#NonfictionWriting

A hypothetical ‘Twist’ to Nehru's 'Tryst with Destiny'

Mistaking it as some sort of an accolade by one of Modi’s so-called ‘andh bhakts’, the skeptics shouldn’t skip this for his mere presence in the subtitle.  Whatever, as a matter of fact, the historical facts vindicate his choice for this hypothetical venture, rather than that of Netaji Bose or Sardar Patel. It’s true, contrary to propaganda, Netaji caused the British-exist from India, confirmed by none other than Clement Atlee, the one who led them out. But given the turbulence of that time, he was not destined to become Azad Hind’s first prime minister. As for Patel, the people’s choice for the premier position, instead of shouldering the nation at its most critical juncture, he catered to maverick Gandhi’s wicked whim, to put its fate in the ill-equipped hands of the fallible Nehru. So, that makes Modi, who proved himself as a nationalist to the core, in thoughts, words and deeds, as the right choice to man this piece, more so, as he just overtook Nehru’s uninterrupted stint as the country’s elected prime minister.

It is pertinent to note that in his 15 Aug 1947 midnight ‘Tryst with Destiny’ address to India’s constituent assembly, Nehru had stated at the very outset - “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially”. Well, for all intents and purposes, if it’s not an exhibition of his utter lack of ambition to lead India to its once-held preeminent position in the world, what else. Just contrast his limited thinking with Modi’s audacious vision of Vikasit Bharat and his energetic approach to realise that. So, hereunder is India’s hypothetical tryst with destiny, had Nehru been a nationalist, or if Modi were in his position as the first prime minister.  [Emphasis supplied] 

“Dear Bharatiya:

No denying that on this august occasion, though it is tempting to indulge in grandiose posturing, I would rather resort to plain speaking to outline my thoughtful vision for the eternal good of our new Bharat in the making.

I, for one, believe that there is no cause for celebrating our long-denied freedom for which we paid the price of partition, of our precious land. Besides, I dare say that we cannot remain oblivious to the fact that the spirit of our people, the soul of our karma bhoomi, came to be stymied under the alien regimens that lasted for a thousand years. Thus, at this historic juncture, as our resolve should be to lead our once-redoubtable country to the new frontiers of excellence, in the not-so-distant-future that is, so we must reckon this as a substantive moment, not a symbolic event.

Hence, it is incumbent upon us to apply our minds to nation-building, for which, first of all, we must, above all else, imbibe that spirit and induce it in the minds of our people, which Alberuni in 1030 CE characterised thus: "The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs." Thus, it is the onerous duty of all of us that happen to hold the positions of influence and power at this critical time, to reinvigorate that sense of pride in our people, with a resplendent past, distant though. So, let us all strive to create the Bharat Varsha of Swami Vivekananda’s dreams in which his Sanatani, garv se kaho hum hindu hai (proudly proclaim that we’re Hindus), refrain is on every lip.

No mistaking that for this ancient land has historically been the Hindustan, and if anything, with the creation of Pakistan for the Muslims, the India today is unequivocally Hindu, by its composition, culture, custom and character. Thus, for some delusionary applause from within and without, I see no point in singing paeans to the mythical ganga-jamni tehjeeb, which, anyway, the partition on the Hindu-Muslim fissures made fallacious. So, in the national interest, what is needed is a hard talk to deal with the ugly reality of the faith-driven Muslim disaffection of the Hindus, conceitedly called kafirs. Strangely though, having whole-heartedly subscribed to the Muslim League’s two nation theory, based on the premise of “Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations with separate religions, cultures, and values”, over a third of the enthusiastic believers of the same, chose to remain in the Hindu India! Is it mere hypocrisy?    

Whatever, it should not be lost on them that Hindus, having been forced to cede one-fourth of their land for a Muslim homeland, did not insist upon their repatriation to it but instead, hosted them in their midst. If anything, that Hindu gesture alone, in the normal human course, is cause enough for these Muslims to rescind their separatist mindset to become the emotional ingredient of our national character. But the hitch, as pinpointed by my erudite brother, Dr. BR Ambedkar, is that “Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin”, and I’m certain that he would love to be proved wrong on both counts. More so, as the onus is on the Muslims to become worthy of the Hindu magnanimity, it pays them to realize that the prejudices of their alien faith render them into square pegs in the round holes of Bharat that is India. And for that, it’s essential for them to understand that the inimical content of their faith, shaped by the alien tribal mores of the dark ages, has become redundant in these altered times, more so in the multi-religious societies like ours.

However, lest the Muslims should feel singled out on the dogmatic front, we must caution the mistaken Christians that their urge to convert the vulnerable Hindus, ostensibly for their supposed salvation, is grossly injurious to Indian social harmony, national unity and demographic health. So, they would be well-advised to desist from their ill-founded evangelism for unlike the prophet-centric prejudices of their, and the other Semitic faiths, the philosophy of Sanatana dharma has evolved through the ages, by the sages. Whatever, it is a travesty of enlightenment in that these dogmatic Semitic orders, sans philosophy, sworn to outrageous diktats of their intolerant gods, should have at all gained their cultish grounds in our land of the Upanishads. Oh, how they visualized that it’s man, who created gods, not the other way round! It’s another matter though, sadly over time, the Sanatani wisdom gave way to the Hindu superstitions, resulting in India’s intellectual decline.

Be that as it may, we must admit that Hindus have to blame only themselves for the Semitic mess in their midst for they disregarded the Sanatana ethos of Vasudhaiva kutumbakam (holds world all in one household) to denigrate part of their ilk as lesser souls, and, what’ worse, branded some others as untouchables. Sadly, though understandably, that make them all the easy prey of the evangelist poachers, equipped with false religious assertations and fake social postulations. However, wonder why it doesn’t ever dawn on the proselytizers of either dispensation that the manner in which they go about luring the others into their lot, in essence, is a dubious way of spreading, what they propagate as a noble religion, or the God’s straight path, or whatever! However, it goes without saying that before demanding the adherents of the alien faiths to imbibe Bharatiyata, the Hindus themselves must bring their sidelined ilk into the Sanatana fold, in both letter and spirit.

Last but not the least is our onerous task to reweave our tattered moral fabric, which, once, as noted by ancient Chinese pilgrims, was ethically pure in an economically prosperous setting. Why, for that matter, even at the end of the rapacious Islamic regimes, the forerunners to the exploitative British colonial rule, our GDP was over one-fourth of the global one, which sadly stands at a meagre three percent of it now. Just the same, without delving too deep into the myriad causes of our moral decay and the economic decline, suffice it say that as corruption is the source of our social scourge that plagues our country in every which way, it can be affirmed without any contradiction that it is treason by another name. It’s thus, unravelling the well-entrenched graft from independent Bharat can only be our vande mataram in its true sense.

Just the same, the problem with a problem is that until one admits that it exists, one cannot address it, and unless it is addressed, it persists. So, let’s honestly confess the problems our country faces, and sincerely strive to evolve feasible solutions to effectively address the same, collectively that is. Given the impeccable pedigree and innate genius of Bharat, I’m quite certain that our people and their progeny, sooner than later, would scale it to the formidable heights, at which our progenitors once positioned it. So, it is with that conviction, I commend this occasion as the beginning of the end of a millennial eclipse for our nation to regain and retain its resplendence for all times to come. Let’s trust our people for that.

Vande mataram.”

Now, from the hypothetical nationalism, back to the ‘Tryst with Destiny’ of the “Englishman by education, Muslim by culture, and Hindu by birth” Nehru, propped up by Gandhi, lo, for being “the most English among us all”, for the comparative record. It’s no wonder then that in its editorial, ‘India: another tryst with destiny’, The Guardian of England, opined that “Today, 18 May 2014, may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India”, and that was the day when its 15th Lok Sabha was dissolved to make way for Narendra Damodardas Modi to be sworn in as its 14th Prime Minister later, on 26 May 2014.

And for record, the following is the rest of Nehru’s ‘tryst’:

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new -- when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India, and her people, and to the still larger cause of humanity.

At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again.

The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Freedom and power bring responsibility. That responsibility rests upon this assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains of labor, and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over, and it is the future that beckons to us now.

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we might fulfill the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.

The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe "every tear from every eye." That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labor and to work, and work hard, to -- to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart.

Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom; so is prosperity now; and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.”

Now, the rest is for your contemplation

After the millennia grind under foreign yokes, first that of the Islamic invaders and then of the British colonizers, Bharat Varsha, the ancient land of the Hindus, regained its independence as India, albeit downsized by the latter by carving out Pakistan from it as a homeland for its Muslims. Thus, it would have been logical that the Hindus had the truncated India all for themselves but owing to its wooly political leadership, it was not to be, which forever constrains them to drink the same old wine in a new bottle. What’s worse was Nehru’s nipping the Hindu nationalistic impulses in the bud, perceiving them as offensive to the religious sentiments of the Muslim minority that made India merely a habitat for varied interest groups.    

What with its Muslim progenation progressively becoming a formidable electoral vote-bank, Indian politicians of all hues, barring the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP for short), have been weary of nationalism that is anathema to Islam. By exploiting the Hindu caste divisions and exacerbating the Muslim identity crisis, the self-serving ruling classes had thrived all through by thwarting nationalism from occupying any political space. At last, though the BJP could raise nationalistic ripples through its Ayodhya movement towards the end of the last century, that it failed to turn them into sustainable electoral currents thereafter exemplifies the vice-like grip the secular parties, read vote-bank politics, came to have on Indian electorate. By the way, nothing symbolizes the Hindu plight in independent India than their inability even to make a case for the restoration of the venerated temples at Kashi and Madhura, vandalized by the Islamic invaders. What with the creation of Pakistan, as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, it can be said that India’s Hindu-Muslim heritage no longer holds good - though Muslims want to have the Pakistani cake and eat the Indian one - and thus the Hindu retrieval of these shrines from the Muslim hands should not raise any secular hackles, should it? It was another matter though that restoration of the much vandalized Somnath temple owed more to Sardar Patel’s nationalistic push than any Hindu religious will.  

However, the inexorable rise of Narendra Modi of the BJP in the Indian political arena after 2014 that too on the plank of Hindu nationalism, made the ‘politicians on the retreat’ to raise the bogey of a Hindu Theocratic State ‘in the making’, threatening the very idea of secular India, conceived by the founding fathers. While this clearly is a ploy of the entrenched politicians to stall the unmistakable voter-tilt against their brand of politics, the ideologically driven left-liberals, nay libtards, and Islamapologists - Islamapologia is condescending to descend to Muslims - together are disdainful of India’s governance by the so-called Hindu ‘fundamentalists’. If anything, the rise of the Islamic radicalism in the theocratic Muslim countries that became the breeding grounds for terrorism has come in handy for the libtards to come up with their ant-Hindu canards. So goes the argument that any revival of the Hindu fundamentalism, as if there was one in India’s long history, would likewise pave the way for a Pakistani India, with like consequences.

