by Mark Tully
‘Well, I’m certainly not a ground-breaker,’ I admitted. ‘It was my love of liturgy and worship which formed my path to God, and I still seem to have a long way to go before I get there!’
The Swami laughed. ‘Well, you really must come here for a longer time and learn to meditate. But seriously – we are not too far apart. I enjoy all the liturgies, but if it stops there and doesn’t give a person the aspiration to personally experience God then it becomes dogma.’
To reinforce his point, Swami Veda Bharati went on to maintain that religions are based on the experience of their founders. ‘The scriptures point you towards God by telling you what Jesus experienced or what the Buddha experienced,’ he said. ‘Their experiences were so powerful, so peaceful, so life-changing that those around them had no option but to believe, and their belief became a religion.’
‘So where does yoga come in?’
‘It was Swami Rama who told me I must verify the scriptures I read by experience gained through yoga meditation. I find many Roman Catholics who have verified their scriptures through yoga meditation, experience a deep meaning in their religion for the first time. Even those who are absolutely atheistic discover there is something beyond “physical being” and some go on to join churches or other religious organisations.’
The next day I witnessed the Swami’s commitment to his religious tradition with my own eyes. Two ceremonies ended the fifty-day Vedic sacrifice. The first was a final Yajna in the ashram’s temple. The ritual was celebrated by more than twenty Brahmin priests. Swami Veda Bharati and the Shankaracharya sat cross-legged in front of the sacred fire. The Brahmins invoked Agni, the god of fire who carries the offerings and messages of us humans to the other deities and brings back their messages. The flames crackled as tins of ghee, or clarified butter, were poured on them. They rose so high that Swamiji had to stand back and hold a long hollow bamboo through which one of the Brahmins poured more ghee onto the fire. The Brahmins also threw handfuls of samagree, a mixture of more than thirty barks, roots, herbs, and leaves, onto the fire. Each time they chanted words to the effect of: ‘Not mine, not mine – I offer all the claims of my ego as an offering of worshipful surrender. I burn all my desires and claims in the fire.’
In the second ceremony, Swami Veda Bharati sat in front of a line of nine young girls and one young boy, while texts glorifying the Divine Mother were recited and sacred mantras repeated time and time again. The Swami then prostrated himself before the children, washed their feet and made offerings to them. He explained to me later, ‘I find great fulfilment in feeling that I know myself to be smaller than a little girl and prostrate myself before the deity in their form. Having invoked the presence of the divinity, the girl becomes a manifestation of the divine presence.’ Swami Veda Bharati told me that the experience he had gained through meditation had verified the rituals he performed and given them a deeper meaning.
My experiences in India forced me to think again about the faith I had been taught because I felt that I couldn’t just ignore what was right before my eyes: the existence of many ways to God. I did get lost, but my gradual acceptance of these many ways enabled me to return to my tradition with my faith strengthened. When I came to understand that, for thousands of years, in changing historical circumstances, in different countries and cultures and climates, people had experienced the existence of what appears to be the same reality, although describing that reality differently, I saw that a universal God made far more sense rationally than one who limited his activities to Christians.
The descriptions of the divine may be different, but the experience seems to me to be fundamentally the same, and this has strengthened my conviction that God or the Ultimate Reality does exist. Of course, many will argue that this experience is merely an illusion and a response to the desire to believe that life has a purpose and doesn’t end with death. If that is so, it is an extraordinarily powerful, persistent, and prevalent illusion. Maybe it’s the arrogance that can accompany rationalism that prevents many people from acknowledging that there could be a God, or a reality, far more powerful than we mortals and our powers of reasoning can comprehend. It is the arrogance that can accompany religious certainty that prevents many from acknowledging the validity of other experiences of God than their own. My feeling is that we have to be humble enough about our religion to recognise that it will never be certain; there has to be an element of questioning and doubt. But Tennyson’s Ancient Sage was surely right when he advised us to ‘cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt’.
