The vital difference

So, the first lesson to bear in mind is that every tradition has in it the potential to become extremist. In this sense, our traditions are indeed similar to the Middle Eastern traditions. This similarity should be a warning to governments and parties that keep traducing Hindus, for instance, and pandering to Muslims and the rest just because the latter are aggressive. Everyone learns.

And yet there is a basic, foundational difference — one that points us to what is of inestimable value in Indic traditions; to the priceless pearl that we should preserve, the one that these heedless secularists and the rapacious aggressives do not realise they are pushing Hindus, Buddhists and others to discard. This basic difference is as follows.

When a tradition has the following elements, as each of the three Middle Eastern traditions has, as do the secular traditions of the West — Nazism, Marxism-Leninism — it will invariably be exclusivist, intolerant and aggressive, and it will invariably deploy all means — from propaganda to money to violence:

• Reality is simple;

• It has been revealed to one man;

• He has put it in one Book;

• That Book is inerrant as well as exhaustive: so that whatever is in it is true, that it is true for all time; and that whatever is not in it or is contrary to what is in it, is false or useless or worse;

• But the Book is difficult to understand; hence, you need a guide, an intermediary, a monitor: in a word, the Church, the ulema, or the Party;

• The Book covers, the intermediary must cover every aspect of life: there is no distinction between the private and the public sphere, between the Secular and the Religious, between the State and the Church. These doctrines are totalitarian — in both senses: they insist on governing the totality of life — the Roman Catholic Church's minatory insistence against contraception, for instance, and the reams and reams of fatwas that deal with even more intimate matters; they are also totalitarian in the sense that what they prescribe on any aspect just must be obeyed;

... contd.

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