Equal rights for Hindus: one year later

 

 

Equal rights for Hindus: one year later

 

(IndiaFacts, 21 September 2020)

 

One year ago on Autumnal Equinox, 21 September 2019, Hindus organized a conference in Delhi devoted to the discriminations against the Hindus in the Constitution, and, on this bedrock, also extant in India’s laws and effective policies. This was not a Sangh initiative (though VHP leader Alok Kumar was present and being honoured), rather it had been called to formulate demands addressed to the Sanghi governing party. Formally, it was the work of an ad hoc grouping, the Hindu Charter (www.hinducharter.org). 

 

Some discriminations are rather academic and only consequential at several removes. Thus, the understanding of religious freedom as guaranteed in article 25, especially the inclusion of the right to propagate one's religion and thus to encourage others to convert, is tailor-made for the Christian mission. This interest group had successfully lobbied to ensure that the right to convert be included in the Constitution. It also fits the Islamic design to islamize all of mankind, but the notion of conversion is foreign to Hindus and even more to Parsis. So the constitutional right to convert seemingly creates a level playing field, counting for all religions, yet in practice it upholds a right central to Christianity and Islam but meaningless (except negatively) to Hinduism. It legalizes the aggression by the foreign and conquering religions to the detriment of the indigenous religion.

 

At the initiative of the Scheduled Tribes, targets par excellence of the missionary efforts, several Indian states have enacted laws against forcible or fraudulent conversion (which according to the missionaries and their secularist allies are non-existent anyway). But these state laws can never acquire teeth as long as the Constitution guarantees the right to propagate religion. Thanks to this unshakable guarantee, the missionary apparatus considers these anti-conversion laws as but an impotent scarecrow, useful only to underpin its own internationally propagated image of hapless victims being persecuted by an overbearing Hindu majority.

 

 

Education

 

The most consequential and effective discrimination is comprised in article 30. It guarantees *to the minorities* (leaving the majority unmentioned) the right to found and manage educational institutions. This means that Hindu schools can be nationalized or subjected to other government controls from which minority schools are exempt. In application of this discrimination, the Right to Education Act, enacted by the Congress-Communist combine in 2008, imposes a back-breaking burden on Hindu schools (putting hundreds out of business) from which it exempts minority schools. 

 

But before this too, the discrimination was already palpable. Thus, in the 1980s the Ramakrishna Mission's schools in West Bengal were harassed by the Communist teachers' unions and threatened with nationalization. Instead of appealing to Hindu society to come to its rescue, instead of challenging the discriminatory rules which made this hostile takeover possible, it dishonourably decided to abandon Hindu society and desolidarize itself from all other Hindu sects that invest in schooling. Instead it approached the Court to get itself recognized as a non-Hindu minority, exemplifying the scramble for the exit from Hinduism.

 

The RK Mission failed in its attempt at dehinduization, as had happened before already to the Sri Aurobindo Society: the Court had to admit that the respective founders, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, had explicitated that they were Hindu and had never intended to found a new religion. But the Arya Samaj at the Panjab state level, the Jains and the Lingayats did succeed in getting recognition as a non-Hindu minority religion. 

 

Point is that article 30 is a constant invitation to the Hindu sects to leave Hinduism. It tends to fragment Hindu society. Apart from the sheer injustice of this anti-Hindu discrimination, its power to trigger the fragmentation of Hindu society should be reason enough for pro-Hindu activists to do something about it. It also helps to confirm the state's right to interfere in other fields of Hindu life, especially the places of worship, again unlike the minorities' inviolable churches and mosques.

 

These two areas, education and places of worship, are extremely important in today's world. In centuries past, children became Hindu by spontaneously absorbing the religion and culture because these were all around them. That is much less the case today. By contrast, formal schooling is far more important than ever before. Keep the teaching of Hinduism out of the schools (a requirement of enforcing "secularism", but only on the Hindus), and it will enter the children's minds less and less. Unknown makes unloved, and it makes Hindus unable to defend the choice for Hinduism to others and even to themselves. This way, they become easy prey for whomever wants to seduce them into abandoning their ancestral religion and entering other worldviews and ways of life. For Hinduism, removing these discriminations is a matter of life and death.

 

 

Abolition

 

The conference a year ago resolved to try and influence the government into finally taking up the problem of this Constitutional inequality. But it can be doubted whether anyone except the participants has even heard of it. For the Government's policies, it has at any rate not made any difference. In 2018 there was a Private Bill by BJP MP Satyapal Singh, but both the party and the Government refused to take it up.

 

If the BJP and Narendra Modi had cared about Hinduism, they would have prepared the correct parliamentary procedures before acceding to power, and set to work in 2014 itself. Failing that, they could have come to their senses in a next phase, and belatedly set to work anyway. Instead, while they may have done their job on the development front, they remained emphatically passive on the "communal" front. Many in there are just time-servers satisfied with enjoying the perks of being in government.

 

The slightly more principled types, of RSS provenance, had absorbed so much of secularist thought that the idea of recognizing and abolishing anti-Hindu discriminations that were strangling Hindu life, just didn't even occur to them. Instead, they take pride in outdoing Congress in minority appeasement, having replaced Hindutva with "BJP secularism" as their ideological backbone. Even independent activist Hindus tend to get carried away by minor issues and muster no more than fleeting attention to the main issue.

 

The problem here is that Hindus are suckers for tokenism. With superficial gestures, wearing Hindu clothes and getting filmed visiting a temple here and there, BJP ministers can assure themselves of Hindu votes. A child's hand is easy to fill, and Hindus will gladly believe that only economic issues are "the real issues", while the reforms that would make a difference to the life and future of Hinduism are but "boutique issues" (to borrow the term that a Hindu actually used).

