The Vatican’s Deepavali Message: A Hindutva Perspective

The Vatican has issued a message on the occasion of Deepavali. It has challenging subtexts which Hindus need to look into.

In 1999, during the time of Deepavali, the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board published a 16-page booklet that stated that “900 million Hindus” live “in the hopeless darkness of Hinduism” and called upon Southern Baptists to “pray that the darkness and that the power of Satan will be broken”.

Today, 15 years after, another Deepavali message comes from another Christian quarter – the Vatican. This message is not offensive – at least not overtly. But there are definitely challenging subtexts which need to be looked into. The message has been issued by ‘the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue’.

The message starts with the statement ‘May the ‎Transcendent Light illumine your hearts, homes and communities.’ Of course ‘May God bless you’ cannot be construed as we are cursed as such. However, given the general Christian theological view that non-Christians are lost in darkness, one wonders if the Vatican message is a euphemist equivalent of the Southern Baptist statement. It was 14 years ago that the Vatican came out with Dominus Iesus ‘on the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church’ that theologically rejects salvation to even Christians outside the Catholic Church. So the message is not as blatant as that of the Southern Baptist Church. Further the Hindu conceptualization of the Divine Light is not just transcendental but also immanent.

Nevertheless we should give the Vatican the benefit of doubt and assume that there is no such subtext.

Then the message asks Hindus to contemplate over the theme of ‘fostering together a ‎culture of ‘inclusion’.’ This is interesting. The Vatican has got onto the moral and civilizational high ground and is setting the agenda. But, then again, it may not be so. The Vatican may simply be sharing a genuine concern. Then the message criticizes one important aspect of ‘globalization’ in the context of which it speaks about inclusion: ‘Rather, globalization has ‎contributed significantly to many peoples losing their sociocultural, economic ‎and political identities.‎’

What strikes one as curious here is that while the Vatican is worried about people losing their socio-cultural, economic and political identities, it is strategically silent about people losing their religious identities.

But there is a separate passage on the impact of globalization on religion.

Here the concerns of the Vatican get more puzzling. It sees ‘the negative effects of globalization’ having the following ‘impact on religious ‎communities throughout the world’ :

‘an increase in relativism and syncretism in religious matters, as ‎well as bringing about a privatization of religion.’

However the rise of fundamentalism as well as ‘‎ethnic, tribal and sectarian violence’ are attributed to

‘discontent, uncertainty and insecurity among ‎peoples, particularly the poor and marginalized who have been excluded from the ‎benefits of globalization’.

This may be the most crucial passage aimed at Hindus in the entire message. It justifies the violence that happens in different parts of India – including the North East where Christian separatist terrorists often indulge in forced conversions of tribal communities at gunpoint. At the same time, it condemns syncretism and relativism which are important civilizational mechanisms in assimilating as well as accommodating diversity in Indian culture.

Sri Ramakrishna Mission, then, with its message of universal acceptance and Samanvaya would be considered an ideal example of the negative impact of globalization. In a way this is the acceptance of the Vatican’s own anxiety – after all it is these aspects of Hinduism which can make it a universal religion. If one remembers the op-ed by Lisa Miller in Newsweek, one can understand why the Vatican is anxious over ‘syncretism and relativism’ while finding typical left-wing excuses for increasing religious fundamentalism as well as for ‘ethnic, tribal and sectarian violence’.

Let us apply the Vatican message to the Indian context.

If a tribal woman in India’s North East tends to coexist with so-called animist, Buddhist, Vaishanavite and even Christian beliefs or practices, that should be seen as the ‘negative impact of globalization’. If an NLFT terrorist guns down such a tribal woman – as it has happened with the Jamatiya tribal community in Tripura- then that has to be seen as the manifestation of ‘discontent, uncertainty and insecurity’ of the ‘poor and marginalized’ left out by globalization process.

This assumes significance because already an army of the rhetoric holy left is working overtime to manufacture the narrative that globalization profits the ‘Brahminical’ forces in India. This crucial passage in the Vatican’s message then should be taken note of by Hindus as pointing out the fault line where the Catholic evangelical industry would launch its war against the heathen darkness.

What about the ‘privatization of religion’?

In India traditionally ‘religion’ has been a private affair. This has created a traditionally liberal atmosphere. Perhaps India is the only culture where blasphemy is a sanctioned traditional form of worship. However in recent decades, banning books for hurting religious sensibilities has been on the rise. While Hindu ‘right-wing’ fringe groups have made themselves arrogantly and foolishly visible in the media limelight, a more systematic institutionalized subversion of freedom of expression has been done by Catholic Church in India.

They have been able to arm twist Indian censor board officials to show them movies that they believe are objectionable and get them censored. Dan Brown novels have faced a ban in North Eastern states. In Mizoram, the Church virtually controls the election process. The kind of medieval control that organized religion had and lost in Europe can be gained in India – that is a great opportunity for the Church and it is in this context one needs to see the lamentation of the gaining ‘privatization of religion’ and projecting it as a negative impact of globalization.

So we cannot complain that they did not tell us when it explodes on our face.

We should accept that the Vatican has identified the most potential area for its intervention in India in the coming years. With the Modi Government accelerating the Indian economy with his ‘Make in India’ slogan, globalization and its impacts are going to be there in Indian society. This may widen the income disparity in a society that has already fault lines drawn along castes and tribal communities thanks to manipulative vote bank politics and a racial interpretation of India’s social history.

The saving grace in India is its social capital. Yet it has two problems. The social capital is closely bound with castes and when there is income disparity there will be erosion of social capital which in turn will make the caste modules more rigid and inter-caste violence may increase in an unprecedented way. This has been witnessed during the first wave of globalization in India.And now this can have terrible aftereffects. For the Church, the social capital is visible modern institutions through which it can have tight control over the community with tangible benefits and long term theological servitude.

So Hindutvaites shall do well to heed this specific warning from the Vatican. We need to create a social capital network that may or may not use the already existing caste entities but that should transcend the caste barriers and democratize the relational networks that link the communities. Freeing India’s traditional social capital from the limiting factors of caste system is a task that Hindutvaites will have to undertake and in that, their guiding lights can be Swami Vivekananda, Dr. Ambedkar and Veer Savarkar.

Finally Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran signs off saying:

“As people grounded in our own respective religious traditions and with shared convictions, may we, Hindus and Christians, join together with followers of other religions and with people of good will to foster a culture of inclusion for a just and peaceful society.”

As Hindus and the last standing pagans, we gladly agree and thank the Cardinal for that wonderful finishing line. Now Hindus are duty bound to reciprocate the Vatican’s gesture on the eve of that winter solstice function now popularly known as Christmas.