install a new Murti.   

By contrast, in Islamic iconoclasm, the goal was to destroy the “idolatrous” religion of which the Murtis were an expression. The destruction of Murtis and the demolition of Mandirs had the purpose of destroying Hinduism or whichever the Pagan religion behind some given Murtis was. When Mahmud Ghaznavi was done destroying the Somnath temple, he did not mean to let Shiva worship resume at the site, not as long as he was militarily in a position to prevent it. While Yasovarman installed the abducted Vishnu Murti for worship, Mahmud Ghaznavi would have the captured Murtis destroyed, or worked them into lavatory walls or into floors in order the humiliate them -- not so much the Murtis themselves but the religion they represented. In destroying the Somnath Shivalingam, he meant to destroy Shiva worship.

One day, a man needed some paper to light a campfire, but he had none. His friend suggested: I have some paper, wait. And he took his wallet to produce a wad of dollar bills. The friend turned out not to see any significance in the dollar bills, only their material dimension. Whether a little rectangle of paper was a currency note worth an exchange value, or a newspaper clipping containing specific information, or merely a blank slip of paper, they were all the same to him: enough paper to light a campfire with. Now that is Nehruvian secularism for you: a deliberate suspension of the power of discrimination. This wilful superficiality claims not to see any difference between abducting an object without any further consequence and destroying this object as part of the attempted destruction of the religion it stands for.

Lalitaditya

“From a different cultural zone note also the example of the conflict between the soldiers of the Gauda (Bengal) ruler and the ruler of Kashmir, Lalitaditya. The episode concerns the moment when the Bengali rulers chose to attack the idol of Vishnu Parihasakesava who was providentially saved because the soldiers mistook this image of the royal God for another. The Rajatarangini notes – “Though the king was abroad, the priests observed that the soldiers wanted to enter, and they closed the gates of the Parihasakesava shrine. Aroused with boldness, the soldiers got hold of the silver Ramasvamin image, which they mistook for Parihasakesava. They carried it out and ground it into dust. And even as Lalitaditya’s troops who had come out from the city were killing them at each step, the Gaudas continued to break it into particles and scatter them in every direction.” See Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, trans., Rajatarangini, The saga of the Kings of Kashmir, Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1935, pp. 326-28.”

Note firstly that this Lalitaditya episode is also related, complete with the spin dear to the NCERT, in Robert M. Hayden, Aykan Erdemir,Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, Timothy D. Walker, Devika Rangachari, Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Enrique López-Hurtado, and Milica Bakić-Hayden: Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces, 2013, p.136-137. As you can see, the Nehruvian secularist bluff is being spread far and wide and is acquiring the status of academic orthodoxy.

We are here dealing with a typical case of Western imitators, if not careerists who want to serve the current orthodoxy of battling “Islamophobia”. Concerning India, they have completely swallowed the Nehruvian bias. Thus, about Islamic iconoclasm deniers Romila Thapar and Richard Eaton, they say: “As scholars of India in the late 20^th century, their aim in doing so is to counter the accusations by Hindu nationalists that the Muslims uniquely violated the sensibilities and rights of Hindus by destroying temples, by showing that Hindu rulers had done much the same thing before Muslims reached India.” (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

It is in itself commendable that they point out the political intentions of these academics. These have a purpose other than dispassionately seeking the truth, which to Marxists would only be “bourgeois objectivity”. While not in itself disqualifying their research, it should at least set some alarm bells ringing. But this political bias only enjoys the unquestioning approval of the new generation of dupes.

So much have they already interiorized the belief in Hindu iconoclasm that they take it one step further: “From the perspective of the AT [= Antagonistic Tolerance] project, of course it would be surprising if Hindu rulers had not done so.” (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Naturally they should think so, for it fits in with the reigning paradigm that “all religions are essentially the same”.

At the end, when practical conclusions are drawn, fashionable academics tend to differentiate again and favour Islam over Hinduism, e.g. by clamouring about “Islamophobia” but ignoring “Hinduphobia” (including their own); but at some point within their narrative, it is useful to put forward the equality and sameness of all religions, viz. in order to preclude or drown out all specific Hindu complaints about distinctly Islamic behaviour.  

Since those authors are only second-hand spokesmen of the Nehruvian view, they sometimes let on facts that, when properly analysed, don’t really fit their narrative, e.g.: “Tantalizingly, Eaton (2000a:293) mentions that temples not identified with royal patrons were generally left unharmed.” (RM Hayden et al.: Antagonistic Tolerance, p.136)

Tantalizing? Only if you pursue the Nehruvian paradigm. In fact it follows logically from the difference between Hinduism and Islam. If at all there were Hindu kings who “harmed” temples because through them they wanted to harm hostile kings, they clearly opted for a policy that constituted another distinction with Muslim iconoclasm: they left politically irrelevant temples untouched. By contrast, when Muslim armies went on an iconoclastic spree, they did not care about these petty considerations, precisely because their motive had nothing to do with “royal patrons” but only with non-Islamic religion.