 

When put on the spot, BJP devotees defend the BJP's actual performance against the ideals to which they were once committed, like "justice for all, appeasement of none". They insist that the leaders "need time": even after more than 6 years in power, without discerning any BJP intention to stray from the Nehruvian path of minority appeasement (for that is what maintaining the anti-Hindu discrimination amounts to), many are still not ashamed to say this, all while consistently remaining passive on the issues for which they supposedly needed that time.

 

 

What to do

 

If you want to achieve any goal, you have an interest in being coldly realistic. Let us face the fact that there is very little commitment among even activist Hindus to abolish these discriminations. This is an instance of a situation with which leaders ought to be familiar. Some policies have popular appeal, but other policies, though the best-informed and most prescient leaders see how necessary they are, just don't ring a bell among the people. Yet, if a leader explains the need for abolishing these discriminations, every parliamentarian of the BJP (and many others too) will fall in line. Many don't think it is a priority, some had never thought about it, but no one will object to it.

 

This is all the more true because abolishing the Constitutional inequality between Hindus and non-Hindus is not hard to do. First of all, it may not even be necessary to amend the Constitution, possibly it is enough to approach the Supreme Court for an authoritative opinion. The judges may point out that the Constituent Assembly could not have meant to deny to Hindus the rights they were giving to the minorities. At that time, the Muslims and Christians were on the defensive, acutely feeling how that were deemed guilty of the Partition massacres c.q. the just-concluded colonial exploitation. The Hindu members had no reason at all to enact discriminations against themselves.

 

Secondly, if amending the Constitution still proves necessary, this need not be insurmountable. Many opposition MPs may supports reforms amounting to more equality. Congress and other parties still have their eyes on the Hindu vote-bank: maybe they never would have taken the initiative for this reform, but they will hesitate to oppose it once it is there. And with the thumping majority that it has, the BJP needs very few votes from outside. What a luxury, you’ll miss it when it’s gone.

 

The normalization of the Kashmir situation was harder, needing lots of security precautions and triggering many negative reactions from the usual suspects. But the BJP was ready to take these challenges on, partly because it was a safely secular issue. Everybody knows the separate status of Kashmir was due to its character as a Muslim-majority state, yet the relevant laws didn't mention religion. It could be framed in terms of national unity, a discourse in which the RSS-BJP is more at home than in anything pertaining to Hindu aspirations.

 

Once religion comes into the picture, the going gets tougher. This was clear from the CAA controversy earlier this year, about the welcome to be given to the non-Muslims oppressed in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, the enemy had it easy to deduce his allegations of BJP fanaticism from the obvious *inequality* between the religions in the CAA. This inequality between oppressed communities and oppressor community had its justification, but the mere mention of inequality counted as criminal to most outside observers. The episode ended as a publicity failure, a loss of face for the BJP government.

 

Well, here you don't have to accept the burden of a word that triggers negative knee-jerk reactions. Here you don't have to justify inequality, only to advertise equality. Who could be against equality?

 

That the Constitution discriminates against Hinduism, and that this has large-scale consequences for the transmission of Hinduism to the next generation, is one of India's better-kept secrets. Most academics suppress this information and pretend loudly that India is a secular state, i.e. a state with equality of all citizens before the law. It is not, and the good implication is that for secularists it will be hard to object to a reform that would turn India into a secular state, one in which no religion is discriminated against.

 

 

But

 

Of course, the secularists are going to resist this normalization of India's interreligious relations. They will for the first time be put in a position of openly having to defend inequality, but some will find a way of stooping that low without getting a bad conscience. Thus, some will say that in order to achieve equality, a little bit of inequality is necessary. That is the principle behind America's "affirmative action".

 

So they will claim (and we already have heard some professors, when pressed to pronounce on this, affirm it) that as a majority, the Hindus owe the minorities something. But in a secular state, there is no such thing as a minority, there are only equal citizens. To insist nonetheless on this point, they will allege that the American white majority has kept the black minority as slaves, ergo majorities commit injustice against minorities (an unjustified generalization), ergo in India too the majority has oppressed the minorities. 

 

Well, we have news for them: no, the Hindus have never oppressed the Christians nor the Muslims. The reverse, yes. So if inequality can be justified as a compensation for past injustice, then it is the Christians and Muslims who have to pay compensation.

But we should not go that far. For the present and future, simple equality will do.

 

 

Conclusion

 

The achievement of equality is not the end. Once the state has created a level playing field, civil society has the task of using the opportunities that arise. Hindus will have to take initiatives. A religion that relies on state patronage will become weak. 

 

Hindus should not want (and fortunately, by and large don't want) to replace a system discriminating against them by a system where they can discriminate against others. Just equality will do, and then let the best worldview and way of life win. But that very limited goal of equality is really necessary, and now becoming urgent. 

 

After 2019 even more than before, BJP devotees smugly assume that they are natural election-winners, so that they can safely postpone any jobs till next term. Right now the opposition is in relative disarray and not in a position to win against the BJP. But this can change. One of my farthest memories about Indian politics concerns the accession to power of the Janata Party, prepared by Jayaprakash Narayan's mass campaign that galvanized the opposition against the seemingly invincible Indira Gandhi. In the coming years too, we might see the rise of a leader type who manages to unite and motivate the opposition.

 

If the BJP loses power, many Hindus will rue the missed opportunities. What are the chances that an avowedly secularist government will care about justice for Hinduism and take the initiative to revise articles 25-30? Crying and gnashing of teeth, that is what many Hindus will feel when they realize that the seemingly timeless window of opportunity has passed, and that an ever-shrinking Hindu society has little chance of ever bringing it back.

 

But it need not come that far. You still have more than three years to get the job taken up and finished. What have you done to persuade the BJP leadership to use the unique window of opportunity that still presents itself?

Read more!

The truth about Ayodhya that many journalists seem to ignore

  

(Published in MyIndMakers, 10 Aug 2020)

 

Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord (Aleph, Delhi 2018) is the first book by Valay Singh. It is a journalistic overview of the developments pertaining to the Ayodhya affairs of the last years. The book is full of interesting anecdotes, both about the recent Ayodhya agitation and how the locals experienced it, and about the late Middle Ages.

