[Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world]

Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world

A few years ago I had visited Amravati near Nagpur. An NRI I knew had for some years funded scholarships for hundreds of school going children. This was their annual meet. A day earlier we had visited an ashram for lepers in Amravati, started by a Hindu saint whose name I don’t remember. And that is the crux of this story.

At the annual meet of these poor children receiving scholarships personally funded by their NRI benefactor, one of the invited guests was the city’s Catholic priest. He had been invited by the local contact of the NRI, an auntie who helped administer the programs. When the priest came up to speak, this “secular” local auntie, introduced him as “the most helpful, the one to turn in the hour of need.” The introduction was strangely misplaced since the one person who was really helping the children in this hour of need was the NRI, who funded their scholarships, and their travel to Amravati for the meet. He was himself a devout Hindu, who had spent several years translating Hindu sacred texts in a labour of love.

In that incongruous setting, with an incongruous introduction, the Catholic priest of Amravati began to speak. To these wide-eyed children, with palpable gratitude towards their benefactor, the priest starting speaking of M Teresa who had recently been beatified by the Catholic Church in the process to proclaiming her a saint. The priest’s address was laced with bile at some alleged Brahmins in Calcutta who opposed Teresa, and how she had taken care of lepers. His main was to have the local main road named after her. It was a focused and well-practiced diatribe, apparently one he had been delivering regularly around town. It had no reference to the occasion, or to the children who were present. It seemed quite clear that the priest was simply following orders from on high, perhaps given to all the diocese all over India, to make sure that roads and other monuments in all the cities got named after Teresa. No point canonising a saint if the Church can’t milk the name.

To my regret, I did not challenge the priest. Perhaps I did not want to add to the sheer incongruity of his presence by creating a conflict in what was to be an inspirational evening for the children. Nonetheless, it was clear that Teresa or her Missionaries had done little for the lepers in Amravati, which had multiple ashrams started by Hindu benefactors and saints for their care. If I had raised a question that day, I would have asked the priest why he did not campaign to have a road named for one of these local heroes of Amravati rather than Teresa of Calcutta. Wouldn’t that be more inspiring and more relevant for the people of Amravati?

It is the power of branding that the Church understands well. Even I couldn’t tell you the name of the local saint who started the Ashram at Amravati. There are thousands and thousands of Hindu organisations that work in India without name or fame or conversion agendas. But the branding and marketing by the Church sells us the tale of “Christian Charity” and the fable of Teresa. The difference between organic native culture and centralised institutional Christianity is precisely this. A local community can find a tree, a rock, a mountain sacred. They can have a gram devata, an ishta deva. They can consecrate a temple, employ a pujari. None of this needs approval from a centralised Church or from the jealous monotheistic God.

But when the evangelical army lands at their doorstep, they must discard the local, their own. They must give up control. Till it is a village temple, the community owns and controls it. The deity is their deity. The stories are their stories. But once this community is converted, by bait or crook, and a cross is planted on this temple, they no longer own it. It is now a property of the centralised multinational Church, controlled by those they will never see. The stories must come from one book. Their interpretation must also be authorised, for pain of heresy. They cannot even dub a local benefactor, the one they revere, a saint. Manufacturing saints is serious business. It only happens with the authority of Rome and it is a long-drawn multi-year process. It is a big investment by the Church, and it needs to make sure that it has appropriate returns. Thus it is with Teresa.

When I was travelling in Europe I was struck by how different Catholic saints were from those I was used to. For us a saint was an enlightened master; someone who transformed lives or brought great wisdom. Thus we had Sant Kabir and Sant Tukuram. The Ramcharitmanas has an entire section on “santan ke guna”, how to recognise a sant. It is for the people to do so, not a title conferred by an institution. What struck me particularly about the Catholic “Saints” was that the great contribution of many of them was that they were physically tortured. For my pagan sensibilities this is rather bizarre that someone becomes a saint not through any great quality or even service to the world but by the sole virtue of being tortured for one’s belief. But that would make sense for a religion whose primary symbol is a body nailed onto a cross in torture. As Nietzsche said “The meaning of the God on the Cross is that …everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the Cross, is divine…”

