Talk to the gathering of social activists in the Annual Get-together of the Programme for Social Action at Pithora 1992. Transcribed from the tape and published in the report in edited form.

What is the power that Sustains us?

I am sure all of us have our own different answers to the question. My own feeling is that it is the fellowship of people committed to transformation of society that keeps us going. It is the team, it is the fellowship of self-commitment. I think most of us will be lost if we are alone and isolated. The sustaining power is the fellowship of other people, who are with us in this fellowship of struggle for the building of a new society.

What is it that we altogether are committed to? The Nagas by Jacobs is a recent publication from Stuttgart - a study of the Nagas by anthropologists. At the end of their thesis, there is a description of what is happening now in the Naga culture and society. They say two things. One is, that today the Nags have a vigorous sense of history, which means looking towards the future, the dynamics of the vision of the future. And secondly, they say there is the awakening of the people to their self-identity, to the search for their unique self-identity.

In fact, they speak about three levels of awakening to self-identity viz., the individual, the tribe and all-Naga nationality. These are three levels of self-awakening of the same people. The individual is brought to a sense of his/her unique identity, the consciousness of being a person. The different Naga tribes have become conscious of their separate tribal identities, their separate cultures and history. Then all Naga tribes together are saying that they are one nationality, unique in its characteristics and separate from other peoples of India. Of course this is happening within the framework of an all-India nationalism. The point is that this is not peculiar to the Nagas, but it is the characteristic of all the peoples of India today. A vigorous sense of history looking towards future and an awakening to self-identity at various levels, individual, tribe, all-tribal and all-India. Of course it is the same people who have this three or four levels of self-awakening. And among the Indian peoples, we find various other levels of self-consciousness emerging. We see the self-awakening of women to their new self-identity and to a vigorous sense of history looking towards the future. We have the caste groups, not only the castes at the lower levels but also at the higher levels of the hierarchy becoming conscious of their self-identity and looking back to their history to affirm their uniqueness as people. The fisherfolk experiences an awakening to selfhood.

Where self is involved, there personhood is involved: spirit also is involved. That is why we have to talk of it as a spiritual awakening. Spirit and self go together. Spirituality is the way we manage the self-consciousness. Of course it is also a materialistic awakening, because people, when they become awake ask for bread to live. But it is not just to satisfy their hunger that they are asking for bread, but that material thing itself is taken up as part of the awakening to the dignity of their personhood. Some people feel that if you give bread to the people they will all be satisfied. No. Because it is as part of their self-awakening to human dignity that they want to overcome hunger. Bread is sought as an integral part of justice to their human dignity. Hunger is not merely a material thing, it is a material means of expressing the self-awakening. That is why it has to be related to justice.

There is a search for overcoming poverty. But it is not just to overcome poverty, but to really overcome the destruction of selfhood, of personhood which poverty points to. Our humanity is destroyed by poverty and therefore it is for the sake of justice to our humanity that we want bread. We do not want to take the question of bread merely as a commodity. Bread is an expression of selfhood. Take the question of women, women s self-awakening. Sex can be understood as a material thing, as bodily interaction and can be utilized as a commodity for sale, as in prostitution. But the new situation is that sex, both for woman and for man, awakened to personhood, has to be part of their personhood and exercised as integral to the inter-personal relation of love. It is the commoditization of sex that feminist movement opposes most, whether in marriage or outside it. Only when woman’s personality is recognized that she feels she can have sex with personal dignity. Even in marriage, immediately as the wife feels that her person is ignored and used by the husband for sex in isolation she revolts. So sex is not merely a material nor even an organic reality. So far as human sexuality is concerned, it becomes part of human personhood and can be expressed personally only when there is love or mutual recognition of personality.

You can have a materialistic interpretation of all these things. It will only be a half-truth. You can have an organic interpretation of it all. Though it is more comprehensive it will also be only partly true. Because in hunger as well as in sex, human personhood has come into play, they have become part of the personhood. You are not prepared to separate them from the personhood to make them commodities. If you do it. self-alienation takes place. Materialist interpretation is correct at a certain level. The organic interpretation is correct at a certain level. They become reductionist if they are taken as the whole truth. If you want to see the whole truth about human sexuality and human economics, you have to take the body and its hungers as related to the self-awakening to personhood.

The same thing with respect to culture. New consciousness of tribal culture, caste culture, needs to be interpreted in terms of people’s awakening to selfhood. Therefore it has to be a spiritual interpretation, because where the self is concerned the question of meaning comes. Personhood, what does it mean? I have a self, what is it for? What is its future? The future dimension is not available to animals and plants and least of all rocks. It is possible only for humans, who are awakened to bring a self with spiritual freedom and transcendence. The question of sacredness also comes along with it. The search for a structure of meaning and sacredness is a peculiar characteristic of self-awakened human beings and peoples. And what we are looking towards is ultimately a community recognizing personhood of individuals as well as the unique self-identity of different ethnic groups, cultural groups, work groups. Justice to humanity means that the structures of society should be such as can help us to move towards communion of love between persons and peoples. But of course, that requires structures. Sex has to be structured, food has to be structured. So we are talking about structures of justice which are oriented towards love. This is our goal in economics, in politics, in social life, the transformation of structures which helps and not hinders the dignity of human persons and the community of persons injustice and love.

Love is the ultimate goal we are looking for. That is,  the recognition of persons in community. That is where human dignity is revered. It requires not merely inter-personal relations, but also structures of economics, politics, culture etc., transformed in such a way that they help and not hinder interpersonal love. A community of persons supported by structures of justice is our goal.

The second point is that this self-awakening is pluralistic. M.J. told us about diversity. The working class, ethnic groups, caste groups, women -all are awakened and a tremendous diversity is there. Because of that diversity self-awakening can create conflict. So it is the source, not only of creativity but also destructivity. An individual or a people becoming awakened to self-identity has tremendous creativity; but absolutised or frustrated, it can also destroy. So we have to work for “reconciled diversity” within the framework of universal human rights, including the rights of persons and peoples.

We are not able to find one category in which to describe these diverse awakenings. Class is one category, caste is another, and so many of the Indian Socialists have been affirming what has been called a class-caste interpretation of the awakening in India. But the complexity is increased with other categories brought in. So the interpretation has to take into account class-caste-gender and ethnic realities of society. It is very difficult to say which is basic and which is superstructure. The ultimate basis is the self awakened to self-identity and self-transcendence. It has tremendous creative and destructive potentialities built into it. That is why the poem of Tagore recited here is very important. The dance of life always goes along with the dance of death. The death forces are stronger at this higher level of awakening. We would never have had a Hitler or a Stalin in the pre-modern days. Today the dance of death is as powerful as the dance of life. But then our commitment is to life. If that is so, there must be a reconciled diversity within this context of spiritual awakening. Women interpreting everything purely in terms of women’s awakening or the poor people interpreting everything in terms of economics etc. does not help the larger interest of the whole community. The basic approach of Niyogi of the Chattisgarh Mukti Moksha was to integrate all of these. He saw these several spiritual awakenings together and sought a reconciliation within the same movement. It is very necessary. Our commitment is to life.

I must also go on to point out that the enemy of life cannot be identified outside us somewhere in the Establishment as Mi said. Which is the Establishment? As a male, with my traditional male chauvinism I am part of the Establishment. But I may be very strongly favouring the struggle against poverty. So we ourselves are part of the Establishment, though in part it is the enemy outside. So the struggle against the enemy which is the Establishment is also against ourselves.

So far as we want to keep ourselves as a team because of the pluralism and diversity tending to conflicts, some kind of mutual forgiveness is necessary. How do we keep ourselves as a community of commitment to this revolution for life.? We must be more humble and say that we need to forgive each other. If there is no forgiveness, the team will be broken. Of course forgiveness cannot be carried to the extent of saying that the enemy is not there. Forces of death are present and need to be fought. But as I said, the forces of death are mixed up with the forces of life. It is the absolutisation of one particular self-awakening that can be destructive. This is the danger of deification of reformers and revolutionary heroes. Once deified we won’t be allowed to discuss the person as a human being later. The main point to emphasize is that person’s contribution to the human awakening. But if we begin to deify later on we won’t be able to discuss his/her humanity. Then he/she becomes untouchable from the point of view of humanity. They are all brought into infallible divinity. Actually what we are talking is about a spiritual awakening and a spiritual end on this earth. So we must keep our heroes also on this earth.

If we are committed to this kind of revolution, self-commitment to transformation of life on the earth and in society, sometimes we have to be anti-religious, sometimes anti-god because religion and god sometimes really take us away into interior places or heaven away from the earth. Then we shall need transformation or renewal of religions and gods so that they talk about the earth, the self-awakening of peoples and its fulfillment. So we have to make them earth-centred. God is for man. “Sabbath is made for man”, religion is to be about the future of humans and of their earthly existence. If you take the prophets and reformers, they have been anti-religious and anti-God to make religions and gods look towards the earth.

In the Gitanjali Tagore tells the devotee in the temple: Open your eyes and see that there is no God inside the closed temple. “He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and path-maker is breaking stones. Stand with Him there”. That is the denial of a certain god for the sake of a new God or for a God beyond God. That is the essence of religious reformation, which is related to this struggle. There is need for atheism, because protest atheism is a necessary part of any true search for God. Job in the Bible talks like an atheist. He asked God what He was doing when all these miseries and injustice were taking place in the world. It was a protest against God in the name of divine justice; a protest atheism in search of a God who is for us, for humanity, for social justice. Anti-religion, protest atheism, are all in terms of a positive fulfillment of the new spiritual awakening to justice.

I always considered Tagore’s poem as the beginning of all modern liberation theologies. The Latin Americans took that path later. What I am driving at is that in this fellowship of ours, we can have religious people and secular ideologists, anti-religious people and atheists, and people who are renewing religions and ideologies- all within the context of this common commitment to the transformation of society with justice to the self-awakening of people in our time. That is what makes our spirituality a secular spirituality. That does not mean that each one of us will not go aside to renew his/her religious spirituality or anti-religious ideology or atheistic or agnostic world-view. What is common to us is this commitment to the transformation of the world around us. For that we are together as one fellowship. It is very important that we keep this goal, which can be interpreted in various ways. We cannot allow reductionist interpretations to monopolize the fellowship. We shall accept the materialistic interpretation within the spiritual interpretation. We will accept the organic interpretation within the spiritual interpretation. And we cannot accept a spirituality unrelated to justice in society and love in community and to the renewal of the earth. All this because ultimately the self-awakening we witness today is the search for the dignity of personhood and for a society which recognizes persons and justice to persons in the functional orders of life like economics, family, community etc. All these orders have to be structured, but structured with the recognition that ultimately our goal is the transformation of society into a community of persons. If we emphasize Individualism alone, in reaction very soon the pendulum swings to Collectivism and then back to Individualism. That is what we have in Europe now. Both Individualism and Collectivism are devoid of spiritual depth. Community of persons is something which transcends Individualism and Collectivism. It is holistic, integral and reconciled. We should not forget this search for wholeness even when we are involved in struggle for partial particular issues of justice e.g. women issue, caste issue etc. Struggle requires this particularization. But they must be waged within the framework of the world-view which is conscious of the final wholeness and realizes it, in fragments.

The ultimate spiritual question is, is human being with his/her awakening to self-identity and personhood an accident in the evolutionary process and earth’s history or is it really the result of the working of some purposive cosmic force, God or whatever? Bertrand Russell in his “Free man’s Worship” describes his visit to the zoo. He sees the monkeys and says that they are our brothers who lost their way and we by accident came through another evolutionary path to become humans, all by chance. There is nothing in the universal framework which purposed the emergence of humans or support the human struggle for personhood and self-awakening of humanity. He says, I shall work for humanity to the last but I am quite sure that humanity is slowly but surely moving towards darkness and doom. I have built my life on “unyielding despair”.

I repeat the question: Is it by chance that human beings have come into being or is it by Purpose? The answer to it is an essential aspect of the faith in the Power that sustains the human struggle. Ultimately my answer is a matter of blind faith. Nehru once said, that he could not find any scientific reason for saying that human beings would succeed in realizing the goals of humanism. In fact history does not give any proof. In a sense any conviction at this level is andha in the sense that it transcends rationality. But it is not blind for those who see it as the sight of the self, the vision of God by the self at depth. It is the whole selfhood that sees it, not merely reason. It is the self committing itself to this faith, namely that there must be a Force that sustains this revolution for human self-fulfillment in Justice and Love. Such faith is not irrational. Though there is no rational proof that human being has come on this earth not by chance but by divine purpose, it is reasonable to suppose that human being’s search for human living in community must have the support of a Power in the universe or beyond the universe sustaining it. Certainly here, I am going beyond our common commitment as fellowship of secular social activists. We have to accept plurality in matters of faith, but we shall share with one another our religious, secularist or agnostic faiths. That is a concern for mutual openness within the fellowship.

Chapter 9: Higher Education In Kerala

A paper presented at a Seminar at Santhinilayam, Thiruvalla on 28 Oct. 95 under the joint auspices of the Kerala Council of Churches and the Mar Thoma College, Thiruvalla.

I. Conceptual Shift in Higher Education - A Critique

The conceptual shift in Higher Education which this seminar is considering, I suppose, is the one that is reflected in the policy of the government to permit self-financing colleges of higher education, specially meant for giving training in technical and managerial skills to those who can afford to buy them. This however is not a shift merely in education. It is in fact an extension into the field of higher education of the government policy of globalization, that is, of letting the global market decide the pattern of economic development of the nation without intervention from the government in the name of social justice, protection of the natural environment or national self-reliance; it is a decision to make economic growth the ultimate criterion not only of economic development but also of social and cultural development of the peoples of the country. This calls for converting not only economic but also cultural and educational goods and services into commodities salable in the market for profit, and therefore producing such of them which have demand from those consumers who have the most purchasing power. It is necessary therefore to evaluate this “ideology” of the market-economy if we have to evaluate the commoditisation of education which is now adopted as the government policy as a part of its policy of giving priority to economic growth.

Markets have been in existence in every society from old times. It was used by society as a means to achieve social objectives. Even when Adam Smith made markets the providential order, it was never the only criterion for deciding economic activities. “The view that markets and the price signals they provide should be accepted as the only criterion for all economic decisions and actions became doctrine or ideology only much later”, says C.T. Kurien (The Economy, p.108). Even when market with its goal of economic growth became decisive for economic activities in capitalism, it was never accepted as decisive for the lion-economic areas of social or cultural life. The ideologisation of the market which commoditises and values everything including culture and morality in terms of its demand and price in the market, is more recent. After the disintegration of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe it has become the dominant ideology globalised through the Brettonwood Institutions, the IMF and the World Bank, in an unipolar world.

