By David
Frawley
Adapted from Hinduism and the Clash of Civilizations.
In media accounts today, particularly in India, it seems that any group which
identifies itself as Hindu or tries to promote any Hindu cause is quickly and
uncritically defined as ‘right-winged’.
In the Marxist accounts that commonly come from the
Indian press, Hindu organizations are routinely called fundamentalists,
militants or even fascists. This may be surprising for the western mind,
inclined to think of India as a Hindu country. But not only have states in
India like Bengal and Kerala been long dominated by Marxists, most of academia
and much of the English-language media has been as well. Their slanted views
are often uncritically accepted by the western media as well.
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, most Hindu causes are more at home in the left in the
West than in the right.
The idea of the ‘Hindu right’ is largely 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 sees the union of science and spirituality
as the way forward for humanity, not a return to medieval views of the
universe.
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 VHP, 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 real social problem in India is not simply caste
but jati, which refers to family, clan, community and regional interests. Many
so-called anti-caste movements in India, including those honored by the left
(like movements of Laloo Prasad Yadav) actively promote the interests of one
community in the country over those of the country as a whole.
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 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.
http://www.vedanet.com/2012/06/the-myth-of-the-hindu-right/
