Cowardice and Religious Intolerance
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| Hope vs Fear |
The Sangh Parivar is driven by hatred whose roots lie
in cowardice.
Cowardice does not always look like
trembling, running away or hiding behind closed doors. Sometimes it marches in
processions, shouts slogans, burns books and attacks helpless people. Sometimes
it dresses itself in religious robes, waves national flags and speaks in the
language of patriotism. It needs enemies because it cannot face its own
inadequacies. It needs crowds because it cannot stand alone. It needs hatred
because it has never discovered the strength of courage. Perhaps the most
dangerous thing about cowardice is that it can persuade itself that it is
heroic.
The Sangh Parivar lacks the courage
to face certain inconvenient truths such as that India was ruled by Muslims and
Christians for centuries. Hence they hate Muslims and Christians. This hatred
lies at the root of its entire outlook, particularly its religious intolerance.
Religious intolerance is often
cowardice elevated into a collective virtue. It begins with an inability to
feel secure in one’s own beliefs and ends with a desire to control what
everybody else believes. The resurgence of right-wing politics in India began
with the slogan: Hindu khatre mein hai, Hindus are in danger.
The more insecure a person is about
his religion, the more aggressively he defends it. One of the most striking
features of the Sangh Parivar’s ideology (if it can be called that) is its
opposition to religious conversion. Why should anyone decide what other people
will believe in? Equally importantly, why will people abandon their own religion
if it is as great as its defenders claim?
Why
religious freedom matters
Religion is a vital part of an individual’s search for
meaning. If one religion fails to provide the meaning, the believer should have
the freedom to choose another religion. The government has nothing to do with
that choice which is a purely personal affair. The Sangh Parivar fails to
understand this simple principle.
Neither the state nor the majority
community has the moral authority to dictate what an individual must believe.
Democracy becomes majoritarianism when the numerical strength of the majority
is used to impose its preferences on everyone else. The rights of minorities
cannot depend on the goodwill of the majority. They must be guaranteed by the
Constitution.
Why believers abandon their original
faith
If a lot of Hindus are choosing Christianity or Islam,
then Hinduism should introspect and see why that is happening instead of
attacking the religious places of other communities. There is a lot of violence
being perpetrated by the defenders of Hinduism today in India. Why should this
happen? Shouldn’t people like Gurumoorthy address that question instead of
demanding the reclamation of churches and mosques?
If people are leaving your religion
for some paltry material benefits, as you allege, then how pathetic is your
religion! Aren’t you admitting that your religion isn’t worth even a bag of rice
and a packet of milk powder for which your followers are abandoning you?
A religion that can survive only by
preventing its followers from leaving is not demonstrating spiritual strength;
it is demonstrating institutional insecurity.
What’s actually wrong with today’s
Hinduism? This is the question that should be addressed squarely instead of going
around poking at history’s gargoyles.
A confident religion does not fear
competition. A confident believer does not feel threatened by another person’s
prayer. And a confident civilisation does not need to erase the histories,
beliefs and cultural contributions of other communities to establish its
greatness.
India’s greatness has never depended
on the uniformity of its beliefs. It has depended, however imperfectly, on the
ability of people with different gods, different scriptures and different ways
of life to inhabit the same country.
Ultimately, the test of a religion is
not how fiercely its followers defend its territory, how many monuments they
reclaim or how loudly they proclaim its supremacy. It is how humanely they treat
those who do not share their faith.
Cowardice needs enemies. Courage can
live with differences. And perhaps the greatest proof of faith is the freedom
to let another person believe differently.
PS. This is the concluding part of a series that was prompted by
one Vidyasagar Gurumoorthy whose life’s purpose seems to be to reclaim certain
Christian churches in the name of perceived historical injustices.
Previous posts in this series
Velankanni and Christian
Missionaries
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