Why I Am a Hindu summary

Today’s Hindus are the inheritors of a tradition which was long synonymous with tolerance. For thousands of years, believers co-existed with other faiths without feeling the need to assert the superiority of their own creed. In fact, Hindus frequently revere other religions’ sacred texts, viewing them as one of many possible paths to self-realization.

That’s something the author experienced firsthand. When he was a child, he was taught that books from other religious traditions like the Quran or the Torah were as holy as Hinduism’s sacred texts. That’s because they all contain valuable insights that can aid a person’s spiritual development. It’s an idea that still shapes his outlook. If he drops a book and accidentally touches it with his foot, for example, he’ll pray for forgiveness for having disrespected a source of wisdom!

The BJP or Indian People’s Party has been in power since 2014. Since then, the country has witnessed an outburst of intolerance which would’ve been inconceivable to its Hindu forefathers. In this blink, we’ll see what the BJP represents and where it comes from.

Let’s start with its ideology. The BJP is committed to Hindutva, meaning “Hinduness.” That’s an idea which first emerged in the early twentieth century. When India’s great independence leader Mahatma Gandhi preached unity between the would-be nation’s religious communities, he came under fire from a number of critics. One of them was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a politician and writer who helped popularize the concept of Hinduness with his 1923 book Essentials of Hindutva.

Being a Muslim in today’s Hindutva-dominated India is a scary business. That’s hardly surprising given that members of parliament regularly promote Islamophobia. Take BJP member and Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath.

Adityanath first rose to prominence for his angry tirades against Islam, but he also led a gang of extremists which physically attacked Muslims. Before becoming a politician, he served an 11-day prison sentence for hate speech after calling the popular Muslim Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan a terrorist. In 2017, he copied Donald Trump and called for a travel ban to prevent Muslims from entering India.

Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t the only break with India’s traditions of tolerance that can be laid at the BJP’s door. Historically, Hinduism didn’t just accept homosexuality, transgender identity and sexual diversity – it celebrated them. Just think of the ancient mythical figure Ardhanarishwara, a deity with a half-male, half-female body, or the many homoerotic sculptures made by Hindus.

That’s all changed with the rise of Hindutva, however. Take the law forbidding gay marriage, a relic from the days of British rule. When the author attempted to have it amended in parliament, the proposal was shut down without even being discussed – a dismissal he attributes to the outsized influence of Hindutva ideology.

The author is a self-declared patriot and proud Hindu. That makes the transformation of those two beliefs into something as toxic and dangerous as Hindutva ideology even more galling. But what’s the best response to the rise of the BJP? Well, as he sees it, there’s only one solution: if Hindus want to save their faith and country, they have to start speaking out against the atrocities being committed in their name.

Those include reported cases in which Hindus have raped Muslim girls and rejoiced at non-Hindus being burned alive. That reflects just how much Hindutva has distorted the faith – after all, how else could people who prize vegetarianism to such an extent that they literally wouldn’t harm a fly end up cheering on such sickening acts of violence against fellow humans?