RAIPUR: A GOD TOO SMALL
RAIPUR WAS JUST a district headquarters, not a very significant town, until it became the capital of the new state of Chattisgarh, carved out of the vast Madhya Pradesh that sprawls across central India. Dr Praveen Togadia, a cancer surgeon and evangelist of a version of Hinduism that runs contrary to all that I have been saying in the previous chapter, had arrived there one Sunday to denounce Islam and Christianity as enemies of Hindus and of India. I had come to film and interview Dr Togadia.
During the interview, I asked the balding, middle-aged doctor why he was so intolerant of other religions. He pointed his finger at me aggressively and said, ‘Let me tell you, Mr Tully, it has nothing to do with religion! We are all from the same ethnic stock, our ancestors are the same. Religion doesn’t matter.’ Needless to say, Togadia maintained that that original ethnic stock was Hindu, and those ancestors were Hindus. Although he said religion didn’t matter, he saw every reason why the missionaries of his World Hindu Council, known as the Vishva Hindu Parishad or VHP, should proselytise forcefully to convince Indian Muslims and Christians to ‘come home’ to Hinduism.
At the VHP meeting that evening, Dr Togadia was preaching to the converted. However, the audience was divided in two. The middle-class and the middle-aged sat sedately in neat orderly rows, appearing for all the world as though this gathering was just another Sunday outing for them – a weekend diversion for the family perhaps. But behind their orderly rows, the young men of Raipur roamed around the park with the saffron bandanas of the VHP tied around their heads, exploding crackers, yelling ‘Jai Shri Ram!’ (‘Victory to Rama!’, the Hindu god) and wielding tridents, which are the symbol of the god Shiva. Inevitably, they surrounded us as we started to film, yelling even more loudly and waving their tridents in our faces.
Those tridents were lethally sharp, and their use had been banned in some states. When I asked the youths why they were carrying them, they replied, ‘Because they are the symbol of Lord Shiva.’
‘Is that the only reason?’ I wondered.
One young man blurted out, ‘No, it’s to kill Pathans!’
‘You mean Muslims?’
‘Yes!’ they all roared.
Togadia’s arrival was greeted with another round of crackers and even more frenzied yelling. He mounted the dais, acknowledged the welcome, and began to rant against Muslims and Christians. He punctuated his speech in true demagogic style by raising his voice in crescendos, followed by pauses to allow his words to sink in and the crowd to yell their applause.
‘Muslims,’ he bawled, ‘invaded India and streams of Hindu blood flowed, and yet Hindus have remained tolerant. But now we are expected to protect Muslims. This is a perverted way of thinking, the result of a thousand years of oppression.’ He went on to warn Muslims to accept Bharat, a code word in his language for a Hindu India, or else ‘face what will happen when 800 million Hindus become Praveen Togadias’. No Muslim would want to live in a country full of Hindus as hostile as Togadia. Yet Togadia maintained that, far from being threatened by his brand of Hinduism, Muslims themselves were threatening India. There was, he claimed, a threat of terrorism sponsored from outside India, as well as a threat within India itself because Islam did not allow birth control and so the Muslim population in India was continuing to increase. As for Christians, they had converted innocent Hindus with bribes of bread and money and now they wanted to convert the whole of Chattisgarh!
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�Doesn’t the Pope claim the right to convert the whole world?’ Togadia bellowed. ‘So how can the Church claim it doesn’t want to convert the whole of your state? Will the Pope allow Hindus to preach in the Vatican? Why then should we allow Christians to make conversions in our country? I warn you: the Church is training an army of missionaries and nuns to convert Hindus!’
Although under Indian law anyone who insults the religious feeling of another person is liable to imprisonment, the police were silent spectators of the insults being heaped on Muslims and Christians at this rally. Which brings me to the question: if middle-class Hindus can spend a Sunday evening listening with approval to Praveen Togadia, doesn’t this suggest that, no matter how ancient India’s tradition of pluralism is, it is dead now? To this, I would reply that while Togadia and his ilk are certainly a threat to that tradition, and as such should not be ignored, I believe it is still intact.