Not only the tortured, the torturers are also sainted. Thus it is that Francis Xavier, who called for the cruellest of Catholic inquisitions onto the people of Goa—Hindus, Muslims and Christians—was made a Saint onto the Church, for his service to spreading Christianity. In that line of illustrious saints Teresa is not all that bad despite Hitchen’s criticism. His main attack that she extolled suffering rather than focusing on removing it, is pretty much in line with other Christian saints. The Buddha too spoke of suffering but he neither loaded it with the guilt of sin nor extolled it. Indian traditions are life affirming. Suffering is there neither for voyeuristic pleasure nor for demonstrations of charity but for moving beyond it. Preying on people’s suffering for conversions, as Teresa’s missionaries were inclined to do, is decidedly bad karma.

Be that as it is, there is a dilemma for the numerous Hindu organisations that work with the seva bhava that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat mentioned. In the world of marketing, exemplified by the Catholic priest’s push to get a road in Amravati named after Teresa; it is common for Indians to buy into the idea that Christian organisations do great charity in India. In fact, as Sandeep Balakrishnan points it, the Missionaries of Charity were a profit centre for the church. The Catholic Church did not fund them. Rather, they made money, collected by marketing the poor, and deposited it into the Vatican bank. They funded the Church. But the average person on the street in India would readily extol their great charity, but be completely ignorant of the hundreds of Hindu organisations that work selflessly and silently. One that recently came to my notice was the Avadhoot Bhagwan Ram Kustha Sewa Ashram reportedly treating the highest number of leprosy patients in the world. These organisations will not toot their own horn. So S. Gurumurthy organised the Hindu Seva fair to highlight some of the work of these organisations. They will not be marketed by a multi-billion dollar MNC Church, so it is up to us to tell these stories.

This article was original published at NitiCentral.com

The attacks in Paris on Charlie Hebdo bring to a fore fault lines in Europe. It has fuelled a European right that is calling for bans on Muslim immigrants. A major French TV anchor called for deportation of their existing Muslim population. For a while the hashtag #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. Germany saw anti-Muslim protests with thousands of people taking to the streets. In the US “Judge” Jeanine on Fox News said “We need to kill them. We need to kill them, the radical Muslim terrorists.” There is a danger of this fuelling a real phobia, aMuslim phobia. This is different from suppressing critique of Islam using the term Islamophobia. Here is why.

Compared to India, the European countries have miniscule Muslim populations both in absolute and relative terms. Yet, though there have been religious riots, usually based on local factors, it would be harder to find such sweeping protests regarding “Muslims” as a whole in India. Neither would enforced uniformity, such as the French ban on the burqa and the niqab get much traction in India where the plurality of ways is deeply ingrained in the culture. Here is a picture from UK I retweeted:

Europe’s skin-deep “multiculturalism” quickly turns to bigotry MT “@LyndaG1963:pic.twitter.com/UaUeQJJX6z”

— Sankrant Sanu सानु (@sankrant) October 21, 2014

Let us be clear. Targeting Muslims as an imagined monolith is bigotry. It must be countered. Human beings are diverse. Just because someone has a Muslim name, or “looks Muslim” or comes from a Muslim country or observes Muslim rituals does not make them a radical. With over a billion people, there is a wide diversity of Muslim experiences. Even within Indian Muslims, customs vary by region, caste and affiliation. The instance I cite above such as the call in UK by right wing groups that “Muslims get out” is an example of what I call Muslim phobia.

This kind of phobia is starting to happen in India as well. Just as Muslims youngsters are being radicalised often via dis-contextualised textual messages, we find instances of young “Hindutva warriors” exhibiting increasing prejudice. Here is a simple example, more egregious ones are easily found.

Millions of Muslims serve in the government, in the armed forces, in the security services of this country not as Muslims but as Indians. To view them simply on the basis of religious identity is another form of Muslim phobia. In Europe we find Muslim phobia increasingly acting as the outlet for racism, xenophobia, and presumed Christian or Western cultural superiority. Orientalist caricatures of Muslims underlie their stereotyping.

