Culture, Secularism and Diversity SPEECH BY SHRI K.R. NARAYANAN, PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON REGENERATION OF INDIA - ITS IMPERATIVES ORGANISED BY THE SOCIETY FOR COMMUNAL HARMONY NEW DELHI, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1998 First of all, may I join you all in paying my tribute to that great crusader for communal harmony and secularism, the late Shri B.N. Pandey. We miss him at this Seminar and it was he who approached me first to inaugurate this Seminar. May I also wish Shri P.N. Haksar who was to preside over the conference, but is unable to join us today due to indisposition, good health and long life. The subject today is "Regeneration of India - its Imperatives". Some people interpret regeneration as going back to a golden age in our history. I do not believe in golden ages of the past because every golden age had some gross material mixed with it. As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: "There are repeatedly periods of decay and disruption in the life of every civilisation, and there had been such periods in Indian history previously, but India had survived them and rejuvenated herself afresh, sometimes retiring into her shell for a while and emerging again with fresh vigour. There always remained a dynamic core which could renew itself with fresh contacts and develop again, something different from the past and yet intimately connected with it." I would like to dwell upon this "dynamic core" of Indian history which has survived every vicissitude of the past and renewed itself into something different from the past, but intimately connected with it. This to my mind is true regeneration of India. When we talk of regenerating India, the first priority should be uplifting the masses of our people from poverty and deprivation. We cannot talk of regeneration without addressing this basic task of uplifting the majority of our people from poverty and squalor. Of all the great men of the past, Swami Vivekananda is the one person who talked most eloquently and convincingly of regenerating India. He talked of combining the modern with the past. "We have to give back to the nation its lost individuality and raise the masses. The Hindus, the Mohemmadans, the Christians, all have trampled them under foot. We are so many Sanyasins wandering about and teaching the people metaphysics...Did not our Gurudev(Sri Ramakrishna) use to say: 'An empty stomach is no good for religion'." That is why I mentioned that improving the conditions of our people and giving them individuality and a sense of fulfilment remain our basic task. The fundamental prerequisite for regeneration is to give India a sense of unity and cohesion. Without it no regeneration would be possible. This sense of unity and cohesion is something we have never had in any of the golden ages of our history. There was a certain cultural unity which did not extend into other spheres. Making India a united and cohesive society is something of a new task that we have to do. In this task of giving unity, we have to connect our past with the present and the present to our future. And for this we have to revive "the dynamic core". We have been and we are still a disparate society. One of our achievements after independence has been the deliberate effort made to give political and economic content to the unity of India. This was the achievement of our great leaders, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders up to the present day. But that unity is still not indisputably established. We have worked for it and are still trying to fulfil it. But in doing so we have to overcome some of the flaws in our history and also some aspects of our national character. Vivekananda had once observed that "Three Indians cannot act together for five minutes. Each one struggles for power and in the long run the whole organisation comes to grief". It is this characteristic of ours that has contributed to the proliferation of tiny political parties including one-man political parties in recent times. What Vivekananda had said over a hundred years ago is still true of the current situation of our country! The primary achievement of Jawaharlal Nehru was to introduce an economic content to the cultural and spiritual unity of India. For the first time, through over-all planning for the country, he gave to the floating dream of Indian unity a stable base - a sense of economic interdependence to every group in every part of the country. It is this sense of socio-economic interdependence that enabled us to survive many a crisis and overcome separatist movements. This was because separatist movements realised that pushing separatism to the extreme would be counter-productive and destructive to their own welfare and future. We now have also for the first time political unity through democracy. Political unity and democracy have several aspects. There is parliamentary system at the Centre and in the States. But what is most important is the extension of democracy to the grassroots. This has enabled us to express our discontentment and our frustrations and still go on living with hope for the future. To regenerate India it is necessary to preserve and contribute to what Nehru called "the dynamic core". It lies in the spirit of toleration, respect for differences and respect for all religions. That dynamic core we have to make more strong and vivid in our highly pluralist civilisation. Vivekananda, that great exponent and interpreter of Indian civilisation, represented this approach when he boasted at Chicago Parliament of Religions that it was only here in India and nowhere else that Hindus helped in building mosques and churches for Mohemmadans and Christians. This heritage we must preserve and strengthen as tolerance is an important aspect of the regeneration of India. India cannot survive without this toleration. We are destined to live with diversity. In such a situation only toleration can enable us to survive as a nation. The Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh had said very tellingly that: "The mandir and the mosque are the same". The Guru also said: "Men quarrel about