Whether Swami Ramdev or the other Gurus who are condemning him for his silence at Deoband on the Vande Mataram issue have learnt any lessons from the humiliating treatment received by the Yoga guru at the hands of the Deoband  Maulanas is yet to be seen.

Swami Ramdev went considerable lengths to accommodate the religious sentiments of Muslims by claiming that yoga was only a system of physical exercise and had nothing to do with religion; that Ishwar and Allah were the different names of the same Supreme Being, and that if Muslims had objections to the use of OM, they could use Allah instead, while performing yogic exercises. Yet just four days after Swamiji's efforts to make yoga acceptable to Muslims, the Maulanas issued a decree advising Muslims against attending Swami Ramdev's yoga camps because they began with the singing of Vande Mataram!

Another yoga guru, the high-flying Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, also visited Deoband a few days after Swami Ramdev, and claimed to have successfully persuaded the Maulanas to soften their stand on Vande Mataram. The compromise formula worked out provided that while the fatwa issued by the Darul Iftah of Darul Uloom against singing Vande Mataram (because it is un-Islamic) cannot be revoked and must therefore stay, the Maulanas will leave the decision to sing or not to sing to the conscience of individual Muslims. (Good Muslims will naturally defer to the fatwa).

Perhaps a charitable view of the two guru's futile overtures to Muslims could be that they believed they were serving the cause of national integration by bringing the followers of Islam closer to the rest of India. But the end result made the Hindu gurus look like rejected supplicants.

Contrasting attitudes

The attitudes of the Gurus and the Maulanas conform to the historic pattern of each side. Steeped in a culture of meek submissive Hindus, the Gurus could not transgress the Lakshman rekha of sarva dharma samabhava in their minds, and innocently believed that the ancient Vedic maxim "ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti" meant that the Ishwara of the Vedas and Allah of the Quran were two names of the same Almighty. They compounded their error by assuming that the Maulanas would accept this seemingly harmless proposition.

Last update : 03-01-2010 15:39

Keywords : Assertive Maulanas, Submissive Gurus, Jai Prakash Sharma

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