Swami Agnivesh

We are assembled here on the threshold of a new millennium. This in itself is not all that important. What makes this a historic event is the fact that we have come together against a background of revolutionary developments and paradigm-shifts in the human predicament the world over. None of us has had anything to do, directly, with engineering the emerging world order, which has presented itself as a fait accompli. But all of us, the six billion human beings that comprise the global community, are profoundly, even disturbingly, affected by it. The global developments in the last one decade have precipitated enormous existential and spiritual questions that need to be addressed squarely. These issues have sharper edges for people in the non-western societies.

Words like globalisation, privatisation, liberalisation, structural adjustment, market economy and so on have lost their novelty. They have wormed their way into the landscape of our mind. We catch the smell of the global order in our neighbourhood. Its colours and sounds pour into our living rooms via satellites. The very feel of our environment has changed. Our sense of independence is growing dimmer by the day. A sense of being remote-launched into unfamiliar, inhospitable economic and cultural orbits fills our intuitions with anxiety. We feel as though pirates have boarded the ship of our collective destiny. This loss of control is deeply unnerving.

We in the East are not smart change-managers. It has been our problem for long. We have, besides, an uncanny knack for turning the means for empowerment into instruments of disability. That is what we have done, for example, with our religions. God was too generous to us in this one respect. Religions have been our main items of produce and export. They have done well as exiles and explorers elsewhere. Buddhism is a good example. At home we have degraded religion into obscurantism and escapism. Also, most lamentably, into a justification for oppression and exploitation, as in the case of the caste system, the most ingenious device ever crafted by man to perpetuate the oppressive status quo. Our doctrines and worldview robbed us of our historical dynamism. We became inward-looking.

In 1947 India became independent. But in independent India, millions continued to be strangers to freedom. They languished in the prisons of poverty, illiteracy and caste oppression. Religion, which is meant to lead people to freedom and dignity, was progressively alienated from our public life in the name of secularism. Our society disintegrated into corruption and cupidity. Floodgates were opened for the MNC predators. Our external debt soared sky-high, and today it stands at US $ 100 billion: an astronomical amount that could break the back of generations. This has cost us our independence. The elite abandoned the poor to their slavery. Today one out of every three Indians is languishing in conditions of servitude. The rich hoarded the fruits of freedom for themselves.

It is painful for me, a staunch patriot, to take this uncomplimentary bird’s eye view of the Indian scenario. But I do it on purpose to address the religious question vis-à-vis the human predicament in the emerging world order as one century gives way to another. As a religious person, a swami, I have no hesitation in recognising that religions have failed human beings in their struggle for meaning and dignity, for justice and equity. That is not all. They have inflicted unhealing wounds on our national psyche due to their adversarial attitude to each other. They have discredited themselves, besides, by their blindness to social realities. The common man no longer turns to religion for inspiration to become a better human being. People expect no public good to come from religion. Escapist religiosity, however, now thrives more robustly than ever before! Temples, gurudwaras, mosques and churches have become richer and more crowded. But they stand in leprous isolation from the burning issues of our times.

I know I am striking here a note very different from what was struck by Swami Vivekananda a century ago. The venerable swami spoke as one euphoric about the spiritual destiny of India that needed to be fulfilled in the global arena to the benefit of the entire human species. That dream has not been fulfilled. Not that it was a pipe-dream. No, it is my own dream. But I must be honest to myself and with you and admit that our dreams and our deeds went their separate ways, creating a national crisis that threatens to turn our dreams into nightmares. Today, it has become a global nightmare: the nightmare of a colossal human crisis, of mounting poverty in the midst of multiplying wealth, of escalating inequality in a world that resounds with the egalitarian rhetoric, of unimaginable social injustice and man’s cruelty to man aggravated, rather than ameliorated, by the freedom of a few and the enslavement of the rest.

