Written by: Rajiv Mehrotra
3 min readJul 13, 2026 06:34 AM IST
First published on: Jul 13, 2026 at 06:34 AM IST
A democracy should welcome the swing of the political pendulum. That is how republics renew themselves. Anxiety begins when the rejection of appeasement hardens into majoritarian entitlement, and a change of government becomes, for some, a change in who may pray to whom, when and where.
I was still a teenager in Calcutta when my father first took me to hear a Swami Ranganathananda lecture. He would one day become the 13th president of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission; he would also give me my first diksha. In the years that followed, I became a student of the Dalai Lama, my root guru for more than 45 years. Each tradition deepened rather than displaced the other.
That tradition has shaped lives beyond the monastery. As a young man, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sought to join the Mission and was turned away. Its genius lay there too, in redirecting spiritual aspiration towards the world, and then releasing it.
Behind that genius stands 19th-century Bengal. Ram Mohan Roy challenged sati; Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar fought for widow remarriage; Rabindranath Tagore gave Bengal its innermost voice. But it was Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda who gave this modernity its spiritual conscience.
Ramakrishna was, above all, a bhakta. Yet from that devotion emerged one of the most radical religious testimonies of modern India. In the 1860s, Govinda Rai arrived at Dakshineswar. Kshatriya by caste and Hindu by birth, he had given himself over to Islamic practice with the intensity of a Sufi dervish. Ramakrishna sought initiation from him and entered Islamic sadhana. He recited namaz regularly, and had “no inclination” even to visit Hindu deities. “I had to practise each religion for a time. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity. I realised that there is only one God toward whom all are travelling; but the paths are different.” From this emerged the phrase that would animate a movement: Yato mat, tato path. As many faiths, so many paths.
It fell to Vivekananda to carry this into the modern world: Practical Vedanta, grounded in consciousness, and seva, the conviction that service was worship. At the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, he told his audience that his tradition believed not merely in tolerating other religions, but in accepting all of them as true. In a television conversation I had with Swami Ranganathananda, he said something I have never forgotten: “If you feel your religion is superior, keep it to yourself.” That inheritance matters because India’s argument with itself is not over. Religion is again asked to declare itself in sharp-edged public forms: As identity, grievance, assertion, boundary, proof of belonging. The civilisational capacity to live with difference without panic is the precondition for everything else. The shallow mind fears difference. The trained mind is enlarged by it.
Yato mat, tato path does not ask us to pretend that religions have no differences. It asks that we do not mistake inherited fear for spiritual fidelity. A Bengali priest demonstrated this by walking away from the temple he served and discovering that the Divine he worshipped was not diminished by another name. The tradition he seeded has not been forgotten. One prays.
The author is honorary secretary, The Foundation of the Dalai Lama. Views are personal
The tradition he seeded has not been forgotten. One prays.(Illustration: C R Sasikumar/File) 
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