Turning India into a land only for Hindus goes against our nation, writes ex-FS Nirupama Rao. My comments...

Good Morning India....

After reading this piece and understanding and becoming conscious of the underlying subtle nuances, which expect this Nation of Hindus to be tolerant of all other religions what ever the cost? Quote Nirupama "Growing up, we were taught to respect all faiths and to be tolerant of differences." Unquote. My question to her was did Christianity teach her that? Given that she went to a Catholic Christian School and College?

Quote "Today we Hindus demand “empathy” from the minorities in our country. A Muslim dairy farmer transporting a cow, even with a permit, is not showing empathy for the majority religion" Unquote. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Tell me madam, did the Christians too ever exhibit empathy for the Hindu way of life during their rule over India? Why even today their agenda is conversion subtly and not so subtly. Not only in India but all over the world. As a matter of fact during my extensive travels in the African Continent, I found this breed of Christians to have subtly destroyed their religion, culture and the social systems of the native Africans. Preying upon poverty as a handle.

I had to comment and share my thoughts. I agree its a piece of good narrative yet yet yet......

Though a bit strong in its words, I try not beat around the bush.

Sometimes I do sympathise with people like Nirupama Rao, for they know not what they do. However the workings of their inner mind lie bared for the observant. I call this learned behaviour of attitudes and beliefs, which lead to a mire of subconscious intellectual and emotional feelings which we are at a loss to understand, and these dictate our thinking mind to respond and act.. I call it obtaining maturity out of religious wedlock.

Typically as I have experienced personally, I went to a primary school run by missionaries and then a second Senior Cambridge school for my final High School Education. Though this was not a Christian School per say, we had a compulsory "Divinity" period. (Later on I am told this period was made only for Christians) As it turned out I was more well versed in Christianity and the Christian way of life, that I used to ridicule my friends from local vernacular schools, who went to temples and rang a bell to wake up god to take his "Darshan".

I never really did get to the bottom of our Hindu way of life as practised at home. So much so that I used to laugh at stories told by our pandits at religious functions like Satyanarayan Pooja, Dashera pooja to name a few. Yet in the same breath would lap up ridiculous stories from the Bible as gods own truth. The religious upbringing in the Hindu way of life at home and the subtle and not so subtle Christian way at school, kind of bastardised my young mind between the two.

We see today the ridiculous extents this government is going to correct this anomaly. 

However they must understand that nothing can be done with the adult population, specially these pseudo Hindu intellectuals like me who have already become Bastardised between religions. What is now the need of the hour is to look after the members of the very young population which are in schools. To see that they are given proper non fanatic education in our Hindu way of life and to ensure that they are not influenced by these Christian missionary crusaders nor the Islamists. So also they be kept out of reach of criminal politicians who unfortunately own a majority of educational institutions. 

In fact I do not mind India being named as a Hindu nation, where is the harm in that? In fact I believe it will go a long way as far as religious tolerance is concerned, in that others will learn to live harmoniously within the parameters as dictated by a Hindu Rashtra. I am sure looking at the Hindu way of life, its tolerant principles of co existence this should not be too difficult.

We have to be more worried of our Nations future which lies in these young citizens than anti gau hatya brigades and Romeo squads. This is only scratching the surface of a far deeper shortfall. There will always be a running battle between the younger generation and the government in power. The generation gap will always be there. Fortunately our Hindu way of life, or the Sanatan Dharma, is tolerant to both so there is no need to get after the Kaccha Baniyan generation, as to how much body they exhibit in public, nor be the guardians of their virtues let them seek their inner selves within the flexibility of the Hindu way of life. Yet first it needs to be inculcated at a very young age. After all Darwins theory of evolution still holds for social and cultural evolution as it does for the physical. One cannot try to make a monkey from a homo sapien. Like these goons of Nav Nirman Sena, Gau Hatya Brigade, Romeo Squads and what have you, are trying to do........

