‘We the People’ Then ‘n Now -

A Case for Constitutional Changes

Being in the seventy-fifth year of our republic, it is imperative that WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA must evaluate THOSE PEOPLE OF INDIA, who had adopted our constitution.

But to put things into perspective, who ‘We’ are need to be ascertained for the constitution, instead of forging India into an unified nation, turned it into a conglomeration of disparate entities, though by then, Gurajada had famously stated that ‘it’s not the soil but its people that make a country’ (desamante mattikadoi, desamante manushuloi). So, given that the Hindu majority is ‘the other’ for the Muslim minority, the raison d'être for India’s partition on the Islamic lines and as the evangelists are ever engaged in harvesting the  ‘heathen’ Hindu souls for their Christian salvation, effectually in the Indian socio-political context, ‘We’ are the Hindus, then as well as now.

When Mohandas Gandhi took the satyagraha path to free India from the British rule, as that was in sync with their pacifist psyche, shaped by the foreign yokes for a millennium, Hindus in their millions flocked to him wide-eyed as if awoke from their collective slumber. However, having sensed that the dispiriting Gandhian way would be self-defeating in every which way, when Subhas Bose came up with ‘give me your blood, I’ll give you freedom’ tune, by and large, it failed to attune with the by then enervated Hindus. It’s as if they were content with having their satyagraha bones broken by the British lathis, bandageable as they were. Whatever, by the time the Union Jack was folded in India, albeit after unfolding the Islamic green in Pakistan, culled out for the Musalmans, Gandhi became a mahatma and his whims the Hindu code and his fancies the Indian credo. What’s worse, his artificial halo has been sustained over the years through a lauding school curriculum and the flattering propaganda machine meant to further the electoral interests of Nehru and his political dynasty in India’s democracy. Though of late, thanks to the information revolution, it transpired that it was not Gandhi’s Quit India ripples that forced the Brits to abandon our shores but it was owing to the fear of Bose’s militaristic impulses surging in the British Indian Army singing them that made them flee, and that’s in Atlee’s words.

Whatever, by the time the freedom movement picked up steam, as Islam’s separatist impulses gained the political ground, Gandhi gave a Khilafat twist to what was essentially a Hindu nationalist upsurge. However, at the threshold of India’s partition, Dr BR Ambedkar, the eventual architect of its constitution, rooted for the territorial exchange of the Hindu and the Muslim populations in the two upcoming nations on the ground that “Islam is a close corporation and the distinction that it makes between Muslims and non-Muslims is a very real, very positive and very alienating distinction… For those who are outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity. The second defect of Islam is that it is a system of social self-government and is incompatible with local self-government because 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 [Your home is where they treat you well] 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.”

However, Gandhi and Nehru, the Hindu the agenda setters of that time, shot down Ambedkar’s visionary proposal and what’s worse, the latter, so to say, took the truncated Hindu land to the Muslim bend that too in the aftermath of its demographic disaster. So, Bankim Chandra’s vande maataram, the marching song of the freedom fighters, regardless of the emotional chord it had struck with the Hindu masses and classes alike got a short shrift when it came to India’s national anthem for the Muslim minority vetoed it as un-Islamic! It’s not just that for Nehru had bent over backwards to Islamically satiate the Muslim remnants in India as if he made it his life’s mission to make them more faithful to their faith than the faithful that made it to Pakistan, the land of the pure.

Nonetheless, it still intrigues; what Gandhi and Nehru were up to in encouraging India’s Muslims to tread on the very Islamic path that brought things to the partition pass (see the tailpiece), and how come that the galaxy of Hindu stalwarts, including the redoubtable Sardar Patel, instead of busting the duo’s dubious agenda had indeed kowtowed to them. But then, the Hindus, so to say, have always been subject to the double jeopardy of Islamic-ignorance and Islam-apologia that, however, needs some elaboration. Despite the millennia-old Muslim presence in India, Islamic awareness, even among the Hindu intelligentsia, has always been dismal.  Maybe that was, and is, owing to the lazy assumption that all ‘religions are the same’, which naturally obviates the bother to probe and explore, an onerous task at any time, more so in that ‘library’ era. Thus, having willy-nilly given a clean chit to Islam, the villain of the piece, the supercilious Hindus then tended to condescend to descend to the poverty-stricken, though recalcitrant, Musalmans and that turned them into Islamapologists; same is the case now with the left-lib Hindus.  

