I received the following post on a Hindu list: "Finally, Romila Thapar admits: 'Fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan.' Satan (or the irrational fear of an imaginary bogeyman) is the bedrock of Abrahamic cults like Islam and Christianity. So, Romila Thapar actually meant to write this (but was dishonest enough to not admit that): 'The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Abrahamic cults like Islam and Christianity.'"
Let me first be clear about what I reject in this post. First of all, the typically Hindu hyperfocus on persons, viz. on retired History Professor (JNU) Romila Thapar, author of A History of India, part 1. I don't care about her personally opting for Nehruvian secularism and all that goes with it. She is a mediocre person who rode with the tide, and the question is why Nehruvian secularism was the tide.
And secondly, the term Abrahamic, admittedly an improvement upon Semitic, but meant as another word for prophetic-monotheistic. Abraham was the ancestor of the Jews, with whom Hindus have no quarrel because they never tried to convert the Hindus as Christians and Muslims have done. The latter two sects have later tried to appropriate Abraham, the Christians by their theory of them being the "true Israel", the Muslims by their claim of being the vicarious descendants of Abraham's first son Ismael. But according to the Bible, the closest source we have on Abraham's family, Ismael returned with his mother Hagar to her native Egypt after his father had a fully legitimate son with his wife Sara, and never had anything to do with Mohammed's Arabia. It is one more case of Mohammed garbling the Biblical stories which he had heard from Jews around the campfire.
Now, coming to the interview which Romila Thapar gave, and to which the Hindu list's attention was being drawn: http://aboutfilm.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/romila-thapar-%E2%80%93-a-history-of-india-and-the-absence-of-satan/ . Under the title "A History of India and the Absence of Satan" (About Film, wordpress, 15 May 2008), one Shakila quotes her as saying:
"Wealth in India, as in every other ancient culture, was limited to the few. Mystical activities were also the preoccupation of but a handful of people. It is true, however, that acceptance of such activities was characteristic of the majority… whereas in some other cultures the rope-trick would have been ascribed to the promptings of the devil and reference to it suppressed, in India it was regarded with amused benevolence. The fundamental sanity of Indian civilization has been due to an absence of Satan."
Indeed, whereas the Christian Middle Ages were bedevilled by fear of the irrational, Hindu civilization learned to cope with it. It had a fundamental sanity where Christian and Islamic civilization were based on a belief in the divine intrusion into history. But Romila Thapar cannot bring herself to seeing this fact and naming it by its proper name: Hindu civilization had a fundamental sanity. It reminds me of Mani Shankar Aiyar, a Minister in the last Congress government, who wrote in his Sunday column some twenty years back to this effect: "There is something in the air here that makes us tolerant"-- but he didn't dare to name that something because it was called Hinduism.
Read more!
Monday, April 16, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Ramachandra Guha in Leuven, Belgium
Even in an age where physical meetings are no longer necessary for communication, it remains interesting to see the human face behind the paper or the e-mail up close. So, today (8 March 2012) I took a trip to my hometown Leuven where Indian sociologist Ramachandra Guha was scheduled to speak in the Grote Aula, a major lecture hall of the Catholic University Leuven normally used by students of Liberal Arts and Theology. He is part of the liberal academic establishment after making his name as a pioneer of “Subaltern Studies”, a soft-Marxist discourse advertised as giving a voice to the voiceless in history, such as women, low-castes and tribals.
The lecture was a big event, organized by the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, with welcoming introductions by spokesmen of the University, the City of Leuven, and the Indian Embassy. Next, Prof. Idesbald Goddeeris, who used Guha’s books India after Gandhi and Makers of Modern India in his own Dutch-medium book on Indian history, gave a eulogy of this internationally acclaimed public intellectual. After twenty minutes of Indian-style floral tributes, Guha himself finally took the floor.
Diversity
He started out with an “entirely non-controversial” statement: “India is the most interesting country in the world.” Nobody had any quarrel with that.
What he meant by that was mainly India’s diversity. He mentioned Sonia Gandhi as “Italian yet completely Indian. None of us regard her as anything less than completely Indian.” Well, I am hearing other opinions on that, pointing to her fleeing abroad or to the Italian Embassy in times of crisis. Second example: “India’s most highly regarded development economist was born in Leuven: Jean Drèze, son of a Belgian economist, but himself an Indian economist and holder of an Indian passport.” Opinions on the wisdom of Drèze’s socialist policies differ, but in his case there is no doubt about his Indianness.
Why is India the most interesting country? “There are twice as many Christians in India as in Belgium”, and certainly more than that, especially if you include the crypto-Christians and take into account that most census Christians in Belgium and Europe are only nominal, effectively lapsed Christians. And this Christian presence “goes back to the first century” CE. Here, like most Indian public figures mentioning Christianity, Guha buys into the legend that Saint Thomas came to Kerala in 52 CE, a belief even the Pope has rejected. But never mind, we can agree that there is an ancient and well-integrated Christian presence in India, 4th-century or so. Further, “in 1947 Pakistan was created as a state for Indian Muslims, but now there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.” More exceptionally, “India is the only country in the world that has never practiced anti-Semitism.” Next to the religious there is the linguistic diversity. Guha counted 17 languages on the rupee notes.
All this helps to make India “the world’s most ambitious and most reckless experiment”. No nation was born in more hostile circumstances. Divided, with a bloody civil war raging from August 1946 to (well after) Independence in August 1947, barbarities, and 8 million refugees to be resettled. But no nation had such capable generation of founding figures, on a par with those of the USA. Mahatma Gandhi became world-famous as a non-violent agitator (Nobel-winning writer Wen Jaibao published a book acknowledging his debt to Gandhi), social reformer, interfaith dialogue pioneer and feminist. Many will frown upon reading the latter claim, and even the other ones are disputed, but let that pass.
The second figure was Bhimrao Ambedkar, 14th son of a soldier in British-Indian army, who with the help of a progressive Maharaja went on to obtain Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, then returned to India in 1926, spurning a comfortable career in the West. He pioneered the emancipation of the Scheduled Castes and of women through the Constitution.
The third one was Jawaharlal Nehru, who was, like Gandhi (but, we may add, poles apart with Ambedkar), a prophet of Hindu-Muslim harmony, as well as an upholder of linguistic diversity and of women’s rights. When he piloted the Hindu Personal Law Code through Parliament, with equal rights to inheritance, divorce etc., no less than 149 demonstration against it took place in one year.
India was expected to fail. Illiteracy stood at 65% in 1952, when the first general elections took place, allegedly “the biggest gamble in history”. Election commissioner Sukumar Sen came up with idea of party symbols, still in use: the Congress Party’s hand, the BJP’s lotus flower, etc. Winston Churchill predicted that in an independent India, the Brahmins (indeed the main enemies of colonial power, vastly overrepresented among freedom martyrs -- KE) would take power, “relying on the support of German mercenaries”! Aldous Huxley, though a yoga enthusiast and friend of India, predicted that after Nehru’s death, the military would take over. Yet, Indian democracy has endured. As they say, “India has general elections, her neighbours have elections of generals”. Paul Ehrlich, author of the doomsday book The Population Bomb, wrote that he understood the population problem emotionally during a taxi ride in Delhi, surrounded by these endless waves of people. He predicted, over 40 years ago, that soon so many millions would die of starvation.
India endures
So, why has India proven these predictions wrong? Why has democracy survived? Why no military coup? Guha listed five reasons:
1) Democracy. There have been 15 general elections with over 400 million people voting. 5 states just now polling, and over 70%. Democracy is a release for discontent etc. Even in Kashmir, there were 70% voting. Villagers defy the Maoist interdictions to vote. Not that Guha is in the pay of the politicians: “Of the three national parties, Congress dislikes me, the Communists distrust me, and the BJP detests me.”
2) Inspired by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, India deliberately didn’t follow the European model of nation-building, with one language, one religion, and one common enemy. To be Polish meant to speak Polish, to be Roman Catholic, and depending on the time of history, to hate either the Germans or the Russians. By contrast, “in India the Gandhian model of embracing diversity has succeeded”.
3) Another factor is the existence of an independent judiciary.
4) The Hindi film industry and its output in popular music has promoted the knowledge of Hindi throughout the country. Hindi as prospective national language has been abolished, but its voluntary spread through film is successful.
5) Cricket, the most popular sport and topic of one of Guha’s books.
As for the economic surge: it is impressive in the aggregate and in certain sectors. It is changing the Western perception: from basket-case to emerging superpower. But both images are vastly exaggerated.
Some challenges to India’s unity
Challenge 1. The opinion is for a Hindu version of Pakistan. Pluralism is hard-won and fragile, threatened by Hindu majoritarianism and by international Islamic fundamentalism. The 2002 Gujarat riots were horrible, but since then no major riots have occurred. Religious tempers have cooled on both sides. To Guha’s knowledge, there is no Indian member of Al-Qaida.
Challenge 2. Out of 28 states, 25 are totally reconciled to being Indian. There is still discontent in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland. Baptist Nagas were fighting till 1998, but their situation is unsolved constitutionally. In Manipur there are no less than 3 wars: the hill Kuki, the hill Naga and the plains Vaishnava all have something against the other.
Challenge 3. Instability in neighbouring countries.
Challenge 4. Growing Maoist insurgency in Central India, comprising 5 to 7% of territory. Its origin lies in the dispossession of the tribals (bauxite, iron, environmental degradation): that is the brutal side of globalization.
Westerners underestimated Indians then, and overestimate them now. Visionaries found democracies, but these can be led in mid-career by mediocrities. Compare Jefferson with GW Bush, or Mahatma Gandhi with Sonia Gandhi. India is plagued with weakness, sectarianism, nepotism, corruption. So, not a superpower, only the most interesting country in the world. Thank you very much.
Questions & answers
After his secular but realistic discourse, Prof. Guha agreed to take some questions.
On regional parties: multiple layers are part of the strength of Indian Democracy. Tamil is as Indian as Bengali, low-caste is as Indian as high-caste etc. Since the sixties, these sectional interests seek political expression.
On Panjab. In the 1980s, some Sikhs staged an insurgency for independence. Today the state is completely at peace. Is was a triumph of Indian democracy. Till 1963, a Tamil party wanted a separate homeland; Mizoram got likewise reconciled to India. Then, in Panjab, there was violence of both Hindus and Sikhs. But in these three states, the conflict was successfully and honourably resolved.
On law (books vs. action), on the progressive Constitution, on the activist judiciary and Supreme Court, on equality promoted yet discrimination continued, on practice vs. principle: it’s a fifty/fifty democracy. 2000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat, most human rights are violated by the State Government, which refused to implement the Supreme Court verdict. Part of the problem is the simultaneity of building a nation, a democracy, and modern industry. I admire Norway, it never made war on another country, neither has India. Norway is maybe 65% democracy, India 50%, not a “formal” but an “imperfect democracy”.
On “truly frightening” right-wing Hindu nationalism (by an Indian questioner), whether it will always be a force: As a citizen, I detest right-wing Hindu nationalism, I will vote for any other party. As a historian, I would say; so long as you have Pakistan, you will have Hindu nationalism. If the political class is alert, it will weaken, but if the political class is weak, Hindu nationalism will be in the ascendant. The Jihadis bomb Bombay to provoke Hindu-Muslim violence. The Kashmiri movement started for rights, was taken over by Jihadis, and expelled Hindus from the Valley.
On the difference between the electorate and the politicians: you need a lot of money for the elections (which you recover after winning), so reforms should make it transparent and state-funded.
On his favourite political leader: Nitish Kumar in Bihar. He is focused on development etc., not corrupt, sectarian, nepotistic. Politicians are more imperfect than us because they inherit our imperfections.
On corruption and movements against it: Part fault of the movement itself, they disregarded Mahatma Gandhi’s “duty of compromise”. The media are good at highlighting the problem, not the solution.
On caste, art. 17 abolishes discrimination on caste, there is affirmative action along caste lines, hence there is more caste voting, yet the Tata Institute says nothing has been done: This is ridiculous, much remains to be done, but much has been done. Vide Mayawati, a woman of Scheduled Caste origin who has been Chief Minister of the most populous state repeatedly. Dumont described the homo hierarchicus, but this is changing. Taliban antifeminism is just a “South Asian practice”?
On superpower claims (affirmed by an Indian): Political/business/media elites chase this superpower thing, this male thing. But so many internal problems remain. In India this claim looks absurd, but Non-Resident Indians might say it (cfr. Jews in New York are crazier than in Israel, Khalistan sustained from Canada).