 

Balanced?

On the cover, the book is announced as “a balanced chronicle of faith, fanaticism and the war between secularism and religious fundamentalism in a key battleground in modern India". Balanced?

Even before reading the book itself, we can form an idea by checking its index and bibliography. There we find that the main scholarly writers arguing for the Hindu claim to the site and about the fact and foundation of the Islamic iconoclasm that created the dispute in the first place, are simply absent. There is no mention of the very key to understanding the whole affair, viz. the 1990 book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them by historian Sita Ram Goel, which catalogues 1836 destroyed temples replaced by mosques, and presents the theology of Iconoclasm that explains it all.

There is only one mention of Prof. Meenakshi Jain. Perhaps her last Ayodhya book and certainly her book about the Hindu reaction to Islamic iconoclasm (2017, 2019) came a little too late for our author, but most certainly her earlier book (Rama and Ayodhya, Aryan Books, Delhi 2013) should have been a prime source for any later book on the Ayodhya affair. For one, by 2018 it was the only book that detailed how badly the Eminent Historians, Singh’s main source of faithfully parroted information, fared when put on the witness stand in Court. So, he only quotes Meenakshi  Jain (p.60) about a 5th-century Shiva linga, quite peripheral to the debate, though perhaps meant as useful to Rama deniers for asserting that Shiva was worshipped there and not Vishnu through his incarnations.

As a report, it is formally rather up to standard: when claims are made about living persons, he has contacted them for their version, as a journalist should. Thus, when the Shia Waqf Board became a party to the Ayodhya dispute very shortly before its conclusion, observers found it suspiciously close to the Hindu wish of weakening the Sunni position: “The desire of the Shia Waqf board members to ingratiate themselves to the Yogi or Modi govenments cannot be ruled out.” Valay Singh is a de facto supporter of the Sunni Waqf Board’s claim, so he has an interest in presenting all factors that may thwart it as suspect. Yet he admits, after due verification at the source: “The chairman of the Board, Wasim Rizvi, denied that this is the case.” (p.368) But then, Jesuits and journalists are known for wrong-footing the reader without brazen-faced lies but with selectively citing otherwise genuine facts.

 

 

The author

On the back cover, Singh is introduced as ”an independent journalist” who has launched himself by working for “NDTV as a researcher and editor” (not exactly a guarantee of objectivity) and has since become a widely-published columnist. Not a professional historian, and ever since the controversial intervention of the “eminent historians” in the Ayodhya affair, this might count as a good thing.

                His position in the ideological spectrum can also be deduced from the description (p.268) of  Irfan Habib as one of the “independent historians like Irfan Habib who had opposed the VHP”. The anti-temple historians representing the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) since December 1990 ludicrously called themselves “independent historians”, though they were statutorily and ideologically in the BMAC’s employ. An objective journalist would have taken his distance from this transparent camouflage, but Valay Singh has no qualms about showing on what side he stands.

By contrast, he sidelines the evidence dug up in the early 1970s by the dean of Indian archaeology, Prof. Braj Basi Lal, or rather, “pro-temple archaeologists like BB Lal” (p.268). No, first Lal did neutral excavations, and after that he stood by his findings; then, more than a decade later, the VHP showed interest in them. Note also that in the 1970s when he had made his discovery, PM Indira Gandhi emphatically ordered him to keep it secret. It is only when the debate came in focus in 1989 that he went public with it.

Unlike Irhan Habib, BB Lal has a record of going where the evidence leads him, regardless of partisan loyalties. Thus, when his diggings had found a human presence at the disputed site down to the -2nd millennium, this refuted the Eminent Historians’ claim that the Masjid had been built on virgin land, but it also conflicted with many Dharmacharyas’s belief that Rama had lived in the -6th or -13th millennium or even a million years back. He stood firm against their protests by replying: “I am not saying this, but my spade tells me so.” Likewise, in the Indo-European Homeland debate, he is nowadays falsely decried as “a convert to Hindu nationalism” for supporting the Vedic nature of the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilization, but for decades he was cited as the lone archaeologist who had given physical proof for the hypothetical Aryan Immigration. As a junior scholar in the 1950s, he had made his name by documenting the Painted Grey Ware and fitting it into the dominant immigrationist paradigm by identifying it as a sign of the Aryan movement deeper into India. Since the 1990s, however, he has gone public with the insight that he had only force-fitted his findings into the reigning paradigm without ever proving it, and that the accumulated evidence of the last decades points in the opposite direction: “The Vedas and Harappa are but two sides of the same coin.” That may be to the VHP’s liking, but the development of this insight was demonstrably independent from any ideological loyalty.

                Finally, note that at the time of the Supreme Court’s final verdict the BBC selected Valay Singh to report the reactions in Ayodhya. There was nothing to report: the carefully crafted stereotype that Kar Sevaks express their joy by organizing massacres of poor hapless Muslims turned out to be false, probably to the BBC’s disappointment. Indeed, this was representative of the cold shower felt throughout anti-Hindu circles: the controversy had been so much fun for them, with plenty of opportunities for virtue-signalling (“look how free I am from this superstitious Hinduism”) and an enemy you’d love to hate.  At any rate, the Mendacious Media only hand out such plum posts to people whom they deem ideologically reliable, i.c. “secularist”. 

 

 

History and myth

The drawback of Valay Singh’s journalistic approach is that he has to rely on others and isn’t sure of his grip on the less obvious elements, hence many instances of “it is said that” and similar hazy claims. Hence also some writing mistakes against technical terminology and historical names, e.g. “Puspamitra Sung” (p.7) for Pushyamitra Shunga.

