Hindutva is just saffron-clad European nationalism: Valson Thampu

Writer, theologian, and professor in English Prof Valson Thampu is a fervent advocate of the reformation of the Christian religion as well as a critic of priesthood. Former Principal of St Stephen’s College, Delhi,  Prof Thampu is perhaps a rare synthesis of a public intellectual and a critic of religion who shares out-of-the-box perspectives.  

He recently renounced his priesthood after practising as a priest with the  Church of North India (CNI) for four decades.

His recent book, Beyond Religion, is based on his lifelong reflections and his creative suggestions in reforming established religion and its practice. In an interview, he said there needs to be a reinvention of the practice of religion. Priesthood should be done away with, and God should be liberated from the clutches of religion, he said. Edited excerpts: 

You are a priest, but you advocate the abolition of priesthood.  Your demand contradicts your own vocation as a priest.  Could you explain what led you to arrive at your present stand?

First of all, I was not, as a priest, on the payroll of any church. I was full-time in higher education and served additionally as a chaplain of St Stephen’s College for 10 years. Not being exposed to church politics, I didn’t have first-hand experiences of the extent to which priesthood has deteriorated. 

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As I began to look deeply and historically into this matter, I began to realise that priests have been the foremost means for the corruption of every religion. My foray into the anthropology, sociology and philosophy of religion, coupled with the emergence of a large number of crimes and depravities perpetrated by priests and bishops in Kerala, as well as the extent to which churches went in defending their corrupt priests and bishops, convinced me that priesthood is a spiritual liability. Then it struck me that the only category of people that Jesus denounced was priests.

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 You are advocating that true believers outgrow religion. You’re saying: ‘Organised religions aggravate many, fold the aberrations of human nature’. How do you think existing religions can be reinvented?  What are the principal  aggravating factors?

 First, the main source of religious corruption, as stated above, is religious middlemen called priests. Priests reduce religion to rites, rituals, and dogmas. They orient religions to the distant past. This is done in order to divert the attention of the people from their lived realities, in relation to which priests have little of relevance to offer. When people’s welfare and spiritual empowerment cease to be the motivating factors for priests, money-making becomes their sole obsession. People come to be seen as parochial milch cows. 

The curse of religiosity of this kind is that  believers do not grow as human beings. The main reason for this is that ritualistic religiosity excludes the need — indeed the freedom — to think factually and rationally. This cripples human growth. The supreme goal of spirituality is the growth and empowerment of human beings. Priests entertain covert anxieties about human growth and empowerment for the reason that it weakens their control over their followers. 

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The anti-dote to this religious malady is re-imagining religion in terms of human growth, worth and fulfilment. This will reduce the people’s need to depend abjectly on priests. Every form of dependence is harmful and must be outgrown.

You and Swami Agnivesh pioneered inter-religious interventions for religious reform for many years. Your views and initiatives were respected nationally. What is the status of those initiatives at present, now that Agnivesh is no more? Have you hit the deadend in this respect?

I am continuing with the same work, though in a different format. So long as Swami Agnivesh was alive we worked effectively as a team. Our many initiatives and interventions were welcomed as well as denounced, depending on whose vested interests were affected in the process. Swami Agnivesh’s death two years ago has been a terrible loss for me. People like him are rare to find. 

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I find Keralites to be indifferent to addressing issues from a non-partisan perspective. Fear of consequences, from which Swami Agnivesh was inspiringly free, holds Keralites back from taking the plunge. Everyone is happy to discuss and air his or her views and to stop with that. Most Keralites are so set in their ways and outlooks that they are hesitant to practise spirituality. 

To Swami Agnivesh and me, justice is the essence of spirituality. We were convinced that unless people are liberated from divisive, obscurantist religiosity, they will not become truly human. We were enormously concerned that communal politics would be the undoing of Indian democracy. I remain firmly anchored in this conviction and continue to raise awareness regarding this through every means available to me.

You say ‘spirituality liberates, whereas religion constricts and enfetters personal freedom’.  India is witnessing a resurgence of right wing nationalism. Why do you think Hindutva nationalism is emerging in a country where cultural and religious diversity and tolerance existed for centuries?

