SIKH REBELLION AND THE HINDU CONCEPT OF ORDER

The militancy of the Sikh separatist movement in India and the response of the Hindu majority to it must be understood against a historical background in which multiple ethnic groups have coexisted in large part by virtue of their willingness to accede to the Hindu social order. The absorption of previous religious heterodoxies such as Buddhism into the Hindu system has provided a model for modern Hindu expectations of non-Hindu religions, and has served as a negative example for those intent on retaining a separate religious identity, such as the Sikhs.

Sikhism is a religious tradition that began in South Asia in the fifteenth century and today claims as its adherents approximately 2% of India's total population. The historic center of the Sikh faith is the Punjab region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, and over the past five centuries, the religious identity of the Sikhs has become intertwined with the ethnic, linguistic, and regional identity of Punjab. In 1984, the fact that this identity had acquired a strongly militant cast became known to the world through the assassination of India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards.

The proximate cause of anger for the Sikhs was the storming of Sikhism's holiest shrine at Amritsar by Indian troops in the so-called Operation Bluestar. The desecration of the Golden Temple was an action that affronted all Sikhs' religious values and served to incite fundamentalists to religious war. Furthermore, Operation Bluestar represented to many Sikhs a breach of India's constitutional guarantee of equal protection of all religions, and led to a sudden drop in Sikh confidence in the national government. The Hindu backlash following the death of Mrs. Gandhi, in which some 3,000 Sikhs were killed and 50,000 fled their homes, further polarized Sikh and Hindu communities in Punjab and across North India.

Though only a minority of Sikhs are actually involved in political activity, the continuing perception that the central government is not acting in the Sikhs' interest is a spur to the community's widespread discontent.

In the spring of 1988, the Golden Temple was once again the scene of

confrontation between Sikh extremists and the government of India (GOI), this time under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The question as to why this conflict continues to simmer and occasionally flare demands an excursion into history. The roots of the present crisis extend far deeper than recent events, and certainly much more than media coverage of them, would suggest.

Sikhs and Singhs

The Sikhism initiated by the religion's founder, Guru Nanak, was different from today's stereotypical Sikh identity. Arising from the sant tradition within Hinduism that traditionally focused on total devotion to a formless deity, Nanak emphasized purity of lifestyle and inner contemplation as the path to truth. Rejecting the ritualism that had come to permeate Hinduism, Nanak and the sikhs (disciples) founded the panth (community), which would persist through various transformations to the present day. The popular contention that Nanak's Sikh faith represented a combination of Hindu and Muslim elements is probably misplaced.' Certainly, Nanak rejected elements of both traditions, such as their inappropriate attention to external behavior. In common with Islam, the Sikhs rejected the caste divisions of Hinduism, favoring equality and interdining of all within the Panth. But the origins of the Sikh rejection of caste need not be found in Islam alone; it was a feature of many of the sant movements of Nanak's time, even within an overarching Hindu framework.

The early Panth, then, can most accurately be seen as a sect arising from within the Hindu fold: egalitarian in ideology, mystical in orientation, and guided by a mediator-the guru-between the divine and the human. Following Guru Nanak, a succession of ten gurus led the Sikh Panth, some of them initiating changes that would firmly establish an independent, non-Hindu religious identity. Hargobind, the sixth guru in the line, made the important decision that the Sikh guru must wield both spiritual and temporal authority. This new orientation, developed at a time in which Mughal hostility toward the Sikhs made worldly action necessary, was expressed in the symbolic donning of two swords, miri and piri, to represent the two faces of Sikh power. Escalating tensions between the Panth and the Muslim Mughal dynasty rulers culminated in the execution of the ninth guru in Delhi in 1675.

It was the tenth and final guru, Gobind Singh, who left a lasting stamp on the character of the Sikh community in the form of a militant Sikh brotherhood called the khalsa (pure). The story is told that Guru Gobind Singh, at one point, asked who among his followers would be willing to die, and taking each volunteer into a tent, he emerged each time with his sword dripping blood. After five had so volunteered, the guru brought out the five beheaded goats that had actually been the victims. The five brave men, thus spared, formed the initial core of the Khalsa brotherhood.