Of course, Individualism which elevates the individual as a law unto itself denying the larger dimension of personal fulfillment through responsibility to community, and the mechanical-materialistic view of the universe characteristic of the Newtonian age which denied the organic and spiritual dimensions of reality, have been the ideological framework of the modern market from the beginning. But it is strange that they have become globally reaffirmed after all the Social Sciences have proved the social dimension of human nature beyond doubt, and after Einstein has brought about a revolution in the philosophy of even the physical universe, displacing the mechanical by the organic.

The Constitution of India formulated by the founding fathers of India’s nation-state, has clearly laid down both in its Preamble and in its Directive Principles of State Policy, that politics and economics are instruments of social objectives rather than the reverse. Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are the goals to which “we the People” commit ourselves in establishing the nation-state. The word “socialist” which was added later to indicate the character of the Indian Republic only clarified this. But the “socialist pattern of society” was the declared goal of the Nehru era. Further, education was conceived as an instrument to realize the goal of a casteless and classless society. The State shall “make effective provision for securing the right to work, to education”(Part IV, 41), provide “free and compulsory education for all children”(45), and “promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the people”(46). I am not saying that the Nehru era realized these goals. Far from it. But it never repudiated them as goals to be striven for. The shift today in the first place is in the ideology of the leadership of the nation-state and as a corollary in the objective of education. The ultimate commitment of the political community today is to the “ideology” of market-economy with its prime objective of economic growth which inheres the promotion of class society keeping as much of the patriarchies and hierarchies of the traditional society and culture intact as are possible; and education is conceived as an instrument of this end.

Even in the meaning given to Privatization of education, there is an equivalent shift. Earlier, it was a call to private agencies to enter the field of education, at the primary level of helping the State in imparting education to the poorer sections of society, and at the level of higher education in imparting liberal education for leadership of political democracy and social change. In fact the “fundamental duties” of citizens, (enshrined later in the Constitution) gave priority to the development of “scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform”(Part IVa). Today the State is closing down the state primary schools for the poor, and they are not interested in aiding private agencies to conduct such schools, because they see it as a costly exercise in social welfare which reduces money for investment in hi-tech development aimed at economic growth. Privatization today is for conducting self-financing technical and managerial professional colleges for the rich to take advantage of the TNC’s hi-tech growth-oriented pattern, of development.

The difference between education understood only as training in technical skills within the ideology of the economic growth and education for promoting a technical society within the framework of a culture of “scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform”, is indeed great. It is the difference between promoting technical rationality which concentrates on “means” of living and promoting revolutionary or critical rationality which examines critically the “ends” of living often embedded but hidden in the so-called neutral means. It is the difference between pursuing knowledge as power only and pursuing knowledge as power at the service of values and responsible to social and ecological justice and to the people whose welfare is affected by the exercise of that power.

The famous German woman liberation theologian Dorothee Solle in her essay on “A Christian Critique of Ideology” (in Confronting Life- Theology out of the Context ISPCK Delhi) speaks about a German film by Lanzmann, where the technicians follow the instructions of the Nazi ideologists in building a suitable truck to gas the Jews without any question because they are interested only in scientific technology and “brushes aside all questions about side-effects, victims and interests as unscientific” The technicians spoke technical words like load, loading, units, and operational period ignoring the meaning of these words in the context (The “load” meant children women and men in mortal terror, “loading” meant the herding of these creatures by their executioners into the trucks using dog-whips, the “units” were people who knew they were going to be killed, the “operational period” was the time during which the people utter death-cries as they got suffocated by the gas). She comments, “As I see it, the technical experts or the managers who are totally free of ideology, are the ones who are gaining ground. And this supposed freedom of theirs from ideology and their detachment from traditional myths is at least as dangerous as the blinding of the masses by an outspoken ideology such as Nazism”(p.33). Technocrats and bureaucrats unconcerned with values can easily go along with tyrants.

I must explain however my statement above of the “so-called means which embodies but hides false ends under neutrality”. No technological system is just neutral. It is always technology integrated with some end in its very structure. Therefore, an education that gives training in technical skills and do not help the trainees to examine and discern the false ends which may be hidden in the engineering and managing technology that they use, is not service to humanity. Gandhi used to insist that violence was embedded in large-scale technology. Vandana Shiva finds that much modern science and technology are patriarchal projects. Philosophy of knowledge affirms that scientific knowledge is the result of the subjective self observing objectified nature, and that therefore the subjectivity, the subjective purposes of the self, always plays a part in the knowledge attained. That part is greater in social sciences and social technology. If this is true, then technologies themselves need reshaping to make them acquire a human face and embody values of justice and community of life. It is this that gives relevance to the idea of “technology with a human face”.

Any higher education which ignores discourse on knowledge of social objectives and human values must end in creating what the Radhakrishnan Report calls a Rakshasa Raj. Of course you might well feel that this is the situation in our institutions of liberal education even today, and the new shift is only revealing the truth of our present situation. But realization of this truth is itself healthy if it calls for a proper response to the challenge of the situation.

With these words I inaugurate the Seminar and wish it success.

II. Self-Financing Higher Education- its Cultural Effects

Based on the Valedictory Talk at the Trivandrum Seminar organized by Vichara, Mavelikara on a critical evaluation of the Kerala govt’s policy of promoting self-financing of Higher Education, with “Higher Education in Kerala-Financial Crisis” by Dr.K.K.George (professor of the School of Management Studies, Cochin University.) as the paper for study.

The basic points which I wish to draw attention to in the paper of Dr. K.K. George are contained in his “summing Up” part on p.24. There he says, one, that the shift from the concept of “the State’s role as providers of equal opportunities to every citizen” to that of providing education, health and other social services “to those who can afford to pay” is a U-turn in public policy which “has been made surreptitiously by administrative action without public discussion and legislative sanction”; two, that the total commercialization of social sectors is “alien even to free market societies”; and three, that “the ready acceptance of self-financing concept in social sectors alien even to free-market societies is the end result of gradual disenchantment with the Kerala Model of Development”, which has been emphasizing the social dimension rather than the economic, but that it is quite false to present the situation as calling for a choice between social development and economic growth. Social development has already made a contribution to the economic development of the state and he has a long quotation from his earlier writing to affirm that it is possible to develop a Kerala Model of Economic Growth on the foundation of its Model of Social Development by a new State strategy of “transforming its expenditure on education and health from merely a social welfare expenditure into an investment in human capital”, and that in fact any other path of economic growth is full of risks for Kerala which has only “limited raw material and fuel resources”.

The classical economists are responsible for the general disenchantment of the Kerala people with the Kerala model of development. It is in striking contrast to the enthusiasm with which the Harvard economist Amartya Sen supports it in the book India-Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Oxford 1995) which he wrote with Jean Dreze and published recently. It presents the Kerala model as something from which the Union Government and other Indian states like UP and Bihar have to learn their lesson that without a basis in social development like literacy, health and women’s education and social security there can be no participatory economic expansion which is necessary if economic growth has to serve society. This is also the lesson they draw from the successful strategies of economic development of China, Korea and other Asian countries. It is also the lesson the study draws from the failure of Brazilian strategy of economic growth to achieve “little reduction of poverty particularly in terms of social backwardness and sectional deprivation”. The book warns that “India stands in some danger of going the Brazilian way rather than South Korea’s”.

Presented to the meeting of theological students of the Federation of theological seminaries in Kerala at the Orthodox Theological Seminary, Kottayam on 14 Dec.95.

I

What is Secular Culture? I suppose what the phrase denotes is the modern culture which gives great emphasis on human being as a creator of culture and of history out of nature and which also believes that human being and history require no transcendent reference to a Divine Creator or a Divine Redeemer from self-alienation to bring about the realization of the community of love which is the ultimate destiny of humanity. So, what we have in mind is a “secular culture” within the framework of a closed “secularist” idea of human progress.

My aim in this paper is to argue that the dynamics of modern “secular culture” have their roots in a concept of humanism derived from the Christian gospel but that because of the failure of the churches to respond positively to the values that emerged in Christian culture as implication of Christian humanism, they were sought to be realized in human history under the dynamic of “secularist ideologies of humanism” in opposition to the Christian faith. In fact, these ideologies of inevitable human progress whether in Liberalism or Marxism had the character of a secularization of the Kingdom of God envisaged as the goal of history by the Christian gospel; they were a kind of Christian heresies. This alienation between secular culture and the gospel led to the dehumanization of the forces of secular culture and has reduced Christianity to a kind of individualistic pietism or a spiritual cult to sanctify some self-centred communal existence. Therefore the contemporary Christian responsibility is to redefine the secular culture in the light of a more holistic anthropology built up through the dialogue of Christianity with secularist ideologies in the context of the religious pluralism of the present situation.

II

Firstly, let me clarify three aspects of modern culture. We have to distinguish between the Secular Forces, the Human Values and Faith-presuppositions of self-redemptive humanism within the framework of which, the forces and values of modernity are defined.

The three basic driving forces that have created modernity are firstly, the revolution in experimental sciences and the application of its findings in the development of modern “technology”; secondly, the awakening of the individual to the rights of “personhood” and of the oppressed groups of people to a new concept of justice based on equality; and thirdly, the break-up of the traditional institutional integration of religion, society and state in European Christendom, defined as “secularization” which removed state and society from the “control” of religion and made religion a “private” option for citizens as individuals and groups.

What was the reaction of European Christianity to these forces? Generally speaking, Catholic Christianity opposed modernity as a revolt against God and Protestant Christianity became a subjective spirituality of individualistic pietism. Between them the Christian understanding of human being and society as created, fallen and redeemed by God was made irrelevant so that these forces of modernity were left to be interpreted solely within the framework of the humanism of the Enlightenment which at best had a Deistic faith coupled with a mechanical view of the world and a self-redemptive idea of history making for an optimistic doctrine of inevitable progress. It was a “secularist” view because its concept of the human self-alienation had no spiritual roots in human alienation from God (sin) and therefore needed no redemption of the human spirit by the Grace of God in Christ. Self-alienation was a mechanical disorder corrected by technical rationality. Marxism of course had a more organic interpretation of self-alienation as social but still able to be corrected by class-revolution.

Starting in Europe, the modern forces and their Enlightenment secularist interpretations, have now become global in character. Western imperialism, English education and Christian missions introduced secular culture into India. Modern reformation movements in traditional Indian religions especially the movements of Neo-Hinduism indicated the impact of modernity on Indian life at its religious level, and India’s liberal democratic and leftist ideologies guiding the struggle for political independence and nation-building in independent India, indicate the assimilation of Enlightenment humanism at the ideological level, though qualified a great deal by the reformed religious view of Gandhism. In fact, modern Independent India has moved away from Gandhism in the direction of scientific and, technical rationalism. It is significant that the Preamble of the Constitution of India spells out transformation of Indian society in the light of the values Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (taken from the French Revolution) and Justice (probably derived from the Soviet Union) as the goal of secular India. Perhaps it may be right to say, that in general the politically conscious educated middle class of India were guided more by the Liberal and Marxian ideologies than the Gandhian or other versions of reformed Hindu thought. After the era of Gandhi, India does not give much emphasis on the renaissance of Hinduism as the dynamics of social justice. In Kerala it seems it has stopped with Sree Narayana Guru; even he has been interpreted by SNDP largely in the light of secularist thought.

The forces of destructiveness and the dehumanization which have become manifest from the late 19th century onwards have put a question mark on the secular modern culture. The two World Wars, the threat of nuclear holocaust, mass poverty in the midst of plenty, the moral anarchy of individualism, the States given to totalitarian planning, new technical theocracies under Hitler and Stalin, the destruction of natural environment and above all the mechanization of life changing persons into things and emptying inter-personal bond of family and community of love reducing them into manipulative relations of utilitarian functions, may be mentioned in this connection as offending the human dignity of persons and peoples which modernity affirmed as values.

III

There are two or three reactions in this context. One is to give up the whole package of modernity and return to the traditional pattern of religion-society-state integration with a new militancy and strengthening it with modern technology. Eg: Return to Christendom and the Moral Majority movements, the Iranian Islamic revolution and its export, India’s Hindutva politics of Communalism and Hindu Rashtra, the revival of primal vision and other expressions of religious fundamentalism and neo-theocracy. Two, there is the acknowledgment by many noble people that human community awaits a tragic doom from which there is no escape but they will fight to defend human values on the basis of the faith that there is no support for them behind or within the universe and therefore building their lives on “unyielding despair” as Bertrand Russell once said.

However, there are groups of tamed adherents of secular ideologies and religious faiths who feel that in the dialogue between religions and secular ideologies they must find some alternative path to save the positive human values and what modernity has realized of them through the last three or four centuries. They are seeking what has been called post-modern paradigms for “an open secular democratic culture” within the framework of a public philosophy (Walter Lippman) or Civil Religion (Robert Bellah) or a new genuine realistic humanism or at least a body of insights about the nature of being and becoming human, evolved through dialogue among renascent religions, secularist ideologies including the philosophies of the tragic dimension of existence and disciplines of social and human sciences which have opened themselves to each other in the context of their common sense of historical responsibility and common human destiny.

In the Life and Work movement of the non-Catholic churches in their search for social justice and international peace (which is now part of the WCC) and in the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Church, Christian Ecumenism has given up the church’s traditional pietist and negativist approaches to modernity and has been involved in the attempt to redefine the forces and values of secular culture within the framework of Christian anthropology. Dialogue between Faith and Modernity has been taking place within the church between the Christian theologians and the scientists and politicians committed to work out the implication of their Christian faith in their profession, and later through some formal dialogues with secularists open to dialogue with Christian tradition. After religious pluralism and ecological issue have been recognized as realities of the present, the ecumenical movement has widened their internal and external dialogues to include adherents of both ideological and religious faiths who have provided their insights to the churches in clarifying their contribution to humanizing modernity. Ecumenism in this process has been dealing at different periods with concepts of goals like “responsible world society”, “ a just participatory and sustainable society” and “justice peace and integrity of creation”. The Vatican II document on the “Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World” has been of crucial significance in the ecumenical approach of a positive character to the redefinition of the forces and values of secular culture within the context of Christian faith and ethics, themselves renewed in the modern context.

Of course there is a lot of confusion in the churches and the ecumenical movement regarding the distinction that has to be maintained between the integrity of the Christian faith and mission and that of a secular culture which has to be based on a syncretism of varied insights about the humanum drawn from many religious, ideological and scientific sources. There is always a conflict between Fundamentalism and Liberality in maintaining this distinction. More so in a country like India with its religious cultural and ideological pluralism.

I believe that the Christian contribution to a “secular” concept of humanity as essentially a Community of Persons can be best made if we maintain the message of the gospel that God became incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ to overcome the alienation of humanity from God and to create a Koinonia in Christ around the Eucharist, a Community of divine forgiveness and mutual forgiveness acknowledging Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, transcending all religious cultural and ideological divisions with a mission to build a wider Secular Koinonia of mutual forgiveness and justice among the peoples of the world, as witness to the ultimate goal of creation, namely the Kingdom of God.

