ASIA THE RECONCILER

By Swami Agnivesh

Asia is a continent whose promise falls short of its performance. No other continent is so richly endowed with resources of all kinds. Yet no other continent remains so indifferent to its true potential. No other continent is so blessed in the history of its spirituality. All religions have had their births in Asia. Yet no other continent is so crushed and crippled with its religiosity. Asia has had unparalleled potential to be the reconciler of the world. It is difficult to argue that this potential has come anywhere near its possibilities. The harsh reality today is that Asia, for all its immense spiritual heritage, is teetering on the edge of a nuclear holocaust. This is not to argue that reconciliation is either irrelevant or impossible. It is only to underline the fact that the destiny of this most populous continent has been forced along an orbit tangential to its spiritual potential and the time has come for us to take stock of this costly aberration. To that extent, the theme of our consultation is a timely and central one.
We need to take stock of the reality that much of Asia’s history, but for certain periods of spiritual effervescence, has been shaped by the principle of revenge rather than reconciliation. The genius of Asia has never been, at the same time, closed to the wisdom of the outlook of reconciliation. The conversion of Emperor Asoka from a great warrior into a profound apostle of peace and ahimsa, through the bloodshed of the battle of Kalinga, is an eloquent example of it. The multiple strategies of Mahatma Gandhi, in the course of India’s struggle for freedom, also illustrate the same principle. Gandhi’s insistence that the aggressors do not have to be hated in the process of fighting aggression, domination and exploitation is an insight that belongs to the paradigm of reconciliation rather than revenge.
The critical difference between the paradigm of reconciliation and that of revenge is the spirituality of self-criticism. Self-criticism, the awareness that one does not have monopoly over the truth at any given point in time, is the bottom-line of spirituality. The alternative to this is to presume infallibility for oneself which leads us, invariably and irresistibly, to the demonisation and caricaturing of others. Self-criticism is a pre-condition for the acknowledgement of responsibility. And without a sense of responsibility (the responsibility of the self) it is impossible to approach the breakthrough point in any inter-personal or inter-group impasse.
The alternative to admitting responsibility is to cast oneself in the role of a victim. As the Indian scenario today illustrates, it is not only the religious or linguistic minorities that fall into this trap. Even the brutal majority finds this temptation too powerful to resist. The right wing Hindu fundamentalist groups have had alarming success in recent times in persuading innumerable Hindus (who comprise 80% of India’s population) that they are the victims of the minority communities who together add up to only 20%. The most significant feature of a ‘victim” is his powerlessness: especially the powerlessness to change or improve one’s plight. It is up to someone other than the victim to make a difference for the better. The power to choose either to reconcile or to revenge is not, by definition, with the victim; it is with the victimizer. So when a majority community embraces the illusion of being a victim (may be we should coin a new word for this –FICTIM: a fictitious victim, one who hallucinates on being a victim, and falls in love with that state) it disables itself from taking any initiative for improving the situation. The outlook of revenge, and not of reconciliation, is what is natural to the psyche of a victim. In this case the disposition of a spurious victim is more intractable and irrational than that of a genuine victim. That is because, a genuine victim could have a sincere desire to come out of his miserable plight. In contrast, the pseudo-victim sees his victim-hood as a haven of material advantages, especially political profit. Such a mindset will inevitably revel in the strategies and advocacies of revenge. It will discredit the approach of reconciliation as a sign of weakness. Hence the irony that nothing is more fertile for the culture of aggression than the mindset of victim-hood.
This explains why all spiritual traditions insist on the dignity and freedom of facing responsibility squarely. Religions, in their periods of decay, in contrast, tend to promote what the existential philosophers call “bad faith”; the idea that our destiny is not up to us, but up to some other forces over which we have no control, but are amenable to the coaxing or coercion of certain specialists in religious rituals and rigmaroles. Such religiosity has played havoc with the very idea of reconciliation. Atheism or agnosticism is more spiritual than this. Almost all the organised religions of Asia have moved far away from the quintessence of spirituality as manifested in the great lives of Ram or Krishna, Zarastruth, Buddha, Mose, Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavir, Nanak, Instead they have degenerated into irreconcilable dogmatic belief systems, Superstitions, Idolatry and hotbeds of religion fundamentalism.