On affirmative action for SC/ST/OBC, upto 70% of the population. This presupposes identifying them, hence strengthening these identities. Caste is declining as a social practice, in terms of marriage, but it is gaining a new lease of life in politics. The Supreme Court kept it at 50% though some states have it higher. I think it’s too much. Not just for income, but for discrimination itself. I would advocate 25-30%. Thus, Lingayats are no longer backward, but a concession once given is hard to withdraw.
On “Population Bomb predictions didn’t materialize, but problems are sure to grow”: Population growth is steadily going down as women join the workforce. In China it was compulsory, we do it voluntarily. The crucial challenge is not numbers but consumption: how much per person? This way, there are too many Belgian, not too many Indians. Bangla Desh is a basket-case: 1 American = 70 Bangla Deshis, 1 American cat = 1 Bangla Deshi person.
On poverty and the vast difference between China and India: This is a complex issue, but India defied the skeptics. However, there are problems with the declining standards of public services. Every citizen should get decent education and healthcare. Education is demand-driven, better, but healthcare is seriously deficient.
On Islam in India, not on Jihad: Bangla Desh sw a brief spike in Islam in the 1980s, now it is making strides in development, Indonesia moves slowly towards democracy, so Islam is not equally everywhere predisposed to violence (though Muslims everywhere are upset about the American invasion in Iraq). But there is a battle in every religion between liberals and reactionaries. Indian Muslims sense Pakistan is a failed state, that’s where Islamic fundamentalism goes.
On how relations between West Bengal and Bangla Desh are worse than those between India and Bangla Desh, and on how Foreign Investment Laws are not implemented by Karnataka: I disagree on how you represent it. It is true but not systemic, it is just due to the weakness of Manmohan Singh. Bihar is patriarchal, run by a Rajput, Nitish Kumar. But every girl passing middle school will receive a cycle to go to highschool in town, and unexpectedly this didn’t lose him the election.
Comment
True enough that India survived thanks to a decentral model, but that model was hardly Gandhi’s invention: it followed ancient Hindu practice. Much of what Ramachada Guha credits the unknown entity India with, accrues to Hinduism. Thus, the asylum given to the Syrian Christians without any questions asked would not have occurred under the Indian Muslims.
On the role of Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the Godhra riots, it must be said that the judiciary has moved towards Modi’s position, viz. his innocence. The rest of the world has mainly been sensitized to his good governance, by his economic successes and by his total absence of religious riots in the last ten years.
Like most secularist urban dwellers who read the conformist media, Guha is under-informed about what the dear neighbours are doing to their minorities. Thus, right now there is a problem in both Bangla Desh and Pakistan of Hindu girls being abducted, forcibly converted and married off into Muslim families. He recognizes the problem of Islamic fundamentalism but fails to realize that when protected by state power, Islam itself is bad enough.
In his account of linguistic diversity, it seems Guha implies a pro-English bias. Among the attempts to overrule diversity with uniformity, he mentioned how a Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (viz. Mulayam Singh Yadav) sent a letter in Hindi to his colleague in Kerala, received a reply in Malayalam, then “got the message” and sent an English translation. In fact, what Yadav did was merely a belated implementation of the constitutional provision to adopt Hindi as link language by 1965, then successfully sabotaged by the English-speaking elite. There was no plan whatsoever to displace the other Indian languages the way France had outlawed and largely destroyed its own local languages. To be sure, the elevation of one of the local languages, even if it is the biggest by far, to a national status above the others, remains a problematic issue, but resorting to the colonial language can hardly be a fair solution. Not just Hindu nationalists but many progressives, like Hindi pro-Communist novelist Kashi Nath Singh or well-known feminist Madhu Kishwar, have argued that the dominance of English is fundamentally undemocratic and certain to remain a major factor of social inequality unless and until the entire population adopts it as first language.
Nevertheless, these quarrels aside, we have to admit that Prof. Ramachadra Guha is an Indian patriot and, in a real sense, a Hindu.
Read more!
The lecture was a big event, organized by the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, with welcoming introductions by spokesmen of the University, the City of Leuven, and the Indian Embassy. Next, Prof. Idesbald Goddeeris, who used Guha’s books India after Gandhi and Makers of Modern India in his own Dutch-medium book on Indian history, gave a eulogy of this internationally acclaimed public intellectual. After twenty minutes of Indian-style floral tributes, Guha himself finally took the floor.
Diversity
He started out with an “entirely non-controversial” statement: “India is the most interesting country in the world.” Nobody had any quarrel with that.
What he meant by that was mainly India’s diversity. He mentioned Sonia Gandhi as “Italian yet completely Indian. None of us regard her as anything less than completely Indian.” Well, I am hearing other opinions on that, pointing to her fleeing abroad or to the Italian Embassy in times of crisis. Second example: “India’s most highly regarded development economist was born in Leuven: Jean Drèze, son of a Belgian economist, but himself an Indian economist and holder of an Indian passport.” Opinions on the wisdom of Drèze’s socialist policies differ, but in his case there is no doubt about his Indianness.
Why is India the most interesting country? “There are twice as many Christians in India as in Belgium”, and certainly more than that, especially if you include the crypto-Christians and take into account that most census Christians in Belgium and Europe are only nominal, effectively lapsed Christians. And this Christian presence “goes back to the first century” CE. Here, like most Indian public figures mentioning Christianity, Guha buys into the legend that Saint Thomas came to Kerala in 52 CE, a belief even the Pope has rejected. But never mind, we can agree that there is an ancient and well-integrated Christian presence in India, 4th-century or so. Further, “in 1947 Pakistan was created as a state for Indian Muslims, but now there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.” More exceptionally, “India is the only country in the world that has never practiced anti-Semitism.” Next to the religious there is the linguistic diversity. Guha counted 17 languages on the rupee notes.
All this helps to make India “the world’s most ambitious and most reckless experiment”. No nation was born in more hostile circumstances. Divided, with a bloody civil war raging from August 1946 to (well after) Independence in August 1947, barbarities, and 8 million refugees to be resettled. But no nation had such capable generation of founding figures, on a par with those of the USA. Mahatma Gandhi became world-famous as a non-violent agitator (Nobel-winning writer Wen Jaibao published a book acknowledging his debt to Gandhi), social reformer, interfaith dialogue pioneer and feminist. Many will frown upon reading the latter claim, and even the other ones are disputed, but let that pass.
The second figure was Bhimrao Ambedkar, 14th son of a soldier in British-Indian army, who with the help of a progressive Maharaja went on to obtain Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, then returned to India in 1926, spurning a comfortable career in the West. He pioneered the emancipation of the Scheduled Castes and of women through the Constitution.
The third one was Jawaharlal Nehru, who was, like Gandhi (but, we may add, poles apart with Ambedkar), a prophet of Hindu-Muslim harmony, as well as an upholder of linguistic diversity and of women’s rights. When he piloted the Hindu Personal Law Code through Parliament, with equal rights to inheritance, divorce etc., no less than 149 demonstration against it took place in one year.
India was expected to fail. Illiteracy stood at 65% in 1952, when the first general elections took place, allegedly “the biggest gamble in history”. Election commissioner Sukumar Sen came up with idea of party symbols, still in use: the Congress Party’s hand, the BJP’s lotus flower, etc. Winston Churchill predicted that in an independent India, the Brahmins (indeed the main enemies of colonial power, vastly overrepresented among freedom martyrs -- KE) would take power, “relying on the support of German mercenaries”! Aldous Huxley, though a yoga enthusiast and friend of India, predicted that after Nehru’s death, the military would take over. Yet, Indian democracy has endured. As they say, “India has general elections, her neighbours have elections of generals”. Paul Ehrlich, author of the doomsday book The Population Bomb, wrote that he understood the population problem emotionally during a taxi ride in Delhi, surrounded by these endless waves of people. He predicted, over 40 years ago, that soon so many millions would die of starvation.
India endures
So, why has India proven these predictions wrong? Why has democracy survived? Why no military coup? Guha listed five reasons:
1) Democracy. There have been 15 general elections with over 400 million people voting. 5 states just now polling, and over 70%. Democracy is a release for discontent etc. Even in Kashmir, there were 70% voting. Villagers defy the Maoist interdictions to vote. Not that Guha is in the pay of the politicians: “Of the three national parties, Congress dislikes me, the Communists distrust me, and the BJP detests me.”
2) Inspired by the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, India deliberately didn’t follow the European model of nation-building, with one language, one religion, and one common enemy. To be Polish meant to speak Polish, to be Roman Catholic, and depending on the time of history, to hate either the Germans or the Russians. By contrast, “in India the Gandhian model of embracing diversity has succeeded”.
3) Another factor is the existence of an independent judiciary.
4) The Hindi film industry and its output in popular music has promoted the knowledge of Hindi throughout the country. Hindi as prospective national language has been abolished, but its voluntary spread through film is successful.
5) Cricket, the most popular sport and topic of one of Guha’s books.
As for the economic surge: it is impressive in the aggregate and in certain sectors. It is changing the Western perception: from basket-case to emerging superpower. But both images are vastly exaggerated.
Some challenges to India’s unity
Challenge 1. The opinion is for a Hindu version of Pakistan. Pluralism is hard-won and fragile, threatened by Hindu majoritarianism and by international Islamic fundamentalism. The 2002 Gujarat riots were horrible, but since then no major riots have occurred. Religious tempers have cooled on both sides. To Guha’s knowledge, there is no Indian member of Al-Qaida.
Challenge 2. Out of 28 states, 25 are totally reconciled to being Indian. There is still discontent in Kashmir, Manipur and Nagaland. Baptist Nagas were fighting till 1998, but their situation is unsolved constitutionally. In Manipur there are no less than 3 wars: the hill Kuki, the hill Naga and the plains Vaishnava all have something against the other.
Challenge 3. Instability in neighbouring countries.
Challenge 4. Growing Maoist insurgency in Central India, comprising 5 to 7% of territory. Its origin lies in the dispossession of the tribals (bauxite, iron, environmental degradation): that is the brutal side of globalization.
Westerners underestimated Indians then, and overestimate them now. Visionaries found democracies, but these can be led in mid-career by mediocrities. Compare Jefferson with GW Bush, or Mahatma Gandhi with Sonia Gandhi. India is plagued with weakness, sectarianism, nepotism, corruption. So, not a superpower, only the most interesting country in the world. Thank you very much.
Questions & answers
After his secular but realistic discourse, Prof. Guha agreed to take some questions.
On regional parties: multiple layers are part of the strength of Indian Democracy. Tamil is as Indian as Bengali, low-caste is as Indian as high-caste etc. Since the sixties, these sectional interests seek political expression.
On Panjab. In the 1980s, some Sikhs staged an insurgency for independence. Today the state is completely at peace. Is was a triumph of Indian democracy. Till 1963, a Tamil party wanted a separate homeland; Mizoram got likewise reconciled to India. Then, in Panjab, there was violence of both Hindus and Sikhs. But in these three states, the conflict was successfully and honourably resolved.
On law (books vs. action), on the progressive Constitution, on the activist judiciary and Supreme Court, on equality promoted yet discrimination continued, on practice vs. principle: it’s a fifty/fifty democracy. 2000 Muslims were killed in Gujarat, most human rights are violated by the State Government, which refused to implement the Supreme Court verdict. Part of the problem is the simultaneity of building a nation, a democracy, and modern industry. I admire Norway, it never made war on another country, neither has India. Norway is maybe 65% democracy, India 50%, not a “formal” but an “imperfect democracy”.
On “truly frightening” right-wing Hindu nationalism (by an Indian questioner), whether it will always be a force: As a citizen, I detest right-wing Hindu nationalism, I will vote for any other party. As a historian, I would say; so long as you have Pakistan, you will have Hindu nationalism. If the political class is alert, it will weaken, but if the political class is weak, Hindu nationalism will be in the ascendant. The Jihadis bomb Bombay to provoke Hindu-Muslim violence. The Kashmiri movement started for rights, was taken over by Jihadis, and expelled Hindus from the Valley.
On the difference between the electorate and the politicians: you need a lot of money for the elections (which you recover after winning), so reforms should make it transparent and state-funded.
On his favourite political leader: Nitish Kumar in Bihar. He is focused on development etc., not corrupt, sectarian, nepotistic. Politicians are more imperfect than us because they inherit our imperfections.
On corruption and movements against it: Part fault of the movement itself, they disregarded Mahatma Gandhi’s “duty of compromise”. The media are good at highlighting the problem, not the solution.
On caste, art. 17 abolishes discrimination on caste, there is affirmative action along caste lines, hence there is more caste voting, yet the Tata Institute says nothing has been done: This is ridiculous, much remains to be done, but much has been done. Vide Mayawati, a woman of Scheduled Caste origin who has been Chief Minister of the most populous state repeatedly. Dumont described the homo hierarchicus, but this is changing. Taliban antifeminism is just a “South Asian practice”?