Thus, when the Ghurid army ca. 1193 destroyed a “thousand” temples in Varanasi (as admitted by Eaton), obviously not all of them had enjoyed royal patronage. But all of them contained Pagan idols, and what was enough to get the Muslim conquerors in a destructive mood. This off-hand refutes the whole point of this new-fangled soft-Marxist hypothesis: that iconoclasm had nothing to do with religion.

Now, as to Lalitaditya, he defeated the Gauda king, invited him with the  Parihasakeshava (Vaishnava) idol as guarantee for the Gauda king’s safety, yet had him murdered. To take revenge, the Gauda servants contrived to visit the relevant shrine in order to destroy this idol. Though they mistook another idol for Parihasakeshava (and apparently the story is gleefully told in order to convey this idol’s supposed cleverness in arranging for its own safety at the expense of another), they did indeed destroy the idol that they could lay their hands on. The fragmentation of the idol is duly described.

So, this indeed is one rare case where Hindus destroyed a Hindu idol. To be sure, they did nothing to Vaishnavism in Kashmir, nor in Bengal, nor anywhere else. They only wanted to get at that particular idol, a radical difference with the numerous campaigns of idol-breaking by Muslims, who were not so fussy. While Hindus did it, Hinduism was not involved. On the contrary, the text itself stipulates that their motive was quite mundane, viz. vengeance for their murdered king. The perpetrators did not quote any Hindu scripture prescribing: “Thou shalt destroy a Parihasakeshava idol whenever thou seest one!” They did not invoke any idol-breaking model behaviour of a Vedic Rishi.

Islamic iconoclasm

We have spent some time writing out several pages in analyzing the NCERT response to an objection. To be sure, a fool can famously ask more questions in a few lines than a normal man can answer in a number of pages. Nevertheless, the fact deserves mention that, through misdirection, the NCERT has succeeded in keeping us busy all while the true answer was so simple. We have been forced to deal with two of the handful of cases of idol-abduction and iconoclasm by Hindus as the supposed reason for Islamic iconoclasm, when in reality, Islamic iconoclasm had nothing to do anything good or bad done by a Hindu. And no secret is made of this in Muslim chronicles, clear enough about the real motive.

Neither the NCERT, nor the Nehruvian historians, nor their foreign followers, has ever succeeded in finding a Muslim chronicle saying that “the Sultan was inspired by Hindu example to destroy idols and demolish temples”. The point, after all, was not finding fault with what Hindus may have done (though finding fault with Hindus is certainly also on the secularists’ agenda), but to explain through Hindu behaviour the known Islamic conduct of iconoclasm. This relation between Islamic iconoclasm and Hindu example has never ever been established. On the contrary, whenever Muslim iconoclasts feel the need to motivate their destructive behaviour, they cite Islamic examples, first of all the destruction of the idols in the Ka’ba by Mohammed himself.

And let alone the words in chronicles or elsewhere, it is actual deeds that prove the radical difference between Islamic iconoclasm and any possible Hindu attitude. The NCERT itself quotes a case where a Vishnu statue was abducted, and then installed for worship by the abductor himself. If such were the example followed by Muslim iconoclasts, we would expect to find mosques where Hindu statues from, say, the Somnath temple or the Rama Janmabhumi temple had been installed. Unlike the Nehruvians, we are not provincials and will not confine ourselves to India, so images of Apollo, Osiris, or any other deity will also do. Pray, NCERT, where is that mosque where an abducted idol has been installed for worship? We are not asking for two examples, just one.

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Interview to a student of religion

(Interview given to a student of Religious Studies collecting material for her dissertation)

1. You have written that a Hindu simply is an Indian pagan. This raises the question: what is a pagan, exactly? Or what is paganism?

  

Strictly a “rustic”, “peasant” or “village bumpkin”, as opposed to the Christians in the Roman Empire, who were at first mostly city-dwellers. The textbook definition since the 4th century is “a non-Christian”. After Islam became more familiar in Europe, it often came to mean a non-Abrahamist, or better, anyone who does not subscribe to prophetic monotheism. The category “Pagan” strictly includes both atheists and polytheists, but mostly it is only used for a type of religious people, excluding non-religious atheists and agnostics.

When the Muslim invaders brought the Persian geographical term “Hindu” (“Indian”) into India, it came to mean “Indian by birth and by religion”, excluding those who were non-Indian or who were Indian but followed a non-Indian religion. In those days, people remained conscious of their original nationality for very long. When in the wake of the British, some Indian Zoroastrians settled in South Africa, they called themselves “Persians” though their families had lived in India for a thousand years. By the same token, the Syrian Christians counted as Syrians; but even if they counted as Indians, they would still not be Hindus, for they followed a non-Indian religion.

