Author: David Frawley
Publication: Aseemaa
Date: February 2002
In media accounts today, any group
that identifies itself as Hindu or tries to promote any Hindu cause is
immediately and uncritically defined as 'right-winged'. In the leftist
accounts that commonly come from the Indian press, Hindu organizations
are also routinely called militants and fascists. However, if we look at
their actual views, Hindu groups have a very different ideology and practices
than the political right in other countries. In fact many Hindu causes
are more at home in the left in the West than in the right.
The whole idea of the 'Hindu right'
is a ploy to discredit the Hindu movement as backward and prevent people
from really examining it. The truth is that the Hindu movement is a revival
of a native spiritual tradition that has nothing to do with the political
right-wing of any western country. Its ideas are spiritually evolutionary,
not politically regressive, though such revivals do have a few extremists.
Let us examine the different aspects of the Hindu movement and where they
would fall in the political spectrum of left and right as usually defined
in the West.
Hinduism and Native Traditions
The Hindu cause is similar to the
causes of native and tribal peoples all over the world, like Native American
and African groups. Even Hindu concerns about cultural encroachment by
western religious and commercial interests mirrors those of other traditional
peoples who want to preserve their cultures. Yet while the left has taken
up the concerns of native peoples worldwide, the same concerns of Hindus
are styled right-wing or communal, particularly in India!
When native Americans ask for a
return of their sacred sites, the left in America supports them. When Hindus
ask for a similar return of their sacred sites, the left in India opposes
them and brands them as intolerant for their actions! When native peoples
in America or Africa protest against the missionaries for interfering with
their culture, the left supports them. Yet when Hindus express the same
sentiments, the left attacks them. Even the Hindu demand for rewriting
the history of India to better express the value of their indigenous traditions
is the same as what native Africans and Americans are asking for. Yet the
left opposes this Hindu effort, while supporting African and American efforts
of a similar nature.
In countries like America, native
traditions are minorities and thereby afforded a special sympathy. Leftists
in general tend to support minority causes and often lump together black
African and native American causes as examples of the damage caused by
racism and colonialism. In India, a native tradition has survived the colonial
period but as the tradition of the majority of the people. Unfortunately,
the intellectual elite of India, though following largely a leftist orientation,
has no sympathy for the country's own native tradition. They identify it
as right-wing in order to express their hostility towards it. They try
to portray it as a majority oppression of minorities, when it is the movement
of a suppressed majority to regain its dignity.
Not surprisingly, the same leftists
in India, who have long been allied to communist China, similarly styled
the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause as rightwing and regressive, though
the Dalai Lama is honored by the American left. This should tell the reader
about the meaning of right and left as political terms in India.
When one looks at the Hindu movement
as the assertion of a native tradition with a profound spiritual heritage,
the whole perspective on it changes.
Hindu Economics
The Hindu movement in India in its
most typical form follows a Swadeshi (own-country) movement like the Swadeshi
Jagaran Manch. It emphasizes protecting the villages and local economies,
building economic independence and self-reliance for the country. It resists
corporate interference and challenges multinational interests, whether
the bringing of fast food chains to India, western pharmaceuticals or terminator
seeds.
Such an economic policy was supported
by Mahatma Gandhi with his emphasis on the villages, reflected in his characteristic
usage of the spinning wheel. Its counterparts in the West are the groups
that protest the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, these protest groups are generally
classified as 'left-wing' by the international press.
The international press considers
the economic right-wing to be the powers of the multinational corporations,
particularly, the oil industry, which certainly are not the allies of Hindu
economics.
Clearly Hindu economics is more
connected with the New Left in the West and has little in common with the
right. The Republican right in America, with its corporate interests, would
hardly take up the cause of Hindu economics either.
Meanwhile the BJP, the so-called
Hindu nationalist party in India, has been responsible for much of the
economic liberalization of the country, sometimes even to the dismay of
some votaries of Hindu economics. It has been the main opponent of the
socialist policies of the previous Congress and left governments that had
communist leanings. While such a movement is to the right in the political
spectrum, the policies of the BJP are a movement towards western capitalism
from the left, they are not a movement from it to the right. At most they
emulate a ignore open capitalist society as in the West but one that retains
a dharmic background.