Message to the Tribal Rally in Ranchi on November 2, 1995 on the occasion of their celebration of the 150th anniversary of the coming of the Gospel to Chotanagpur.

I deem it a privilege to have been invited to participate in your celebration of the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Gospel of Christ in Chotanagpur. I thank Bishop Minz for his kind invitation.

My involvement with the tribal peoples of India began in the sixties when as Director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS), I participated in consultations of Christian tribal leaders and researchers on the manifestations of their self-awakening. Nirmal Minz who was on the CISRS staff for a period before he left for Chicago for his doctorate studies gave the leadership. It led to the publication of a Christian group-study under the title, Tribal Awakening, with several leaders of the tribal people and churches from different parts of India, including Dilbar Hans and Nirmal Minz from Chotanagpur as authors. In fact the Writing Party which produced the book was held at Hazribag. It is significant that the objective facts and the subjective attitudes the book represented were considered relevant for the book to be reprinted in 1981. Later as secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference, the council of churches of East Asia (now called Christian Conference of Asia), I organized an all-Asia consultation of Christian tribal leaders in Sagada, in the Mountain Province of the Philippines; and Bishop Lakra from Chotanagpur and Pastor Zarema from Mizoram were participants. It produced a report on the self-awakening of the “cultural minorities” of Asia, which was the term used in the Philippines to denote the tribal peoples. Much later in the nineties I had the privilege of serving Nagaland as its Governor, which I interpreted as a call to be a sort of “secular pastor” of the Naga people. These are my humble credentials which made me accept the invitation to this celebration.

We are celebrating today the coming of the four missionaries of the Gossner Mission to Ranchi in 1845. As a result of their work, four Oraons were baptized in 1850 and the first church was founded; and two Mundas were baptized in 1851. The Anglican Mission established its work in Ranchi in 1869 and the Roman Catholic mission started work in Chotanagpur in 1887. Thus Christianity spread in the Chotanagpur area. The church, for over a century has been an essential part of your corporate life and a mould in which the traditional pattern of your social and cultural living has been getting transformed.

It is quite clear to all historians of modern India that the story of the spiritual and socio-political awakening of the adivasees or indigenous people anywhere in India can be understood only by taking into account the large role played by western Christian Missions and indigenous churches in transforming their lives. Of course Christian Missions, English education and colonial administration went together. But Christian missions introduced the Crucified and Risen Jesus Christ as Victor over cosmic forces of evil, which released the people from fear of malevolent spirits. They introduced Christ also as the revelation of God’s purpose in world history and as the Messiah who fulfilled that goal in the end; it brought the peoples out of their traditional isolation into the realm not only of universal church history but also of secular national and world history. Ever since then, you have been seeking to define your self-identity and historical vocation of your peoplehood and to acquire the political power to realize it.

No doubt the western missions interpreted and communicated Christ in association with their western culture and religious divisions along confessional lines, which had their creative aspects but also their destructive side; and the goal of displacing traditional culture and religion by western culture-Christianity brought some cultural uprooting. But they had also the wisdom to realize that Christ preserved whatever was not integrated with traditional animistic spirituality. So Christianity became the source of renewal and development of your tribal languages and codes of community-life. In fighting for the land-rights of the tribal people, Christian missions brought justice to them and also without being fully aware of it, reinforced the central place of land in your traditional way of life. Therefore, what Julian Jacobs says about Nagas would be true for most Christian tribes. He says, “It would be wrong to see the Nagas as passive victims of a process of deculturation. Rather we may discern the ways in which Naga ethnicity is being actively and consciously moulded in the present era. What emerges is a vigorous sense of history and identity at the level of individual, tribe and nation”(The Nagas: Society, Culture and Colonial Encounter, 1990 p.176).

Awakening to self-identity and sense of history brings tremendous potential for human creativity. But creativity also has within it the seeds of destructivity. Any new stage of creation has its fall. Srishti and samhara always go together in human existence, because the self-alienation produced by the spiritual alienation of finite human self from God sees history as the realm of self-aggrandizement and conquest. Therefore much new evils are to be found among tribal peoples which were not there in the traditional society- evils created by lawless individualism, irresponsible exercise of power and money. Self-giving love is possible only where there is freedom for selfishness and self-righteousness. Therefore any idea of a simple return from modernity to tradition is to be ruled out, though redefinition of the traditional community-values relevant for the post-modern society is to be welcomed. It is here that the Christian understanding of the relation between the Law and the Gospel becomes relevant in a new way in meeting the forces of perversion produced by the human self’s rebellion against its finiteness. Moral codes and power-politics are necessary to check evil and promote legal and social justice that protects human rights of the weak; and redemptive power of Divine forgiveness helps to create a community of mutual love that transcends historical divisions of society.

Within such a spiritual framework, the adivasees of Central India have to work out the paths of their future witness to the Gospel in India.

Firstly, I am sure that while you are celebrating this anniversary of the coming of the gospel, you are also looking towards your part in realizing the unity of the Indian church, transcending not only inter-tribal but also tribal-nontribal rivalries. Christ reconciling cultural diversities is equally important as Christ taking indigenous form in every culture Secondly. in the context of the present government policy of high-tech development based on the global free market, the dalits, the tribals and the fisherfolk are increasingly getting alienated from the Land, the Forest and the Water-sources respectively which have been giving them their living, and are also getting uprooted from their habitat and culture; and women are commoditized and their sexuality, fertility and labour are increasingly commercialized. In this situation, the awakened tribal people of Chotanagpur have a special role, not only to fight for their political autonomy within the unity of the nation, but also to affirm their solidarity with all their bellow-victims of the lopsided processes of modernization in their struggle for political and social justice. Thirdly, in the world setting in which the protection of natural environment and organic processes of production and reproduction of life have become crucial for the continuation of human life itself, there is the felt need for a revival of the spirit of reverence for nature which you had preserved in your culture for ages. Here there is need for a re-evaluation of your traditional spirituality itself which was earlier rejected. Perhaps it may have to come back not in its earlier pantheistic but in a new Christ-centred pan-in-theistic form.

I wish the churches and peoples of Chotanagpur a bright future.

Paper presented at the Madras Gurukul Seminar on Theological Implications of the Primal Vision”

The wording of the topic as indicated in the programme for me was, Primal Vision as a Critique of Modernization. I have changed it slightly to indicate that our goal is to critique both the primal and modern visions of human being and society in the light of each other and in the light of the theological vision of God’s purpose for the future of humankind. I do not think that we can get away from the fact that modernity has come to stay and that the task is to humanize it. Any idea of going back to the pattern or world-view of traditional societies either primal or medieval or even early modern is doing violence to the historical nature and social becoming of human beings. Human future both historical and eschatological is a valid theological category and so is the idea of historical development. Therefore any society we envisage for the human family should be post-modern in nature and form.

The theologies of Creation and Redemption point to the newness of the future of humanity. Human creativity building culture out of nature is inherent in Creation according to Genesis and this creativity remains an essential expression of the image of God in human beings bestowed in creation even when all human creativity has become perverse and come under divine judgment. And St. Paul interprets the new Adam Jesus Christ as belonging to a higher spiritual order than the original Adam of Paradise. It is therefore not wrong to interpret cosmos itself as a movement from mechanical matter through organic life to the spiritual human selfhood, and to interpret human history itself as the evolutionary or revolutionary enlargement of the human selfhood and its spiritual self-determination and its social and cosmic responsibility. I should add that such a historical approach is not wrong provided it is clearly understood that self-determination and responsibility whether in the early or later historical stages, has a tendency to get perverted by the false position of self-centredness in relation to God and others. So cosmic history does not experience fall till human beings appear, since matter, vegetable and animal do not have the spiritual freedom to fall. And every new stage of growth in creative selfhood is accompanied by a new fall; and even at the end of history, the New Testament speaks of a Last Judgment before the Kingdom is established. So in the course of history every growth in spiritual freedom and responsibility is not a growth from bad to good but from a lower capacity for good and evil to a higher capacity for them. And Divine Redemption is to be understood as necessary at every stage of the spiritual expansion of the human self-consciousness, more so at the higher stages of self-consciousness.

In this approach, there is a distinction between two theological criteria to evaluate societies. One is in terms of goodness and other in terms of the intensity of self-consciousness. Some societies may not have high sense of selfhood and the right of self-determination, but may show a great measure of social virtues; and others may have high sense of self and its freedom but may show greater perversity in human relations. The question is whether we can have some kind of a balance between goodness and self-determination in social ordering. It is here that I see the necessity of a synthesis between tradition and modernity in the development of peoples in our sinful world. Any society in history will need structures which balance enhancement of freedom and self-determination with checks on it by long-established legal and moral traditions of keeping power in the service of order and mutual responsibility, as well as creation of new structures of public morality.

Nevertheless it is important to recognize that God’s vision of the future of humanity is the Community of Persons in which persons have the highest sense of selfhood but are redeemed of self-centredness and therefore are also good and responsible; and the foretaste of it is the church, the community of people who know themselves to be forgiven by God through Christ and therefore forgiving one another and growing towards love which is the mark of perfection, as Col. 3 puts it. The pressure of the church in a society should help reduce the tension between spiritual freedom and social morality and therefore the influence of the church in society should produce a larger community which also may be spoken as a first fruits of the Future, God intends for human beings.

II

I have given this rather long theological-sociological introduction because it provides a framework for us to consider the relation between primal and modern visions of reality and society and to see what kind of a spiritual framework will help develop a post-modern society.

The forces of modernization need not detain us. But I would just mention them, namely the science-based technology which gives power to humans to control and engineer with material, social and even psychic forces to achieve purposes and goals for the future chosen by humans; the revolutionary social changes produced by the revolts of the poor and the oppressed in all societies; and the break-up of the traditional religious integration of societies and their reintegration by the State. They have no doubt produced a global society and revolutionized all traditional societies one way or the other Since however modernization has brought with it a good deal of dehumanization betraying the promises it held forth, the spiritual vision behind it is now under challenge. The criticisms come from all the traditional visions of society including the primal tradition. Our concern in this study is with the spiritual vision behind modernity and the nature of the critique which primal vision brings to it and to evaluate the same from a Christian theological view-point and to see how the spiritual vision of post-modern society may incorporate what is valid in it.

The spiritual vision of modernity as we know it in ideology and practice has emphasized three aspects of realty, namely progress through differentiation and autonomy of individuality; the concept of the world as history moving towards the Future through the creativity of human rationality; and the ethos of secularism as the basis of social ordering. At all three levels modern vision challenged and even broke the primal vision.

The primal vision is that of what may be called Undifferentiated Unity. John Taylor’s Primal Vision, a study of African culture speaks of “a total unbroken unity” of the cosmos as characteristic of African spirituality. In it there is the vision of a spiritual continuum within which the dead and the living, natural objects, spirits and gods, the individual, clan and the tribe, animals, plants, minerals and humans form an unbroken hierarchical unity of spiritual forces; and the human self is not an individual self but an extended universal self present and actively participating in all parts of the totality. This is generally descriptive of the primal vision everywhere I presume.

Modernity is a spirit that seeks to break up this vision of an unbroken continuum to produce individuals and groups conscious of their individual selfhood and different from other individuals and groups. It emphasizes the difference of humans from gods and nature; it also separates religion, society and government and the functionaries within them and gives them autonomy to function according to the laws inherent in each. In one sense the discovery of human individuality was necessary for the development of human rights, the economic individualism orientated to profit and free market produced the modern economy; the separation of human being from nature coupled with the autonomy of the world of science helped the development of technology; and the autonomy of different areas of life like the arts and the government, each to follow purposes and laws inherent in it, did make for unfettered creativity in the various fields. Of course, now we have become conscious of the destructive effects of these developments and therefore of the one-sidedness of the vision behind it. It is this one-sidedness we have to correct because we do not want to give up the human achievements of the modern period. So it would not be right for primal vision to ask for a return of humanity to the traditional undifferentiated unity. But it is right to criticize the spirit of modernity for its exaggerated individualism which made the individual a law unto itself and deny any moral or spiritual responsibility to the social totality and destroying even the traditional egalitarian community-values to further the power and interests of the individual in isolation.

Here the theological understanding of human being as person-in-community must help develop the incorporation into modernity of certain traditional cultural values in the pre-modern spiritual vision. Also in the face of the ecological disaster created by the modern ideas of total separation of humans from nature and of the unlimited technological exploitation of nature, it is proper for primal vision to demand, not an undifferentiated unity of God, humanity and nature or to go back to the traditional worship of nature-spirits, but to seek a spiritual framework of unity in which differentiation may go along with a relation of responsible participatory interaction between them, enabling the development of human community in accordance with the Divine purpose and with reverence for the community of life on earth and in harmony with nature’s cycles to sustain and renew all life continuously.

One may take up the modernist vision of world-as-history as contrasted with the primal vision of world-as-nature. The latter sees social life as a cycle like the cycle of natural seasons which is the basic framework for life; therefore nothing new enters the scene, and any creativity that affects the harmony of life and nature is considered a spiritual evil. Since every point in the circumference of a circle is equidistant from the centre, there is nothing radically contradictory in life and therefore all things and values and gods are allowed to coexist without encounter. The situation has been criticized as productive of stagnation. But modernity has emphasized that human personhood involves freedom understood as creating new forms of nature and life in the light of future fulfillment of the meaning of life. Thus new ideologies of the Future and of being a chosen people and commitment to a mission in world history to bring about that future, taking sides and fighting to determine the world’s future in one’s own terms, have become essential expressions of the spirit of modernity. But this historical dynamism has brought with it the idea of conquest and the consequent results in absolutisation of State power, world wars and threat of nuclear holocaust quite unknown to traditional societies.

In such a situation even Pundit Nehru has said that it is better to have the spirit of paganism which tolerates many gods including an unknown god than to have a self-righteous belief in one god or ideology for the world. This of course is an argument for a return to primal vision. But it would amount to giving up the search for meaning, not only of one’s own life but also of the whole humanity and even the cosmos. Search for meaning is essential to human personhood. Therefore while the criticism of modernity with respect to its idea of history is valid, the answer has to emphasize the fulfillment of the meaning of history in suffering service, solidarity with the poor and forgiving love. Here the theological understanding of Christ as Suffering Servant and bearer of the ultimate purpose of history is of great significance.

In this connection I quote Nirmal Minz about the tribals of India awakening to their responsibility to world history through Christianity. He says, “They did not find themselves playing their role in the history of the nation or of humanity as a whole. But Christ has given them a right to claim a history which goes back to the creation of the world and of the human race, and they know now that their history is the history of the new Israel which is connected with the old Israel in and through Christ” (Tribal Awakening, Reprint, p.221). The theological anthropology inherent here is relevant, not only for the tribals but for all peoples.