If these corrections could still be dismissed as pedantry, more consequential is his unsophisticated understanding of the basic categories of history and mythology. On the first page of text already, he shows reliance on the secularist superficialism that “the Ramayana is an epic of mythology and scripture and not a historically verifiable document” (p.3). In fact, a text that is pure fantasy or “myth” is a modern invention. Ancient epics were typically rooted in real history, but with a lot of embellishment. Pitting mythology against history is a 19th-century childhood disease of the scientist worldview, when anything scriptural was laughed off as “obviously unhistorical”,-- until amateur Heinrich Schliemann dug up Troy and showed that Homer’s “fanciful legend” did have a basis in real history.

Here and there, Singh has dug up interesting anecdotes, though always in the service of an anti-Hindu agenda. Thus, we learn that in 1938, the Vaishnava Pandit Ramtahal Das wrote a “hagiograpical” biography of Akbar-age Vaishnava saint Devmurari. Yet he claims: “Pandit Ramtahal Das, himself a Vaishnava, displays remarkable neutrality when writing about the historicity of the Vaishnava tradition. He asserts that if there was indeed a Ram or Vaishnava centre in Awadh at the time of Nabhadas (circa 1600) it would certainly have been mentioned in his Bhaktamal.” (p.60) “Neutrality” is of course code for a viewpoint that comes in handy for Singh’s own narrative. So when Babar’s contemporary Guru Nanak does report his pilgrimage to Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, we are expected to consider this testimony “neutralized” by the alleged non-mention in this Nabhadas’ writings almost a century later?

“According to a legend, corroborated by interviews with several Vaishnava saints in Ayodhya, ‘if 500 Vaishnavs used to go to the north, only 50 would return.’ Ramtahal Das also confirms this in Devmurari’s biography: ‘the Dashnamis, with the help of north Indian kings, started attacking Vaishnav saints who used to venture northwards for pilgrimages. It was the time of Muslim rulers and they had decreed that the sects be allowed to settle their scores without interference.” (p.60) No close sources are given, only a “legend”, that is (in spite of his claming otherwise) not corroborated by any real sources. A 20th-century writer is quoted as alleging only that Vaishnava pilgrims got “attacked”, yet Valay claims that 95% of the Vaishnava pilgrims were “killed”, a pretty sensational phenomenon that ought to have left tangible traces in the record.

 

 

Casteism

Valay Singh’s desire to belittle Hindus and predictably reduce Hinduism to “caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste” makes him put a casteist spin on many stories. Describing a controversy between the purely Brahmin Ramanujis (followers of Ramanuja, the medieval philosopher crucial in the tradition of Rama worship) and the Ramanandi order, he quotes the Dutch scholar Peter van der Veer as certifying that a particular Ramanandi leader, Lakshmandas, had been humiliated by a Ramanuji teacher of Sanskrit. This proved that the Ramanujis looked down on the Ramanandis simply because, according to Van der Veer, “he belonged to the Ramanandi community.”

But a sectarian conflict can exist within any religion, and for a Hindu-basher, that is not good enough: Hinduism must be confirmed to be blacker than the rest, viz. through caste. So: “However, the possibility that van der Veer leaves out of his anthropological study is that (…)  Lakshmandas was perhaps not a high-caste Brahmin and as his guru knew that, he could not have given him the same pot that was used in his kitchen.” (p.177) This Singh writes less than one page after he himself had written that Lakshmandas had been “born in UP in a Brahmin family”.

The Ramanandis, because of their association with the Janmabhumi temple association, tend to be back-projected as the bad guys, yet Valay Singh reports that in 1813-14, “Francis Buchanan found that the Ramanandi priests ‘stressed upon their followers a strict moral code and adherence to a daily regimen of prayer and physical exercise; they also forbade meat and alcohol. Observance of their Vaishnava traditions gave them, untouchables included, a substantial amount of self-respect’, he concluded.” (p.94)

Unlike the secularists, who have demonized the Rama devotees, the British (who must have recognized much of their own Protestant innovation of Methodism in the Ramanandis) actually liked them: “The British found the Vaishnava values of complete devotion to a personal god to be more in line with their own idea of religion. As opposed to the militant, extremely ambitious and warlike Shaiva ascetics, the British found common ground with Vaishnavas.” (p.92)

Singh even admits that throughout the Vaishnava world, a fermentation of caste reform was taking place ca. 1900. Far from leading the peasant revolt of 1921, MK Gandhi actually tried to rein it in: “You, the peasants, should bear a little if the zamindar torments you.” (p.151) In their quest for social justice, the Vaishnavas went farther than upper-Bania Gandhi was willing to go.

 

 

The much-maligned British

Valay Singh of course rehashes the very popular lie (not just among secularists and Indologists, but also among Hindu sentimentalists) that British policies “result[ed] in the partition of the subcontinent on religious lines”. (p.180) No, it was the Muslim League’s policy that did so. There were only two significant opinion currents in the Muslim community, both Muslim supremacist: the traditionalists like Maulana Azad who felt that, like until the 18th century, Muslims could take full power in India in spite of being the minority (silly secularists call them “nationalist Muslims” because they tried to use Congress as their vehicle); and the modernists who took the new wave of democratic thinking into account and calculated that the Muslims should first settle for geographically limited sovereignty and only prepare for the conquest of the rest of the Subcontinent once the demographic equation had evolved in their favour.  The British involvement was limited to unwittingly creating circumstances favouring the second party over the first.

So, Singh misrepresents Muslim attacks on Hindus, such as the “Great Calcutta Killing”, which took place when the British were on their way out and the provinces had native autonomy. This pogrom, which convinced the British that their resistance to the Partition plan was useless, was planned by the Muslim League, with the passive connivance of the police which was under control of the Muslim League state government. He, however, denies Muslim agency by calling it a “large-scale riot” and a “massacre of Hindus and Muslims” (p.181). This is the usual media discourse: two-sided violence or even one-sided Muslim violence is presented as a Hindu attack on the poor hapless Muslims (as in late February 2020, when the Wall Street Journal and Scroll.in notoriously misrepresented a photograph of a Muslim rioters’ attack in Delhi as showing a Hindu attack), and only when the Muslim initiative is too glaring to be denied, their rearguard tactic is to present it as two-sided. In the case of the Great Calcutta Killing, this was purely a one-sided attack by the Muslim League on the Hindus, with the passive complicity of the state police, which only started to intervene as soon as the Hindu side managed to mobilize for self-defence.

