Said by a Muslim man facing charges of criminal conspiracy and out on bail, in a country with 84% Hindus (2011 census) during an event targeted at a section of Hindus who enjoy reservation in government jobs and educational institutes for being "depressed Hindus" but Hindus nonetheless.
“there can be no future for a nation which does violence to itself by losing faith in its own way of life”
M.S.Golwalkar
How does this happen?
This happens because wherever you see, it is Hindus who themselves hack away at Hinduism which motivates others to join in on the party. At this point it is getting tiring to keep reiterating and feel good about how Hinduism is the only remaining “Pagan” religion which could not be defeated by monotheistic crusades and how the ancestors suffered but ultimately survived and in doing so repelled the attack on Hinduism. It is as true as the fact that we are all mortals, but to substitute inaction in the present by the constant reminiscence of this resilience, especially post 2014 is basically a crime.
Consider these names;
Arundhati,Jignesh,Aditya,Rajdeep,Sagarika,Subhashini,Brinda,Prakash,Kaushik,Ashok, Rohini,Barkha, Nidhi,Abhisar,Ravish,Prannoy,Srinivas,Vinod,Punya Prasun,Divya,Mitali,Yogendra,Swati,Swara,Kanhaiyya,Vidya,Devangana,Meena,Ajit,Romila, Bipan,Satish,Amratya,Devdutt and even Sitaram and Ramchandra.
Do any of these names sound Muslim or Christian to you? That it is possible that some of them may no longer be Hindus (as we know) and others may not be practicing Hindus is another matter. But when the audience sees people with such names criticize Hindus, declare them a false majority, label them as Eurasians, promote and share pictures of themselves eating beef and do monologues, write op-eds, write fiction novels and call them History, the people when they see and hear the same thing over and over are bound to give in. What is worse, this gives enemies of Hinduism an in, if you question them, they can easily point to people with such names and cite precedent. If you ask them to clean their own house first, the kind of people mentioned above jump in to their defense.
Now consider these names;
Umar,Sharjeel,Safoora,Shehla,Ladeeda,Salman,Arfa,Rana,Zainab,Farah,Jawed,Zeeshan, Ali,Munawwar,Rahat,Farhan,Aamir,Naseeruddin,Hamid.
There is total consensus. There is no deviation. None of such names, will ever praise BJP. All of these names will speak about Dalits. None of these names will talk about honour killing of Hindu boys and their families done by Muslim families as revenge for having an affair with a Muslim girl. All of these names will talk about Munawar Faruqi. None of these names will talk about Kamlesh Tiwari.
So even if us Hindus, in our own country, yes, once again, in our own land, we have no other place to go, so even if we want to gain an in, we have to rely on people like Tarek Fatah and Arif Aajkia who are both Pakistanis. As soon as we do that, the people mentioned before with very traditional sounding Hindu names are the first ones to rebuke us for taking genuine offense.
The arsenal that Indian Muslims use against Hindus today was provided to them by people who are seemingly Hindus themselves on the outside and a wasp nest on the inside. Hindus are now asked to prove their origin in a country where they make up 85% of the population. Hindus are accused by Muslims of all people for treating Hindu women in an unfair manner. Hindus have been recently educated about a concept called “Brahminism” and “Brahmanical Patriarchy” and are instantly asked by Muslims to justify it, it must be mentioned here that it was a bunch of seemingly Hindu women themselves who helped legitimize this concept by having the twitter CEO hold a placard mentioning it. Indian Muslims emboldened by their seemingly Hindu role models, pose questions to the larger Hindu community and then answer those questions themselves. Hindus are accused and then passed judgement on every day in India, yes, India, not Pakistan. They do so because our own do this first, our own question the President’s contribution to the Ram Mandir, just like the inauguration of Somnath was questioned all those years ago by Nehru and only after that, the rest follow.
So this brings us back to the fact that all the outrage we feel, it is of our own doing. If not us in particular, then our parents’ generation, if not them, then our grandparents’ generation and the ramifications which we have inherited in the form of our society’s state today. Going any further back in time is pointless because we were still under occupation before that. It is now that we must talk about the “root malady” as laid out in detail by the only Prophet I know. His name is M.S.Golwalkar. The collection of his speeches and articles is titled Vichar Navneet and titled Bunch of Thoughts in its English translation. The book among other things is astonishingly prophetic. He knew about our history, he was observing what was happening back then (1940-1973) and he could tell where things were going. Through the course of this article you will get an idea of his wisdom. For instance, he in his final few days in 1973, foresaw dictatorship. 2 years later Indira Gandhi had the Parliament suspended and jailed several members of the opposition, not to mention the Constitution amendments done during the emergency.
