Thin Line Separates Jehovah's Witness, Jihadism And Western Universalism

In the recent Kerala blasts at Kalamassery, one self-confessed perpetrator by the name of Dominic Martin said he set off the bombs at a Jehovah’s Witness congregation because they promoted the “wrong ideology”.

This Christian sect believes in the end-of-days theory, where the kingdom of god will one day replace all human governments. They obviously do not believe in the concept of nationhood.

There is only one truth under one god. Theirs. They will thus not salute any flag, or serve in the armed forces or involve themselves in war (for more on what this group is all about, read this primer here).

This ideology be considered quaint and cute, as long as the idea is just an idea, does not involve violence, and is restricted to a microscopic minority.

One wonders why Martin would think this tiny Christian group should pose such a threat to anybody and that they needed to be dealt with violently. Our Dharmic culture has enough space in it for allowing such diversity of thought.

The problem, though, is not with the idea itself, but its extension. If only one idea about god is right, it does not matter if the group that originally believed in it is small or non-violent. For ideas can be bent to suit other political and imperialist ends.

For example, the Jews were one of the first people to accept the idea of one god. The Egyptians under Pharoah Ikhnaton and Zoroastrians in Persia were two others who propagated the same idea before Moses.

But what was a benign idea for the Jews — they did not seek to shove it down the throats of the non-chosen people around them — became lethal when early Christians took it up and decided that only their god and religion had the right to survive. They destroyed entire civilisations using the idea of 'one true god'.

Centuries later, a prophet of Arabia took the idea one step further and created the Umma — a nationless people ruled by the 'one true god Allah', whose eternal truths were revealed through his Last Prophet, Mohammed. 

The only difference between the Jehovah’s Witness idea of the kingdom of god under Jesus, and the Umma under Allah and his rightly guided prophet and (later) caliphs, is that the latter were willing to use force, violence and intimidation to enforce the ideology of religious imperialism. 

Beyond Christianity and Islam, there is communism, which too had an ideology that sought to erase nations under a god who was not god, but still had a book (Das Kapital), and a prophet (K Marx), and many rightly guided caliphs ruling after him (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot).

A benign idea, when adopted by a Jehovah’s Witness, becomes lethal under others. This is false universalism, a curse. What is wrong is the sheer idea that there can be only one god, one people, one truth, and one way to do anything. There may be one truth, but humans cannot but see it in different ways — Ekam Sat Viprah Bahuda Vadanti.

Western universalism is a curse that seeks to destroy others, and their versions of the truth. It does not matter whether this truth is about god or his creations. It is essentially about creating a binary, to pit us against them, our god versus their demon, our truth versus your falsehood.

The ideological gap between a largely peaceful Jehovah’s Witness and violent communism or jihadism is not that large. They are essentially questionable ideas implying a false and non-inclusive idea of universalism. They must be abandoned.