The voice of Vivekananda reverberated in the citadel of materialism in an eloquent call to rediscover the lost spiritual vision of the human species. He saw it, primarily, as the fulfilment of the spiritual genius of India and then as the evolution of the human species as a whole. Much has changed since then. The precarious balance between materialism and the spiritual culture has only tilted further. The instruments of international control have gained unimaginable powers of coercion. The capacity of the poorer nations to resist the cultural onslaught on them has declined further. The juggernaut of economics and trade has broken loose from the controls of democracy and the compulsions of politics. The Moghuls and managers of religions are in a state of extreme marginalisation.

At the same time, anxiety is mounting all over the world that, like the biblical Tower of Babel, the gigantic structures we create could come crashing down and crush our future. In less than two decades, our honeymoon with globalisation has begun to sour, paving the way for the realisation that unless the global order is fortified by an appropriate and adequate spiritual vision it could turn into a gas chamber for our humanity. "Man," as Jesus forewarned two millennia ago, "does not live by bread alone". This is a truth that continues to stare us on our face. The materialistic misconception to the contrary, offering bread at the cost of our humanity, can only end up in robbing the poor of the crumbs on which they survive.

To create a world order, and not enunciate an appropriate spiritual vision for the global community, is positively suicidal. To throw the nations and peoples of the world together in an economic pell-mell, without addressing the divisiveness and bankruptcy of religions, as they have been re-crafted in this century, is an act of irresponsibility. Why is that so?

To ask this question is also to ask what we mean by religion. Reduced to its essentials the religions of the world address essentially the question, as Tolstoy pointed out so ably, of our vertical and horizontal relationships. In spiritual terms, this is the need that all human beings have to know and love God and to love one another. The joys and sorrows of our life are born out of our relatedness. The closer we get to people and groups the greater is the problem of their ‘otherness’. Proximity is a unique human paradox, given the fact that we are meant to be social beings. We need to belong. To belong is to come closer. But to come closer is to intensify the problems of differences. At a distance, differences do not offend. They hurt in nearness.

The recent communal turbulence in India illustrates this. More than in any other part of the world, different religious communities lived together in peace and harmony for long in the Indian sub-continent. But, of late, the tensions between some communities have intensified. This is largely due to the greater proximity between religious communities affected by the age of communication and increased mobility. Knowledge is a category of nearness. You are not far away from what you know. Now the custodians of various religions know a great deal more about each other than they ever did before.

This increasing knowledge about each other need not necessarily aggravate the hostility of religious communities. What makes this otherwise desirable development a source of trouble is the fact that religions are still situated in a conflictual model. This gives an unfortunate slant to their interface. They look at each other in terms of differences, and are blind to what they share in common. This creates a peculiar situation. The call of the times is centripetal; it pulls religions together. But religions in their attitude to each other are centrifugal; they pull away from each other.

This case study is relevant to our concern as an assembly of religious people to the unfolding global scenario. Globalisation will necessarily blur the familiar national boundaries. The distances between and among nations will diminish. Continents will come closer. Cultures will bump into each other. Languages will cross-fertilise each other to a greater extent than they did in the age of colonialism. Worldviews will struggle for survival space. An unprecedented level of human desperation could result in many parts of the world, especially in non-western societies. The human predicament will come under added pressure.

In such a situation, religions can no longer afford to (1) play their customary adversarial roles and compete among themselves in order to maximise their respective advantages or thrive at each other’s expense. (2) Nor can they hope to prolong the uneasy truce by limiting their spheres of operation in the interest of communal harmony, which is a purely negative strategy. Harmony, if understood only as an absence of tension because of ghettoisation, is hardly a spiritual value. Harmony of the dynamic kind calls for an active interaction among the religions of the world and the formation of a shared forum for addressing the pressing issues of the global community.

