87.Essay Writing Format, structure and Examples. ‘THE COMMUNAL SITUATION AND NEED FOR RELIGIOUS REFORMS IN INDIA’

THE COMMUNAL SITUATION AND NEED FOR RELIGIOUS REFORMS IN INDIA

INTRODUCTION: We Indians tend to regard ourselves as unique in our virtues and our vices. No religion is free from contradictions and problems. So, Hinduism, too, which for centuries appeared to be calm, is now off balance.

DEVELOPMENT OF THOUGHT: Politics has produced a “lumpen” religion with lumpen adherents who have no roots in real religiosity. Their altar is the ballot-box and their God is State Power. This write-up draws attention to the contradictions plaguing both Hinduism and Islam in this country and outlines the objective aspects of the modern-day communal situation. It suggests that a “reformed” Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leadership can lead India to gain its rightful place in the comity of nations.

CONCLUSION: If, in a democracy, symbols are to be manipulated let politicians not do violence to true religiosity in the most religious country in the world. If the route to the ballot is through temple and mosque, it makes a triple mockery of temple, mosque and democracy. We are then left with Nirad Chaudhuri’s hand of the “Great Anarch”, who lets the curtain fall, “And Universal Darkness buries all!” And the “dread Empire, chaos! is restored”.

In the whole Ayodhya episode of recent years, in the flood of statements, no one has perceived that there is a global problem of every religion finding it hard to come to terms with the modern world. Christianity is troubled with abortions, women clergy, modern genetics, apart from the old Catholic/Protestant divide and numerous sects. The Papacy has struggled for 400 years to come to tennis with Galileo’s conception of the universe. Islam seems to have been in rage and frustration against the whole non-Islamic world, a modernizing Satan. Now Hinduism, as calm as evolution for millennia, is off balance. This hurts scientists and buffets States.

And now the world is reverting to its atavistic past: China to the ways of celestial empire behind a Marxist facade, Africa to tribalism, eastern Europe to ethnic Balkanization, Islam to Fundamentalism, India to caste and communal societies. Therein is a reality, threat and promise. There are no dilemma-free choices.

 Let us probe the whole Indian situation in its majority-minority, communal and secular aspects, on both sides of the coin; the subjective and the irrational, which is no less a part of reality than the other side, the rational and objective. If Ayodhya was the work of “ghosts” of the past, those ghosts have had sufficient power to rock Indian society and the State, with international repercussions.

The first subjective yet realistic recognition has to be given to the fact that, if Hindu society is uniquely emerging from 800 years of Islamic domination, and 200 years of foreign rule, all non-Hindus, especially in India, should appreciate that emergency calls for sympathetic understanding. And especially because that predominantly Hindu society has been a tolerant host to so many other religions over centuries. In all human history, no society has been in that position for so long. And if this basic historical fact and the consequent feelings are treated with understanding, it is still capable of being a good and tolerant host to other minorities.

If Hindu society has fallen from its great pre-1,000 A.D. civilization, the Hindus themselves, from Tulsidas to Ram Mohan Roy to Vivekananda and Gandhi, have been exercised about it. Let us also remember that after 1947 the same Hindu society gave equal constitutional and democratic rights to the minorities, and even set up a Minorities Commission to look after their interests. This overall goodness must be seen beyond the traumatic vandalism of Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

The second subjective reality is that Indian Muslim society, by and large, has made a conscious self-wounding choice—post-I857 and post-Syed Ahmed Khan—not to follow a progressive modernizing path in the last century and a half. It has been a fundamental mistake of Muslim leadership, inflicting poverty, suffering, and alienation from the mainstream on the Muslim masses. Modernizing, liberal, mainstream Muslims have been too few, too weak, too shortsighted in both political and economic terms.

Long before, “Hindutva”. the Muslim League and Jinnah exploited the backwardness of the Muslim masses: even after Gandhiji held out a cooperative hand in the Khilafat movement, and eventually sacrificed his life for Hindu-Muslim amity. The seeds of hatred, militancy, and an unrealistic Pan-Islamic view of the world were sown as if these could have revived the Afghan or Mughal empires of the 12th century. The recent Hindutva distortions of pristine Hinduism were matched earlier by the distortions of Koranic Islam by a man who tore India apart and became the President of Pakistan. The seeds of the double distortion have produced a poisoned harvest on both sides in our time.

