The Fundamental Unethicality Of Being Hindu
By Ankur Betageri
18 February, 2015
Countercurrents.org
The man who propounded Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, V.D. Savarkar, was an atheist. In his book, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, he conceived Hindus as a race descended from the Aryans who, he claimed, contrary to all evidence, were the original inhabitants of India. The descendants of these Aryans who consider “Bharatavarsha” – the ancient Sanskrit name for India that first appears in Vishnu Purana of 4th century CE – both their “Holy land” and “Fatherland” were Hindus according him. To put it a little differently, the nationalist Hinduism of Savarkar placed India or Bharatavarsha at the centre of Hinduism, as both the Jerusalem and Israel of the Hindus.
Savarkar who called himself an atheist was nevertheless a Brahmin supremacist. His praise of Manu’s Dharmashastra, the law code which upholds the varna system (the hierarchical division of Hindu society into four classes plus a fifth category), and meticulously codifies discriminatory social and legal practices, as the “scripture which is most worship-able after the Vedas for our Hindu Nation,” was therefore unequivocal. The Hindu nationalist religion he created was an attempt to unite all non-Islamic sects in India under the umbrella of Brahmanism in opposition to, and as a bulwark against, the “polluting” influence of the foreign and “barbaric” Islam. It was undoubtedly a reaction to the separatist, exclusionary and aggressively Islamist Muslim identity created by the Muslim League leaders, especially Sir Muhammad Iqbal. (The very notion of “Hindutva” as comprising of “all the departments of thought and activity of the whole Being of our Hindu race” and of the “Hindu” as someone who considers India as both his holy-land and fatherland, follows the exclusionary and monotheistic Islam, which has always conceived the holy and fatherland together, as a totalitarian political state, beginning with the first Islamic state, Medina, the institution of which marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Hindutva also shares with Islam the violent hatred of the religious outsider who does not “submit” to the totalitarian might of a homogenizing ideology, and consigns him to the status of a dhimmi, or a second-rate citizen.) The Muslim League’s dream was realized when the separate state of Pakistan, created in 1947, became an Islamic republic in 1956. But Hindu nationalism and its rabid Muslim-hatred had no takers in secular India. When Nathuram Godse, a frustrated Hindu nationalist, tried to assert his Hindutva by assassinating the “Muslim-appeasing” Mahatma Gandhi, he was universally condemned, though according to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps), he was “a patriot” who was “not understood”. With Godse’s execution, and the ban on the RSS, Hindu nationalism ended up as the unconscious resentment of the “Hindu” society, a society which had defined itself almost exclusively in terms of its opposition to the Muslims.
The birth of the Hindu nationalist party, BJP, in 1980, provided a new mainstream forum to this resentment, simmering as militant rage in fringe Brahmanical organizations like the RSS and VHP, and the Hindu Mahasabha of pre-Independent India. But it was only in 1990, with the all-India rath yatra, journey by chariot, undertaken by the BJP leader L.K. Advani, that this resentment erupted into national consciousness. Advani’s ploy of galvanizing national support for the construction of the Ram Temple by demolishing the Babri Masjid, and thereby uniting the Hindus against the Muslims was to pay rich political dividends, but this strategy of divide-and-rule, imbibed from the Colonial masters, proved very costly for India, because by delegitimizing the Indianness of the then second largest Muslim population in the world, it drove a permanent wedge between the two prominent religious communities of the country.
In 2014, with a view to milking the old “Hindu” resentment against the Muslims for the Lok Sabha elections the BJP stepped up the Hindutva propaganda. It consisted of the usual moves of citing selective incidents from history and painting all Muslims rulers as marauding invaders and destroyers of “Hindu” culture. The idea was to legitimize communal hatred against Muslims, and to whip up a communal frenzy, which, going by the electoral results, it managed to do successfully. But something unusual had also happened. With the help of a dedicated international community of “Internet Hindus” a mythological RSS-version of Hindu civilization was now installed as the official version of Hinduism. It quickly gained legitimacy by its huge and impressive presence in a network of sites and blogs, and in an Internet encyclopaedia. This propagandistic version of Hinduism completely obscured academic scholarship on Hinduism. Separate anti-Brahmanical non-theistic religions like Buddhism and Jainism, and heterodox materialistic and atheistic schools of philosophy like Charvaka and Ajivika, were passed off as parts of “the eternal religion of Hinduism.” With this, the propaganda machine of Brahmanical dogma took a new turn: it now became expressive of what can be called quintessential Hindutva: the dogmatic religious force which wants to bury the voice of Reason by fashioning itself as “Hindu-nationalist Reason.”
