But what does it mean to me to be a practicing Hindu? I have never been particularly fond of visiting temples. I do believe in praying everyday, even if it is only for a couple of minutes. I have a little alcove at my home in Manhattan, where I try to reach out to the holy spirit. Yet I believe in the Upanishadic doctrine that the divine is essentially unknowable and unattainable by ordinary mortals; all prayer is an attempt to reach out to that which we cannot touch. Although I have occasionally visited temples, and I appreciate how important they are to my mother and most other devout Hindus, I don't really frequent them because I believe that one does not need any intermediaries between oneself and one's notion of the divine. “Build Ram in your hearts” is what Hinduism has always enjoined. If Ram is in your heart, it would matter very little what bricks or stones Ram can also be found in.
So I take pride in the openness, the diversity, the range, the lofty metaphysical aspirations of the Vedanta. I cherish the diversity, the lack of compulsion, and the richness of the various ways in which Hinduism is practiced eclectically. And I admire the civilizational heritage of tolerance that has made Hindu societies open their arms to people of every other faith, to come and practice their beliefs in peace amid Hindus. It is remarkable, for instance, that the only country on earth where the Jewish people have lived for centuries and never experienced a single episode of anti-Semitism is India. That is the Hinduism in which I gladly take pride. Openness is the essence of my faith. And that's the perspective from which I sought to serve in an office that must belong equally to people of all faiths, beliefs, and creeds around the world.
My avowal of my own Hinduism sits ill with those who assume that every believing Hindu automatically believes in the Hindutva project.* Yet it is hardly paradoxical to suggest that Hinduism, India's ancient homegrown faith, can help strengthen Indianness in ways that the proponents of Hindutva have not understood. In one sense Hinduism is almost the ideal faith for the twenty-first century: a faith that is eclectic and nondoctrinaire, one that responds ideally to the incertitudes of a postmodern world. Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. But this cannot be the so-called Hindu fundamentalism that has demonstrated such hateful intolerance toward other religious groups. It has to be the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, the great preacher and philosopher, who more than a century ago, at Chicago's World Parliament of Religions in 1893, articulated best the liberal humanism that lies at the heart of his (and my) creed:
I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a country which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all countries of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I remember having repeated a hymn from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”… The wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita [says]: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”
* The purpose of which is to create a Hindu political identity for India.
Vivekananda went on to denounce that “sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth.” His confident belief that their death knell had sounded was sadly not to be borne out. But his vision — summarized in the Sanskrit credo “Sarva Dharma Sambhava, all religions are equally worthy of respect”—is the kind of Hinduism practiced by the vast majority of India's Hindus, whose instinctive acceptance of other faiths and forms of worship has long been the vital hallmark of Indianness. Vivekananda made no distinction between the actions of Hindus as a people (the grant of asylum, for instance) and their actions as a religious community (tolerance of other faiths): for him, the distinction was irrelevant because Hinduism was as much a civilization as a set of religious beliefs. In a different speech to the same Chicago convention, Swami Vivekananda set out his philosophy in simple terms:
Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognized it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realized, or thought of, or stated through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols — so many pegs to hang spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for everyone, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism…. The Hindus have their faults, but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbors. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition.
It is sad that this assertion of Vivekananda's is being contradicted in the streets by those who claim to be reviving his faith in his name. What this tells us is we should never assume that, even when religion is used as a mobilizing identity, all those so mobilized act in accordance with the tenets of their religion. Nonetheless it is ironic that even the Maratha warrior-king Shivaji, after whom the bigoted Shiv Sena is named, exemplified the tolerance of Hinduism. In the account of a critic, the Mughal historian Khafi Khan, Shivaji made it a rule that his followers should do no harm to mosques, the Koran, or to women. “Whenever a copy of the sacred Koran came into his hands,” Khafi Khan wrote, Shivaji “treated it with respect, and gave it to some of his Mussulman followers.”
Indians today have to find real answers to the dilemmas of running a plural nation. “A nation,” wrote the Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl, “is a historical group of men of recognizable cohesion, held together by a common enemy.” The common enemy of Indians is an internal one, but not the one identified by Mr. Togadia and his ilk. The common enemy lies in the forces of sectarian division that would, if unchecked, tear the country apart — or transform it into something that all self-respecting Hindus would refuse to recognize.
What Hinduism provides is a foundation that promotes a commonality among all religions and their beliefs. In fact, Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives. The Muslim reformist scholar Asghar Ali Engineer has written that “rural Islam… (is) almost indistinguishable from Hinduism except in the form of worship…. The degree may vary from one area to another; but cultural integration between the Hindus and Muslims is a fact which no one, except victims of misinformation, can deny.”