All manner of probably true statements are spun to convey some anti-Hindu or at least Hindu-belittling messages. Thus, “given the late development of Ayodhya as a pilgrim centre, it was not surprising that most Hindus had never been to Ayodhya.” (p.234) Not too late for Guru Nanak to go on pilgrimage there in 1510-11 as per his Janam Sakhi biography, at any rate. But alright, even in the present age of trains and airplanes, it is still only a minority that has actually gone there, let alone in the age before high-tech. In those days, how many Muslims had been to Mecca and earned the title Hajji (someone who has performed the Hajj)? And does this prove that Mecca “developed only late as a pilgrim centre”? Journeying was long and difficult, only available to well-to-do people, mostly only in the latter part of their lives if their health still permitted it. For every lay pilgrim who made it to Ayodhya, there were a hundred Rama devotees back home.

Singh claims about Walter Hamilton’s gazette of 1928: “It is noteworthy that Hamilton finds not one temple to be described in detail.(...) His account makes no mention of Rama’s birthplace temple or of the Hanumangarhi or even the ancient Nageshwarnath temple.” (p.97) So he himself admits at least the existence of the Hanumangarhi and Nageshwarnath temples, yet notes that Hamilton doesn’t care to mention them. Rather than taking this non-mention as proof of how unimportant Rama’s birthplace is, he should merely have drawn the obvious conclusion that Hamilton never sought to give a description of Ayodhya’s religious landscape. So the non-mention of Rama Janmabhumi cannot even be used as an argument from silence (as non-historian Valay Singh does here), which would still be the weakest type of argument anyway.

By contrast, other British sources are conceded to mention the Hanumangarhi, but he still finds fault with those: “In 1855, curiously enough, no extant British record of the Hanumangarhi identifies the said mosque as Ram Janmabhumi.” (p.111)  Well, of course, because it wasn’t.

He adds facts that might become important the day a real history of the Ayodhya movement is written, e.g. that Hindutva stalwarts MS Golwalkar and Nana Deshmukh had been present for the installation of the idols in 1949. The strong involvement of the Hindu Mahâsabhâ from the beginning was already known, but recently the RSS has been magnifying its own role in the early Ayodhya agitation. Here Singh maintains a proper distance, qualifying this claim with “if true”. (p.189)

 

 

Me

There is a mention of myself (p.29), where I discuss Ramacharitmanas poet Tulsidas’s perfectly explainable non-mention of the purported temple demolition by his contemporary Akbar’s grandfather Babar. (I later learned that in a lesser-known text of his, the Doha Shataka from 1590, verse 85-92, deposed before the Allahabad High Court in 2003, Tulsidas does mention Babar’s destruction.) This is a rather peripheral historical argument within my book Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, which he has apparently read. The central thesis of the book, which he studiously ignores, consists of scholarly arguments for the temple, and a refutation of all the secularists’ and Eminent Historians’ attempts to escape this evidence.

Moreover, that book of mine also treats of a few parallel cases. Thus, it is where Singh could have found the demolition of the well-known false claim that Pushyamitra Shunga awarded a prize for the head of every Buddhist. Yet, he faithfully reproduces this false claim: “In Ayodhya, local tradition says that he declared a price of one gold coin for the head of one Buddhist. He is believed to have led a Brahmin campain to wipe out Buddhist rule from north India.” (p.7) The claim is not just wrong, but is also misattributed: his local informers have not expressed some “local tradition”. Being located far from Pushyamitra’s capital, the locals have merely parroted the Nehruvian story megaphoned through the textbooks and media. In history courses, you learn about the need for “origin criticism”; once you have some experience with this, you can, even before delving into the books or the dusty manuscripts, already see that in the present case, the claim is not based on some mysteriously preserved local tradition but on the (carefully engineered) received wisdom.

At any rate, Singh has been caught in the act of denying pro-temple evidence which he must have learned about as per his own testimony. So it doesn’t surprise us that he feigns unfamiliarity with the scholarly state of the art. According to him, the VHP sought “the cover of scientifically gathered evidence”  and “is said to have surmised that if the excavation proved (which it did in the minds of some Hindus) that there was a Hindu temple at the site prior to the Babri Masjid, then the demolition of the Babri Masjid was justified.” (p.270) No, proof from the excavations (converging with that from many documentary sources) did not just show the temple’s existence “in the mind of some Hindus”; this variegated proof is the scientific state of the art. Those who deny it, even if they boast academic titles, are ipso facto anti-science.

 

 

Some good things

Let’s not be overly pedantic. Some good things can be reported about this book. We learn here that Narasimha Rao (who, as PM, followed in Rajiv Gandhi’s footsteps by promising a solution in consonance with the historical evidence, a neutral way of saying: in accordance with the Hindu preference), according to a Congress politician, was “India’s first BJP Prime Minister”. (p.257) He certainly was India’s best PM so far, for he patronized the decisive move away from the Nehruvian socialist policies that had bankrupted India, and he sat unmoved through the news of Kar Sevaks demolishing the disputed structure without ordering the only thing that could have saved the Masjid: an intervention by the army. This actually saved many lives, for a standing Masjid would have swayed millions of fence-sitting Muslims to go on claiming this otherwise unimportant building, and would have dissuaded the Supreme Court from finally closing the controversy by letting common sense prevail: leave a Hindu sacred site to the Hindus.  