By contrast, all Indians without foreign links are Hindus: Brahmins, upper castes, middle castes, downtrodden, tribals, Buddhists (“clean-shaven Brahmins” according to the 8th-century Muslim chronicle Chach-Nama), Jains. By implication even sects that did not exist yet, were Hindu upon birth: Lingayats, Sikhs, Arya Samaj, RK Mission, ISKCon. Today, “Hindu” is a dirty word, so they all try to weasel out of it and declare themselves non-Hindu, also to enjoy the legal benefits of being a minority. (Indeed, under the prevailing anti-secular Constitution, non-Hindus are privileged above Hindus.) They see Hinduism as a sinking ship, and being rats, they leave it. But I am not impressed by this. People should simply grow up and face facts: they satisfy the definition of “Hindu”, so they are Hindus, Indian Pagans. I don’t care what elephants think of being called elephants; since they satisfy the definition of “elephant”, they are elephants, period.

Since roughly 1980, the RSS family of Hindu Nationalist organizations have tried to water this clear historical definition down by saying that “Hindu” simply means “Indian”. That would have been the pre-invasion usage, when Persian and Arabic were not tainted by Islam yet. But when the word was brought into India, it immediately differed from “Indian” by its religious dimension. Muslims and Christians are by definition not Hindu. But because the contemporary Hindutva leaders are not clear-headed (or not brave) enough to face difference, they try to spirit the difference between Hinduism and Islam away by calling the Indian Muslims “Mohammedi Hindus”. And likewise, “Christi Hindus”. I think that is the summum of cowardice.

Look, I don’t claim to be brave. I just sit behind my computer screen. Writing articles that displease some people doesn’t require more courage than posting cheerful holiday messages on Facebook; it’s just words. It is nothing compared to a soldier on the battlefield running into enemy fire.  Here in Flanders’ fields, we are presently commemorating every event that punctuated WW1, a hundred years ago. When you read about those events, you come across unspeakable acts of bravery. So, compared to that, scholarship is nothing, even when a bit controversial. But conversely, when even words can intimidate you, when even a purely logical application of the definition of “Hindu” is too much, when even a word of disapproval by the secularists is too much, that is really intolerable cowardice. To be sure, even the secularists approve of a difference between “Hindu” and “Indian”, but the so-called Hintutva people now try to out-secularize the secularists by even denying that there is a separate religious category “Hindu”, different from the secular-geographical term “Indian”. They have come a long way: from flattering themselves as being the “vanguard of Hindu society” to denying that there is even such a thing as a “Hindu Indian” different from a “non-Hindu Indian”.  

2. You have criticized both Christianity and Islam for being basically a set of superstitious beliefs. Yet many would claim to the contrary that there is a lot more superstition in Hinduism. For instance, while Christianity and Islam at least have a historical basis to many of their most important stories, this is less the case for the Hindu stories about various gods and goddesses, which are more akin to the stories about Greek or Egyptian gods. Furthermore, the practice of image- or idol-worship could itself be considered superstitious, since it leads the worshipper to fetishize the idol as a source of magical powers, or as a divine being in itself. What is your response to this?

The core beliefs of Christianity and Islam are superstitious. Or without bringing in any psychologizing jargon like “superstitious”, they are, more simply, untrue. It is not true that Mohammed had a direct telephone line with God, and that the Quran is simply a collection of divine messages. It is simply not true that Jesus rose from the dead; just like all deceased people, he is not part of this world anymore. Much less is it true that he thereby freed mankind from sin (and thereby also of mortality, the punishment that befell Adam and Eve after their Fall into sinfulness); levels of sinfuless or of human mortality have not appreciably changed in 33 AD. Yes, it is claimed by believers as a historical that Jesus resurrected or that Mohammed received revelations, but apart from the fact that the date given is realistic, the event is definitely not. And I don’t even go into the theories that Jesus or Mohammed never existed. Believing something that is flatly untrue, and moreover as the basis of your worldview, that is simply not the case with Hinduism.

As it happens, Hinduism is not one definite worldview. It is not based on one untrue statement, like Christianity or Islam. It is not necessarily based on a true statement either. Within the Hindu big tent, there are many traditions with their own doctrines. They have an awe for the sacred in common, but what counts as sacred is conceived in many ways. As the Rg-Veda says: the wise ones call the one reality by many names. Among these traditions, the Upanishadic ones converge on an insight that is not historical but true, just as the Law of Gravity is not historical (its date and place of discovery happen to be known but are immaterial, as it is valid everywhere and forever). It is the Atmavad or doctrine of the Self, summed up in Great Sayings like Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahma. That is the monist or Vedanta view, in parallel you have the dualist or Sankhya view, still within the Hindu big tent, the basis of Patañjali’s yoga. It is both rational and spiritual; Christianity and Islam cannot boast of anything parallel. But I agree that this is only the spiritual backbone of Hinduism, and that many of the beliefs and practices around it are not so rational. However, these don’t have the status that the core beliefs of Christianity c.q. Islam have. You can safely discard them and still be a Hindu.   

3. You have questioned the conventional view that Siddharta Gautama broke away from Hinduism and founded a new religion. Yet did he not deny the authority of the Vedas? And did he not reject the caste system, saying (variously quoted): “By birth one is not an outcaste, by birth one is not a Brahmin; by deeds alone one is an outcaste, by deeds alone one is a Brahmin”?