On superpower claims (affirmed by an Indian): Political/business/media elites chase this superpower thing, this male thing. But so many internal problems remain. In India this claim looks absurd, but Non-Resident Indians might say it (cfr. Jews in New York are crazier than in Israel, Khalistan sustained from Canada).
On affirmative action for SC/ST/OBC, upto 70% of the population. This presupposes identifying them, hence strengthening these identities. Caste is declining as a social practice, in terms of marriage, but it is gaining a new lease of life in politics. The Supreme Court kept it at 50% though some states have it higher. I think it’s too much. Not just for income, but for discrimination itself. I would advocate 25-30%. Thus, Lingayats are no longer backward, but a concession once given is hard to withdraw.
On “Population Bomb predictions didn’t materialize, but problems are sure to grow”: Population growth is steadily going down as women join the workforce. In China it was compulsory, we do it voluntarily. The crucial challenge is not numbers but consumption: how much per person? This way, there are too many Belgian, not too many Indians. Bangla Desh is a basket-case: 1 American = 70 Bangla Deshis, 1 American cat = 1 Bangla Deshi person.
On poverty and the vast difference between China and India: This is a complex issue, but India defied the skeptics. However, there are problems with the declining standards of public services. Every citizen should get decent education and healthcare. Education is demand-driven, better, but healthcare is seriously deficient.
On Islam in India, not on Jihad: Bangla Desh sw a brief spike in Islam in the 1980s, now it is making strides in development, Indonesia moves slowly towards democracy, so Islam is not equally everywhere predisposed to violence (though Muslims everywhere are upset about the American invasion in Iraq). But there is a battle in every religion between liberals and reactionaries. Indian Muslims sense Pakistan is a failed state, that’s where Islamic fundamentalism goes.
On how relations between West Bengal and Bangla Desh are worse than those between India and Bangla Desh, and on how Foreign Investment Laws are not implemented by Karnataka: I disagree on how you represent it. It is true but not systemic, it is just due to the weakness of Manmohan Singh. Bihar is patriarchal, run by a Rajput, Nitish Kumar. But every girl passing middle school will receive a cycle to go to highschool in town, and unexpectedly this didn’t lose him the election.
Comment
True enough that India survived thanks to a decentral model, but that model was hardly Gandhi’s invention: it followed ancient Hindu practice. Much of what Ramachada Guha credits the unknown entity India with, accrues to Hinduism. Thus, the asylum given to the Syrian Christians without any questions asked would not have occurred under the Indian Muslims.
On the role of Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the Godhra riots, it must be said that the judiciary has moved towards Modi’s position, viz. his innocence. The rest of the world has mainly been sensitized to his good governance, by his economic successes and by his total absence of religious riots in the last ten years.
Like most secularist urban dwellers who read the conformist media, Guha is under-informed about what the dear neighbours are doing to their minorities. Thus, right now there is a problem in both Bangla Desh and Pakistan of Hindu girls being abducted, forcibly converted and married off into Muslim families. He recognizes the problem of Islamic fundamentalism but fails to realize that when protected by state power, Islam itself is bad enough.
In his account of linguistic diversity, it seems Guha implies a pro-English bias. Among the attempts to overrule diversity with uniformity, he mentioned how a Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (viz. Mulayam Singh Yadav) sent a letter in Hindi to his colleague in Kerala, received a reply in Malayalam, then “got the message” and sent an English translation. In fact, what Yadav did was merely a belated implementation of the constitutional provision to adopt Hindi as link language by 1965, then successfully sabotaged by the English-speaking elite. There was no plan whatsoever to displace the other Indian languages the way France had outlawed and largely destroyed its own local languages. To be sure, the elevation of one of the local languages, even if it is the biggest by far, to a national status above the others, remains a problematic issue, but resorting to the colonial language can hardly be a fair solution. Not just Hindu nationalists but many progressives, like Hindi pro-Communist novelist Kashi Nath Singh or well-known feminist Madhu Kishwar, have argued that the dominance of English is fundamentally undemocratic and certain to remain a major factor of social inequality unless and until the entire population adopts it as first language.
Nevertheless, these quarrels aside, we have to admit that Prof. Ramachadra Guha is an Indian patriot and, in a real sense, a Hindu.
Read more!
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (4) The new Hindu Right
Meera Nanda’s main target, the “new Hindu Right”, is introduced as follows: “The new Hindu Right has been honing its radical critique of Islam and Christianity from the perspective of ‘yogic spirituality’ largely through books published by the Delhi-based publishing house Voice of India (VoI), which was founded in 1981 by two ardent Hindu revivalists and anti-Communists, Ram Swarup and his friend, Sita Ram Goel (both now deceased). Voice of India’s goal is to produce ‘bauddhik kshatriyas’ (intellectual warriors), who will defend Hindu society against the triple ‘threat’ of Islam, Westernisation and Marxism. The signature theme of Voice of India thinkers is to attribute these three ‘evils’ to ‘Semitic’ or monotheistic religions that are ‘inherently intolerant’ because they believe in One True God, One Truth and One Book. In recent years, Voice of India has emerged as the hub where ‘Sanatan Dharma movements’ make common cause with Islam-bashers, anti-Christian pagans, New Age seekers, deep-ecologists/eco-feminists and other disaffected right-wingers from Europe and the US.”
To get a confusing side issue out of the way first, we have to admit that many Hindu authors, including even the great Ram Swarup, have indeed used the term “Semitic” as a common denominator for “Christian and Muslim”. In certain theoretical contexts, the term may also include Judaism, but often it does not, especially because in the real world, this religion never posed a problem for the Hindus. Judaism practises ”live and let live”, it doesn’t try to convert Hindus by means of missionary propaganda or forceful imposition, unlike Christianity and Islam. Numerous times have I tried to convince Hindus to drop this usage of “Semitic religions” where they mean “aggressive prophetic monotheism”, but to no avail. (If Meera Nanda thinks I have influence on my Hindu contacts, she is mistaken.) Precisely because they don’t mean any harm with it, they don’t see a need to change it.
My oft-stated reasons for avoiding this usage are briefly these: (1) It creates all the wrong connotations among an English-speaking audience accustomed to the synonymy of “Semitic” with “Jewish”, particularly confusing since most Hindu nationalists are outspokenly pro-Zionist; and (2) it is completely inaccurate. There is nothing intrinsically prophetic-monotheistic about Semitic-speaking people: the first known propagator of monotheism was the non-Semitic Pharaoh Akhenaten, while the first mortal victims of prophetic-monotheistic intolerance were Semitic Israelites, viz. the 3,000 worshippers of the Golden Calf lured into the open by Moses’ brother Aaron and killed on Moses’ orders. The priests of the stellar temples in Babylon and Harran, paragons of Pagan polytheism, were Akkadian- or Aramaic-speaking Semites, while the monotheistic fanatics who started a genocide on the Hindu idolaters in 1947and 1971 were Panjabi and Bengali Indo-Aryans.
Though few in the West would characterize “New Age seekers” and “eco-feminists” as “right-wingers”, the latter term has such a potential for conditioning Meera Nanda’s target audience to hold them in contempt that she has given in to the temptation of misusing it. Some “Islam-bashers” may be right-wing, but others are not, and there is no intrinsic relation between Islam criticism and the Right. Many in the Old Right, especially its anti-Semitic section following the elad given by Heinrich Himmler, tend to have a lot of sympathy for Islam, the martial and natalist religion that keeps people in their proper places. In the Muslim world itself, Islam criticism mostly has left-wing roots, e.g. the late Aziz Nesin in Turkey, or closer to India: Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen.
According to Dr. Nanda: “Evidence of the global reach of the VoI school of Hindutva can be found in the 1,518-page-long manifesto titled 2083: European Declaration of Independence that the Norway killer posted on the internet just hours before he went on his rampage.”
The Voice of India authors deliberately avoid the term “Hindutva”, a clumsy neologism combining the Persian root Hindu with the Sanskrit suffix –tva, and properly designating only the specific Hindu nationalist line embodied in the Hindu Mahasabha (HMS, Hindu Great-Assembly) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps). They were never too enamoured of the brainless nationalism of the organizations properly described and self-described as championing Hindutva. Calling them a “school of Hindutva” is part of a widely-used terminological strategy of prejudicing the audience against anyone taking any pro-Hindu position, along with older Procrustean misnomers like “Hindu Right”, “Hindu fundamentalism” and “Hindu fascism”. In many cases it is not even a “strategy” but an instance of intellectual laziness: being on top of the world in an all too comfortable power position, the secularists don’t even take the trouble of using or coining an appropriate terminology specific to the Hindu revivalist phenomenon. At any rate, Voice of India is not a “school of Hindutva”.
The influence of the Voice of India school of thought is, at present, extremely limited. Among Westerners, you can count its readers on your fingers. To my knowledge, only one of its books was ever translated into a European language (Ram Swarup's Hindu View of Christianity and Islam, into French). Some influence is visible in the written output of NRI/PIO groups in London and Houston, i.e. among people who have a foot in both Indian and Western culture, just like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel themselves had. No major political party or organization has incorporated any specific Voice of India ideas in its manifestoes or policies. Few if any new writers have developed them further.
Only time will tell how far its influence will ever reach, but for now, the attention paid by Meera Nanda to Voice of India is far out of proportion to its impact in the real world. Then again, since she is an intellectual of high calibre (a far worthier opponent than the more famous secularists), her focus on Voice of India should be read as a compliment: though vastly outnumbered by mainstream Hindutva, the quality and potential of its ideas is far superior to the dumb and repetitive nationalism of the Sangh.
[to be continued]
Read more!
To get a confusing side issue out of the way first, we have to admit that many Hindu authors, including even the great Ram Swarup, have indeed used the term “Semitic” as a common denominator for “Christian and Muslim”. In certain theoretical contexts, the term may also include Judaism, but often it does not, especially because in the real world, this religion never posed a problem for the Hindus. Judaism practises ”live and let live”, it doesn’t try to convert Hindus by means of missionary propaganda or forceful imposition, unlike Christianity and Islam. Numerous times have I tried to convince Hindus to drop this usage of “Semitic religions” where they mean “aggressive prophetic monotheism”, but to no avail. (If Meera Nanda thinks I have influence on my Hindu contacts, she is mistaken.) Precisely because they don’t mean any harm with it, they don’t see a need to change it.
My oft-stated reasons for avoiding this usage are briefly these: (1) It creates all the wrong connotations among an English-speaking audience accustomed to the synonymy of “Semitic” with “Jewish”, particularly confusing since most Hindu nationalists are outspokenly pro-Zionist; and (2) it is completely inaccurate. There is nothing intrinsically prophetic-monotheistic about Semitic-speaking people: the first known propagator of monotheism was the non-Semitic Pharaoh Akhenaten, while the first mortal victims of prophetic-monotheistic intolerance were Semitic Israelites, viz. the 3,000 worshippers of the Golden Calf lured into the open by Moses’ brother Aaron and killed on Moses’ orders. The priests of the stellar temples in Babylon and Harran, paragons of Pagan polytheism, were Akkadian- or Aramaic-speaking Semites, while the monotheistic fanatics who started a genocide on the Hindu idolaters in 1947and 1971 were Panjabi and Bengali Indo-Aryans.
Though few in the West would characterize “New Age seekers” and “eco-feminists” as “right-wingers”, the latter term has such a potential for conditioning Meera Nanda’s target audience to hold them in contempt that she has given in to the temptation of misusing it. Some “Islam-bashers” may be right-wing, but others are not, and there is no intrinsic relation between Islam criticism and the Right. Many in the Old Right, especially its anti-Semitic section following the elad given by Heinrich Himmler, tend to have a lot of sympathy for Islam, the martial and natalist religion that keeps people in their proper places. In the Muslim world itself, Islam criticism mostly has left-wing roots, e.g. the late Aziz Nesin in Turkey, or closer to India: Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen.
According to Dr. Nanda: “Evidence of the global reach of the VoI school of Hindutva can be found in the 1,518-page-long manifesto titled 2083: European Declaration of Independence that the Norway killer posted on the internet just hours before he went on his rampage.”
The Voice of India authors deliberately avoid the term “Hindutva”, a clumsy neologism combining the Persian root Hindu with the Sanskrit suffix –tva, and properly designating only the specific Hindu nationalist line embodied in the Hindu Mahasabha (HMS, Hindu Great-Assembly) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps). They were never too enamoured of the brainless nationalism of the organizations properly described and self-described as championing Hindutva. Calling them a “school of Hindutva” is part of a widely-used terminological strategy of prejudicing the audience against anyone taking any pro-Hindu position, along with older Procrustean misnomers like “Hindu Right”, “Hindu fundamentalism” and “Hindu fascism”. In many cases it is not even a “strategy” but an instance of intellectual laziness: being on top of the world in an all too comfortable power position, the secularists don’t even take the trouble of using or coining an appropriate terminology specific to the Hindu revivalist phenomenon. At any rate, Voice of India is not a “school of Hindutva”.