Be that as it may, what an irony that the Christian Islamapologists, who don’t shy away from exhibiting their Hindu allergy, fail to see that Muslims from the Islamic nations, once colonized by them, have begun to Islamize their own countries! Given the pace at which the ‘fastest growing religion’ is growing in Europe and in the Americas, it may not be long before their progeny would be cursing their ancestors for failing to Christianize their erstwhile Muslim colonies. That would also be when the much maligned Hindus gleefully watch the bikinis giving way to burkas, even as the beards grow longer and longer there. But more to the point, as Islam nips the inquiring mind in the bud, in time, the superiority of the western thought would be a thing of the past, as is the case with the once advanced cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. (Read ‘Islamic Assault ‘n Christian Retreat’ at this site)

Leaving the West to its self-destructive Islamapologian ways, a closer look at India would reveal how the fear of the Hindu Theocratic State is unfounded to say the least. True, the Islamic fundamentalism could usher in theocratic states in many Muslim countries owing to the religious fervour of the believers for the adoption of the oppressive sharia and other depressive Islamic laws that Islam enjoins them to abide by. But when it comes to Hinduism, there are no such religious ways that the Hindu masses crave to be the laws of the State to its detriment. In fact, it is the other way round as there have been umpteen reformative movements to eradicate the social ills that crept into the day to day Hindu life, such as the scourge of untouchability. Whatever positivity the Islamic and Christian presence in India there might have had was offset by the male chauvinism occasioned by the former and sexual prudery induced by the latter in the open Hindu ethos.

Back to the issue, the diversity of the Indian sub-nationalism, rooted in the vernacular affiliations, would provide enough hurdles and more for the alleged fundamentalists to rally Indians towards the Hindu Theocratic State. Moreover, in Arya Varta’s long history as Bharat Varsha, save Aurangzeb’s brief Muslim theocratic interregnum in its Hindustan era that too in parts, which the libtards push under their secular carpet, there never was a Hindu Theocratic State in its bosom. It was as it was, and as it would be, for the very concept of it is alien to the Hindu ethos, steeped in the tradition of liberalism from inception. Yet, a flashback into the colonial Indian history would reveal that it is when the Islamic sense of separateness took wings as the Muslim craving for a separate homeland for them that some farsighted Hindus like Savarkar, with the hindsight of history and a grasp of the Islamic ways, deemed it fit to wake up the Hindus from their suicidal stupor.

But by then, the Hindu society was beset with antagonistic caste divisions, sowed by the priestly interests through interpolations such as chāturvarnyam in the revered Bhagavad-Gita (more about that in “All about Interpolations” in the author’s Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of Self-help, a free ebook in the public  domain  which were later exacerbated by the feudal order. So, it was imperative for Savarkar to first lay unity bridges across the caste divisions by defining the Hindu as “one who was born of Hindu parents and regarded India as his motherland as well as holy land” and then unite them on the Hindutva ground of “common nation, common race, and common culture of their ancient nation”. Besides, by proclaiming that “we Hindus are bound together not only by the tie of the love we bear to a common fatherland and by the common blood that courses through our veins and keeps our hearts throbbing and our affections warm, but also by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization - our Hindu culture”, he sought to integrate them emotionally as well.  However, owing to वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम् (vasudhaiva kutumbakam, world is one family) being the undying ethos of Sanātana dharma, he later remoulded Hindus as “those who consider India to be the land in which their ancestors lived, as well as the land in which their religion originated.”

In juxtaposition, fundamentalism is all about the perseverance with the dictates and the enforcement of the diktats in a given scripture based on the fundamental and unwavering belief of their inerrancy. It may be appreciated that for a theocratic state to come into being, it is essential that vast multitudes of the majority community should clamour for it as Muslims do for their Caliphate. Any informed analysis of the present day Hindu social structure and its religious practices will point out to the fact that the Hindu Theocratic State is incomprehensible even conceptually; leave alone the possibility of it ever becoming an Indian reality. However, on the flip side is the lack of the Hindu intellectual apathy for the antagonistic religiosity of the minorities - the Christian disdain for them as heathens and the Islamic dismissal of them as kafirs. Besides, how the laudable, though naïve, ‘world is one family’ outlook has been stretched to ludicrous lengths is testified by the way the alien faiths were allowed in Hindustan, over a millennium, to unceasingly expand their demographic ground through calculative conversion and progenation, without let or hindrance.

It’s thus the history of Hindustan had thrust a multi-faith feather on the Hindu egalitarian cap though letting the Muslims and the Christians to wear their exuberant religious colours. And that proved fatal as Muslims, after having shared the land of the Hindus for centuries, yet began to demand a homeland for them, which in effect means that they don’t deem anything as their own unless fully owned by them. And true to their intent and character, once the British gave them Pakistan, they were ever at getting rid of the Hindus from it, which should be an eye-opener for the libtards. But yet, maybe fearful of being branded as Islamaphobes, they tend to be indulgent to the Muslim penchant to carve out exclusive Islamic enclaves in India, be it in Kashmir, Assam, West Bengal, or wherever they are in numbers. (By the way, Islamapologia is about condescending to descend to the Musalmans) What’s worse, they not only cry hoarse over the Hindu resentment over the Muslim demographic designs but also preach the virtues of religious tolerance, a constitutional obligation at that, to Hindus!  (Read Incongruities in Indian Constitution - A Summation at this site) Lo, it’s akin to the devil quoting the scriptures that is the good quotes for there are many a devilish one therein. Its ditto with evangelicals who are ever at reaping the ‘great harvest of faith’ in the Hindu hinterland and that gladdens Western hearts to pick up the libtard cues to badmouth the Hindus the world over.

So be it, but the Encyclopedia Britannica describes “Hindutva ('Hindu-ness'), as an ideology that sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values" and India’s Apex Court had ruled that “Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism ...”. However, it can be said that their lordships erred in assuming that there is something called Hindu fundamentalism, religious or cultural, for the Oxford Dictionary states that “fundamentalism is strict maintenance of ancient or fundamental doctrines of any religion, esp. Islam.”

I rest my argument by quoting from my Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife, also in the public domain as free ebook - “The Hindu fundamentalism is a misnomer, coined by the cunning and subscribed by the naïve, which had come in handy to the Semitic proselytizers to undermine the Indian nationalism. Why, it should be apparent to the discerning that while the Brahmanism is orthodox, the sanatana dharma, exemplified by swadharma, is amorphous, and in them lay the social diversity of the Hindu spiritual ethos.”   

Unmindful of the old adage, when you point a finger at someone else, there are three pointing back to you, Udhayanidhi, the Christian son of the atheist Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin and his devout Hindu wife, had raged an unseemly controversy through his clarion call for the eradication of sanatana dharma aka Hinduism that he likened to dengue, malaria and corona. It is another matter though that he has no issues with the ethics of the Christianity that required him to get baptized into its fold to wed his believing beloved. Be that as it may, his closet Christian party colleague A. Raja pitched in with AIDS and leprosy tags to picture Hinduism as a menace to the world at large for it is a synonym of casteism. But who were to ask the Indian Church as to why it won’t deem encouraging Crypto-Christianity, which is the secret practice of Christianity, in places and time periods where Christians were persecuted or Christianity was outlawed, as a fraud in the secular Bharat, whose constitution naively grants its citizens, read Christians and Muslims, the right to propagate their faith, which is but the license to convert the gullible Hindus. Likewise, who were to question the morality of the closet Christians, who allegedly follow the teaching of Jesus and yet have no compunction in hiding their changed faith to fool the public and deceive the State to derive undue benefits to gain illegally? That the Church is hands in glove with this duplicitous evangelical ways is of no credit either to their God or His Son is somehow lost on the born-again Christians as well as the eager converts.  In so far as the caste in the Christianity is concerned, the segregated Churches stand tall to testify the same. That being the Indian Christian reality, there’s no gainsaying for the dalits to embrace the alien faith on the sly but yet the onus is on the Hindu samaaj to make them feel at home in the Sanatana tent. 

However, the Hindu intellectual response to the malicious Semitic attack on their dharmic ethos was stymied for the caste has always been the Achilles heel of their social chore. Hence, it is imperative to probe the Hindu social ills and delve into the Church’s religious ill-wills so as to bring the lopsided discourse onto an even keel. It may be noted that even as narō nārayana (man is but God) is the integral maxim of sanatana dharma, the Christian credo suffers no qualms about the inhuman slavery as averred in the Bible (1 Peter 2.18) – “Slaves, be subject to your masters with all reverence, not only to those who are good and equitable but also to those who are perverse” and such. Also, whereas Hinduism espouses the eclectic concept of ekam sadviprā bahudhā vadanti (what is right is One only, describe it wise variedly), the Church holds the narrow view that only faith in Jesus portends salvation and the choice against him results in eternal doom. That’s not all, while sanatana dharma postulates vasudhaiva kutumbakam (holds world all in one household) in the Christian scheme of things, all non-Semites are heathens; if anything Islam debunks all other faiths, Christianity included, and vilifies all non-Muslims, not exempting the Christians, as kafirs destined to eternally burn in the hell of a hell. 

It’s no wonder thus, in the times of yore, while the Hindus soft-sold their eclectic dharma for the greater good of the mankind, the my way or the high way Christianity, averred Edward Gibbon, ‘was the harbinger of the destabilization of the religious harmony of the ancient world, achieved by the facility with which the most different and even hostile nations embraced, or at least respected, each other’s superstitions’. If anything, the Muslims made it worse in medieval times by thrusting their even more intolerant Islamic dogma on much of the then hapless world. However, the irony of the Abrahamic religions is that whereas their common God freed the Jews, his chosen people, from slavery of the Pharaohs, the followers of His Christian Son and the believers in His Islamic Messenger came to enslave the conquered peoples besides commoditizing them for the slave market! That apart, if only these convert-censurers of sanatana dharma were to be mindful of the Christian treatment of the Black Americans well into middle of the last century besides the prevalence of the Jewish hatred, the racial abuse and the religious atrocities in the Christian as well as the Islamic societies, they would have probably held their vicious tongues in their cheeks and desisted from spewing religious venom against the dharma of their forebears.  

Whatever, the Hindu social aberration that is the abhorrent dalit slight was never as dehumanizing as the Abrahamic slavery, and thus the ranting of Udhayanidhi & Co to eradicate the sanatana dharma is akin to the Semitic pot calling the Hindu kettle black. Just the same, there is a cynical method in the Semitic madness to deride Hinduism and that is to turn the disgruntled Hindu castes into an evangelic feed to try to fulfill the fond hope of Pope John Paul II expressed in New Delhi in November 1999, “may the third Christian Millennium witness a great harvest of faith on this vast and vital continent”. If anything, and despite the Papal threat to their national interests, first the Hindu cadres of the Congress party followed by the sanatana voters naively vested, for two decades or so, the political power in the Christian hands of Sonia Gandhi, who unabashedly gave a fillip to his evangelical agenda like never before to try to disturb Bharat’s demographic balance. 

However as Bharat’s destiny would have it, in 2014, when the reign of power passed onto Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist, he slowly but steadily reined in the non-governmental organizations engaged in surreptitious conversion programs facilitated by the Western Christian entities through illegal monetary support for the same. That apart, the introduction of the anti-conversion laws by his party-ruled States to check fraudulent conversions, and more so, the increasing Hindu awareness of the Semitic threat to their demographic order, have begun to pique the crypto and the closet Christians to the hilt. But this is only half an anti-evangelical measure and the tougher half lies in Hindus themselves admitting the inequalities in the caste order and redressing the same. 