He did not go out of his way to deny the Vedas, and if he did, it only followed the latter part of the Veda itself. The Jnanakanda part (knowledge), the Upanishads, is explicit in declaring the Karmakanda part (ritualism), the Brahmanas, as outdated. Shankara lambasts the Sankhya-Yoga school for never quoting the Veda. It was part (not the whole, but part) of Hinduism to ignore the Veda.

He did not bother about the caste system, which Buddhists in Lanka and Tibet also practised. Buddhism never changed the social system in China, Japan or Thailand, because it had a spiritual agenda incompatible with a social reform agenda. If pursuing your own desires is already incompatible with pursuing Enlightenment, this counts even more for the immense job of structurally changing society. Either you do that, or you become a monk practising the spiritual path, but you cannot do both.

 It simply accepted the social structures it found. Check the Buddha’s own life. Once his friend Prasenajit discovered that his queen was not a true Kshatriya, only on her father’s side, so he repudiated her and their common son. The Buddha persuaded him to take them back, pleading for the older conception of the caste system, which was purely in the paternal line (same caste as father, mother’s caste can be any). Now, if he had been a caste revolutionary, as all Indian schoolkids are taught nowadays, this incident would have been the occasion par excellence to lambast and ridicule the caste system. But he does no such thing, he upholds one version (the older one, for far from being a revolutionary, he was a conservative) of the caste system.

Or consider the distribution of his ashes after his cremation. They are divided in eight and given to eight cities for keeping them as a relic in a Stupa. The ruling elites of those cities had staked their claim exclusively and purely in casteist terms, though this was a Buddhist context par excellence. After 45 yeas of Buddhism, they say: “He was a Kshatriya, we are Kshatriyas, so we are entitled to his ashes.” If Buddhism had been anti-casteist, then as bad pupils they still might have thought in casteist terms, but they would have used a non-casteist wording. Instead, they have no compunction at all in using casteist terms.

I have more examples, but to sum up: the Buddha was an elite figure par excellence, he mainly recruited his novices among the elite, and all the later Buddhist thinkers were Brahmins, as would be the Maitreya, the next Buddha. He was not an egalitarian at all, witness his initial refusal to ordain women, and when he relented on this, he ordered that even the seniormost nun would be subservient to the juniormost monk. So, the secularist-cum-Ambedkarite attempt to appropriate the Buddha for modern socialist causes is totally false. It is bad history par excellence.     

4. Regarding Islam, it seems that one of your foremost critiques of this religion is the Qur’an itself, which you view as (if I understand your position correctly) irredeemably fanatical and intolerant. Yet as you are surely aware, the Qur’an is a complex work which takes on different qualities depending on how the verses are interpreted, which verses are emphasized, whether a verse is considered as universal or contextual, and so on. Thus there are many Islamic scholars who claim, for instance, that armed jihad is only permitted in self-defense, seeing that militant verses are often accompanied by verses preaching restraint and forgiveness. So does the Qur’an really have to be problematic in itself? Is it not rather certain traditions (mostly Salafi) of interpreting the Qur’an which are a problem?

Let me clarify first that my fairly elaborate answers to your questions on Islam do not mean that I am especially interested in Islam. The Salman Rushie and the Ayodhya affairs forced me to study it more closely, but since the 1990s, I have only returned to it when current affairs dragged me back to it. As a subject, it has lost my interest because it is quite straightforward and all the important answers have already been given. The only meaningful debate that remains, is on which policy vis-à-vis Islam wil deliver both Muslims and non-Muslims from it, as painlessly as possible.

Now, your very common position that “source text good, tradition bad”, or “founder good, followers bad”, or “prophet full of good intentions, followers misunderstood him”. (It is equally used in the case of Christianity: “freeing Christ from Churchianity”, and all that.) Only by not reading the Qur’an, and especially the life events of the Prophet, can you say that. The magic wand of “interpretation” does not impress me. What interpretation do you know of that turns QaTaLa, “slaughter”, into “restraint and forgiveness”? Moreover, Muslims and their sympathizers have had decades to “reinterpret” their scriptures, and what is the result? The prophet’s biography (Sirat Rasul Allah), of which the authoritative translation by Alfred Guillaume is very literal and has been published in Karachi under Islamic supervision, is used by Muslims worldwide (their Quranic Arabic is usually not that fluent either), unaltered. Thomas Cleary’s islamophile “translation” of the Qur’an does not meaningfuly “reinterpret” the Qur’an, but simply leaves out the embarrassing parts; similarly a Dutch selective translation of the Sira that was recently published. The most-used English translations of the Qur’an are by Muslims, yet they faithfully translate that “war will reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone”. There, we are fortunate that their great respect for the prophet’s every word prevents them from imposing their own false interpretations instead of it.

Jihad only permitted in self-defence? Pray, why did Mohammed order a (failed) invasion of the Byzantine empire? Why did he attack the Meccan caravans, who went about their business peacefully? When the Muslim army was defeated in central France by Charles the Hammer in 731, what was it doing there, thousands of miles from Arabia? Defending itself? These are just silly sop-stories. As an intellectual spectacle, it is amusing to see the acrobatics of “enlightened” Islamophiles in exculpation of Islam.