diet, dress, rituals and over caste, Community and creed; And they have torn man from man My mission is to restore mankind to single brotherhood." To regenerate India this approach of treating the mandir and the mosque as same must be reinforced, while quarrels over food, dress, caste and religion, etc should be eschewed. At the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda claimed that Hinduism itself is a Parliament of Religions. This soul of tolerance within Hinduism itself needs to be projected so that on such a base we can build the structure which embodies the spirit of India and the aspirations of our people for the future. Gandhiji had said the same in different words. But why is it that we are not able to follow the advice and the example of our great men? Perhaps human beings are frail and so we cannot observe the ideals given to us by great men. But these ideals were practised in India in the past and are still being practised on a vast scale even now by the ordinary people of India. However, one reason for our failure may be as Vivekananda said, our incapacity to work together. A second reason could be the social and economic disparities which remain as major obstacles to our regeneration. These obstacles seem to increase as time goes on. To some extent material conditions also become an obstacle. People who taste good things of life are far from satisfied but have their hunger multiplied manifold. This materialism - I am not against materialism per se - but a little less of materialistic sentiment would have made us more satisfied with our achievements! Of course, one of the side-effects of the liberal economic policies the world has followed is that the material appetite has been intensified. This we can fight only by reviving our cultural heritage or to use a big word our spiritual heritage. Gandhiji said that the human mind is a restless bird which wants more and more. There must come an end to this multiplication of wants. People are not content with just soaps and cosmetics but they want hundreds and thousands of varieties of such goods. Gandhiji said that there must be an end to this and he used a telling phrase "physical and intellectual voluptuousness" of man. By physical voluptuousness he referred to the craving for goods and by intellectual voluptuousness he meant the human mind dreaming of more and more. The environmental disasters we talk about will be the ultimate consequences of our over-consumption. Producing more also means creating more problems, more environmental pollution. A certain limitation of this endless craving is needed for the sake of the future of humanity itself. In our cultural heritage, we have enough stock of weapons to fight this new menace. I can see the possibility and the potential even in our younger generation. They are taking more interest in our classical arts. This can be systematically popularised to give them some values and satisfy their urge for self-fulfilment. So in any effort at regeneration culture becomes an important instrument. After having satisfied basic needs such as hunger and shelter, then what you crave is for culture and if that is given, many deviations can be avoided. Before I end, I would like to touch upon the subject of communal harmony. We do not look at foreign societies with critical eyes but are over-critical about our own society. Foreigners do the reverse to us and are very critical of our society. Although people live in communal harmony in India, politics often tend to distort and disturb this fact. There are countries and I do not want to give names where Catholic and Protestant students do not sit in the same classrooms because of religious animosities and nobody talks about that. For us in India communal tolerance is absolutely essential for our very survival. Our old society was a co-existence society, although in some areas there was intermingling and even assimilation to some extent. That is probably why we have recommended co-existence to the whole world. For each group or community in India, the main interaction is within that group. Even today at weddings and other intimate occasions, 99% of those who attend would be from the same community, except perhaps in the great cities of India. This is a fact of life. Groups co-exist and interact with one another in certain common spheres, such as the economic sphere or the educational sphere etc. During the last fifty years there has been an enlargement of this common sphere in our life. Although most interaction is within one's own group, there has been a rapid expansion of the common sphere where everybody collects together and co-operates and act together. We have to give conscious and systematic attention to the enlargement of this common sphere of social interaction. Politics has a lot to do with promoting group interests and heightening divisions. It is possible that there are some votes cast on the basis of caste or religion but not in a total manner. Every religious and caste group has also cast some of their votes in elections for candidates of other religions and castes. Harmony should not be only within communities, but should also exist between communities and all individuals in society. Our attempt should be not to think in terms of communities but to think in terms of human beings. For this we have to return to the eternal core of Indian philosophy which holds forth the concept of every human being as manifestation of God. The political and social counterpart of this philosophical concept is equality of individuals in society. All this make it necessary for us to be human beings first. When we speak of communal harmony, we must speak of harmony that transcends communities, harmony among all irrespective of the community to which he or she belongs. Communities do not feel joy or sorrow, injustice or unfairness; it is the individual who suffers injustice and exploitation. We have to rise above the concept of community and think of ourselves as members of a common humanity. With this thought I wish the National Conference on "Regeneration of India - Its Imperatives" organised by the Society for Communal Harmony all success. Thank you Jai Hind ^Top