Well, to begin with, it is inconceivable that sanatana dharma with narō nārayana (man is but God) ethos would have conceptualized the exalted uchch and untouchable neech amongst men, and yet this abominable disparity had become the caste reality of the Hindu polity, the why, how, and when of which is rarely analyzed and hardly researched. What is worse is the Hindu hypocrisy which proclaims that in fact caste is not about birth but is all about one’s guna (character) or that all are Shudras at birth and it is guna that enables one to become a Brahmin, a Kshatriya, or a Vysya, as the case may be. While this absurd ‘Shudras at birth’ thesis belies the naivety of the savarna minds, the alleged guna-aided ascent on the caste ladder exhibits their intellectual dishonesty but for which Dr. BR Ambedkar would have been anointed as Brahmarshi by them. Whatever, as such homilies to humour the disgruntled dalits have come to naught, it is imperative that a level playing caste ground is provided to alleviate their justifiable bitterness.         

In this regard, it is worth noting that in the early 11th Century as Al-Beruni noticed, the Vysyas the agriculturist-traders and Shudras the artisan-labour force lived in the same quarters, which happenstance underscores that the varna vyavastha of yore was not that caste-tight after all. But sadly, so it seems, at some point thereafter, Shudras, based on their respective occupations, came to sub-divide themselves into numerous caste groups in what can be called vruththi vyavastha, an imitation of the hierarchical varna vyavastha, which not only relegated the dalits to the lower rungs of the caste-ladder but also pushed their habitats to the village fringes. Needless to say, the genesis of this inimical sectarianism that facilitated the fruition of the alien Islamic and the Christian dogmas by way of conversion of the marginalized Hindu sections beg for a robust academic research and a wider public debate to understand our chequered history. 

There is yet another dimension to the Shudric antagonism and that is the scriptural distortions brought about by inane interpolations in Purusha Sukta and Bhagvad-Gita that are highlighted in the author’s free e-book ‘Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation)’ available in the internet that is besides the much maligned Manu Smriti, unfairly though, as brought out in his essay ‘On Bashing Manu Smriti, Or Flogging A Dead Horse Riding A Blind Ass’ that can be Googled for reading. Last but not the least, as for the embittered Hindu souls, they may realize that their true path to salvation is not becoming Crypto-Christians but through their social ‘Dalit as Deva - à la Black is Beautiful’ assertion, accessible through the net.

When the Semitic free run on the Hindu turf under Sonia’s proxy watch ended with the ascent of Narendra Modi onto the Delhi gaddi, the Indian agendas of the Christian west and the Muslim umma faced impediments resulting in the brouhaha over the growing religious intolerance of Hindus towards India’s minorities. Given the racial biases and the religious prejudices of both against the Hindus and that the world media, by and large is controlled by them, a critical appraisal of their propaganda with objective lenses is called for.

Hence, as the accusation is on the religious ground, it is imperative that the theocratic credos of Islam and Christianity as well as the philosophical ethos of santana dharma aka Hinduism, the only surviving ‘way of life’ of yore on earth, are to be reckoned with.

The pristine precepts of Hinduism are -

Narō Nārayana

Man is but God,

Vasudhaiva kutumbakam

Holds world all in one household, and

ekam sadviprā bahudhā vadanti.

What is right is One only, describe it wise variedly.

However, in time, as the broad ‘man is but God’ became the narrow ‘caste is the creed’, the so-called Hindu upper castes, so as not to suffer all and sundry, turned head on the unifying ‘holds world all in One household’ into the divisive ‘sunder castes men on earth’. What is worse, they managed to push the so-called lower castes into untouchable dalit ghettos on the peripheries, and far away from temples of their gods.

It was into such an Indian setting that the Muslim vandals, spurred by the Quranic credo of loot and rapine, made their way to render it unto Islam. However, setting aside the Muslim penchant to force the conquered populace into their alien faith, for the most part, the craving of the deprived-of-god dalits for a religious hold that could have furthered their Islamic cause to convert. Nevertheless, the self-absorbed upper caste Hindus were indifferent to the socially inimical development that began to upset the demographics of their ancient land even as the progeny of the converted began to imbibe the ethos of Islam that underscores their inseparable separateness from the non-believers that is besides inculcating hatred towards them with Quranic diktats such as –

“Your friend can be only Allah: and His messenger and those who believe, who establish worship and pay the poor due, and bow down (in prayer).”

“O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. He among you who taketh them for friends is (one) of them. Lo! Allah guideth not wrongdoing folk.”

“Let not the believers take disbelievers for their friends in preference to believers. Whoso doeth that hath no connection with Allah unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them, taking (as it were) security. Allah biddeth you beware (only) of Himself. Unto Allah is the journeying.”

“Those who believe do battle for the cause of Allah; and those who disbelieve do battle for the cause of idols. So fight the minions of the devil. Lo! the devil’s strategy is very weak.”

“Relent not in pursuit of enemy, If ye are suffering, lo! They suffer even as ye suffer and ye hope from Allah that for which they cannot hope. Allah is ever Knower, Wise.”

“It is not for any Prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land. Ye desire the lure of this world and Allah desireth (for you) the Hereafter, and Allah is Mighty Wise.”

However, the haughty upper caste Hindus, who according to Alberuni thought ‘there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs”, never deemed fit to grasp the nitty-gritty of the alien faith and instead could have falsely assumed that it would be but a benign variant of their own dharma, ‘what is right is One only, describe it wise variedly’, and thus saw no need to contain its growth in their midst for which their progeny paid the Islamic price in the form of Pakistan a millennium later.

In that setting, while the upper caste Hindus, who dismissed the Islamic invaders as mlechchas, also derided the converts as katuas, owing to their circumcision that their new faith ordained, the new-found religious aggressiveness of the latter coupled with their age-old social grievance could have ensconced them in an impotent rage. However, the fact that the intruders happened to lord over their erstwhile oppressors would have afforded some vicarious pleasure to the Indian Musalmans. Yet, in a remarkable social intercourse, the newly minted Muslims that gloated  over the reflected glory of the new rulers and the upper caste Hindus, who laid store on their perceived superiority over all others, managed to live together tenuously though, which, in later days, the left-liberals came to romantically falsify as ganga jamuna tahjeeb.

Then, when the eight-hundred years old Islamic semi-dominance over India was on the wane, the Christianity spread its religious wings under the aegis of the British Raj, ostensibly to reform the Hindu heathens that the Bible holds in utter contempt in psalms such as -

“Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” 2:8

“Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.” 2:9

“Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.” 9:5

“Thou hast given us like sheep [appointed] for meat; and hast scattered us among the heathen.” 44:11

“But thou, O LORD, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.” 59:8

“Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name.” 79:6

So, starting from the dalit bastis, the evangelists forayed further into the tribal tandas to spread Christianity by means fair and foul. However, as their catchment areas were peripheral to the Brahmin agraharas and the upper caste quarters, the Christian demographic alarm failed to wake them up from their slumber of indifference though unyoked from the Islamic hegemony by then. And to make matters were for them, Macaulay came up with his Minute on Indian Education, which, among other things was aimed to divest the Hindus from their “false history, false astronomy, false medicine, in company with their false religion” with the right western education.

However, while the Musalmans, fearing that the western education would lead to the dilution of Islamic faith among their wards, avoided Macaulay like a plague, the Hindus embraced him willy-nilly giving up their ‘haughty’ indifference to other faiths end ending up with ‘naive’ indulgence towards them. What is worse, from the Hindu point of view, the Macaulay education, over time, succeeded in making them have a dim view of the sanatana dharma of their progenitors and skeptical about all things Hindu be it its history, astronomy, medicine, culture etc. If anything, Gandhi in later years, to put it in the Hindi phase, turned out to be Macaulay’s baap, for he professed that “Hindus should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives.” But it was Nehru, who symbolized the fruition of the Macaulay mission for he not only proclaimed that “I’m English by education, a Muslim by culture, just born a Hindu by accident” but also conducted himself accordingly.

It’s thus, when it came to choosing the first Prime Minister of what is left of India after Jinnah had parted with parts of its land to establish Pakistan for the Musalmans, it’s no mere coincidence that Gandhi threw his heavy weight behind the Muslim-oriented Nehru and against the Hindu-minded Patel. Immediately thereafter, true to his character, Nehru strained every nerve to ensure that the Indian Musalmans did not migrate in numbers to Pakistan though the raison d'être of India’s partition was their assertion that they cannot co-exist with the Hindus.  What is worse, he was allergic to the persecuted Hindu refugees from the then East Pakistan and even wanted them to be pushed back into it never mind their annihilation by the Bengali Musalmans therein, so to say, to put Gandhi’s preaching into practice. In the light of the above, and his reported obeisance, besides that of his daughter Indira and his great-grandson Rahul, to the Islamic invader Babur’s grave in Afghanistan, should be seen the conjecture that his own grandfather was a Musalman with Nehru nom de guerre.

Hence, it could not have been a mere coincidence that Nehru placed Hindu India’s educational reins in the hands of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who publicly voiced his fears that post-partition, the Muslim minority in the Hindu majority India would be disadvantaged. So, so to say, during his decade-long helm at India’s ‘secular’ education, the clever Maulana succeeded in making it seem to the vulnerable Hindu minds that the Muslim rule over their ancient land was but a natural Islamic course all the while downplaying their ancestral resistance to the same. Neither is the fact that four more Musalmans, all appointed by either by Nehru or Indira, reigned supreme in the corridors of Indian education for about nine more years, all of which was during the first thirty years after India’s independence, could be more than mere coincidence. It’s no wonder the Hindus who adorned that office in between these worthies or those that came later dared not alter the Nehruvian educational course set by the Islamic credo that insensibly became the non-violable creed of the Indian school curriculum till date.

It was in this continuing Hindu tragic play, Indira leased the academic stage to the Hindu-allergic and Islamapologic leftists in lieu of their political props, to let them shape and sustain the Hindu-inimical narrative for over five decades. Thus with the State’s patronage, the dubious leftists by adding the deceitful liberal suffix, managed to spread their anti-Hindu tentacles into every sphere of intellectual activity with impunity, thereby unerringly shaping an inalienable idea of India in which the Islamo-Christian communalism is deemed as secular and Hindu cultural assertion is regarded as communal. This obnoxious narrative on one hand gave fillip to Muslim separateness, displayed by skullcaps, even on kids’ heads, and on the other, fuelled the Christian urge to harvest the dalit and the tribal souls for the cause of Jesus, and any Hindu concern on either count came to be derided as religious intolerance. It was as if the Hindu feelings didn’t count in their own country, even after its partition on religious grounds, and when their pent-up anger erupted in Ramajanma Bhoomi movement resulting in the hot-headed demolition of the Babri Masjid, built over Ayodhya’s Ram Mandir in Babur’s time, the left-liberal ecosystem ensured that the entire Hindu community was engulfed in secular shame.

However, ten years later, when a Muslim mob at Godhra torched alive fifty-two Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya to their native places in that Sabarmati Express resulting in the retaliatory rioting in Gujarat, even as the Mullahs tuned in “Islam is a religion of peace”, the Muslim intelligentsia proclaimed the growing Hindu communalism as the bane of secular India, of course to the nodding Islam naïve Hindu heads. It was this Hindu intellectual apathy that failed to produce even a single book on Islam in thousand years of its Indian presence (save Ambedkar’s stray, though incisive, thoughts on Islam and not counting Chamupati Lal’s thirty-four page Hindi booklet, Rangeela Rasool, published anonymously though, some hundred years before then that is available even now in the internet, which, anyway, was only about Muhammad’s unbridled libido that too as a retort to some Muslim derogatory writings in the form of Krishna teri geeta jalani padegi and Uniseevi sadi ka maharshi) that prompted this writer, innately a novelist, to come up his Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife ( A Critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n More).