Hindutva is not, by any stretch of imagination, a Hindu phenomenon. If anything, it is contrary to the essence of Hinduism. The fact that Hindutva, which is saffron-clad European nationalism, with its fixation on cultural homogeneity, is increasingly misconstrued as Hindu self-assertion points to the fact that Hinduism, like all other religions, is not a shaping influence on the people. It serves largely as a means for mass mobilisation as well as anaesthetising the masses to their deprivation. It is potent political opium. 

The meteoric rise of Hindutva is due not only to the decline of true, tolerant Hindu outlook, but also to the decline in the moral, intellectual and spiritual culture of Indians in general. Negative ideologies appeal to popular imagination very powerfully during times of generalised decay. Using politics for furthering communal interests is not an aberration exclusive to the Hindus who favour Hindutva. It is rampant today in all religious communities in India. 

Minority religious communities, which readily lent themselves to vote-bank politics, are majorly responsible for this political aberration. The second contributory factor is the ascendancy of religious fundamentalism and religious orthodoxy that mistakes a few trees for the woods. It is high time all right-minded Indians realised that this is a recipe for disaster, as the catastrophic experiences of the western hemisphere in the 20th century proved.

As a priest who served the Church for many years, when you demand that the maladies of religion and priesthood be erased, don’t you give credence to atheism and its votaries, who insist on the non-existence of God?

It is necessary to understand atheism and faith aright. To me, whatever serves as the handmaiden of the status quo is atheistic. God is a live and dynamic power. You cannot have a ‘living God’, who stays frozen in time, confined to the distant past! If God is a living presence today, it is imperative that religious life and practices conform to the nature of God. 

God’s nature is expressed through godly attributes: love, truth, justice and compassion; above all, the liberation and transformation of human beings. Organised religions have abandoned their commitment to these values, in favour of ritualism and otherworldly piety. This, I believe ardently, is practical atheism masquerading itself as piety or religiosity. The people remain spiritually famished, vulnerable and anxious. 

Interestingly, there is a quantitative increase in religiosity on the one hand, and collective human malady — boredom, depression, growing faith in violence, organised and assertive selfishness, indifference to ethical demands and social justice — on the other. Churches turn a blind eye to all this. As a result, they are enveloped in hypocrisy. So, the youth of today are moving away from religion. This is a healthy sign for the reason that they do so, refusing to be hypocritical. 

It is this practical atheism, lurking behind apparent religiosity, that makes the thinking people of today feel allergic to religion. This is a serious issue, and it needs to be addressed.

You say that ‘common to all religions is the fault line of gender inequalities’ — that women are discriminated against in relation to priesthood. According to the Bible, God created men and women as equals. Could you explain why women are an anathema to priesthood in Christianity and other religions?

The status of women in religions is an interesting issue. Most religious scriptures are free from pejorative ascriptions to women, though stray instances to the contrary may be found here and there. Religious demerits and disabilities are thrust on women mostly by patriarchal religious hierarchy. This is particularly indefensible in Christianity, as the abolition of the inequality and discrimination between the male and the female is basic to the teachings of Jesus. 

The most surprising thing is that the Catholic Church, which worships the Blessed Mary, is particularly prejudiced against women in relation to priestly roles and status. God’s outlook, according to the Bible, is as follows: ‘My ways are not your ways’. That applies certainly to how man-centred churches view and treat women. The discriminative attitude endemic in churches is an insult to Jesus Christ.

Though Hindu philosophy has had ardent advocates of the liberal worldview, such as Swami Vivekananda, who articulated the need for universal brotherhood, why don’t we have Hindu seers and leaders advocating the same now, even though its need has increased? Has Hindutva nationalism stifled the sanity and spiritual catholicity of Hinduism?

The religious outlook of people is substantially influenced by the prevailing political, economic and cultural milieu in every age. Two factors would have had a deep and formative influence on Swami Vivekananda. First, the political domination of India by a western power. This inspired him to confront the West with the true effulgence of Indian spirituality; something that Mahatma Gandhi practised through political action. Second, Vivekananda was a true sanyasi, or liberated soul. It is a sign of a man’s spiritual evolution that he emerges from the tribal and the jingoistic to the enlarged horizon of universality. 