This is more than evident from the fact that reconciliation is comparatively more difficult among religions than among other centers of earthly power. This is due to various reasons; the foremost among them being the inability or unwillingness on the part of unspiritual religious establishments to be self-critical. Without such self-criticism, spiritual humility becomes impossible. In the absence of humility, the option most attractive to human nature is that of assimilating or homogenizing one’s life-world, leaving no margin for differences and diversities. Basic to the outlook of reconciliation is the willingness to welcome and celebrate plurality and diversity as the God-given foundation of beauty and vitality in nature as well as life.
Ironically what disables religions from being great reconcilers is their presumption of exclusive monopoly over truth, which is in itself a sufficient proof that our religiosity is far away from truth. The conviction of truth degenerates into intolerance for want of spiritual humility. Organised Religions have become more and more exclusivist and mutually antagonistic. Spiritually the most disruptive evil is pride. Pride is the mother of all other evils, as was well recognized by medieval theology in Europe. In the Vaidic tradition, the word for a true scholar is “vineet”, the humble one. Vidya dadati Vinayam Learning or scholarship generates humility. When passion for truth is de-linked from spiritual humility, it degenerates into extreme intolerance and catalyzes abominable cruelties. Hence the irony in history that saints have not lagged behind criminals in the advocacy and practice of cruelty, except that saints pretend to do it for God whereas the latter have no such fig-leaves with which to cover their nakedness.
Clarity of understanding is of the essence of spirituality, and we should not mistake reconciliation for something else. We must insist, for instance, that reconciliation is not mere compromise. The goal of reconciliation should be much more than the mere preservation and propagation of the status quo, which is all that the spirit of compromise is interested in. To see this clearly for what it is, all we have to do is to rub it against the inhuman and untouchability touchstone of justice. No spiritual strategy that sacrifices justice is valid or worthwhile. Even peace is worthless if it is meant to be a cover up or alibi for injustice. Abominable caste system, Gender Inequality in the form of son preference, female foeticide, dowry abuse and bride burning (rampant in India particularly) witch hunting among the tribal societies.
Reconciliation is a holistic and dynamic concept. The willingness to be reconciled, especially when reconciliation calls for circumscribing the interests and advantages of the self, can be obtained only if there is a commitment to a larger interest: the interest of the whole. Reconciliation issues itself out of the eagerness of the parts to abide in the whole so as to yield the harmony and wholeness vital to the well-being of the parts and the whole. The problem today is that that we lack woefully a total vision within which the parts can be recognized as parts of the whole, and not as superfluous or, what is worse, polluting, ‘foreign bodies’ in the given social or national unit. This, again, is well-illustrated by the rise of divisive communalism in India. Contrary to the integrative and holistic vision that underlies the Indian Constitution, the outlook of right wing Hindu extremism sees religious minorities as ‘foreign bodies’ that have to be either cast out or contained within strictly insulated enclaves. That such a mindset is utterly incompatible with reconciliation is a fact that does not have to be argued. The British colonial powers promoted a devious Divide and Rule Policy and instigated religious bigots for politicization of religion and communalization of politics which legacy continues to ravage the Indian subcontinent even after 50 years of Independence.
In contrast to this model of pseudo-religiosity stands the great spiritual reform movement spearheaded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati more than a century ago. Recognizing how Brhaminical hegemony had hijacked and degraded the universalistic vision of the Vedas, the great reformer issued a stirring invitation to “return to the Vedas”. He put the spotlight on the duty to doubt, debate and, if need be, to dissent at a time when the propagation and practice of blind and unthinking faith and scriptural obedience Dayanand was unsparingly critical of all religions, most of all of Hinduism, his own faith and Bhraminism, the cast he was born into. He insisted that the goal of religion is to ennoble, and not degrade, human beings. He founded the Arya Samaj: the brotherhood & sisterhood of the noble and the Righteous. He denounced the inhuman the inhuman caste system and the irrational practice of idol worship. He upheld rationality to be the quintessence of spirituality. Above all, he emphasized the spiritual importance of self-criticism. The path that Dayanand blazed could have paved the way for a higher harmony among religions in India and elsewhere. But, unfortunately, that did not happen. Instead, the almighty brahminical lobby continued to reinforce its domination, perpetuating caste, communalism and exploitation. It was this, more than anything else, that made disunity and social injustice endemic in India.