The solution is simply to grow up. It is not so hard to outgrow childhood beliefs, though it does take an intellectual and social transition, especially in the intermediate period when you have to co-exist with relatives who still shy away from taking this step. But then, I am asking no one to make changes in his life and outlook that I haven’t been through myself. I had the exceptional good fortune of being in the middle of a nation-wide (largely Europe-wide, in fact) religious conversion. I was born in Catholic Flanders, a frontline of the Roman Church against Anglican England, Calvinist Holland, Lutheran Germany and secular-Masonic France. In the 1950s, society was still deeply penetrated by the Church’s all-seeing eyes. Everyone in my primary school went to church on Sundays, was baptized, had a Catholic Saint’s name, etc. In the 1960s, this edifice started crumbling, with Vatican 2 as both cause and consequence. By the 1980s, this became the dominant narrative, and the conformists who had earlier gone to church because everyone did, now stayed away because everyone did. Today, practising Catholics are a small minority. The ex-Catholics are now the dominant group, until the next generation takes over, because they are not even “ex”, they simply have no memory of Catholicism. And all this without bloodshed, without destruction of the admittedly wonderful artistic heritage of the Church. (I still sing Gregorian plainchant under  the shower.)

So, that is what I wish for my Muslim friends too. Make Islam un-cool. Outgrow it. And take it from me: there is life after apostasy.

5. I would also like to ask the same question regarding Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the prophet of Islam. There are many hadiths attributed to Muhammad which certainly seem to us to set a bad example, but there are also many hadiths to the contrary. Is it not again simply a matter of emphasis and interpretation? For instance, consider this opinion by the scholar Hamza Yusuf, who was traditionally educated in the Maliki madhab. Do you consider his understanding of what Muhammad stood for as somehow Islamically illegitimate? (pardon the flawed subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmcQOb_FPO4

I have toughed it out to listen through the Shaykh’s special pleading, but I really knew enough after the first sentence, where he names Karen Armstrong as his main inspiration. Hers is a rare extreme of special pleading, distorting everything of Islamic history to fit modern values. The rest of his narrative is the usual idealization of the person Mohammed, as in his very special courtship with the widow Khadija (but with the false allegation that women before Islam had no inheritance rights, just when Khadija’s case proves the opposite). It is the basic conjuror's trick: directing the audience’s focus to a few nice episodes in Mohammed’s life and keeping the rest out of view. That is why Muslims are more properly called “Mohammedans”: they are far more punctual followers of Mohammed than Christians are of Christ.

To be sure, Mohammed may well have had some positive traits. He was known as very reliable, and I have no quarrel with that. Whether Khadija chose him because of those traits, as amply argued here, is another matter: he was a good young toyboy for this mature lady, and like his poverty (he worked as a shepherd in the service of the Meccan townspeople), his age made him her inferior and thus less likely to claim lordship over the wealth she had inherited or augmented by her entrepreneurial skills. But even i fit was a marriage made in heaven, wit hall manner of perfections accruing to the bridegroom,that doesn’t make him God’s spokesman. Shaykh may pontificate as much as he wants about Mohammed’s claimed virtues, that still does not make him more than the next man. He was neither the Son of God (as Muslims rightly hold against the Christians) nor a prophet with a private telephone line with God (as Muslims believe; it is the heart of their religion). 

Let’s cut short all the circumlocutions, let us cut out all the modern propaganda, and look at what the primary sources say.  We can summarize Mohammed’s life story in a single sentence: he destroyed an existing pluralistic society (Polytheists, Sabians, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews and Hanifs) and replaced it with a monolithic Islamic dictatorship. That is what the Islamic source texts themselves say. It is the height of ridiculousness that the multiculturalists in Europe, like their “secularist” counterparts in India, hobnob with Mohammed’s followers.

A lot also becomes clear when we know that most Arabs shook off Islam after Mohammed’s death and defeated the Muslim army. Unfortunately, they demobilized after that, the Muslim army came back and this time they securely imposed Islam. But the Arabs were the first victims of Islam. Mohamed practised robbery, extortion, abduction for ransom, rape, enslavement, slave-trade, and the murder of his critics and of a resistant Jewish tribe. All those data are in the primary sources of Islam. There is no way that an Islamic court can declare them un-Islamic,-- short of saying that “Mohammed was a bad Muslim”.