Sanatana Dharma (which is loosely refered to as a Hindu way of life) is by its very essence a term that is devoid of sectarian leanings or ideological divisions. This is evident by the very term itself. The two words, "Sanatana Dharma", come from the ancient Sanskrit language. "Sanatana" is a Sanskrit word that denotes that which whichis Anadi (beginningless), Anantha (endless) and does not cease to be, that which is eternal and everlasting. With its rich connotations, Dharma is not translatable to any other language. Dharma is from dhri, meaning to hold together, to sustain. 

Its approximate meaning is "Natural Law," or those principles of reality which are inherent in the very nature and design of the universe. Thus the term Sanatana Dharma can be roughly translated to mean "the natural, ancient and eternal way."

When translated to English, Sanatana refer to Eternal, Perennial, Never Beginning nor Ending, Abiding, Universal, Ever-present, Unceasing, Natural, and Enduring while Dharma refers to Harmony, The Way, Righteousness, Compassion, Natural Law, Truth, Teachings, Tradition, Philosophy, Order, Universal, Flow, Religion, Wisdom, Divine Conformity, Cosmic Norm, Blueprint, Inherent \Nature, Law of Being, and Duty.

Sanatana Dharma do not denote to a creed like Christianity or Islam, but represents a code of conduct and a value system that has spiritual freedom as its core. Any pathway or spiritual vision that accepts the spiritual freedom of others may be considered part of Sanatana Dharma.

First and foremost, Sanatana Dharma is anadi (without beginning) and also a-paurusheya (without a human founder). It is defined by the quest for cosmic truth, just as the quest for physical truth defines science. Its earliest record is the Rigveda, which is the record of ancient sages who by whatever means tried to learn the truth about the universe, in relations to Man's place in relation to the cosmos. They saw nature — including all living and non-living things — as part of the same cosmic equation, and as pervaded by a higher consciousness. 

This search has no historical beginning; nor does it have a historical founder. This is not to say that the Rigveda always existed as a literary work. It means that we cannot point to a particular time or person in history and say: "Before this man spoke, what is in the Rigveda did not exist."

Turning India into a land only for Hindus goes against our nation, writes ex-FS Nirupama Rao.

I am a Hindu by birth and by enduring faith. The house that I was born into that my grandfather built, had no special puja room — but the plaster of Paris statue of a flute playing Krishna, the Ravi Varma oleographs of a Lakshmi rising from a lotus with elephants trumpeting their joy at her presence, the veena-playing Saraswati, and our special deity Lord Guruvayurappan, with beautiful Kartikeya and his "vel"(spear) and his vehicle, the peacock made up the pantheon of our isthtadevatas.

On my trips to my "native place" as we say in Indian English, I remember how every evening, the vilakku (bronze lamp) was lit with cotton wicks we lovingly made, dipped in gingelly oil, and brought out to the verandah of the tharawad (Hindu matrilineal family) house, with the heralding word: "Deepam" (lamp) repeated two or three times, quietly, with deep reverence. We would greet the sight of this burnished lamp and its brave, bright flame in a prayerful namaskar with bowed heads in a moment of blessed quietude, as imaginary and heavenly angels murmured in the dusk of a tropical Kerala garden around us.

Wherever we lived as children travelling the length and breadth of India with my army officer father, my homemaker mother would gather us three sisters together at dusk to say our prayers after she had lit the little vilakku that graced a small corner of the bedroom, auspiciously positioned.

We sat down cross-legged on the bare floor, put our hands together in prayer, and recited our Om Namashivaya, and sang a few bhajans including Gandhiji's favourite "Raghupati Raghava". We must have sung with youthful fervour and reasonable harmony because in one of the towns we lived in, the neighbouring Malayalee Catholic family with whom we shared a wall, the Pereiras, would listen tell my mother how much they loved our “evensong”. Them being Christian, and our being Hindu did not matter in those simple days.

I went to Catholic school till I finished high school and to a Catholic undergraduate college after that. I read Bible history as a young girl and was equally fascinated with the stories of Moses, N the Ark of Noah, and the life of Jesus as I was with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. 

Growing up, we were taught to respect all faiths and to be tolerant of differences. We grew into self-confident Hindus, secure in our faith and respectful of our Christian and Muslim classmates and friends.