Or take the third element in the modern vision, namely its emphasis on the secular ethos in contrast to that on the sacred ethos in all traditional societies. Modernity’s emphasis on secularism involves three elements- a) the desacralisation of nature which produced a nature devoid of spirits preparing the way for its scientific analysis and technological control and use; b) desacralisation of society and state by liberating them from the control of established authority and laws of religion which often gave spiritual sanction to social inequality and stifled freedom of reason and conscience of persons; it was necessary to affirm freedom and equality as fundamental rights of all persons and to enable common action in politics and society by adherents of all religions and none in a religiously pluralistic society; and c) an abandonment of an eternally fixed sacred order of human society enabling ordering of secular social affairs on the basis of rational discussion. There is no doubt that such secularism (or secularization to be correct) has enhanced the dignity and rights of personhood in the modern world. But many ideologies of secularism by aggressively denying any transcendent spiritual dimension of human person or society and interpreting human selfhood in the framework of a mechanical materialistic world-view cut at the root of its own humanism. It not only denied the sacredness of the human person and the religious dimension of human culture; it also had little recognition of the organic natural basis of life in general. The problem was not secularization but reductionist interpretation of reality by ideologies of closed secularism that brought about the problem. The emergence of religious fundamentalism and the political ideologies of religious communalism is often a reaction against such closed secularism.(This reaction to Closed Secularism was already mentioned in earlier essays.)

Primal vision is right to criticize the too neat compartmentalization of life into sacred and secular which is characteristic of the ideology of closed secularism: the sacredness of the human person and the sacramental and sacrificial view of all activities and functions of the human person go together so far as theological anthropology is concerned. In a society which is religiously and ideologically pluralistic, this view has to be mediated to public life through the church and other voluntary groups committed to it. What one may expect from the State and other public institutions is that they follow the path of secularism which is open to such mediation.

To the growth of such post-modern spirituality, the tribal peoples with traditional primal vision, can make a very significant contribution. But it depends upon their giving up both their uncritical acceptance of the present ideology of modernization identifying it with Christianity and any revival of primalism in a militant and fundamentalist way in the name of their self-identity, and evaluating both modernity and tradition in the light of Christian personalism i.e. the idea of human beings as persons in community, and all natural and social functions as sacramental means of communion in the purpose of God. This will help not only them but the whole national community to build up new indigenous idea and pattern of development incorporating what is valid in the primal critique of modernity gone destructive. No people can forget their cultural past. What they can do is to interpret it in the light of the present forces impinging on their lives so that the new pattern of life may be continuous with their cultural tradition. It will also be their contribution to the idea of post-modernism.

It is also necessary to insist that any pattern of development for the tribals and others who still have cultures and communities predominantly based on the primal vision of undifferentiated unity, world-as-nature and cosmic spirituality, should introduce differentiation and individuality, historical dynamism and secularism gradually and without violently tearing down but grafting on to the stabilities of traditional spirit and patterns of life and living followed by them In fact from my experience, I have found that modernized educated tribal leaders are the worst offenders in this respect.

Christianity which had in the past facilitated the process of modernization in several tribal communities of India is finding it difficult to cope with the destructive forces the process has brought into being. There is need of serious theological rethinking to build up the prophetic and constructive function of the Church in the present situation.

Graduation address delivered at the Christian Medical College, Vellore on 11th Oct. 1993

I must first of all thank Drs. Booshanam Moses and Molly Thomas for their kind invitation to me to be present here with you for this year’s Medical Graduation as your Chief Guest. I deem it a distinct honour to have been so invited.

What shall I say to you on this important occasion in your life when you have finished securing the basic degree in medicine and considering your future course? I am a person belonging to an older generation having graduated in chemistry from the University of Madras in 1935, that is, 58 years ago. But through the years chemistry has changed and I have moved away from it into researches and writings on Religion. Culture and Politics. It has been said that old people dream of the past and young people see visions of the future. So I have been wondering how I could speak some words of relevance to you who are visualizing the future both of yourselves and the world which you enter.

I understand that this is the 51st year of the starting of the MBBS programme and the 46th Graduation Day. I was reading the College Prospectus for 1993 which was sent to me and it speaks of a Tradition laid down by the founder Ida Scudder which has been moulding you through the years you have spent here. I thought I would serve the occasion best by enlarging on some aspects of the relevance of that tradition for the contemporary post-modem world situation. It comes nearest to my own concerns.

The three themes emphasized in the college tradition from the foundation are: modern medical technology, the humanist culture of service and justice to the community of the poor and the needy, and religion as the source of the humanist culture. Building a proper relation between Technology, Culture and Religion was very much present in the mind of Ida Scudder when she founded this academic institution. If I interpret the prospectus of the CMC correctly, the objective of the CMC namely to “impart to men and women an education of the highest order in the art and science of medicine and to equip them in the spirit of Christ for service In the relief of suffering and promotion of health”, that is, the idea of a combination of training in professional skills, moulding the technically trained in a culture of human values and motivation, equipping them to utilize technology to serve “with compassion and concern for the whole person”, the people especially the weaker sections of society, and giving spiritual reinforcement of that culture by the “spirit of Christ” and the motto “Not to be Ministered unto but to Minister” derived from him, goes back in tradition to the founder herself (Prospectus MBBS Course p.5). Of course she could not have realized at that time fifty years ago that some specialized medical technologies could be so fully integrated with the materialistic-mechanical reductionist view of human being and with the profit-consumerist motives that it would be impossible to convert them to the holistic view of human personhood or to be made an appropriate tool for promoting health of poor communities. That awareness has come only in recent years with the destructiveness of technological culture becoming expressly manifest. Today of course medicos engaged in community health services are critiquing high-tech medical technology itself as class-biased and exploitative and call for technologies more appropriate. One should also appreciate the fact that though an institution founded by Christian Missions, considering the inter-religious character of the academic community of the college, the founders emphasized the Christian “values” of self-giving service to the poor and concern for the whole person rather than Christian salvation, thereby somewhat separating the common “culture” and values of humanism of academic community of the college, from the Christian “religion” and thus relatively secularizing it to keep the academic community free from discrimination on the basis of religion.

Of course, for a Christian college it was right to emphasize the special role of Christianity to reinforce the humanist values. But one does not know whether the founders remembered the historical fact that it was the movement of Secular Humanism associated with the European Enlightenment that brought the humanist values of liberty, equality and fraternity to the forefront in the French Revolution and helped Christianity to discover them and their roots within the Christian tradition and the gospel of Christ. The implication is that a dialogue between Religion and Secularism is necessary to keep a culture of Humanism alive. The American democratic constitution came into being and is sustained within the context of such a dialogue between Christianity and Secular Humanism. And if the Indian Constitution begins with affirming the humanist principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice it has behind it the impact of liberal and socialist secular ideologies as well as Renascent Hinduism from Raja Rammohan Roy to Gandhi who absorbed these values and made them part of the Renascent Hinduism itself. And today, the threat to the further development of common humanist culture comes from religious fundamentalism and communalism which deny the reality of religious pluralism and the possibility of a composite human culture reinforced by many faiths and ideologies.

It is the contemporary situation of the relation between Modern Technology, Humanist Culture and Religious Pluralism that I want to highlight today. Here I see two challenges which seem to loom large in the modern world including India which is in the process of modernization; one, of humanizing the technological revolution to serve the poor and protect the ecological basis of life; and the other, of building a secular state and common civil society with openness to religious insights in a situation of religious pluralism. These are challenges to the present generation of youth looking towards making their contribution to the shaping of the future of humanity.

Firstly, how to make technological developments in the modem world instruments of justice, rather than exploitation, to the poor and the needy in society and also serve to protect and not destroy the ecological basis of the community of life on earth? There is no doubt that the scientific and technological revolution of the modem period has been a tremendous expression of human creativity, It has eliminated distances and created the global community materially. It has given us the knowledge necessary to produce goods and services in abundance. It has given us power for social, psychic and genetic engineering, to control disease and death as well as birth. But as we survey the world situation today, the general feeling is that along with many benefits, many of the promises of technology stand betrayed and there is evidence of a lot of technology having become instruments of exploitation of peoples, destruction of cultures and dehumanization of persons and pose threat of destruction not only to the whole humanity through nuclear war but also to the whole community of life on the earth through the destruction of its ecological basis.

In India’s “ten percent economy” as economist C.T. Kurien calls it, 40 to 50 percent of people are living below the poverty line; and the present pattern of development through globalization with economic growth as the only criterion will lead to large-scale cuts in welfare measures and to the capital-intensive industries under the auspices of the multi-national corporations and consequently to more poverty and unemployment as it happened in Latin America. The dalits, the tribals, the fisherfolk and women who have been outside the power-structures of traditional society and state have become more oppressed through technological advance giving their traditional oppressors more power. Class, caste, race, ethnic and sexist oppressions and violence have become more intense with people getting awakened to demand their just rights. In fact, Narmada, Chilika and other people’s struggles are against technological development which have become inhuman and destructive of not only peoples’ livelihood but also of their self-identities.

There was a time when people thought that technologies were morally neutral and that if peoples’ purposes were changed all technologies could be utilized for the good of the community. There may be some truth in that approach with respect to the earlier stage of the technological advance and probably also with respect to small-scale technologies. Today however many knowledgeable people are saying that many of the high-tech developments have produced technological systems in which the mechanical-materialist view of reality, human greed and ecological destruction are built in; and that therefore a new paradigm of development with technologies integrated with a more holistic understanding of human personhood and peoplehood and recognizing the organic natural and spiritual dimensions of human community are called for. The WCC Conference of technicians and scientists in Boston on the Future of Humanity in a Technological Age held sometime ago, asked for the development of an Ethics of Appropriate Technology. This was of course Gandhi’s approach. Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful is a technologist’s restatement of Neo-Gandhism as an ideology of humanized technology.

Since the CMC was started in response to the village women’s situation, it is worth mentioning that today the feminist movement on the whole (as represented by the recent recipient of the Right Livelihood award Vandana Shiva’s book Staying Alive) considers modern science and technology as essentially an expression of masculine chauvinism intent on “raping” nature and woman; and therefore they call for a reorganization of society on the traditional “feminist” principle of production, reproduction and sustenance of all life for saving the future. There may be exaggerations here but there is little doubt that the relation between technology and justice needs to be rethought.

Secondly, how to recognize the religious dimension of public life in a society of many religions and secular ideologies without allowing society to fall into the dangers of religious fundamentalism and communalism? Religious and linguistic and ethnic plurality we always had. But then they lived in more or less isolation from each other. Today what we have is pluralism where the old isolation is gone and we are thrown together to recognize each other and even to relate to each other on an equal footing in a democratic set-up and build society together. Thus religious plurality has moved to religious pluralism which has its own dynamics. We have sought to keep the unity of India as a nation-state in such a situation through the idea of the secular state. It guaranteed freedom of religion and freedom from religious discrimination in civil society to all but allowed religion to enter vital areas of public life only through the inspiration religion gives to individuals. This framework of unity in pluralism has been developed through the movement of national struggle for independence under the leadership of Gandhi, the leader of Renascent Hinduism and Nehru, the advocate of Secular Socialism. In fact, Gandhi became martyr to preserve India a secular state with equality for all religions under law. The threat to this idea of secularism arises form religious fundamentalism which is afraid of insecurity through change in traditional religious dogmas, ritual practices of purity and impurity in social laws; the threat also comes from communalism which seeks political power for one’s religious community or in the case of Hindutva wants to establish a Hindu state. This communalist path will lead, as Rammanohar Lohia said long ago, to the break-up of India.

Minority consciousness or majority consciousness are dangers to both religion and politics because they arise as defensive reactions stifling creativity. The real struggle in all religious communities is for spiritual reformation opening themselves to enter into dialogue with other religions and with secular humanist ideologies regarding the nature and rights of the human person and the meaning of social justice enabling to build together a new spiritually-oriented humanism and a more humane society. Opening up is the only path for the humanization of religion which will also enable it to communicate its message of spiritual salvation in relation to the humanization of society itself.

A Paper presented at the Seminar organized in connection with the tenth Anniversary of the Dept. of Social Analysis of the Tamilnadu Theological Seminary, Arasaradi.

Ten years ago, I was invited to open the Dept. of Social Analysis at the TTS (Tamilnadu Theological Seminary). I am grateful to the Dept. for their invitation to me to participate in the celebrations of its 10th anniversary. Thanks to the leadership of the Dept. and the relevance of it in our time, the concern for social analysis has taken root as an essential aspect of the Christian theological enterprise, not only in the TTS but also in most other Indian theological schools and in the Serampore University curriculum itself. The TTS can legitimately take the credit for being the pioneers in this trail.

I have been asked to speak here on “Power and powerlessness of Christian Faith in the present Indian political situation”. I have interpreted it in a broad manner, as an invitation to talk about the Christian Faith in its relevance to social analysis of the present political situation and social response to it. It was Augustine who spoke of Faith as the foundation for understanding. I remember that a long time ago I wrote on the evolution of my thought under the title Faith Seeking Understanding and Responsibility, which was not published; and later I published a book on my Ideological Quest within the Christian Commitment. Today, to be relevant to the theological dept. of social analysis, I am rephrasing the topic as “The Significance of Faith for Social Analysis and Responsible Action in the Indian Situation”.

My paper has two sections. One, a longer section on the theological basis of social analysis and social response; and two, a brief analysis and response to the present political situation created by globalisation.

I

Hinduism speaks of God’s three-fold action in the world as shriti, sthithi and layana, as creation, preservation and reabsorption into the Universal Spirit. In the Biblical scheme, it is shriti, sthithi and udharana, creation, preservation and redemption. Biblical anthropology is derived from this.

The Bible starts with three covenants of God with all Humanity (Gen. 1-12)- namely, with Adam. Noah and Abraham symbolizing God’s creating, preserving and redeeming activity in the world. At the same time they symbolize three aspects of the universal vocation of Humanity, namely its vocation to be creative, sharing responsibility with God in the continuing creation and re-creation of the world, in the preservation of the fallen world from chaos through the promotion of legal justice based on reverence for all life and especially human life, and in sharing the suffering of God’s Messiah mediating the Grace of God that redeems the creation. Thus human beings are persons called to responsible existence in the community of persons in the context of the community of all life on the earth. And in the Colossian Christology (Col. 1.15 -20). all these covenants and the accompanying human vocations and responsibilities are seen as fulfilled in the Divine Humanity of Jesus Christ. Through Him all creation comes into being and develops, and in Him all creation today remain united in spite of the forces of human self-alienation and disintegration, and by His Cross, He redeems, renews and perfects all humanity into a new community of persons in the context of the community of life and all creation. I find Henrik Berkhof’s combination of continuing development with continuing redemption of creation (of Tiehard de Chardin and Karl Barth) interesting. He defines the Gospel as “a great movement from lower to higher, going through estrangement and crises, but also through atonement and salvation, and so directed towards its ultimate goal, a Glorified Humanity in full communion with God, of which goal the Risen Christ is the guarantee and first fruits”.