It follows that I am skeptical of Muslims who call themselves “moderate”. First of all, the distinction between moderate and extremist Muslims is an invention by non-Muslim soft-brains, unknown in Islam, and firmly rejected both by ex-Muslims and by leading Muslims such as Turkish president Erdoğan. He calls it insulting to Islam to make such a distinction. At any rate, I will accept Shaykh’s interpretation as moderate the day I hear him say: “Mohammed was wrong. Don’t follow Mohammed.” If, by contrast, he still recommends following Mohammed, as every Muslim is expected to do, he is in fact telling us: do practise abduction, robbery, rape, slave-taking, beheading, stoning, for those are all things he actually did, not just displaying his charms to win Khadija in marriage, as you might think after hearing Shaykh's narrative. Until he takes this distance from Mohammed’s precedent behaviour, he is just a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

6. Finally, I haven been impressed by many of your writings, which always allow the reader to follow transparently your train of thought – more than can be said about much academic literature in my opinion – and which offer some thought-provoking conclusions on diverse subjects. I am not always in agreement with your viewpoints (and sometimes I simply don’t know), but all the same your method strikes me as a very refreshing example of how the history of religions can actually be studied. This is all the more interesting since you are, if I understand correctly, unaffiliated with any university and basically carrying out your research on your own. So my final question is: What advice would you give to someone who wants to pursue the same path? What type of literature would you recommend; how does one work with the primary sources; how many languages does one need to master? (How many languages do you know yourself?)

To start at the end: I have studied mother tongue Dutch, other Belgian national languages French and German, and English; these I read and speak fluently. Afrikaans is really simplified Dutch, so I can also follow it effortlessly. Because of my studies, I can get around in Mandarin and Hindi, but claim no fluency. Persian I have largely forgotten. I also know a smattering of Spanish, and in my young days, I also browsed through the Teach Yourself books of the Celtic, Scandinavian, the main Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian), Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. I totally forgot about those, though I can still decipher written Scandinavian because of the closeness to my mother tongue, Dutch. But knowing something of the structure of the languages has proved useful in comparative linguistics and studies of the Indo-European language family.  Among classical languages, my Latin was always good, my study of Wenyan (classical Chinese) and Sanskrit was thorough but I claim no fluency, alas no time to go deeply into them lately. I also studied Greek for two years, some Biblical Hebrew, and a smattering of Quranic Arabic, Sumerian and Sangam Tamil. The net result is that I know plenty of political and philosophical terminology and can place the concepts in their proper contexts, but I rarely use those languages as language. Thus, when I need to look something up in the Vedas or the Mahabharata, I scroll through the English text, and only when I come to the passage I was looking for, I switch to reading the original. Life is short, and languages only interest me as entry to a world of thought. I am a historian and more and more a philosopher; philology has been a good basis but only as an instrument. 

For born Indians, it ought to be a feasible minimum to familiarize yourself with Sanskrit. For doing Indian history or philosophy, it is simply necessary. For medieval history, you need to know Persian, and Arabic is a plus. In the US, they did a test: of two equally-gifted groups of pupils, one took 8 hours of English, and one 4 hours of English and 4 hours of Latin. After a few years, the second group not only knew Latin, unlike the other group, but also had a better knowledge of English. Similarly, your knowledge of your Indian mother tongue will increase if you take out time to study the supposedly useless Sanskrit. It also promotes national unity, the convergence between the vernaculars, and also the phasing out of English, which you and me may find practical, but which to Indians is an anti-democratic imposition by the Nehruvian elite.

Whenever possible, you should go back to the primary sources. Thus, I am presently working on the history of early Buddhism, and I was initially surprised by the world of difference between the usual narrative peddled nowadays in schoolbooks and popular introductions, and the narrative revealed by the primary sources. Apart from the many errors that have crept into the modern narrative (mostly showing a strong anti-Hindu bias; see e.g. what I told you above about caste), the over-all conceptual mistake is the cardinal sin in history: the projection of modern concerns onto ancient developments. History is all about difference, the fact that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.  

My being outside academe was not a matter of choice, but of being boycotted. Thus, my very first Indological conference was the International Ramayana Conference 1990 at my own university, Leuven, and I defended the existence of a Hindu temple forcibly replaced by Babar’s mosque. One-third of the professors there were privately in support but publicly silent; one-third were furious at my daring to violate their safe space of rationality with such a silly and politically tainted claim; and the last one-third just didn’t have an opinion but were embarrassed at the commotion. The following years, I was boycotted and bad-mouthed throughout academe. But the fact is: I was right all along, as recent excavations and a court verdict have confirmed, and all those big-time professors were wrong.

The good thing about being on my own is that I don’t feel pressured to conform to the received wisdom. Thus, on Buddhism, practically all academics concerned swear by the paradigm “Hinduism bad, Buddhism good”. If I had been part of their circuit, I would probably have conformed to some extent to their view, at least to accept the narrative of “Hinduism and Buddhism”, as if these were two distinct entities on the same footing. Today I can just ignore their fairy-tale and state: the Buddha was 100% a Hindu.  

I don’t advise anyone to take the path I stumbled upon. But if somehow it happens, at least you should enjoy its good side. Meanwhile, I keep hoping against hope that the present supposedly Hindu gevernment will come to its senses and invest in scholarship, rather than parroting the narratives that several generations of secularist control over culture and education have established. In that endeavour, they will not only have to deconstruct all the harm done by the Nehruvians, but also the hare-brained alternatives presented by traditionalist Hindu “history-rewriters”, who think history means quoting from the Puranas. The last half-century, a gap in Hindu scholarship has grown that will require energetic initiatives to fill.

