Hindu Prayer in U.S. Senate

Posted by Harsh Nevatia Jun 27, 2007

Rajan Zed is a Hindu chaplain from Nevada. He is also the director of public affairs of Hindu Temple of Northern Nevada and spokesman for India Association of Northern Nevada. On March 19, 2007 Zed read a Hindu prayer in the Nevada Sate Assembly and on May 9, 2007 he prayed with the Nevada State Senate.

The encouraging thing about this event was that it was attended and lauded by priests from other religious denominations. This kind of support to “other” religions is the need of the day in a world threatening to split along religious lines. Perhaps this was made possible by the reputation that Zed commands in the community. He takes the trouble to learn about other faiths and when he lectures on Hinduism, he seeks to inform rather than to convert. Hinduism is anyway a religion that does not proselytize.

Now Zed is set to break new ground. He will recite Hindu prayers in the U.S. Senate in Washington when it opens on July 12, 2007. This is perhaps a result of the growing Hindu population in the United States and the growing interest in the tenets of Hinduism, which treats the world as one family and accepts other religions as different paths to the same God. This is also the result of a desire to move away from harsh rhetoric against other religions and build religious bridges instead. Zed is likely to recite prayers in Sanskrit from the Riga Veda, the earliest religious scripture, and the Upanishads. He will begin and end the session with the incantation of “Aum”, the sound from which the Hindu scriptures were divined by the sages.

When this event was reported in the Indian media, it evoked surprise and even shock. Religious prayers are not allowed in Indian Parliament and government events, because of the secular nature of the government. Whenever right wing political parties have tried to introduce Hindu prayers, it has met stiff opposition as mentioned in the blog on yoga. The view taken by the other political parties is that the Hindu majority will victimize the minority religions if such practices are permitted.

Another reason why this event has surprised many Indians, especially those of the younger generation, is that Indian society is slowly moving away from its original culture and adopting the culture of the west symbolized by MTV and McDonalds. Hence the interest that Hinduism, with its ancient heritage, is creating in the west is something of a conundrum to many.