On the flip side, there is a term used most often by apologists, “Islamophobia.” This term has a history. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) specifically promoted the idea of Islamophobia. OIC funds and supports, conferences, reports, politicians, diplomats, academics, journalists and activists to combat this “Islamophobia.” When that term is bandied about, it is right to be suspicious about the funding and agenda of its proponents. As Asra Nomani writes in the Washington Post:

“In 2007, as part of this playbook, the OIC launched the Islamophobia Observatory, a watchdog group based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, with the goal of documenting slights against the faith. Its first report, released the following year, complained that the artists and publishers of controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were defiling “sacred symbols of Islam . . . in an insulting, offensive and contemptuous manner.” The honor brigade began calling out academics, writers and others, including former New York police commissioner Ray Kelly and administrators at a Catholic school in Britain that turned away a mother who wouldn’t remove her face veil.”

Unlike Muslim Phobia, which is about real people, Islamophobia is a term used to protect an ideology from criticism. Islam is not a person, it is an idea much like capitalism or communism. Ideas must not be immune from criticism. When people in the UK say “Muslims get out” it can be, and often is, an expression of latent racism. We most oppose that. But ideas need to be up for criticism, just as people as a whole must not be stereotyped.

This played out in a famous American talk show confrontation in the Bill Mahler show, where Sam Harris guest called Islam a “motherload of bad ideas.” Now what Sam Harris says is, and should be, contestable. But to shut off the points he makes as Islamophobia is to shut off the debate altogether. There is a problem of religious radicalism, and Islam may be linked to the problem, at the very least since a number of people that are blowing themselves and others up explicitly self-proclaim that they are doing it for Islam. But to discover Islam is or isn’t the problem we cannot forestall the debate. To label criticism of Islam into a “phobia” does exactly that, by labelling criticism as an irrational psychological disorder. This is exactly the tack used in Islamic states where people criticising Islam have been branded mentally ill and terrorists. The term Islamophobia, funded by the deep pockets of the OIC, is used to subject the world to the same Islamic theological restrictions.

A final two points. First, Muslims rightly point out that, despite the highly publicised terror killings, the Christian West has killed far more people, even in recent times. The invasion of Iraq is a case in point, where the death toll has surpassed half a million. There is also evidence that Bush’s irrational foray into this war was guided by his Christian belief in end times and that the war was fulfilment of Biblical prophecy, and that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s briefings for the war were framed by Biblical quotes. Just because the Iraq body count came from a formal army, covered by “embedded journalists” of a “sophisticated” West doesn’t make it any less brutal. Perhaps a thousand times more children died in Iraq as a result of the war, than in the recent Peshawar school attack. While Islam and Christianity both have a bloody history, there is little doubt that, in sheer body count, Christianity has no parallel.

Yet, despite the flaws, the Christian West has launched a serious critique of Christianity. Our accounts of the genocides and killings by Christians come from Western sources. The challenge to Christian theological presumptions has also emerged from there. This kind of challenge and critique is equally necessary for Islam and it should not be forestalled either by the financial clout of the OIC, and its own paid coterie yelling “Islamophobia” or by misguided moral relativism. The current climate in Islamic societies, particularly laws related to blasphemy and apostasy, make this critique difficult from within.

The values of free speech in the West have offered protection to dissident Muslim voices to begin this critique of Islam, though it only has marginal influence yet on Muslim societies. Charlie Hebdo may not be the best example of such a critique, but it bludgeons open the space for one. The challenge for the West will be to not let that space be filled by mindless xenophobia that leads to Muslim phobia. Europe has been there before. Those that call themselves liberals and intellectuals must take up that challenge of confronting Islam intellectually without the straightjacket of political correctness.

This article was original published at NitiCentral.com

India needs freedom from communalism of minority-majority politics.

It may be the law of unintended consequences or it may simply be the result of the climate of partition in which our Constitution was framed. Whatever the reason, the Indian Constitution has significant communal clauses that result in separatism and religious identity politics. Constitutional reform is necessary for these clauses to be fixed.

The first of these clauses is Article 30.

30. Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions.—(1) All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.

(1A) In making any law providing for the compulsory acquisition of any property of an educational institution established and administered by a minority, referred to in clause (1), the State shall ensure that the amount fixed by or determined under such law for the acquisition of such property is such as would not restrict or abrogate the right guaranteed under that clause.

