Hindutva politics is assault on life-affirming religion of Hinduism: Shashi Tharoor
New Delhi: The political project of Hindutva is nothing less than an assault on Hinduism, but where the life-affirming religion has for millennia proved its resilience to external attacks, it is now revealing its vulnerability to attack from within, says writer-politician Shashi Tharoor.
In his new book "The Hindu Way An Introduction To Hinduism", which is a sequel to his bestseller "Why I Am a Hindu", Tharoor, 63, delves deep into Hinduism's most important schools of thought such as Advaita Vedanta and explores various other seminal concepts that underpin the religion.
He probes the fundamentals and complexities of Hinduism, presents both its ancient texts and the modern beliefs of Hindutva descriptively and on their own terms to offer a lucid but brilliant account of one of the world's "oldest and greatest" faiths. "Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion which has always been able to assert itself without threatening others. But this is not the Hindutva that destroyed the Babri Masjid, nor that spewed in hate-filled diatribes by communal politicians," Tharoor writes in the book, published by Aleph.
The author of 18 books notes that the Hindutva ideology is a malign distortion of Hinduism, which is a religion of astonishing breadth and of awe-inspiring tolerance.
He asserts that the Hindutva politics must be resisted for presenting a view of Hinduism that is at odds with everything the eclectic religion has sought to stand for. "It (Hindutva) seeks to refashion Hinduism as something it has never been... The Hindutva project seeks to reinvent Hindu identity with a new belief structure and a new vocabulary," he writes.
The senior Congress leader says the central challenge of India is to accommodate the aspirations of different groups in the national dream, asserting that the ethos of Hinduism inclusionist, flexible... - helped the nation meet this challenge.
