Comments on: Time to dump some anachronisms?

By: tarique

tarique — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:24:51 +0000

very well said vck .u really don’t mince words and i like ur attitude to call a ’spade a spade ‘.i also admire ur hindu pride lot . it is much better and more purposeful than many other ‘rabble rousing ‘ hindutvadis who see a ‘violent jihadist’ in every muslim .i feel if u r a truthful person u can be a proud hindu or a proud muslim ,and hold ur head high in any corner of the world ,even if u r just one among a million people .

By: v.c.krishnan

v.c.krishnan — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:01:03 +0000

Dear Shantanu,
People get riled up when we attempt at that sort of thing.
Today the Educated lite will not groan in suffocationof religiosity if Gordon brown brings in a legislation because his morals as being brought up as a “Prebyterian Christian”.
The seculars will not graon with agony when one discusses the aspect that Obama belongs to “The United Church of US”.
Let them only hear that “Rajaji”, “Advaniji”, or “Sadhvi Rithambara” are practicing HINDUS; OOPS you have set the cat among the pigeons. Their hackles are raised and shamelessely we will have the whole Stephanian, ST’S school educated group coming down on them like a pack of growling dogs;
By the way I call them growling dogs as in front of the white man they are “Grovelling Dogs”. Sometimes even Dogs have their self respect but these do not.
Let us get back to the basics and then we can take up this socialistic issue for whatever it is worth.
Unless we Indians learn to respect each other as humans any amount of legislation of any type will not work.
Regards,
vck

By: B Shantanu

B Shantanu — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:17:08 +0000

Some excerpts from Why we must lose sleep over Hindu terror by M R Venkatesh which reinforce the point I made in the post re. “secularism” (emphasis mine)

Samuel Huntington, one of world’s foremost political thinkers, captures this paradigm rather eloquently and brings out this conflict between the temporal power and the spiritual authorities when he states in his celebrated book The Clash of Civilizations: ‘God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture.’

He further adds: ‘Only in Hindu civilisation were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, god is Caesar, in China and Japan [Images], Caesar is god; in orthodoxy, god is Caesar’s junior partner. The separation and recurring clashes between church and state that typify western civilisation have existed in no other civilisation.’

It is this separation programme in western civilisation between the church and the government, between the spiritual and the temporal power, that came to be popularly (at least in India) known as secularism.

Traditionally, India had a simple approach to this vexed issue — temporal power achieved this separation by respecting all religions by adopting the broader philosophy of Raj Dharma. In return, religious leaders never interfered in the matter of mundane governance as was the case of the church in the west.

It is indeed surprising that despite the civilisational advantage of having settled this issue of separation of temporal and spiritual power long back, it is the lack of understanding of world experiences as well as the history of our nation that continues to haunt modern India.

…what is missed in the melee of adopting this brand of secularism is that secularism as practiced in the West is by and large an intra-religious affair. To amplify further, how could a model that handled one and only one religion and that too the predominant religion in its relationship with the State become a model for setting the relationship of government in a multi-religious, plural and complex country like India?

…Naturally, when we adopt secularism modelled on the west to deal with religious issues, we run the risk of shooting ourselves in our temple.

…In the process our politicians have failed to understand that India is secular, not because of the Constitution of India which proclaims India to be a secular state, but because the vast majority of people from all faiths believe in the right of others to follow any other religion. At every village, town or city, barring minor exceptions, it is this approach of ordinary people that makes India governable to whatever extent that she is.

…Nothing else can explain maintenance of law and order across the country consisting of over six lakh villages with a mere hundred thousand police stations.