While Rajpal Malhotra, the publisher of Rangeela Rasool, was murdered by a teenaged Musalman in 1929, there were no takers for Puppets of Faith in 2003, even as the rejection slip sent by one desi publisher is a giveaway.

I enjoyed reading the book. But I suggest you read Dr. Zakaria’s “Communal Rage in Secular India”. Your book is a bit Strident and could prove dangerous in wrong hands (Hindu fundamentalist).

What is to be noted is the Muslim communal grip on the Hindu secular mind, though it is another matter that this writer’s work has been in the public domain as free ebook for long without either raising Islamic hackles or fuelling Hindu fundamentalism, if ever there was.

It was in that Indian setting, the Italian Sonia could catapult herself into such a political position to be able to direct its administrative course to further the Christian evangelical drive, to fuel the Islamic fundamentalism and to demean Hinduism as saffron terrorism. No wonder that the Christian democracies and the Muslim autocracies alike toasted her decade-long proxy rule as the golden period of religious tolerance in the annals of the Indian Republic. But for the media coverage of her unbridled avarice and the idiocy of her heir apparent, she might have had her Hindu-inimical way in India for some more time but then as karma caught up with her in the Hindus’ karma bhoomi, she was busted at the hustings by Narendra Modi, who managed to stir the nationalistic feelings among the Hindus like none before him.

However, the advent of Modi on India’s political firmament coincided with the spread of internet therein that began to reveal unflattering facets of Gandhi and Nehru and the outraged Hindus lost no time in circulating the same through the emerging social media thereby taking away much of the sheen from these two, whom the Hindu-inimical ecosystem made into demigods. But more significantly, as the nationalist Modi’s ascent to the throne uplifted the Hindu morale as never before, some enterprising began to tackle the tailor-made Indian history to serve the Nehru dynasty’s political interests to lay bare its falsities before the public through their publications, if anything more effectively in their talk shows in the TV channels as well as in the social media platforms that came to abound. The net result of it all is that the Hindus have become more aware of the intolerant Islamic credo and the subversive evangelical creed that were together downplayed by the Nehruvian left-liberal kabal thus far, and so became less indulgent towards both, which is galling to the Hindu-inimical forces within and without that have come to orchestrate the chorus of India’s religious intolerance.

Be that as it may, Narendra Modi, on whom the resurgent Hindu multitudes pin their hopes to blind the Semitic demographic eyes that are cast on India, while going about it must take cognizance of Niccolo Machiavelli’s following advice in The Prince.

“So it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler ought to determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He should inflict them once for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men’s minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him. Violence should be inflicted once for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. Benefits should be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better. Above all, a prince should live with his subjects in such a way that no development, either favourable or adverse, makes him vary his conduct.”

So, Modi must inflict some secular injuries on the communal minded Muslims and the Christians on the ground that -

i) Muslims aver that all non-Muslims are kafirs and the Christians assert that Hindus are heathens, which flies in the face of the secular dictum that all men are equal.

ii) When all men are equal, as their gods cannot be unequal, the proclamation by Muslims in the Azan that There is none worthy of worship except Allah and the Christian propagation of Jesus’ words, “I am the Way, and the truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (John 14:6), are alike untenable.

iii) What is worse, while Muslims inculcate hatred in the believers against kafirs in the masjids, they let the religious education in the madrasas poison the minds of their youth to perpetuate hatred against the others in their umma, the Christian evangelists falsely propagate that the Hindu gods and deities are false, both of which are detrimental to the communal harmony in our country.

iv) The Muslim goal to usher in Ghazwa-e-Hind by Islamizing India through their unbridled procreation coupled with the illegal Islamist infiltration into it, and the evangelical agenda to bring all Hindus into the Christian fold are at odds with the preservation of India’s sovereignty and integrity.

Hence,

a) The Article 25 of the Indian Constitution that guarantees the freedom of conscience, the freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion to all citizens should be amended to desist any from propagating their religion though they are free to profess and practice the same. (Read the chapter ‘Constitutional Amnesia’ in Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife cited above)

b) All should be prohibited from making divisive suggestions such as, There is none worthy of worship except Allah, Hindu gods and deities are false, salivation is possible only through belief in the Christ, at the pain of imprisonment, punitive fines, and /or both.

c) The propagation that non-Muslims are kafirs and the Hindus are heathens, both destined to hell, should be prohibited at the pain of imprisonment, punitive fines, and /or both.

d) Madrasas, under the guise of religious education, should not be allowed to inculcate hatred in its pupils towards other faiths and their followers and masjids should be barred from doing the same through divisive sermons at the pain of their closure (now there’s the French precedent), imprisonment of its mullahs and punitive fines.

e) All religious exhortations or encouragement for unwarranted population expansion in any community with the intent to upset the existing demographic balance of the Indian polity should be prohibited at the pain of imprisonment, punitive fines, and /or both.

f) All religious personal laws should be invalidated by the Uniform Civil Code for the whole of India.

g) Last but not the least, the Bangladeshi Muslim intruders should be disenfranchised to begin with and to be deported eventually, if need be by coercing Bangladesh to have them back.

Modi may appreciate that while Raj dharma of sanatana dhanrma - ahimsa paramo dharmaha / dharma himsa thadhaiva cha (nonpareil is non-violence / nonetheless is righteous outrage) ordains him to take recourse to the above measures to avert India’s second partition down the line for the Quran that made Musalmans press for the first partition because they cannot co-exist with the Hindus  would remain the same (it’s another matter though that they have become the most pampered lot in India), his political acumen should prompt him into ushering in comprehensive legislative and administrative measures some six months or so before the 2024 parliamentary polls, so that his possible return to power then would be deemed as the public endorsement of the same, once and for all, to silence and all.

Needless to say, it may not be lost on Modi that knowingly or unknowingly, he had been following Machiavelli’s second advice - benefits should be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better – for the benefit of his party, and so he can disregard the first dictum of the political genius only at the cost of India’s ruin.

Adolf Hitler had on his hands the blood of six million gas-chambered Jews besides fifty million soldiers, in the flower of their youth, and thirty million civilians of all ages, who perished in the World War II that he started, but yet he is among the most debated about worldwide. Moreover, Mein Kampf, his autobiography with an anti-Semitic slant is not ostracized either by the book world, but in a stark contrast, uttering the very name of Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi, a frail seventy-eight-year old man, and paid the price for his crime on the gallows, just running forty, remains a taboo in his own country for whose good he believed he did what he did, seemingly into eternity! So, sadly for him, the reality his legacy faces belies his hope, expressed in his ‘Why I killed Gandhi’ testimony; “I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof some day in future.”

It is one of the ironies of human history that Hitler, who restored to Germany the pride the Treaty of Versailles robbed if off, and Gandhi, who inspired India to free itself from the British yoke, should’ve become the bane of their countries in the  long run. Though Germany could recover its Hitler trauma in time, it couldn’t repair its demographic dent the war had left to its hurt, but trapped in a Gandhi matrix mired by Godse conundrum, India is stymied, seemingly forever, from inculcating a nationalistic pride and purpose to achieve its true potential. 

Godse, in his own words, was “Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone,” and that should have earned him a place of honour in the pantheon of India’s social reformers. Thus, but for a quirk of fate, maybe, Godse would have rubbed ‘reformist’ shoulders with Gandhi whom he had assassinated for altruistic reasons.

What had put him in the dock that led him to the gallows, again in his words, “I took courage in both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds of Birla House. I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots. I bear no ill will towards anyone individually but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi.”

Being himself a Hindu that Gandhi tended to be ‘unfairly favourable towards the Muslims’ at every turn to the hurt and humiliation of his co-religionists is a matter of common knowledge but the motivating factors of this unnatural tendency would’ve stemmed from his vanity to sustain the false aura of a ‘Mahatma’ that the vulgar minds had built around his fallible persona, lo, when he was in his mid-forties! Having seen Gandhi’s ‘image-need’ to bend over backwards to be ‘unfairly favourable to Muslims’ in the socio-religious as well as political spheres, Jinnah had exploited his ‘mahatman’ fallibility to the hilt and walked away with Pakistan to the hurt and humiliation of the Hindu majority of Hindustan. That Gandhi could not shed his inappropriate partiality towards those Muslims, who opted to stay put in the remainder of the sundered Hindustan, notwithstanding their unremitting aggression against his co-religionists therein, illustrates the power of vanity to blind one to the realities of life and times, which, so to say, proved to be the proverbial ‘last straw on the camel’s back’ for Godse.

On his crossing the rubicon, Godse had said, “Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be proved practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces”. But alas, Godse had failed to reckon the Hindu-indifferent propensities of Nehru to whom Gandhi had handed over the political reins by then that is against the consensus of congressmen, who had instead pitched in for Patel and that much for Mahatma’s democratic convictions.

With Gandhi gone, Nehru, whose background and brought up made him feel, “I am English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by an accident of birth” became the Caesar and that was a double jeopardy for the Hindus for whose sake Godse lost his honour and earned infamy. While his English education precluded the inculcation of Hindu values and dharmic ethos in his mindset, his cultural affinity for Muslims made him averse to the idea of nationalism, an anathema to Islam, in the post-partitioned Hindustan, home to ninety percent Hindus! By crudely exhibiting the Godse red herring and by cleverly equating Hinduism with Brahmanism, for Godse was a Brahmin, and emphasizing the danger it posed for the Hindu masses, Nehru cynically exploited Gandhi’s assassination to malign the Hindu nationalistic impulses per se. Having thus nipped the Hindu nationalism in the bud, Nehru encouraged the separatist-minded Muslim ghettoism, and together, they debilitated the Indian polity for the nationalist void was filled by an accentuated communalism, casteism, regionalism, nepotism and above all an unbridled corruption in every walk of life.

Just a digression, why is this worldwide prevalence of Islamapologia among the left-lib elite notwithstanding the debilitating effect of the debasing ideology of Al-Qaeda, ISIs etc.? One can surmise that these ‘enlightened’ non-Muslims in a way pity the ghettoized ummah that’s afflicted with bigotry and backwardness in equal measure and thus condescend to descend to the Muslims without troubling themselves to address the root cause of the state of the base Muslimness, which is owing to the inimical ethos of Islam.

Back on the track, by acclaiming Gandhi as ‘Father of the Nation’, it was as if he had occasioned the birth of the sub-continental part of the planet, and overemphasizing his role in India’s freedom movement that is either by under-playing or altogether ignoring other eminences’ contributions therein, Nehru managed to create the ‘Brand Gandhi’ for his congress party to market in the poll arena of the then illiterate India for its electoral gain. Not just that, Nehru was pretty shrewd to realize that it was only half a job done for Godse’s testimonies, if allowed to gain ground, would bring Gandhi’s Muslim fault lines to the fore on the Hindu sentimental plane, which could dullen his haloed image to the detriment of the congress party. So, using the state machinery that was at his beck and call, not only did Nehru succeed in deifying Gandhi and demonizing Godse but also created an enduring ecosystem to forever ensure public revulsion for the errant ‘patriot’ as unforgivable ‘traitor’, and that worked wonderfully well for his congress party that is electorally.

