How Sanatan Sanstha turned Hindu spiritualism into terrorism
What one needs to do is understand why Hinduism is turning aggressive both in its nationalism and intolerance
25-09-2015
The sudden visibility of the Sanatan
Sanstha in north Goa produces a whole range of stereotypes about Hindu
spirituality and terrorism. Yet a historian of science watching both
rationalist societies and Sanatan Sanstha sometimes senses startling
similarities between the two. Both rational groups and the sanstha are
involved in reform. Both seek to create a logic of activity for both
individual and collective life, which is intriguing to watch.
Consider the sanstha itself. It was established by Balaji
Athavale, a hypnotherapist who for years tried to study the causes of
disease to realise that clinical hypnosis did not work on most of his
patients. As an atheist, Athavale was stunned to realise that a mere
pilgrimage as a mode of searching or visiting the sacred was more
effective than any clinical cure. Athavale sensed the power of
spirituality which he saw as superior to scientific medicine and sought
to spread it. He established the sanstha to spread spirituality among
Hindus creating as it were a web of practices, techniques to spread
spirituality. It was an attempt to create an awareness of righteousness,
and sought to unite Hindus everywhere. In fact the sanstha was a deep
enthusiast of sustaining Nepal as a Hindu kingdom.
At an everyday level, the sanstha produced an array of
do-it-yourself techniques combining home science, hygiene and
spirituality, where the symbolic, the psychic and the technical merged.
One can take as evidence its essays on clothes and the maintenance of
hair. Clothing, the document, says has to be sensible because perverse
dressing leads to temptation, while correct clothing helps imbibe
positive energies. Satvik clothes as per Hindu dharma include plain,
clean, washed, light-in-colour clothes with a minimum of designs.
Similarly, the recipe for normal hair advises men not to wear ponytails
as it creates negativity. The world is full of vibrations which one
needs to channelise. At this level of homeliness and hygiene, the
sanstha is almost innocuous. It almost mimics rationalism in its
emphasis on prescription, taboos, such that rationalism and spirituality
often mimic each other. The techniques of spirituality and rationalist
methods mimic each other in their ritual emphasis.
The litmus test is however not the civics of how you live
religion but how you treat your rival. Rationalism can often become
snobbery but spiritualism can become a form of intolerance seeking to
suppress forces on the other side.
The spirituality of the sanstha created an aggressive
Hinduism seeking to terrorise rationalists. What began as a form of
table manners of spirituality became terroristic. In 2009, sanstha
associates conducted a bomb blast at the screening of Jodha Akbar. In
2009, sanstha activists were arrested in connection with a blast at a
Margao Church. One must confess that these terrorists were amateurish
and in fact detonated a bomb accidentally killing two of the sanstha's
members. By 2001, the Maharashtra government had compiled a 100-page
dossier which slumbered in some politician's office.
It is the sanstha's reported association with the murder of
three rationalist activists that raises deeper questions. The murders of
Kalburgi, Pansare and Dabholkar were executed in cold blood. Whether
Sanatan Sanstha is an umbrella for fellow travellers or a Hindu activist
outfit committed to violence is still to be investigated fully. Yet
what is clear is that the Hindu imaginaries it creates does lead its
followers to intolerance, terror and violence.
One must add that there is nothing spiritual about the
three acts. Police investigations reveal that journalists like Nikhil
Wagle have been threatened by Samir Gaikwad, who was arrested in
connection with the murder of Govind Pansare. It is clearly an act of
guilt by association and the demands for banning the sanstha have begun.
Yet bans do not create closure. They drive organisations underground.
Let us not forget the RSS once banned by Sardar Patel runs the current
regime.
What one needs to do is understand why Hinduism is turning
aggressive both in its nationalism and in its intolerance. This
intrigues one because Hinduism is a syncretic religion. One admits Hindu
terrorism is not as routine and ruthless as its Islamic or Buddhist
variants. Yet the temptations to violence appearing from ashrams,
sansthas, many of which are later discovered to be armed fortresses,
needs examination. Is this a residual aspect of Hinduism or is violence
becoming a trademark of many Hindu groups who sense the climate in India
seems right for a few epidemics of intolerance? What is tragic is that
these groups see such revivalism and violence as a part of the new Hindu
masculinity.
What is sadder still is the support this receives from the
Hindu orthodoxy and politicians jealous to preserve votebanks or too
cowardly to challenge such trends. But two things are clear - both
science, in its reductionist form as scienticism, and spirituality,
which begins as a search for meaning to culminate in violence, need to
be rethought in democratic India. The crucial thought experiment is to
create conversations between rationalism and spirituality, science and
religion as the Dalai Lama and Jiddu Krishnamurthi have attempted to do.
Stereotyping oppositions only leads to a totalitarian impasse full of meaningless violence.