On p.82-83, he faithfully quotes the Austrian Jesuit Josepf Tieffenthaler, an eye-witness to the religious practices in Ayodhya. Like all witnesses in the first centuries after Babar, he reports plenty of Hindu activity at the site, esp. celebrations of his incarnation on Ram Navami; and conspicuously omits mentioning any Muslim activity there. Perhaps Akbar, who sought to curry favour with the Hindus as a counterweight to the sectarian and ethnic Muslim lobbies threatening his power, had reached a compromise with the Hindus to the effect that they could worship Rama there on condition of not offending the Muslims by demolishing the mosque architecture. The details about that period, probably ending with or interrupted by Aurangzeb’s iconoclastic fury, remain to be explored by the historians, who are all the more free to do so now that the burden of a momentous controversy has been lifted. 

Singh also approaches honesty when he reports: “On 27 February 2002, more than fifty karsevaks were burnt to death reportedly by a ‘Muslim mob’.” (p.262) These scare quotes were unnecessary, the facts have been established and even confirmed by the judiciary, but at least the true story is more or less explicitated.

This is his farewell sentence: “Ayodhya has come a long way in its journey over millennia, and while today it is called the graveyard of Inda’s composite culture and rule of law, I am hopeful that this label, too, will not stick forever. Ayodhya will keep changing its course with the river Sarayu as its eternal witness.” (p.369) We retain that the false label on Ayodhya as graveyard of pluralism will, in spite of frantic attempts by the secularists, not stick forever.

 

 

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Ram Swarup & Sita Ram Goel Centenary Conferences

Ram Swarup & Sita Ram Goel Centenary Conferences

(22 July 2020)

On 12 October 2020 is the centenary of Ram Swarup, which the Ram Swarup & Sita Ram Goel Memorial Fund intends to celebrate by means of some kind of a conference. Unless circumstances clear up miraculously, this will have to be in teleconference format. This is admittedly make-do, but at least we won't let this solemn occasion pass by unsung. One advantage of this emergency format is at least that it won't cost much, chiefly the cost of the technological team that will ensure our digital connectedness.

On 16 October 2021 is the centenary of Sita Ram Goel. By then, fingers crossed, it should be possible to organize a real conference. There, we should be able to present the Congress Proceedings of the Ram Swarup conference, or at least a collection of papers on Ram Swarup; and a Sita Ram Goel reader, with which I have started to occupy myself. For this, in accordance with the family's wishes, I will seek the patronage of a particular prestigious institute, but this first requires a successful call for papers.

Call for Papers

For the Ram Swarup teleconference, we welcome papers on any aspects of his life and works: the Changers' Club, his role in the Quit India movement, Gandhian activism and critique of Gandhi, critique of Communism, view of language, critique of Christianity and Islam, view of Hindu Dharma, and his influence on Hindu society. Since you don't honour a great man by reverentially keeping him on a sterile pedestal, we emphasize that this may include reasoned criticism. We set a soft deadline on 15 August, but don't feel inhibited if inspiration strikes you later than that.

For the Sita Ram Goel conference, we already declare the call for papers open, so we welcome abstracts of papers the sooner the better, though the actual (hard) deadline will be 15 August 2021. We need twelve of these abstracts soon in order to comply with institutional patronage conditions. They may pertain to any part of Goel's intellectual production, but also to his organisational work in the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia, his candidacy for the Lok Sabha in 1957, the business side of his career, his troubled relation with organised political Hinduism, and of course the inspiring role of Ram Swarup in the development of his thought, which he always acknowledged.

We emphasise our appreciation for any testimonial work that may be offered. Their books will remain extant and be commented on by future generations, but the people who can add to their biographies from personal experience are getting on in years and will soon disappear forever. So we would like them to speak out now. Also, anyone unable or unwilling to participate in a conference but having new data or insights to offer, are welcome to entrust these to paper and send it in. Finally, if you know anyone whom we have overlooked but needs to be heard in this context, please pass on their names or pass this message on. 

We hope to hear from many of you very soon, and will keep you posted.

Dr. Koenraad ELST 

Chairman of the Ram Swarup & Sita Ram Goel Memorial Fund

All correspondence to: koenraad.elst@gmail.com

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Even more on Hinduism

 (written in January 2018, published in the forthcoming issue of the ICHR bulletin)

What does American academe think about Hinduism nowadays? Well, just like in questions about God, the answer “depends on what you mean by that term”. Geoffrey Oddie, general editor of the series including the present collective book, Hinduism in India, thematizes the term in the first chapter. The original geographical meaning of Hindu as “Indian” remained in use into the late 19^th century, when native converts called themselves “Hindu Christians”. Yet since the entry of the Muslims in the Middle Ages, it had acquired a second meaning which gradually became standard, viz. an Indian non-Muslim, a Heathen. Today, it has become quite unacceptable to describe an Indian Muslim or Christian as Hindu, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat draws a lot of flak when he asserts once more that “every Indian is a Hindu”.

Just like e.g. Greek philosophy, divided in different mutually antagonistic schools yet understood as a single project when looked at from the outside, Hinduism was heavily conscious of its divisions in Shaivas vs. Vaishnavas, Sankhya vs. Vedanta, etc., until confrontation with an outsider made it realize its relative unity. From at least the 13^th century, doxographers like Madhavacharya see a pan-Hindu essence, able to compete with the creeds defining Islam and Christianity. In this book, unfortunately, while this is correctly enunciated, it remains only a sociological nod to a human reality but without any ideological flesh: no attempt is made to analyse just what this core could be contentswise.  

This book is, after all, more focused on contemporary Indian sociology than on religious contents through classical or vernacular sources. The latter are featured mostly in the chapters on folk Hinduism (with the “little traditions” contrasting with the Sanskritic “great tradition”), the religious role of ghost-possession, and the modern guru movements. Really existing Hindu society is studied more closely in chapters on its economics, healing traditions, the impact of modernity and specifically of the media, transformations in the institute of marriage, Hindu law, and of course the caste system. The latter chapter is not the usual litany against Hinduism as “nothing but caste religion, the religion that decrees inequality between people”, but juxtaposes that view with its opposite, that “we are so embroiled in understanding caste system that the other salient aspects of caste has been relegated to the back seat” (p.272).