After Nehru’s long Caesar-like reign over India, during which, though he always tended to bend backwards for the approval of a white man or ‘the white woman’ and / or both (god only knows how many times he could’ve sprained his spine), his daughter Indira, who in the meantime hand appropriated the haloed name of Gandhi for a surname in place of the phonetically matching Ghandy, her estranged husband’s surname, had assumed the reins of power after a short Shastri interlude that is. Be that as it may, the significance of Indira’s phonetic slieght could be gauged from the fact that even Sonia Maino, the Italian entry into her dynasty, could eventually walk her way through the Indian political arena like a colossus with the nom de guerre of Sonia Gandhi! Whatever, keeping the Godse bogey alive, the dynasty Indira had established in Gandhi’s name was able to retain its political hegemony by electorally exploiting the societal fault lines that Nehru had cemented.   

What is most perturbing that is invariably lost on short-sighted sophists devoid of hindsight to boot, is that the ‘nine percent’ Muslim canal that Nehru brought about on the post-colonial Indian soil has, in six decades, swelled into an ‘eighteen percent’ Islamist stream, which if left to its own course, is bound to facilitate Article 370 Muslim Districts, if not States, all over the land, with Art 35A ‘No Hindu Entry’ boards that is by the turn of the 21st Century. Given the resurgent upsurge in the ummah to paint the universe green, it goes without saying that there is this urgent need to nudge the recalcitrant Muslim Indians into the national mainstream to preserve the sovereign integrity of India without subjecting it to a second vivisection.

That being the case, when Sadhvi Pragnya Thakur, a new entrant into the political arena, invited the wrath of the left-lib congress crowd for her ‘Godse is deshbhakt’ assertion, the failure of the ‘resurgent’ nationalist forces to back her stance amply illustrates the ‘traitor’ sway Gandhi’s ghost has over Godse’s legacy. It should not be lost on any that while the vast majority of Hindus remained silent, the Muslim Indians, who have no love lost for Gandhi, hand lent their subtle voices to her vociferous denouncers, but why? It is not generally realized that Muslims, groomed by hadith and armed with well-defined strategies to survive as a minority in non-Muslim countries that is as a precursor to mid-term expansion leading to eventual domination therein, make the cleverest political creatures in the world.  

It is thus, the Muslim antipathy towards Godse stems from the self-same strategy that is to stall the possibility of his narrative awakening the lazy Hindu intelligentsia to the virtues of Indian nationalism that runs counter to their Dar-al-Islam destination. Moreover, one cannot eulogize Gandhianism and yet vouch for nationalism in the same vein with any conviction for they are oxymoron, and the failure to differentiate Godse the deshbhakt from Godse the assassin, willy-nilly endorses the Nehruvian vulgarity of Gandhi is India, a la later day Barua’s Indira is India.

Wonder how anyone, rooted in the Hindu cultural ethos, can fail to realize that Lord Rama, who killed Ravana for his villainy had yet acknowledged his vidvat by asking Lakshmana to seek his advice. Besides, Ravana is not blue-penciled in Ramayana nor are Duryodhana ‘n Dussasana blocked out in Mahabharata for they are as much a part of it as Yudhishthira ‘n Arjua are. Moreover, the asuras galore of Hiranyakasipa, Narakasura et al, who committed unspeakable atrocities against humanity, are an integral part of our puranic literature for whatever they were. That is owing to the Hindu approach to life and times based on the concept of dharma and adharma, both of which were open to debate and deliberation, like say the school of thought that after all Ravana as the king was duty bound to avenge the wronged Surphanaka by abducting Seetha and that Duryodhana was not wrong in coveting Hasthinapura’s throne for he was the first born of the first born. When it came to appraising the puranic heroes, even the rights and wrongs of the way Lord Rama slew King Vali by slyly hiding behind a tree are debated.

But then, how is it that any public debate on the pros and cons of the Godse ‘act’ is frowned upon and the answer is not far to seek for it is the fear of the nationalist inimical forces, the overseers of Nehruvian ecosystem, that the ‘murderer’ Godse’s sense of Indian nationalism would bring to the fore the hollowness of the ‘martyred’ Gandhi’s propensity to be ‘unfairly favourable towards the Muslims’.

Given that the nuances of sanatana dharma came to be perceived as prejudices of backwardness in Nehruvian wisdom, so to say, Indians have ceased to base their distinctive discourse based on dharma and adharma, but instead have come to develop a tendency to bury the ‘fallibilities of the favoured’ in the graves of martyrdom, and apart from Gandhi, as all are aware, there are more political martyrs to name.

Thus, it is high time that Indians begin to reflect upon the compelling reasons that Godse said had goaded him to eliminate Gandhi in the spirit of ‘what is said is more important than who said it’. It is for another day though, whether Godse, who willingly disgraced himself for the sake of his country or Gandhi, who, chased the mirage of personal glory by turning a blind eye to national interests, is a deshbhakt, is better left to individual perception. But all may beware that if Godse’s words are not heeded to in time, then the very circumstances that made him an assassin could produce his clone in times to come. So, it’s time the gag on Godse is removed, more so as Gandhi got his justice but Godse is in wait of the same.  

[More on Gandhi in “A Lingering Longing” in Glaring Shadow – A stream of consciousness novel  https://g.co/kgs/9gAzSM

The other day, Narendra Modi has vowed to free India from its ghulami manasikata (colonial mindset / slavish mentality) by 2035, but given his own manasikata that could be well-nigh impossible, as essayed in my On Semitic Upswing ‘n Hindu Downturn. Whatever, his assertion that exorcizing Macaulay’s ghost would be the panacea for India’s educational and cultural ills is farfetched for its Christian community is its torchbearer. Besides, having guarded itself against Macaulay-effect in the British Raj itself, its madrasa-rooted ummah is largely unaffected by it. So, truth to tell, it is only the Macaulayzed Hindu populace that is stymied by the colonial mindset and afflicted with a slavish mentality. So, in effect, though India is culturally incongruous, it has become politically correct to ignore it and secularly incorrect to admit it. Nevertheless, if and when the Hindus could shed their ghulami manasikata, they may be able to reappraise their country’s partition and visualize the ways and means of their redemption.

While it was the internecine Hindu royal rivalry that gave rise to the Muslim Sultanates in India, it was the eventual decline of the Mughal regime that paved the way for the British colonial rule therein - through the commercial entry of the East India company into its trading arena and then its subsequent political exploitation of the domestic disarray. But for the twisted Hindu destiny, the kalachakra would’ve let them re-erect their Akhand Bharat on the ruins of the Islamic edifices. However, putting its course in the reverse gear, the British made them part with a part of their ancestral land to the Muslims for the latter maintained that they and Hindus constitute two separate nations with fundamentally different religious philosophies, social customs, and traditions etc. Just the same, the then Hindu leadership, under the thrall of Gandhi, the Muslim appeaser nonpareil, was impervious to the old adage that ‘what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’.

It's thus, instead of enforcing the population exchange of the two ‘new nations’, they chose to retain Muslims in millions in what was, and is, legally and morally an exclusive Hindu domain. That is regardless of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s ‘informed’ warning that ‘Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin.” So, making a mockery of India’s partition, having got Pakistan as a homeland all for themselves, yet over forty percent of Muslims staid put in the motherland of the Hindus. But then, how the Quran-unaware Hindus were to know that the Muslim stay back was the playbook move of their political Islam - of first retaining and then expanding the demographic base of the faithful to facilitate its eventual turn into a dar al Islam in its future course.  

If anything, under the secular pretext, the Islamapologic Nehru made matters worse for the Hindus by know toing the Islamic obscurantism and its separatist ethos, bred by its intolerant credo. And that came to stymie the Hindus, who, having been pacified by Gandhi, became hopelessly spineless by then. Well, even as they obstruct the civic life with their deliberate namaz-on-roads, they disrupt Hindu religious processions with malicious stone-pelting. Though they have no compunction in blaring azans through loudspeakers, five times a day, yet they take provocative exception to the occasional sounds of the temple bells in what is essentially a Hindu land, in letter and spirit. Besides, so as to satiate their Islamic thirst for Ghazwa-e-Hind, even as they enlarge their unwieldy families, as if to leave no stone unturned, they resort to Love Jihad to further bring about an Islamic tilt to the Indian demography. So to say, these are but a few of the many Muslim commissions and omissions that the hapless Hindus got accustomed to put up with in the Nehruvian ‘secular’ state of theirs! Whatever, Ambedkar’s words have been validated - “the brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity.”  

What’s worse, as the Muslim clamor for more Pakistans in India is on the rise, apparently, the clueless Hindus have reconciled to a second partition in time, more or less that is. Be that as it may, some Hindus seem to draw some solace, even vicarious pleasure, at the prospect of Pakistan’s ‘inevitable’ breakup, a case of the Muslim dream turning sour. If anything, this is but the gleeful side of the ghulami manasikata that has long resigned to its Islamic fate. That Modi-sarkar is belatedly contemplating to constitute a demographic commission bears testimony to the sedentary state of affairs but not the brisk return of the Sanatana manasikata, articulated by Lord Parashurama - agratas chaturō vēdān / prushtash saran dhanō / idam  kshātram idam brahmana / sepādapi sarā dapi.  (Spar at not a Vedic soul / Armed to the teeth as well / Brain ’n brawn as thus combined / Curse I might or subdue thee). However, by reacquiring their ‘age-old’ vision, Hindus can clearly discern the brand-new socio-political developments in the world. Why, at long last, the Christian West, having woken up to the inimical Islamic reality, is in the process of tackling the menace of Muslim immigrants. More significantly, it should not be lost on the ‘Sanatana manasikata’ Hindus that the world is coming round to acquiesce to the Russian invasion of its ethnic provinces in its neighboring Ukraine.

So, why not India, at some point, invade Pakistan to resettle its Muslim misfits as Muhajir fits therein, a sort of homegoing to their forebear’s designated destination. Besides, as a goodwill gesture, it can let Pakistan keep its Azad Kashmir, however, augmented by the Muslims of the Valley, in part-fulfillment of the ardent wishes of both. Needless to say, given that this military exercise would be meant, not to usurp Pakistani territory, but to belatedly implement the Indian Independence Act 1947 (of the ‘once’ Great Britain) in letter and spirit, the Muslim-harassed free world should have no objection to it. Well, when it comes to Bangladesh, maybe, it falls in line to take India’s Bengali Muslims, not to speak of its illegal emigrants, or else. However, as a humanitarian gesture, India can let those Muslims, who have crossed their reproductive age, to remain within its borders, but with no family visits of their kith and kin from without.

So, with Sanatana manasikata, Hindus need to make Bharat ‘armed to the teeth’ and wait for the opportune moment to strike, real and well. That’s not all, to prevent a Christian encore, it has to constitutionally bar evangelism in any form to enable Hindus live in their Bharat, freed of any Semitic menace. Now, it is up to Modi and those that follow him to act for fortune favors the brave while fate lets the cowards dig their own graves.

If the body of a nation is formed by its people, its democratic soul gets shaped by its voters. However, in its nascent stages, it was not the case for the lesser souls were unfranchised, robbing it of its egalitarian ethos. But has the later-day all-adult franchise helped it acquire its representative character? Not necessarily, as the elaborate democratic exercise in India (a continuing civilization of over five millennia), involving a complex mix of over 990 million electorate, of regional and ethnic diversity (28 states and 8 union territories; 705 scheduled  tribes and 2,000 ethnic groups), religious and linguistic variations (six religions in the main and scores of tribal traditions; 121 languages and 19,000 mother tongues/dialects) besides social and economic disparities not to speak of the mindboggling caste divisions (3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes) across the regions, indicates.