(2) The State shall not, in granting aid to educational institutions, discriminate against any educational institution on the ground that it is under the management of a minority, whether based on religion or language.

At the outset these clauses sound eminently reasonable, shouldn’t minority rights be protected? However the very idea of a “minority” communalises India in a way that it wasn’t before this. How is that?

Notions of majority and minority were extremely relevant in a Europe beset by religious warfare between Christian factions. Exclusive Christianity brooked no rivals. Since there was only one “true” way, other religions and even other “heresies” must come from the devil and needed to be eliminated. As a result, as soon as one religious group gained majority power, it would set out to eliminate the others. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church kept a stranglehold on Europe. After the internecine conflict between Protestants and Catholics, Europe started to discover the virtues of tolerance and the separation of Church and state. It is because of the inherent intolerance of Abrahmic monotheism that the concept of minority rights needed to be created.

Pluralistic India is a land of minorities. The Swaminarayana sect, without about 20 million adherents, is as much a minority as the Jains are. About 4 million Tamil Brahmins are a miniscule minority, as are the even smaller 200,000 Kashmiri Pandits. However, according to the Constitution, neither the 20 million Swaminarayanas nor the 4 millions Tamil Brahmins, nor even the 200,000 Kashmiri Pandits are minorities, while the nearly 200 millions Muslims are one monolithic “minority.” This communalises India along European lines.

Neither India’s Muslims nor the so-called Hindus are monolithic groupings. Indian Muslims followed a diversity of regional customs and laws, not one uniform “Muslim Personal Law.” In a land of minorities, Muslims as a whole can be called a super-minority. But even that is not correct. In calling out certain groups and treating them as monolithic and homogenous, the Constitution lays the basis for religious identity politics and polarisation.

When the Ramkrishna Mission was being hounded in Communist West Bengal, it filed a suit to be granted minority status arguing that it was not Hindu. In practically any other country, “status” accrues by being part of the mainstream. Ahmediyas in Pakistan or politically, Mormons in the US, would be quite happy to be considered part of the majority. However, India follows a unique system akin to apartheid, where being declared a minority creates a “status” and privileges that are not available to you if you are classified as part of the “majority.” While the Constitutional framers probably intended equal rights, these Constitutional provisions have been caricatures of equality, leading to communal polarisation, identity politics and the spectre of an “aggrieved majority.”

In fact, the majority identity itself is a creation of the Constitution. If you define certain groups as minority and give them specific rights, then one must also, by default, create the notion of a majority. This divides up India’s diverse, intermixed, syncretic traditions around communal lines. It is like using an 18th century European template on Indian society and starting to replicate the problems of 18^th century Europe in India.

Strangely enough, even in Christian-dominated US, the US Constitution is able to safeguard individuals without any specific provisions for minority groups. Moreover, the Indian Constitution allows the state to fund religious institutions and “minority” schools which can blatantly discriminate on religious grounds, such as St Stephen’s does. The funding of a Muslim or a Mormon institute by the US Government, which could then discriminate in admissions, would be patently absurd and unconstitutional and would be thrown out immediately by the law courts. In India however, the Constitution specifically enables this religious apartheid where, if you call yourself a “Hindu”, the state can interfere completely in your educational institution but not if get yourself legally labelled a religious minority.

It has been rightly pointed out by many commentators that the despite the alleged “special privileges”, many Muslims remain mired in poverty. But that is only part of the issue. The Constitutional privileging of religious labels supports religious identity politics. This identity politics, in turn, creates special interest groups and leaders that thrive by these politics. None of this actually helps either those that are labelled as “minority” or “majority.” But it does help the Catholic Church and the Mullahs retain a hold on their community. Conversely, it fans anger in Hindu groups and creats an anti-Muslim and anti-Christian backlash. In the end, it does not help Indians or create sabka saath sabka vikas.

All political parties need to come together on the platform of equal rights for all. The Constitutional “provision” to privilege “minorities” over others should either be removed or a line added:

Notwithstanding Articles 29 or 30, any right given to any minority group shall equally be accorded to those that are classified as a majority, such as the freedom to run educational institutions without interference.

Better still, dropping all labels of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ and treating all citizens equally shall reduce the pull of religious identity politics and communalism in India.

This article was original published at NitiCentral.com