It is from these Biblical truths that Christian anthropology and its various insights about the human situation are derived. What are some of the more important insights which are relevant to our current political situation? I list a few.

1. Faith and its opposite Unbelief presuppose a universal spiritual dimension of human selfhood in which the self sees itself as poised between the world and God i.e. at once as an integral part of the world of matter and the community of life governed by the mechanical and organic laws of development respectively on the one hand, and having a limited power to transcend these laws through its spiritual relation to the transcendent realm of God’s purpose on the other. This human self-transcendence provides the self its power of self-determination to choose its own path of self-fulfillment and to bring the world process to serve it. Since in the insecurity arising out of its awareness of its finite freedom, the self tends to absolutise itself and puts itself in opposition to its own nature as given by God in Creation and Redemption, self-alienation is an ever-present aspect of human reality.

Therefore no human situation can be analyzed in its totality purely as the working out of a mechanical or organic necessity, or for that matter, purely as a relation between Divine Spirit and the human souls. No doubt, scientific analyses have their relative validity and help understanding provided they are recognized as partial. But a full analysis requires that we interpret the situation in the light of a theological anthropology which takes seriously the dimension of human spirit’s orientation and disorientation to God’s purpose active in the situation in its interaction with and taking hold of the mechanical dynamics of matter and the organic processes of life in the world of nature.

Actually the rational scientific analyses of the situation will not only be partial but also be distorted, because the human reason seeking to observe the situation is not unconditioned enough to see the full objective truth of the situation. Marx, Freud and Nietzche have proved that reason is conditioned by the unconscious urges of the individual or the collective self for power and self-justification in its self-alienated state and that they distort the truth. Therefore any rational knowledge to be true must overcome the self-alienation of human existence. Theological anthropology would agree with this but would add that it is too superficial to interpret the self-centredness in human beings as a mechanical disorder or as an organic maladjustment easily corrected by the mechanical or organic processes to come; and that the condition of rational objectivity also requires overcoming of the spiritual alienation of the self from God which is behind all psychic and social alienations. He who does the Will of God shall know. It is in this sense that Faith is a condition for true understanding.

2. The interpretation of the present nature of human beings in any situation, as “made in the image of God” and as “brothers for whom Christ died” should be as Persons-in-Relation and destined to become Persons-in-Loving-Community with each other in the context of the community of life on earth through the responsible exercise of the finite human freedom reconciled to God. Since the Christian Faith holds that as a law or an ideal, it is impossible of realization because of human alienation from God and that where it is realized even partially in history, it is realized as the result of the Divine Forgiveness freely given in Christ providing the motivation for mutual forgiveness among persons and peoples in their historical setting. “Forgive one another as the Lord forgave you”.

This leads Christian anthropology to a Moral Realism which recognizes the Human Community in the ultimate sense, like the human experience of friendship and love, is a gift of Divine Grace, and that therefore there is no final path towards it through technological, political or legal organization. What such organization can do is to make the structures of our corporate life more just, that is to say, able to check the forces of exploitation, corruption, tyranny and war and minimize their threat to human life and also maximize the space for mutual responsibility so as to receive the spiritual gift of communion. Moral Realism inherent in this approach is to avoid two absolutist positions of utopianism- one, the approach of political religions which seek to bring perfect community on earth through political action, which ends in tyranny because it asks the impossible from power-politics; and the other, a withdrawal from politics because it cannot bring perfect community on earth, which ends by tolerating the worst tyranny and oppression without resistance. Utopianism is based on the conviction that human beings can justify themselves before God without God’s saving Grace. This, to Christian Anthropology, is also quite unrealistic.

We humans are called to be involved in the use of imperfect means to realize less than perfect ends of justice which alone history offers. God’s covenant with Noah which asks fallen humanity to establish a society based on reverence for life and a legal justice that protects the innocent human beings from the murderer who is around; and God’s call to Moses to liberate the Israelite people from Pharaoh’s slavery; and God permitting monarchy with new perils of oligarchy to destroy the more human Tribal Federation to liberate the Israelites from the technically superior Philistines in Palestine; and Paul’s doctrine that the Roman State, which he knew had its role in crucifying Jesus. was ordained by God and given the “sword” to punish the evil and promote the good in society as His Minister of Justice (Rom. 13)- all these point out that politics of law and justice has a positive role in a sinful world in relation to the ultimate human destiny.

The State is indeed the reflection of human imperfection. Though a stateless society is the ultimate goal of human community. it is never put forth by Christian anthropology as a realistic possibility in history where sin and death exist. But since the State tends of become the Beast that makes war on the saints (Rev. 13), i.e. to become totalitarian, it needs the checks of tradition, law and judiciary as well as opposition and revolution, to keep it a servant of justice.

In fact one has the feeling that the New Testament sees realms of society and state as both capable of being transformed by the ferment of the church, the community of Divine forgiveness and the hope of the coming Kingdom, to become foretastes and signs of ultimate human destiny, namely the Kingdom of God.

3. Christian Faith has in it a positive affirmation of the human vocation of creativity. The calling to create, recreate and develop cultures arises out of the involvement and transcendence of the human self in relation to nature and to other human selves under God’s purpose. At the same time, since human creativity is involved in the spirit of self-alienation, creativity has in it the seeds of turning it into destructivity. Human shriti sakti is good but it tends to turn almost inevitably into samhara sakti which in history needs to be constantly checked by law and redeemed by Grace. Nicholas Berdyaev the Russian philosopher was most critical of the traditional Christian ethics which confined itself to the ethics of law and ethics of grace and ignored the ethics of creativity, while secular modernity to which Christian modernism succumbed, elevated the human vocation of creativity as supreme and as capable by itself of solving the problem of destructivity within it without the need of grace and even of law in the long run Anthropology got perverted on all sides by converting Creation into an order of static laws which are only to be obeyed and perfected by grace in Catholic thought and by getting validated for collective existence without criticism but to be rejected as totally irrelevant in the realm of existence in grace in Protestant thought.

This means that any society that is static or stagnant will be disturbed by the human spirit waking up to its vocation of creativity. Reinhold Niebuhr says that medieval religions and societal ordering under it in Europe could not comprehend the new creativity of Renaissance and Enlightenment and therefore had to break up. Marx and Engels emphasized the creativity of capitalism and prophesied that it would break down because it would soon become a fetter on production, that is, on further creativity. In fact Stalinism broke down in Eastern Europe partly for the reason that it became a fetter on production and other creativeness of human freedom. I have the feeling that so long as the Multinational Corporations remain the sole source of technological creativity, it is impossible to replace it however inhuman they become, unless a similar technical creativity is shown by an alternative human pattern of society.

Rammanohar Lohia used to compare the western spirit which had creativity but produced strife with the Indian spirit which was quite peaceful but produced stagnation. He was in search of a spirit which would enhance creativity without producing strife . It is simply unrealistic to speak of returning to a pre-modern tradition of community life lacking dynamism and creativity as an answer to the tragic perversion of the dynamism of modern technological and cultural creativeness. We have to go forward to a post-modern humanism that takes the dialectics of the human spirit at work in human creativity and destructivity more seriously. We have to build up structures of law which will control destructive uses of human creativity more effectively and conceive of new ways of relating the ferment of Grace to redeem human creativity from its perversions. At the same time we have to work towards a more humane alternative pattern of creative technological and social development. One hopes that this is possible within the framework of the movements of peoples like that of the dalits, the tribals, the fisherfolk and women who are today victims of modernity turned destructive.

4. Christian anthropology’s emphasis on human personhood fulfilling itself in interaction with persons, leads it to give priority to preserve and develop small-scale social institutions which enable face to face relations to promote personal values and humanize people. A Papal Encyclical calls it human ecology. Hannah Arendt writing on the Human Condition speaks of three elements which make the lives of people truly human- namely “social life in its plurality. ..relationship with the earth...and a relationship with time”, that is, the other, earthiness and sense of participation in contributing to a meaningful historical future. Only social institutions like the family, village and neighbourhood community and decentralization of modern big functional organizations like the State and Trade Union can provide them. This has been the emphasis of Gandhism. Therefore politics and economics should be seen as means to social development as the end, rather than reverse it as modern politics and economics tend to do.

II

Now, how do these anthropological insights apply to our Indian political situation, created by the new economic policy of Globalisation and Liberalization?

1. Firstly, Market-economy has made its contribution to economic growth in the world. Its contribution to economic creativity and dynamism cannot be denied. Christian anthropology as I have defined it does not allow us to oppose it for its utilization of self-interest and profit-motive. That would be succumbing to utopianism which I have rejected in the name of the Christian understanding of reality. In fact, it is the resurgence of the utopianism associated with the traditional laissez fare capitalism in the contemporary globalisation that we have to oppose as idolatrous in the name of Christian realism.

From its very beginning in Adam Smith the Free-market was set within the framework of an idolatrous utopianism, individualism and mechanistic world-view which were characteristic of the ideology of humanism that informed the political and economic movements of that period. According to Goudzward and Harry de Lange in their book Beyond Poverty and Affluence (WCC. 1995), ‘the fine working of the market is close to the heart of western society’s self-definition” and they speak about its underlying presuppositions thus: “Indeed for Smith, the market played a role in all forms of human progress. It stimulated industrial culture and desire to save. Moreover the market itself, led as if by an Invisible Hand ensured the participation of the poor in the expanding wealth....These premises ...are misleading in content, displaying the colours of the Enlightenment’s naive belief in human progress and a Deistic vision of society. They have in their undertone the mechanistic world-view that suggests that a good society must function like a machine whose operation is controlled by the laws of nature” (pp. 44-5). Ronald Preston who argues that the market is an efficient mechanism for the limited purpose of economic growth. and should be used as such by the Third world countries also, agrees that the original and continuing premises of the market was that “if each pursued his own advantage through the automatic device of the market, an Invisible Hand would ensure that the result was the promotion of the common good”. Further, he adds that it is bound to a “possessive individualism” which is clearly false. Preston comments, “It is important to separate (the premises) from the concept of the market as a useful mechanism for solving some economic problems if it was set within a different value commitment and an extensive structural framework” (Church and Society in the late 20th Century. 1983, p.42). According to him, the capacity of the market to maximize the productivity of relative scarce resources “above any other consideration” makes it useful if it is limited to that function and made to serve other considerations through State control of it. He says: “The institution of market needs to be put into a fine political framework. Left to itself it is cruel and callous”. He adds, “In short, the market is a human device set up to serve human purposes, to be servant and not master. We must not bow down to the idol we ourselves have created. It is a political decision as to which areas of economic life are left to the impersonal verdict of the market and which to be decided by public discussion, as it also is to decide the broad parameters of economic guidelines within which the economy has to operate. No government however devoted to laissez fare can escape that responsibility” (pp. 114-5).

Preston’s almost looks like Jawaharlal’s economic policy. But in the present policy of globalisation and liberalization the function of the state is only to make the climate safe for the market and withdraw almost completely from the realm of economic goals, leaving the market alone to determine them. This means that economic goals like liquidation of poverty and unemployment, distribution of welfare, narrowing the gulf between the rich and the poor, people’s participation in the economic process, accountability of economic centres to the people, economic self-sufficiency and similar other economic purposes are jeopardized because the market is not concerned with them. M.A. Oommen says that globalisation achieves along with economic growth, globalisation of poverty.

More importantly, issues of ecological justice, and justice to the weaker sections of society and specifically development of social institutions cannot be taken up by the economy directed only by the market-profit mechanism.

As Rajni Kothari points out, high-tech industrialism under the market system (one should add, within the framework of individualist and mechanistic ideology) not only globalises pollution of soil, air and water but especially also it “leads to a wanton exploitation of the natural resource base of the country, especially based on the forest and the sea. In human terms, this has a disastrous consequence for certain groups of people like the tribals, scheduled castes, traditional fishermen and such other groups who depend on them to eke out a living... They would also be torn away from their natural roots as well as from their community and cultural ties - producing in them a sense of isolation” (Quoted from ISA Journal Dec. 94). The social objectives of the peoples are destroyed for the sake of economic growth.

It is here that the state as the organ of the whole national community has to intervene rather than withdraw. As C.T. Kurien has written, the State has to discipline capital both domestic and international if capital is not to discipline the state to serve its purposes; and for it the State needs not only political power but also some economic power derived from public corporations. Today Manmohan and Rao have surrendered the state to the ideology of the free-market with the backing of the greedy middle class (which includes also a good part of the organized working class) who have coopted Indian Nationalism to serve their vested interests.

Where then is the source of power to discipline the nation-state and through it the national and transnational capital in the name of social justice? The peoples’ movements of dalits,  tribals, fisherfolk and women in India are too feeble politically to make a dent. But it is possible that such movements acquire a transnational character, because the problem we encounter in globalisation is world-wide.

In fact this has been evident in the Copenhagen summit on Social Development. The reports on the Summit indicate that the market economics of the G7-TNC-IMF-WB-WTO combination dominates through their “global governance” not only the political UN but also the UN Special Agencies for social development and justice like ILO,UNESCO,FAO, Commissions on Human Rights, Women’s Development, Indigenous People etc for their goal of economic growth.

The seeds of a transnational opposition to that dominance is also present in the world situation. Perhaps the time of relevance of the nation-state is past with the smaller micro-units of peoples within the nations and the transnational united peoples expressing their political awakening in relation to each other in new ways of mutual protection.

A talk at the Seminar on the topic at Kottarakara, Kerala on 18 November 1995

The word “Secularism” is used in India usually in relation to the idea of the Secular State which has been established in the religiously pluralistic context of India. The Constitution of India when formulated by the Constituent Assembly did not have the word “secular” to denote the character of the State in independent India, but it was assumed in several of its clauses. But the word was added later in the seventies through an amendment. The Supreme Court of India has declared it to be a basic character of the Indian state which should not be changed.

It essentially aims at avoiding the medieval pattern of state which was “theocratic”. All traditional states and societies in the medieval period have been theocracies. State and society were integrated with the authority of one or other single “established” religion whose sanction determined the law of citizenship and social structure. In medieval Europe it was Christendom, and in the Arab countries it was Islamic, and in India it was Hindu or Islamic. A theocracy gives first class citizenship only to the adherents of the established religion; the others are legally restricted in their religious practices and discriminated adversely in social life and in the provision of social opportunities. The Secular State is anti-theocratic in the sense that the State has no special relation to any one religion. Therefore the adherents of all religions and no religion have the same status and rights of citizenship including freedom of religion/belief and freedom from discrimination in civic life on the basis of religion/belief. It gives all citizens in the land, irrespective of their religious or ideological belief or affiliation,

1 This historical part has already been given in essay No. 2

2 Characterised as “Closed Secularism” in Essay No. 2

the right to cooperate in the building of the national community as a “fraternity” of individual persons and peoples on the basis of equality before the law of the land.

