Rajiv Malhotra Quotes

She wrote: 'In the course of our conversation about effective interfaith dialogue, he [Rajiv Malhotra] pointed out that we fall short in our efforts to promote true peace and understanding in this world when we settle for tolerance instead of making the paradigm shift to mutual respect. His remarks made me think a little more deeply about the distinctiveness between the words "tolerance" and "respect", and the values they represent.' Haag went on to explain that the Latin origin of 'tolerance' referred to enduring, which, though a laudable idea, did not connote mutual affirmation or support. '[The term] also implicitly suggests an imbalance of power in the relationship, with one of the parties in the position of giving or withholding permission for the other to be.' She then explained that the Latin word for respect meant holding someone in esteem and that the term 'presupposes we are equally worthy of honor. There is no room for arrogance and exclusivity in mutual respect.'

The next big occasion that offered an opportunity to test my position was the United Nation's Millennium Religion Summit in 2000. This was a major gathering in New York City of hundreds of leaders from all religions. It was promoted as a pivotal event which would be a harbinger of harmony among all faiths in the new millennium. This goal was to be partly accomplished by the release of a resolution on the matter. Everything seemed to be going well until the last minute, when the New York Times reported serious disagreements over the final language of the resolution that was to be passed. A few days later, the Summit faced the prospect of a collapse with no resolution passed, prompting top UN officials to intervene in an attempt to try to break the impasse.
The Hindu delegation, led by Swami Dayananda Saraswati of the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha, had insisted that the term 'tolerance' in the draft be replaced with 'mutual respect'. However, the then representative of the Vatican, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict, had put his foot down in opposition to such a phrase. After all, if religions deemed 'heathen' were to start getting officially respected, there would be no justification for evangelizing and converting their adherents to Christianity. This would undermine the exclusive claims of Christianity which form the justification for the Church's large-scale proselytizing campaigns.....
However, the matter did not end here. Within a month of the Millennium Summit's conclusion, presumably after an internal analysis of the consequence of this UN-affiliated resolution, the Vatican suddenly made an announcement which shocked liberal Catholic theologians.
The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (an office which was previously known as the Inquisition ), responsible for formulating and enacting official Catholic doctrine, issued a new policy to address the issue of religious pluralism. The policy document, called Dominus Jesus , reaffirms the historic doctrine and mission of the exclusivity of the Church.

I looked at the various examples of religious tension that were listed in the paper and wondered whether it was perhaps too simplistic to identify the 'victims' and the 'culprits' as they had done. I noticed that Islam was listed as a victim in one country but not as an aggressor in others. The same was true of Christianity: its representatives had lodged complaints against other religious groups in places such as East Timor, but there was silence concerning Christianity's own aggressive campaigns elsewhere. Later I realized that such asymmetrical representations are not uncommon in the academy, so I proposed to Prof. Law that we do some pre-conference preparation and research the deep-rooted causes of religious violence. My feeling was that all religious ideologies, without exception, should be open to serious investigation.
My foundation offered to fund a one-year research project in which graduate students at Cornell representing every major religion would closely scan the major books of every religion. They would highlight every line or statement that expressed contempt, intolerance or hatred against non-believers as well as other excluded and marginalized groups such as slaves, women, foreigners, and so on. Since religious violence often gains steam from such hateful speech contained in the very texts believers revere, the conference would endeavour to enumerate these offensive and questionable teachings and call for a resolution against them. In Hindu scriptures, for instance, all statements that are disparaging of 'lower' castes were to be placed on the list. Throughout the process, each religious delegation would have sufficient opportunity to make comments and resolve disagreements on specifics. I felt it would be a watershed event in the cessation of violence if the various religions agreed to discontinue such offensive teachings.
Prof. Law herself supported my proposal but was unsure about how the religious groups would feel; so she set about calling them to gauge their reactions. Some weeks later, she told me that merely raising my suggestion with certain religious heads (whom she did not name) had elicited considerable anger. They could not 'tolerate' the idea of outsiders meddling with their religious texts. These texts, after all, could never be altered nor declared invalid in any manner as they contained the words of God.

When it was my turn to speak, I recommended that the term 'tolerance' in the resolution be replaced with the phrase 'mutual respect'. .... As I noted, we 'tolerate' those we consider not good enough, but we do not extend our respect to them. 'Tolerance' implies control over those who do not conform to our norms by allowing them some, though not all, of the rights and privileges we enjoy. A religion which involves the worship of 'false gods' and whose adherents are referred to as 'heathens' can be tolerated, but it cannot be respected. Tolerance is a patronizing posture, whereas respect implies that we consider the other to be equally legitimate – a position which some religions routinely deny to others, instead declaring these 'others' to be 'idol worshippers' or 'infidels' and the like.

India itself cannot be viewed only as a bundle of the old and the new, accidentally and uncomfortably pieced together, an artificial construct without a natural unity. Nor is she just a repository of quaint, fashionable accessories to Western lifestyles; nor a junior partner in a global capitalist world. India is its own distinct and unified civilization with a proven ability to manage profound differences, engage creatively with various cultures, religions and philosophies, and peacefully integrate many diverse streams of humanity. These values are based on ideas about divinity, the cosmos and humanity that stand in contrast to the fundamental assumptions of Western civilization.

India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India’s spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilizational matrix is being digested into western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential.

Pro-India perceptions are ignored and the Indian legacy of supporting the rights of down-trodden are dismissed derisively. Worldviews that emphasize conflicts are encouraged. Ideologues give open call to racial civil wars, which are published by prestigious academic publishing houses of the West. US governmental monitoring mechanisms focus on India with distorting lenses and quote and requote their own reports to project a savage imagery of India as a dark frontier region ripe for Western intervention.

