INDIA—A POTENTIALLY SPIRITUAL COUNTRY

INDIA—A POTENTIALLY SPIRITUAL COUNTRY Power of Spirituality T OLERANCE 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. Followers of 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 2011 census, the demographics of India’s population according to religion are: 79.80% Hindus, 14.23% Muslims, 2.30% Christians, 1.72% Sikhs, 0.70% Buddhists, 0.37% Jains, and 0.9% followers of other religions. This composite nature of the Indian society is not by accident. It is attributed directly 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 advaitvad, 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 destination. It was this concept that was declared by the well-known Hindu thinker Swami Vivekananda (18631902) 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. The Indian Constitution accords Muslims equal rights of citizenship in every aspect and there is no discrimination at all on the basis of religion.