short note on religious tolerance and peace
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Tolerance is the opposite of intolerance. If you consult an English dictionary, it will tell you that tolerance means the capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.
Tolerance is a highly valuable quality in social life. It is a fact that there are differences among people in various aspects of life. In such a situation, if people act according to their own mindset, it is bound to create intolerance that may lead to violence. Therefore, the best policy is what is called tolerance. Tolerance is the only way to establish peace in society. Adhering to the way of tolerance creates the kind of environment in which everyone finds room to carry out their constructive activities.
Tolerance is an integral part of India’s tradition. One can say that tolerance is India’s national identity. India has a long history of the culture of tolerance. India is a multi-religious society. Almost all the major religions live in India with total harmony. One can say that India has proved to be a peaceful haven for different religions and cultures. In this sense, one can say that India is like a peaceful garden in which all kinds of plants and trees flourish. This is the identity of India. India is a composite society. According to the 2001 census, the demographics of India’s population according to religion are: 80.5% Hindus, 13.4% Muslims, 2.3% Christians, 1.9% Sikhs, 0.8% Buddhists, 0.4% Jains, and 0.6% followers of other religions.
This composite nature of the Indian society is not by accident. It is directly due to the Indian way of thinking. According to the traditional way of thinking, India believes in plurality, or in the words of the great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, “the manyness of reality.” Hindus comprise the majority in Indian population. The Hindu religion is based on advait vad, that is, monism. Monism means that divine reality is one, manifested in different ways. According to this religious philosophy, the Hindus believe that everything in the cosmos is an ansh, or part, of divinity. They believe in the concept of an indwelling god, that is, every human being has a content of divinity. Due to this concept, the Hindu mind accords equal position to every man and woman. This is the genesis of the culture of tolerance in India.
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the holy books of Hinduism. It maintains that all paths lead to the same summit. It was this concept that was declared by the well-known Hindu thinker Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in these words: “We believe not only in universal toleration but we accept all religions as true.” (Chicago, September 11, 1893). It is a fact that Hinduism believes in religious pluralism. Almost all scholars of Hinduism, for example, Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Rabindranath Tagore, C. Rajagopalachari, and S. Radhakrishnan, have confirmed this concept of Hindu philosophy.
A practical example of this culture is narrated by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) in his famous book The Discovery of India, in these words: “In Kashmir a long-continued process of conversion to Islam had resulted in 95 per cent of the population becoming Moslems, though they retained many of their old Hindu customs. In the middle nineteenth century the Hindu raja (ruler) of the state found that very large numbers of these people were anxious or willing to return en bloc to Hinduism. He sent a deputation to the pundits of Benares, the religious centre of India, inquiring if this could be done. The pundits refused to countenance any such change of faith and there the matter ended.” According to the Hindu pundits, this kind of conversion was not objectionable.
Due to this mindset, the authorities of Hindu religion have given Islam a very honourable status. For example, Dr Bhagavan Das (1869-1958) was a well-known scholar of Hindu religion. He has been an author of a large number of learned works on philosophy and religion. He writes in his magnum opus, Essential Unity of All Religions: “The word Islam has a profound and noble meaning which is, indeed, by itself, the very essence of religion. Derived from salm, peace, shanti, it means ‘peaceful acceptance’ of God; calm resignation, submission, surrender.”
Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1895-1982) was one of the greatest advocates of the Hindu philosophy. He used to say that although he was born as a Hindu, but “main hindu bhi hun, main muslim bhi hun, main Christian bhi hun”, that is, “I am a Hindu too, I am a Muslim too and I am a Christian too.”
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