Vis-à-vis the global scenario, today we stand at the cross-roads. From here, we can take either of the following paths:

(1) By default, we can be a party to the tragedy of the non-western cultures and religions being superseded by the western culture and its acquired religious arm of Christianity: a pattern that seems to have influenced Pope John Paul II’s vision for the Church in Asia as enunciated in the Synodal document released in Delhi recently. This reflects not so much the spirit of biblical Christianity as the hegemonistic and invasive spirit of the western culture that equates its ideas with the fate of the global community. That way, globalisation would in reality amount to nothing more than westernisation and Christianisation, which is different from evangelisation. Evangel is "good news" and the good news shared by all religions is that we are all equally the children of God and have an eternal destiny. It is also that in true spirituality we have all the resources we need to transform individuals and societies alike. The good news is that in religion, when it is understood and practised according to the scriptural ideals, we have a mighty weapon to defeat the forces of oppression and exploitation and to usher in a new heaven and a new earth.

(Surprisingly, Christians seldom wonder why the biblical vision deems it necessary to long for "a new heaven", and not merely for "a new earth". Is it not because they, too, like others, corrupted both heaven and earth and made their God after their own image to fit into their vested interests from time to time. If God is indeed, as many of them have understood for these many centuries, it cannot but create an identity crisis for heaven as the seat of the Christian God. It makes heaven not such an exciting place, after all).

(2) The second of the two roads could take us in an entirely new direction. It would call for a new paradigm of inter-faith relations and perceptions. Religions would be re-located in a climate of mutual stimulation and shared commitment to human well-being. They would deepen their respective spiritual roots, but will do so not to be one-up on their neighbours, but to bring their wealth into the comity of religions for the further ennoblement of the human species. The worth of religions will no longer be measured in terms of the size of their religious communities. This is necessary to negate the spirit of competition among them. As with religions, so with cultures. The spirit of hegemony will be mastered by a sense of shared destiny and our collective stewardship of the human species.

It is a nightmarish prospect for the poor and powerless societies of the world to be incorporated into a world order uninformed by spiritual values and moral imperatives. In the absence of the moral demand, it is crass power that dictates human affairs. Justice and equity keep poorly in systems shaped by power. The role of spirituality is to bridle power with a sense of fellow-humanity so that all the bones are not monopolised by the strongest of dogs. It is the business of spirituality to make us better than dogs, in sharing Earth’s resources.

Religions cannot any longer afford to perpetuate the fatal foolishness of seeing each other as enemies, and in the process lose sight of the real enemies. The enemy of a religion cannot be another religion. The enemies of religions are poverty, injustice, illiteracy, exploitation, discrimination and all that subverts the spiritual goal of fullness of life for all people.

Religions for Social Justice

Some of us in India are involved in a new initiative, an exciting socio-spiritual enterprise, to prepare the way for this paradigm-shift. Leaders from various religious traditions — Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, and the Baha’i faith — have come together to constitute a multi-faith forum to constitute a "voice crying in the wilderness" of social oppression and communal aggression. We have discovered the liberating truth that true spirituality is not the exclusive preserve of any particular religious tradition but the common heritage of the human species. We are convinced also that spirituality is a call to practice justice and to liberate the oppressed. It is also a call to exercise vigilance over the moral and social health of our societies. In the last one year that Religions for Social Justice has been in existence in India, several multi-religious initiatives have been launched and they have elicited wide-spread popular and media interest. The three basic goals of this movement are:

(1) To relocate religions in a paradigm of mutual co-operation and dialogue of active engagement with social and political realities,

(2) To project social justice as the essence of true spirituality, and so rescue religions from their escapist and obscurantist moulds to which they have been consigned for centuries, and

(3) To evolve a new and appropriate spiritual outlook conducive to social and political cohesion so that religion becomes a resource for nation-building, rather than a communal stumbling-block.