Needless to say, Asia has exciting potentials to be the reconciler for the world at large. But this is a role that we cannot, especially today, take for granted. We have to prepare the religious communities in Asia, in tandem with the global family, to play this crucial spiritual role. A few essential pointers in this direction are:
1. We need to evolve a shared global spirituality, as against the divisive and competitive religiosity fostered within the framework of nation states and effect a paradigm shift from such religions to social spirituality.
2. The disruptiveness of materialism and its country cousin, militarism, need to be denounced in unequivocal terms.
3. Divisive ideologies, especially ideologies and outfits that preach and practice vengeance, need to be discredited and outlawed. No more the division of people into Believers & Non-Believers. A massive programme of public education or people’s education has to be launched. The media must be challenged and enabled to play a constructive role in this.
4. A programme for the re-orientation of religious leaders needs to be launched and sustained. The unspiritual advocacies of religious communities and leaders including the emergence of certain Godmen & Women and pseudo spiritual cults need to be scrutinized and reformed.
5. A grand God-centered vision for the global family must be evolved, transcending the prejudices of the secular lobby. Reconciliation implies a spiritual logic of Truth, Love, Compassion and Justice and must be acknowledged as such.
The foremost issue in this context is that of the degradation of religion itself. The chilling patriarchal character that religions have assumed in the course of their development have degraded them into theatres of the will to power, which are the exact antitheses of the agents of reconciliation. Creation is a harmony and dynamic partnership between the male and the female. This is also the secret of social and spiritual health. Reconciliation is akin to the female principle, rather than the male principle which has become power-driven over the centuries. The tyranny of the one over the other is necessarily disruptive and unjust, which is the state in which all organized religions are today. This poses a major challenge as well as presents a great opportunity to the women of Asia. They need to come forward and evolve a new spiritual culture of gender integration (mere equality won’t do). Scriptures need to be reinterpreted and, most importantly, religious systems need to be radically reformed and revamped. Instruments of male hegemony that denote spiritual sickness need to be dismantled. Religions need to be imbued with compassion, commitment to quality of life and a sense of partnership based on mutual trust and respect. The predator instinct of religions needs to be exorcised.
An important corollary to this is the kind of economic systems that we adopt or evolve. Globalization is a male-centred, control-oriented, exploitative and aggressive economic model. It aims at the re-colonization of non-western societies and the re-imposition of the hegemony of western nations. The consumer culture that animates this model can yield only conflict, frustration and all-round alienation. It does not have to be argued that exploitative economic models are incompatible with the ethos of reconciliation. We cannot talk honestly of reconciliation even as we promote or patronize cultural, political and economic models that are predatory and conflictual. Asian nations need to work together in faithfulness to their spiritual heritage and evolve a commensurate way of life and vision of economy. Reconciliation, understood within a framework of domination and manipulation, cannot amount to anything more than the subjugation of the weak by the strong, the developing by the developed. Sustaining a sentimental charade on reconciliation without addressing these harsh ground-realities amounts to an exercise in hypocrisy.
It cannot be denied that it is easier for Asia, than for any other region, to take the initiative in effecting this paradigm shift from revenge to reconciliation. But the key to this process, as I have tried to argue, lies in the spirituality of self-criticism. So long as individuals, religious communities and social groups presume on the infallibility of their scriptures or prophets or Avatars, the specious logic of victim-hood will continue to keep the global community hostage. Only those who are spiritually liberated and inspired can serve as the agents and ambassadors of reconciliation. Liberation is the goal of reconciliation. The unreconciled are prisoners: prisoners of hate and destructiveness. Reconciliation must be seen as a natural flower that blossoms on the tree of a spiritual and humane way of life. It cannot be a synthetic or artificial flower that can be created in isolation from the essential grain of the larger way of life.