Sightings
June 25, 2007
Looking Over India
— Martin E. Marty
Sightings can too easily overlook India's public religion scene, so far away does it seem. But Sightings also has to look over India rigorously, so near are its issues to those we perceive at home. India further provides a comparative model that deprives Islam of its unique bogeyperson status in the eyes of our citizens who have coined and use the term "Islamofascism." Third, since many romanticize Hinduism as an innately non-violent alternative to the warring madness of "peoples of the Book," studying Indian extremism may foster some de-romanticization. And finally, such observing may lead some locals to be more cautious about legally privileging Christianity or religion-as-such in our own constitutional republic.
To begin at the end: nervous American patriots of certain sorts want to legally privilege religion over non-religion and, more subtly, Christianity over other faiths. Ironically, some of them express regret over assaults on secular constitutions (like our own) in India or Turkey. Studying India also suggests that religious militancy and hatred is ecumenical or potentially universal. Muslims are not the only agents and victims of such aggression in the name of God or gods.
And now to India, thanks to Pankaj Mishra's review of a new book by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum writes that India is "increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condone and in some cases actively support violence against minorities, especially the Muslim minority. Many seek fundamental changes in India's pluralistic democracy." Central to such moves is the BJP (Indian People's Party), whose members demolished a historic mosque in North India fourteen years ago, an act that led to the death of thousands.
Then in 2002 Hindu mobs lynched over 2,000 Muslims and left 200,000 homeless. Low-caste Dalits and rich upper-caste Hindus coalesced in acts that led to women being raped and tortured, and children killed with their parents. Nussbaum calls this "genocidal violence," and wants to end "American ignorance of India's [violent] history and current situation." She also worries that "the current world atmosphere, and especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, have made it easier" for Hindu nationalists to use the stratagem of making their attacks on Muslims "seem part of the US-led war on terror."
The goal of such Hindus, as with fundamentalist Muslims in some nations, is the quest for "a culturally homogeneous [in this case Hindu] nation-state .... Most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter." No, we do not have here a "clash of civilizations" since, Nussbaum writes, the real clash exists "within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the ... domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition."
Nussbaum sees some hope within the Gandhian heritage in India, and in a women's movement that is not merely "theory-driven," but that contributes to common-sense support for religious pluralism and republican constitutional existence. And she hopes on these bases that Indians will "cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others."
References:
Pankaj Mishra's "Impasse in India" (New York Review of Books,
June 28) can be read online at:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20339.
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Belknap/Harvard).
Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
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