A Return to Vivekananda

IN 1893, A 30-YEAR-OLD prodigiously talented monk took India to the world. Swami Vivekananda, already an authority on Western logic, a Vedic philosopher and historian, astounded his audience at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago with a dazzling treatise on the refreshingly tolerant and non-prescriptive Hindu dharma. Awestruck, the delegates even gave Swami Vivekananda a three-minute standing ovation.

Now, 130 years later, the world is well and genuinely flocking to India.

Over two days (September 9-10), leaders of G20 will be hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. Never has a more robust and influential gathering of world leaders met on Indian soil at one moment in time. G20 represents 60 per cent of the world’s population but more importantly, it accounts for 85 per cent of global GDP and 75 per cent of international trade.

It bears mentioning that India has assumed the presidency of G20 at not just another moment in time but perhaps the most consequential moment for the world. The earth is scarred by a once-in-a-century pandemic, singed by the fires of a futile war, and stalked by the sceptre of an impending ecological apocalypse.

A primer on the Indian government’s official G20 website tells us in typically prosaic bureaucratese that the Modi government hopes New Delhi can use the opportunity to broker new ground on “inclusive growth, digital innovation, climate resilience, and equitable global health access.”

But hosting this premier division of world leaders cannot be, by any stretch of the imagination, a means to an end.

In fact, India must leverage its presidency to mark the beginning of something more epoch-defining: Propagate the seeds of Hindu internationalism.

India may be all the rage today but as the Chinese and Russian examples demonstrate, its continued acceptance at the global high table is subject to obeying the rules of a West-contrived “standard of civilisation”.

Perceived deviations will elicit a quick rap on the knuckles from, for instance, the European Union or US President Joe Biden, who once condescendingly described India’s refusal to go along with sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine as “somewhat shaky”.

Clearly, New Delhi is reflexively expected to beat to a Western moral drum even if it means India must sacrifice its own geopolitical interests.

Though the world is supposed to have moved beyond the patronising colonial project of rescuing the “non-European world from itself”, the core maxims of Western moral mores are embedded, for instance, even in the UN Charter.

Had the post-colonial world indeed been flat, Swami Vivekananda’s exposition of an alternative model would have roused the West to look beyond their own model. Especially when Vivekananda’s Western audience had admitted how

“foolish it is to send missionaries to this learned nation [India]”.

Surprisingly, not even Nehru’s passionate commitment to modernism—laced with the ideals pronounced from the pulpits of Renaissance Europe—endeared India to Western elites. For decades, India was condemned to lurk in the “rimland” of the West’s sphere of influence.

Nehru’s India (that stepped out from the old into the new) might have succeeded had, as Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar notes, New Delhi’s engagement with the West catered more adequately to the new American primacy.

Truth be told, India’s snub by the Western hemisphere ended in 1991, chiefly because the “balance of payment crisis” had forced New Delhi to swear by the edicts of a Washingtonian (Bretton Woods) free-market internationalism.

Now, three decades on, having emerged as a compelling actor for reform beyond the ‘system’, one can only hope that India doesn’t waste another 70 years striving to live up to the standards of the Western ideal.

The use of Indic flourishes—Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam— on the G20 stage may be a welcome beginning in introducing the world to an Indic view. But for India to truly universalise a model rooted in an Indic philosophy, something more needs to happen. For a start, the bulk of India’s political and intellectual establishment must first overcome its own disdain for Bharat’s Hindu civilisational past.

Post-1947 scholarship (indentured as it was to a totalising Marxist dogma) marred attempts towards evolving a distinctive idea of India—uniquely grounded in pre-Islamic and pre-British indigeneity.

There is no denying that the democratisation of politics in India has spawned a more indigenous nationalism. But because it is still resisted by a deracinated Indian elite, its global competitors have found another pretext to not legitimise its espousal by the Modi regime.

At the end of the Cold War, the West, blinded by hubris, mistakenly proclaimed the “end of history”. But India (not unlike China) must return to its own history if it wants to assert influence beyond its borders.

There’s no better opportunity for all Indians to unite behind the task of (at the risk of tautology) globalising Hindu internationalism than during India’s G20 moment.

G20 SummitHindu internationalismHinduismIndiaSwami Vivekananda