Times of India: When PM Narendra Modi mockingly stated in Japan that ‘secular’ people would disapprove of his gifting the Bhagwad Gita to Emperor Akihito, he seemed to echo what has become a caricatured version of secularism, namely an un-Indian cult decrying anything remotely ‘Hindu’. In the early 1990s Congressman V N Gadgil wrote how he incurred secular wrath simply for breaking a coconut at a public function. Today this ‘silly secularism’ is its own cult, with its high priests, its orthodoxy and its intolerance of dissent.
Its intolerance is similar to the Hindutva cult, with its raging commanders, a cult where all questioning is banned, leading jurist Fali Nariman to recently remark that the benign face of Hinduism is being usurped. The diatribes of Yogi Adityanath and Sakshi Maharaj show that an avenging rage is attempting to take the place of an ancient theology. Gita as a philosophy is being overthrown for the sake of Gita as a political weapon. The Hindutva cult seeks to stereotype any dissent as ‘anti-Hindu’, just as the ‘silly secular’ cult seeks to stereotype any alternative viewpoint as ‘communal’.
Both the ‘silly secular’ cult and the Hindutva cult are driven by the belief, My Cult Right or Wrong, each cult brooking no dissent. In this war of two feuding cults, where does the modern believer in pluralism go?
The PM has also quoted Vivekananda, but while Vivekananda was indeed a Hindu monk, he believed deeply in the truth of all religions, not in denigrating any religion, or any belief system, as the spiritual ‘enemy’. It was silly secularism that began the practice of dubbing as national enemy any belief system antithetical to Congress, a tendency BJP seems to be imitating.
Categories: Asia, Civil Rights, India, Secularism, Separation of Church and State