Among those of the Khalsa, all took the surname of Singh (lion), and all adopted the five symbols of Sikh identity-the uncut hair, the comb, the shorts, the dagger, and the steel bangle. These symbols are themselves indicative of the dual character of the religion, uncut hair being a longstanding tradition of Hindu mystics, for example, but binding it into a turban is associated with the martial behavior required of the Khalsa. The extent to which violence was acceptable to the Singh tradition was defined by Gobind Singh in two ways: first, it was to be used only in defense of the faith; and second, it was to be used only when all other means of defense had failed.2 Whether these two preconditions have been met in recent events is a question that is deeply troubling to many Sikhs.

The identity of the Khalsa Sikh, the follower of Guru Gobind Singh, has come to represent in many people's minds Sikh identity generally. This is a historically incorrect impression, however. The Nanakpanthis, followers of the founder, Guru Nanak, continued their tradition of essentially non-violent mysticism alongside the development and growth of the Khalsa brotherhood. Not all Sikhs became Singhs, in other words. For a long time a schism existed between these two branches of the faith, with the kesdhari (those with uncut hair) asserting a more militant separation of Sikhism from the Hindu tradition and the sahajdhari Sikhs (those with cut hair) continuing to view themselves, and to be viewed by others, as one of many sects within Hinduism. Today, however, there is a growing acceptance of the militant Singh identity as the Sikh identity and an increasing unwillingness among all Sikhs to be considered as just another sect of Hindu. 3

Why did this coalescence of militant and nonmilitant identities occur, with the former largely assimilating the latter? One important factor in the development of a united and separatist Sikh identity was the British colonization of India. Based on their own popular though unscientific ideas about the biology of race, the British decided early on that the Sikhs were one of the martial races of India, and they made the Khalsa symbols part of the official accoutrements for the valued Sikh solider. This highly visible military figure, with his bold blue turban, knee-length tunic, and flashing curved sword, became the model for contemporary Sikh identity. Up until a recent epidemic of desertions, approximately 20% of the Indian army officer corps and 11% of its soldiers were Sikhs, though the Sikhs consititute under 2% of the total population. The publicized valor of these military men was carried over into the civilian identity of all Sikhs. Hence, an essentially mystical sect of Hindu origins developed a martial and separatist identity. This transformation was effected gradually through the long reign of the ten Sikh gurus and was further cemented by the British colonial definition of Sikh martialism. We now turn to the question of why this potential for militancy has been mobilized in recent years.

Modern Sikh Protest: Why?

When the British empire lost control of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Punjab was split between the newly formed states of Pakistan and India, with almost all of the Sikhs ending up on the Indian side. While many

historically and spiritually important Sikh sites were essentially cut off from the Sikh population, the Sikhs in Indian Punjab came to dominate the cultural and political life of the state. Tensions between Hindu and Sikh Punjabis under these conditions may have been predictable, but the escalation of conflict to the point where the Sikhs confront the entire Indian-Hindu community demands further consideration.

Explanations of unrest among the Sikh population since 1947 cluster around several different theoretical viewpoints. The simplest of these, as expressed in the GOI's White Paper on the Punjab Agitation, considers that the violence has been primarily instigated by "external forces, with deeprooted interest in the disintegration of India."6 The idea of an outside conspiracy, encompassing overseas Sikh organizations in the U.S. and Canada but focusing on the idea of illicit support from Pakistan, has caught the public imagination with a vengeance. While the possibility of Pakistani involvement cannot be discounted, the notion of a “Muslim connection”7 owes its popularity to a denial that any sector of Indian society could hold a grievance against the government, and it appeals to many whose nationalist sentiments are strong. Putting the blame on outside subversives allows a comfortable complacency about the domestic situation in India itself. Thus far, there is minimal evidence for such subversive involvement from next door.