In this recalling of memory, I am reminded of the saying that "the past is another country". Where is that far-off land? What starship are we voyaging on today? Today we Hindus demand “empathy” from the minorities in our country. A Muslim dairy farmer transporting a cow, even with a permit, is not showing empathy for the majority religion, an NRI friend said recently. India is a Hindu nation he added and the minorities should respectfully acknowledge this and adjust to this basic reality.

Ensconced in the United States, I do not believe he had any doubt in his mind that Hinduism should constitutionally be India’s national religion. Having lived in Sri Lanka, I was reminded of the manner in which that island country made Buddhism its state religion, with its Buddhist clergy being the most powerful source of authority in the land, and all the momentous repercussions of that approach for civil society and the Sri Lankan minorities.

Is India a wounded civilization? If our religion as Hindus has survived intact despite the depredations of conquest and empire over the last millennium, then are we not prepared to face the next with the steadfastness of faith and the confidence that Hinduism with its capacity for tolerance and accommodation can create the India of our dreams? Are we instead, intent on moulding our lives on the basis of religious militancy and a fundamentalist interpretation of belief? Are we intent on the subjugation of our religious minorities so that they conform to what our idea of their place in our society should be?

Pepita Seth, the English woman who has become a Hindu, and made Kerala and particularly Guruvayur her home, has a passage in her book, Heaven on Earth: The Universe of Kerala's Guruvayur Temple, that eloquently sums up how I define my being Hindu:

“In northern Malabar there is a Theyyam deity, Kshetrapalan, the guardian of temples, who once demolished a semi-ruined shrine and built a mosque to give a growing community of Muslims a place of worship. This, in essence is a sharing of cultures and spaces, even as the other is respected. This fineness shows India’s profoundly pluralistic dimension. It is beyond me to suggest what can be done, political will being what it is. The great hope is that our children can, at an early age, be shown what is common to us all, that with opened minds they come to recognize that this will give them a share of the wider whole. As India is railed against for the dreadful things that now too often happen, it can help to recognize that the other side of the coin exists. And that I have been lucky to experience it."

India’s is a map of many migrations. She speaks to both East and West, those twins of history, when she demonstrates the fact that labels like Hindu, Muslim, Christian are no more than starting points. We are a blended nation. Our long traditions, our languages, our home states, these cultural geographies have blurred and indistinct boundaries, interrelated contexts of meaning. There are many echoes, spirits and voices that inhabit our gardens. Separation and distinctiveness are not their defining features. Human life is not about separation but about connection.

Gandhiji drew inspiration from the devotional traditions of Hindu faith as expressed in the ideals of the religious poets and preachers of rural Gujarat, as also from Thoreau and Tolstoy, and even Christianity. He wove these influences into his life and made them work in a manner that was magnetic, riveting and resoundingly powerful. There is power in his example. The Indian answer to the question “who am I” which is “I am that” or Tat Tvam Asi, signifies a oneness with all creation. The Chinese saying: There is me in you, and you in me bridges divisions of race or creed. The Sanskrit word, Viswabodh or, awareness of the whole world, should apply in everything we do.

It was Rabindranath Tagore who, when he spoke of the idea of India, which as he emphasised was not just a geographical expression, (“I love my India, but my India is an idea and not a geographical expression”), stressed the assimilative outlook, the irreducible diversity that characterised the civilization of India. In a similar way, life in my home state of Kerala has been largely marked by the tenor of coexistence between Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Each community left the other to come to terms with his God in his or her own fashion and in the words of the writer Krishna Chaitanya, realising that difference here in no way militated against close cooperation in activities that ensured the livelihood of all.

The great twentieth century poet in Malayalam, Vallathol, a Hindu, wrote a narrative poem on Mary Magdalene which is treasured by the Christian community both for its spiritual high notes as well as its sheer beauty. The story of Genesis is seen integrated with the Hindu myth of origin of the churning of the primeval ocean by the gods and demons. This is the true symbiosis that India should seek to treasure and to preserve.

Today, at evensong, even as I celebrate my being Hindu, I pray for India. I pray for peaceful coexistence, and for us to conduct our lives as citizens of a great and grown-up nation. Let us not leave our destinies to the vagaries of fate, or the tyranny of the closed and confined mind.

The author is a former Foreign Secretary of India