ONE people, one language, one religion and one culture — this was once the ideal of all human societies. India was the exception. It chose the path of diversity. How can one account for India’s astonishing diversity? The one word that symbolises diversity is freedom. It was the freedom of the mind and freedom of the senses which led to India’s diversity and contributed to the richness of its civilisation. No other civilisation, not even that of the Greeks, could have enjoyed the freedom that we had. Remember, Socrates was forced to drink hemlock! The Inquisition burnt the Christian apostates at the stake and Islam beheaded dissenters. Which is why the European and Islamic civilisations are so poor in content.

Freedom was born in India the day the Buddha challenged the authority of the Vedas. The process began even earlier. Doubt, the mother of freedom, was born with the Rig Veda, the most sacred scripture of the Hindus which has the following:

Here was a profound doubt. With it at the heart of the Vedas, there was no scope for dogmatism — for infallibility. India chose to remain tolerant of dissent.

Freedom of the mind created the wondrous world of the intellect — the world of our philosophers, poets and dramatists. And freedom of senses gave us our music and dance, painting and sculpture, the arts and architecture — in short, the sights and sounds and smells of our civilisation.

If India’s diversity is without parallel, it is because India had always been free to think. No other civilisation can make similar claims.

Can diversity go wrong? Yes. "The process of god-making in the factory of man’s mind", in the words of Dr S. Radhakrishnan, gave us gods by the hundreds. (But Vivekananda says: the more the merrier — no doubt, a different opinion). But we also produced more religions, more philosophies, more epics.

Was India, then, a mad-house of gods and contending doctrines? No "How many gods are there really, O Yajnavalkya?" asked a disciple of the sage nearly 3,000 years ago. "One," replied the master. (Taitariya Upanishad). The real is one; the learned call it by various names, say the vedic seers. Unity amidst diversity is the basic principle of India’s life, for the real is one.

Indians were the first to discover that truth had many facets. They, therefore, never committed the error of imagining, as some people did, that they knew the ultimate truth, and that no further enquiry was required. Says Dr Radhakrishnan: "The Aryan did not possess the pride of the fanatic that his was the true religion."

Uniformity can give strength to a people. But it can also weaken them. A people, who hanker after uniformity, become intolerant of dissent and diversity. They turn against the spirit of enquiry. With what result? Their life becomes a repetitive existence —a monotony.

True, diversity can also weaken a polity. But it also gives it strength. India’s strength lies in its diversity. It is the richness of its civilisation that is the perennial wonder of the world.

The genius of India is assimilative. Puritanism is alien to its life and thought. It never opposed scientific enquiry. While all Semitic religions have opposed the pursuit of science at one time or another, India has always welcomed scientific enquiry. India is not afraid of knowledge. The path of knowledge, the path of enquiry, the Gyana Marga, is considered to be one of the ways to salvation by the Hindus. No other religion gives this liberty. Remember the opposition to the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin?

India was never afraid of dissent or diversity. There were believers and non-believers in India, heretics and sceptics, rationalists and free thinkers, materialists and hedonists. India has never drawn a line to divide the faithful and the faithless, the blessed and the damned. Everyone followed the path that suited him best. Swadharma was the ruling principle. There never was conscious persecution.

It is this spirit of accommodation and tolerance that made India a peaceful home to so many religions and peoples. In one of his edicts, Ashoka says: "There is no higher service than the welfare of the whole world." To him, the world was his family. He did not insist that the world should first embrace Buddhism.

As in thought, so in men, we are a mosaic of peoples. The Dravidians and Aryans were perhaps the first to come. Then came the Sakas and Kusanas, the Pahlavas and Scythians, Caucasians and Tartars, Greeks and Huns, Mongols and Turks, Arabs and Persians, Uzbeks and Afghans and, of course, the Europeans. They melted like sugar in milk in the vast expanse of India. At least most of them did. They gave up their separate history and became part of India’s history. They thus gained total acceptance. There is no such example anywhere in the world.

To say in these circumstances that India must follow the Western lead is absurd. The west had its history. It had its experience. But they need not be relevant to us. We had our history, which was the product of our experience. It is relevant to us. Each has its merits. Each is unique. They must be left free to seek their different ends.

Prof Max Mueller, an authority on ancient India, says: "I do not deny that the manly vigour, the public spirit and the private virtues of the citizens of European states represent one side of the human destiny." But, surely, he asserts, "there is another side to our nature and possibly another destiny open to man." And he points to India, "Where the climate was mild and the soil fertile." He asks: "Was it not, I say, natural then, that another side of human nature should be developed — not the active, the combative and acquisitive, but the passive, the meditative and reflective?"

But, let it not be thought that the meditative and active are in conflict. They are not. They are, in fact, complementary.

Should India give up its unique reflective civilisation for the combative civilisation of the Europeans or the Semitic peoples? Such a step will be a great loss to mankind a real tragedy, for we are yet to see the full potential of the Indian civilisation.

The Indian mind tends to transcend the limits of empirical knowledge. The same cannot be said of the European mind or the mind of the Semitic people. Only in India the mind went beyond monotheism to monism, from dvaita to advaita — to a god without form and attributes. One cannot go beyond that.

That is why we should not exchange the path we have taken for the path of other peoples. Tagore says: "We must seek for our own inheritance and with it buy our true place in the world."

Aurobindo calls the commercial civilisation of the West "monstrous and asuric (demonic)". It condemns man to live by the sweat of his brow — a Biblical curse. An insatiable desire is at the heart of this tragedy, the very thing that the Buddha identified as the root of human misery. Progress does not lie in inventing the radio or TV, but in reaching out to the highest that the mind is capable of.

The predicament of India today is the ignorance of its people. They know little of their history and least of all of their civilisation.

So, we have here people who have the mind of the Caliban, the slave — Hindus afraid of the broader vision, Muslims seeking salvation in an Islamic society, and Christians who believe that salvation is possible only through Jesus Christ.

Little do these people know that there is no other way of life which gives more freedom than the Hindu way. They hardly know what went into the making of the Indian path. They do not accept diversity. They are afraid of freedom. They have nothing of the questing spirit of India in them.

Little do they realise that the Indian civilisation is what will become the model for tomorrow’s world. Monocultural societies have no future. The future belongs to the mind that is free.

Gandhiji used to say that a Hindu should strive to be a good Hindu, a Muslim to become a good Muslim and a Christian, a good Christian. This should be the way of India. We should be the pathfinders of a new mode of life. Anything else is the way to conflict.

Gandhiji was opposed to conversion. Assimilation is not the way for us. Both, conversion and assimilation go against the diversity we cherish, and the freedom that has made our civilisation the greatest. We must accept our diversity. Exult in the freedom it gives. Seek personal excellence. Our ideal can never be the "melting pot." It can only be the garden of varied flowers.