A second perspective on the Punjab problem comes from the Marxist camp. Though the relative weight accorded the factors involved varies, most researchers interested in the economic background to Sikh rebellion point to the Green Revolution as the catalyst for social tension in Punjab 8. One effect of technological advancements in agriculture was the creation of a class of what have been called "capitalist farmers," mostly among the Sikh Jat population. The rise of this newly wealthy farming class meant increasing competition with the essentially Hindu merchant sector of the citiesS9 Thus, while Punjab today boasts a per capita income roughly twice the national average and hence is rarely perceived as an oppressed region, the ascendant Sikh farmers there feel their interests to be at odds with those of the predominately Hindu central government. Conversely, so the Communist Party of India (Marxist) claims, the ruling Congress Party has purposely exploited communal divisions in Punjab so as to thwart this rising agricultural class. All of these tensions have been exacerbated by the fact that the demographic balance in Punjab has been shifting against the Sikhs, as their economic success has encouraged many Sikhs to try their hand elsewhere and non-Sikhs to migrate into the state. 10

A third conception of Sikh rebellion focuses on the idea of the Sikhs as an ethnic nation, which in its protest against the Indian government is asserting its right to self-determination. This conception mirrors the Sikhs' own rhetoric in which the demands, first for a Sikh state and now for the independent nation of Khalistan (Land of the Pure), have been held up as rallying points. Though only a small minority of Sikhs actually support the idea of Khalistan, the definition of Operation Bluestar and later confrontations as part of a war between two nations rather than an internal security matter has held great appeal.ll The fact that the geographic range of the Sikh religion corresponds generally with the boundaries of the Punjabi language in India has further enhanced the sense of ethnic unity among the Sikhs. The state of Punjab was ostensibly created around the language issue, thus giving rise to it as a Sikh majority state. There is, furthermore, some historical evidence that the converts to Sikhism have come in large extent from the Hindu lower castes, who themselves may represent ancestrally different ethnic groups from the high-caste Hindus who came to dominate modern Indian politics. In this view, though perhaps stretching the point a bit, the Sikhs share with the Tamils, the Nagas, and other peoples outside the Hindi-speaking belt of north central India an interest in the decentralization of political power.

A final orientation to Sikh rebellion centers specifically on the political machinations of the Congress Party, which has been accused of purposely orchestrating Sikh agitation with the explicit aim of reunifying Hindu India around Mrs. Gandhi whose popularity had been fading at the time of the 1984 operation. l 2 That Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who according to this theory was Congress's own pawn, got entirely out of hand in occupying the Golden Temple precinct with a small private army, only served as an excuse for the Operation Bluestar rout, which, if it united all Sikhs against the government, also united most Hindus (a far greater number) in favor of it. The extent to which the desired goals of Hindu unity and support of Congress was achieved was proven in the monolithic support accorded Rajiv Gandhi after Mrs. Gandhi's death, aided by election campaign advertising directly inflaming Hindu sentiment against the Sikhs.

Further evidence of the government's complicity in the unrest was provided by the "Report of the Citizens' Commission," which noted that police officers in Delhi and other centers of Hindu-Sikh rioting did nothing to quell the Hindu backlash of violence against the Sikhs and, in fact, may have encouraged it. The Citizens for Democracy and the People's Union for Civil Liberties have both stated that the government itself is to be held responsible for a large part of the violence.13 The agreement reached by Rajiv Gandhi and the Sikh leader, Longowal, in 1985 in which most of the original Sikh demands were conceded, causes speculation as to why the government had reacted so vehemently in the first place. 14

Of the above perspectives, the outside conspiracy theory probably has

least to commend it, not only because of the absence of reliable information about Pakistani or other involvement but also because such external interference cannot explain the groundswell of support among the Sikhs themselves. If an outside "seed" was planted, it nevertheless must have fallen upon fertile ground for it to germinate in the manner that it did. The importance of the economic changes that have transformed Punjab into the breadbasket of India cannot be denied and are a more plausible source of current problems. The economic interests of the landowning Sikh Jats, however, would not be coincident with those of the landless laborers, from whose ranks have come many in the Sikh fundamentalist movement. While Marxist writers have generally been quick to condemn interclass communal solidarity as antithetical to real social change (based, in this paradigm, on class rather than ethnic awareness),15 it is clear that in this case economic factors are necessary but not sufficient factors in the situation. Other recent ethnic movements, such as that of the Basques in Spain, also seem to confound the strictly Marxist view in their blend of economic and cultural grievances. The region in which the Basques live, like Punjab, is wealthier, not poorer, than the nation as a whole.

