IN RESPONSE TO SWAMIJI BEING HAILED IRONICALLY IN AN EXCLUSIVE MANNER AS THE HARBINGER OF SECULARISM IN INDIA

IN RESPONSE TO SWAMIJI BEING HAILED IRONICALLY IN AN EXCLUSIVE MANNER AS THE HARBINGER OF SECULARISM IN INDIA 

Swamiji was also the shaper of Hindutva. His speeches and writings are replete with references to that tune even as his speeches and writings are replete with references to seemingly the reverse philosophy. To pigeon-hole Swamiji within one's cellular thinking would be to deny his message its organic wholeness. Thus, to label him as a secularist or a Hindutvavaadi, a socialist or a capitalist, a dualist or a non-dualist, a freedom fighter or a shunner of all politics, a nationalist or an internationalist or even a universalist would be selling him short as per one's own limited conception and partisan predisposition. Swamiji was, to put it in his own words, a phenomenal being with head and heart 'as wide as the sky and as deep as the ocean'. He included all, excluded none, embraced all systems of thought, analysed them and systhesised their best elements to form a superstructure of thought where each one is seen in its positional phase and context, and humanity helped on by adhering to such without having to suffer radical cultural changes that are damaging and detrimental to natural growth. 

Study of Swamiji is a lifelong process and as one evolves, Swamiji's message assumes altered significance that lends it a more holistic and wholesome meaning. We are ever in a hurry to stamp Swamiji with our preferred positional proposition, puerile though it may be, and in the process we miss out on the sage's vaster imperatives and impulsions in the context of India's and humanity's chequered history, for Swamiji by self-averment belonged as much to India as to humanity as a whole. Hence, Swamiji remains the inexhaustible library of human thinking, nay, higher consciousness, whence humanity will yet arise unto life and action en route to eventual liberation. 🕉

Written by Sugata Bose