This way, some papers approach scholarly objectivity; but truth to tell, most contributors do show their bias to a limited degree, as they drink in this default position during their Indology studies. Contrary to their Arabic or Chinese counterparts, the Indian Studies departments have been structurally anti-Hindu for decades, so the absorption of this bias is no surprise. Mercifully, it is mostly insinuated here in small doses so that only the expert will notice.

Thus, the Moplah violence during the Khilafat movement was directed against “Kerala landlords” (p.109) as if was merely a social and not a religious struggle, a negationist thesis promoted by the Communists. This way, Hindus are spirited away from the “victim” category and turned into exploiters who only deserved what they got. Likewise, the not-so-innocent Saint Thomas legend, unhistorical (he never set foot in India) anti-Brahmin blood libel (they never murdered him) but profitable to the Christian mission, is uncritically taken for granted (p.103). The Hindus are accused of being “discriminatory” (p.17) because caste-based reservations are (or rather, were) limited to the broadly defined Hindu category, not extending to Christians or Muslims. In fact, this is a logical corollary of Christian and Muslim propaganda that their religions know no caste and that any Dalit convert ceases to be a Dalit. Indeed, when establishing the first caste reservations in 1935, the British expressed willingness to extend this privilege to the missionaries’ flock, but those missionaries refused. They still had a sense of consistency and honour.

In most cases, no malice need be involved: the Indology departments typically attract India-lovers who innocently swallow the uniquely hostile bias without really realizing it. In the section of “secularism”, however, Timothy Lubin makes claims (or merely repeats them, as most authors do) that can’t stand scrutiny at all. Unfocused outsiders may have swallowed them, but to actually prepare a paper on that very subject and then still calling India a “secular state” (p.50), admitting that this claim is criticized yet remaining silent on the prime reason for this criticism, viz. the constitutional as well as the effective discriminations against Hindus and Hinduism esp. in education and temple management, is either blindness or bad faith.

It is the most eminent among the contributors, Robert Eric Frykenberg, who goes the farthest in expressing his bias. He shudders to think what an “absolute majority” for the BJP would do (p.116). Well, since 2014, the party does have an absolute majority, and what calamity has befallen India? To explain the BJP’s policies in the 21^st century, he has nothing better to show than the same two worn-out quotes from the RSS leader-to-be, MS Golwalkar, penned down in 1938 (p.116). He likens the Hindu Nationalist organizations to Fascism, in the US the single gravest allegation you can possibly make, and calls them “totalizing, if not totalitarian” (p.116). He slanderously alleges that Hindu leader VD Savarkar was complicit in the Mahatma Gandhi murder, against the police findings and the judicial verdict. Short, the same tone you routinely find in India’s dominant anti-Hindu media, apparently the uncritically swallowed source of his view of Hinduism.  

When I first met him, at Wisconsin University’s Annual South Asia Conference in 1995, the India-watching community was filled with foreboding about an imminent BJP breakthrough to power. The experts were outdoing each other in predicting how terrible BJP rule would be: “They will come down on Dalits and women”, “They will abolish democracy”, “They will throw all Muslims into the Indian Ocean”. None of those academics has ever publicly recanted or apologized, yet the BJP has been in power now for ten years (1998-2004, 2014-18, and even for thirteen days in 1996) and nothing of the sort has happened.

Or has it? Not if you live in the real world, but the parallel world which the Indologists have created for themselves is different. Frykenberg claims the post-Godhra riots (the anti-Hindu Godhra pogrom itself, trigger of what followed, remains unmentioned) resulted in “10,000 Muslims killed”, i.e. reality times ten (p.115). He thinks the Vajpayee government went all out with an “authoritarian agenda of ‘saffronization’ aimed to ‘Hinduize’ all institutions and to bring minority people ‘into the Hindu fold’ by whatever means necessary” (p.115); in reality, the few Hindu Nationalist intellectuals were desperate at the party’s lackadaisical treatment of the cultural frontline, where it left the power equation untouched and proved to have no higher ambition than an ever-elusive pat on the shoulder from the secularists. The term “saffronization” mainly referred to Vajpayee’s creation of a chair for Indian Studies in Oxford, that ended up being given to a vocal enemy of Hindutva.  

It has been the same thing under Narendra Modi: no “draining the swamp”, no overhaul of key educational or research posts, only an inconsequential bias towards Hindutva-reputed artists in the awarding of prizes, and doling out posts to useless gerontocrats as reward for their lifelong service to the party. “BJP secularism” proves to be a very enduring doctrine, the maker of government policy, yet it is steadfastly ignored by the India-watchers. So, next to some informative chapters, a few mainly just tell us what is wrong with present-day Indology, or rather, with “South-Asian Studies”.  

Will Sweetman and Aditya Malik, eds. (under general editor Oddie, Geoffrey): Hinduism in India: Modern and Contemporary Movements (Sage, New Delhi, 2016). Pp. xviii+312. Rs 795/-. ISBN: 978-93-515-0099-5

Dr. Koenraad Elst, Visiting Professor at Indus University, Ahmedabad

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Speculations about the mental condition of some Hindu Saints

On 1 May 2017, I received an invitation for the release by the Dalai Lama (IIC Delhi, 25 May) of Arun Shourie's new book: TWO SAINTS: Speculation around and about Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Ramana Maharshi (publisher Harper Collins). From the announcement:

"The life of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa ‘enables us to see God face to face’, Gandhiji wrote. Similarly, when someone in his circle was distraught, the Mahatma sent him to spend time at the Ashram of Ramana Maharshi. Such was their stature and influence.

"The Paramahamsa and the Maharshi have been among the greatest spiritual figures of our country. They have transformed the lives of and have been a solace to millions. Moreover, in our tradition, words of such mystics are regarded as conclusive. They have evidentiary status: if they say there is a soul, there is; if they say there is life after death or reincarnation, there is. Their peak, mystic experience is what we yearn to have, even just once.

