Author: David Frawley (Vamadeva
Shastri)
Publication: Organizer
Date: September 2, 2001
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 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. 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
cause 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 concerns of
native peoples have been taken up by the left worldwide, the same concerns
of Hindus are styled right-wing or communal, particularly by the left 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 missionaries
for interfering with their culture, they are supported by the left. Yet
when Hindus express the same sentiments, they are attacked by the left.
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
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 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 style the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause as right-wing 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.
Hindu Ecology and Nature Concerns
Hindu groups are well known for
promoting vegetarianism and animal rights, particularly the protection
of cows. The Hindu religion as a whole honors the Divine in animals and
recognizes that animals have a soul and will eventually achieve liberation.
Hindu groups have tried to keep fast food franchises, which emphasize meat
consumption, out of India. Such a movement would be part of consumer advocacy
movements that are generally leftist or liberal causes in the West. Again
it is hardly an agenda of the right-wing in America, which has a special
connection to the beef industry; or to the right-wing worldwide, which
has no real concern for animal rights and is certainly not interesting
in spreading vegetarianism. Hindus look upon nature as sacred, honoring
the rivers and mountains as homes of deities. They stress the protection
of Mother Earth, which they worship in the form of the cow. They have a
natural affinity with the western ecology movement and efforts to protect
animals, forests and wilderness areas. This is also hardly a right-wing
agenda.
Hindu Religious Pluralism
The Hindu religion is a pluralistic
tradition that accepts many paths, teachers, scriptures and teachings.
One cannot be a Christian without accepting Christ or a Buddhist without
accepting Buddha, but one can be a Hindu without accepting any single figure.
In fact there are Hindus who may not follow Krishna, Rama, Shiva, Vishnu
or other Hindu sages or deities and still count as Hindu. Hindus have been
at the forefront in arguing for the cause of religious diversity and the
acceptance of pluralism in religion, rejecting the idea that any single
religion alone can be true. This Hindu idea of religion-which is also subscribed
to by so-called right wing Hindu groups like RSS-is obviously not part
of the agenda of the religious right in the West. The American Christian
right is still sending missionaries to the entire world in order to convert
all people to Christianity, the only true religion. It is firmly fixed
on one savior, one scripture and a rather literal interpretation of these.
Yet when Hindus ask the pope to make a statement that truth can be found
outside of any particular church or religion they are called right-wing
and backwards, while the pope, who refuses to acknowledge the validity
of Hindu, Buddhist or other Indic traditions, is regarded as liberal! Such
pluralism in religious views is hardly a cause for any right-wing movement
in the world, but is also considered progressive, liberal, if not leftist
(except in India).
Hinduism and Science
Unlike the religious right in the
West, the Hindu movement is not against science or opposed to teaching
evolution in the schools. Hinduism does promote occult and spiritual subjects
like astrology, Ayurvedic medicine, Yoga or Vedanta, but these are the
same basic teachings found in the New Age in the West, generally regarded
as a liberal or leftist movement, not those of the religious right in the
West. Many leaders of the Hindu movement are in fact scientists. For example,
RSS leaders like former chief Rajinder Singh, or BJP leaders like Murli
Manohar Joshi have also been professors of modern physics.
The Hindu Movement and Caste
The Hindu right is often defined
in the media in terms of caste, as favoring the upper castes over the lower
castes. This is another distortion that is often intentional. Modern Hindu
teachers have been at the forefront of removing caste. This includes great
figures like Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi and Aurobindo. It includes major
Hindu movements like the Arya Samaj, the largest Vedic movement in modern
India, and the Swadhyaya movement. The RSS, the largest so-called Hindu
right wing group, rejects caste and works to remove it from Hindu society,
giving prominence to leaders from lower classes and working to open the
Hindu priesthood to members of all castes. While caste continues to be
a problem in certain segments of Hindu society, it is generally not because
of these current Hindu social, religious and political movements, but because
their reform efforts are resisted.
The Hindu Movement and Women's Rights
Generally, the right wing in the
West is defined as opposed to women's rights. However, there are many women's
groups and active women leaders in the Hindu movement and in the Hindu
religion. Being a woman is no bar for being a political or religious leader
in India as it often is in the West. Hinduism has the worlds' largest and
oldest tradition of the worship of the Divine as Mother, including as India
itself. Great female Hindu gurus like Ammachi (Mata Amritanandamayi) travel
and teach all over the world. The Hindu movement worships India on a spiritual
level as a manifestation of the Divine Mother (Shakti).