The influence of the Voice of India school of thought is, at present, extremely limited. Among Westerners, you can count its readers on your fingers. To my knowledge, only one of its books was ever translated into a European language (Ram Swarup's Hindu View of Christianity and Islam, into French). Some influence is visible in the written output of NRI/PIO groups in London and Houston, i.e. among people who have a foot in both Indian and Western culture, just like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel themselves had. No major political party or organization has incorporated any specific Voice of India ideas in its manifestoes or policies. Few if any new writers have developed them further.
Only time will tell how far its influence will ever reach, but for now, the attention paid by Meera Nanda to Voice of India is far out of proportion to its impact in the real world. Then again, since she is an intellectual of high calibre (a far worthier opponent than the more famous secularists), her focus on Voice of India should be read as a compliment: though vastly outnumbered by mainstream Hindutva, the quality and potential of its ideas is far superior to the dumb and repetitive nationalism of the Sangh.
[to be continued]
Read more!
Hindu-Christian relations: the Kentucky case
In autumn 2011, Kentucky politics was enlivened by an incident over Governor Steve Beshear’s participation in a Hindu ceremony for the Diwali festival and the attack by Senator David Williams, his Republican challenger in the upcoming elections, on the Governor’s descent into “idolatry”. This led to a discussion on the RISA (Religion in South Asia) internet list in early November, with thread header: “Hinduism has become an issue in Kentucky politics”.
Hindu-American response
After drawing attention to the event, a list member sent in an article presenting the Hindu American Foundation’s protest note: “Hindu Americans Shocked By Kentucky State Senate President's Intolerant Remarks”. Suhag Shukla, HAF’s managing director and legal counsel, said: "The words of Sen. Williams are not only an affront to Hindu Americans, but all Americans as he conjures up the lowest sentiments of exclusion and bigotry. He’s shown he’s ignorant and intolerant -- two qualities that we hope Kentuckyians will reject at the polls.” We learned that Williams was trailing Beshear by a nearly 2-1 margin in the polls, that he criticized the Governor for sitting cross-legged with a “dot on his forehead” in a ceremony that he described as “polytheistic”, and that he “disparaged” the “Hindu gods”.
I commented: “As usual, the HAF isn't getting the real import of this salutary incident. Candidate David Williams is reminding us of the essentially unstable and merely provisional nature of ‘interreligious dialogue’. He is only stating the proper Christian position: polytheism, idolatry and all the other heathen stuff that Hindus are guilty of, leads to hell and away from salvation. Christian love requires that Christians refuse all compromise with the devil (the horned antigod with his trident, elsewhere known as Shiva) and tell Hindus on every occasion that only Jesus can save them. Liberals and liberal-talking HAF Hindus may call that ‘hate’ (yes, of false religion leading fellow-men astray) and ‘intolerance’ (yes, of sin masquerading as openness), but it is only unadulterated Christianity. Any respect paid to false religion may cause people not to find the way to salvation, which in the Christian perspective is the most horrible thing you can do to them. As a student for the Catholic priesthood once told me with a little hyperbole: ‘We should not talk with the heretics. We should burn the heretics!’
“To be sure, there are Christians, not just the Kentucky Governor but also Church officials, who play the game of interreligious chumminess. While HAF seems implicitly to applaud such exercises, it ought to realize that the difference with the likes of candidate Williams is mostly only one of manners, or rather, of tactics. Those Christians who mean it, don't represent a Christianity recognizable to its founders, which was a radical religion, but a made-up religion mixing some elements from Christianity with modern liberalism. As for the others: the biggest player of this game, the Catholic Church, has openly stated in successive encyclicals that the diplomatic exercise of interreligious dialogue does not nullify the duty of all Catholics to propagate Christ. In this approach, interreligious dialogue itself is only one front in the missionary offensive. The much-touted dialogue pioneer Bede Griffiths with his ‘Christian ashrams’ and saffron robes explicitly justified his approach as the remedy for the limited inroads that the mission had made into Hindu society.
“I am not at all against interreligious dialogue, but I want to be clear about the inevitable finality of real dialogue. It is to transcend the viewpoints from which the participants start. Either one religion has the exclusive truth (as claimed by the founders and ideologues of at least Christianity and Islam), and then all open-minded participants will eventually leave their own religion and embrace the true one; or all the doctrines that constitute the separate identities fall short of the truth and have to be transcended. Now, in the decades that interreligious dialogue has been a big thing, numerous people have crossed or transcended religious boundaries, but not in the dialogue forums, on the contrary.
"There, all participants merely defend their own religion, at most reformulating their religion to bring it in tune with the fashionable values, pronouncing absolute bunkum with a straight face, e.g.: ‘The Bible is against slavery’, ‘Mohammed was the first feminist’, ‘the Buddha preached a social revolution’, ‘the Veda too is monotheistic at heart’, ‘caste is totally un-Hindu’. If you hold the claims made in this context against the light of the real traditions and their real history, a candid observer can only conclude that, while religion-in-general remains a valid project, each of these specific religions have to shed a lot of harmful baggage that is bound up with their self-declared essence (or is there a Christianity without the Bible, an Islam without Mohammed?). They have to shed what is most distinctive about themselves. The Kentucky officials' participation in a Hindu ceremony is to be welcomed to the extent that they do sincerely outgrow basic Biblical assumptions, the ones which Williams has helpfully restated, such as the evil nature of polytheism and ‘idolatry’.
“At the ‘Religion in Asia after 9/11’ conference in Jamia Millia 2009 (featuring all the usual suspects: the Dalai Lama, Mark Tully,..), Hindu liberation theologian Swami Agnivesh spoke at a session called ‘Is interreligious dialogue the solution?’ and cut out all the crap in his first sentence: ‘No. Interreligious dialogue has not yielded any meaningful results. It is time we tried something else.’”
My opening line disparaging the HAF as simply not understanding the stakes, “as usual”, was based on earlier experiences with the clumsy performance of Hindu-American organizations in debates and struggles such as the one about the California textbooks (which gave a hostile outsider account of Hinduism, contrasting with the insider accounts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and the fairly respectful account of Buddhism) in 2005-2009. However, a few weeks after this exchange on the RISA list, I met the new HAF at the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion and its RISA subdivision in San Francisco. No less than five HAF members were present to follow and to report on the sessions pertinent to Hinduism or to the position of the Hindus in American society. To my satisfaction, Hindu Americans are getting their act together at last.
“Believers don’t care a fig”?
Professor L. sent in some helpful polling data about how the majority of American Catholics, Evangelicals and Muslims answered in the affirmative to the claim that "many religions can lead to eternal life". In detail: “Hindus 89%, Buddhists 86%, Jews 82%, Catholics 79%, Orthodox Christians 72%, historically Black churches 59%, Evangelicals 57%, Muslims 56%, Mormons 39%, and Jehovah's Witnesses 16%, = 70% of Americans in all.” For Hindus and Buddhists, this position is only natural, so it is no wonder that they are in the lead.
To these data, I replied: “This mainly proves that people cannot be reduced to their religious denomination, that their opinions aren’t effectively dictated by their church’s official teachings.” Lapses from orthodoxy by the flock have always been a headache for Church leaders. Many baptized Christians have retained or adopted views and attitudes that are properly Pagan, such as the acceptance that other religions may be just as salvific as the one to which they themselves happen to belong.
I had to agree with the professor’s observation that “we all know that many religionists don't really care a fig for what their Pope, synod President, acarya, mullah, etc. says, or may give only lip service while thinking and doing something else.” And I added: “Exactly. But then, while people cannot be reduced to their church’s official teaching, neither can the church’s teaching be reduced to what its contemporary members give as their opinions. Good to hear that 79% Catholics grant salvific power to other religions; but still, Catholicism doesn’t.”
The evils of essentialism
A Professor P. from Maryville TN was sharper in his reply to my position: “I wish to take a stronger stand against Dr. Elst’s remarks than [Prof. L.]’s more measured response just has. Ignoring the fact that the HAF statement that apparently provoked Elst’s reaction neither implicitly or explicitly references interreligious dialogue, I believe his latest post really crosses a line and portrays a religious tradition in a way that has no place in an academic forum like RISA-L. There is nothing scholarly or even minimally informed about his caricature of Christianity. It is pure polemic: utterly ahistorical, essentialized, two-dimensional, and bigoted. I object in the strongest possible way.”
Before reproducing my actual reply, we should first clarify some terminology. My view that Christianity at most tolerates other religions but does not respect them is denounced as “a-historical” and “essentialized”. In academic circles, you can expect to score if you denounce an opponent in these terms. But do they apply?
That Christianity merely tolerates the existence of other religions but does not really grant them legitimacy, is a consistent fact easily verifiable on both ends of the concept “Christianity”: in its doctrinal foundation and in its practice today. Yes, even today, when Christians claim to have freed themselves from medieval cobwebs, we see that in missionary frontline states like India, Christians still denounces Hinduism as a “false religion” or even “devil-worship”. Papal encyclicals keep on reconfirming the Catholic Church’s claim on a monopoly of access to salvation. This is just factual.
But by “a-historical”, the professor probably means something else than “in conflict with the facts of history”. This can be deduced from the juxtaposition with “essentialized”. What he objects to, is that I don’t treat Christianity as merely a set of phenomena conditioned by and evolving through history, but as having an “essence” that remains the same throughout its history and offers resistance to change-inducing influences from historical developments. “Essentialism” is now the central bogey of fashionable postmodern discourse. Not being a follower of fashion, I consciously stick to an essentialist view of the major religions. And so do the legitimate and acknowledged leaders of those religions.
For clear thinking, every concept used should have a clear definition, a criterion that allows us to separate the phenomena covered by the concept from those that fall outside the domain of the concept. That criterion marks its essence.
The attack on essentialism is most visible in the numerous attempts to blur or block the debate on Islam. When people link the facts of Muslim terrorism and of Muslim oppression of non-Muslims with doctrines laid down in the Quran, Hadith collections and the corpora of Islamic jurisprudence, they are told that they are guilty of “essentialism”. Yet, in Muslim circles everyone agrees that Islam does have an essence. While there may be a grey border zone, there is an undisputed core of what constitutes Islam both in Mohammed’s time and today, starting with monotheism and the belief in Mohammed’s final prophethood. I challenge Professor P. or anyone else to find me one self-conscious Muslim who would deny that there exist ideas (say, polytheism) or practices (say, idol-worship) which are intrinsically “un-Islamic”, which fall outside Islam by their essence. What the anti-essentialists do, is to arrogantly overrule the consensus of all doctrinal authorities in Islam from Mohammed till today.
In the case of Christianity, a few more lines will be needed to capture its essence than in the case of Islam, but it still has self-consciously endowed itself with a clear essence, chiefly the Nicene Creed. And this includes exclusivism, the belief that there is no salvation outside Christ. Baptized people who play to the gallery, who affect and perhaps also interiorize liberal attitudes of religious pluralism, objectively place themselves outside Christianity. Christians may have changed, i.e. absorbed modernism and gotten estranged from the defining Christian doctrine, but this doctrine itself has not.
In my opinion, Prof. P.’s overreaction is at least partly the psychological consequence of his sneaking realization that he is standing on very shaky ground. He can only get away with his denial of Christian exclusivism on that particular RISA forum because its dominant agenda is to belittle and criminalize Hinduism and hence to blunt all Hindu (or, in my case, pro-Hindu) criticism of Christianity and Islam.
Reply to Prof. P.
Now follows my RISA reply to Prof. P., dd. 6 November 2011:
“Dear listfolk,
“I’ll have to write a proper paper to explain my position vis-à-vis these various Christian positions, and time is running short now before taking the plane across the pond [i.e. from Belgium to San Francisco, where the AAR annual conference was about to take place]. So, just a few parting shots on this admittedly sensitive topic.
“The gestures of interreligious chumminess, with the Kentucky governor pronouncing a Diwali sermon, are fine for politicians or ordinary laymen. Such gestures don’t bring religions together, but they bring people closer together, and that is good. They may even make people realize that those others whom scripture taught us to see as benighted or unclean or agents/prisoners of the devil, aren’t all that different from ourselves. That exactly is what David Williams sees as a danger, for it blurs the radical Christian distinction between the doomed and the saved. The governor, on the other hand, may not see a conflict between his own Baptism and hobnobbing with idol-worshippers, but the Baptist missionaries in India certainly do.