Gurudev Tagore was a kindred soul to Vivekananda in this respect. His patriotism, like Vivekananda’s, did not make him negative, or indifferent, to the universal. In the case of both, there was no tension between being Indian and being universal in outlook. Regrettably today, the obligation to be imprisoned in ‘narrow domestic thoughts’ is perceived as basic to patriotism. This is bound to do enormous harm to the soul of India, though it will be a while before its full horror becomes manifest.

What do you think of the future of Indian democracy, given the ascendancy of the Sangh ideology and the decline of the Congress vision of the liberal-secular democracy? What do you think is the future of democracy in India?

Clearly, the BJP is on the rise. This needs to be envisaged in two phases —  that of expansion and of consolidation. In the expansion phase, where the priority is to acquire control of the country as a whole, the bogey of Hindutva will be foregrounded, as there is no other comparable magnet to mobilise the masses for electoral gains.

Once the period of electoral expansion is over — which could take a decade more — the period of consolidation will begin. In that phase, the Hindutva ideology will have to be either modified or sidelined. A jingoistic ideology ideal for mobilising the masses need not be conducive to governing a country, especially in a globalised world. 

Had Hitler, for example, confined his Aryan superiority theory to the domestic matters of Germany, he would have lasted a few decades more. He undermined his survival by exporting it to the rest of the world. The same holds good for the Indian context. India cannot remain faithful to the Hindutva ideology for long, without rendering herself a global outcast. So, my hunch is that this ideology will be quietly discarded when the time is ripe for it. For the time being, however, it will provide the main traction for the BJP juggernaut, especially given that the promise of good governance is a poor vote-catcher in comparison.

The BJP’s overtures to the Catholic Church have been going on for some time. Some of the Church leaders seem to believe that the BJP is a reliable patron of the Church. But, the BJP and Hindu nationalism are hostile to Muslims and Christians, as is evident in the writings of Hindutva ideologues. Recently, when tension arose in Kerala between Muslims and Catholics following an allegation by a bishop, the BJP openly supported the bishop.  Do you think the Church can trust the  BJP?

What a party, while struggling to create an electoral footprint in Kerala, does at the present stage, and what it stands for ideologically, may have nothing in common. Strategies are evolved not on the basis of truth, but on short-term calculations. Given the demographic dynamics of Kerala, the BJP cannot make any headway in the state so long as Christians and Muslims unitedly vote against it. 

So, the BJP is desperately keen to drive a wedge between the two communities by aligning itself with the Catholic Church, which is the most numerous and prosperous church in Kerala. The fact that the leaders of this church are vulnerable on account of various corruption charges and crimes allegedly committed by some among them, makes this easier for the BJP. 

Almost every church in Kerala is deficient in transparency and accountability in managing its assets and finances. A large amount of black money is generated by them. If there is a proper investigation into these matters, several   bishops and priests could be in deep trouble. This keeps the church authorities keen to cultivate the goodwill of the BJP as a means for insuring themselves against adverse consequences. 

Clearly, this is a short-sighted policy, given the stated position of the Sangh ideology that Christians and Muslims cannot be citizens in India insofar as they have their Holy Lands and Father Lands outside of India. The heat of this could be felt in due course.  It is also likely, as I have stated already, that this indefensible prejudice is abandoned in view of the universal condemnation it is bound to invite. The obsession of the BJP with citizenship issues, as evidenced by the NRC and CAA legislation, it is important to note, is consistent with the Sangh idea of the Hindu Rashtra.

What is the current status of the practice of liberation theology which emerged in the 20th century? Has it vanished?  Do that philosophy and its practice have any relevance in countries like India?

Liberation theology has had its day. Various fashions emerge in theology, in response to the prevailing or emerging contexts and the human predicaments within them. Liberation, however, is central to the vision of Jesus Christ. It is also basic to the human plight. The Church diluted this agenda in its eagerness to be on the right side of political equations.

Liberation as a shaping spiritual paradigm came to the fore in the South American context. The ideal of freedom continues to remain beleaguered everywhere in the world, including India. But, churches and Christian theologians lack the spiritual courage and conviction to address this reality. This is due, to a large extent, to the internal weaknesses of churches and the ascendancy of escapist religiosity in Christendom. Church itself has become a school of religious slavery, denying to its members the right and freedom to think for themselves in relation to religious beliefs and practices. Unthinking conformity is imposed on believers. How can such churches and theologians assume a stand in favour of human liberation?