Another very important feature revealed in Sangam literature is the conception of the unity of the land-mass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. In at least two sources, Tamil kings were praised as having had supremacy amidst all the chieftains who reigned in the land between ‘the Himalayan abode of Gods’ in the north and Kumari in the south and the lands which have the sea as the frontier. 46 The northern limit of this cultural unity is often referred to as the Himalayas. Ganges in floods, as well as ships travelling on the Ganges, is among the scenes depicted in Sangam literature. Pilgrims from all over India coming to have holy baths at Kanyakumari as well as Rameswaram (Koti) have been mentioned in Sangam literature. Speaking of Himalayas and Kanyakumari in association, is another hallmark of many Sangam poems. Apart from such spiritual-cultural unity of India depicted in Sangam poems, there is at least one poem that refers to the political unity of India. This poem, from Puranannuru, speaks of a time when the whole of India ‘from Kanyakumari to Himalayas’ was ruled as one nation, unifying the diverse geographical zones of ‘plateaus, mountains, forests and human habitations’ by kings of the solar dynasty, and identifies Tamil kings as descendants of the solar dynasty.

But the book could not get a mainstream publisher and I had to work very hard. The big mainstream publishers did not want to touch it... And it became an instant best-seller. They refused to put the cover image of a broken India even though I explained that I found it in the office of an African-American professor in Princeton, who was part of the Afro-Dalit movement. They found it too provocative.

But what the media—both Indian and International—did not report, is that charges of such child abuses have surfaced in the vernacular media in South India concerning Christian institutions. In March 2010, at a Catholic institution in Kerala a teenage girl died – declared as suicide due to rat poison. However, under pressure from her parents the police investigated the case and two priests were arrested, charged with sexual harassment of the deceased girl. In February 2010, a boy was abused by a Catholic priest and investigations revealed that the priest had been previously accused of misbehavior, but when reported his accusors were fined by the church and he was promoted to a position where he could abuse even more students. In 2008, a Catholic priest was found murdered in the hostel room of a famous Catholic pilgrim center in Tamil Nadu. Subsequent investigations by a news magazine revealed that he was part of a network which abused girls in Catholic orphanages. In 2007, a girl was found hanging to death inside a Catholic convent in Pondicherry. The public suspected sexual abuse and murder. In 2006, a Tamil Nadu Dalit girl was found dead under mysterious circumstances inside a Catholic educational institution. Condoms and liquor bottles were found inside the premises. Subsequent medical reports proved that the girl had been sexually abused.

In 2010, Western media revealed that a Catholic clergy absconding from US law had been working in a diocese in Tamil Nadu. Despite numerous entreaties, and efforts by a Minnesota prosecutor to have him extradited on charges of child rape, the accused priest remained in his position as a secretary of the Diocese of Ootacamund’s Education Commission. According to the lawyer representing one of the priest’s victims the only ones who knew about him being a rapist were the bishop and the Vatican, and this was kept a secret. When the news broke out internationally the bishop of the Indian diocese in which the priest was working reacted calmly, as though it were not a major charge. The Indian media gave a lukewarm reporting to this case and at least one mainstream media person claimed an anti-Indian/ anti-Catholic bias as the reason for such allegations.

Such attacks and provocations on indigenous spiritual traditions never find their way into international media or the reports about freedom of religion.

There have been numerous suicides by those subjected to aggressive evangelism, particularly among young girls in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In one instance, the vice chancellor of a university was removed because he had allowed aggressive evangelism inside the university hostel, while in another case a girl left a suicide note accusing Christianity of ruining her life. A twelve year old girl who alleged religious harassment in a Christian school committed suicide after she was publicly insulted for being unable to read verses from the Bible. From 2007 to 2008, several Hindu temples have been vandalized in districts of Tamil Nadu where Christians are in considerable numbers. In villages where Hindus have become the minority, temples were smashed and Hindus were threatened to leave and make the villages ‘Hindu-free’. In 2009, the traditional Tamil harvest festival Pongal has been stopped in a village in Kanyakumari district because of Christian activism against it.

From the seventeenth century onwards, Christian missionaries made scathing attacks on the Indian classical dance-forms, seeing them as a heathen practice. This was often expressed by attacking the devadasi system on the grounds of human rights. The devadasis were temple dancers, dedicated in childhood to a particular deity. The system was at its peak in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but a few hundred years later, the traditional system of temples protected by powerful kings had faded away under Mughal rule, especially since the Mughals turned it into popular entertainment, devoid of spirituality. The devadasi system degenerated in some cases into temple dancers used for prostitution, although the extent of this was exaggerated by the colonialists.

Meanwhile, in a very famous Hindu pilgrimage center in the forests of Kerala, a Catholic priest proclaimed that his parish had unearthed a stone cross established by Thomas in 57 CE. The location was close to the ancient Mahadeva temple at Nilakkal, in the sacred eighteen hills of the deity of Sabarimala. 18 Soon, a church with a five-foot granite cross was erected and consecrated by top Catholic clergy, and daily prayers were started. 1Meanwhile, in a very famous Hindu pilgrimage center in the forests of Kerala, a Catholic priest proclaimed that his parish had unearthed a stone cross established by Thomas in 57 CE. The location was close to the ancient Mahadeva temple at Nilakkal, in the sacred eighteen hills of the deity of Sabarimala. 18 Soon, a church with a five-foot granite cross was erected and consecrated by top Catholic clergy, and daily prayers were started.