#LiteraryCriticism

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.