The much anticipated Clash of Civilisations between the forces of Western Christianity against the forces of Eastern Islam has taken place. The God of Arabs has been left in the desert sands under a triumphant Western God. Over the past weeks Trinidad & Tobago’s local Muslim community protested against the American-led war in Iraq. Yet the local Muslim community remains silent about the implications about the closure of Caroni [1975] Ltd.
The very same Muslim community was also at the forefront of protest against the war against the vicious Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Today, like with the Afghanistan war, a religious element is being used to justify terror. It is highly deplorable that Indian Muslims are supporting Saddam Hussein and Iraq. This is not merely to justify America’s action but we must note that Saddam is not a saint nor was he ever an Islamic leader as Muslims are making him to be. It was this Saddam who declared war on Iran in 1980 and the war continued for eight years leaving thousands of people dead. This man is in possession of chemical weapons and biological weapons and used it against Iranians. Saddam, still not satisfied with eight years of war, attacked Kuwait resulting in the Gulf War in 1991. Saddam often turned his wrath on the defenceless Iraqi citizens killing hundreds of Kurds in Northern Iraq and thousands of Shiite Iraqis in the South. The United States and Great Britain should be commended by the world for the stance against this vicious dictator. If the nations of the world adopted this philosophy in the 1930s, there would never have had an Adolf Hitler. Millions of lives would have been saved.
The tendency of some in the West and Islamic intelligentsia to portray America as an evil empire bent on hegemony and Iraq as an innocent, persecuted nation, makes one a little uneasy. After all, has not the United States risen up and paid with its blood every time the free world was in danger and is not Iraq one of the nations which has sponsored international terrorism, particularly against Israel? It is the purpose of this piece to look at war from a Hindu point of view, a point of view that has often been the subject of many misunderstandings. “Man’s natural tendency,” writes the great Hindu thinker Sri Aurobindo, “is to worship nature as love and life and beauty and good — and to turn away from her grim mask of death. We adore God as Shiva, but refuse to adore him as Rudra.”
Hinduism does not advise peace in the face of evil and injustice. The Bhagavad Gita is a message to Arjuna when he hesitates to wage a war against his own kith and kin. Sri Krishna advises that Arjuna should wage the war because it was a part of his duty or karma and that he should not think of withdrawing from his responsibility out of fear or cowardice. In the words of Sri Aurobindo, Arjuna’s refusal to fight, “is the emotional revolt of a man hitherto satisfied with action and its current standards, who finds himself cast by them into a hideous chaos where human beings are in violent conflict with each other and where there is no moral standing ground left, nothing to lay hold of and walk by, no dharma.” The Gita, as we have seen, takes for its frame such a period of transition and crisis as humanity periodically experiences in its history, in which great forces clash together for a huge destruction and reconstruction, intellectual, social, moral, religious and political.
Furthermore, in the words of India’s great avatar: “It is an illusion to think that our hands should remain clean and our souls unstained for the law of strife and destruction to die out from the world. “On the contrary, abstention from strife and concomitant destruction may help one’s moral being, but leaves the slayer of creatures unabolished. “It is only a few religions which have had the courage, like the Indian, to lift-up the image of the force that acts in the world in the figure, not only of the beneficent Durga, but also of the terrible Kali in her blood-stained dance of destruction and to say: ‘this too is the Mother.’ And it is significant that the religion which had this unflinching honesty and tremendous courage has succeeded in creating a profound and widespread spirituality such as no other can parallel.”
The Gita thus proceeds from the acceptance of the necessity in nature for such vehement crisis and it accepts the moral aspect of the struggle between righteousness and unrighteousness, between the self-affirming law of good and the forces that oppose its progression. The Gita, concludes Sri Aurobindo, is therefore addressed to the fighters, the men of action, those whose duty in life is that of war and protection of those who are at the mercy of the strong and the violent and for the maintenance of right and justice in the world. Hinduism believes that God Himself reincarnates on earth whenever there is a rise of evil on earth to protect the weak, destroy the evil and restore order. Hence according to Hinduism, war is justified when it is meant to protect oneself and the world from evil and injustice. However Hinduism, neither supports acts of aggression nor advocates violence to terrorise people into submission.
Hinduism, like most religions, believes that war is undesirable and avoidable because it involves killing fellow humans. However, it recognises that there can be situations when waging war is a better path than tolerating evil. War is justified only when it is meant to fight evil and injustice, not for the purpose of aggression or terrorizing people. The American and UK forces upon completion of the Iraq occupation must seriously consider moving also to the terrorist states of Iran, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea.
