On Secularism, Hinduism and Dharma

Originally written in Jun-1990 in personal diaries

Of late, I have been reading statements of MPs (Members of Parliament) about secularism and Dharma. A BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party, a right-wing political party in India) MP said that Hinduism was the only Dharma and all others were religions. A Congress MP said that secularism and religious non-interference are two different things. However correct they were from their points of views, it is a fact that the word religion means "following certain principles, certain laid down unchangeable laws throughout one’s life", while the word Dharma, in its Sanskrit origin, simply means the correct behavioural pattern i.e. claiming one’s rights but after performing one’s duties. Now, this correct is not laid according to some guiding principles or anything, it is to be decided by the people, whatever they feel is correct has to be correct. A religion, somehow, is necessarily laid/ founded by some single person or a group of persons. That Christianity arose in Christ, Islam in Prophet Mohammed, Buddhism in Buddha, Jainism in Mahavira, Sikhism in Guru Nanak etc. simply depict that all the religions are simply thinking of one man (or perhaps a group of men) and however great that one man may be, he may be next only to God, but certainly he is not God. And strange though it may seem, most of the above quoted men did not claim themselves to be God.

So each religion is the reflection of one man’s thought only. But what actually makes it matter, what actually makes it religion in the first place, is that the reflection is not a simple one, along with it are mixed the shadows of numerous other unaccountable men and women, the followers of the religion. However, a religion still remains a fixed set of ideals and principles. Language-wise, it is "a" religion but it is "the" Dharma.

Dharma has the qualification of evolving with the evolution of humankind. This evolution is continuous and unstoppable, so is the side by side evolution or change in the pattern or the concept of Dharma. So what was once justified by Dharma, or rather, as Dharma – may be totally unjustified today and may again be justified sometime in future. Dharma is essentially laid by the contemporary meaning of the word proper.

A very important and noteworthy difference between Dharma and religion is that religion is essentially associated with the Almighty, the supernatural one, God. It distinguishes between a believer and an atheist. Dharma, meanwhile, being much more an individual than social concept, has no such classification and is concerned only with what we may call correct.

Coming to Hinduism, the origin of Hinduism is essentially the extraction of a religion from the then Dharma. The fact that the relation between the Hinduism and the Dharma had been very deep cannot undermine the fact that Hinduism has turned itself into a religion, had done so years, centuries ago, by turning itself into a closed shell, by accepting some doctrines as the basics of Hinduism, by making itself rigid.

I would go on to say that all the religions are hate-able, at least they become so when they come out of an individual and assume collective form, interfering in the normal functioning of life. Meanwhile, Dharma is necessarily associated with levelheaded thinking persons, may they be of any community or religion. Flexibility is the only basic constituent of Dharma, flexibility not only with time and space, but flexibility from individual to individual. The persual of the contemporary correct is the only definition somewhat near to Dharma, always remembering that correct is not a collective concept only, it belongs to the individual as well.