The third subjective factor was produced by Nehru and the Westernized intelligentsia. Apparently rational, it was unclear secularism, which no one has been able to translate into any vernacular meaningfully for child or adult. One hears it translated as, respect for, or tolerance of, all religions” by the State. But when the polity politicized it for the purpose of building up vote banks, it has been transformed into nothing but the sordid exploitation of religion, the opium of politicians of all parties.

Secularism is a kind of Western ghost looking for an Indian soul — in a country where religion and its symbols have been external, where Vivekananda clearly divorced ‘politics from his Ramakrishna Mission, and where Gandhi saw no separate worlds of religion and politics. And then came State secularism in a society which Netaji described as “a government less civilization”. Could such a transplant take root here?

 Where is the ghost of the secular State in the West, its apparent source? The U.K. is an Anglican State, with the sovereign as “Defender of the Faith” since Henry VIII. In Germany, public funds are disbursed to various churches. Poland was “liberated” by the Pope. All Catholic States and societies owe as much allegiance to the Papacy as Tibetan Buddhism owes to the Dalai Lama. The USA is the unique exception, being a recent melting pot of all societies and religions. So, on any objective reckoning, the modern secular State is a largely rootless myth, and yet in this country and elsewhere it has become a vague intellectualized subjective assumption. Clearly, the modern secular states need an indigenized soul.

And so a myth-creating Indian State now finds itself gripped by multiple contradictions and dilemmas. The first of these is the dilemma of a weak and small modernizing sector faced with a still-predominant traditional, fundamentalist sector of both Hindus and Muslims. Every thrust towards modernization or globalization is met with a strong reactionary pull towards the temple, mosque and a lumpen traditional culture, producing no great work of art, architecture, literature or painting comparable to the subcontinents contribution in either the pre-1000 A.D. or the Mughal period.

Secondly, there is the Muslim dilemma of the Shariat and Civil Code; of covert pan-Islamic and Indian loyalties; of strong monotheistic faith in a land of the widest polytheism: of the slaughterhouse and the cow; of a dying’ Urdu and rising vernaculars and English. And all these facets are subsumed by the illusion of a demographic war of survival in the long-run.

Thirdly, there are the more recent contradictions and dilemmas of Hindu society; between the higher castes and the Mandalization forces: between the backward Hindi speaking belly of India and the more progressive limbs else-where; between resurgent fundamentalism in both Hinduism and Islam, now ironically producing a case of reversed roles, with the “Sangh Parivar” infected with the Pakistani complex, a complex which loses its own intrinsic identity and acquires the aggressive, militant identity of an adversary constantly seeking an enemy to justify its existence.

 This un-Hindu complex lives to kill, not to live and let live. The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, was an act of revenge against Babar and, symbolically, all invaders from Ghazni to the domiciled Aurangzeb. And in that single flush of insanity was lost the best heritage of Akbar, Rain Mohan Roy, Vivekanand, Dadabhai Nauroji. Gandhiji, Maulana Azad, et al. What can a Narasimha Rao and the rest of us do with these inherited subjective factors, these living ghosts of the past, these awesome contradictions and dilemmas? Even Marx would have been perplexed by this primitive accumulation of the mythological capital of the past, which is so hard to demythologise. Is India now a melting pot of earlier peoples, myths, cultures, angsts, refusing to melt into modern, molten steel?

To turn to the more rational, pragmatic side of the coin, it may be a good idea to challenge straightaway a question posed by a letter-writer in a national daily “can you tell me a higher common denominator than Ram to keep the country united?” This is indeed too simplistic a construction for human reality. Neither Christ nor Allah has kept Christendom and Islamic societies united. Nor in all the ages of Hindu history has Ram kept even Hindus united. Far from it.

An over-centralized State in India (primarily the work of Mrs Gandhi and the higher bureaucracy) is an important culprit in any rational reckoning, a State which has acquired immense legislative and ordinance power but which is important in either saving a targeted place of worship or the lives of its citizens. Modern societies have lost control over their gargantuan Governments, and Governments have lost control over their affairs. Both the recent Bank scam and Ayodhya have shown that, despite laws, guidelines and a plethora of controlling authorities, there has been no control and no effective action.

The Centre, smug in Delhi, is out of sync with the periphery. One result of this is the proliferation of dehumanized role-players inside and outside the establishment. This has been the dismal transition between the strong hand of Patel who rebuilt the Dwarka temple in a stable state; and the hordes of ineffective, confused men and women in and out of authority who created the Ayodhya debacle in a very unstable state.