“Re: ‘There is nothing scholarly or even minimally informed about his caricature of Christianity. It is pure polemic: utterly a-historical, essentialized, (...).’ The religions under discussion are by their own self-understanding ‘ahistorical’ and ‘essentialized’. Religious doctrines do define an ‘essence’ of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc., implying criteria which allow them to discern insiders from outsiders, the faithful from the infidels, the ‘real’ from the ‘nominal’ church members. The postmoderns who ‘problematize’ this straightforward fact are themselves outsiders to the religions and project or impose their own secular categories onto it, i.c. their allergy for ‘essentialism’. Now I personally don’t care for these essences, don’t throw stones at me, I am merely being respectful of the essentialist self-understanding of accredited religious leaders/ideologues.
“Some religious doctrines are also essentially and ostentatiously a-historical. I am aware that in the Catholic Church, the Holy Ghost can inspire the Council or the Pope to introduce non-Biblical novelties, much to the indignation of Protestants, but even the infallible Pope doesn’t treat the old-time religion lightly. Likewise for Muslims. Once in a debate on Islam I proved a point by quoting from the Quran, to which my opponent answered: ‘But the Quran is already an old book, it has little to do with today’s Islam’! But he was a pro-Islamic non-Muslim, for a Muslim would never have dismissed the Quran like that. The whole point of Islam, practically its ‘essence’, is that it takes the Quran as divinely revealed and valid until Judgment Day, exactly as all-important today as it was in Mohammed’s day. I don’t think any accredited Islamic authority will deny or doubt this, because by his colleagues’ reckoning he would place himself outside Islam if he denied the permanent validity and centrality of the Quran. Hindus, whose Vedas according to the texts themselves are merely human products composed by poets situated in time and space (unlike the Quran), spoil it by likewise claiming that their Vedas have been divinely revealed on Creation Day, unchangeable and valid forever.
“As for ‘scholarly’, I readily admit that my understanding of a scholar’s proper job in interreligious dialogue is miles away from that of many nice people here. For scholars it is proper to not just clothe this superficial bonhomie in academic jargon, but to see through it. The commendable desire to be nice to our fellow-men should not stand in the way of the scholar’s duty to be tough on ideas. While Obama was doing a politically sensible thing when he went to Cairo and pleased his Muslim audience by praising their religion, a dialogue between Christian and Muslim scholars should have a different agenda. Thus, instead of hollow jubilation that ‘after all, we both give a special place to Jesus’, they had better say: ‘Alright, we see Jesus as the son of God, saviour from sin, and resurrected after dying on the cross, while you deny each of these core beliefs. On each of these points, either your position is correct or ours is, tertium not datur. The two positions are logically irreconcilable, so let us not waste time anymore by leaving half of us in error, let us see if we can decide from the sources which of them is the right one. We being scholars, it goes without saying that we will abide by the scholarly findings: if the Islamic position proves right, we will accept it and drop our present belief, and if ours proves right, you will convert to our side.’ That would be the old-school approach, simple logic, valid in all sciences worth the name, but so far purposely shunned in interreligious dialogue. What immense service scholars would render to mankind if they could strip religion of all its deadwood like this, instead of further legitimizing the status-quo.
“Hope we can discuss it in San Francisco. As the song goes: ‘I lost my faith in San Francisco...’
“So long,
“KE, non-affiliated Orientalist”
The outcome
The issue was not decided by us scholars on our little debating forum. The discussion petered out as we were getting ready to catch our planes for San Francisco. However, just before leaving, the news from the real world out there provided me an opportunity to add a tongue-in-cheek little coda. The elections were won by the liberal governor Beshear and lost by his sincerely Christian challenger:
“Dear listfolk,
"Remember Kentucky governor Steve Beshear taking some flak over his participation in idolatry from righteous Christian David Williams:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/kentucky_republican_slams_dem_gov_for_participatin.php?ref=fpblg
Skipping some later rounds in this debate, we can now comment on its happy ending:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/kentucky-gov-steve-beshear-wins-reelection-easily/2011/11/08/gIQAUqRB3M_blog.html
"Like in a heathen ordeal, this victory may be taken to provide divine justice. It proves that the many false gods bestow more favours on their faithful than a lone true God can muster. At least in the case of politicians, those notorious peddlers of falsehood.
"Kind regards,
“KE, non-affiliated Orientalist”
Read more!
Hindu-American response
After drawing attention to the event, a list member sent in an article presenting the Hindu American Foundation’s protest note: “Hindu Americans Shocked By Kentucky State Senate President's Intolerant Remarks”. Suhag Shukla, HAF’s managing director and legal counsel, said: "The words of Sen. Williams are not only an affront to Hindu Americans, but all Americans as he conjures up the lowest sentiments of exclusion and bigotry. He’s shown he’s ignorant and intolerant -- two qualities that we hope Kentuckyians will reject at the polls.” We learned that Williams was trailing Beshear by a nearly 2-1 margin in the polls, that he criticized the Governor for sitting cross-legged with a “dot on his forehead” in a ceremony that he described as “polytheistic”, and that he “disparaged” the “Hindu gods”.
I commented: “As usual, the HAF isn't getting the real import of this salutary incident. Candidate David Williams is reminding us of the essentially unstable and merely provisional nature of ‘interreligious dialogue’. He is only stating the proper Christian position: polytheism, idolatry and all the other heathen stuff that Hindus are guilty of, leads to hell and away from salvation. Christian love requires that Christians refuse all compromise with the devil (the horned antigod with his trident, elsewhere known as Shiva) and tell Hindus on every occasion that only Jesus can save them. Liberals and liberal-talking HAF Hindus may call that ‘hate’ (yes, of false religion leading fellow-men astray) and ‘intolerance’ (yes, of sin masquerading as openness), but it is only unadulterated Christianity. Any respect paid to false religion may cause people not to find the way to salvation, which in the Christian perspective is the most horrible thing you can do to them. As a student for the Catholic priesthood once told me with a little hyperbole: ‘We should not talk with the heretics. We should burn the heretics!’
“To be sure, there are Christians, not just the Kentucky Governor but also Church officials, who play the game of interreligious chumminess. While HAF seems implicitly to applaud such exercises, it ought to realize that the difference with the likes of candidate Williams is mostly only one of manners, or rather, of tactics. Those Christians who mean it, don't represent a Christianity recognizable to its founders, which was a radical religion, but a made-up religion mixing some elements from Christianity with modern liberalism. As for the others: the biggest player of this game, the Catholic Church, has openly stated in successive encyclicals that the diplomatic exercise of interreligious dialogue does not nullify the duty of all Catholics to propagate Christ. In this approach, interreligious dialogue itself is only one front in the missionary offensive. The much-touted dialogue pioneer Bede Griffiths with his ‘Christian ashrams’ and saffron robes explicitly justified his approach as the remedy for the limited inroads that the mission had made into Hindu society.
“I am not at all against interreligious dialogue, but I want to be clear about the inevitable finality of real dialogue. It is to transcend the viewpoints from which the participants start. Either one religion has the exclusive truth (as claimed by the founders and ideologues of at least Christianity and Islam), and then all open-minded participants will eventually leave their own religion and embrace the true one; or all the doctrines that constitute the separate identities fall short of the truth and have to be transcended. Now, in the decades that interreligious dialogue has been a big thing, numerous people have crossed or transcended religious boundaries, but not in the dialogue forums, on the contrary.
"There, all participants merely defend their own religion, at most reformulating their religion to bring it in tune with the fashionable values, pronouncing absolute bunkum with a straight face, e.g.: ‘The Bible is against slavery’, ‘Mohammed was the first feminist’, ‘the Buddha preached a social revolution’, ‘the Veda too is monotheistic at heart’, ‘caste is totally un-Hindu’. If you hold the claims made in this context against the light of the real traditions and their real history, a candid observer can only conclude that, while religion-in-general remains a valid project, each of these specific religions have to shed a lot of harmful baggage that is bound up with their self-declared essence (or is there a Christianity without the Bible, an Islam without Mohammed?). They have to shed what is most distinctive about themselves. The Kentucky officials' participation in a Hindu ceremony is to be welcomed to the extent that they do sincerely outgrow basic Biblical assumptions, the ones which Williams has helpfully restated, such as the evil nature of polytheism and ‘idolatry’.
“At the ‘Religion in Asia after 9/11’ conference in Jamia Millia 2009 (featuring all the usual suspects: the Dalai Lama, Mark Tully,..), Hindu liberation theologian Swami Agnivesh spoke at a session called ‘Is interreligious dialogue the solution?’ and cut out all the crap in his first sentence: ‘No. Interreligious dialogue has not yielded any meaningful results. It is time we tried something else.’”
My opening line disparaging the HAF as simply not understanding the stakes, “as usual”, was based on earlier experiences with the clumsy performance of Hindu-American organizations in debates and struggles such as the one about the California textbooks (which gave a hostile outsider account of Hinduism, contrasting with the insider accounts of Christianity, Judaism and Islam and the fairly respectful account of Buddhism) in 2005-2009. However, a few weeks after this exchange on the RISA list, I met the new HAF at the Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion and its RISA subdivision in San Francisco. No less than five HAF members were present to follow and to report on the sessions pertinent to Hinduism or to the position of the Hindus in American society. To my satisfaction, Hindu Americans are getting their act together at last.
“Believers don’t care a fig”?
Professor L. sent in some helpful polling data about how the majority of American Catholics, Evangelicals and Muslims answered in the affirmative to the claim that "many religions can lead to eternal life". In detail: “Hindus 89%, Buddhists 86%, Jews 82%, Catholics 79%, Orthodox Christians 72%, historically Black churches 59%, Evangelicals 57%, Muslims 56%, Mormons 39%, and Jehovah's Witnesses 16%, = 70% of Americans in all.” For Hindus and Buddhists, this position is only natural, so it is no wonder that they are in the lead.
To these data, I replied: “This mainly proves that people cannot be reduced to their religious denomination, that their opinions aren’t effectively dictated by their church’s official teachings.” Lapses from orthodoxy by the flock have always been a headache for Church leaders. Many baptized Christians have retained or adopted views and attitudes that are properly Pagan, such as the acceptance that other religions may be just as salvific as the one to which they themselves happen to belong.
I had to agree with the professor’s observation that “we all know that many religionists don't really care a fig for what their Pope, synod President, acarya, mullah, etc. says, or may give only lip service while thinking and doing something else.” And I added: “Exactly. But then, while people cannot be reduced to their church’s official teaching, neither can the church’s teaching be reduced to what its contemporary members give as their opinions. Good to hear that 79% Catholics grant salvific power to other religions; but still, Catholicism doesn’t.”
The evils of essentialism
A Professor P. from Maryville TN was sharper in his reply to my position: “I wish to take a stronger stand against Dr. Elst’s remarks than [Prof. L.]’s more measured response just has. Ignoring the fact that the HAF statement that apparently provoked Elst’s reaction neither implicitly or explicitly references interreligious dialogue, I believe his latest post really crosses a line and portrays a religious tradition in a way that has no place in an academic forum like RISA-L. There is nothing scholarly or even minimally informed about his caricature of Christianity. It is pure polemic: utterly ahistorical, essentialized, two-dimensional, and bigoted. I object in the strongest possible way.”
Before reproducing my actual reply, we should first clarify some terminology. My view that Christianity at most tolerates other religions but does not respect them is denounced as “a-historical” and “essentialized”. In academic circles, you can expect to score if you denounce an opponent in these terms. But do they apply?
That Christianity merely tolerates the existence of other religions but does not really grant them legitimacy, is a consistent fact easily verifiable on both ends of the concept “Christianity”: in its doctrinal foundation and in its practice today. Yes, even today, when Christians claim to have freed themselves from medieval cobwebs, we see that in missionary frontline states like India, Christians still denounces Hinduism as a “false religion” or even “devil-worship”. Papal encyclicals keep on reconfirming the Catholic Church’s claim on a monopoly of access to salvation. This is just factual.
But by “a-historical”, the professor probably means something else than “in conflict with the facts of history”. This can be deduced from the juxtaposition with “essentialized”. What he objects to, is that I don’t treat Christianity as merely a set of phenomena conditioned by and evolving through history, but as having an “essence” that remains the same throughout its history and offers resistance to change-inducing influences from historical developments. “Essentialism” is now the central bogey of fashionable postmodern discourse. Not being a follower of fashion, I consciously stick to an essentialist view of the major religions. And so do the legitimate and acknowledged leaders of those religions.
For clear thinking, every concept used should have a clear definition, a criterion that allows us to separate the phenomena covered by the concept from those that fall outside the domain of the concept. That criterion marks its essence.