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interview to digital Swarajya

(interview by e-mail, Swarajya, 16 April, to questions by Shitanshu Shekhar Shukla)

 

Q. Do you think the BJP is still in opposition, ideologically speaking? If so, what must the party do to turn the tables on the secularists?

 

On economic issues, the party has the advantage of the identification of its adversaries with mismanagement. The Congress's return to socialism undid the high growth rate India enjoyed at the end of the previous BJP government. However, the blind adoption of American free-market policies is at odds with any Swadeshi commitment the BJP once had, and is chasing away some important constituents.

 

On the cultural front, the less said, the better. Even when in power -- no, let me correct that: when in office, for "power" means the ability to change things according to your own designs, and the BJP shows no signs of wanting to change anything. So, even when in office, the BJP plays by enemy rules and even thinks in the categories laid down by its enemies, with Hindus as an ugly overbearing majority that needs to be kept in check, and the poor hapless minorities as needing extra favours. 

 

Everybody could see this at the time of Barack Obama's visit. Fed hostile stories about the BJP's "Hindu fanaticism" by the secularists, he berated this government for injustice to the minorities. Instead of giving the arrogant US president a lecture about India as a shining example in its treatment of religious minorities and refugees, Modi swallowed the misplaced reprimand and reproduced it himself to his own countrymen the next day. That was Hindu-bashing secularism issuing from the mouth of the Hindu Hrdaya Samrat. It was Nehru speaking through Modi.

 

 

Q. How will you like to describe the volatile situation in India in the wake of incidents in JNU? Is it rise of internet Hindus or that of angry India?

 

Freedom of speech does include the right to make anti-national statements. If it doesn't mean the freedom to offend, it doesn't mean anything. The Motherland is not above criticism, even if misguided, just as the Prophet is not above criticism. So I am sorry to break ranks with most Hindus, but I think these anti-national slogans at JNU are much ado about nothing. It is commotion over mere words illustrating a lack of action, of real steps towards more national integration. Angry India should calm down and instead do the needful to fully Indianize Kashmir.

 

 

Q. What do you think the Modi government must do for the right without offending the minority community? Especially when he has been knocked out of Delhi and Bihar?

 

Where does the minority come in? Apart from raising the Hajj subsidy, how has Modi harmed any minority? At any rate, nobody should be harmed, not Akbar, not Anthony, and not Amar either. You worry about not offending the minorities, but the majority should not be offended either. In that regard, some constitutional, legal and policy reforms are needed to undo the existing discriminations against the Hindus, especially in education and temple management -- and all this without diminishing a single prerogative of the minorities. But the Modi government is not moving at all in this regard.

 

Moreover, it is a bit rich to call Indian Muslims and Christians "minorities". Not only are they more numerous than the population of many countries (say, Saudi Arabia), but they are only the Indian branch of worldwide movements. They benefit from international financial and media support that the Hindus cannot even dream of.

 

More fundamentally, the concept of "minority" is reprehensible in itself. Every democrat can understand that the law should equally apply to all, regardless of religion. Every Indian citizen may sociologically be a member of one or more communities, but legally, he is just an Indian citizen. That is the minimum for a state to be secular. India today is not a secular state at all. An Indian political analyst or a foreign India-watcher outs himself as incompetent when he asserts or implies: "India is a secular state." It is not.

 

Q. What do you think should be roadmap for the BJP to return to power in next Lok Sabha elections in 2019?

 

Right now, the BJP is assiduously following a roadmap towards massive defeat. The BJP secularists, dominant in the party's upper layer, claim that this government was elected on a secular platform of development. But even charitably assuming this, the party's inconsistent economic policies are chasing away several of its natural constituencies. 

 

In reality, Narendra Modi was brought to power because the dominant hostile media had successfully portrayed him as a militant Hindu,-- an image which the BJP itself downplayed or denied. The often sceptical Hindu voters turned out in large numbers because here at last they saw a man whom they expected to fight for Hindu causes. Baba Ramdev spoke for millions of Hindus when he said: "I voted for Modi, not for the BJP."  But once in office, the BJP disowned the numerous volunteers who had worked for Modi's victory and systematically let its Hindu constituents down. Millions of Hindus will not return for the next campaign nor even in the voting booth. And if they do, it will not be to support the BJP. 

 

Two factors still work in the BJP's favour. One is the opposition's weakness. Its capacity to unite and defeat the BJP, as in Delhi and Bihar, is harder to repeat at the national level; and Congress remains impotent as long as it doesn't side-line Rahul Gandhi. Second and most important, the BJP might still develop a Hindu conscience. (A third potential factor is: winning an Indo-Pak war just before the elections, as in 1999.)

 

Not that these mindless time-servers will suddenly feel guilty about having betrayed the Hindu cause. But politicians care about winning elections, and it might suddenly dawn on them that the secular Vikaswallahs ("development"-ists) in the government will never gain them a majority. These BJP secularists have been useful in the BJP's bid for a pat on the shoulder from the Nehruvians (in vain, but count on the BJP not to notice this outcome), but they are not the ones who will do the campaigning for the party. Only Hindu volunteers, including many RSS militants, will do that. I have plenty of criticism of the RSS, but I acknowledge that its rank-and-file has its heart in the right place and is willing to put in real work for the Hindu cause. However, if they don't get to feel that this has been a really Hindu government, they will fail to show up in 2019. And without them, the BJP has no chance.