Even though democracy, in any form, is a number game everywhere, its Indian version is numerically enormous, demographically divisive and politically fragmented like nowhere else. Even then, the competing political outfits spare no efforts to woo the electorate to the polling stations in what is arguably the most daunting of the daunting political exertions in the democratic world. It’s as if to prove itself equal to this herculean democratic task, the electoral apparatus of the state pulls out all the stops to maximise the franchise by way of its voter-friendly, state-of-the-art election process. But yet, some one-third, or so, of the rural and around half of the urban electorate invariably stays away from the periodic polls, characterised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the ‘festivals of democracy’. However, on the face of it, it may seem that nothing could be amiss in this sort of sub-par electoral show for the voting patterns of the absentee voters would have been in political consonance with the collective electoral will of the participative millions.

Nonetheless, a closer look at those who choose to vote and those who prefer to abstain would reveal that which the sizeable electoral numbers fail to bring to the fore - the demographic dynamics of the Indian democracy. In one of the many ironies of the Indian republic, even though the Muslim ummah far outstrips every Hindu caste group there is and the Christian converts (counting the closet characters) outnumber each of the Hindu sub-castes, yet both are prioritised as minorities in its ‘secular’ set-up! So, to put things demographic in the prevailing democratic order, one has to juxtapose the nearly unified 15% Muslim and 5% Christian mandate with around 80% caste-ridden Hindu franchise that the sub-castes and the tribals fracture further.  

More to the point, even as the bulk of the absentee voters happen to hail from the Hindu electorate, the Muslims and the Christians, given their religio-political attitudes, queue up to vote against the proponents of Hindutva, namely the advocates of the Hindu cultural renaissance, read Bharatiya Janata Party and its political associates. It’s thus, in India’s multi-party democracy that entails multi-cornered electoral contests, any one of the relatively populous caste groups, in cohorts with the one-fifth Muslim-Christian voters-combine, can become a dominant political force in a given region. What’s worse, making a mockery of the democratic level playing field, such an unhealthy political nexus can come up trumps at the hustings in conducive states by co-opting a few of the ‘one-or-two percent’ caste groups to the detriment of the rest of the populace, as exemplified by the infamous Muslim-Yadav combine in the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.  

That happenstance is owing to the fact that in the rural electoral arenas, it is the socially dominant castes and the politically affiliated voters that turn up most at the polling stations to protect their social clout or to retain their political hedge, and/or both, in their respective domains. However, on the contrary, numerous miniscule castes and various sub-castes, with no socio-political turf of their own, and left to fend for themselves by the competing political outfits for the same reason, constitute the bulk of the rural electoral absentees. But when it comes to the urban electorates, their diverse socio-economic compositions render them unamenable for any large-scale rural-type caste consolidations, and that partly explains the abysmally low urban voter turnouts. Besides, as the urbanites are largely salaried or self-employed, ineligible subjects of the state’s politically expedient beneficial schemes, they fail to become the objects of the political wooing. It’s thus, besides being unaffected by the electoral outcomes, as they remain unsolicited by the political parties, they tend to give a short shrift to the polling process, and bring democratic disrepute to their adopted constituencies.  

That’s not all as political dynasties, false poll-eve promises, endemic mis-governance, pandemic mal-administration and unabashed corruption that came to characterise the Indian democratic order have given raise to widespread public apathy and attendant voter cynicism. So, such of those have come to see the periodic poll process as a futile exercise of choosing between a Tweedledum of a Gog cabal and a Tweedledee of the Magog gang. Not that all of them have no axe to grind, it’s just that they don’t have a grinding stone for that. But still, by not being a part any of the self-serving caste groups, they, with their cumulative votes, would be able to make a qualitative difference to the collective franchise. Hence, it is imperative to impress upon them that as their self-interest is entwined with the national interest, they must back only those political forces that are wedded to the nation’s good. However, though this holistic dictum is applicable to one and all, it is better spread among the poll-shy electorate, in every conceivable manner, by the well-meaning individuals, social entities and political outfits.

Now that Narendra Modi has managed to rekindle vande mataram’s nationalist flame, singed by Jawaharlal Nehru at the outset, it is left for social servers such as Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and political forces like Bharatiya Janata Party to take the lead in bringing the nation back on the patriotic path so as to put its voters on the right political track. No denying that given India’s putrid political state and its tattered moral fabric, it is no mean a task, but the need of the nation is that all its patriots must apply their minds to come up with ideas that could facilitate the same.  Needless to say, the ways of convincing the rural folks and the urban dwellers about the ill effects of caste politics on the nation and by extension on themselves would necessarily vary – personal interactions with the former and mass communication with the latter – the message being the same – Better our Bharat, better you are; so better vote to better Bharat.

Walter Mendez’s ad, branding Kerala as God’s Own Country, in the land of Hindu gods and goddesses, intended or otherwise, was as much an advertising gimmick as a Semitic statement, for India’s tryst with the monotheistic faiths began there – first with the Jewish traders in the 6th century BCE, then with the Christian evangelists in 52 CE, followed by Arab Muslims around 629 CE. However, as the pre-Islamic Arab traders too were polytheists like them, and their monotheistic Jewish cousins chose to keep their religious wares to themselves, the Hindu Keralites have had no inkling of the Christian evangelic agenda or the Muslim Dar-al-Islam obsession.

However, having imbibed the Hindu philosophy of ekam sadviprā bahudhā vadanti (what is right is One only, describe it wise variedly), presumably, the Keralites would have assumed that all religions affirm the same (still the refrain of the naive Hindus without hindsight) without a clue to the Christian credo that “salvation is only through Christ". It’s that erroneous presumption that might have led the Hindus then to let the alien evangelists to convert the native souls without any let or hindrance. Whatever, it is seldom appreciated that Jesus was, as is evident from his Sermon on the Mount, in essence was a Jewish social reformer, eager to ease the rigor of the unremitting Mosaic Laws, with no provisions for penitence or clemency in Judaism. That apart, had not Jesus, unambiguously told the Commissioned Twelve – “Don’t go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but only to the people of Israel – God’s lost sheep. Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure the lepers, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received!”

All the same, but for Peter, the rest of the apostles, like ‘lost sheep’, instead of reaching out to the ‘people of Israel’, loitered everywhere else to spread his ‘message’ among the ‘prohibited’ gentiles. So, even as Paul, took it to the nearby Roman mainland, Thomas reached the distant Kerala shores, far-off Jesus’ radar, with the same. Not just that, the later-day Gospels of Mark, Mathews, and the others that followed, transformed Jesus the social reformer, into Christ the religious preacher, of divine descent, which in itself is a travesty of the Christianity. Whatever, the legend of Christ, cemented by the Gospels that followed, with additional miracles, became the handmaiden of the gospellers. But to what avail! In a ghastly irony of Christianity, some of the gentiles, brought into its fold against Jesus’ command, persecuted his ‘God’s lost sheep’ for centuries, by way of numerous pogroms, and eventually sought to exterminate them all in the holocaust!

Now, back to the Keralites; reared in the utopian, Sanatana credo of, Vasudhaiva kutumbakam (holds world all in one household), not only they let the eager Arab Muslim traders to settle down in their midst but also made them their moplahs (sons-in-law), thereby enabling the later to father their Islamic footholds in the Hindu motherland. Oh, how it was lost on the Keralites that for centuries, the very Arabs, in the pre-Islamic era, were uninclined to settle on their shores! Eventually, this thoughtless lapse proved fatal to their progeny as many of them were mercilessly massacred by the moplah descendants as if to demonstrate that it’s not just history, but irony too repeats itself!

If anything, the Northern princelings had fared worse on the Islamic front. So as to settle political scores with the fellow royals, some of them had entered into military alliances with the alien Muslim warlords, maybe failing to reckon that by then, the nations the Muslim armies overran, were all transformed into Islamic countries. But had they been privy to the Quranic credo - “It is not for any Prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land…”, arguably, they would have developed second thoughts, and the Islamic horror that followed in Hindustan would have been well averted.  

Whatever, Maryam Jameela, a Jewish convert to Islam,  lamented in her 1971 book, Islam and Orientalism - “If the Mughal monarchs had assumed their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized intensive tabliq or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake, never would have arisen.”* If only she had realized that, if anything, Quran is more of a War Manual than a religious scripture, and thus tried to drive home that Islamic reality into the Muslim heads, she  would have done a world of good, not just for the Ummah. But then, that’s not the way with the competing Semitic faiths, for juxtaposing Maryam’s Islamic lament, Pope John Paul II, exuded his Christian hope in Ecclesia in Asia, of 1999, in New Delhi - "Just as the first millennium saw the cross firmly planted in the soil of Europe, and the second in that of America and Africa, so may the third Christian millennium witness a great harvest of faith on this vast and vital continent."

By the way, these very missionaries, invariably shy away from the Muslims, for Muhammad had taught his faithful how to shoo them away with Quranic quotes such as – “When Allah saith: O Jesus, son of Mary! Didst thou say unto mankind: Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah? He saith: Be glorified! It was not mine to utter that to which I had no right. If I used say it, then Thou knewest it. Thou knowest what is in my mind, and I know not what is in thy mind. Lo! Thou, only Thou art the Knower of Things Hidden”. So to say, by rechristening Jehovah as Allah and positioning Quran as a grand sequel to Torah and Bible, Muhammad had cleverly taken away the religious winds out of the Jewish and the Christian sails. Not just that, when it comes to religious marketing, he bettered all the Gospels put together, by telling Amr ibn al, upon his conversion into Islam - "Do you not know that Islam destroys that which came before it?" – implying that he can start his life afresh with a clean slate as Allah forgiveth all his previous sins. Call it poetic justice or treat it as a religious irony, this prophetic ploy that exploits the Gospel’s ‘sin overkill’ has become the Islamic conversion tool in the Christian west to its bane, that is even as it busies itself in ‘harvesting’ the Asian souls that include the gullible Hindus!   

However, owing to the Hindu demographic indifference and the ‘secular’ political chicanery, neither the Pope’s hope became a total dupe nor Maryam’s despair a complete dud. While the state sarkars in the south, run by ‘secular’ parties, tend to pay a blind eye to the insidious evangelism to forestall the Hindutva forces with the Christian votes, their counterparts in the eastern parts have been expanding their Muslim vote-banks through the infiltration of Bangladeshis, with a like motive. Now that the Christian closets are brimming with Hindu recruits and the Muslim influx became a deluge, both Paul and Maryam can really rest in ‘peaceful anticipation’ in their graves as India’s self-serving politicians are leaving no stone unturned to fulfill their wishes, paradoxically aided by the slumbering Hindus.

Whatever, after the religious partition of India, the Muslims who stayed put in its Hindu portion, have been handicapped when it came to effecting fresh conversions, owing to the contempt the long familiarity had already bred. Nevertheless, as the formation of Pakistan, instead of quenching their Quranic thirst, furthered their Ghazwa-e-Hind zeal, they took the procreative route to augment their Islamic numbers in the Hindu India. That apart, as if to further speed up the demographic change, they started a concerted ‘love jihad’ on unsuspecting Hindu and Christian females to convert them as Quranic ‘farm fields’ to augment the Islamic yields. Well, the other side of their ‘religious fertility’ coin is etched with the Muslim glee that the Imaran Khan - Jemima Goldsmith nikah elicited - One Jewess less! In spite of all that, but for the foresighted few, Hindus pay no heed to the Muslim ‘goings on’ amidst them, for they were so conditioned by Gandhi, who said, “Hindus should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus, we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives.” Oh, how ludicrous he was! Well, how naive are they he still awes!! 