The attack on essentialism is most visible in the numerous attempts to blur or block the debate on Islam. When people link the facts of Muslim terrorism and of Muslim oppression of non-Muslims with doctrines laid down in the Quran, Hadith collections and the corpora of Islamic jurisprudence, they are told that they are guilty of “essentialism”. Yet, in Muslim circles everyone agrees that Islam does have an essence. While there may be a grey border zone, there is an undisputed core of what constitutes Islam both in Mohammed’s time and today, starting with monotheism and the belief in Mohammed’s final prophethood. I challenge Professor P. or anyone else to find me one self-conscious Muslim who would deny that there exist ideas (say, polytheism) or practices (say, idol-worship) which are intrinsically “un-Islamic”, which fall outside Islam by their essence. What the anti-essentialists do, is to arrogantly overrule the consensus of all doctrinal authorities in Islam from Mohammed till today.
In the case of Christianity, a few more lines will be needed to capture its essence than in the case of Islam, but it still has self-consciously endowed itself with a clear essence, chiefly the Nicene Creed. And this includes exclusivism, the belief that there is no salvation outside Christ. Baptized people who play to the gallery, who affect and perhaps also interiorize liberal attitudes of religious pluralism, objectively place themselves outside Christianity. Christians may have changed, i.e. absorbed modernism and gotten estranged from the defining Christian doctrine, but this doctrine itself has not.
In my opinion, Prof. P.’s overreaction is at least partly the psychological consequence of his sneaking realization that he is standing on very shaky ground. He can only get away with his denial of Christian exclusivism on that particular RISA forum because its dominant agenda is to belittle and criminalize Hinduism and hence to blunt all Hindu (or, in my case, pro-Hindu) criticism of Christianity and Islam.
Reply to Prof. P.
Now follows my RISA reply to Prof. P., dd. 6 November 2011:
“Dear listfolk,
“I’ll have to write a proper paper to explain my position vis-à-vis these various Christian positions, and time is running short now before taking the plane across the pond [i.e. from Belgium to San Francisco, where the AAR annual conference was about to take place]. So, just a few parting shots on this admittedly sensitive topic.
“The gestures of interreligious chumminess, with the Kentucky governor pronouncing a Diwali sermon, are fine for politicians or ordinary laymen. Such gestures don’t bring religions together, but they bring people closer together, and that is good. They may even make people realize that those others whom scripture taught us to see as benighted or unclean or agents/prisoners of the devil, aren’t all that different from ourselves. That exactly is what David Williams sees as a danger, for it blurs the radical Christian distinction between the doomed and the saved. The governor, on the other hand, may not see a conflict between his own Baptism and hobnobbing with idol-worshippers, but the Baptist missionaries in India certainly do.
“Re: ‘There is nothing scholarly or even minimally informed about his caricature of Christianity. It is pure polemic: utterly a-historical, essentialized, (...).’ The religions under discussion are by their own self-understanding ‘ahistorical’ and ‘essentialized’. Religious doctrines do define an ‘essence’ of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc., implying criteria which allow them to discern insiders from outsiders, the faithful from the infidels, the ‘real’ from the ‘nominal’ church members. The postmoderns who ‘problematize’ this straightforward fact are themselves outsiders to the religions and project or impose their own secular categories onto it, i.c. their allergy for ‘essentialism’. Now I personally don’t care for these essences, don’t throw stones at me, I am merely being respectful of the essentialist self-understanding of accredited religious leaders/ideologues.
“Some religious doctrines are also essentially and ostentatiously a-historical. I am aware that in the Catholic Church, the Holy Ghost can inspire the Council or the Pope to introduce non-Biblical novelties, much to the indignation of Protestants, but even the infallible Pope doesn’t treat the old-time religion lightly. Likewise for Muslims. Once in a debate on Islam I proved a point by quoting from the Quran, to which my opponent answered: ‘But the Quran is already an old book, it has little to do with today’s Islam’! But he was a pro-Islamic non-Muslim, for a Muslim would never have dismissed the Quran like that. The whole point of Islam, practically its ‘essence’, is that it takes the Quran as divinely revealed and valid until Judgment Day, exactly as all-important today as it was in Mohammed’s day. I don’t think any accredited Islamic authority will deny or doubt this, because by his colleagues’ reckoning he would place himself outside Islam if he denied the permanent validity and centrality of the Quran. Hindus, whose Vedas according to the texts themselves are merely human products composed by poets situated in time and space (unlike the Quran), spoil it by likewise claiming that their Vedas have been divinely revealed on Creation Day, unchangeable and valid forever.
“As for ‘scholarly’, I readily admit that my understanding of a scholar’s proper job in interreligious dialogue is miles away from that of many nice people here. For scholars it is proper to not just clothe this superficial bonhomie in academic jargon, but to see through it. The commendable desire to be nice to our fellow-men should not stand in the way of the scholar’s duty to be tough on ideas. While Obama was doing a politically sensible thing when he went to Cairo and pleased his Muslim audience by praising their religion, a dialogue between Christian and Muslim scholars should have a different agenda. Thus, instead of hollow jubilation that ‘after all, we both give a special place to Jesus’, they had better say: ‘Alright, we see Jesus as the son of God, saviour from sin, and resurrected after dying on the cross, while you deny each of these core beliefs. On each of these points, either your position is correct or ours is, tertium not datur. The two positions are logically irreconcilable, so let us not waste time anymore by leaving half of us in error, let us see if we can decide from the sources which of them is the right one. We being scholars, it goes without saying that we will abide by the scholarly findings: if the Islamic position proves right, we will accept it and drop our present belief, and if ours proves right, you will convert to our side.’ That would be the old-school approach, simple logic, valid in all sciences worth the name, but so far purposely shunned in interreligious dialogue. What immense service scholars would render to mankind if they could strip religion of all its deadwood like this, instead of further legitimizing the status-quo.
“Hope we can discuss it in San Francisco. As the song goes: ‘I lost my faith in San Francisco...’
“So long,
“KE, non-affiliated Orientalist”
The outcome
The issue was not decided by us scholars on our little debating forum. The discussion petered out as we were getting ready to catch our planes for San Francisco. However, just before leaving, the news from the real world out there provided me an opportunity to add a tongue-in-cheek little coda. The elections were won by the liberal governor Beshear and lost by his sincerely Christian challenger:
“Dear listfolk,
"Remember Kentucky governor Steve Beshear taking some flak over his participation in idolatry from righteous Christian David Williams:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/kentucky_republican_slams_dem_gov_for_participatin.php?ref=fpblg
Skipping some later rounds in this debate, we can now comment on its happy ending:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/kentucky-gov-steve-beshear-wins-reelection-easily/2011/11/08/gIQAUqRB3M_blog.html
"Like in a heathen ordeal, this victory may be taken to provide divine justice. It proves that the many false gods bestow more favours on their faithful than a lone true God can muster. At least in the case of politicians, those notorious peddlers of falsehood.
"Kind regards,
“KE, non-affiliated Orientalist”
Read more!
Friday, March 16, 2012
Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (3) Breivik, India and National-Socialism
According to Meera Nanda: “India, it turns out, figures quite prominently in this web of hate. So far, the India connection has been limited in media reports to the 100-odd references to India that appear in Breivik’s massive manifesto, including his ringing defence of ‘Sanatan Dharma movements’. The irony of a Muslim craftsman from Banaras embroidering the skull-and-sword badge for his army of ‘Knights Templar’, modelled on the 12th-century Christian crusaders, has also evoked much commentary. But there is a lot more to the India connection than it appears at first glance.”
One of the badges tailor-made in India for Breivik has a dagger cutting through the symbols of Islam, Communism and National-Socialism. Though the laziest pressmen have described Breivik as a “neo-Nazi”, purely out of habit, he actually presents himself as an articulate anti-Nazi. He has taken the trouble of explaining (quite sensibly) that National-Socialism is un-European at heart. Indeed, Europeans and especially Nordic Europeans are traditionally freedom-loving, individualistic and uncomfortable with the purity obsession and racial hyperfocus of the Nazis. In the Germanic pantheon, the different classes of gods, the Aesir, Vanir and Giants, freely intermarried. In real life, the Vikings assimilated into the populations among whom they settled within two generations at most, adopting the local language and religion and intermarrying with the natives.
Breivik has also pointed out that in the larger scheme of things, the Nazis have caused Europe tremendous damage. One of his heroes is Winston Churchill, whom he quotes or mentions dozens of times, because he stood firm against the Nazis as well as warning against Islam. Finally, he keeps his distance from the National-Socialists because ultimately they were losers (he advises nationalists to study winners instead, such as Mao Zedong). Only alcohol-disturbed loonies and police infiltrators join the meagre ranks of the extant neo-Nazi groups, an inspiration a contrario for Breivik to act scrupulously alone and in secrecy.
All the same, few commentators have the discipline to discuss the Breivik case without bringing in their usual cheap shots involving Nazi references. Thus Meera Nanda: “The simple fact is that some of the most revered personalities of the Hindu Right have actively cultivated and nurtured links with the European New Right. We don’t have to go as far back as the Nazi-loving founding fathers of the Sangh Parivar. The Savarkar and Golwalker generation that admired Adolf Hitler for trying to exterminate the ‘Semitic races’ has been replaced by a newer generation of Hindu chauvinists that raves and rants against ‘Semitic monotheistic religions’—Islam, above all. This new Hindu Right has managed to move beyond the old Nazi fixation on racial purity to a new ideology of hate based on cultural and religious purity that is proving to be attractive to ‘crusader nationalists’ such as Breivik and his fellow ‘patriots’ from Europe, North America and Israel.”
We will come to the topic of the contemporary “Hindu Right”, but now let us consider the old “Hindu Right” which Meera Nanda tries to link to National-Socialism. Having written two books on the falsity of the “Hindu fascism” rhetoric (The Saffron Swastika, Delhi 2001, and Return of the Swastika, Delhi 2006), I need not go too deeply into the worn-out Nazi allegations against V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar once more. Suffice it to say that what ignorant Golwalkar applauded when he wrote We: Our Nationhood Defined in 1938 was only the intended territorial separation of Germans and Jews as an application of the homogeneous nation-state principle (itself admittedly conflicting with the Hindu tradition of internal multiculturalism, the fatal contradiction of Hindu nationalism). Golwalkar did not refer to any “trying to exterminate the ‘Semitic races’”, which started only in 1941 and in secrecy. Well before that, in September 1939 immediately after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Savarkar called on Hindu young men to join the British war effort, a call heeded by hundreds of thousands. Actions speak louder than words, and Savarkar contributed a lot more to the Nazi defeat than the non-cooperators Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
A minimum requirement for a Nazi sympathizer should be hatred of Jews. But in fact, in 1938 in the same publication, Golwalkar holds the Jewish people up as his very first example of resourceful nationalism, an example for Hindus to emulate; just as Savarkar had done in his 1924 manifesto Hindutva. On this, admittedly, they don’t differ much from Breivik, who likewise supports Israel against its Muslim enemies and welcomes it as Europe’s natural ally in West Asia.
Meera Nanda admits that “this new Hindu Right has managed to move beyond the Nazi fixation” — as if it had ever been involved with that. The two thinkers of her “new Hindu Right” whom she is about to attack, Ram Swarup (1920-97) and Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), took their first non-Hindu inspiration elsewhere: from British liberals like Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Ram Swarup worked for the American war effort in 1944. Both were active leftists in the subsequent years, and Goel nearly joined the Communist Party of India in 1948. As they gained maturity and better knowledge of ideological and geopolitical realities, they turned against Communism; and as their reflection on the roots of the Communist evil deepened, they started rediscovering their own Hindu civilization. But they were never involved with any “Nazi fixation”, on the contrary.
This much is true, that many politically illiterate Hindus admired Hitler because they had heard he was a vegetarian and a “brahmachari” (celibate), because he had adopted a swastika as his party’s and later his country’s emblem, and because he was the enemy of the British colonizers. In reality, Hitler was entirely in favour of the British empire and its hierarchical relation between a Germanic master race and the subservient darker races, and he had advised Lord Halifax to shoot the leaders of the freedom movement. But fact remains that the war against Hitler bankrupted Britain and greatly contributed to the decolonization of India. Having read a great deal of what Hindus have written about World War 2, both during and after the event, I must say I have never encountered anything remotely resembling a call for exterminating the Jews nor applause for the Nazi extermination policy.
This contrasts with the Muslim world, where many then and later supported the idea of solving the “Jewish problem” by the most radical means. Genocide did not horrify them: in 1947 in West Panjab and again in East Bengal in 1971, South-Asian Muslims did effectively attempt to commit genocide on the Hindus. It is therefore logical for people interested in the problems Islam poses, not excluding Anders Breivik, to focus on the Indian experience.
[to be continued]
Read more!
