From L K Advani to Narendra Modi, there is a paradigm shift. It is neither accidental nor arbitrary, therefore, that Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi look honourable relics, and Yashwant Sinha seems a geriatric rebel against the Shah-Modi dispensation. The shift in question can be stated as follows. I was a ‘Hindu Christian’ in Advani’s scheme of things. Today, I am ‘the Christian other’ whose punyabhoomi is extra-territorial. This signals a tectonic shift in identity-perceptions.
I was naïve when Advani’s classification dawned upon India. So, I failed to understand its benignity. Today I know the geniality underlying his advocacy and it is imperative that Christians and Muslims do so. Ironically, Advani is more relevant to India today than he was at the zenith of his influence under the first edition of the NDA.
Advani was invoking a universal pattern native to all religious cultures, especially virulent in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic blocs, loosely classified in the RSS lingo as ‘Abrahamic faiths’. That pattern involves an insistence on defining and judging others on one’s own terms. The Jews divided the world into Jews and Gentiles. Christians labelled the rest of the world as non-Christian, treating it as the domain of ‘the other’. To a zealous Muslim, the rest of the humankind are kafirs.
Advani’s insight was that this is a cultural pattern that has nothing to do with the genius of a faith. It is culturally, not spiritually, that there are Gentiles, non-Christians, kafirs and Dalits. None of these categories is valid spiritually for the simple reason that harmony with otherness is the essence of spirituality. The spiritual insight common to all religions is that not only all humans, but all forms of life, derive from a common source—the Creator.
Culture being man-made, ‘otherness’ inheres as a site of offence in all cultures, against which there have been protests wherever spiritual lights dawned. The need to label and stigmatise ‘the other’ is a cultural disease, not a spiritual merit. This sparks intolerance in religious zealots of every kind. As Jonathan Swift, the Irish satirist, said, we have enough religion to make us hate each other, but not enough religion to help us love one another.
Hindutva is a cultural project that uses religious markers, memories and mimetics to attain its pan-Indian political end. It is animated by the spirit of the western materialistic, power-driven culture. The RSS salute to its flag is quasi-German; the idolatry of the flag itself being a western nationalistic phenomenon. It made a pretty sight of tell-tale contrast when Pranab Mukherjee stood in attention in the RSS function in Nagpur, his elbows pressed to his sides, while Mohan Bhagwat saluted the ascending RSS flag after the Sangh fashion. The vision of the RSS is rooted in the soil of exclusivist European nationalism, which Tagore portrays as the Nemesis visiting a whole civilisation for its collective perversion. Tagore was concerned that Japan, in its nascent awakening, would go the way of European nationalism. He wrote, in words of striking relevance today, “It (adopting nationalism) is like dressing our skeleton with another man’s skin”. You may borrow knowledge from others, but not soul or temperament.
I feel a lurking affinity to the spirit of the RSS. It is spookily close to historical Christianity: the same negativity to those of different persuasions, the same tendency towards hegemony and triumphalism, the same faith in violence and the same ethno-centric pride. This uncanny affinity worries me as well; for affinities follow the law of magnetism—like poles repel.
The universal and irreducible feature of all cultures in history is they are driven entirely by elite interests. The elite in every society arrogate to themselves the right to define all aspects of reality to advantage their interests—most virulent among the religious elite. Judaism was distorted beyond recognition by its socio-religious elite—the Sadducees and Pharisees—into an anti-Gentile cult. The Vedic spiritual vision was caricatured into casteism by Brahmanical ascendancy. Christianity, in its demented denominational fragmentariness, was misused and abused by European nation-states for justifying their predatory control, via colonialism, on Afro-Asian peoples and cultures. Names varied, but the pattern remained the same.
Given this historical reality, the demand makes cultural sense: Those who live in India share the same matrix of culture, just as those living in the western world share the secular-scientific culture. (In the wake of globalisation, we are all western in culture.) It is a historical fact that the RSS would not have come into being, but for the interface between Indian and Western culture, with Christianity as the mediator, in the theatre of colonialism punctuated by European nationalism.
The RSS is a significant expression of the Indian culture (in contrast to Indian spirituality), reacting to the challenges of European nationalism and its colonial predators. Since European nationalism thrived on its genius for conflicts and idolisation of power, it is understandable if the RSS exemplifies the self-same streak. Mimetic hegemony—responding in a hegemonic spirit imitated from an erstwhile adversary—is a cultural response strategy, just as promoting universal fraternity is a spiritual strategy. “This (the European) political civilization,” Tagore wrote in Nationalism (1917) “is scientific, not human. It betrays its trust, it weaves its meshes of lies without shame, it enshrines gigantic idols of greed in its temples, taking great pride in the costly ceremonials of its worship, calling it patriotism.”
The task before me is not to resist a label, but to invest it with spiritual significance. The insult is not in being coercively turned out in ascribed clothes. It is in my being no more than a rattling skeleton that will, for want of vitality, be defined wholly by the ascription.
Valson Thampu
Former principal of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi
Email: vthampu@gmail.com