In 1992 the international press was full of dire foreboding when followers of Togadia’s brand of Hinduism defied the government and tore down the medieval mosque in Ayodhya, which they claimed stood on the birth site of Rama. The media wondered if India would ‘fall to the zealots’. The apprehensive atmosphere became graver when riots broke out in many parts of India, and in particular when the police joined in attacks on Muslims in Mumbai. But whenever my opinion about events was canvassed by BBC interviewers, I held to my belief that the storm would pass, saying, ‘In my experience tempers in India flare up very rapidly but cool down quickly too.’ And so they did.
I believe the reason that tempers did eventually cool down, as I had expected they would, is because the Indian tradition of religions living side by side in comparative harmony eventually reasserted itself. In the sixty years since Independence, India has demonstrated the resilience of that tradition time and time again. At Independence, India’s greatest leader, Mahatma Gandhi, didn’t take part in the celebrations because he disapproved of the division of the country on the basis of religion. In fact, Nehru and other leaders of the Congress party had only acceded to the demand for a Muslim homeland, the new nation of Pakistan, when they became convinced there was no other way of reaching an agreement with the Muslim League leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The more extreme Hindu organisations regarded Mother India as sacred and her division as sacrilegious. When partition came, it led to a massive two-way migration and to appalling bloodshed. To this day, the debate continues about exactly how many people were butchered and how many fled their homes. This bitter legacy might have been expected to result in the new Muslim Pakistan being matched by an India which was a Hindu nation instead of a secular democracy. If India had been declared a Hindu nation, hatred and irreconcilable differences might have arisen between Hindus and the millions of Muslims left behind in the country after partition. India could have become another Northern Ireland or another Lebanon – a country torn apart by sectarian strife.
Since Independence, India has faced a number of crises between communities, the nature of which would have destabilised many other countries. Probably the most dangerous of these was sparked off by the attack on the Golden Temple, described in Chapter 3. When news broke of the damage to the shrine, Sikh soldiers mutinied in several different places. Sikhs have always been prominent in the Indian army and this was the first time the integrity of the institution – which was the final guarantor of India’s security and the last resort when riots broke out – had been threatened.
That was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31 October 1984 by two of her bodyguards, who were Sikhs. I was halfway up a mountain, more than 200 miles from Delhi, trying to keep up with the entourage of Princess Anne, who was visiting schools for Tibetan refugee children, when I overheard two policemen discussing the news that Indira Gandhi had been shot. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who was in eastern India, rushed back to Delhi after hearing my colleague Satish Jacob’s report on BBC World Service radio. The sudden death of such a dominant leader left a dangerous power vacuum. Indira Gandhi had ensured that no one anywhere near her stature had emerged in the Congress party, so now the senior ministers fell back on Rajiv. As he had been in politics for only about four years, it is perhaps not surprising that he floundered dangerously at first.
When I attempted to hurry back to Delhi from the Himalayas, my car was surrounded by an ugly mob in the town of Muzaffanagar. The crowd was shouting slogans against America – in those days always assumed to be the villain – and I only managed to pass through it unharmed by frantically shouting, ‘English, English, BBC!’ This was the first I saw of the violence that subsequently erupted across India.
For two days the police lost control of the capital. Gangs roamed the streets with lists of houses where Sikhs lived. They attacked the houses, killed their occupants and looted their property, and it wasn’t until Rajiv Gandhi called out the army that the violence in Delhi started to subside. Sikhs were attacked in many other places as well. The government admits that in this violence nearly 3,000 people were slaughtered, 2,000 of them in Delhi.
Although the Sikhs are a comparatively small community, they play a very important role not only within the army but also in all the security forces. They have a large presence in the capital, and their home state, Punjab, is on the border with Pakistan. So if Amritsar and the violence after Indira Gandhi’s death had alienated them permanently, there would have been a dangerous wound festering at the heart of India. But that wound didn’t fester; it healed.