The Sikhs as nation theory, though perhaps a bit abstract, has a great deal in its favor. Many observers of Sikh life have noted the sense of unity pervading this community, the commonality of its traditions and beliefs, and the definite sense of boundary between itself and the wider society. In fact, throughout Indian history non-Hindu religious traditions have many times been linked to specific ethnic and linguistic groups, from the early Buddhists and Jains who are speculated to have sprung from the non-Hindu ethnic groups indigenous to the subcontinent,16 to the modern converts to Christianity found especially in the far southern periphery of India where Aryan penetration was weakest, and also in the tribal northeast. Ever since the ancient self-definition of the Aryans as "those who worship the Vedic gods," religious and ethnic identities in India have been closely intertwined.

The problem with looking at the current Sikh rebellion as a type of ethnic separatism is the fact that, as noted earlier, modern Sikh identity is of relatively recent origin. Historically, the Sikhs themselves have been divided as to whether they constituted a separate religious tradition. Ethnographers have noted that in the past it was common for Hindus and Sikhs to worship at one another's shrines, and that some Hindu families would have one son convert to Sikhism. The separateness of the Sikh faith as defined by Khalsa Sikhs has only recently been widely accepted, and any paradigm that proposes to consider the Sikhs as an ethnic group must delve into the reasons why this sense of ethnic unity has come to the fore at the present historical moment.

The rise of Sikh identity and militancy can profitably draw on all the above perspectives, and can certainly be linked to the idea that the ruling Congress Party itself may have played a key role in fanning Sikh emotions. In the following section, we will trace the dialectical interaction between the Hindu revivalism associated with the rise of the Congress Party and the corresponding Sikh revival that resulted in the conflict we now see before us. The premise is that the Sikhs did not acquire the identity of an ethnic nation in a social vacuum; their own sense of unity and separateness must be considered in the context of a growing sense of solidarity on the part of the Hindu center.

The Rise of Communal Identities

Blaming the British for communal divisions on the Indian scene is a common pastime these days. Unfortunately, the popular image of India as a nonviolent land where all religions were tolerated and all ethnic groups coexisted until disrupted by colonization is demonstrably false. While the British encouraged Sikh-Khalsa identity into a single stereotype, the attribution of Sikh militarism to British influences also neglects the key fact that during the same period the Hindu majority was also undergoing a condensation and redefinition of its identity. The movement was called sanghatan, meaning the consolidation, unification, and organization of the Hindu community that would be necessary if it were to effectively resist foreign (that is, British) domination. The call for Ram Raj, a return to the Hindu Golden Age, became a rallying cry for anticolonial organizers in the early decades of this century. It should be noted that the British themselves probably had a hand in encouraging this notion during their own colonizing in which Hindus suffering under Muslim domination could be won over to a British alliance under this theme. However strong the pull of the idea of Ram Raj was, however, and however successful in unifying Hindus to eventually fight for independent nationhood, this tactic of mobilization had important negative repercussions, the full impact of which is only now becoming evident.

The major problem with the idea of independence as a return to the reign of Rama was the fact that the British, while the main target of attack, were not the only foreign influences contaminating the Hindu nation. There were the Muslims, who prior to independence constituted more than one-fourth of the population, as well as smaller numbers of Christians, Jains, Parsees, and some lingering Buddhists. As part of the campaign to unify all the people back into a single ethnic nation, Hindu organizations started the process of shuddhi (purification), which was aimed at readmitting people who had converted to these other faiths back into Hinduism. There were some strong demographic reasons for this measure; Max Weber in his Religion of India reports that from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning years of the twentieth, Hinduism was on the decline in India while other religious groups were correspondingly increasing.'' That most of these converts out of Hinduism came from the lower castes is not surprising, nor is it illogical that the Hindu revival organizations rested on the support of the higher castes (as the main Hindu party today, Bharatiya Janata, continues to do). In any case, organizations such as the Arya Samaj, crucial to the education, modernization, and independence movements of India, rested on a firmly Hindu foundation, welcoming all if only they agreed to eradicate the contamination they had acquired through pursuing non-Hindu ways.