In the Indian national movement, from the time national struggle for freedom became militant, there has been a conflict between “secular” nationalism and “theocratic (Hindu/Islamic)” nationalisms. Gandhi with his reformed Hinduism and Nehru with his secular humanist belief reinforced the secular idea of politics and state, against the theocratic. Though partition of India and the communal (Hindu/Muslim) killings at the time of Independence and the Hindu ideologist assassination of Gandhi showed the strength of the theocratic ideology in Indian politics, the Union of India established itself as a secular nation-state¹. Even today the secular versus theocratic political ideology is an important part of the Indian political scenario.

There are various approaches to religion and religions which have gone into the make up of Indian secularism. The advocates of each of these approaches have their own interpretation of the political meaning of it. Three of these deserve special mention.

1. The idea that secularism confines religion to the private realm and bars it from any relation to the public life which is to be guided purely by secularist ideologies which deny any religious view of reality²

2. That secularism is based on the doctrine of the equality of religions.

3. That secularism means that the State guarantees the security of the laws and structures of family and society of religious communities which have the sanction of traditional religion.

We shall evaluate these critically to point out their lopsidedness in the light of a more adequate definition of secularism. A positive idea of secularism will, I hope, get clarified in the process of this critical evaluation.

Firstly, the approach of anti-religious philosophy of secularism. The early Liberal Rationalist Nehru and Dialectical Materialist E.M. Sankaran Nampoothiripad have maintained the position that Secularism means that religion is a “private” affair, of individual’s belief and worship and that it should not have anything to do ultimately with “public” life of state or society. EMS often quotes Jesus’ words, Give to God and Caesar what belongs to each, with this interpretation.

There is a good deal of truth in this interpretation if we look historically at the emergence of the idea of the secular state in Europe and India. In the former, the Catholic-Protestant War to secure domination of public life lasted three decades before they listened to the rationalist proposal to build nation-states which were common to all who lived in the territory irrespective of their religious affiliation or their atheistic faith. The Hindu-Muslim communal riots in India also made a certain separation of religion from public education and party-politics a necessity for public peace in India. And if we look at the dominant influence shaping modern Indian public life, it has been the impact of Liberal or Marxian secular humanist ideology. The Preamble of the Constitution of India speaks of “We the People” committing ourselves to build a nation-state as the instrument of a new society based on liberty, equality, fraternity and justice. The first three comes from the slogans of the French Revolution and the last is inspired by the Russian revolution.

Nevertheless, the logical goal of this “secularist” (as different from an “open secular”) interpretation is that the State should be a sort of anti-theo “theocracy” with some anti-religious ideology as its established “quasi-religion”, promoting secularization of all public life. Kamal Pasha tried this in Turkey, Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao in China. In these countries the right of individual to practice religion in the privacy of their religious group was legally granted, but the right to propagate it (either to educate children and youth in it or to make its insights the basis of a prophetic role in politics, economics or society) was constitutionally banned. That right of propagation was given only to the official ideology. Of course the attempt failed.

In any case, no religion worth the name would accept this interpretation of religion as limited to individual’s piety. If religion is concerned with ultimate Truth or God, it cannot but have its implications for the whole of life, private and public, and therefore the fundamental human right of religious freedom should include the right to express religious faith in prophetic ministry in society and politics in the name of justice. Gandhi has given expression to his position that he cannot conceive of religion and politics in separation.

In fact, the religious view considers the secularist “mechanical materialist view of reality as too reductionist and as leaving out the “organic” and “spiritual” dimensions of human being and history and therefore as unable to renew the values of humanism and its reverence for life and the dignity of the human person in society in the name of which secularism started to protest against religious authoritarianism. Hitlerism and Stalinism have proved beyond doubt that even secularism can be authoritarian, even totalitarian which leaves no room for any other effective stream of thought and life. Further. secularist ideologies have created a spiritual vacuum in the life of the secularized people. leading many to return to religious fundamentalism and communalism in militant forms. The only answer to such a situation is the witness of the relevance of reformed religions with their holistic view of reality for public life.

Pandit Nehru himself, though remaining skeptical of institutionalized religions, had in later years. given expression in his Interview with Karanjia. to the idea that material advance, if it is to become meaningful and to enhance the quality of life, should recognize the spiritual real iii of eternal values towards which religions point. The Socialist Lohia spoke of the necessity of a synthesis between Indian spirituality and dialectical materialism. Jai Prakash Narain in his last phase, gave up materialism and accepted Gandhian spirituality as the basis of his politics of the Total Revolution.

But that does not mean that religion must enter politics for the purpose of securing power for the religious community. Religion is concerned with the meaning of life and with faith expressing itself in bringing forgiving love in inter-personal relations and justice for the poor and the weaker sections of society in inter-people power-relations of public life. If religions thus eschew separate “communal power” and seek justice in society, there is no reason why for this purpose, they should not bring their specific faith-insights regarding public morality into dialogue and common action through secular multi-religious groups open for faith-interaction among themselves as well as with secular ideologies. Of course, religions should have their separate explorations of their separate theologies of public life, and also their education of the laity for their ministry in the realm of secular public society and state. In institutions of service to the poor, where no issue of power is involved. separate action is legitimate. But in public action involving power, especially in politics, it is better that they work through open multi-religious political parties rather than through political parties confined to the adherents of one religion which runs the risk of falling into the danger of being swayed by religious communal self-interest and search for communal power over against other religious communities. What is called for here is that the religious concern for public life be expressed through the faithful laity and not through the institutional authority of religions, that is. in a secular and not the traditional theocratic manner in a religiously pluralistic situation.

In fact, religions will also be more truly religious if they are not tied to the State and its exercise of power. The insight of the Free Church traditions that the Constantinian establishment of Christianity has perverted the Christian church is important for Christians to remember.

What is called for is a spiritual reinforcement of “Open Secularism” by the renascent religions.

A second interpretation of Secularism is by the advocates of Gandhism and other ideologies of Liberal Hinduism like Radhakrishnan. It declares that the idea of Indian Secularism is an expression of the toleration based on the traditional Hindu doctrine of the equality of religions. Gandhi’s opposition to the two-nation theory of the Muslim League based on religious difference between Hinduism and Islam and the partition of the country arising from it was indeed religious. Gandhi said. Partition means a potent untruth. My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine for me is a denial of God....we are all, no matter by what name designated. children of God”. Radhakrishnan says, that secularism is based, not on irreligion or atheism, but on “the universality of spiritual values which may be attained by a variety of ways”. Unity is the ultimate reality and not Plurality

Donald Smith In his study of Indian Secularism points out the significant contribution made to the idea by the attitude of toleration arising from the Hindu doctrine of equality and unity of religions.

However, this toleration of plurality is on the spiritual assumption that plurality, (that is, all differences). is unreal. It is a characteristic of the religions which elevate mystic realization of the formless and nameless Spirit as the ultimate human destiny; they consider historical religions with their nama and rupa as belonging to the world of maya to be transcended. For this reason, they cannot comprehend the prophetic religions (the Jewish, the Christian and the Islamic) which emphasize that the ultimate destiny of human beings is to serve God’s Purpose in human history, which Purpose He has revealed in some unique historical Person. Law or Event with nama and rupa. Since Hinduism as a mystic religion cannot comprehend this historical nature of prophetic missionary religions, it gives them also a mystic interpretation; so much so, Hinduism cannot tolerate them until these religions themselves accept the mystic interpretation of the unity and equality of all religions. (This has been clarified by Fr. Sebastian Kappen in his booklet on Understanding Communalism, about which reference is made in several essays.)

Of course democratic toleration is toleration of real plurality and differences. That also requires a doctrine of equality. But it is equality of “persons” and not equality of “gods” or even “ideas”. Persons who in their moral integrity pursues truth may come to accept one religion or another or may reject all religions and acknowledge the truth of atheism; and they should be free to propagate and give expression to the truth as they differently see it. It is in the freedom before the challenge of ultimate Truth and penultimate truths, human persons are equal, an equality that should bc recognized by the law of the state so long as a person respects the same freedom of other persons.

This does not preclude the exploration of mystic and prophetic religions to dialogue with each other regarding the character of interfaith relations. There is a common recognition of the religious dimension of human selfhood in which they are united. Beyond that there must be mutual interpenetration as a result of living together. Certainly equality of religions is one doctrine of inter-religious relations which needs to be discussed among religions. Missionary and prophetic religions have been quite intolerant of other religions in their history; and Hindutva is Hinduism taking into itself the worst inhuman features of that Semitic intolerance which these historical religions are now seeking to shed.  Indeed, all prophetic religions have to learn a great deal from the mystic religious approach which emphasizes unity and equality. But when many in India are attracted by atheistic ideologies and their emphasis on the historical dimension of human destiny, mystic religions can also learn a great deal from prophetic religions which affirm the religious significance of the historical dimension. In fact, all religions and secularist ideologies have a common task which unites them, namely the humanization of the modern technological culture through the development of a common post-modern humanism which incorporates the valid insights of all religions, ideologies and the sciences.

The third interpretation of Indian Secularism is from the point of view of the minority communal consciousness of the Muslims of India. They consider the constitutional right of religious freedom given to all citizens under the Secular State as guaranteeing all religious communities the right to follow their traditional “personal” law regulating family and community relations which are sanctioned by religion. It is on that basis that the Muslim authorities guarding their family laws opposed the judgment of the Supreme Court in the Shabano case and continues to oppose the idea of a Uniform Civil Code which will entail modification of their religiously sanctioned Shariat Law. I suppose the advocacy of Sankaracharya of Pun to preserve laws of untouchability and sati which were religiously sanctioned in Hinduism also come from the same interpretation of the religious freedom under India’s Secularism. The opposition of Christian bishops to the revision of the family law of the Christian community also arises from the same source.

This however is a clear misinterpretation. The Constitution in guaranteeing religious freedom to citizens spells out clearly that it will not preclude the state from recodification of family and community laws which go against the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and justice in man-woman and inter-caste relations even if they are sanctioned by religion. These social relations are declared secular areas calling for change in new directions. In fact the fundamental rights of the citizen require that all traditional communities change, breaking traditional hierarchies and patriarchies, to bring about social justice by giving the dalits, the tribals and the women who were excluded from the traditional power-structures of society, fuller participation in the power-structures; and the State is called upon to assist it by suitable legislation and other means.

Of course that does not mean that the diversity of social codes related to diversity of cultures should be destroyed. But all have to acknowledge the common framework of egalitarian justice and recodify their traditional civil codes which were formulated in other times and under other principles. This is by no means an infringement of religious freedom which is given under Secularism.

In fact, all religious communities in all parts of the world have been making changes to respond to the new conceptions of egalitarian justice to which the subject peoples have been awakened. Religions can rightly claim that these new democratic values which Secular Humanism has brought to light are derived from the religious conceptions of the dignity of human beings in society but which they neglected in the past; and that therefore in assimilating them into their religious reformation they are only claiming their own and preventing their getting perverted in the secularist framework of Materialism and Individualism.

Summing up. one may say that Open Secularism and Renascent Religion are allies and need to reinforce each other in public life to redeem the new human values of freedom, equality and justice and enhance the quality of national fraternity in a situation of religious and ideological pluralism.

A Talk given at the Seminar on the Future of inter-religious Dialogue at Dharmaram on 17 August 1993.

In this Seminar on the future of the inter-religious dialogue, it is proper that we start with the specific context of the present crisis of Indian Secularism and its relation to religious fundamentalism.

Indian Secularism emerged as a basic political ideology in the course of the Indian national struggle for independence. It emerged as the concept of Secular Nationalism in opposition to the nationalism based on the interests of one or other of the religious communities, therefore also called communalism. The Hindu nationalism with its goal of Hindu Rashtra of Akhanda Hindustan drawing its strength from Hindu revivalism appeared with militancy in the latter half of the first decade of the century in the Congress in opposition to the Liberal Nationalism of the earlier period which was too weak to fight for national independence. With its weakening in the Congress, it found organized expression in the Hindu Mahasabha and later in the Rashtriya Swayamseva Sangh. The two-nation-theory that India consists of the Hindu and the Islamic nations which are to be separated at independence found organized expression in the Muslim League. The idea of Secular Nationalism became dominant under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It provided an ideological framework within which the many religious communities of India as well as the plurality of linguistic caste and ethnic cultures (in the formation of which one or other religions had played a dominant role) could participate together with the adherents of secular ideologies like Liberalism and Socialism (which emerged in India in the framework of the impact of modern humanism of the West mediated through western power and English education). Therefore dialogue between Religion and Secular Humanism as well as between Religions began to take place within the national context on the meaning, values and goals of modern Indian nationhood.

Gandhi represented the long history of Renascent Hinduism from Raja Rammohan Roy through Swami Vivekandnada to Gandhi himself, in which Hindu religion and culture were being renewed in interaction with Western Christianity and modern secular culture; and Nehru represented the dynamic of European Enlightenment and Liberal Democratic and Marxian social ideologies which emerged in the ethos. Thus India’s Secular Nationalism was a dialogic integration between renascent religion and secular ideologies. The middle class who give leadership to the national movement was the bearer of this idea of Secular Nationalism for pluralistic India.

When India became independent it was this middle class committed to secularism that drew up the Constitution of the Indian Nation-State. They imposed the idea of secular nationalism on the Indian peoples because they were convinced that it was the best basis for unity of pluralistic India and the best path towards building a new society based on the values of liberty, equality and justice. They also hoped to build indigenous roots for them in the various religions and cultures of India by reforming them from within and also by legal intervention and developing a composite culture supportive of a State which is common to all peoples living in India equally and a modernized society with dignity and justice for all.

Ram Jethmalani specifies the clauses in the Constitution defining Indian Secularism in his article in the Indian Express (Feb. 14, ‘93) on “Clearing Confusion”. “The most important component of secularism of the Indian variety is to be found in Articles 14, 15(2) and 16(2). These Articles compel equality of all citizens before the law and entitle them to equal protection of the laws. They outlaw the discrimination against any citizen on the ground only of his religion, whether it be in the matter of public employment or access to public places and even charity. Another facet of it was in Article 19(1)a  which granted freedom of speech and expression and Article 25 which preserved the total freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion. Of course this right was subject to reasonable restrictions in the interests of public order, morality and health and the power of the State to legislate for social welfare

The partition of India and the establishment of Pakistan as an Islamic State and the Hindu-Muslim riots which happened in the wake of independence did strengthen the idea of Hindu State in India. But the assassination of Gandhi by the advocates of Hindu Rashtra boomeranged and Gandhi’s martyrdom and Nehru’s leadership exposing the Fascist nature of Hindutva reestablished Indian Secularism as the basis of Indian polity and nationhood. Nehru’s characterization of the Hindutva of the RSS assumes that Hindu Nationalism is one way of relating itself to the modern western religion cum secular impact on India. For Fascism too is a western ideology. In fact Hindutva is a reaction in self-defence of the traditional religious and social structure utilizing the technocratic and political power-means imported from the modern West. Savarkar asked for “Hinduisation of Indian politics and militarisation of Hinduism” to establish and defend Akhanda Hindustan.