However, in the same vein, Gandhi had opposed the missionary practice of trying to convert others, especially through methods he considered coercive or based on material incentives, and philosophised as well - “I disbelieve in the conversion of one person by another. My effort should never be to undermine another’s faith but to make him a better follower of his own faith”. But yet, when he, the ‘father of the nation’, made Nehru the ‘Son of India’, the latter set out to make his motherland, a Christian nursery as well as an Islamic Zannat on earth, which, in later years, Sonia, the Italian entrant into his dynasty, sought to turn into the Christian Paradise that is besides making it a sort of a Hindu Narak. Just recall the arrest of the revered Shankaracharya that Deepawali night, on a trumped-up murder charge, that too, lo, without a Hindu whimper, for the cast feathers remained unruffled! 

But at long last, like a ray of hope for the dispirited Hindus, Narendra Modi appeared on the Indian political firmament to hit the ground running to transform their nation in ways beyond dreams. Not resting on his decade-long laurels, he has even envisioned the Vikasit Bharat yagna, with the vikas - virasat mantra. However, realizing that his mantra would be ineffective in the existing Macaulay altar, he seeks to transform it into a Sanatana mandap over a decade. Though he hasn’t yet spelt out ‘the go abouts’ of his laudable project, given that he emotionally stands on the incompatible stools of Hindu Nationalism and Gandhian meandering, he is likely to fall in between them, failing in his mission, and that would be sad for India that is Bharat. Why, he castigates Nehru for truncating vande mataram but keeps mum about Gandhi’s debasement of raghupathi raghava rajaram; he cries hoarse over our virasat but bows before the very constitution that seeks to negate it in every which way. Besides, even as he extols Chhatrapati Shivaji, Lachit Borphukan, and such valiant Hindu warriors against the Islamic invaders, he inexplicably venerates Gandhi, the foremost Islamapologist and an inveterate Muslim appeaser. 

That’s not all, while applauding the revolutionaries such as Netaji Bose, Veer Savarkar and Birsa Munda and others, who were the scourge of the British, he erroneously eulogizes Gandhi the pacifist of the freedom struggle, whose ‘Quit India’ role in gaining independence was described as ‘m-i-n-i-m-a-l’, in a drawling manner at that, by none other than Clement Attlee, who granted it. Likewise, he rightly condemns the anti-Sanatani Nehru but wrongly condones the nepotistic Gandhi, who knowingly promoted him, that too unethically. Thus, his inconsistent ‘virtue signalling’, devoid of moral base and ideological focus, besides being confusing, is bereft of any USP (for starters, unique selling proposition), so essential for the effective promotion of his mission Virasat. It's not as if Modi wouldn’t be unaware of these political aberrations that make him seem as a ‘hesitant nationalist’, for he, besides being extremely intelligent, is an extraordinary thinker. 

But give it Nehru, for he was focussed, at least in advancing his self-interests, in that in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, he promoted the ‘martyr’ as an apostle of peace and targeted the nationalist forces, political and cultural, as votaries of violence. It’s his this USP, that he was the sole upholder of the Gandhian values (fabricated by his propaganda machinery) and only his congress party, read his fiefdom, that can bring peace and stability to the country. It’s thus, he kept the nationalist forces at bay for over fifteen years after Gandhi’s death, while his legacy, cleverly conjoined with that his mentor, served his dynasty for five more decades before the Hindu nationalist Modi overcame that false political barrier. However, it pays Modi to realize that Gandhi is a congress patent, pictured as a national asset, and the royalties of his promotions, if any, will go there. 

However, is it is inconceivable that Modi may not privy to the universal truth that there are no half-measures for success. But yet, maybe reckoning that the prevailing nationalistic winds are not strong enough to subdue the Islamapologic currents within and to stall the Hinduphobic waves without, he, in a waiting game, is at facilitating a patriotic tide, over a period of time, for him or his successors to ride over its nationalist flood. Whatever, it takes a mean man to suggest that he too, like Gandhi and Nehru, has subserved the Hindu interests for international acclaim. 

Be that as it may, It is not much appreciated that in the duty-bound era of yore, the gamut of Sanatana dharma, with the varna centric swa-dharmas, catered to the Hindu social diversity rather harmoniously, though, on the flip side, the lack of edictal unity, precluded the evolution of a unified Hindu polity. What’s worse, as times passed by, with the varnas splitting into sub-sects, castes and sub-cases, the swa-dharmas became redundant, enfeebling the Sanatana dharma itself. It’s thus the Hindu social structure became culturally feeble and politically vulnerable. If not, the Hindu-inimical congress dynasty could not have lasted in power for that long, leaving the then Jan Sangh and its reincarnated Bharatiya Janata party, in the political lurch all along. 

Whatever, now or never is the time for the Hindus to come out of their constitutional slumber to visualize the religious incongruities in the hybrid tome**, that was structured, devoid of hindsight and lacking in foresight, which facilitates the Semitic upsurge in India that is supposed to be Bharat. Why, as if to let India remain a country of perennial conversions, it jolly well grants its citizens, read the proselyting Muslims and the Christians, the ‘freedom of propagation of religion’, which, in effect, is the Semitic right to poach in the Hindu religious arenas. Maybe, seemingly, it hasn’t occurred, even to Modi, why an ordinary Indian citizen should be concerned about the propagation of his faith for the constitution to grant it to him. Besides, where does the right of an Indian citizen for propagation of his faith leave his fellow citizen’s cultural need for the preservation of his own order. Moreover, the right of propagation is but the right to spread one’s religion, and one cannot do that without coming into direct conflict with another’s religious faith. 

Well, the inevitable constitutional amendment has to wait, but what prevents the current Modi dispensation from bringing the questionable conversion tactics into the ambit of the Bharat Nyaya Samhita, with prohibitive fines and deterrent jail-terms, such as - of denigrating other faiths and derogating their followers (false faith, fake gods, heathens, kafirs) or offering monetary incentives and exploitation of vulnerable  human emotions, or through deceitful oracles / fake miracles / false attributions. Besides, to set right the distorted social order, each and every religious preaching or education involving the inculcation of enmity towards other faiths or its followers should also be treated as a criminal activity. That’s not all, faking religious identities in pursuance of hidden personal or religious agendas or non-disclosure of religious conversions to retain or obtain ineligible social or state benefits should also be accounted for, along with the above and such, under the hitherto side-lined sub-heads of our very conversion-friendly constitution. 

Above all else, the social treatment of the Semitic plague lies in the mass education of the Hindus, more so the vulnerable ones, about the exclusivist, intolerant and expansionist precepts of Christianity and Islam. Needless to say, a comparative religious profile of the basic tenets of the Indian-origin religions and that of the alien Semitic faiths should be made part of the school curriculum, so that Hindus, for generations to come, won’t be falling prey to the Abrahamic deceptions. Last but not the least, Gandhi, the main hurdle to the Hindu upturn, must be brought down to earth from the Mahatma (ask Ambedkar) pedestals, in all our school grounds that is, as it is his falsified legacy that has been the root cause of the Hindu apathy of our times.     

* Analysed in Chapter 22, The Number Game, of the author’s free ebook ‘Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n More) that is Googleable

** Detailed in the author’s article, Incongruities in Indian Constitution’ that is Googleable.   

In the days of yore, land was the only resource available for man to have a say in the material aspects of life, and as for the land-less, neither ambition nor resentment was of any avail to get even in the universality of inequality. What is worse, as envy and caprice only make it worse, the wise among the have- nots learned to cultivate contentment in their minds to mend their resource- less lives, and even the less resourceful ones, relatively speaking that is. Thus emerged the old adage - contentment is the finest thing in the world - to lend peace of mind to the lacking millions by way of a stoical philosophy. Nonetheless, one’s reconciliation with the deprivations that contentment entails serves so much and no more for it fails to enable him or her to feel fulfilled, which is the essence of equitable living. 

However, the advancement of the world that enlarged the frontiers of livelihood began to afford material opportunities to the land-less lot, and that came to alter the grammar of living, written with the alphabets of ambition. In time, as success became the key word of life and contentment the anathema to ambition, man truly set himself on the rat race on the material course to his mental detriment. Be that as it may, man need not feel damned, so it seems, In the days of yore, land was the only resource available for man to have a say in the material aspects of life, and as for the land-less, neither ambition nor resentment was of any avail to get even in the universality of inequality. What is worse, as envy and caprice only make it worse, the wise among the have- nots learned to cultivate contentment in their minds to mend their resource- less lives, and even the less resourceful ones, relatively speaking that is. Thus emerged the old adage - contentment is the finest thing in the world - to lend peace of mind to the lacking millions by way of a stoical philosophy. Nonetheless, one’s reconciliation with the deprivations that contentment entails serves so much and no more for it fails to enable him or her to feel fulfilled, which is the essence of equitable living. 

However, the advancement of the world that enlarged the frontiers of livelihood began to afford material opportunities to the land-less lot, and that came to alter the grammar of living, written with the alphabets of ambition. In time, as success became the key word of life and contentment the anathema to ambition, man truly set himself on the rat race on the material course to his mental detriment. Be that as it may, man need not feel damned, so it seems, the quality of his fulfillment could be immeasurable. Thus, expanding on Peter Drucker’s ‘a first-rate truck driver is better than a tenth-rate executive’ we can say that the former could feel fulfilled on account of his sense of contribution, which would be beyond the grasp of the latter despite his material overreach. 

So, that is how the sense of contribution is the source of fulfillment in life that mere contentment cannot bring about.

‘What ails India’ has been the subject matter of the left-lib right-wing tussle for long, what with the cynics chipping in, in between. However, the right-wing assault on the left-lib ‘Idea of India’, facilitated by Narendra Modi’s nationalist rise in the Indian political firmament, has only increased the intensity of the scrimmage. Be that as it may, this is to throw a new ‘right’ light on India’s ‘left’ plight that has been Bharat’s bane, for a fresh look at it.  

In Kitab al-Hind, Al-Biruni had stated that “the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs”, and that was in the 11th century CE. Wasn’t it the current American parallel of yore? But still, by the 20th century, the sangh pariwar, in order to make Hindus feel proud of being Hindus all again, had no option but to come up with the slogan, garv se kaho hum hindu hain. But then, what it was that so adversely affected the Hindu morale that led to the initial decline and the eventual downfall of Bharat that is India is the subject matter of this exercise.   

That the Hindus felt what they felt in the 11th century, despite the 1st century evangelical forays into Malabar by St. Thomas and the 8th century Arab conquest of Sind, in a way, is a giveaway of the cause of India’s plight, past and present – the abject ignorance of the Hindus about the exclusivist ethos of the expansionist Christian and Islamic faiths, and their utter disregard for the perils their followers posed to India’s social harmony, political unity and national integrity. However, given their social ethos of religious amity, this sedate Hindu failure of yore, to grasp the divisive credos of the alien faiths, is understandable, though not anymore. Even so, as the sanatana Hindu non-varnas were socially kept away from Bharat’s varna mainstream, the precedence of Buddhism and Jainism that sought to correct this self-negating social code, were more of reformist offshoots than rebellious branches of the otherwise all-encompassing sanatana dharma that, lo, holds Charvaka’s atheism too in its Hindu fold!

