Religion with a heart

Swami Agnivesh

Religious people can be quite scary, especially nowadays. Swami Agnivesh was a religious person in the genuine sense of the term. He loved people. He stood for what was right. He gathered enemies because he was a good man. Today [Sep 11] is his third death anniversary.

I met Swami Agnivesh personally only once. It was some 20 years ago when he visited the school where I was teaching in Delhi as the chief guest on the occasion of Independence Day or Republic Day. I had no idea what kind of a person he was until then. His speech on the occasion struck a chord with me. When words come from the heart, they are powerfully eloquent. Swami Agnivesh’s speech had the power to stir the depths within.

Here was a man for whom religion was a matter of action rather than prayers and rituals. Swami Agnivesh was a champion of social justice and communal harmony. Ramachandra Guha described him as a man of “steely courage and enormous compassion.” That was the most apt description of the person that the Swami was.

He got into quite a few clashes with the right-wing activists because of his convictions and courage. These activists of the Bajrang Dal and the RSS attacked him because they couldn’t accept his inclusive vision and spirituality.

It was after the Kandhamal violence of 2008 that Swami Agnivesh became a chosen enemy of the right-wingers in North India. Swami Lakshmananda was killed by some attackers whose identity was never ascertained. The crime was believed to have been committed by Maoists. But certain members of Bajrang Dal and RSS put the blame on Christians and attacked hundreds of Christians in and around Kandhamal. Thousands of houses belonging to Christians were burnt. About 6000 houses were plundered. Many people were burnt alive. Many were forced to convert to Hinduism. Those were horrible days in Odisha. Swami Agnivesh appeared there like a soothing balm. But the killers didn’t want peace and harmony. They attacked the Swami many times. I was in Delhi at that time and watched the national news channels showing the brutal assaults on this holy man by certain vicious elements.

Swami Agnivesh was a professor at St Xavier’s College, Calcutta before he donned the garb of an ascetic. He wanted to do more than teach the principles of management to young, ambitious people. He wanted to liberate the country from certain ills that plagued it from deep within. He was an ardent campaigner against child labour and bonded labour. Eventually, he strove to make religion and spirituality really meaningful.

What we now have in the country is not religion or spirituality though they pretend to be sacrosanct. The country needs more teachers like Swami Agnivesh.

At Sawan Public School, Delhi