Now how do we account for the emergence of RSS-VHP-BJP parivar and their Hindu ideology to new strength after four decades of the working of Indian Secularism to the extent of threatening the secular pluralistic basis of Indian polity? Their new strength is clear in their electoral successes and the appeal of their agitation and their new confidence about coming to power as rulers of India. It is their new vitality and popular support in the country of Gandhi and Nehru that needs interpretation.

There are no doubt many reasons for a complex phenomenon like this. Here I mention a few, actually three, which may be specially relevant to the theme of our Seminar.

1. Firstly, the spiritual vacuum created by Closed Secularism. Recently Rustom Bharucha’s The Question of Faith (published as no:3 of the Tracts for the Times by Oriental Longman 1993) raises the question of the relation of Indian Secularism to religion as Faith. The Editor in the Preface says that the Tract “polemises against a form of narrow sectarian Secularism which refuses to be sensitive to tradition and faith” and argues that Secularism needs to be rethought taking religious faith seriously, that “only then can Secularism reclaim the ideological space which Fundamentalists are threatening to take over, only then can Secularists capture the minds of the people”(p.vi). And the author Bharucha explains, “If by Secularism we mean a total avoidance of religious matters, the secular weapons may not be enough” to fight Fundamentalism. The point is that “if we do not intervene in the debates concerning the interpretation of religion, we are simply playing into the hand of Fundamentalists. Merely non-antireligious terms will only strengthen the deadlock” (p.4). The author discusses melas and lilas, Ananthamoorthy’s novels, Lohia and Gandhi, to show that there is religion as faith which is distinct from religion as ideology, and that it is an ally of political secularism. His conclusion is that “a reductive Secularism that has tended to equate almost anything religious with a fundamentalist purpose” is not the best way to resist the onslaught of fundamentalism. Therefore he asks for discrimination between terms like Religious, Communal and Fundamentalist (p.88). He adds that encountering fundamentalism on rigidly political lines is not enough; “alternatives have to be explored within the larger secular drives of neo-religious forms and philosophies” (p.92). In this connection he speaks of the significance of the Liberation Theology movements in all religions and notes the significance of the radical religious movements. The tradition of Neo-Hindu movements represented by Gandhi has been a force behind Indian secularism. Nehru could recodify Hindu personal law only because the Neo-Hindu movements had prepared the Hindu religious mind for it. Nehru saw no such neo-Muslim movement in Islam to touch the Muslim personal law. The Neo-Hinduism of Sri.Narayana Guru challenging the caste structure religiously was the basis of a good deal of the radical secular politics of social justice in Kerala. But Indian Secularism in recent years has been too closed to take any real interest in religious movements of renewal and denied religious spirituality or spiritually based morality any role in “public’s life. Alternately, it has made secularism to mean keeping as vote-banks a federation of fundamentalist/conservative religious communities each resisting any social change towards equality in its traditionally sanctioned social structure and showing indifference to the reforming liberal elements working in these communities. One may point to the politics of the Congress or the Left to illustrate it.

Actually Indian Secularists in the recent past did not care to put down roots in the indigenous soil of the religious or vernacular linguistic cultures of the country. As a result, when electoral politics enlarged the political community of India by bringing the groups other than the middle class into it, it produced popular leaders more inclined to the unrenewed traditions. That is to say, the dialogue between Religion and Secularism came to a stop leaving the field to closed secularism on the one hand and the revived communally oriented fundamentalist religion and culture on the other.

2. Secondly, Religious Fundamentalism. Whether all religious fundamentalisms emerge out of reaction to closed secularism or not is debatable. It may also arise from the insecurity of faith when its religious expressions are faced with the necessity to change. Whatever its origin, religious fundamentalism which rejects change in religion or its social structure ends up by isolating itself from the influence of other religions or the values of secular humanism, and in the long run tends to make religious community centred on its self-righteousness and eventually its self-interest. In the many quotes from Bharucha, religious fundamentalism almost becomes the basic enemy of Indian secularism. Therefore we must define Religious Fundamentalism a little more clearly.

The word Fundamentalism came into vogue in 1920 in relation to the Christian group who earlier published a set of twelve booklets under the title, Fundamentals. These booklets opposed the application of modern critical historical approach to the Bible and the traditional dogmas of Christianity, because in their opinion, it would destroy their supra-national and supernatural elements which belong to their very essence. Thus Fundamentalism and Modernism, Faith and Reason, were separated into two water-tight compartments. In contrast, some other believers maintained that the interaction between them was essential to discriminate the truly supernatural elements necessary to religious faith from irrational superstitions which distort faith; that it was also necessary to make faith reasonable and to express it intelligently to the moderns so as to offer them a faith that liberates reason from becoming idolatrous and inhuman.

This debate was crucial in distinguishing and relating scientifically objective history and the mythical interpretations of it expressing the divine and subjective meaning of the same for the community of faith. This was crucial, especially in relation to the Genesis account of Creation, the story of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus in the Gospels and the New Testament accounts in which the hope of the consummation of the Kingdom of God in the future was expressed. The debate included also the distinction and relation between the history of the church as part of the general religious history of humankind and as God’ select community to be the universal sign of Divine salvation for all. In the 80s when the Fundamentalists emerged in USA with control of the electronic media and formed the electronic church, they also formed the Moral Majority movement with a conservative ideology backing Reagan’s policies of laissez fare economics and dismantling social welfare entitlements and of opposition to equal rights for all irrespective of colour or sex. At this point. Religious Fundamentalism became a political ideological religion.

I have related this history of Christian fundamentalism to clarify what fundamentalism means and to show that it is justifiable to characterize as fundamentalist similar movements in any religion which through communal isolation from critical reason, secular humanism or through search for political power, buttresses traditional beliefs and social order from reform and seeks to destroy democratic freedoms.

In India the use of the word Fundamentalism has developed certain special nuances which are worth noting. V.M. Tarkunde, himself a Radical Humanist, in his JPMemorial Lecture on “Communalism and Human Rights” (PUCL Bulletin June 93), clearly distinguishes Fundamentalism from Communalism. He says, “Fundamentalism consists of uncritical adherence to ancient beliefs and practices. Communalism on the other hand consists of animosity of persons belonging to one religion toward persons of another religion. A fundamentalist need not be communalist at all...On the other hand a communalist need not be a fundamentalist at all...Fundamentalism requires to be opposed by all Humanists and Democrats, but that opposition should not be mixed up with an opposition to communalism. In fact many members of Muslim fundamentalist bodies may be helpful to us in promoting communal amity in the country”. Tarkunde is right in distinguishing between them, but he underestimates the inability of fundamentalism to embrace people of other religions or secular humanists within their theological or community circle predisposing them to theocratic politics in the interests of “true religion and virtue”; and I would add that he underestimates the role of fundamentalism in India.

Fundamentalist Hindu opposition to change of the traditional Hindu social order had played a large part in the creation and strengthening of the RSS ideology of opposition to other religions and to movements of Hindu reformation. This is clear from what Golwalker says in his writings on Hidutva and Lohia’s essay on Hinduism which he wrote soon after the assassination of Gandhi. Golwalker says, that Hindutva is hostile to Islam because “Islam was the first religion to interfere with our social organization of chaturvarna...Islam in India challenged our scheme of class-caste organization. All post-Islamic sects sought to counter Islam by seeking to take the wind out of Islamic sails by themselves making the same challenge. That is why these sects have now become a source of national division and weakness”. Here the RSS chiefs opposition to Islam, the sufi and bhakti sects and Gandhism and by extension to Christianity, liberalism and socialism, are all one piece. This led Golwalker to characterise those “who advocated Hindu-Muslim unity as necessary to fight for swaraj” as the perpetrators of the “greatest treason in our society” (Yogendra Sikand “Religion and Religious Nationalism” in The Frontier 9.5.92). Lohia writing on the motivation behind Gandhi’s assassination coupled Hindutva hostility to Islam and to the democratic transformation of Hindu society. He wrote, “No Hindu can be generally tolerant to Muslims unless he acts at the same time actively against caste and property and for women”. To Lohia, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was not an episode of Hindu-Muslim fight as of the war between the Liberal and the Fanatical in Hinduism(“Hinduism” in Fragments of a World Mind). That is, Hindutva’s Communalism is closely related to its Fundamentalism.

 M.N. Srinivas makes a distinction between Orthodoxy and Fundamentalism. He sees that substantial numbers of Hindus have moved into the middle class who have been most affected by the process of secularization. This process has been strengthened, not necessarily by the philosophy of secularism but by the “recent great developments in communication, transport, urbanization and education”. As a result, “ideas of purity and impurity” which were so pervasive in the lives of Hindus have become much weaker, and in the life-style of the middle class they are “becoming confined to rites of passage, pilgrimages and a few festivals”. Middle class from other religions are also affected, but purity-impurity ideas were “weaker among them initially”. Unemployment has added economic security to the religious uprooting. This provides the “ideal soil for sowing fundamentalist seeds”. But he adds, Fundamentalism has to be distinguished from Orthodoxy; for while the latter involves strict adherence to tradition, the former interprets tradition for political purposes” (“Towards a New Philosophy” in The Times of India 9.7.93). But in the light of the history of Christian fundamentalism, Srinivas’s Orthodoxy is Fundamentalism and his Fundamentalism is the ideology of Communalism. Purity-impurity ideas were the religious foundation of caste and it is the return to it by the middle class for spiritual and economic stability that makes for their shift from Secularism to Hindutva. The middle class of other religions may also be showing a new passion for the securities of their religious tradition. In their case the sense of being part of a minority community may add to their insecurity.

It is necessary however to state that scholars like Ashish Nandy see no genuinely religious motivation in Communalism, and therefore avoids relating it to Fundamentalism which has a basic religious concern in its motivation. Hindutva like Closed Secularism itself “assumes the world to be a desacralised place, where only the laws of the market, history, judiciary and empirical science work”. It is “blatantly non-Indian and recognizably an illegitimate child of colonialism”, which introduced the idea of priority of State over Religion against the Indian concept of building the State on the basis of a “secondary allegiance” as in the case of Asoka and Akbar and, in modern India, Mahatma Gandhi. It is the Semitization of Hinduism in the 19th century that now “reaches its form in political Hinduism, Brahminic, steam-rolling...The ultimate product of this process was Nathuram Vinayak Godse...”. In Nandy’s opinion, serious believers cannot use their faith instrumentally as ideology. “Hinduism is a Faith; Hindutva an Ideology”. It is “Secularism’s double, the poor man s Statism”(Indian Express Feb. ‘90). Therefore the tradition of Hindu tolerance practiced within a world assumed to be the realm of the sacred, has no relevance for Hindutva as for Secularism. Here we are back to the necessity of religious faith and of dialogue with both Secularism and Hindutva to convert them to a genuine basis of what Nandy calls “the plural patriotism on which the most important strand of the freedom movement was based, and is now culturally orphan”. I suppose he means a return to Gandhism.

3. Thirdly, the tension between religions on Conversion. I should mention briefly a third factor contributing to the crisis of Indian Secularism, namely the tension between Hinduism and the missionary religions on the question of conversion which continue unresolved’. Not only the Hindutva of the RSS but also the Neo-Hinduism of the Gandhian line consider the mission of conversion of people from one religion to another as religious imperialism and destructive of inter-religious harmony.

Recently H.V.Seshadri, the General Secretary of the RSS issued a commentary on the RSS’s call to the minorities. In it he makes the point that Hindutva being by nature “all embracing and looks upon every sincere religious and spiritual pursuit with equal respect, is the opposite of Fundamentalism” which is intolerant of plurality. Fundamentalism, he said, “represents a mind-set confined within one Prophet, one Book, a single way of worship” which by nature led to the “concept of believers going to heaven and nonbelievers going to hell, with a religious duty cast upon its followers to convert the rest by any means whatsoever” (Indian Express? 1993).

The more liberal Krishna Kanth, the Governor of Andhra Pradesh, in his address to the Assembly of the National Council of Churches in 1991 and following it in a press interview with Neerge Choudhury (Indian Express 21 Oct. 1991) “called for an end to religious conversion in the country, not by law but by a voluntary consensus of religious leaders”, because in his opinion, communal strife is closely linked to conversion. His main argument is as follows: “The word Hindu which had essentially geographic and cultural meaning began to acquire religious connotations” and communal overtones when missionary religious began converting the untouchables and lower castes of Hindu society with promise of their liberation from caste indignities. It produced in Hindus the feeling that “in an age of competitive politics” in which power-sharing is “determined by numbers”, conversion would reduce them to insignificance. In any case, says Kanth, conversion did not bring liberation to the converted people from caste, because caste is not just a Hindu phenomenon but an Indian reality and is practiced by all religions in India. So, the “social logic” of conversion is no more there. But it is with conversion that the “false concept of majority and minority emerged making Hinduism a religion and caste a Hindu phenomenon”. Only a stopping of conversion will be “a starting point for harmony in society and for lessening mental insecurity, fanaticism and prevalent climate of confrontation”.

The fundamental law of religious freedom in the Constitution of India includes the freedom to “propagate” religion. But the debate on it was endless. It was the announcement by Mukherji and D’ Sousa that the Christian Community had decided to forgo special communal representation in the legislature and other communal safeguards so that there would not be political exploitation of increase of numbers through conversion that there was a spontaneous decision in the Constituent Assembly to include propagation of religion as a fundamental human right of the citizen. Though the Court has ruled that the right to propagate does not include the right to convert, that right is the right of the one who hears the propagated religion. But even afterwards there were attempts to restrict this freedom by law in Parliament. It was Nehru’s opposition to them that defeated them. The O.P. Tyagi Bill got the support of then Prime Minister Morarji Desai and it was the fall of the Desai ministry that prevented it from getting passed. But the question has continued to agitate Hindu minds. It raises many very sensitive theological as well as social issues on which Hinduism with its mystic orientation and Christianity and Islam with their prophetic historical orientation differ in a fundamental sense. But the ecumenical inter-religious dialogues in recent years have been exploring new paths to break the deadlock. The Indian situation certainly calls for mutual understanding at depth and consensus about permitted parameters of religious practices, for which inter-faith dialogues among religions and secular ideologies at various levels may be necessary, specifically within the Indian context. Since freedom of propagation and conversion involves not only matters of religion, but also of culture and political ideas, any restriction at this point will affect the fundamental rights of the human person in general. I suppose that must be the reason for Governor Kanth proposing a consensus of religious leaders on this matter outside the law.