Whatever, given the inadequate growth of these sub-religious trees, as they failed to provide much of a reformist shade to the non-varnas, the practice of their debasement, if not enslavement, persisted in the Hindu social arrangement. Sadly but inevitably, this social wedge became the Achilles heel for the proselytizing Christians and Muslims to pierce through the Hindu body politic. Even so, the Muslims needed the might of their sword and power of patronage and the Christians, the guile of enticement and the guise of charity for their religious headway. However, it is a testimony to the Indian social resilience that together they could only uproot, up to a quarter of its Hindu roots that too in a millennium. Ironically though, it is this intellectual complacency that makes the Hindus the ‘once bitten not twice shy’ kind, showing a blind eye to the unabated conversion of their disgruntled sections into these alien faiths to India’s demographic detriment.         

Just the same, Maryam Jameelah in her book, Islam and Orientalism, lamented that “If the Mughal monarchs had assumed their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized intensive tabliq or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake, never would have arisen.” If only Jameelah had read Al-Biruni, she could have envisaged the haughty hurdles of the Hindu varnas that the Mughal tabliq had to surmount. Besides, as the unceasing tabliq would have entailed a perpetual jihad, probably, the Sultans staid put in their palaces annexed with harems in the limited lands that came under their sway. All the same, they spared no efforts to pluck the low hanging Hindu ‘non-varna’ fruits to substantially fill their Islamic religious baskets.  

Eventually though, signaling the end to the eight-hundred years old partial Muslim rule, Robert Clive planted the British colonial foot in the Battle of Plassey, plotted by Jagat Seth’s avenging ‘financial’ hand at Siraj-ud-Daulah’s  insult of him. Nevertheless, the Nehruvian school curriculum, as if to deprive the Hindu kids of the feel good revenge, made the game-changing event seem an all-Muslim affair with Mir Jaffar as the quisling. Whatever, given the Mughal decline by then, but for this Cliveian twist to the Mughal legacy, it is not inconceivable that the Marathas, Rajputs and the valorous rest would have given a Hindu turn to the Muslim history. Be that as it may, by ending the Muslim influence in India, the British had enabled the Hindus to feel at home in their ancestral land, at long last that is. But all that turned out to be a false start for them as the British Macaulayzed their educational mechanism to uproot generations of Hindus from their sanatana grassroots to upend their cultural legacy from their collective consciousness. Hence, as if to prove that ‘there’s a price to pay for freedom’, history threw the Hindus out of the frying pan into fire. That it affected an encore for them is the irony of India’s history!

Not just that, the British pauperized Bharat by ruining its industry and degrading its economy, from some 24% of the world’s GDP to around 4% of it before they had to leave its shores for their own safety. However, it’s another matter though that the centuries-long Islamic turbulence had earlier brought down the Indian economy by ten notches or so. Even as the British rule impoverished India that hurt all, still the Muslims couldn’t care less for their holy book hath it that “Naught is the life of the world save a pastime and a sport. Better far is the abode of the Hereafter for those who keep their duty (to Allah). Have ye then no sense?” Not only that, having barred the secular education to their kids for the fear of its intellectual corruption of their irrational belief system, they had confined them to madrasas for further cementing their blind faith in their tiny heads. As ummah is change averse, the Muslim conditions apply even now and maybe into the foreseeable future as well. Thus, it’s no wonder that this inimical feature of the Muslim character has become the cornerstone of the electoral strategy of the cynical politics – Give Muslims their Islam and be done with them.

But then, even as the patriotic fervour began to awake the Hindu nationalism, the Islamic craving for a Muslim homeland started taking its political shape, both anathemas to the British colonial masters. It was then that the much-wronged Hindus needed a visionary leader to guide them to their rightful place under the sun but instead they got the silly but wily Gandhi, who sadly fouled it for them, so to say, for all times to come. However, Muslims found their messiah in Jinnah, who delivered the hoped-for Pakistan to them, so to say, on the Hindu platter of his own ancestors. Surely, Gandhi was erudite enough to know about the Muslim religious obligation to strive for the establishment of an Islamic rule in dar al-harb, which India was, and still is for them. Even then, instead of tackling the ummah on the separatist front, by appeasing the Musalmans in every which way, he naively persisted in his attempts to avert India’s inevitable partition with disastrous consequences. It’s thus, even as he was unequivocal about the Hindu non-violence, he was ambivalent on the Muslim violence, be it Moplah massacres or Swami Shraddhanand’s murder to cite but two examples.

More so, it was Gandhi’s lack of foresight leading up to India’s partition that hurt the Hindus the most, to appreciate which his wooly Hindu-Muslim sadbhavana should be contrasted with Ambedkar’s robust take on the Muslim psyche: “…the allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country which is his but on the faith to which he belongs. To the Muslim ibi bene ibi patria is unthinkable. Wherever there is the rule of Islam, there is his own country. In other words, Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin.”  Thus, failing to see the Muslim intent to break India, even after personally witnessing the Direct Action Day’s virulent violence, he remained pigheadedly adamant against India’s inevitable, even necessary partition, albeit with the population exchange on the respective religious grounds, advocated by Sardar Patel, not to speak of Ambedkar. Just the same, as if he had a premonition of the post-partition calamity in the offing, on April 6, 1947 he lectured that “Hindus should not harbour anger in their hearts against Muslims even if the latter wanted to destroy them. Even if the Muslims want to kill us all we should face death bravely. If they established their rule after killing Hindus we would be ushering in a new world by sacrificing our lives.”

If only Gandhi had a knack for realpolitik, seeing the writing on the Muslim-fractured Indian wall, he should have brought about an equitable religious separation in an amicable manner, which would have saved the catastrophic outcomes of the haphazard partition for Hindus as well as Muslims, more so for the former. But yet, he showed no remorse for his foolhardiness in opposing a planned ‘population exchange based’ partition, but instead had allegedly stated that Hindu and Sikh women should get willingly raped by their Muslim violators. Capping all that, his incalculable harm to India lay in the unilateral anointment of Nehru, the most English of them all (in his own words) as its putative Prime Minister by immorally sidelining the Hindu nationalist Patel, opted by the congress party to lead the nascent nation.

Not just that, with his fast-unto-death stunt later, he coerced the Indian government into releasing to Pakistan its share of the partition funds that is in the midst of their military engagement! Sadly for India, this anti-national stance of Gandhi on his utopian moral ground turned out to be the proverbial last straw on Godse’s patriotic back. Whatever, sensing a godsend opportunity to grind his political axe in Godse’s senseless act, Nehru cleverly dubbed the murder of a maverick as the martyrdom of the Mahatma. But equally cynically, so as to smoothen the way for the Muslim aggrandizement in India, he forged the ant-communal hammer on the anvil of that human tragedy for smothering the resurgent Hindu nationalism. Why, he did proclaim that he was “English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident.”

However, his Muslim affinity, as can be seen from his midnight missive to Padmaja Naidu, wherein he penned his ‘relief’ at the British military action that killed 400 Bihari farmers indulged in a retaliatory Hindu rioting after the Noakhali Muslim carnage, was more cynical than cultural. What is worse, it is an unambiguous giveaway of his anti-Hindu disposition that he was wont to exhibit throughout albeit in the secular garb. Here are a few lines from that ‘insensitive’ letter for all to ponder over:     

‘’.. I learnt that the military had fired on a peasant mob in the rural areas some miles from here, and about 400 had been killed. Normally such a thing would have horrified me. But would you believe it? I was greatly relieved to hear it!”

“And so when the news came that they have been stopped at last in one place and that 400 of them had died, I felt that the balance had been very slightly righted.” 

Oh, bemoan Gandhi for having entrusted the fate of the trusting Hindus to such a cynical person, who was emotionally as well as intellectually anti-Hindu. But then, the crux of India’s plight is that both these crass characters were at chasing the mirages of their false images - Gandhi as an apostle of non-violence and Nehru as the messiah of non-alignment – by turning its interests into a desert of despair, which apparance is seldom appreciated by the wronged Hindus themselves.

No less significant is the start of Nehru’s epochal Tryst with Destiny address to the Indian Constituent Assembly – “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially” – that is an intellectual indicator of not only his limited ambition for the independent India but also his lack of belief in the Hindu potential to reclaim its ancient glory. But, lo, as India’s ill-fate would have it, he happened to helm it for the first seventeen years in its making as an independent nation! However, it’s true that he shaped the ‘temples of modern India’ in the form of giant public sector undertakings and ushered in the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, ostensibly to train their pujaris. Nevertheless, as it turned out, these prized pundits invariably sailed to the American shores for ‘bettering themselves’ and, in time, the Nehruvian temples were turned into white elephants by their ‘socialist’ attendants. That’s not all to the litany of the national, social, moral, material, and political ills that have come to plague India, courtesy his unsavoury legacy, made worse by his daughter Indira and her daughter-in-law Sonia, who lorded over India for long. No denying, there are books and books, about India’s plight, but doubt if any of them pinpoint the root causes of the malady, and what follows is but an attempt at that.

So to say, to enable the Musalmans to feel at home in the Hindu India, for reasons better left for researchers to explore in the future, Nehru had ensured that the Hindus have no cause and effect to feel it is their own country, which  proved to be its double jeopardy. It’s thus, with its caste-centric Hindus lacking nationalist impulse and its Muslim residuals devoid of any sense of belonging to it (recall Ambedkar’s words) forming its demographic triad, with the ‘neither here nor there’ closet Christians, India has become the habitat of varied interest groups but not a unified nation with a unitary purpose. But still, the historic situation was never beyond redemption, if only the Hindus were made to believe that in essence India belonged to them and them only and so it was their bounden duty to make it great again, morally, spiritually, as well as materially, never mind the non-committal minorities, by and large that is. However, his dynastic successors, not content with engineering the caste divisions to fracture the Hindu mandate, had fostered the captive Muslim vote-bank to willy-nilly put India on the demographic path of future partition.  

But at long last, as if to give itself a rightful turn to its wrongful history, India had induced its indifferent Hindu electorate to vote out Nehru’s dubious descendants, who have become its nemeses since long, and vote in the nationalist Narendra Modi. Hitting the ground running, Modi had diagnosed India’s true malaise and started curing the same by restoring the Hindu religious virility and infusing Bharat’s cultural pride in the Indian national consciousness. It’s as if, so to say overnight, India has regained its lost Hindu josh on its march towards Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat, the veracity of which the Operation Sindoor has validated. By now it is apparent, more than ever, that the Hindus have come to believe that India is theirs to cherish, nourish, and protect against all odds and in every eventuality. What is more heartening is, the Hindus have come to believe that like the Sindoor, Atmanirbhar too is not a one-off thing, but an ongoing endeavour to usher in the Vikasit Bharat after Modi’s heart.

But yet, India has to contend with the nefarious nexus of the intransigent Islamists, obscurantist Muslims and their left-lib cohorts, who leave no stone unturned to impede its progress in every possible way, judicial activism included. So, it is only by defanging this venomous system that Bharat can become vikasit, and hopefully Modi would be able to do that in time so that the present and the future generations of Hindus would be blessed to be able to echo their ancestors’ modified motto, ‘there is no country but theirs, no culture like theirs, no society like theirs, no democracy like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs, no economy like theirs and no military like theirs’.