India on the brink

Most religions bind their adherents into a community of believers. Hinduism segregates them into castes. And people excluded from the hierarchical caste system — the ‘untouchables’ — are permanently doomed to a life of scripturally sanctioned calvary. This hideousness doesn’t, however, hinder Shashi Tharoor from breathlessly exalting Hinduism as ‘a religion for the 21st century’. Having catalogued the Raj’s depredations in his previous book, Inglorious Empire, and demanded an apology from the current generation of British politicians for the crimes of their forbears, Tharoor, a prominent Indian parliamentarian from the opposition Congress party, declares in the introduction to Why I Am a Hindu that he will ‘make no apology’ for the ‘flaws’ of his faith. And when he touches upon caste, it feels, despite his sincerity, like an inconvenient detour, akin to those perfunctory chapters on the Amritsar massacre in apologias for the British empire. Those exposed to the rough edges of Tharoor’s (and my) faith will find that the claims made for Hinduism in this book bear no relation to their experience with it. Like all believers, Tharoor regards violence in the name of his religion as a departure from, and not an affirmation of, its ‘values’. But how do you distil the values of a faith as heteroclite as Hinduism? There is no Hindu papacy, no Hindu Bible. It is the ‘ordinary believer’, as Tharoor writes, ‘who demonstrates the essence of his faith in his own practice of it’. Which is why his denunciation of the current Hindu-supremacist dispensation in Delhi as a deviation from Hinduism is so unpersuasive. The anti-colonial nationalism pioneered by the Congress party, seeking to unify Indians of all faiths in opposition to the British, obfuscated India’s pre-colonial history. It didn’t work. The subcontinent’s decaying Muslim nobility pitched for a state of their own to preserve the privileges introduced by medieval India’s Muslim overlords and snatched away by the British.