Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power at the Centre in 2014, Hindu fundamentalists have been pushing ahead their communal agenda with great speed. They attack the very idea of India as a democratic, secular and socialist nation as enshrined in the Constitution, and have launched an all-out offensive to re-establish a society based on the Manusmriti. At such a time, it is important to spread Vivekananda’s true thoughts and ideas among the people. Vivekananda was not a traditional Hindu monk as the Sangh Parivar makes him out to be. He was a modern ascetic with a scientific and materialist outlook who unequivocally stated: We must strive to eliminate caste; we should believe in rational thinking instead of the scriptures; and that progress is not possible without individual freedom and women’s liberation. Unlike other saints, he did not offer prayers to the Almighty for his own salvation but sought salvation of the poor and the marginalised—be they Hindus, Muslims or Christians—who had been oppressed for ages. He dedicated his life for their upliftment: “May I be born again and again, and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God that I believe in, the sum total of all souls—the miserable and the poor of all races, of all species.” Critical of the way the Brahmin priesthood exploited the people of this country, he declared: “No religion on earth treads upon the necks of the poor and the low in such a fashion as Hinduism.” 1896 Vivekananda proclaimed himself a socialist.

In this extract from our longer essay on the writings of Swami Vivekananda, we focus on his views on religion and secularism.

The definition that Vivekananda gave for religion is simply beautiful:

“To devote your life to the good of all and to the happiness of all is religion.”

An untraditional Hindu saint, his views on religion are completely opposed to the propaganda of Hindu fundamentalists. Today they are able to project a false image of Vivekananda and use him to spread their doctrine of hatred towards other religions, because people are unaware of his real views. Vivekananda held that all true religions are equal holding the same ideals,

“The proof of one religion depends on the proof of all the rest…. If one religion is true, all others must be true.”

and further:

“The ideal of all religions … is the same—the attaining of liberty and cessation of misery.”

Vivekananda called upon the people to give up blind faith and believe in reason. In a talk on 24 May 1896 he said:

“Why was reason given us if we have to believe? Is it not tremendously blasphemous to believe against reason? What right have we not to use the greatest gift that God has given to us? I am sure God will pardon a man who will use his reason and cannot believe, rather than a man who believes blindly instead of using the faculties He has given him. He simply degrades his nature and goes down to the level of the beasts—degrades his senses and dies.”

He asked his listeners not to believe blindly in any scripture. During his lectures, he would often say:

“Do not believe in a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe in a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realisation.”

In December 1966, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 18 of this Covenant recognises that:

• Everyone shall have the right to have or adopt a religion of his/her choice;
• Everyone shall have the freedom to manifest his/her religion through worship, observance and practice;
• No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his/her freedom to have or adopt a religion of his/her choice.

Seventy years before the world’s nations adopted this Covenant, Vivekananda preached respect and dignity for all religions:

“What is needed is a fellow-feeling between the different types of religion, seeing that they all stand or fall together, a fellow-feeling which springs from mutual esteem and mutual respect.”

Vivekananda treads where Hindu fundamentalists wouldn’t dare. He called Mohammed the “Messenger of equality” and also “the Prophet of equality, of the brotherhood of man.” In a letter to Mohammed Sarfaraz Husain written on 10 June 1898, he wrote:

“If ever any religion approached to this equality in an appreciable manner, it is Islam and Islam alone.”

Conscious of India’s syncretic culture, he observed in a letter to his Madras disciples on 19 November 1894 that the Hindus had learnt several elements of “material civilisation”, such as wearing tailor-made clothes and food hygiene, from the Mohammedans. Vivekananda emphasised that if this country is to progress, if India in the future is to rise “glorious and invincible”, there must not only be cooperation among all religions, but their confluence. In the above mentioned letter to Sarfaraz Husain, he further wrote:

“I am firmly persuaded that without the help of practical Islam, theories of Vedantism, however fine and wonderful they may be, are entirely valueless to the vast mass of mankind… For our own motherland a junction of the two great systems, Hinduism and Islam—Vedanta brain and Islam body—is the only hope.”

While traversing the country as a wandering Sanyasi between 1890 and 1893, Vivekananda had closely observed the terrible poverty in which millions of people were living, and its close relationship to religious backwardness and exploitation by Brahmin sadhus. Deeply disturbed by it, he wrote about it to his friends and disciples in words that spew fire as from a smouldering volcano.

“A country where millions of people live on flowers of the Mohua plant, and a million or two of Sadhus and a hundred million or so of Brahmins suck the blood out of these poor people, without even the least effort for their amelioration—is that a country or hell? Is that a religion, or the devil’s dance?”

Vivekananda warned people against religious fundamentalists’ attempts to propagate all kinds of myths and divide Hindus and Muslims. One such false propaganda is about forcible conversions. Vivekananda exposed the falsity of this propaganda in his writings. Thus, in a letter to Haridas Viharidas Desai written in November 1894, he says:

“Why amongst the poor of India so many are Mohammedans? It is nonsense to say, they were converted by the sword. It was to gain their liberty from the … zemindars and from the … priest, and as a consequence you find in Bengal there are more Mohammedans than Hindus amongst the cultivators, because there were so many zemindars there. Who thinks of raising these sunken downtrodden millions?”