Guruji made no concessions when he stated that the reason foreigners were able to establish themselves and rule in India, be it Muslim invaders or the English, at the root of our slavery lay our own inability to organize ourselves and resist as a collective unit. The problem that plagued us then, has hurt us historically, still persists today. The ills of jealousy, provincialism have rendered us defenseless against our enemies. Guruji in his own words;
“the root cause of our national tragedy then, a thousand years ago, and now, a thousand years later, is the same- the utter lack of organized life among the Hindus, the children of this soil. The law of cause and effect knows no limits of time and place. Every page of our history of the past thousand years is a mute witness to this bitter truth operating on our national plane.”
As he witnessed India emerge from colonial shackles, bruised and bleeding, he could not help but feel that the direction that was chosen and the people in charge of leading the country were so disconnected from the land they struggled for, that his aspersions were justified then and today are prophetic wisdom as we have seen all that he had to say, stand true even today. His aversion to Western concepts dictating the minds of our body politic were very clear. He dismissed communism and socialism as he believed in the fact that any interpretation of the Indian society through the lens of ‘materialism’ was redundant as we had for thousands of years practiced and preached renunciation and freedom from worldly pleasures. One could keep typing and run out of energy but in light of what has been happening and the trigger behind this article, some of his thoughts must reach all those who are concerned. The seemingly Hindu names mentioned above pride themselves as “progressives”, Guruji had the following to say about such people;
“But there are people calling themselves “progressives” in our country today for whom all our ancient life-values appear as reactionary and harmful. Their chief argument against our values of life is its age. These neo-prophets have neo-mania. For them all that is old is bad. Since their nostrums are chronologically later arrivals, they assume them to be more efficacious….to condemn things as useless and retrograde simply because they are old would amount to accepting the worst type of slavery-the slavery of the intellect. And yet these intellectual slaves are pleased to appoint themselves as “progressives” of this age.”
Wherever we turn our gaze, we see a similar thing happening. In cuisine, old recipes are being marketed with the USP being the cultural heritage and a view into the days of past, fitness enthusiasts are researching for ancient methods of strengthening their bodies, nutritionists are looking back as well, so are architects and interior designers, Greek mythology has been honored by space scientists by naming galaxies and constellations after Greek mythical characters. What has our “intelligentsia” done? They have mocked Hanuman and dismissed Ram Setu while they buy Rs.500 tickets at PVR to watch a movie on Zeus, Aries, Poseidon and Hades. Their idea of culture is harem pants and at the most a Khadi Kurta. If they could, they would discredit Yoga as well with having anything to do with ancient India because as far as they are concerned there was no India before 1947. Netflix and Hollywood is full of productions on Vikings, Romans, Greeks and even Ottomans now. What has our rich industry done? We have fought 3 direct wars and repelled 2 other aggressions, we sent men to fight in the World Wars, we have sent soldiers in UN peacekeeping missions, but is there anything that can remotely capture the sacrifice and scale of effort put in by our men to save the country? Not even a good book. How can there be anything positive or full of pride when deep down we still suffer from a tremendous inferiority complex and the metropolitan populace now suffers from an identity crisis as well. Guruji touched on this when he saw the educated, turn into cheap rip-offs of the Westerners;
“..Inferiority complex that we suffer in relation to the Westerners. This is an evil legacy of the days of English rule here. During the last one century or more many personalities have arisen in this land who have striven to shake off the foreign yoke. But most of them had themselves become mental slaves to the English. A sense of defeatism, a sense of inferiority complex ruled their minds. How did this happen? The reason is simple and lies in the common human weakness of associating good qualities with wealth and power…when the tide of war turned in the favour of the English and for a time it seemed as though we were finally overthrown, there came a period of lull and diffidence, resulting in the fostering of the idea that the victors, superior in their military prowess and scheming skill and possessed a brave show of physical prosperity, must also be superior in all kinds of knowledge. That is why our people at the beginning of the English rule started aping the manners and customs of the English and voicing opinions borrowed from the West with an air of conviction. Every European ideal, however absurd was gospel truth; everything ours by contrast, was naturally false and foolish. Especially those learned in the Western lore, the “educated” class, became in truth “black-skinned Englishmen. No wonder that such ‘educated’ men found no difficulty in gulping down the extraordinary absurdity, cleverly propagated by the foreigner that at the root of our defeat and degeneration lay our way of life. So they began to rebuild our national life with contempt for our own culture and infatuation for the foreign ideals…today we find everywhere attempts to recast our life-pattern in the mould of an American, English or Russian way of life. How can we call it ‘Swatantrata’ which has no ‘swa’ in it? Then it is only para-tantrata. If Lenin is kept as the ideal it becomes ‘Lenin-tantra’ and not swa-tantra! In fact, protection and propagation of our national life-values, i.e. our Dharma and Sanskriti, have always been held on our historical tradition as the raison d’etre of Swatantrata.”
