c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Professor Akbar S. Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor of International Relations at American University in Washington. His most recent book is “Islam Today: A Short Introduction to the Muslim World.”)

(UNDATED) “Akbar Bhai, isn’t it a singular tragedy that our countries are blowing up so wantonly the great opportunity our independence gave us of shaking off the deadening burden of long centuries of downslide and degradation?”

Addressing me as bhai, or brother, with the usual courtesy common to South Asian culture, Virendra Prakash raised the rhetorical question when we met recently at a seminar on South Asia in Washington.

Prakash added, with some indignation: “And that, too, in the name of Allah and Ram! Could it be that in reality God has forsaken us, leaving our people at the mercy of the leaders we have?”

Prakash is a distinguished Indian. In the best traditions of the Indian civil service, he has combined senior posts in government, such as secretary to government and chief secretary, with academic interests. He holds a master’s degree from Harvard. Now that he is retired, Prakash has joined the struggle to define his great religion _ Hinduism.

Prakash was aware that the Gandhian vision of a tolerant and compassionate Hinduism was challenged in February 2002 by the savage communal killing in Gujarat, India, by fundamentalist Hindu nationalists. This was especially ironic, as Gujarat is Gandhi’s home state.

Prakash presented me his first book, “Hindutva Demystified” (2002). As few people are really aware of the debate between nationalist communalists and pluralists within Hinduism, I am reproducing some relevant excerpts that highlight the important ideas of Prakash. The opening lines plunge us into the crisis in Hinduism:

“Godhra, Gujarat, Orissa _ oh! The anguish, the sorrow, the shame! Is this what we got our freedom for? Is this how India is to be brought down _ to the level of a Rwanda or a Serbia?

“Is rabid communalism of the majority under Dvija-inspired ideology the best we can come up with? Is killing helpless men, women and children the way to enhance the glory of our Motherland? Is the Sangh Parivar’s `Hindutva’ the answer to India’s agony? Let us ponder over the predicament of this ancient civilization, of a billion-plus humans, believed to be a unique example of unity in diversity.”

“`Hindutva,’ as articulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and adopted by Hedgewar as the bedrock of the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (movement) has little to do with the real, noble faith of the Hindus.”

Prakash is skeptical of the leaders: “It has always been so. The masterminds, who plan and organize violence and carnage in God’s name, pandering to their sadistic egos and pursuing their diabolic designs, stay behind the scenes, safe and secure with their families, friends and wordly possessions. They watch the `fun,’ bask in the glow of their notoriety and relish the fruits of human tragedies enacted by them, and prepare to stage the next great dance of death and destruction.

“The months of February and March 2002 have witnessed the orgies of violence of the most mindless and virulent kind in the Indian state of Gujarat.” Prakash calls the killing of the Muslims a “pogrom.”

He is indignant with the developments after Gujarat: “As if the continuing mayhem against the Muslims in Gujarat was not enough of a national shame, the RSS compounded it by holding out a brazen threat to the Muslims that they must earn Hindu goodwill to secure their safety in India.

Prakash quotes the leading ideologue of the party:

“From this standpoint, sanctioned by the experiences of shrewd old nations, the foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in a reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. of the Hindu nation, and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race; or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment _ not even citizen’s rights.”

Prakash is rightly proud of the great religious traditions of South Asia: “Buddha, Mahavira, Nanak, Ram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda, Dayananda, Gandhi _ these great sages of India represent the noble tradition of critical introspection on the state of our religious thought and practice since times immemorial.

“To most Hindus these `men of God’ represent the true, the noble and the fundamental spirit of an oceanic religion into which are assimilated many of the world’s mighty religious rivers.”

In the end, appropriately, Prakash quotes Gandhi, who wrote in September 1931: “I shall work for an India in which the poorest shall feel it is their country in whose making they have an effective voice, an India in which there will be no high class or low class of people; an India in which all the communities shall live in perfect harmony.”

That vision of Gandhi today is under challenge.

DEA END AHMED