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We need to understand something very fundamental.

There is no such thing as Hinduism in the way we generally understand the word religion.

“Hindu” was never the name of one particular belief system. It was never one fixed philosophy, one book, one prophet, one god, one prescribed way of worship or one particular way in which everybody was supposed to live.

Hindu was first the identity of a land. And because of that land, the people who lived here came to be called Hindus. Because of those people, an enormous civilisation came to be understood as Hindu civilisation. And from that civilisational identity came words like Hindustan. This is important because today, the moment we hear the word Hindu, we immediately reduce it in our minds to a particular type of religious person. Someone who goes to a temple or worships certain gods and follows certain customs. Someone who believes certain things.

But that is a very limited understanding of what grew out of this land. What we have traditionally called Sanatana Dharma is something much more fundamental. Sanatana means eternal. And Dharma does not simply mean religion. Dharma means the law - that which holds everything in its nature, the fundamental law according to which the entire existence functions.

So Sanatana Dharma, quite literally, points towards the Eternal Law. It is saying that there are fundamental laws to life and existence, and that the possibility for a human being is to live in harmony with them. You don't have to believe in gravity for gravity to work or subscribe to a philosophy for your body to follow the laws of nature or belong to any religion for cause and effect to operate in your life.

The laws of existence do not ask for your belief. They simply are. 

If the human intellect can be released from fear, guilt and excessive greed - if you can look at life without constantly bending reality according to your insecurities, compulsions and desires - naturally you begin moving towards what this civilisation called Dharma. In that sense, being Hindu was never fundamentally about subscribing to a religion.

It was about belonging to a civilisation that spent thousands of years asking a much deeper question:

What are the laws of life, and how can a human being live in harmony with them?

And this is the most important thing to understand: the Eternal Law does not only belong to Hindustan. Hindustan has explored it deeply and built a civilisation around it, but Sanatana Dharma - eternal law - excludes no nations and no human being. It includes everyone, everywhere.

Today is Pakistan's Independence Day.

And whenever we talk about keeping religion completely outside politics in India, I think there is one historical reality we cannot simply erase from the conversation. Pakistan came into existence through the Partition of India, in a political process where religious identity became fundamental to the demand for a separate nation.

What followed was hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes. Atrocities and brutalities that were committed torn entire families. Entire communities were uprooted. People who had lived on the same land for generations suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a border. There was extraordinary violence, displacement and suffering.

1947 is gone. But a family that fled its home carries that memory. All of the living members of the family and their unborn children will carry those memories. Fear, distrust, insecurity, attachment to land, ideas about community and the need for protection will travel from grandparents to parents to children who were born decades after the original event.

The conversation around the "politicisation of Sanatana Dharma" is much more complicated than simply saying: "Religion should have nothing to do with politics." In an ideal world, perhaps spiritual life and electoral politics should remain completely separate.

But Indian society did not arrive in 2026 without history.

One of the defining political events of modern India was the division of the country along lines deeply connected with religious identity. So there is a legitimate question that needs to be asked:

How does a civilisation preserve its religious and cultural identity without allowing that identity to become merely a political weapon?

Because forgetting history is dangerous. Living permanently inside historical trauma may be equally dangerous. Before dismissing the politicisation of Sanatana Dharma as something irrational or purely contemporary, we need to understand the historical wound from which it emerges.

Today is Pakistan's Independence Day.

And whenever we talk about keeping religion completely outside politics in India, I think there is one historical reality we cannot simply erase from the conversation. Pakistan came into existence through the Partition of India, in a political process where religious identity became fundamental to the demand for a separate nation.

What followed was hundreds of thousands of people losing their homes. Atrocities and brutalities that were committed torn entire families. Entire communities were uprooted. People who had lived on the same land for generations suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a border. There was extraordinary violence, displacement and suffering.

1947 is gone. But a family that fled its home carries that memory. All of the living members of the family and their unborn children will carry those memories. Fear, distrust, insecurity, attachment to land, ideas about community and the need for protection will travel from grandparents to parents to children who were born decades after the original event.

The conversation around the "politicisation of Sanatana Dharma" is much more complicated than simply saying: "Religion should have nothing to do with politics." In an ideal world, perhaps spiritual life and electoral politics should remain completely separate.

But Indian society did not arrive in 2026 without history.

One of the defining political events of modern India was the division of the country along lines deeply connected with religious identity. So there is a legitimate question that needs to be asked:

How does a civilisation preserve its religious and cultural identity without allowing that identity to become merely a political weapon?

Because forgetting history is dangerous. Living permanently inside historical trauma may be equally dangerous. Before dismissing the politicisation of Sanatana Dharma as something irrational or purely contemporary, we need to understand the historical wound from which it emerges.

My exposure to the words like Dharma and Karma were from B.R. Chopra's Mahabharata and Ramanand Sagar's Ramayana which I watched while growing up. And I always believed that Karma is something only very serious people perform and it is a very important thing to do. And that only Gods or demigods or people with Supernatural powers are the ones who protect Dharma. When I watched Mahabharata again while I was in my late teens, I actually caught the meaning of Karma and could relate it with my life. But Dharma was still something I thought only is about people who are very very important and I belong to middle class family - what is my responsibility in uplifting the Dharma.

Only very recently, after going through the Inner Engineering program designed by Sadhguru, I came to know that Karma is something that is affecting all life on the planet and it is not some reward or punishment system as everyone understands it. And Dharma is the law. As there are laws and rules for performing any kind of action in the world, Dharma are the laws of the existence. It had never occurred to me yet paradoxically I had been drawn to this question that while living in this existence there are laws that this existence is governed by but I was in complete oblivion to what those laws are. After going through the Inner Engineering program, if we are in tune with the laws of the existence, if we are in Dharma, if we perform our Karma being in Dharma, that's the way the existence yields to one. Dharma was never engrained deeply within me, I always thought not being bad to other, being a good citizen, being there for friends or maintaining a relationship with relatives and people of the society - I thought by following these I was doing Dharma, but none of these are existentially relevant.

I first understood how Karma is happening from me and how is it happening out of me. For example, I am breathing - the air that I am breathing is going into my body, and is making by organs functions, so physical karma is happening, whether I choose to sit, stand, run, sleep but physically karma is still happening. Whether I am sitting, the air is in some form of contact with my body, if I start running my contact and my bodily relationship with air increases and changes depending according to the movement I am making. Now the same air is responsible for my mind thinking in a certain way, my emotions being in a certain way. And there are innumerable things you can do with breath and energy. So based on all these there are 4 different types of Karmas happening at the same time within ourselves. The laws that are governing the performing of Karma is Dharma. If I were not to perform any Karma - that is not possible as Karma is our bondage, the very bond that attaches us to the world and yt it is the way for liberation. Anything that happens to our lives internally and externally is governed by Dharma and Karma. And that makes it the most important knowledge to be imparted to all the human beings on the planet.

I realised that even if I don't believe Dharma is important for my life, it is what I am governed by and Karma is the basis of my existence and the very reason I am a human and I exist so I started paying attention to it.