In the case of the Punjabi Sikhs, the insistence on shuddhi was probably the single most important factor turning the Sikhs away from the all-Indian Arya Samaj and toward their own organizations, the Singh Sabha and later the Akali Da1.18 Though most Hindus viewed the Sikhs as but a single caste within Hinduism, and many Sikhs, as noted, continued to consider themselves Hindus, the fact that Sikh communities ignored caste barriers through such longstanding customs as interdining meant that they were irreparably polluted. They, too, had to be repurified before being welcomed to the Arya Samaj movement. In addition, the Arya Samajists in Punjab campaigned for the use of the Hindi language in the schools and urged Hindus to discontinue the practice of allowing one son to practice Sikhism. As a result, most Sikhs decided to forego the opportunity to be repurified, which would have meant virtually losing their separate identity, and instead turned to the all-Sikh political forum, already dominated by the more militant Khalsa Sikhs. In time, the Akali Dal became inextricably linked with the Khalsa itself, and its spokesmen claimed to speak for the Sikh Panth generally. Today, opponents of the Akali Dal are portrayed by Akali leaders, and indeed regarded by most Sikhs, as enemies of the entire Sikh Panth.

The point is that the Sikhs during the early anticolonial years were receiving a mixed message from Hindu leaders. On one hand, all were to unite, despite differences in doctrines, beliefs, and gods that were in fact not only tolerated but actively welcomed as part of the identity of the multiethnic Hindu nation. This diversity of belief is the aspect of Hinduism that has most strongly come through to the West, which has typically found it both admirable and puzzling. But diversity of social rules, particularly with regard to caste prohibitions, was strictly limited, forcing those who sought reform to express it in terms of non-Hindu or heterodox religious systems. The fact that the Sikhs, who shared much philosophically with most Hindus, were nevertheless impure because of their social practices, illustrates this principle well. The Sikhs response was a campaign on the theme of Ham Hindu Nahin (We Are Not Hindus) that was carried through to the 1984 occupation of the Golden Temple from which Bhindranwale issued his demand that the central government recognize Sikhism as an independent religion.

Renascent Hindu communalism has taken its most extreme form in the development of a paramilitary organization called the Rashtriya Svayam-sevek Sangh (RSS), complete with cadres of highly trained troops and an ideology of the Hindu state involving the complete elimination of all non Hindu minorities. During World War 11, two RSS leaders held talks with Hitler with the aim of establishing an Aryan alliance that would enable Hindu Aryans to overthrow the British, and prompted Nehru to call the RSS "the Indian version of fascism." The major Hindu political parties first the Hindu Mahasabha and later the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (now liberalized to form the Bharatiya Janata Party), the Hindu Manch, and the Shiv Sena-also called for the establishment of a Hindu state in which the identity of Indian nationalism and Hindu purity would be made explicit. The link between the Hindu organizations and the Congress Party in the fight for independence (in which, for example, Congress leaders were active in anti-cow slaughter associations) did much to alienate non-Hindu sectors of the population. l9

That Hindu chauvinism is by no means dead is shown in the fact that in 1984 an estimated 200,000 RSS members worked to elect Rajiv Gandhi, and in 1987 this group once again endorsed his party. 20 Though Gandhi has alternately tried to placate the minorities and woo the Hindu right, his commitment to secular pluralism has to appear shaky, particularly to those who remember the Nehru heritage. (The complete transformation of this party would surely shock Nehru, who tried to limit the Hindu elements within the Congress and to define it as a secular, democratic, and universalist organization.) In the post-assassination elections of December 1984, Congress showed itself to have consolidated its hold to a solid belt of

Hindi-speaking Hindus in north central India, while losing ground everywhere else to regional, communist, or non-Hindu religious parties 21. The Congress government in Delhi is now perceived by many of the minorities as the Hindu heartland bearing down on the peripheral areas 22 particularly in the south where the major ethnic party, the DMK, recently swept past Congress to an overwhelming electoral victory. Coupled with the disillusionment with Congress based on recent corruption charges, this regional dissension bodes ill for Rajiv Gandhi's future as prime minister.

