Reprinted from Indian Currents, May 11-17 issue
TWENTY years ago when I was transferred to
"Religion!" The editor was shocked to hear the word. Of course, he clarified, "I believe religion is in the personal domain. It has caused more problems than it has solved. I would rather ignore religious issues than comment on them". I knew it was pointless to persist when he was dead against the idea of a religious writer on the rolls of the HT.
Soon I began writing on issues like militancy in
It was obvious that Dua did not know much about him. When I told him that it was the Paramacharya who had come to the rescue of a mosque in front of the Kanchi Shankaracharya¿s abode when Hindu zealots wanted to demolish it, I could see a change in his attitude. Finally, he relented and HT became the only paper, at least in
Why blame Dua? Most editors are wary of touching religion. They are so scared of offending religious sensibilities that they prefer to ignore subjects they think have religious connotations. In doing so, they prove unequal to the task of providing enlightened opinion on many subjects which have religious undertones.
Take the case of Mother Teresa. When she died, most newspapers paid eloquent tributes to her. They all praised her as a great social worker who cared for the poor, the destitute and the forlorn. It is a different matter that her services to humanity make no sense if they are divested of their religious content. As she herself said, she saw in the dying destitute the image of the dying Jesus on the cross. So when she served man, she actually served God.
A journalism that ignores or dismisses the role of religion in our common life misses the greatest stories of our time. The more sophisticated our knowledge of religion, the more sophisticated is our knowledge of the world. G.K. Chesterton once called secularism "a taboo of tact or convention, whereby we are free to say that a man does this or that because of his nationality or his profession, or his place of residence, or his hobby, but not because of his creed about the very cosmos in which he lives".
Thus when Baba Seechewal of Punjab motivates his followers to clean a dirty drain, it is not his sense of cleanliness that is at work. It is an expression of his religiosity. History is replete with instances of men and women attempting great things for God, to quote William Carey. It was in service of his heavenly master that this cobbler from
It was Quakerism which motivated early abolitionism. Again, it was 19th century evangelicalism that continued and completed that fight. William Wilberforce, known as God¿s politician, was able to drum up support for abolition of slavery in the British Parliament only because he believed slavery was against the very concept of equality that Jesus preached.
When Mahatma Gandhi visualised Ram Rajya as his ultimate aim, he used an idiom which is similar to the Biblical ¿
Because of editors with secular blinders, journalists who have an aptitude for religious writing are seldom recruited or encouraged to write. Renuka Narayanan of the Hindustan Times who can give a lecture at Vidya Jyoti, a think tank of the Jesuits, and get away unscathed, is an exception. Most newspapers are happy to publish an article on Christmas on the Christmas day and greet the readers on Id and Diwali. They think that is how religion ought to be covered. There is need for greater understanding of religion to understand even contemporary political issues.
The recent developments in
Ignorance of religion is not peculiar to the Indian media. The secular Press in the West is as dismissive of religion as the Indian media. Journalists there are as ill-equipped as Indian journalists are. A New York Times correspondent made a gaffe while reporting what he thought was a gaffe on the part of then President George Bush. The President made an off-the-cuff statement that "we ought to take the log out of our own eye before calling attention to the speck in the eye of our neighbour".
The reporter mentioned it as a gaffe and termed it as "an interesting variation on the saying about the pot and the kettle" calling each other black. Neither the reporter nor his editors knew that it was derived from the Bible. The ignorance was shameful as the reference is contained in the Sermon on the Mount.
The NYT¿s rival Washington Post exposed its ignorance when it quoted an onstage exclamation from one of the religious broadcasters: "Let¿s pray God will slay everyone in the Capitol". Without an explanation, the reader would get the impression that the preacher prayed for the death of all the
Sociologist Christian Smith is reported to have said that he is tired of calls from journalists who don¿t know that Episcopalians are not "Episcopals" or who confuse Evangelicals with "Evangelists" or even, God forbid, "evangelicalists". How many journalists know that the Shankara of Kaladi set up only four Peeths, though there are more than five holy men calling themselves Shankaracharyas?
The word ¿Jihad¿ has different connotations. There are two types of jihad, the superior and the inferior as M.J. Akbar explains in his book The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity. The war against non-believers comes in the latter category while a person¿s war against the evil in his mind belongs to the former. The "Ram Ram" with which a pious Hindu villager greets another is different from the "Jai Sri Ram" heard from the BJP platforms.
Roberta Green Ahmanson is a writer and philanthropist whose qualities of head and heart I personally know of. She and her husband Howard Ahmanson founded Fieldstead and Company, a private philanthropy, in 1979. She was a Religion Reporter at ¿Orange County Register¿ when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards in 1984. Her assignment that day was to talk to the Indian community leaders, understand what prompted the killers and explain the assassination to the readers.
Most American newspapers reported that it was an act of political vengeance. Ahamanson was better equipped to do the story because she knew about Sikhism. Besides, she also talked to a number of Sikhs and Hindus in
Ahamanson concluded that "the story was that Indira Gandhi had died for her faith: not her Hindu faith, for she had little, if any. Certainly not her Sikh faith, for she had none. Instead, she died for her faith in the necessity and healing power of secularism". Unlike her, most American reporters covered it as a political story. "But it did not explain why so many Sikhs actually thought they needed to be at war with Indira Gandhi, nor why she was in a war with Sikhism, a faith that proved stronger than her guards¿ loyalty to secular tradition".
Having covered the Sikh soldiers¿ mutiny at Ramgarh in undivided
This anthology argues the need for greater journalistic awareness of religion in the modern-day world which is increasingly influenced by religion. In retrospect, we can say how wrong Indian diplomat and historian K. M. Panikkar was when he predicted in 1952 that "Christianity throughout
A series of events since then leave one with the inescapable conclusion that God is far from dead and He is indeed controlling world politics. Within a year of the Time story, the leader of secular Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israeli Army during the Six-Day War. "By the end of the 1970s,
In
A defining moment was the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian election. One of its first acts was to replace the PLO flag flying over the Palestinian Parliament with its emerald-green banner heralding, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet". Earlier, Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda had left nobody in doubt when following 9/11, he declared that "this war is fundamentally religious. Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For, the enmity is based on creed".
Osama bin Laden can never be accused of ambiguity. He has a list of grievances against the Western world. The starting point is not the creation of
Today, Ataturk¿s secularism is under increasing attack in
The writer can be reached at ajphilip@gmail.com