Valson Thampu

It is sensible to evaluate the seductions of immediacy from a long-term perspective. Those who marry the spirit of the times become widowers in the next. What seems advantageous and smart in the present, that is to say, becomes a future liability. The logic for this is easy to see. To act under exigency is to act out of a partial and inadequate understanding of the given situation. As St Paul said, ‘now we see in part’. That is to say, our immediate understanding of a situation is apt to be fallible for being partial. Human situations are dynamic, changing and evolving continually. Nothing remains the same over time. From the Cross of Calvary Jesus warned humanity at large –a warning in the form of a prayer – You’d never know quite what you are doing at the time of doing it.
In my reflections on the possible meaning and intent of Prime Minister Modi’s Easter visit to the Sacred Heart Cathedral in New Delhi, I regarded it from the perspective of hospitality as a spiritual discipline. In this piece, I propose to flag a related issue which is bound to grow in importance in the days ahead.
The Sangh Parivar and some of the church leaders in Kerala –the latter acting as though representing the Christian community as a whole – appear to be at pains to discover some commonality of interests and purposes between them. When two well-defined entities choose to get closer to each other and project an air of kinship, it is implied that they have stumbled upon a shared core of signifiance. Is that the case with the scenario evolving in front of us? Consider the following.
In an earlier piece that I wrote for this column a year ago, I dealt with Hindutva’s political and pragmatic compulsions for projecting Lord Ram, via the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement, as India’s de facto national God. If you have been even an indifferent Ayodhya-watcher, you would have realized that the temple there is being erected virtually as a national temple, with the Prime Minister at the centre of its bhoomi poojan. It has not been stated as such; but what is obvious need not be. It is wiser to proceed as if it is so. The singular achievement of the Sangh Parivar is that it has converted polytheistic Hinduism into a homogeneity-savvy monotheistic religion centred on Lord Ram. Time will prove that the temple rising in Ayodhya, at the site where once a mazjid stood, is envisaged to be a national temple, much like the Temple of Jerusalem for the Jews.
This needs to be viewed in a historical perspective. Fortunately, the Bible affords such a perspective; so that we don’t have to look far, or range into unfamiliar territories, in search of one. Yahweh in the Old Testament was a national God as regards the historical condition of the Jews. He was their God. He fought their wars. Protected their interests and undermined those of their enemies. He sustained the Jewish morale, legitimised their superiority to the gentile world and guaranteed their invincibility. But, that ethno-centric idea of God became unsustainable when the Jews came under the Roman Empire. Jesus unveiled a radically different idea of God. God is no longer a partisan warrior, or protector of parochial privileges. God is universal. He is the father ‘in heaven’. He cares for the alien and the excluded. He is as much ‘theirs’ as he is ‘ours’. Not even God can be exclusively national as well as universal at the same time! This is the fundamental cleavage between Judaism and Christianity, though both are clubbed together by those who deal in broad labels. Even centuries of tension between Christians and Jews – culminating in the Holocaust – did not deliver us from this error of misidentification.
Theologically, Hindutva is closer to Judaism than to the Way of Jesus Christ. The Hindu vision of vasudhaiva kutumbakam –the world is my home – is akin to the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus. Both transcend national boundaries. Both are inhospitable to the hysteria of jingoistic patriotism and neighbour-baiting nationalism. The mustard seed of the Kingdom of God, in Jesus’s parable, spreads its branches to the end of the world and the birds of the air (irrespective of their ethnicities and nationalities) are free to build their nests on it. In contrast, only birds of the Hindutva genus are free to build their nests on its mustard plant of Hindu Rashtra.
The core spiritual-theological question at the heart of the laboured Hindutva-Christian bonhomie is this: “Are its sponsors aware of the tension between a nationalist God – a God that wills enmity to those who are unlike him – and a Universalist God, such as the one the Christian faith proclaims? Or, do they want us to believe that both are the same and can exist in a state of consanguinary felicity?
I am not arguing even for a moment to refrain from Hindu-Christian meetings. Far from it! I believe that spirituality, if not religion, involves the encounter and harmony of the different and the contrary. My limited point here is that this meeting and mingling must be an exercise in truth and transparency, not a secretive charade of ‘what seems, is not what is’. Playing fast and loose with truth is tantamount to practical atheism. For Christians to endorse the idea, even covertly, that God is national and exclusive is to bear false witness to God. The irony at work here needs to be noted. Those who advocated till the other day negativity towards Hinduism have reinvented themselves overnight as exemplars of positivity to Hindutva.
A national God is necessarily a god of exclusion. He may serve better to quicken national energy; but such energies tend to be negative, divisive, and destructive. Suppresses one’s sense of justice and fellowhumanity. It was such an idea of God entertained by the Judaic officialdom that resulted in the judicial murder of Jesus. It was precisely this that ‘they knew not’. And it is this very thing that some of us choose at present to pretend that we know not.