Hindus pride themselves on belonging to a religion of astonishing breadth and range of belief; a religion that acknowledges all ways of worshiping God as equally valid — indeed, the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. This eclectic and nondoctrinaire Hinduism — a faith without apostasy, where there are no heretics to cast out because there has never been any such thing as a Hindu heresy — is not the Hinduism that destroyed a mosque, nor the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. How can such a religion lend itself to “fundamentalism”? Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. To be an Indian Hindu is to be part of an elusive dream all Indians share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors from many sources that we cannot easily identify.
Of course it is true that, though Hinduism as a faith lends itself to eclecticism, this does not exempt all Hindus from the temptations of identity politics. Yet India's democracy helps to acknowledge and accommodate the various identities of its multifaceted population. No one identity can ever triumph in India: both the country's chronic pluralism and the logic of the electoral marketplace make this impossible. In leading a coalition government from 1998 to 2004, the Hindu-inclined Bharatiya Janata Party learned that any party ruling India has to reach out to other groups, other interests, other minorities. After all, there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us.
India's national identity has long been built on the slogan “Unity in diversity.” The “Indian” comes in such varieties that a woman who is fair-skinned, sari-wearing, and Italian-speaking, as Sonia Gandhi is, is not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than one who is “wheatish-complexioned,” wears a salwar kameez and speaks Urdu. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally “foreign” to some of us, equally Indian to us all.
At a time when the Huntington thesis of a “clash of civilizations” has gained currency, it is intriguing to contemplate a civilization predicated upon such diversity, one which provides the framework to absorb these clashes within itself. Our founding fathers wrote a constitution for a dream; we continue to give passports to their ideals. Rushdie's “Overartist” finds his aural counterpart in the Muslim ustads playing Hindu devotional ragas and the Bollywood playback singers chanting Urdu lyrics. The music of India is the collective anthem of a hybrid civilization.
The sight in May 2004 of a Roman Catholic political leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) — in a country 81 percent Hindu — caught the world's imagination. That one simple moment of political change put to rest many of the arguments over Indian identity. India was never truer to itself than when celebrating its own diversity.
Ultimately, of course, what matters in determining the validity of a nation is the will of its inhabitants to live and strive together. Such a will may not be unanimous, for there will always be those who reject the common framework for narrow sectarian ends. But if the overwhelming majority of the people share the political will for unity, if they can look back to both a past and a future, and if they realize they are better off in Kozhikode or Kanpur dreaming the same dreams as those in Kohlapur or Kohima, a nation exists, celebrating diversity and freedom. That is the India that has emerged in the last sixty years, and it is well worth celebrating.
2. Hinduism and Hindutva: Creed and Credo
THE QUESTIONS A CANDIDATE FOR PUBLIC OFFICE HAS to answer from the media can cover any subject, and intrusiveness is difficult to resist. Still, I was surprised with the frequency with which, when I was India's candidate for Secretary-General of the United Nations, journalists from Boston to Berlin expressed curiosity about my religious beliefs. I tend to think of faith as something intensely personal, not really a matter I feel any desire to parade before the world. But, in an era where religion has sadly become a source of division and conflict in so many places, I had to concede that the question was a legitimate one — especially after one of my rivals specifically appealed for support on the grounds of his religion.
It's true, in my view, that faith can influence one's conduct in one's career and life. For some, it's merely a question of faith in themselves; for others, including me, that sense of faith emerges from a faith in something larger than ourselves. Faith is, at some level, what gives you the courage to take the risks you must take, and enables you to make peace with yourself when you suffer the inevitable setbacks and calumnies that are the lot of those who try to make a difference in the world.
So I have had no difficulty in saying openly that I am a believing Hindu. But I am also quick to explain what that phrase means to me. We have an extraordinary diversity of religious practices within Hinduism, a faith with no single sacred book but many. Hinduism is, in many ways, predicated on the idea that the eternal wisdom of the ages about divinity cannot be confined to a single sacred book. We have no compulsory injunctions or obligations. We do not even have a Hindu Sunday, let alone a requirement to pray at specific times and frequencies.
What we have is a faith that allows each believer to reach out his or her hands to his or her notion of the Godhead. Hinduism is a faith that uniquely does not have any notion of heresy — you cannot be a Hindu heretic because there is no standard set of dogmas from which deviation would make you a heretic.
So Hinduism is a faith so unusual that it is the world's only major religion that does not claim only its set of beliefs to be true. I find that most congenial. For me, as a believing Hindu, it is wonderful to be able to meet people from other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I have embarked upon a “right path” that they have somehow missed. I was brought up in the belief that all ways of worship are equally valid. My father prayed devoutly every day but never obliged me to join him: in the Hindu way, he wanted me to find my own truth. And that I believe I have. It is a truth that admits of the possibility that there might be other truths. I therefore bring to the world an attitude that is open, accommodating, and tolerant of others’ beliefs. Mine is not a faith for those who seek certitudes, but there is no better belief system for an era of doubt and uncertainty than a religion that cheerfully accommodates both.
The misuse of religion for political purposes is a sad, sometimes tragic, aspect of our contemporary reality. As former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan once said, the problem is never with the faith, but with the faithful. All faiths strive sincerely to animate the divine spark in each of us; but some of their followers, alas, use their faith as a club to beat others with, rather than a platform to raise themselves to the heavens. Since Hinduism believes that there are various ways of reaching the ultimate truth, the fact that adherents of my faith, in a perversion of its tenets, have chosen to destroy somebody else's sacred place, have attacked others because of the absence of foreskin or the mark on a forehead, is profoundly un-Hindu. I do not accept these fanatics’ interpretation of the values and principles of my faith.