This situation calls for a new, stable balance between the centre and the States, between Hindus and minorities, between the liability of misgoverned Hindi-speaking states and the assets in much of the rest of India. Insecure politicians are afraid of change; mindless politicians are not capable of giving such problems the statesmanlike thought they require. We are electing plundering villains and making a mockery of democracy in the world’s most plural and poor society.

The next rationality factor is that in the world’s most plural society, extremism of any faith or ideology is dysfunctional, disastrous, insane. Co-prosperity has to be preceded by a spirit of co-existence, a reasonable give-and-take. The third aspect lies in the formation of a new, more credible leadership in all parties, especially the Congress (I), the BJP, and the splintered Muslim and Sikh minorities. Without stability in India as perceived by the world, .the lack of much-needed trade, technology and investment will leave the country in the 18th-century backwater of poverty, illiteracy and disease.

The Muslim community in particular needs to throw up a 21st-century leadership, modelled on the Aga Khan, with a forward-looking vision to lift 120 million people from poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and ill-health, apart from promoting the culture, art and architecture of Islam in India to its highest traditions. Nor should this be accomplished in isolation. It ought to be the legitimate demand of 120 million Muslims on the remaining 730 million Indians and the Indian State.

As for the Sikhs, they are entitled to feel grievous hurt to their psyche after the Golden Temple issue and the massacre in Delhi after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. This should weigh on the Hindu conscience as much as the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Indeed, it is time for the 80 per cent majority Hindus to shot magnanimity to the II per cent Muslims and two per cent Sikhs if they themselves wish to transform an earlier formative Hindustan to a more united India, taking its rightful place in world politics, economics and culture.

So, whether of the Congress (I), BJP or Janata variety, will the Hindus throw up in or reformed leaders who will not either profess hollow secularism on the one hand or propagate a minority-ism and pseudo-secularism on the other? Can “Hindutva” shed its Pakistani complex? If 80 per cent Hindus are them-selves a self-confident people, they should perceive no threat from the Muslims and Sikhs. Once the political complexion of the leaders of all three communities changes, the ballot box, the polity, and the economy will change for the better too.

Yet all this may be wishful thinking if we did not expose the real politic of money, the scam of religious institutions in Indian society. In the Watergate, the episode, the advice of Deep Throat was “to follow the money”. When the Washington Post heeded that advice, they could pin down the Head of State and all his henchmen. The Indian public needs to heed that, the same advice. After being so closely integrated with the Hindu community for three centuries, Master Tara Singh’s politics (and that of many of his Akali successors) was to gain control of the rising revenues of the Gurdwaras. Separatist politics in the name of the Khalsa concealed the pursuit of money. Similarly, the vast funds of Hindu temples fuel narrow, chauvinistic urges. The influx of petrodollars has had a similar influence on Muslim Mosques and Madarisas.

If we are fundamentally concerned, spiritually or secularly, with the human condition, the Licence-Permit Raj also needs to be removed for two basic social objectives: first, to lighten the burden of inflation and inefficiency on the poor and, second, to lift the additional burden of mounting Government expenditure from the back of the people. “Follow the money”, and we will uncover the root causes of problems, political, economic, social and communal. So the stagnant Licence-Permit Raj is also a conditioning factor in the exploding socio-economic malaise, which finds an outlet in growing lumpen participation in communal riots:

One last suggestion about the razed Babri Masjid site. First, the court. verdict must adhere to quasi facto and de facto, Then with consensus of both Hindus & Muslims let there be a national memorial dedicated to (a) the memory of all those irrespective of religion who have lost their lives and suffered injuries in communal disturbances anywhere in India, and (b) to the poor of India of all faiths whose human condition is basic in the teachings of Christ, Muhammad, Guru Nanak, Vivekananda and Gandhi. And let its architecture match the blend of Mughal Rajput architecture, which we treat as a great national heritage. Let mosque and temple be healingly and mutually built close by in Ayodhya. Let there be interdenominational intercession for India’s integrity and interfusion by religious priests and let them initiate steps to interconnect Indian masses. That will be the true test of the human concern of all faiths and their protagonists; and the test of the recognition of the inescapable reality of the co-existence of Hindus and minorities.

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