Sikhs were not alienated because India’s pluralist tradition reasserted itself. India is like a great ocean liner, which is hit from time to time by storms and giant waves that would capsize most ships. She pitches and rolls dangerously but sails on. However, sailing through such stormy waters and surviving can lead to dangerous complacency, a sense that India will always muddle through somehow and so there is no need to worry. The fact that Togadia and his ilk have not succeeded in setting India on fire is no reason for failing to try to understand why he does appeal to a significant number of Hindus. It is impossible to say exactly how significant because, with a campaign of hatred against Muslims, buttressed by all the paranoia of the war on terrorism, there may well be many Hindus who don’t come out in public but who secretly have some sympathy for Togadia’s views. Since I believe that pluralism is the only way India can survive, and the only way the world can solve not only the religious but also the ethnic and linguistic conflicts that plague us, I am aware that I too must examine the Togadia phenomenon.
There is one obvious reason for the rise of Hindu nationalism and that reason is politics. Nationalism is a cause around which some Hindus will inevitably rally and it therefore gives the Bharatiya Janata party, or BJP, which comes from the same family as the VHP, a constituency. It also provides an enemy – an essential requirement in ethnic, linguistic or religious politics. For the VHP, the minority communities are the enemy, especially the Muslims, who are identified as the community standing in the way of a Hindu India. Any suggestion that Muslims are being privileged in the name of secularism is leapt on by the Hindu nationalists. Their whole strategy is designed to create a constituency of Hindus who reject India’s pluralist tradition and want their religion to have a dominant role.
Togadia also plays on a religious grievance. The population of Chattisgarh is dominated by tribes who used to live in the forests and who were outside the mainstream of Indian life, as well as the mainstream of Hinduism. They had a vibrant art and culture of their own but were easily influenced and exploited by more sophisticated people. One wall of my flat is covered with paintings by a tribal artist friend of mine, Jangarh Singh Shyam. His death was a cruel example of how tribal peoples can be exploited. A Japanese art dealer regarded Jangarh as a commercial prospect and lured him to his country. There he sat him down to paint. Jangarh became more and more lonely but he was not allowed to return home. He sent despairing letters to his family but they could do nothing to help him, and in the end he committed suicide.
During the Raj, s
ome Christian missionaries also exploited the tribals. They persuaded them that their animism was superstition and that only Jesus could save them, using the added lure of food and sometimes money to convert them. The missionaries created a class known as ‘rice Christians’ who were not treated with respect by the better educated members of the Church. These were almost always Christians who had been converted from higher castes and were far fewer in number than the rice Christians. Reporting on a flood in central India, I came across some tribal Christians who had taken refuge in the large compound of the parish priest’s house. Instead of caring for them as members of his flock, the priest pointed to them and said to me, ‘You see the state we are in. I have to put up with these sort of people in my house!’ On another occasion, a Roman Catholic headmaster from south India said to me, ‘I wouldn’t take communion from the hands of a Dalit priest.’ The Dalit converts were also known as rice Christians.
It was this tradition of mass conversion that gave Togadia the ammunition he needed against the Christians in Raipur. The same tradition gave rise to the Hindu sect, the Arya Samaj, that provides his theology for him. In the nineteenth century a scholarly and persuasive Swami, Dayanand Sarasvati, became a bitter critic of the Christian missionaries and their tactics. Commenting on Jesus’ promise to make his followers ‘fishers of men’, the Swami argued, ‘Jesus founded his religion in order to entrap people. He set out to accomplish his object by ensnaring others into his net like a fisherman. Is there any wonder, then, that Christian missionaries follow their master in ensnaring other men into their religion?’ Dayanand Sarasvati admired the missionaries’ zeal and decided that the only way to beat them was to play them at their own game. Realising that the cohesion of the missionaries’ message depended on their having an authoritative scripture – the Bible – to work with, he declared the Vedas to be ‘the supreme authority in the ascertainment of true religion’ and said, ‘Whatever is enjoined by the Vedas we hold to be right; whilst whatever is condemned by them we believe to be wrong.’ Swami Dayanand also accepted Christian criticism both of idol worship as superstition and of caste, which he realised was dividing Hindu society, although he still advocated a social hierarchy. He encouraged conversion, establishing a new ritual to welcome converts, because traditionally it was believed that you had to be born a Hindu – you couldn’t become one. Modelled closely on the Western dogmatic religious tradition, the Arya Samaj became what the respected French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot has described as ‘one of the first crucibles of Hindu nationalism’.