In fact the difference in the character of mystic and prophetic, Indian and Semitic spiritualities needs to be discussed at depth. Nehru used to say that he preferred the cultural attitude related to the spirit of Paganism which allowed many gods including an unknown god to coexist; it reinforces democratic tradition. He also thought that the totalitarianism of Communism and Fascism was a secularization of the Semitic religious outlook. Lohia saw the same difference but thought if the attitude of coexistence of gods is allowed to go to extreme in matters of society and politics, it would cut active dialogue between different points of view and bring about stagnation. He realized that the other approach brought about strife. So he asked for a synthesis of the two, failing which he would prefer strife rather than stagnation. This discussion shows that there are clear political and cultural implications for all religious attitudes. So inter-faith dialogue must include these implications also.

Talk given at the meeting of the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture of the University of Kerala at the Syndicate Hall, Trivandrum on 17 April 1975

Pluralism is different from mere traditional plurality which was a coexistence of communities largely isolated from each other. Vice-president K.R.Narayanan in his recent speech at the Indian Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi spoke of Indian society even now as “a ‘coexistence society’ rather than a single society”; he defined coexistence society as “many groups, castes and religions living together but interacting among each other only at the margins”. He added that “what we have achieved through years of social reforms and economic changes is, that the degree of this marginal interaction has been progressively enhanced” (Address by K.R.Narayanan, ISC Delhi 1994). Secular ideologies which have brought a new sense of selfhood to all communities and the rights of that selfhood for full participation in the Centres of power which determine the meaning-content and goals of life in society are also a basic factor in this pluralism with parity. As religion has been constitutive of the self-identity of several traditional communities in India, the situation may be spoken of as a pluralism of religions and secular ideologies. The only path available today is, either the domination of the majority religion or secular ideology as the established framework of the State suppressing the rights of others using State coercion or open democratic secularism in which a consensus is sought regarding the values and directions of the common life of society and the State policy related to that common life, through peaceful but active dialogue among religions and ideologies. My topic deals with some lines in which the transition from coexistence to democratic secular existence in a single society may be constructively pursued.

This Open Secularism should not be interpreted as the common acceptance of any one secular or religious faith. That will be a denial of plurality. The common unity should be sought at the level of Values of secular living and not at the level of Ultimate Truth. The traditional understanding of separation between Vyavaharika versus Paramarthika levels of truth is important. But the separation of the two levels should not be considered in any total sense. People’s faiths (Truth affirmations have their implications for the values for secular living to which they commit themselves. Faith and Culture as well as Faith and Morality are different but closely related. But it is possible to hold to different Faiths and support a move towards a more or less consensus about cultural and moral values through rational dialogue among Faiths, and reinforce that consensus from different faith-standpoints. What does this mean in practice?

Democratic Secularism should not be interpreted as a common denial of belief in a transcendent religious ultimate, as when Scientific Rationalism or Marxism is made the State ideology. That would be making a Secularist Ideology the “established religion” of the common life. It would only make for a religious vacuum in the life of the people leading to the rise of religious fundamentalism and communalism to fill the vacuum. Of course it is one thing for individuals and groups having faith in a philosophy of Secularism that denies the transcendent ultimate, but it is a another to make it the established faith of the whole society or State. Indeed one may even argue that atheists are necessary in any religiously oriented society to correct corruptions and criticize superstitions in religion; they play the prophetic role when prophets who attack false religion in the name of authentic religion are not available.

Similarly no one religious faith or religious conception of the Ultimate Reality or even any one doctrine about the relation between religions should be made integral to Open Secularism. The idea that equality of religions is integral to Secularism is a characteristic of the Mystic approach to Reality that denies any ultimate reality to nama and rupa of religions. This approach is different from that of the Semitic religions which is based on the self-revelation of the Ultimate in history in unique particular nama and rupa. Here again there will be peoples affirming the mystic or revelatory approach to Reality, but any one approach cannot be made basic to democratic secularism, though there is no harm in discussing the relative merits of each in relation to the ethic of common living. No doubt equal respect for persons holding different faiths in sincerity and equal respect and serious consideration for whatever faith held by any person in sincerity are essential to democracy. But this should not be confused with religious belief in the equality of religions. Freedom to “profess practice and propagate religion makes sense as a fundamental right of persons only on the basis of the recognition of this difference. The right of religious propagation given by medieval theocratic religious states was only for truth recognized as true by the established religion and state, It was different from the present democratic freedom of persons to pursue truth as dictated by one’s reason and conscience and to propagate the truth to which he decides to commit him/her-self. Even in States which had the ideology of Communism as established truth, as formerly in Russia and China, it was only the truth in its established sense that was originally given the right of freedom of propagation; it was a purely medieval theocratic idea in its reverse Secularist form.

The crucial question is whether a plurality of religious and secular faiths, each of which had developed its own traditional culture. that is philosophy, morality, ideology and legal system of corporate life, can through inter-faith rational discourse create at least the basic framework of a common culture or common direction and scheme of values for peoples to build together a new dwelling, like the national community. That is, will the faith-communities while keeping their separate identities be prepared in the present historical situation of pluralism, to interact with each other bringing their respective religious and/or ideological insights on the conception of the human so as to build something of a consensus of cultural and moral values on which to build a single larger secular community? While their distinctive cultural traditions will have to be renewed, call they do it and feel that their traditions have found fulfillment through that renewal? I submit that we can.

Let me spell out two very clear ideas about the nature and destiny of human-ness. First, all religions and ideologies posit Love as the ultimate moral law of human perfection and community of love with its harmony as the final goal of human and cosmic relationships. Second, nevertheless all religions and ideologies do have a sense that humankind as they are today, is in some kind of self-alienation which makes the fulfillment of that perfect law impossible and corruption of power inevitable. Therefore while keeping love as the essence of humanness and therefore the criterion and goal of all human endeavour, human society today has to eschew utopianism and organize itself as power-structures based on a sense of the moral law of structural justice and utilize even the coercive legal sanctions of the State to preserve social peace and protect the weaker sections of society in a balance of order. freedom and justice. That is to say, all realistic social morality requires keeping the relation between power, law and love in tension, till the sources of human self-alienation are overcome and loving relation which has spontaneity as its character is possible.

Thus in Biblical thought, there are two divine covenants with humanity operating in the face of evil created by human self-alienation. One, the covenant of redemptive grace with Abraham which ends in the Messianic-Kingdom of Love and the other, the covenant with Noah of protective law of reverence for life and later with Moses of the Ten Commandments for the preservation of realisable justice in society. In Christianity, Jesus’ Sermon of the Mount expresses the character of the ethic of perfect love characteristic of the community appropriating the reconciling Grace of God in Jesus and this is to be consummated in the Kingdom of God to come. Since this unconditioned love is impossible of practice in a world where unredeemed sinfulness must be considered the general characteristic, common civil society and its individual members as well as institutions like the family, the economic order, nationality and the State necessary for the preservation of humanity are to be ordered according to the Moral Law inherent in their nature. Such laws are ordained by God in their creation and are not destroyed by sin and therefore called Law of Nature understandable by reason in the Catholic tradition. In the Protestant tradition sin has perverted the moral law of creation more radically and therefore takes a more pragmatic approach to the laws needed in different historical situations for the preservation of civil society, its individual members and its basic institutions. But the idea of two distinct and inter-related levels of morality, the ultimate ethic of Love and the relative ethic of Law, are clearly laid down in the Christian system of ethics.

The two levels of morality is found in Marxist ideology. Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity interpreted theology as only a form of anthropology and explained the human belief in the God of Love as an affirmation of Love as the essence of being human which is denied in human existence. Marx and Engels accepted this interpretation but strongly criticized Feuerbach for assuming that this essence can be realized in human existence by morally willing it. Engels says: “But love! yes -- with Feuerbach love is everywhere and at all times the wonder-working god who should help to surmount all difficulties of practical life -- and that in a society which is split into classes with diametrically opposite interests. At this point the last relic of its revolutionary character disappears from his philosophy, leaving only the old cant: love one another; fall into each other’s arms regardless of distinctions of sex or estate -- a universal orgy of reconciliation”(Quoted by Bastian Wielenga, Introduction to Marxism p.353). Love is not realizable until the social alienation of human beings in class-society is overcome and classless society emerges, for which of course the ethics of power-politics of class-struggle with its denials of love is to be followed. In fact Marx would say that just as selfishness is natural in class-society, love will be natural in classless society. They need not be interpreted in moral terms. Both are natural necessities of social conditions, one of social alienation and the other of its being overcome. It looks that they do not even interpenetrate now; they come one after the other in history. It is this that Fiedel Castro and Che Guevara have questioned “Let me tell you, at the risk of looking ridiculous, that a true revolutionary is led by great feelings of love” (p.354).

Hinduism also has this two-tier morality of Perfect Love and Relative Law. It speaks primarily, not of love but of Unitive Vision as the final goal of human life. But as Vivekananda has maintained, the two are ethically the same; only the Hindu system of ethics uses, not the personalist but the more philosophical language. He says. “There is no limit to this getting out of selfishness. All the great systems of ethics preach absolute unselfishness. Supposing this absolute unselfishness can be reached by a man, what becomes of him?  He is no more the little Mr. So-and-so; he has acquired in finite expansion....The personalist when he hears this idea philosophically put, gets frightened. At the same time, if he preaches morality, he after all teaches the very same idea himself”( Works I. p.107). While striving for this end, the natural goals (the secular purusharthas -artha, kama and dharma- pursuit of wealth, happiness and duties of ones social station) of civil society are organized according to the laws of sadharana dharma of ahimsa, varnasrama dharma of four social vocations and the asrama stages of individual life. Of course the dharmic laws of civil society got absolutised when separated completely from the final goal of unitive vision. and as a result their historical situational character was lost until Neo-Hinduism took up the cause of social reform. That is another matter. The point is that the perfect ethics of nishkama for the self-realized and the relative ethics of artha, kama and dharma of the world of plurality, were both posited in traditional and modern ethical systems of Hinduism.

India’s Socialist Secularism worked out within the ethos of traditional Hinduism, pursues this two-tier absolute-relative system of ethics. For instance, Asoka Mehta writing on Democratic Socialism said that a thorough-going moral relativism would bring about chaos or tyranny. So while recognizing that there are historically conditioned morality like feudal morality, bourgeois morality and proletarian morality, there must be an absolute moral criterion to evaluate all moralities. Elsewhere he said “There undoubtedly are aspects of ethics that are relative but men’s deeper responses are to the absolute ethic, that nostalgia of man’s deepest ultimate triumph overall limitations.” The absolute is the “achievement of self-harmony and acceptance of the rights and reality of other persons”, i.e. harmony is self-realization in a community of inter-personal love. For him it is the final fruit of all efforts and the end of all quests. It provides the “touchstone to judge and improve the historically conditioned morality. To deny validity to absolute ethics is to rob the ship at sea of its compass” (Report-The Congress Socialist Part 1950). Ram Manohar Lohia interpreted the relative-historical and perfect-eternal dimensions of his Socialist ethics by relating Marxism to Hindu spirituality. He wrote, “Every moment is no doubt a passing link in the great flux, but is also an eternity in itself”, and added, “The method of dialectical materialism informed by spirituality may unravel the movement of history; the method of spirituality informed by dialectical materialism may raise the edifice of being”(Marx, Gandhi and Socialism p. 373-4.)

Islam with its central emphasis on the unity of God and God’s moral sovereignty of the world, sees the universe as “teleological, growth-oriented and destined to evolve towards perfection” in which the unity of all humanity will be realized. God has “created the potential for it through divine hidaya and revealed the values which would ensure growth”. God called human being to be vice-regent of God and entrusted him/her with the burden of responsibility for the future of the universe. But human beings have betrayed the trust through shirk, that is, by associating creatures with God. The Quaran declares. “Verily I proposed to the heavens and the earth and the mountains to receive the trust (amanah), but they refused the burden and feared to receive it. Man alone undertook to bear it, but has proved unjust, senseless”. It is in this situation of human alienation from the path of perfection that the laws of social living which took the form of shariat were ordained to call human beings to God and to their vocation of witness to divine justice and mercy. Here too, there seems to have an ethic of perfection and an ethic of the alienated situation(Ref. Asghar Ali Engineer, Islam and its Relevance to Our Age. Bombay 1984).

A. A. Fyzee in his Modern Approach to Islam (Bombay 1993) says that the shariat is “analogue of the Torah of the Jews and the Dharma among the Hindus”. One could add that they analogous to the Christian ethic of law of nature, to the Liberal ethic of individual freedom and to the Marxist law of class-struggle. They are all ethics of empirical historical situations alienated from the essence of humanity, in one sense witnessing to, and in another sense waiting in hope for the realization of the ethic of love. And one could further add Engineer’s comment about shariat to all of them. He says, “Law is empirical and vision is transcendental. The balance between the two is lost if either is de-emphasized”(p.34). Once the ethic of law is totally separated from its relation to the transcendent or the futurist vision of perfection, it loses dynamism and becomes static and gets absolutised and made irrelevant to new historical situations. When that happens, there is absolute conflict between them or they join hands in defending ethics of reaction against all new conceptions of justice in law, as shariat and natural law did in the recent Cairo World Conference on population.

My thesis is that the many visions of perfection are more or less the same or at least analogical, and therefore if each Faith keeps its ethics of law dynamic within the framework of and in tension with its own transcendent vision of perfection, the different religious and secular Faiths can have a fruitful dialogue at depth on the nature of human alienation which makes love impossible and for updating our various approaches to personal and public law with greater realism with insights from each other. This will help to make our different ethics of law expressive of our historical responsibility of building a common civil society for adherents of all Faiths.

Recently at a meeting in Kozhencherry, Kerala, E.M.S. Nampootrhiripad advocated cooperation between religious believers and Marxists at the action-level for the good of humanity, without interfering at the level of each other’s beliefs or basic ethics. Personally I think the cooperation in action requires some conversations on each other’s anthropology for the sake of arriving at a measure of consensus on an adequate common approach to what constitutes the good of humanity in the present situation and to the nature of the ethic of struggle and action needed to realize it. (At a meeting in Mavelikara on the 13th Feb 96, where EMS, gave the Bishop M. M. John Lecture on The Significance of Dialogue between Religion, and Secular ideologies for building a New Humanism, as chairman I raised the question whether a future Socialism would not require the following changes in the Marxist ideology so as not to fall into Stalinism. 1. That the moral dimension of human society is the foundation and the material of the superstructure; 2. That scientific and technical rationality is only a path to one dimension of truth; to affirm otherwise leads revolutionary technology to technocratic domination over persons as in Stalinism. 3. The source of the corruption of power is the spiritual self-alienation of the human life and will remain even after class or any other instrument of it is gone: ignoring of this has led to Communism’s rejecting democratic checks resulting in the Stalinist totalitarianism. EMS answered these questions from a traditional Marxist position.)

This remains true for cooperation between religions and between religion and secular faiths. For a situation of ethical pluralism, that is the only way in which a more or less common mind on empirical ethics relevant to the contemporary situation can emerge. Only then can law become an instrument of humanizing the technological culture of the global village and of meeting the demands of social liberation of the dalits, the tribals and the women whether in our separate communities of faith or at large in the country.