Eight years ago I went to India to teach and speak for 10 days. I flew to Mumbai, then to Hyderabad, where I was picked up by my host Pastor Israel Supogu. From Hyderabad we rode in a car 5 hours south through central India to the city of Kurnool. Using Kurnool as a home base, I spoke there and also traveled by all-terrain vehicle to various villages on the Deccan Plateau. All in all it was an eye-opening trip for me. I saw real Hinduism first hand. And I gained a heart for India.
In today's Chronicles of Higher Education the brilliant University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum has an excellent article on what's now happening in India. It's entitled "Fears for Democracy in India."
Nussbaum writes: "What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism."
Especially interesting is Nussbaum's idea that Samuel Huntington's famous "clash of civilizations" thesis does not apply to violence in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Nussbaum: "It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash of civilizations. That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant, other, and that we are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do is to remain ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujarat shows us that the world is very different. The forces that assail democracy are internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, and they are not foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning the voices of aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against the original aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a long experience of domination and humiliation.
The implication is that all nations, Western and non-Western, need to examine themselves with the most fearless exercise of critical capacities, looking for the roots of domination within and devising effective institutional and educational countermeasures. At a deeper level, the case of Gujarat shows us what Gandhi and Tagore, in their different ways, knew: that the real root of domination lies deep in the human personality. It would be so convenient if Americans were pure and free from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another form that the resourceful narcissism of the human personality takes on the way to bad behavior."
Look at that point: "The real root of domination lies deep in the human personality." Thus "sin" and "evil" are human, not cultural, properties. Put in a Christian sense, "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
It's a long, scholarly-analytical essay. But one more Nussbaum quote: "Today's young people in India... tend to think of religion, and the creation of symbolic culture in general, as forces that are in their very nature fascist and reactionary because that is what they have seen in their experience."