What we see from the kind of people who have names like the ones mentioned before, much of this can be attributed to the way our polity shaped up from the years leading up to 1947 but even there the hook was always Islamic. The fabled Hindu-Muslim unity during 1857 did not exist. There is ample evidence to suggest that rather than independence, in the princely states of India the goal was to establish Nawabs in place of Hindu rulers and re-establish the Mughal descendant in Delhi. Similarly the pan-islamist agenda of Indian Muslims which took shape as the Khilafat Movement was branded as Muslim participation in Indian Independence simply because the Congress did not have the conviction of speaking plainly and calling a spade a spade. There was a period when the slogan was raised “no swaraj without Hindu-Muslim unity”, around the same time written assurances were being given by Congress that cow slaughter will not be prohibited after India gets independence, those who got the assurance still voted for the Muslim League in 1946 provincial elections. The much eulogized Hindu-Muslim unity was a myth, the repeated bending over could not satisfy the appetite of the ever hungry Musalman and ultimately was paid for in blood, land and self-respect.
Still, after 1947 we had a chance to start afresh, but what happened in Britain after World War 2 was unthinkable in India. A change in leadership, Churchill was ousted, the same should have happened in India but the personnel did not change and with them the pre-1947 way of appeasement politics continued. As always our own were there to lead the way. The event in question, Elgar Parishad, where people like Sharjeel Usmani get the platform to express their true feelings towards Hindus is one of those events where our own are to be held accountable. Once Guruji found himself attending such an event, this was his observation;
“Once in Nagpur there was a conference of some persons calling themselves non-Brahmins. I was surprised to find Muslim and Christian speakers also addressing the conference. When I inquired of this from one of the organizers of the conference he said, “well they are also non-Brahmins”! No part of the country is free from such internecine quarrels. Everywhere the ground is being prepared by our own people for the enemies to step in and fortify their positions.”
What we see happening today, manufacturing protests, trying to enforce a street veto to laws made by the Parliament as the opposition does not have the numbers in both houses, is the manifestation of that same “root malady” and the ignorance born out of intellectual slavery and mutual hostility and greed. So long as the personal goals of opposition politicians are fulfilled, they are not concerned with the cost. They do not believe in our civilizational state, they never did, and hence cannot be expected to work in its favour. Guruji highlights this gangrenous mind-set when he writes;
“There are in addition several cleavages developing among our people on any and every issue, whether of language, caste, sect or party. Everyone stands up and says that he wants a state for his own language, a state for his own sect, and if at all he is prepared to stay in the Union, he wished that it should be a loose federation with greater and greater powers for his state and the Central authority prevailing only in name. The same curse of mutual hatred and jealousy, which turned our national life into shambles during the last thousand years, is continuing to play its devil dance under the new grabs of love of province, party, language, community, sect etc. Once a prominent leader of Andhra had publicly declared that if a separate Andhra state was not formed he would take the aid of Russia to achieve it. A prominent Sikh leader once threatened that if Punjabi Suba was not carved out then all Sikhs would turn Communists. With the Chinese armies poised on our frontiers, such a statement could convey only one meaning, and that is, an invitation and an assurance to the aggressor of help from inside, in exchange for his help in carving out a separate state.”
The day roti-making machines reached Singhu Border from Gurudwaras, the protest was no longer about anything else but communal. There is not much that the Communists leave to imagination when they describe in very clear terms how they wish to achieve a revolution. Anything that can bind people together must be done away with, whether it is nationality, religion or plain camaraderie. But we would be foolish to think that we are up against staunch ideologues. The people we see today holding the capital hostage are full of greed and self-interest. Nothing more. These words of Guruji when he addressed the All India General Council at Nagpur in March 1973, two months before his passing are almost picture perfect;
“Today, disintegrating forces are afoot in our country and the foreign powers are lying in wait to fish in the troubled waters. Some years back, the foreign powers had their hand in the language conflict in Assam. Now it seems there is the foreign hand in the circulation of exaggerated news of persecution of Harijans. The foreign powers know very well that they can retain their supremacy in this country only by splitting Hindus. We must accept that we have not been successful to the extent expected of us in integrating the society and rousing the feeling of intense patriotism in it. As such, we have to be more keenly conscious of our responsibility, think about all aspects of our work, and put ourselves to the wheel wholeheartedly and with a resolve to reach the goal at all costs in the near future.”
DISCLAIMER: The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this article. The author carries the responsibility for citing and/or licensing of images utilized within the text.
