Fundamentalism and the Sikh Religious Tradition by T.N. Madan

mantra is of the essence and supreme, in Sikhism it is only the meaning and content of
the hymn followed by deeds which alone are relevant or of any religious value.
This being the context, the problem in India is not of any contradiction between
Secularism and Sikhism, or Secularism and Islam, but of implementing Indian
Secularism. Madan's misconceptions are two. He ignores the fact that the Indian
Secularism and Western Secularism are not synonymous terms. The former is a wishful
compromise in a society of religious pluralism. His second misconception is that the
danger to it is not from the minorities but from the tradition of the majority and the
realities of India's past. Madan's failure appears to be the proclivity of the Indian mind,
first, to create a new myth, and, then, naively to insist that it is a historical truth; and,
second, to maintain a rigid objective to recreate the traditional past, whenever there is an
opportunity of revival or resurgence. We have already mentioned the strict adherence to
Brahminism in the Maharata cum-Peshwa rule, in contrast to the rule of Ranjit Singh,
which had the background of Sikh ethos. Madan cannot be unaware of the fact that after
independence, from the Prime Minister down to every Chief Minister was a Brahmin; and
of the shocking knockdown blow to Indian Secularism that was given when, first,
Nariman, the undisputed Parsi stalwart of Bombay Congress was unceremoniously
excluded and a Hindu was made the Chief Minister"" and later when as a national
language, Hindustani was given a go-by.
Minority experience of Congress Secularism has been far from happy or
reassuring. Although Madan perceives no incongruity, when a whole community resorts
to public misstatement, yet his perception remains opaque to the facts that it is the Sikh
ideology and the Sikhs, who relieved the groaning Indian sub-continent of a thousand
year wave of oppression, and made the largest contribution of blood and suffering for the
Independence of India, both in the past and the present. But they and their ideology are
called Fundamentalist. Instead the tag of Secularism is placed on those, some of the
greats of whom, including the Father of the Nation, are not willing to share food at a non-
Hindu's place, and apart from officially practising religious discrimination, are trying to
revive the Hindu past by seeking to build a mandir on the site of a mosque. This
insistence on the construction of a temple, continues, even though the Historical
Committee of the Government has reported lack of evidence of a temple there in the past.
In contrast the Sikh tradition is that not only Ranjit Singh gave liberal grants to Muslim
Shrines, but the Sixth Master actually constructed a mosque for Muslims in his area.
It would seem that sometimes personal bias is so strong, that one cannot help
giving misinformation, making a blackout of essential happenings and events and
construing them in a manner, which facts do not justify.
Faults and Failures of Understanding : Madan's paper is a classic instance of a
unidisciplinary approach to a subject which is multi-dimensional, especially when it tends
to be dogmatic about doctrines of a religion which has its own ontology, method of study,
and history. The author's failure to take into consideration the history of religions, and of
Judaic monotheism, a miri-piri. system, vitiates his entire understanding and
interpretation of the doctrines and development of Sikhism. To a student of religion it is
well-known that in the West, the original tradition of monotheism has been of a wholelife
system, and monasticism or pacificism are, in fact, later developments, finally leading
to Secularism. Further, that, as it happens, in a creative spiritual experience, Guru Nanak
completely departed from the dichotomous Indian religious tradition. His second fault,