The current generation of Hindus is a one which has been denied it's history. While the education system is to blame, parents need to shoulder a big chunk of it. And that needs urgent fixing.
I recently found myself in a debate over whether the identity of the Indian state can be divorced from its Hindu roots or not. The person across me was a left-leaning friend, who was extremely displeased over prime minister Modi attending Bhoomi Poojan of the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple. Such was his anguish, that he even endorsed sacrificing prime minister’s fundamental right to practice his religion at the altar of secularism. At this point, I simply retorted that just because religion is not an important thing for him, it doesn’t mean it’s not an important aspect for the majority of the people of the country. After all, it’s due to the agency of the voters, that religion features so prominently in our political discourse. Begrudgingly, he conceded this as a bitter fact, saying that he was making an argument from the lens of idealism.
While a lengthy argument can be made about applicability of secularism to the Indian context or lack thereof, it was his perception of idealism that made me think hard. The position the one considers to be idealistic reflects deeply about his frame of thought. Can we wish religion away from our law-making when this land has been ravaged by years of persecution of its native faiths? When this land was torn into two on religious lines less than a century ago leaving millions dead and displaced? Let me ask the same question with different characters. How many people’s sense of idealism would lead them to vouch for Germany to formulate its modern identity uninformed of the Holocaust.
This friend of mine is a Hindu, and he’s a part of a much bigger demographic. For them, the idea of India only began once the tricolour replaced the Union Jack in 1947. Such a line of thought is symptomatic of a generation oblivious to its history. Of the biggest sins that the modern Indian state has committed on Hindus is to deny them their history. A history where genocides of millions were unscrupulously discarded as the musing of fanatics, and which drew false equivalences between these genocides and struggles for survival by the persecuted.
However, I don’t want to digress into the role of what I call the leftist-Nehruvian mafia in distorting the history of our land, for it’s not the topic I want to primarily focus on. Enough has been said about it, by people who are far more qualified than I am to speak upon the matter. What I want to rather talk about is the role of Hindu parents and their utter failure in educating their children about the persecution that Hindus had to go through to keep their civilisation alive. In fact, it is this void left in the minds of many young urban youths that have been filled with venomous propaganda by the leftists. But why are Hindu parents so reluctant to talk about their history? I’ve wondered this for years and only now, given I’ve accumulated a little wealth of experiences in my life, that I have begun to wrap my head around how the Hindu mind functions.
It dawned upon me when I was talking a local guide who had a German couple as his clients that particular day. The couple remarked how the North was bereft of grand temples, something that they saw frequently in the South. The guide explained that once the Islamic invasions started happening, most of the temples in the North were razed. The Hindus fought back and rebuilt some temples, only to see them see them meet the same fate once the Islamic invaders regained power. Eventually, temples were re-built, but they were only a shadow of their former glorious selves, the Shikharas becoming shorter so that tyrannic eyes of the ravaging armies of the invaders would not fall upon them. All this, withheld in our history books, still lives as post-traumatic stress in our civilisation’s psyche.
Perhaps that is the reason why Hindus don’t teach their children their history. The pain suffered was so much that even visiting the memory lane completely wrenches one’s heart. Truth be told, it’s a tough job to hold back tears once one gets to read Persian, mind you not the translated and diluted, but authentic Persian accounts of how the invaders gloat about the crimes they committed to the “Kafir” (A person who does not believe in Islam) filth. Perhaps, if it was so hard to even the parents to digest, they thought it’d be better to keep it from innocuous minds of their children. The children that they would then send to westernised schools where the Indian state had arranged for systematic brainwashing that would deny these children any pride in their identity. It was perhaps better, the parents thought, for their children to never know of a world where heinous crimes as the ones committed by invaders on the aborigines of this land were committed. As a great-grandson of a woman who saw her parents decapitated in front of her during the partition, I’ve been witness to such negationism.
But while smaller families, a more liberalised economy and a focus on skill-building have got Hindus in a much better economic shape, we must not forget the forces that once put Hindus in peril have not really stopped. The parents must take a bitter pill and expose their children to the atrocities that Hindus have been at the end of since 1000 years. It’s an important part of our identity and our children deserve to know the truth. Jews have festivals that are about mourning their persecuted ancestors, so do Shia Muslims who celebrate Ashura. The Christians have made the cross, a symbol of their persecution as their ubiquitous religious symbol. There is a reason why communities canonise their sufferings, for it reminds them why their religion is worth fighting for. Hindus seemed to have totally missed out on this boat, and have delegated the responsibility to protect them to the state. Same “liberal, democratic” state which sat ducks when Hindu presence was violently wiped from Kashmir about 3 decades ago.
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