One of the badges tailor-made in India for Breivik has a dagger cutting through the symbols of Islam, Communism and National-Socialism. Though the laziest pressmen have described Breivik as a “neo-Nazi”, purely out of habit, he actually presents himself as an articulate anti-Nazi. He has taken the trouble of explaining (quite sensibly) that National-Socialism is un-European at heart. Indeed, Europeans and especially Nordic Europeans are traditionally freedom-loving, individualistic and uncomfortable with the purity obsession and racial hyperfocus of the Nazis. In the Germanic pantheon, the different classes of gods, the Aesir, Vanir and Giants, freely intermarried. In real life, the Vikings assimilated into the populations among whom they settled within two generations at most, adopting the local language and religion and intermarrying with the natives.
Breivik has also pointed out that in the larger scheme of things, the Nazis have caused Europe tremendous damage. One of his heroes is Winston Churchill, whom he quotes or mentions dozens of times, because he stood firm against the Nazis as well as warning against Islam. Finally, he keeps his distance from the National-Socialists because ultimately they were losers (he advises nationalists to study winners instead, such as Mao Zedong). Only alcohol-disturbed loonies and police infiltrators join the meagre ranks of the extant neo-Nazi groups, an inspiration a contrario for Breivik to act scrupulously alone and in secrecy.
All the same, few commentators have the discipline to discuss the Breivik case without bringing in their usual cheap shots involving Nazi references. Thus Meera Nanda: “The simple fact is that some of the most revered personalities of the Hindu Right have actively cultivated and nurtured links with the European New Right. We don’t have to go as far back as the Nazi-loving founding fathers of the Sangh Parivar. The Savarkar and Golwalker generation that admired Adolf Hitler for trying to exterminate the ‘Semitic races’ has been replaced by a newer generation of Hindu chauvinists that raves and rants against ‘Semitic monotheistic religions’—Islam, above all. This new Hindu Right has managed to move beyond the old Nazi fixation on racial purity to a new ideology of hate based on cultural and religious purity that is proving to be attractive to ‘crusader nationalists’ such as Breivik and his fellow ‘patriots’ from Europe, North America and Israel.”
We will come to the topic of the contemporary “Hindu Right”, but now let us consider the old “Hindu Right” which Meera Nanda tries to link to National-Socialism. Having written two books on the falsity of the “Hindu fascism” rhetoric (The Saffron Swastika, Delhi 2001, and Return of the Swastika, Delhi 2006), I need not go too deeply into the worn-out Nazi allegations against V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar once more. Suffice it to say that what ignorant Golwalkar applauded when he wrote We: Our Nationhood Defined in 1938 was only the intended territorial separation of Germans and Jews as an application of the homogeneous nation-state principle (itself admittedly conflicting with the Hindu tradition of internal multiculturalism, the fatal contradiction of Hindu nationalism). Golwalkar did not refer to any “trying to exterminate the ‘Semitic races’”, which started only in 1941 and in secrecy. Well before that, in September 1939 immediately after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Savarkar called on Hindu young men to join the British war effort, a call heeded by hundreds of thousands. Actions speak louder than words, and Savarkar contributed a lot more to the Nazi defeat than the non-cooperators Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
A minimum requirement for a Nazi sympathizer should be hatred of Jews. But in fact, in 1938 in the same publication, Golwalkar holds the Jewish people up as his very first example of resourceful nationalism, an example for Hindus to emulate; just as Savarkar had done in his 1924 manifesto Hindutva. On this, admittedly, they don’t differ much from Breivik, who likewise supports Israel against its Muslim enemies and welcomes it as Europe’s natural ally in West Asia.
Meera Nanda admits that “this new Hindu Right has managed to move beyond the Nazi fixation” — as if it had ever been involved with that. The two thinkers of her “new Hindu Right” whom she is about to attack, Ram Swarup (1920-97) and Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), took their first non-Hindu inspiration elsewhere: from British liberals like Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Ram Swarup worked for the American war effort in 1944. Both were active leftists in the subsequent years, and Goel nearly joined the Communist Party of India in 1948. As they gained maturity and better knowledge of ideological and geopolitical realities, they turned against Communism; and as their reflection on the roots of the Communist evil deepened, they started rediscovering their own Hindu civilization. But they were never involved with any “Nazi fixation”, on the contrary.
This much is true, that many politically illiterate Hindus admired Hitler because they had heard he was a vegetarian and a “brahmachari” (celibate), because he had adopted a swastika as his party’s and later his country’s emblem, and because he was the enemy of the British colonizers. In reality, Hitler was entirely in favour of the British empire and its hierarchical relation between a Germanic master race and the subservient darker races, and he had advised Lord Halifax to shoot the leaders of the freedom movement. But fact remains that the war against Hitler bankrupted Britain and greatly contributed to the decolonization of India. Having read a great deal of what Hindus have written about World War 2, both during and after the event, I must say I have never encountered anything remotely resembling a call for exterminating the Jews nor applause for the Nazi extermination policy.
This contrasts with the Muslim world, where many then and later supported the idea of solving the “Jewish problem” by the most radical means. Genocide did not horrify them: in 1947 in West Panjab and again in East Bengal in 1971, South-Asian Muslims did effectively attempt to commit genocide on the Hindus. It is therefore logical for people interested in the problems Islam poses, not excluding Anders Breivik, to focus on the Indian experience.
[to be continued]
Read more!
Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (2) Sources of Breivik's terror option
Dr. Nanda casts the net of guilt for the Oslo slaughter as wide as possible: “Even though Anders Breivik alone pulled the trigger, the massacre in Norway was by no means the work of Breivik alone. He is a product of years of immersion in a worldwide web of anti-Islamic ideas espoused by cultural purists and nationalists of all stripes.”
What triggered Breivik?
Actually, if we are to believe the sincerity of his manifesto (and Dr. Nanda, who bases her argument on it, clearly does), Breivik the mass-murderer was the “product” of something more elementary. He testifies that he embarked on his crusading mission against Islam in 1999, well before reading up on any “anti-Islamic ideas”. A number of Islam critics profusely cited by Breivik, such as American scholars Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and the websites www.gatesofvienna.org, www.jihadwatch.org and www.brusselsjournal.com, only became active on the Islam front in the years after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Likewise, Bat Ye’or had written important studies on Islamic history earlier, but her crucial thesis on “Eurabia” only appeared in 2005. The late Oriana Fallaci only turned from left-wing writing to Islam criticism years after Breivik had made up his mind. No, according to his own testimony, he conceived a hatred of Islam as a consequence of bitter personal experience rather than of reading.
This experience included a number of physical batterings he and his friends endured from Muslim gangs, as well as the estrangement from a Pakistani school friend who evolved from a well-integrated Norwegian with Paki roots to an Islamic fanatic living in a Paki ghetto and reportedly involved in a gang-rape of a Norwegian girl. And speaking of rape: a wave of Muslim-on-Kafir rapes in Norway (and likewise France and other places), later documented in detail by the Norwegian Arabist Peder Jensen writing under the pen name Fjordman, was apparently the foremost factor of his budding hate. Empathy with rape victims is a logical source of hate, for who would deny rape victims the right to hate their rapists?
That intellectuals and political parties critical of Islam were not the inspiration for his crime, is explained in so many words by Breivik himself. He chides them for being all talk and no action, being more concerned about their own respectability than for the tough measures required. (p.764) But he realizes, knowing the vileness and meanness of most caviar-leftist intellectuals, that the Islam critics will nonetheless all be smeared by association with him. And he welcomes this prospect. He wants them to be discredited, for that way alone will the common people come to see that talking in seminars and parliaments cannot be the solution. From the Islam-criticizing parties he borrows some rhetoric but emphatically rejects the solutions. Taking the example of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party), of which he himself had been a member years ago, he expects it to suffer seriously by association with himself and applauds this as a way to make the population shed the illusion of countering Islamization by democratic means and choose the revolutionary path instead. (p.1401)
This violent alternative has nothing to do with anything written by the Islam critics quoted elsewhere in his manifesto. It taps into a different and well-known source of inspiration: the Far Left. From the 19th-century anarchists to the German Rote Armee Fraktion and the Italian Brigate Rosse of the 1970s and the Maoists of today’s India, left-wing terrorists have always believed that their actions would serve as an ignition mechanism for the revolutionary uprising of the masses. Although their terror never led to the revolution intended (and Lenin, who did succeed in making a revolution, firmly denounced their counterproductive “childhood disease of Communism”), at least it didn’t damage the standing of their ideology of class struggle. The same rhetoric used by left-wing terrorists simply continued to be repeated in the respectable media by Marxist commentators. These handled the question of moral responsibility adroitly by passing the buck on to the “root causes”.
The example of Islam itself is even more inspiring for the Breiviks of this world. After 9/11 all politicians and opinion-makers closed ranks around Islam to shield it from criticism. While the perpetrators themselves were absolutely clear about Islam as their motivation, and while they were applauded as brave Islamic martyrs by Muslims the world over, the media claims of Islam being the religion of peace were never louder. Numerous dignitaries including President G.W. Bush paid visits to mosques and Islamic centres to reassure the Muslims that nobody in his right mind would ever think of connecting the attacks with Islam. Whoever drew the logical conclusions from the Islamic motivation invoked by the perpetrators themselves was denounded as a criminal guilty of “racism”, or as a psychiatric case suffering from a new disease called “Islamophobia”. Never did Islam get a better press than after this murder of three thousand innocent people. If anyone convinced Breivik that blind violence pays, if anyone “created the climate” for his jump from a political conviction to an act of terror, it must be those who so crassly rewarded Islam for 9/11.
Incidentally, neither me nor most of the others who have argued the scholarly case against Islam, have ever espoused “cultural purism” or “nationalism”. While everyone is welcome to cite and borrow our arguments, including even cultural purists and nationalists, there is nothing particularly nationalistic or cultural-puristic to stating the historical and doctrinal facts concerning Islam. Nor will those facts change as a consequence of being mentioned by a disturbed personality, now officially diagnosed by Norway’s court psychiatrists as a “paranoid schizophrenic”.
[to be continued]
Read more!
What triggered Breivik?
Actually, if we are to believe the sincerity of his manifesto (and Dr. Nanda, who bases her argument on it, clearly does), Breivik the mass-murderer was the “product” of something more elementary. He testifies that he embarked on his crusading mission against Islam in 1999, well before reading up on any “anti-Islamic ideas”. A number of Islam critics profusely cited by Breivik, such as American scholars Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom and Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and the websites www.gatesofvienna.org, www.jihadwatch.org and www.brusselsjournal.com, only became active on the Islam front in the years after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Likewise, Bat Ye’or had written important studies on Islamic history earlier, but her crucial thesis on “Eurabia” only appeared in 2005. The late Oriana Fallaci only turned from left-wing writing to Islam criticism years after Breivik had made up his mind. No, according to his own testimony, he conceived a hatred of Islam as a consequence of bitter personal experience rather than of reading.
This experience included a number of physical batterings he and his friends endured from Muslim gangs, as well as the estrangement from a Pakistani school friend who evolved from a well-integrated Norwegian with Paki roots to an Islamic fanatic living in a Paki ghetto and reportedly involved in a gang-rape of a Norwegian girl. And speaking of rape: a wave of Muslim-on-Kafir rapes in Norway (and likewise France and other places), later documented in detail by the Norwegian Arabist Peder Jensen writing under the pen name Fjordman, was apparently the foremost factor of his budding hate. Empathy with rape victims is a logical source of hate, for who would deny rape victims the right to hate their rapists?
That intellectuals and political parties critical of Islam were not the inspiration for his crime, is explained in so many words by Breivik himself. He chides them for being all talk and no action, being more concerned about their own respectability than for the tough measures required. (p.764) But he realizes, knowing the vileness and meanness of most caviar-leftist intellectuals, that the Islam critics will nonetheless all be smeared by association with him. And he welcomes this prospect. He wants them to be discredited, for that way alone will the common people come to see that talking in seminars and parliaments cannot be the solution. From the Islam-criticizing parties he borrows some rhetoric but emphatically rejects the solutions. Taking the example of the Norwegian Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party), of which he himself had been a member years ago, he expects it to suffer seriously by association with himself and applauds this as a way to make the population shed the illusion of countering Islamization by democratic means and choose the revolutionary path instead. (p.1401)
This violent alternative has nothing to do with anything written by the Islam critics quoted elsewhere in his manifesto. It taps into a different and well-known source of inspiration: the Far Left. From the 19th-century anarchists to the German Rote Armee Fraktion and the Italian Brigate Rosse of the 1970s and the Maoists of today’s India, left-wing terrorists have always believed that their actions would serve as an ignition mechanism for the revolutionary uprising of the masses. Although their terror never led to the revolution intended (and Lenin, who did succeed in making a revolution, firmly denounced their counterproductive “childhood disease of Communism”), at least it didn’t damage the standing of their ideology of class struggle. The same rhetoric used by left-wing terrorists simply continued to be repeated in the respectable media by Marxist commentators. These handled the question of moral responsibility adroitly by passing the buck on to the “root causes”.