The global order and the call to spirituality

In their historical developments, religions got identified with cultures and nation-states, especially since the Renaissance. This is out of synch with the logic of a globalising world. Ironically, the seeds of globalisation lie buried deep in spirituality, which was the only authentically universal vision that human kind has ever had. It is doubtful if any of the international organisations would have come into being, but for the pattern that existed already in spirituality. Unlike the mechanisms of institutionalised religions, the call of true spirituality has all along been to transcend the familiar boundaries drawn by individual and corporate ego and to discover the unity that underlies the diversity that marks our world. As a matter of fact, the very purpose of human spiritual formation is to train people in the art of coping with differences constructively and to turn variety into an enrichment rather than a liability. Thus, while religion may see the non-itself as its adversary, from a spiritual perspective even the enemy is part of the larger body of the human species and so cannot be excised out or excluded. This is the secret of the health and wholeness of a society. It is out of this sense of inalienable belonging that the compulsions of justice and compassion are born. Injustice, on the other hand, thrives by distorting ‘otherness’ into hostility or a source of pollution. It is for this reason that tribes, castes and groups that have been subjected to systemic oppression have always been caricatured as sub-human or as sources of pollution. Pollution is sacral dehumanisation. It is a religiously sanctioned rejection of the humanity of the victim. In such a context, true spirituality cannot but assume a subversive role, the reason why, as Jesus of Nazareth said, "no Prophet is acceptable among his own people".

In the days ahead, we may not have any use for a spirituality that leaves the oppressors untroubled. And peace should not be allowed to degenerate into the rhetoric of the Establishment. The spirituality for the emerging global order cannot afford to be a compendium of nice and toothless sentiments. The oppressed and miserable people of the world have no use for such pious ornaments. They are not looking for improved cages. They are crying out for freedom. They want to be out of their cages. They long to be airborne and belong to the heavens. The heart of our global spirituality must, therefore, be an uncompromising commitment to social justice. The cultures of the world must be graded no longer, as the West used to do, on the scale of their rationality, but on the basis of their commitment to social justice. A society that is unmindful of the claims of social justice must be branded primitive. And the global community must evolve effective instruments to enforce agreed norms of justice on the systems and governments of the world. The cliched arguments that social justice is an "internal affair" of nation-states should no longer be entertained. In a globalising world, fundamental values and bottom-line justice should not be left to the charity of nation-states. But we do not have, as of now, an instrument with sufficient credibility and moral authority, free from the angularities of a global order based on power and inequality, to address this task.

Spirituality is not an anthology of multi-faith dogmas or scriptures. It is, instead, the priorities and compulsions that emerge through an active engagement with the given context from a position of love for humankind and reverence towards God. Spirituality is the foremost resource for human empowerment. But "empowerment" itself can be, and has been, understood culturally, rather than spiritually. As has been understood in the West, and adopted by the rest of the global community, "empowerment" amounts mostly to negotiations of power-sharing. To "empower" is to equip a deprived individual or group to negotiate effectively with the systems and powers that be so as to share the resources and opportunities in the given context. While this is important in the given scheme of things, this is not the final reach of "empowerment" in the spiritual paradigm. The goal of empowerment is not only to negotiate power-sharing, but also to transcend the power-paradigm itself in the macro-situation. Every human being needs to be empowered to attain the fullness of his/her hidden human scope. Also, conditions conducive to the full unfolding of the human potential in all people must be created. History bears witness to the fact that such a goal cannot be achieved within the current paradigm of power. The business of true spirituality, in the end, is to supersede power with love as the shaping paradigm for the human species. The essence of the spiritual light that all great religious seers have brought is the need for the human species to shift from the love of power to the power of love.

Spirituality as war on world poverty

Religions of the world must declare war on poverty. We have had two World Wars. We need a third one. And that War — truly the Mother of all wars — should not stop until the enemy is wiped out of the face of this planet. From a spiritual perspective, our foremost enemy is poverty. The poverty of the world is entirely man-made and is wholly unnecessary. Nothing discredits the religions of the world more than their disgraceful tolerance of this massive human scandal. The idea of Jesus breaking his body to feed the people has been turned by Christians into some sort of sentimental and mystical mumbo-jumbo. It was nothing of the sort. What Jesus meant by the revolutionary ritual he instituted was the need to develop a culture of sharing so that everything — not excluding even one’s own body — is shared in a sacred commitment to "do to others what we would that they should do to us". The same generosity of spirit is captured by the spiritual glow of other faiths too. This is the spiritual core that needs to be infused into the spirit of the approaching millennium. We must refuse to sentimentalise or glamorise poverty. Poverty is not a virtue. It is a spiritual scandal; a blot on the face of the Creator.