Although one would not want to convey the idea that all Hindus are religious chauvinists (this would be far from the truth, as the tolerance many Hindus have held for other traditions is well known), the point is that political conditions since the beginning of the century have prompted certain elements of this faith to express a markedly intolerant position. Sikh-Hindu violence is, in other words, a two-way street. This is an aspect of the situation commonly ignored by the Western press, which continues to conceive of India as it is portrayed by moviemakers and others attracted to the "exotic" Orient. An article in my own local newspaper, the Des Moines Register, introduced Sikh violence in the spring of 1988 as follows: "In India, where peaceful protests gave birth to a nation four decades ago, the cradle of nonviolence is being rocked by regional rebellions, terrorist attacks and the taking of hostages. To some, the land of gurus has become the land of guns."23 The picture of India as a nation of all-tolerant mysticism provides the backdrop against which the entire world sees Sikh rebellion as the work of religious fanatics, if not madmen. The fact that such rebellion is occurring in all the peripheral and non-Hindu areas of the Indian nation implies, however, that the causes of such rebellion are not to be sought in the internal attributes of the peripheral groups themselves. What we are seeing is a concert of reactions against the center, whose own characteristics are therefore to be seen as a prime mover. Sikh rebellion can be understood only in the context of the order against which it pushes.

The Hindu Order

It is historical and anthropological evidence that best provide an avenue of approach to the dynamics of the Hindu center in India. In particular, any inquiry attempting to look at this civilization in macroscopic perspective has to consider the incredible persistence of the Hindu social order, asking how it is that this order has been maintained over some 3,000 years since its inception. Like much of academic scholarship, half the game is won by asking the right questions. Too often, the question of why a particular order persists is not asked at all, as if persistence is assumed and only change need be explained. In this case, the strategies evolved by Hinduism in coping with pressures for change are identifiable and point to an answer to the puzzle of Sikh protest today. Hinduism cannot be seen as simply continuing out of inertia; rather, it was made to continue by specific actions that led up to the state of affairs we see before us today. One observer in 1983 commented that Hindus carry the Vedas, their sacred books, "like a flag," and this remark aptly highlights the fact that the Hindu faith had its origins in, and continues to carry the potential for identification with a particular ethnic nation. The Aryan people who created the Vedas were by most interpretations also the creators of India's caste system, in which the upper three (twice-born) levels are the arya(pure) while the lower level is the anarya (impure). The elaborate rules of pollution, avoidance, and servitude that characterize the caste system all have as their endpoint the preservation of Aryan purity; that is, by its origins, caste ideology is an ideology of ethnic domination, whatever other concomitants it came to have. This is a simple point, but one that many writers on caste as a system seem to forget. Anthropologist Gerald Berreman has been one of the few who consistently points out the key element of racial prerogative inherent in caste ideology.24

The symbolic idiom utilized in Hindu belief makes the identity of ethnic patriotism and spiritual truth inescapable. Balraj Puri points out that the Hindu gods are the rivers and mountains of India and even Bharat Mata or Mother India itself, and a strong feeling persists that denying these means denying India. He writes that "Hinduism meets other religions not as another religion but as a representative of the ancient heritage of the nation, and has … acquired the de facto right to set requirements … of Indian  nationalism."25 In 1983 the Indian government made an attempt to assuage the growing fissiparous tendencies in India by staging a patriotic pilgrimage in which water was brought together from all the sacred rivers around the nation, without explicit concern for the fact that this tactic by its nature could only unify Hindus, and not other Indians. Similarly, Hindu temples are national treasures and are so supported, though non-Hindu Indians may not enter. The very fact that traditionally one could not convert to, but had to be born into Hinduism highlights its exclusive ethnic character. Even the slightest contact with those outside the fold demanded elaborate purification rituals, and intermarriage was among the strongest taboos. The difficulties of using this religious tradition as a model for nationalism in what is really a multiethnic state are obvious. In these terms, the tensions we now see are not enigmatic but entirely predictable.