 

An insider to the BJP's core group told me that that the AB Vajpayee government erred in not doing anything visibly pro-Hindu at all. He admitted that this had been a major cause of the BJP's surprise defeat in the 2004 elections. The proper lesson would be to implement pro-Hindu policies this time around. Abolishing the anti-Hindu discriminations in education and temple management would not ruffle feathers among the minorities, all while being very consequential for the future of Hinduism; so a pro-Hindu government should not waste time in taking these issues up. (By contrast, enacting a Common Civil Code, while fully a demand of secularism, would arouse a revolt among the Muslims.) However, that is not what the BJP has in mind. All they want to do is to "keep the pot boiling": whip up some Hindu emotions, but without doing anything. So, when visiting Dhaka or Kathmandu, BJP dignitaries make sure to be filmed while visiting a local temple in order to suggest a difference with the previous, secular government. That costs them nothing and yields Hindu society nothing, but it looks Hindu. The cow slaughter issue also came in handy, it arouses real feelings among the Hindu masses. But in the long run, this is not going to save the BJP. You can't run after the approval of your enemies (who will never vote for you anyway) while spitting on your core constituency.

 

 

Q. How do you look at serious negationism in India against the Islam?

 

The issue should not be dramatized. It is only history. And of course contemporary Muslims should be left free to distance themselves from the crimes of Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb. But the true story must be told. However, after Murli Manohar Joshi's failed attempt to rewrite the history textbooks ca. 2002 (a horror show of incompetence), there is not even an attempt in this direction.

 

On this front, the mendacious secularists have been gaining a lot of ground, in spite of eating humble pie in the Ayodhya controversy. The attempt by the Eminent Historians (and their Indian and foreign dupes) to deny the existence of temple foundations under the Babri mosque has been completely discredited. Yet, their underlying message that there never was an Islamic policy of temple destruction, and that it emulated a similar pre-existent Hindu policy, has won the day. Thus, when I speak about the Ayodhya affair, there is always someone in the audience who asks whether that temple destruction wasn't but an imitation of what Hindus had done. That belief wasn't around twenty years ago.

 

This shows the systematicity of secularist propaganda. While the Eminent Historians thought they could simply enforce their denial of Islamic iconoclasm, their American sympathizer Richard Eaton understood that at least some iconoclasm had to be admitted, but that the blame for it could be passed on to the Hindus. So he spun the story that a few cases of "idol abduction" by Hindu warlords, who re-installed captured icons in their own temples to continue their worship, amounted to the same thing as the thousandfold Islamic cases of destruction of icons. Immediately the secularists seized upon this story and propagated it through all channels. By contrast, my paper refuting this story was completely ignored by the Hindu militants, too smug and lazy to even take notice. The result in a sizable anti-Hindu switch in public opinion, even among common Hindus.

 

 

Q. The Hindus are more individualistic. They lack collectiveness. Is it a death instinct?

 

To some extent it is a healthy attitude. The Indian Republic is very correct in giving only a negative definition of "Hindu": any Indian who is not a Muslim, Christian or Parsi. That is also the historical definition applied by the Islamic invaders who imported the word "Hindu". A Hindu is just a normal person who happens to live in India, whereas Christians and Muslims are defined by their adherence to a superstitious belief. But yes, this common belief unites and mobilizes them, whereas the Hindus have to do without this standard to rally around.

 

 

Q. Must the Hindus in India have a media house exclusive to the community? Kindly elaborate.

 

"A media house exclusive to the community" is the kind of refuge that a minority would seek comfort in. Hindus should be more ambitious, and wrest the leading media houses back from the secularist stranglehold. They don't need to be exclusively Hindu. Just fair to Hindu positions, open to Hindu contributions, free from their present Hindu-bashing, that is good enough.

 

Exclusive media support to one religion, like state support to religion, is a bad thing. Long ago, I lived in Varanasi, and my landlord was Prof. Veer Bhadra Mishra, the head priest of the famous Sankat Mochan temple. When, some ten years ago, Islamic terrorists killed many worshippers at his temple, he gained a lot of applause with his plea for self-control and against Hindu revenge. He made a very important point on the need to keep religion and state separate: "A religion that is supported by the state, will become weak." When I see the religious landscape in Belgium, with a once-dominant Catholic Church completely crumbling in spite of plenty of state support, I can confirm the wisdom of Mishra's words. So, Hinduism does not need media houses of its own, it simply needs a level playing field. And that is an achievable goal: the anti-Hindu discriminations in the Constitution, the laws, policies and media, should go.   .

 

 

 

 

Dr. Koenraad Elst (Belgium 1959), who deliberately calls himself an "Orientalist", is the author of many publications on Indian religion and politics. Among them is the book On Modi Time (Delhi 2015), evaluating how the BJP's policies measure up to its erstwhile Hindu ideals. 

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