Today the RSS and its affiliates pursue a vicious campaign of low-intensity but sustained violence against Muslims and Christians to terrorise and intimidate them, so that they either convert ‘back’ to Hinduism or internalise their subordinate status and accept that they are living in India at the mercy of the ‘Hindu majority’. The teachings of Vivekananda exactly oppose all that the Sangh Parivar stands for. He denounced forcible conversions as well as re-conversions, like the Ghar Wapsi campaign of the Sangh Parivar:

“The man who is frightened into religion has no religion at all.”

When Vivekananda preached equal respect for all communities, he clarified that this did not mean tolerance. On the contrary, he berated tolerance as blasphemy:

“Toleration means that I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to live. Is it not a blasphemy to think that you and I are allowing others to live?”

And so,

“Our watchword, then, will be acceptance, and not exclusion…. I accept all religions that were in the past, and worship with them all; I worship God with every one of them, in whatever form they worship Him. I shall go to the mosque of the Mohammedan; I shall enter the Christian’s church and kneel before the crucifix; I shall enter the Buddhistic temple, where I shall take refuge in Buddha and in his Law.”

He criticised the imposition of religious values of one community on others. At this time when religious fanatics have launched a violent campaign to force the vegetarian eating habits of the Brahmin minority on the entire people, especially Muslims, it is important to recall Vivekananda’s wise words:

“We leave everybody free to know, select, and follow whatever suits and helps him. Thus, for example, eating meat may help one, eating fruit another. Each is welcome to his own peculiarity, but he has no right to criticise the conduct of others … much less to insist that others should follow his way…. The terrible mistake of religion was to interfere in social matters…. What business had the priests to interfere (to the misery of millions of human beings) in every social matter?”

Elsewhere, he stated:

“Liberty is the first condition of growth. Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress, and marriage, and in every other thing, so long as he does not injure others.”

The Swami has nothing in common with Hindu fundamentalists. One of his disciples, Swami Akhandananda, was building an orphanage in Bengal. Vivekananda wrote to him saying:

“Admit boys of all religions—Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian …” and further advised, “But never tamper with their religion. The only thing you will have to do is to make separate arrangements for their food etc….”

Vivekananda stood firmly against religious fundamentalism, and expressed his deep anguish at the communal divisions, violence and bloodshed unleashed by fundamentalist forces on society. He said:

“Though there is nothing that has brought to man more blessings than religion, yet at the same time, there is nothing that has brought more horror than religion. Nothing has made more for peace and love than religion; nothing has engendered fiercer hatred than religion. Nothing has made the brotherhood of man more tangible than religion; nothing has bred more bitter enmity between man and man than religion. Nothing has built more charitable institutions, more hospitals for men, and even for animals, than religion; nothing has deluged the world with more blood than religion.”

Vivekananda said that this universe of ours, the universe of the senses, the rational, the intellectual, is bounded on both sides by the unknown. Man is not content with the known, with just eating and drinking. From the very beginning of humanity, man has struggled to understand the unknown, to inquire into the beyond, to transcend the limitation of the senses. That is the real reason for the origin of religion; religious thought is in man’s very constitution. Therefore, if we want to tackle the ills created by religion, we will have to do so through religion itself. And so, in his earlier mentioned letter to Sarfaraz Husain, he wrote:

“We want to lead mankind to the place where there is neither the Vedas, nor the Bible, nor the Koran; yet this has to be done by harmonising the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran.”

The radical views expressed in Vivekananda’s letters undermine the most fundamental tenets of the ideology of religious fundamentalists. It is only by distorting his teachings that the Sangh Parivar has been able to project Vivekananda as a Hindutva icon. For instance, Vivekananda scorns false glorification of the past, no different from the current attempts to find aeroplanes, cars and genetic science in ancient India. He laments:

“When, O Lord, shall our land be free from this eternal dwelling upon the past?”

Elsewhere, he wrote:

“There were many good things in the ancient times, but there were bad things too. The good things are to be retained, but the India that is to be, the future India, must be much greater than ancient India.”

The long and fierce debate that erupted when Dr. Shriram Lagoo wrote an article titled Time to Retire God is well-known. But what is not known is that Vivekananda had expressed a similar view in a letter to his monastic brothers of Alambazar Math on 27 April 1896. Saying that the previous Gods “have become rather old”, he declared: “We (need to build) a new India, with its new God, new religion, and new Vedas.”

Vivekananda’s views are completely antithetical to the fundamentalists who, through the RSS and its offshoots, pursue a vicious offensive to undermine the Indian Constitution, destroy the country’s secular fabric and convert India into a Hindu Rashtra. Three decades before the RSS’s formation, when the monster of religious nationalism was hardly born, this far-sighted Swami gave the call:

“All sect ideas and tribal or national ideas of religion must be given up. That each tribe or nation should have its own particular God and think that every other is wrong is a superstition that should belong to the past. All such ideas must be abandoned.”

Note
All quotations are from: “Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”,
www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info. For more specific details regarding these quotations,
please see the booklet: “Rationalist, Scientific, Secular Vivekananda”, Lokayat Publication,
www.lokayat.org.in, available for free download on the internet.