Rhetoric Race and Religion
Never before in post-independence India have political elections have created this sense of alarm and fear from religious fanaticism. But fear of religious fanaticism is nothing new to a secular, liberal India. Fear, ignorance and violence are common elements that encourage fanaticism. Fanaticism occurs when monism outweighs pluralism. Mahatma Gandhi who himself was a victim of religious fanatics, struggled all his life against fanatical zeal and monistic impulses.
When Mahatma Gandhi arrived on the political scene of India in 1915 his nonviolent and pluralistic approach to religion and politics brought him in direct conflict with the issue of communalism and religious fanaticism. So far as the question of Hindu- Muslim unity was concerned, Gandhi had to confront two major perceptions in the Indian National Congress party.
On the one hand, there was a group of Hindus within the Congress party which believed that the Indian Muslims were not sufficiently patriotic so far as the Indian Nationalism was concerned. On the other hand, there was a great feeling of Pan-Islamism among some of the Muslims leaders of the Congress, intensified with a color of doubt and skepticism in regard to the future of Islam in India. Viewed in this perspective, the divergence between Gandhi and communalists was very deep from the very beginning of his entrance on the Indian political scene.
The reason is simple: for Gandhi the power of the nation was vested with the people, rather than religion. And the reason why Gandhi saw religion in the Indian intra-civilisational context rather in an ideological dimension was that he believed in the inherent harmony of the Indian cultural and social order, which had been disrupted by modernity.
Gandhi was a pluralist in religious matters, though he was not a relativist. His equal respect for all cultures and religions implied the idea of mutual learning and inter-faith dialogue. When Gandhi affirmed: “I do not want my house to be walled on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible”, he was essentially talking about a spirit of openness in the quest for the sacred which transcends religiosity and organized form of religion. Thus, Gandhi did not privilege any one religion over another, not even Hinduism. Religion for him was a matter of soft spirituality, rather than hard rituals and hard institutions. Gandhi’s pluralist attitude towards God and spirituality developed over time through his study of different religions and his friendships with individuals of faiths other than his own.
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