In the struggle for Dharma's survival, "the only weapon we have is the truth", according to Sita Ram Goel. This much we can take as firm ground for our action. It is a thing really worth working for. The question is merely whether it will prove strong enough for victory. Is it not possible that a future excavator will find that some of us were onto something, but that it proved a dead end, snowed under before it could find a hearing among those capable of giving it any effect?
Our mentors, the late philosopher Ram Swarup (1920-98) and the historian-publisher Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), had comparatively little influence during their lifetimes. For starters, in their mid-twenties they were members of the Changers Club, founded by Ram Swarup. Though the name alluded to Karl Marx' maxim that the philosophers should not discuss but change the world, it was just another talking-shop. While it produced some good ideas, it never got its chance to realize them, and hardly even to publicize them.
Its first booklet, Ram Swarup's Indictment (1947), was about the now-forgotten topic of the mismanaged Quit India movement, and its most memorable line is a general observation in the foreword's opening-line by the late but then-young philosopher Daya Krishna: "The bane of Indian politics is hero-worship." In those days it applied to Quit India leader Mahatma Gandhi, later to a Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar or a PM Narendra Modi. According to a maxim with a long tradition among clergymen but loosely ascribed to its quoter Eleonore Roosevelt, "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people". It's what Goel in his later life remarked on RSS-BJP folk: they are enamoured of an Atal Behari Vajpayee as an entertaining orator but don't pay attention to the distinctly Secularist (or to personalize it: "Nehruvian") flavour of his ideas, pooh-poohing Hindu Dharma.
In the 1950s, Ram Swarup's and SR Goel's anti-Communist think-tank Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia (SDFA, Kolkata) received some praise from opinion. leaders in Taiwan and the West but could not impact India's foreign policy. The only Indian political party that sympathized with it was not the Hindu-Nationalist Jan Sangh (which saw it as a CIA outfit at cross-purposes with its own anti-American gut feelings) but Chakravarti Rajagopalachari's Swatantra Party, which was still dealing with its own organizational birth pangs. It unsuccessfully put Goel up as a candidate in Khajuraho constituency for the 1957 elections because it saw in him the only man capable of standing up to PM Jawaharlal Nehru. By the time this party became a major political player, in the 1962 elections, the SDFA had folded, with Ram Swarup retiring to a more reflective lifestyle and Goel starting to devote his energies to managing a commercial book business.
For long. Hinduism has been defined for the Hindus by its inveterate enemies. Hindus were told what kind of depraved religion and society they had and how they should conduct themselves in a modern secular state. In the telling phrase of Ram Swarup, an educated Hindu was expected to behave as if he was making amends for being a Hindu. No longer. This book looks at Hinduism and others with open and clear eyes.
If all religions preach love, brotherhood and kindness, why do we see so much hatred, strife and violence in the name of religion? This question has often baffled not just atheists and agnostics, but also quite a few devout souls. This book is an attempt to answer it in the light of Indian spiritual tradition i.e. Sanatana Dharma. It seeks to show what unites religious traditions going beyond their apparent differences.
It also tries to show what spawns intolerance, discord and conflict among different religious groups.
While the whole discussion here is rooted in the Indian experience, past and present, there is nothing geographical or temporal about the deep truths it highlights. The ideas, ideals and truths it refers to are not exclusively Indian or western, ancient or modern. They have a universal appeal because the quest for truth is innate to human nature, just as hunger and thirst. Then again, what is discussed here are ideas and ideologies, not peoples and communities. It is Islam, not Muslims; it is Christianity, not Christians. That is because the mind of a man may be broader or smaller than the tradition he is born into. Also, at individual level, what matters is not what the Book says, but what one picks up from it. And religion, let us remind ourselves, is an intensely personal affair.
Public discourse in post-independence India has suffered from a double distortion. Any attempt to bring out and emphasize the essential unity underlying Hinduism and other Indic traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism is condemned as a shrewd plot to swallow up minority religions which arose as a revolt against 'Brahmanism'. At the same time, pointing out fundamental differences between Sanatana Dharma and Abrahamic religions is run down as hate speech designed to foment communal discord. There is an insistence on treating the same as separate and vice versa. Ironically, all the talk about "essential unity of all religions" is firmly yoked to the service of this distortion. This has confused our intellect, clouded our vision and paralyzed our will to adopt right attitudes, frame proper policies and undertake appropriate actions.
This book is an humble endeavour to set the record straight on both the counts. Essentially, it discusses two types of religious traditions, as ably articulated by Sita Ram Goel.
They proceed from entirely different premises and lead to very different mindsets and behavior patterns. One of them may be called the Biblical or Abrahamic traditions and the other, Vedic/Indic/Pagan traditions. There is a large body of literature discussing each of the Abrahamic faiths on a standalone basis in great detail. Instead of repeating the exercise, the effort here is to focus on a few characteristics which they share in common and which separate them from what they contemptuously look down upon as kufra or falsehood.
Hindu (1765)
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Comparative (66)
Dictionary (12)
Ethics (44)
Language (350)
Logic (80)
Mimamsa (58)
Nyaya (134)
Psychology (497)
Samkhya (60)
Shaivism (66)
Shankaracharya (233)
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