The example of Islam itself is even more inspiring for the Breiviks of this world. After 9/11 all politicians and opinion-makers closed ranks around Islam to shield it from criticism. While the perpetrators themselves were absolutely clear about Islam as their motivation, and while they were applauded as brave Islamic martyrs by Muslims the world over, the media claims of Islam being the religion of peace were never louder. Numerous dignitaries including President G.W. Bush paid visits to mosques and Islamic centres to reassure the Muslims that nobody in his right mind would ever think of connecting the attacks with Islam. Whoever drew the logical conclusions from the Islamic motivation invoked by the perpetrators themselves was denounded as a criminal guilty of “racism”, or as a psychiatric case suffering from a new disease called “Islamophobia”. Never did Islam get a better press than after this murder of three thousand innocent people. If anyone convinced Breivik that blind violence pays, if anyone “created the climate” for his jump from a political conviction to an act of terror, it must be those who so crassly rewarded Islam for 9/11.
Incidentally, neither me nor most of the others who have argued the scholarly case against Islam, have ever espoused “cultural purism” or “nationalism”. While everyone is welcome to cite and borrow our arguments, including even cultural purists and nationalists, there is nothing particularly nationalistic or cultural-puristic to stating the historical and doctrinal facts concerning Islam. Nor will those facts change as a consequence of being mentioned by a disturbed personality, now officially diagnosed by Norway’s court psychiatrists as a “paranoid schizophrenic”.
[to be continued]
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Meera Nanda against Hinduism and its friends: (1) Anders Breivik's faith sister
When corpses lie about after a massacre, vultures descend to feast on them. After Anders Behring Breivik’s bomb-attack in downtown Oslo and shoot-out on the nearby island of Utøya, journalists and academics espousing the dominant ideology have indulged their ill-concealed euphoria at this unexpected occasion to smear a school of thought mentioned with partial approval in Breivik’s manifesto, viz. the critics of Islam. Among these exploiters of the massacre, we notice a number of secularists and other anti-Hindu polemicists from India. The most eloquent of these is probably Meera Nanda, fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Institute of Advanced Study, Delhi, who contributed an article to Open Magazine (4 August 2011), titled “Spiritual bedfellows. The Norway massacre and the Indian connection”.
Anders Breivik and Meera Nanda as Crusaders
Dr. Nanda starts with a brief description of the event: “On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, set off bombs in the heart of Oslo. He then went on a shooting spree on a nearby island where young members of the Labor Party were holding a summer camp. All told, he killed 77 people that day, many in their teens. He targetted Labor Party youth because he saw them as part of a multicultural left-wing cabal that was allowing a Muslim takeover of Norway. In his view, they were ‘category A traitors’ who had to be eliminated to save Europe from Islam.”
The first thing to note in Prof. Meera Nanda’s opinion piece on the Oslo massacre is a tiny but telling detail, viz. her spelling “Labor Party”. In British and also in Indian English, as normally used in Open Magazine, the first word would have been spelled “Labour”. But her orthography betrays the American roots of her ideological orientation. In 2005-2007 she was in the employ of the John Templeton Foundation, an American Christian lobby-group that claims science as compatible with and even a product of Christianity. In that position and ever since, “Nanda has supported Protestantism as being scientific, while describing Hinduism as the exact opposite”, as Rajiv Malhotra points out. [Breaking India, Amaryllis, Delhi 2011, p.262]
It is not clear whether Meera Nanda has actually converted to Christianity or is merely one of those secularists who, after the fall and discrediting of Communism, have found new patronage in the US-centred Christian network. But fact is that she champions the Christian cause in India. And it explains the most remarkable oddity about her article on Anders Breivik’s massacre: she conceals from her Indian readership that the killer explicitly defines himself as a Christian. It was impossible to omit mentioning that he modeled himself on the Crusaders, but since the word “Crusade” has passed into general usage without necessary religious connotation, it needed explicitating that he goes out of his way to describe his own religious position as Christian. Not just a Christian by baptism, like myself, but a conscious Christian who, breaking with his secular family background, sought and received baptism in Norway’s Reformed (= Lutheran) Church at age 15.
As a self-styled warrior, he doesn’t lose much time on elaborate pieties, anymore than his Crusader and Templar role models did, but that doesn’t make him any less Christian. Indeed, he does take some time in his manifesto to discuss theology, e.g. to argue (as did many before him during the Romantic period) that the Protestant Churches ought to seek rapprochement with their Catholic mother Church. The Regular-Masonic Lodge of which he was a member required in its charter all members to be believing Christians. In spite of the attempts by American Christians to deny it (e.g. by Timothy Dalrymple http://www.patheos.com/community/philosophicalfragments/2011/07/25/was-anders-breivik-really-a-christian/ and by John Shore http://johnshore.com/2011/07/26/is-breiviks-blood-on-us/) and even to slanderously mislabel him as a “neopagan” (by Roland Shirk http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/who-benefits-whos-behind-it.html), Breivik was very much a Christian. If you’re looking for his counterparts in India, forget about the usual Hindutva bogeys and look for cross-bearers. Think of Swami Lakshmananda’s Maoist-trained Christian murderers, think of Sonia Gandhi, of John Dayal, of Father Dominic Emmanuel, and perhaps of Meera Nanda herself.
The apparent difference in attitude to Islam between neo-Crusaders in Europe and Christian activists in India stems from different circumstances. In Europe, Islam is emerging as the biggest threat to Christianity, bigger than secularism and even bigger than the persecution by the late Communist regimes. Whereas the soft secularism of European liberals (like that of the Nazis) has left Christians free to practise their religion even after losing their grip on the state; and whereas the hard secularism of the Communists had only offered a negative alternative, a void that Christianity has been able partly to fill up again; Islam offers a positive replacement for Christianity, one that can strike far deeper roots than secularism, one that can consign Christianity to the history books the way it did in North Africa ca. 700 CE or in Turkey more recently.
Short-sighted Christians welcome Islam as an ally against secularism, e.g. after the murder of Islam-critical filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004) and the Danish Mohammed cartoon crisis (2006), the left-leaning Christian fundamentalist party Christen Unie in the Netherlands tried to use the high tide of Islamic activism against “blasphemy” to reactivate the country’s dormant anti-blasphemy law. But those Christians who can read demographic data and who are in touch with the persecuted fellow-Christians in Muslim countries, are alarmed at the rising presence of Islam in their midst.
In India, by contrast, the threat of lslam to Christianity is not that imminent. Locally, it is felt acutely and is provoking reactions similar to what Breivik dreamed of for Europe. Thus, in Nagaland, the Christian-dominated National Socialist Council of Nagalim has decreed the death penalty for Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants marrying native girls. In Kerala, after the 2001 census showed a decline in Christian (and Hindu) percentage in favour of the fast-growing Muslim community, some bishops have called on their flock to suspend their cooperation with the Government’s birth-control policy and have at least four children per couple. But in the well-to-do places frequented by JNU professors, the malodorous presence of idolatrous Hinduism is a more immediate concern. There, Islam is a welcome ally in a common minorities’ front against Hinduism. As long as both Islam and Christianity have Hindu society to prey upon, the latter acts as a buffer between the two. That is why a Templeton Foundation agent on a mission to demonize Hindu resistance seizes on this opportunity to criminalize criticism of Islam by associating it with Breivik.
[to be continued]
Read more!
Anders Breivik and Meera Nanda as Crusaders
Dr. Nanda starts with a brief description of the event: “On 22 July, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, set off bombs in the heart of Oslo. He then went on a shooting spree on a nearby island where young members of the Labor Party were holding a summer camp. All told, he killed 77 people that day, many in their teens. He targetted Labor Party youth because he saw them as part of a multicultural left-wing cabal that was allowing a Muslim takeover of Norway. In his view, they were ‘category A traitors’ who had to be eliminated to save Europe from Islam.”
The first thing to note in Prof. Meera Nanda’s opinion piece on the Oslo massacre is a tiny but telling detail, viz. her spelling “Labor Party”. In British and also in Indian English, as normally used in Open Magazine, the first word would have been spelled “Labour”. But her orthography betrays the American roots of her ideological orientation. In 2005-2007 she was in the employ of the John Templeton Foundation, an American Christian lobby-group that claims science as compatible with and even a product of Christianity. In that position and ever since, “Nanda has supported Protestantism as being scientific, while describing Hinduism as the exact opposite”, as Rajiv Malhotra points out. [Breaking India, Amaryllis, Delhi 2011, p.262]
It is not clear whether Meera Nanda has actually converted to Christianity or is merely one of those secularists who, after the fall and discrediting of Communism, have found new patronage in the US-centred Christian network. But fact is that she champions the Christian cause in India. And it explains the most remarkable oddity about her article on Anders Breivik’s massacre: she conceals from her Indian readership that the killer explicitly defines himself as a Christian. It was impossible to omit mentioning that he modeled himself on the Crusaders, but since the word “Crusade” has passed into general usage without necessary religious connotation, it needed explicitating that he goes out of his way to describe his own religious position as Christian. Not just a Christian by baptism, like myself, but a conscious Christian who, breaking with his secular family background, sought and received baptism in Norway’s Reformed (= Lutheran) Church at age 15.
As a self-styled warrior, he doesn’t lose much time on elaborate pieties, anymore than his Crusader and Templar role models did, but that doesn’t make him any less Christian. Indeed, he does take some time in his manifesto to discuss theology, e.g. to argue (as did many before him during the Romantic period) that the Protestant Churches ought to seek rapprochement with their Catholic mother Church. The Regular-Masonic Lodge of which he was a member required in its charter all members to be believing Christians. In spite of the attempts by American Christians to deny it (e.g. by Timothy Dalrymple http://www.patheos.com/community/philosophicalfragments/2011/07/25/was-anders-breivik-really-a-christian/ and by John Shore http://johnshore.com/2011/07/26/is-breiviks-blood-on-us/) and even to slanderously mislabel him as a “neopagan” (by Roland Shirk http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/07/who-benefits-whos-behind-it.html), Breivik was very much a Christian. If you’re looking for his counterparts in India, forget about the usual Hindutva bogeys and look for cross-bearers. Think of Swami Lakshmananda’s Maoist-trained Christian murderers, think of Sonia Gandhi, of John Dayal, of Father Dominic Emmanuel, and perhaps of Meera Nanda herself.
The apparent difference in attitude to Islam between neo-Crusaders in Europe and Christian activists in India stems from different circumstances. In Europe, Islam is emerging as the biggest threat to Christianity, bigger than secularism and even bigger than the persecution by the late Communist regimes. Whereas the soft secularism of European liberals (like that of the Nazis) has left Christians free to practise their religion even after losing their grip on the state; and whereas the hard secularism of the Communists had only offered a negative alternative, a void that Christianity has been able partly to fill up again; Islam offers a positive replacement for Christianity, one that can strike far deeper roots than secularism, one that can consign Christianity to the history books the way it did in North Africa ca. 700 CE or in Turkey more recently.
Short-sighted Christians welcome Islam as an ally against secularism, e.g. after the murder of Islam-critical filmmaker Theo van Gogh (2004) and the Danish Mohammed cartoon crisis (2006), the left-leaning Christian fundamentalist party Christen Unie in the Netherlands tried to use the high tide of Islamic activism against “blasphemy” to reactivate the country’s dormant anti-blasphemy law. But those Christians who can read demographic data and who are in touch with the persecuted fellow-Christians in Muslim countries, are alarmed at the rising presence of Islam in their midst.
In India, by contrast, the threat of lslam to Christianity is not that imminent. Locally, it is felt acutely and is provoking reactions similar to what Breivik dreamed of for Europe. Thus, in Nagaland, the Christian-dominated National Socialist Council of Nagalim has decreed the death penalty for Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants marrying native girls. In Kerala, after the 2001 census showed a decline in Christian (and Hindu) percentage in favour of the fast-growing Muslim community, some bishops have called on their flock to suspend their cooperation with the Government’s birth-control policy and have at least four children per couple. But in the well-to-do places frequented by JNU professors, the malodorous presence of idolatrous Hinduism is a more immediate concern. There, Islam is a welcome ally in a common minorities’ front against Hinduism. As long as both Islam and Christianity have Hindu society to prey upon, the latter acts as a buffer between the two. That is why a Templeton Foundation agent on a mission to demonize Hindu resistance seizes on this opportunity to criminalize criticism of Islam by associating it with Breivik.
[to be continued]
Read more!
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