A few thoughts on India’s 2009 general elections
Come Carpentier de Gourdon
It is my experience that Indians of all parties, at least those who follow “Indic” creeds, are in their very vast majority, instinctively or intellectually secular or rather ecumenical. They see themselves as part of the cosmic family in which many beliefs and traditions exist with a valid claim to truth, at least in their relative space-time context, a concept that finds its scientific expression in quantic physics, but that Indian wisdom has professed for millennia. Many pious and scholarly Hindus, Jains and Sikhs feel that religion should not be mixed with partisan politics, though philosophy undeniably plays a seminal role in the Aristotelian description of politics. Therefore, they remain unconvinced by the attempts of certain Hindu nationalist politicians to promote notions of religious activism and policing borrowed from the semitic faiths that have come to dominate much of the world.
West’s pincer strategy
The fading of Confucianism and Buddhism in Korea paved the way for the birth and spread of the Moon Church and other rather bizarre Christian or non-Christian (i.e. Scientology) denominations that are in some cases used by US Intelligence agencies as recruiting grounds and support systems.
India must protect native faith
The prospect that India, under the unrelenting combined assault of American commercial “culture” and Biblical proselytizing, may lose large swathes of its traditional religious civilization to various forms of “materialistic imported monotheism” is unfolding in many areas and the Government should address that problem and not shun it with the excuse that religion is a matter of personal freedom and individual conscience.
If France for one has been able to adopt and enforce the legal notion of a “cultural exception” in order to protect itself upto a point from the Anglo-Saxon onslaught, there is no reason why India should not implement a similar set of measures with regard to its native religions and ways of life. Such an agenda should not be left to any one party, but rather can be a matter of national consensus.