The “Hindu-nationalist Reason” can be understood by listening to the way its most powerful advocate, Narendra Modi, speaks. Modi’s utilitarian logic is simple: people will not lead an honest, non-corrupt life, will not keep their surroundings clean and will not work unselfishly in the interest of the nation, if they are not religiously inspired. It is only Hindu nationalism (and Muslim hatred) which can awaken the nation, mired in corruption and laziness, and take it on the path of progress and development. This shockingly unflattering idea of his own Hindu brethren as gullible imbeciles who can function morally only under the influence of chauvinism is not, however, Modi’s creation. The preponderance of Dharma over Reason is a feature that the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri, in his book Philosophy in Classical India (2006), recognizes as unique to many schools of Indian philosophy. “Reason unchecked,” he writes, “was seen as a threat to the stability of Brahminical social order, as the tool of heretics and troublemakers.” This Dharma-guided thought, adopted by Gandhi, and zealously propagated by his disciple-intellectuals in post-Independent India, as liberal Hinduism or Gandhism, leads to the exact same position taken by Modi — people should be drugged with religious dogma to be obedient servants of the state. Rational thought, which can breed disagreement, dissent and even disobedience, is therefore dangerous. Hindu Dharma, though defined in different ways in different contexts, presumes to know, and states, the correct way of life with dogmatic certainty. One of the things it states with dogmatic nonchalance is that the member of each varna or social class has a certain predestined role to play in the world – a role assigned to him based on his karmas in previous lives – and one’s Dharma lies in playing this role to perfection. Anyone who refuses to follow the path of Dharma, who questions the ethics and rationality of following one’s “sacred duty in life”, is not only unrighteous, but evil. If Hindu Dharma is cosmically harmonious and the moral expression of the collective will of the Hindu state, then rational thought which challenges it, is inherently in the wrong and doomed to failure. Dharmic thinking, which proceeds from unquestionable dogmatic axioms and goes only so far as the Dharmic propriety allows, boils down, ultimately, to this: Dharma is good, non-Dharmic rationalism, evil; therefore cultivate Dharma and banish non-Dharmic rationalism. It is this simple formulation which has made the work of internationally acclaimed Marxist historians like D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma and Romila Thapar “anti-national” and turned a social democrat like Jawaharlal Nehru into an “evil force”. In this atmosphere of religious hysteria the question that must be constantly asked but which seldom gets asked is, “Who decides what Dharma or the righteous way is?” But whoever it is that’s deciding it is clearly not thinking straight. Because, what could be right, or even sane, about an earlier race of “invaders” (Aryans) branding a successive “invader-community” (Muslims) as foreigners and hating them as outsiders? What is right about discriminating against over one-third (Dalits and Muslims together constitute 37.8%) of the Indian population? How seriously deluded must a people be to pick up religious cudgels to violate the dignity and self-respect of one’s own fellow citizens?
The contemporary crisis of Hindu majoritarian tyranny is only a symptom of a deeper philosophical problem — the fundamental unethicality of being “Hindu.” Being a “Hindu” means positing and affirming the idea of pure and impure classes of people. As the practice of untouchability against the Dalits has been made criminal by the Indian Constitution, something that the Hindu worldview invariably forces one to practice, the innate Hindu tendency to create “a community of pariahs” and passionately hate them to affirm one’s own worthiness, is now finding expression in turning the entire Muslim community into a community of “untouchables.” (I am aware of the painful history of untouchability and do not use the word lightly.) Muslims who eat the flesh of the Holy Cow (nobody’s bothered by the Rig Vedic gods’ penchant for beef and horsemeat!), who undergo circumcision and who “barely bathe in weeks” are almost the new “untouchables” in contemporary India. And these are not ordinary “untouchables” but dangerous ones; every sensible Hindu needs to guard himself against them because in each one of them there is a potential terrorist (or at least a love-jihadist).
If this tragic crisis in the life of the Indian nation is to be resolved with any degree of permanence the 19th century Brahmanical nationalistic religion of Hinduism must be dismantled once and for all, and accepted for what it is—a collection of diverse religious sects, each with its own set of rituals and practices. This is the only way to ensure a life of dignity and self-respect for the Dalits, Muslims and Adivasis of India. It also seems to be the only way to create a society where everyone is judged by his or her actions, and not by his or her birth.
Ankur Betageri is a poet, short fiction writer and visual artist based in New Delhi. His published works include The Bliss and Madness of Being Human (poetry, 2013) and Bhog and Other Stories (short fiction, 2010). He is currently a PhD candidate in philosophy at Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi
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