Thursday, March 12, 2009

Truth & Ahimsa – Gandhiji’s Expressions of Rational Hinduism

For a major part of his life, Gandhiji fought against the evils of communal hatred towards inculcating the spirit of unity & brotherhood among his countrymen. Yet, his relentless endeavour was cut short by a Hindu fanatic who considered his gospel of Ahimsa as prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu Community and its interests. Nothing could have been farther from truth for Gandhiji’s crusade for Hindu-Muslim unity was borne as much out of his abhorrence of the British policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ as his implicit faith in the rational Hinduistic cult, which according to him ‘enables the followers not merely to respect all other religions but to admire and assimilate whatever may be good in other faiths’. It was his fervent belief that Hinduism was not a religion in ‘exclusivity’ but is all-pervading & all -encompassing and all his actions were consistent with India’s struggle and realization of democratic national freedom.

Yes, Gandhiji’s nobility of thought and action was borne out of his empathy for mankind and not for any particular religious order or sect. His avowed belief in the Sanatani Hindu cult, which preached to everybody to worship God according to his own faith or dharma, found expression as – ‘I have found Hinduism as among the most tolerant of all religions known to me and so it lives at peace with all the religions.’ It was religious tolerance that saw his endless crusade against the dissolute practice of untouchability, which according to him was to be looked upon as an excrescence on Hinduism, not protecting religion, rather suffocating it. Likewise, he was vehemently opposed to proselytism, which the Hindu faith did not submit to.

It was Gandhiji’s modest claim that he had nothing new to teach the world as ‘truth and non-violence were as old as the hills’. His belief in non-violence also found the highest expression in Hinduism, which ‘believed in the oneness not of merely all human life but in the oneness of all that lives’, which is sacrosanct. He essentially felt that Hinduism propagated the search for truth through non-violent means and ‘a perfect vision of truth alone can follow a complete realization of Ahimsa’, which was the bedrock of all that he preached and practiced. Gandhiji felt that while Hinduism, in its incipient spirit and form, could raise one to the highest echelons, it could also bring down ignorant masses to the lowest depths. It was therefore, for every individual to see the Universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth by loving the meanest of creations as belonging to oneself.
It was Gandhiji’s immutable faith in the capacity of Hinduism and its assimilative character to purge itself of all impurities from time to time that he reposed his full faith in it. It was his fervent belief that Hinduism has never in centuries extolled militant activities and ‘the identification with everything that lives is impossible without self-purification in all walks of life, not just of oneself but also of the surroundings, without which the law of Ahimsa shall remain a distant dream’. Today, in this world embroiled in ethnic & religious strife, Gandhiji’s teachings, which derive their essence from the power of the soul and the purity of spirit, are the most relevant to salvage one’s thoughts & actions.

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