Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: March 13, 2001
The most distasteful aspect of Taliban's
military offensive against the Bamiyan Buddhas and other pre-Islamic relics
in Afghanistan is the ill-disguised glee of our predatory radical secularists
who have worked overtime to subvert the significance of this civilizational
assault and provide an alibi to its perpetrators. Delighted
at this unexpected exoneration of Islamic fundamentalism, Muslim intellectuals
have jumped on the bandwagon to unjustly equate Hindu and Muslim fundamentalism.
Worst are the puerile jokes about Buddha smiling.
By justifying the ballistics at
Bamiyan in terms of the reclamation of the Ram Janmabhoomi by Hindus, secularists
have taken unacceptable liberties with truth. But in their
haste to absolve the Taliban, they have ceded valuable ground on the very
issues they seek to fudge. Thus, by linking Bamiyan with Ayodhya,
they have held Hindus responsible for Taliban's retribution and placed
the Sakya muni firmly on the Hindu/Indic firmament, contradicting their
own canard that Buddhism is a faith separate from and opposed to Hinduism,
that was 'driven out' of India by scheming Brahmins. After
all, if Buddha statues can be battered in response to Hindu misdeeds, he
must have a contemporary relevance to the community.
The Hindu tradition (scholars prefer
the term Indic) reveres Buddha as an avatar (incarnation) of Vishnu.
Buddhism is rooted in India's dharmic tradition and constitutes an essential
part of the invisible yet tangible unity of the Indic narrative.
Dharma is natural (cosmic) law, and has, through the ages, assumed various
forms. It is not a static notion espousing values of a bygone
era, but accepts and adapts to change. Moreover, just as India
is a living nation, so Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism are strands of its
living civilization - the sannatan dharma (Eternal Tradition).
This civilization is now in peril
- in Kashmir, in Kerala, in the environs of Kabul. It is in
acute danger of being cannibalized by marauding hordes armed with more
deadly weapons, and even more lethal intent, than ever in the blood-splattered
past. This is why there is a stark difference in the perception
of Indians and non-Indians to the destruction of the statues.
Buddhist countries have reacted with anguish, viewing it as a humiliation
of their creed; they wish to save and retrieve the icons. The
western countries, including the United Nations, are concerned at the loss
of valuable cultural heritage.
Both have failed to perceive Taliban's
action as a new, more vicious chapter in the old civilizational conflict
with India. This is why, even in the absence of a Buddhist
community there, Taliban feels sufficiently deranged by the lingering sanctity
of the images to take up cudgels against them. I hope Taliban's
unpaid envoys will not insult us with the claim that Afghanistan's miniscule
Hindu-Sikh community enjoys full freedom of religion and worship, when
even today Indians working in Gulf countries cannot carry images of their
Gods with them for private worship.
For India, Bamiyan cuts much deeper.
For us, civilization, culture and religion are a continuum; a strike against
one is violence on the whole. When you dynamite an icon, you
wage war on Dharma itself. At Bamiyan, the wheel of Dharma
(dharma chakra) set in motion by Buddha when he proclaimed his new teaching
to the world has been grounded; the monetary or artistic value of the relics
being destroyed stands belittled before this grim truth. The
Taliban and its secular allies can claim that the desecration is retaliation
for the Masjid-i-Janmasthan (Janmabhoomi Masjid) only because Buddha is
inseparable from our living spiritual tradition. This is a
universal tradition; it stands and strives for Consciousness, Truth, Beauty,
Wisdom and Compassion, and is India's true, eternal legacy to mankind.
The West - which takes its religion from Palestine and culture from the
Graeco-Roman world - must learn to appreciate this; it will need India
to combat the threat Islamic fundamentalism poses to the civilized world.
If the West is serious about such
an endeavour, it must prove its credentials by withdrawing funds and patronage
to Christian missionaries and the questionable practice of conversions;
these, too, outrage dharma. Without labouring the point, I
would like the US to introspect about the status of Native Americans living
like wild game on sanctuaries (called reserves), and the situation of Blacks
since the days of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As for European nations,
the horrendous destruction of Latin American civilizations and peoples
has few parallels in history. By the time wisdom dawned, even
the most strenuous efforts by the white man himself could not recollect
the lost traditions (not save or revive, mind you), so complete was the
devastation. Octavio Paz has written of the identity crisis
gripping his society, Christianity having failed to compensate for the
loss of the old way of life. The efforts of Carlos Castaneda
and his nagual (mystic) masters do not amount to the recovery of the tradition;
it is gone forever. As for Africa, it does not even bear thinking
about.
I may add that Muslim nations and
intellectuals who formally condemn Taliban's action as 'un-Islamic' are
engaging in subterfuge as they are addressing an exclusively non-Islamic
audience. None of them can dare raise the issue of the destruction
of Gods of another faith within the Islamic world (with the clergy and
civil society), which is where it must be debated and decided if the world
is to be spared such sacrilege again. Scholars of Islam are
aware that the community closed the doors on ijma (consensus) and ijtihad
(interpretation) centuries ago; that no dialogue has taken place in the
Islamic world since, while the clergy has intensified its stranglehold
over the faithful. As the clergy recognizes only the reign
of the Prophet and the first four pious Caliphs as valid, it can hardly
be persuaded to respect other faiths. Islamic society has no
secular space in which so-called liberals can operate and prevail; their
role is only to deflect attacks on and negotiate space for fundamentalists.
Before the bogey of Hindu fundamentalism
is raised, let me state that in the modern period, there is not a single
issue concerning Hindu society that its leaders have not confronted directly.
Even setting aside the centuries-old tradition of Bhakti saints and their
efforts to uplift lower sections of society, Hindus from the days of Raja
Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar have not hesitated to take entrenched
orthodoxy head-on - be it sati, widow re-marriage, child marriage, female
infanticide, education and emancipation of women, or more modern evils
such as dowry, bride-burning, and now female foeticide. In
fact, by the time Mahatma Gandhi launched his public crusade against Untouchability,
the orthodox had already lost the capacity to fight against reforms on
the hitherto secure ground of tradition and shastric (scriptural) sanction.
This is not to say that Hindu society
has become perfect. However, all debates and reforms in Hindu
society are internal to itself and consistent with the demands of dharma,
which must renew itself in every age. We also have our share
of obscurantists. But we know how to sideline even Shankaracharyas
if they defend sati or any practice repugnant to modern sensitivities.
I do not know of a single Islamic scholar, religious divine or political
leader who can debate upon modern-day sensibilities with mullahs in Cairo
(which has a pro-west benign despotism that deals harshly with fundamentalism),
leave alone Kabul. This is what makes the equation of non-existent
Hindu fundamentalism with doctrinaire Islam so obnoxious.