Integrity of Creation

The spirituality for the new millennium must celebrate a renewed global responsibility to protect the integrity of creation. But we must refuse to buy the canard that nature can be saved by some cosmetic changes or technological fine-tuning. The harsh truth must now be faced. The integrity of creation hinges on our integrity as the carers of creation. The environmental crisis that torments us today is the product of predatory consumerism and unbridled covetousness. Scandalous global inequality and inflated life-styles, rather than the poor of the world and their multiplication, are what endanger creation.

Spirituality and Human worth

The equal worth of all human beings, insofar as all embody the divine equally, is the foundation of spirituality. Spirituality is uncompromisingly egalitarian. It denounces every system and ideology, religious or secular, that belittles the worth of human beings. This is good news for the oppressed; but is bad news for the oppressors. The last thing that the oppressors want to do is to recognise the humanity or worth of their victims. This is as true of the high priests of the caste system in my country as it was of the ring-leaders of Apartheid in South Africa. Materialism, in contrast, is perforce an outlook to which inequality of human worth is endemic. The insult in materialism is that it values human beings not for who they are, but for what they have. There can never be any standardisation of what human beings may own. And so human equality seems an unattainable, even undesirable goal. Yet justice is not egalitarian. Any overt or covert endorsement of in-egalitarianism tilts its dispensation in favour of the rich and the powerful, as has happened in all societies. The passion for justice that characterises all spiritual traditions is based on the equal worth of all human beings. Systemic and endemic injustice has always been sustained and legitimised only by apportioning unequal worth to different sections of the society.

Barring rhetoric, in-egalitarianism still remains the operative outlook of the global community. The dangers of this unspiritual outlook could aggravate many times on account of globalisation. The life of an American, for example, today is globally more precious than the life of an African or Asian. Within our own societies, the life of an ordinary citizen is as nothing compared to the life of our VVIPs.

Equal opportunities for economic and trade activities, as envisaged in globalisation and liberalisation, can be a dangerous thing in a world of gross inequalities where human beings are ascribed unequal worths. Within such a climate of opinion, the arrangement that sacrifices billions of lives to prop up the artificial life-style of a few millions might not provoke the indignation of the global community. This would allow free play to the global merchants of death who need to sustain regional conflicts in order to secure steady markets for their deadly merchandise. The predatory military-industrial combine, unshackled by moral scruples and unhindered by national or international instruments, are already the ultimate nightmare for the peoples of the Two-Thirds World. Let us not forget that the overwhelming majority of the armed conflicts that took place since World War II have been located in Asia and Africa and that the beneficiaries of these accursed death-games have not been the miserable wretches of this region.

Today we have enough grounds to despair of the possibility that politics or diplomacy would secure a stable foundation for world peace. All along diplomacy has preached peace and prepared for war at the same time. The cause of world peace will be safe only on spiritual foundations, with an adequate emphasis on the equality of human worth. Poverty has been the foremost catalyst for war. War, in its turn, has also been the foremost cause for the perpetuation of poverty.

Spirituality as integration

Social justice, as I have argued, is the soul of spirituality. In a practical sense, justice and spirituality are synonymous. Both are essentially principles of integration. They are necessary for a society to hold together. An unjust society must undo itself, sooner or later. It is futile and foolish to clamour for social cohesion and national unity, as long as the divisive and alienating powers of injustice in that society are not contained. The systemic violation of social justice is the primary reason for the endemic disunity in India. It was also because caste injustice was socially legitimised that the spiritual evolution of India got stunted. The same is true also in the history of other religions. As and when Christianity got mixed up with state power and deviated from the paths of justice, it squandered its spiritual substance. Islam too suffered a similar distortion. The rise of materialism has unleashed forces of division and disintegration everywhere. It has aggravated social degradation and communal aggression.