Despite the upper-caste ideology of consensus and stasis in the caste system, those consigned to the lower levels and excluded from the circle of the pure did rebel many times in history. Since the definition of the dominating group was phrased in religious terms, opposition to it most often

took the form of religious movements as well. The first major upheaval came over two millennia ago in the form of the heterodoxies of Buddhism and Jainism. The fact that the eventual decline of Buddhism in India has classically been called an enigma is something like the puzzle of Sikh rebellion today; it is enigmatic only in a paradigm that assumes tolerance, coexistence, and stasis where none exists.

There was, in fact, a great deal of outright persecution of both Buddhists and Jains in Hindu history, episodes that are conveniently forgotten in the schoolbooks Indian children read. It was transformation within what was then Brahmanism (that is, the ancestral religion to modern Hinduism) that eventually took the wind out of the sails of Buddhist heterodoxy. Most importantly, the Buddha himself came to be defined as an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, so that people claiming allegiance to the Buddha were perceived as only worshipping another manifestation of Vishnu. Sankara, one of the greatest Hindu philosophers, took over some of the key features of Buddhism such as the notion of inner contemplation as the key to enlightenment, and hence is dubbed a crypto-Buddhist by several Indian writers today.26 A key distinction of Sankara's scheme, however, was the preservation of the caste order that Buddhism rejected; in Sankara's conception only the "competent" could hope to achieve enlightenment, while others were bound to this world of illusion. He was, therefore, accepting the most radical of Buddhism's philosophical innovations, while perpetuating in its entirety the system of inequality that characterized Brahmanic society. This tolerance and even welcome of all possible ideas and beliefs, alongside the rejection of any social innovation, remains characteristic of Hindu attitudes.

The encounter of Hinduism with Buddhist and Jaina heterodoxy in ancient times served as a kind of template for future confrontation, with the tradition of erasing heterodoxy by embracing it evolving as a standard pattern. Anthropologist David Mandelbaum wrote that "it seems almost to be a property of this social system that such movements well up periodically, develop through the cycle, and then devolve back into the system." 27

Missing in this description is the sense that this welling up and falling back down is not some kind of inherent characteristic of a system, but is a specific pattern of recurring rebellion on the part of dispossessed groups that consistently fall in favor of a yet more syncretic Hindu philosophy at the center. One Indian scholar dubs this the Nilakantha syndrome, Nilakantha being the god who neutralizes poison by swallowing it, turning blue-throated in the process.28 Hinduism, seen over the long term, is a dynamic pattern of domination, rebellion, and incorporation, always transforming itself but maintaining its characteristic social order. Paradoxically, it is the very complexity and diversity of Hindu belief that shows its greatest intolerance. Critics point out that it is a tradition that cannot respect true otherness but can only assimilate otherness to Hinduness, which is then accorded legitimate respect.

Every religious and cultural tradition carries some potential for mobilization as an ethnopolitical force. Hinduism's particular burden is its historical heritage of spiritual imperialism, divided from truly relativistic tolerance by a very fine line. This line has been crossed back and forth by various leaders in recent years, and it must be a matter of explicit concern for reflective Hindus today to orient their religion to a truly democratic political position, one with an attitude of respectful coexistence with other persuasions. The best among the Hindu community have always held this attitude; the worst fail to recognize the existence of the problem.

Many Hindus today cannot understand why religious minorities continue to reject the place offered them within the relativistic Hindu framework. 29 The peculiarly Indian notion of secularism, the idea that tolerance to all faiths should be encouraged on the grounds that all represent different paths to the same universal truth, has come to dominate political discussion to the exclusion of the kind of secularism intended in the Western democracies, in which one's religious beliefs are in no way the concern of the state. For example, Mahatma Gandhi's statement that "I am a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim, and a Christian" has a very different meaning than the idea that one is a citizen, whose religious beliefs are irrelevant to one's citizenship. As one Muslim observer said of Gandhi's comment, "Only a Hindu could say that." But then, Gandhi himself said that "those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means." He was one leader who had learned the lessons of Indian history well. Many scholars, both Indian and Western, have questioned the idea of the Indian secular democracy, pointing out that individual, social, and political identities in India have historically been entirely tied up in religious ideology. Perhaps because of the strong desire on the part of the West to find at least one true democracy in developing Asia, these perceptions have been largely ignored. As a result, when communal violence breaks out it is seen as an aberration, a social problem rather than a central feature of this civilization's very identity.