Rakesh Kumar Pandit
Once I had an opportunity to visit the Kishtwar town regarding some official engagement. Excluding the main filthy and dusty market of the Kishtwar town, which is wholly man made, I wonder how nature has blessed this place. The scenic beauty of the place enveloped by the beautiful mountain ridges is mesmerizing and one wishes to be one with its beauty, its calmness and its spiritual aura. The people of the Kishtwar in particular and the people of the J&K in general are expected to maintain this beauty, calmness both internal as well as external in the true sense. Gone are the days of 1990’s in J&K, peace has now prevailed to a large extent in this beautiful place of land in India. Leaving aside very few hate mongers and anti-national elements who use the name of religion to keep the pot boiling in order to be in limelight and also to fulfill the evil and selfish designs of their bosses across the border. These hate mongers ignore the plight of the people and bankruptcy in almost every sphere of life across the border. The people of J&K have realized the importance of peace and harmony, because only peace, harmony and stability will provide at least bread and butter to the poor people of J&K where corruption has broken the backbone of the society and unemployment is at its peak. Even the hate mongers of the state know that hate and cry on the name of religion can not be carried forward with empty stomach. The recent incident of clashes between the two communities of different religions in the Kishtwar town and its consequences and impact in the rest of J&K has once again put the question in the forefront that, can we afford this in the 21st century when our country is dealing with external aggression even from our neighbours at economic, political and military fronts simultaneously. I will not go into the causes of these clashes, which is crystal clear to all the stake holders. The government and the security agencies were well aware of the situation at the ground level much before the incident took place, which led to these clashes and large scale destruction and deaths on the auspicious occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr.
Is there any remedy, so that these unfortunate incidents will not happen in future and disturb the atmosphere of peace, harmony and stability, which is the crying need of the hour. In fact the remedy for these types of evils has been time and again put forth by the spiritual leaders of our great country.
I would like to put forth the message of Swami Vivekananda, whose philosophy and message is universal in appeal and crosses the limits of sects, religions, even nations. Their relevance is for entire mankind. I will put the messages as they are because one’s interpretation always leads to one’s own point of view as well. So I will leave it to the readers to feel for themselves. Very few of these messages have been taken from the Swami Vivekanand’s addresses to the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago, in 1893 where delegates came from all parts of the world, representing perhaps every form of organized religious belief. In his speeches at the Parliament Swami Ji stressed again and again the idea of validity of all religions and their harmony. He presented the ideal of a Universal religion which would have no temporal, spatial or sectarian boundary but include every attitude of the human mind in a grand synthesis.
” If there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time, which will be infinite like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krsna and of Christ, on saints and sinners alike, which will not be Brahminic or Buddhistic, Christian or Muhammedan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development. It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose scope, whose whole force will be created in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature.”
Making a plea for universality, at the Parliament Swami Ji said,
” If any one here hopes that this unity will come by the triumph of any one of the religions and the destruction of the others, to him I say, Brother, yours is an impossible hope. Do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu? God forbid. Do I wish that the Hindu or the Buddhist would become Christian? God forbid. The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the other and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth. In the face of this, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance:
“Help and not Fight.”
“Assimilation and not Destruction.”
“Harmony and Peace and not Dissension.”
But the political, religious and ethnic clashes that plague the world today will prove that we have missed the link of Divine Unity of the people of the world with each other. The Earth, therefore continues to be torn in dissension and Swami Vivekananda’s message of ‘Harmony and Peace’ emerges more relevant everyday.
( The author is Assistant Professor of Physics at GDC Bhaderwah )
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