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When outgoing President KR Narayanan quoted Vivekananda, Gandhi and Nehru on tolerance and exhorted Hindus to speak in the traditional spirit of Hinduism, many newspapers presented it as a parting kick of the president to the BJP in the context of Gujarat. But I fail to understand the logic behind such an inference.
There is hardly anything in the president's speech that goes contrary to the spirit of Hindu dharma as we understand it.
That an outgoing president thought it fit to exhort Hindus to take care of the national spirit of tolerance because they are the majority is in fact a reinforcement of the RSS viewpoint that the Hindu majority is the natural instrument of upholding the nation's traditions and guaranteeing the safety of the minorities.
Narayanan did not have any bitter feelings towards even the 'higher castes' of the Hindu society, who generally get the brickbats for treating scheduled caste Hindus badly. He recalled how "upper caste Hindus. helped me in my early studies".
Towards the end of his speech, he said, "We need the Hindus, who form the majority, to speak out the traditional spirit of the Hindu religion." This is a very significant appeal to Hindus.
It is noteworthy that the outgoing president did not feel the need to address the same appeal to Indians of other religious faiths. He could have asked Muslims to be more tolerant and less 'jehadi', especially in the light of Rafiq Zakaria's books presenting Islam as a religion of tolerance, peace and coexistence. If, as some newspapers have commented, Gujarat was weighing heavily on his mind, he could not have afforded to forget Godhra. In essence, he appealed to Hindus by name to become Hindus in the right sense of the term.
That's exactly what Hedgewar, founder of the RSS, also felt. He said that unless we unite Hindus, reform them and make them better real Hindus, the curse of foreign subjugation won't leave us. We are the most tolerant society of the world.
In the words of Swami Vivekananda (also quoted by Narayanan in his speech), "I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations 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." (First Chicago address at the World's Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893).
Civil societies function only on the spirit of tolerance. If, in the words of Narayanan, "the poison of communalism has caused so much violence and hatred in some parts of the country", we need to think about the root causes behind it.
The fault lies not with the one who reacts, but with those who act and spread the virus of hatred. It is true that Vivekananda talked about "a Vedantic mind and an Islamic body". He wanted the Hindus to be as strong as Muslims. Remember what Gandhi said about Hindus - "A Muslim is a bully and a Hindu is a coward." Vivekananda has dwelt at length on the Hindu's "spinelessness, hypocrisy and humiliating compromising nature". He was a proud Hindu and wanted Hindu society to be revitalised and strong.
But the question is who vitiated the atmosphere and injected intolerance in this 'tolerant Indian republic'? More than 50,000 Hindus have been killed in the last two decades of Islamic jehad. They have been denied the right to protect the icons of their faith, whether it is the restoration of the three greatest temples devoted to Rama, Krishna and Shiva or saving the cow from slaughter. The best of their existing temples have been taken over by the government and the language of their religion is mocked at. Their pilgrimages get not even a fraction of the attention the Haj pilgrimage gets and their institutions are forced to declare themselves 'non-Hindu minority institutions' to resist untimely deaths.
But they have to be tolerant, because that's the mainstay of their dharma. The comic part of this scenario is that those Leftists who never believed in the goodness of religion are now telling Hindus the norms of behaviour and how to be 'real Hindus'. It's like rubbing salt into their wounds.
None appealed to the Islamists when they continued to kill helpless Hindus in J&K and other parts of the country. None appealed to Muslims, citing examples from the life of the prophet, that they should be as tolerant and respectful towards other religious groups.
Tolerance cannot be a one-sided affair. The world is feeling the heat of Islamist threats. And the Hindu behaviour stands out in stark contrast. Wherever they have gone, they have lived amicably with the local societies sharing their religious and cultural flows.
That the same Hindus should be considered as the most effective instrument to safeguard the Hinduness of the nation is simply recognising a fact. But their tolerance can't remain an absolute idea. It will depend on others' behaviour and no one should expect more tolerance from Hindus than they show to them.
(The writer is editor of the RSS
publication, Panchjanya)
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