Just the same, they were, and are, well off the mark on either count for the Quran has it that:  All they who disbelieve and deny our revelations, such are rightful owners of hell and lo, 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? So, simply put, Muslims give a damn being poor and the anatomy of Islam is such that it shapes them into a kind of religious monsters the non-Muslim world has been at a loss to contend with. Be that as it may, the interested can have Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n more), possibly a new genre, that’s in the public domain as a free ebook.

It’s thus, crafted by those people, our constitution under the guise of ‘freedom of religion’, so to say, has granted a free hand to the Muslims and the Christians alike to do whatever it may take to deepen their faiths and further them as well by ‘religious propagation’, read, through conversions of the gullible Hindus into their respective folds by means fair or foul and / or both. But what is perplexing to note is that the very Ambedkar, though aware that ‘Islam can never allow a true Muslim to adopt India as his motherland and regard a Hindu as his kith and kin’ (surely he couldn’t have been unaware of the Christian evangelic urge as well) had allowed such pernicious provisions that would only augment those faiths and further their numbers at the cost of the Hindus, to creep into it. Maybe the inimical incongruities were not deliberate designs but his indifference to the plight of the Hindus, the historical oppressors of his dalit ilk, would be apparent on espial. Whatever, considerable demographic damage has already been done and thanks to the emergence of the social media now at least ‘We’ are aware what it is like.  Whereas the Muslim population has doubled itself in percentage terms in the last seventy-five years, the Christian demographic surge in the country as well as the hill side is all too evident from the mushrooming of the Churches meant for the salvation of the freshly minted souls.  

Likewise, ‘We’ are also aware of the Islamists’ Ghazwa-e-Hind agenda besides the Pope’s zest to harvest Hindu souls for the Christian crops though most of us tend to dismiss them respectively as the Muslim pipedream and the Christian daydream. However, it pays us to know that our forbears’ complacency on the same score brought their Akhand Bharat to Jinnah’s Pakistani pass. And given that demography is destiny, our failure now to heed to history, over time, would ensue to our progeny three nations in Gurajada parlance that of the Hindus, the Musalmans, and the Christians in the self-same Indian soil. So as to avert that from ever happening, it is imperative that WE THE AWARE PEOPLE OF INDIA should bring about suitable changes in our untenable constitution by binding our parliamentarians to that task.

 

Tailpiece

 

It’s on April 6, 1947 that Gandhi said:

“We should dispassionately think where we are drifting. 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. None should fear death. Birth and death are inevitable for every human being. Why should we then rejoice or grieve? If we die with a smile we shall enter into a new life, we shall be ushering in a new India. The Concluding verses of the second chapter of the Gita describe how a godfearing man should live. I would exhort you to read and understand those verses and ponder over their meaning…”

However, as can be seen from Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of Self-help, a free ebook in the public domain, Gandhi got it all wrong for the concluding verses of its second chapter are not contextual to his silly propositions that go against the very Sanatana credo of ahimsa paramo dharma, dharma himsa tathaiva cha (abhor violence, violate violators) that though he had cynically truncated to enervate the Hindus. Thus, it can be said that at best he was a moodhatma (hare-brained) and at worst a duraatma (evil-minded) and by no means a mahatma. 

As for Nehru, in his 5 Nov, 1946 midnight missive to Padmaja Naidu, in the context of the Hindu retaliation in Bihar to the Muslim massacres of them in Bengal’s Noakhali,  he wrote:

“My dear,

Why exactly I am writing to you just at this present moment, nearing mid-night, when I am tired out, I do not quite know. But after the excessive strain of the last two days I had a feeling of reaction and relaxation and I thought of you and wanted to write.

This evening I returned by air from Bhagalpur. On arrival 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! So we change with changing circumstances as layers of fresh experience and feeling cover up the past accumulation.

I have had horror enough during the past two days. Something incredible has happened here, or something that I would have refused to believe in, a few days ago. Hindu peasant mobs have behaved in a manner that is the extreme of brutality and inhumanity. How many have been done to death by them I do not yet know, but it must be a vast number. To think that the simple, unsophisticated, rather likable Bihar peasant can go completely mad en masse upsets all my sense of values.

For a few days they had it their own way, with few checks or hindrances. 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.

I do not know how long I shall stay here – I have forgotten Delhi and all else for the moment. All I am concerned with is Bihar for the present. As soon as I see light here I go back to Delhi.

I am very tired and sleepy now.

Love,

Jawahar”

This is but a sample of Nehru’s umpteen Hindu omissions and numerous Muslim commissions that betray his Hinduphobia screened by his coterie historians with secular filters.