"But what if several of the experiences they had—the feeling that someone higher is present next to them, the feeling that they are floating above their body, looking down at it; the ‘near-death experience’; the ecstasy; the visions "Did the experiences occur from some ailment? As was alleged in the case of Sri Ramakrishna? From some ‘madness’, which he for long feared had taken hold of him. From the fits that Sri Ramana said he used to have?

"What of the experiences of devotees? Seeing the Master where he wasn’t? Seeing the Master, feeling his presence, after he had passed away? Are these hallucinations? Or do they testify to the Master’s divinity? How would conclusions about their experiences affect their teaching? That the world and everything in it is ‘unreal’?

"In the light of their pristine example, how should we view and what should we do about the godmen and gurus who control vast financial and real estate empires today, to whom lakhs flock? Are they the saints they set themselves up to be or just marketers?

"With the diligence and painstaking research that mark all his work, Arun Shourie probes these questions in the light of the recent breath-taking advances in neuroscience, as well as psychology and sociology. The result is a book of remarkable rigour: an examination—and ultimately reconciliation— of science and faith as also of seemingly antagonistic, irreconcilable worldviews."

As a first reaction to this book, that I haven't seen yet, I must say I am curious to see what Arun Shourie has to reveal about this subject. It is of crucial importance, for numerous Hindus venerate persons. Special persons of great merit, but nonetheless persons with their contingent qualities and experiences. Not quite apaurusheya ("impersonal", said of the Vedas).

In the past I have argued that Mohammed was a textbook case of paranoia, with a central delusion of chosenness nurtured by sensorial hallucinations. The auditive part of those hallucinations became the Quran. This argument built on earlier similar observations: by psychologists, ex-Muslims, Mohammed's own neighbours, and even Mohammed himself. Indeed, upon receiving (or rather, undergoing) his first hallucination, he feared he was becoming mad, or as they called it: possessed by an evil spirit. He even tried to commit suicide to avert the fate of becoming Mecca's village idiot, but his wife Khadija managed to soothe him and accustom him to these recurring hallucinations. She fatefully practised "folie a deux", i.e. supporting an afflicted dear one by entering into his delusion, and thus set the example for all those millions of Muslims who have interiorized and actually believe Mohammed's cardinal delusion: "Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah."

This viewpoint has cost me a lot of bad press: in New-Age and Gandhian-Hindu circles because of their affirmation that "all religions are equally true" and that therefore, "all founders of religion were equally good (c.q. spiritual, enlightened)", and in RSS-BJP circles where they hope to solve the Islam problem on the cheap, viz. by avoiding the tough questions and repeating the lie that "the founder was right and enlightened, it is only some of his followers who has misunderstood or distorted his message". By contrast, it was welcomed by others, including some of the Indic Academy. Yet even among these sympathizers, there sometimes was a sneaking doubt.

"Yes, definitely there was something wrong with Mohammed", they say, "but, errr, could you not argue something similar about some Hindu saints?" Well, unlike Islam, Dharma doesn't stand or fall with the mental condition of one individual. But I do not exclude the possibility that on the margins, some individual had enough of a spiritual aura to attract followers, yet also thrived on a self-delusion.

A friend of mine was the personal disciple of a Lingayat Guru (now deceased), living with him for seven years somewhere outside Dharwad. No snide word about that Guru. However, in that same village, there was a vagrant fellow who, from all episodes my friend described, and from the photograph I saw, appeared to be crazy. Yet, sometimes he was garlanded by the villagers and treated like a saint. Common people do not apply much power of discrimination when they see odd behavior. What is crazy to one is saintly to another. That indeed is why in his beginnings as a cult founder, Mohammed met both skepticism and credulous acceptance.

Among famous Hindu sages, it definitely is Ramakrishna who has most readily been suspected of suffering from a neurological ailment. Not having studied his life and works (save for his attitude to Christianity and Islam), I will not offer an opinion there. About Ramana Maharshi, such suspicions are not usually voiced. Let us see what Shourie makes of these two. In his book about suffering, Does He Understand a Mother's Heart?, he has proven himself skeptical of the Karma doctrine dear to most Hindus. His falling-out with Narendra Modi and the present BJP may have made him even more ready to "hurt Hindu sentiments". Let us see.

Enlightenment is not about "experiences", but about a zero state of consciousness beyond experiencing (which implies that any vision excitedly ascribed to Ramakrishna by his followers was not Enlightenment). Whereas Descartes said that "I think, therefore I am", with "thinking" covering all states of consciousness, and with all these states standing on the side of consciousness in its dualistic opposition to matter; the ancient Indian Sankhya philosophy opposes only pure consciousness, conscious of itself but not "experiencing" anything outside itself, to all matter including all states of applied consciousness (sensory perception, memory, imaginaton...) lined up on the other side. As you know, the intake of substances can trigger altered states of consciousness. For Descartes, this poses a problem, for how can something material affect the separate world of "thinking" (pure plus applied consciousness) ? For Sankhya, the problem doesn't pose itself, for the altered states of consciousness triggered by substances (starting with chocolate taken to soothe depression)  all belong to Nature/Prakrti, as distinct from Purusha, the unit of consciousness. Compare it to a computer: it can reason, it can deduce a conclusion from the data it is fed, yet this process is not conscious.

So, it is a perfectly natural state of affairs from the Sankhya viewpoint if electrodes applied to specific parts of the brain trigger altered states of consciousness. If neurological research, and now perhaps Arun Shourie, confirm this, they may ruffle some feathers among Bhakti (devotional, "religious") Hindus, but they remain within the confines of Hindu philosophy. Many mental phenomena may well fall within the ambit of neurology, many strange experiences may well be triggered by mechanical and material causes; and Hindus may well be called upon to define their spiritual practices anew.

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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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