The Hindu Bomb
Perhaps the main thing in recent
years used to define Hindus in India as right-winged is India's testing
of the nuclear bomb in 1998. Yet India's concern for its military welfare
and need for a nuclear deterrent is certainly no more than what the democratic
party in the United States, America's left-wing party, has asked for. The
Indian government has at the same time argued for complete nuclear disarmament,
which it would be happy to comply with, which no right-wing party in the
USA would argue for.
The Indian Left: The Old Left
In India, the political terminology
of right and left is defined by Marxists, who like to call anyone that
opposes them right-wing or fascists. According to their view anything traditionally
Hindu would have to be right-wing on principle, just as only their views
are deemed progressive, even if supporting Stalinist tactics. This means
that in India such subjects as Yoga, natural healing, vegetarianism and
animal rights are all automatically right-wing because they are causes
of the Hindu mind, with antecedents in ancient Indian culture. Great Hindu
yogis and sages from Shankaracharya to Sri Aurobindo are classified by
modern Marxists as right-wing, if not fascist. However, the Indian left
is mainly the Old Left, emphasizing a failed communist ideology and state
economic planning such as dominated Eastern Europe in the decades following
World War II and took it nowhere. It wreaked the same havoc with the economy
and educational systems of India and kept the country backward. Indian
communists are among the few in the world that still proudly honor Stalin
and Mao (while warning of the danger of Hindu fundamentalism)! Communist
ruled Bengal still teaches the glory of the Russian revolution for all
humanity, though Russia gave up communism ten years ago! The Old Left was
itself intolerant, oppressive and dictatorial, sponsoring state terrorism
and genocide wherever it came to power. Indian leftists have never rejected
these policies and look back with nostalgia on the Soviet Union! Therefore,
we must remember that the leftist criticism of Hinduism coming from the
Indian left is that of the old left. This old left in India does not take
up many of the causes of the new left like ecology or native rights. It
even sides with the policies of the political right-wing in western cultures
upholding the rights of missionaries to convert native peoples and continuing
colonial accounts of Indic civilization. The communist inspired left in
India has tried to demonize the Hindu movement as a right-wing phenomenon
in order to discredit its spiritual orientation. The aim of the Indian
left is to keep the Hindu movement isolated from any potential allies.
After all, no one likes fascists, which is a good term of denigration that
evokes negative emotions for both communists and capitalists.
Hinduism and the Left
The causes taken up by the Hindu
movement are more at home in the New Left than in right wing parties of
the West. Some of these resemble the concerns of the Green Party. The Hindu
movement offers a long-standing tradition of environmental protection,
economic simplicity, and protection of religious and cultural diversity.
There is little in the so-called Hindu right that is shared by the religious
or political right-wing in western countries, which reflect military, corporate
and missionary concerns. The Hindu movement has much in common with the
New Age movement in the West and its seeking of occult and spiritual knowledge,
not with the right wing in the West, which rejects these things. Clearly,
the western right would never embrace the Hindu movement as its ally. To
counter this distortion, some Hindus are now arguing for a new 'Hindu Left'
to better express the concerns of Hindu Dharma in modern terms. They would
see the new left as more in harmony with Hindu concerns and a possible
ally. Hindu thought has always been progressive and evolutionary, seeking
to aid in the unfoldment of consciousness in humanity and not resting content
with material or political gains as sufficient. Hindu Dharma should be
reexamined by the new left and the distortions of by the old left discarded.
The new left will find much in Hindu Dharma that is relevant to its concerns.
The Hindu movement can be a great ally to many social movements throughout
the world. It has a base of nearly a billion people and the world's largest
non-biblical religious tradition, with a long tradition of spiritual thought
and practice. The Hindu movement can be an ally for any native causes,
environmental concerns, women's spiritual issues and movements toward economic
simplicity and global responsibility, to mention but a few. Groups espousing
such causes may have looked upon Hinduism as an enemy, being taken in by
leftist propaganda. They must question these distortions of the old left.
They should look to the Hindu view for insight, even if they may not agree
with it on all points. They should not trust the anti-Hindu stereotypes
of the old left, any more than they trust the views of the now defunct
Soviet Union.
Towards a Non-Political Social Order
However, the entire right-left division
reflects the conditions of western politics and is inaccurate in the Indian
context. We must give up such concepts in examining Indic civilization,
which in its core is spiritually based, not politically driven. It reflects
older and deeper concerns that precede and transcend the West's outer vision.
As long as we define ourselves through politics our social order will contain
conflict and confusion. Democracy may be the more benign face of a political
order, but it still hides the lack of any true spiritual order. We must
employ the vision of dharma and subordinate politics to it, which should
be a form of Karma Yoga.
