Recall the trick that has been played in India of our time – that opposing Hindutva is to be anti-Hindu.
This same trick has been played by the Zionists in Europe, America, and Israel – that opposing Zionism and the state of Israel is being anti-Semitic.
Well, listen to this erudite Rabbi here, make an agonised distinction between Judaism and Zionism.
Judaism, he explains, is the religion that believing Jews must follow.
This involves being devoted to the teachings of Moses, the Tablets that God gave him on Mount Sinai, the Torah, in short.
A 3,000 year old faith, Judaims as per the Torah explicitly forbids killing (‘Thou shall not kill’).
In another interview, the Rabbi, David Weiss, referenced above, maintains that Judaism is not consistent with establishing a political state, since nationalism contravenes subjugation only to god.
The institution of a theocracy, therefore, is, according to Judaic injunctions, antithetical to the religious teachings of Judaism.
Zionism, however, emerged as a nationalist-political movement in Europe only about 150 years ago.
According to the Rabbi, David Weiss, this occurrence was conducive to European Christians and political Jews, because it was a way both of evacuating Europe of Jews and affording to Zionist nationalists a land and state of their own – a sort of Europe beyond Europe.
In the wake of what happened in events leading from the Balfour Declaration to the Nakba of 1948, Judaism came to become a state ideology of the modern kind through recourse to covert and overt violence forbidden by the Torah.
Here in India those who look upon Gandhi as the icon of Hinduism believe that Hinduism is inconsistent with the demand for a Hindu theocracy, the goal that Hindutva nationalists pursue.
If Gandhian Hinduism grounds itself in non-violence and social inclusiveness, Hindutva, as the scholar, Vinayak Chaturvedi explores in Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and a Politics of History [Permanent Black, 2022] was regarded by Savarkar as inseparable from violence, as he – Savarkar – lays out in his Six Golden Epochs of Indian History [Marathi 1963, translated to English by S.T. Godbole, 1971].
One might extend these juxtapositions to a similar schism between Sufi Islam and Islam as a nationalist-political, theocratic ideology.
If the former advocates universal love and harmony, because god is the author of all that exists, the latter has tended to be constantly embroiled in violent assertions of state sovereignty, and expanded conquest.
It would thus seem that Jews, Hindus, and Muslims fall into two clearly enunciated categories – those who believe that true religious faith must remain uncontaminated by the pursuit of state formation and state power, and those Jews, Hindus and Muslims who hold that it is their religion that must govern their political existence.
Coming from another perspective, we may add that there are those who believe that sharp class interests inform these distinct demarcations.
Plenty to chew on.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
