The construction of Ram Janmabhoomi temple at Shri Ram’s birthplace of Ayodhya had led to universal condemnation from the press within India and abroad. Normally media outlets which are right-wing and left-wing, conservative and liberal, secular and religious, white supremacists and anti-racist, Christian and Islamic, free market and socialist, would be polar opposites and antagonistic.
But on this, they all appear united. To just blame the leftists and woke does not explain this phenomenon. Instead, it becomes much clearer when we look at it through the prism of monotheism, and more explicitly what is known as Abrahamic supremacy.
This narrative looks at anything pagan, polytheistic, and henotheistic as barbaric, savage, and worthy of annihilation. There can be only one ‘way’ as there is only one ‘god’, because even atheism, secularism and humanism are part of this destructive manner of looking at the world.
The term Abrahamic encompasses the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Of these, Judaism has not had a history of trying to aggressively convert and denigrate other forms of belief.
By the same token small Jewish communities flourished in India for hundreds of years without any conflict with the majority host population. Christianity and Islam however have a missionary zeal in which denigration of other forms of belief are integral.
For this reason we find missionary mouthpieces for these two proselytizing faiths extremely antagonistic to the construction of Ram Janmabhoomi as they believe it threatens India’s very secular fabric.
From the perspective of Christianity and Islam it is understandable why they would feel so perturbed by the resurgence of an indigenous and the longest surviving belief system which they have worked so hard to extinguish; whether through force such as Mahmud Ghaznavi, Francis Xavier and more recently with state pressure in Pakistan, or through soft power with schools, hospitals, and other exploitation of poverty.
Yet why would they be so upset about a change to the very secularism that these faiths have always opposed? Because in India, secularism is not neutral as understood in the west. It is anti-Hindu in its modus operandi. That is because secularism is itself the child of Christianity. It is therefore just another monotheistic faith and part of this Abrahamic supremacy.
It is for this reason that one finds condemnation of Ram temple in Ayodhya as vociferous in the secular press as in any Christian missionary media outlet. Secularism was the result of a compromise between warring Catholic and Protestant factions in the Thirty Years War which devastated Germany in the seventeenth century. Applied to India it took on a very different tone, but one in keeping with its Christian roots which saw pagan civilisations as backward. In Europe and other parts of what became the western world, secularism rolled back the very Christianity which had given rise to it. In the eighteenth century, we can see the rise of humanism and later atheism which made humanity the centre and lessened the role of the churches.
The Enlightenment which gave rise to putting civilisation on the path of reason, science, and progress. It looked back to the pre-Christian classical period to find antecedents with Socrates, Aristotle, Xenophanes, Lucretius, and the ideas of the Cynics and Stoics.
When the physicist Laplace was asked by Napoleon what role did God play in his theory of the universe, the former replied that he had no use for that “hypothesis”. God was no longer a supreme being. He or it was a ‘theory’, so beloved of Marxists. This was enforced by the fact that while humanists could use ancient Greek ideas to bolster secularism and atheism, those same ideas had in fact been morphed into the very Christianity they opposed.
Once we understand that the Abrahamic or monotheist god is just a ‘theory’, the bias against Ram temple at Ayodhya and in fact understanding Hinduphobia in a wider context becomes clearer. Hinduism is the largest surviving pagan civilisation. Elsewhere pockets of pagan belief survive or are only found in museums. If polytheism is widespread and flourishing then monotheism cannot tolerate it. If however, it is dead then all the well-meaning woke brigade turn out to demand the demolition of symbols that symbolise the oppression of the past. Hence the statues of Junipero Serra have been torn down in California for his oppression and destruction of Native American pagan cultures.
Yet these same anti-racists, anti-fascists, and progressives denounce the building of Ram temple on the very site where a previous pagan culture was oppressed. How to explain this anomaly, this cognitive dissonance? Because the very forces who applaud the tearing down of Junipero’s statue in the past would have been the ones supporting him in the name of progress and attacking barbarism. Both his supporters and antagonists have the same Abrahamic Supremacist roots.
Read More Secularism : A Christian Sect ?
Read More The Church, Indian Secularism or Valhalla ?