Facts of A Fake ‘Idea of India’

For starters, India that came under the Islamic onslaught in the early 8^th Century culminating in the Mogul rule over it in the late 15^th Century carries the oldest extant civilization on earth. Then, at the beginning of the 17^th Century, the British landed in the sub-continent as spice traders to end up pitching their colonial tents under the British Raj upon which the sun had never set that was until the mid 20^th Century. That was when the clamor of the Musalmans for a nation of the faithful in the subcontinent increased even as the Hindu zeal for India’s independence picked up speed. So, unable to bear the native azadi heat, the English vacated the place, giving separate space to the Indian Musalmans by carving out Pakistan exclusively for Islam, however, leaving the Hindus to decide India’s religio-cultural fate for themselves. But the then Hindu polity was devoid of the urge to resurrect sanatana dharma, the ancient ethos of the land, in their national share, and what’s worse, its leadership too lacked the foresight even in the hindsight, a la not being ‘once bitten twice shy’. So, in a never before kind of betrayal of a nation by its classes and masses alike, they opted to cook the toxic Hindu-Muslim kichdi in India’s hearth. What’s worse, in a continuing saga, the Hindus of the day too remain unmindful of the inimical demographic designs of the Islamists and the evangelicals alike in their land that would portend its geographical doom should baffle the historians and the laymen alike. So this exercise is to decipher the peculiarity of the suicidal Hindu mindset that set India on its ruinous course, and continues to do so.

Though the Indian Musalmans’ insistence that they cannot co-exist with the Hindus was the raison d'etre for dividing the ancient landmass and despite Ambedkar’s articulation of Hindu-Muslim transmigration over the partitioned lines on that very score, yet the then Islam-naive Hindu leadership, headed by the Muslim-partial Gandhi Nehru duo, rooted for the Islamic presence in India. Thus, while the then Jaichand’s perfidious collusion with the intruding Muhammad Ghori to undermine his rival king Prithviraj laid the foundation for the Islamic rule in Hindustan; it’s the paucity of Hindu leadership at the time of its partition that precluded the mainland to regain its pristine Hindu character, and worse. But the moot point is how was it that the Hindu educated classes too had failed to see the irrationality of granting the Musalmans their Islamic space in Pakistan with one hand while with the other enable them to constrain the Hindu ethos in India! And true to their Islamic character, the Indian Musalmans were at it, so to say from the word go, vetoing vandemataram as the national anthem, refusing to hail the motherland, objecting the salutation to Surya the sun god, obstructing prayers to Saraswathi the goddess of learning, citing Islamic credos in India (!) even as its Secular State was at conditioning its Hindu subjects to remain helpless. Wonder if there’s such a parallel in the annals of human history, the Hinduphobics of the world must tell.   

Well, so as to grasp the self-defeating Hindu psyche, we may have to delve into The Macaulay Minute dated the 2nd February 1835 that laid the foundation for the edifice of the Indian education system under the British Raj.  

 “[8] .. the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them…

[31] .. But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. … We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. …..can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

[34] ….. it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. [We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population].” ([..] Emphasis supplied)

Thus, needless to say, unaware of the cynical British agenda for them, then the Hindus in general, began to let their children embrace Macaulayism to obtain new sarkari naukaris (the propagated purpose of English education) while, by and large, the Musalmans, true to their character, went along with their madrasas, worried as they were about the dilution of their faith the very education might occasion in their kids. No wonder then that at the critical juncture of India’s sunder, the Hindu elites - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect – moulded in a century-old Macaulay brainwash to totally disregard their religion and develop a near contempt for their culture, were naturally devoid of any dharmic wherewithal to guide Bharat in a proper post-partition sanatana direction. So, the by then rootless Hindu masses too saw nothing amiss in placing their fate and that of their newly independent nation, albeit after a millennial slavery, in the palpable hands of Nehru though he made no secret of his personal disposition by proclaiming that “I’m English by education, a Muslim by culture, just born a Hindu by accident.”

So, sadly for the Hindus, Nehru’s Muslim-oriented mindset was such that for him, “Mahmud (Ghazni) was far more a warrior than a man of faith and like many other conquerors he used and exploited the name of religion for his conquests. India was to him just a place from which he could carry off treasures and material to his homeland” (p235, Discovery of India) that is against Alberuni’s eyewitness account that “He utterly ruined the prosperity of the country (India), and performed those wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people”, and for him “the Hindus were infidels to be dispatched to hell as soon as they refused to be plundered”.

Thus, it was Nehru’s Islamapologia, to condescend to descend to the Musalmans regardless, which made him pass on the baton of India’s Macaulayised education system to the Saudi Arabia born Islamic theologian Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who had all along opposed India’s partition lest its depleted post-partition umma should lose its socio-political clout in the new Hindu-tilted nation. So, manning the Indian educational mechanism for nearly ten years, he cleverly steered it clear of the Islamic excesses of yore and parked it in the garage of ganga jamuna tehjeeb, the make-believe Hindu-Muslim hunky-dory, under the latter’s benign reign over the former barring the solitary Aurangzeb aberration. Surely, Azad’s idea was not to raise the Hindu hackles against the Musalmans’ past atrocities against them, but given the reality of the live Hindu-Muslim divide, so the legends of the latter’s crudities were ingeniously transferred into the British ‘divide and rule’ account to entitle the Indian umma to the benefit of the Hindu doubt.

Not Just Azad, four more Musalmans, all  appointed by either by Nehru or Indira, his daughter who succeeded him shortly after his death, continued to ‘guide’ the Hindu students that way for nine more years, whereby setting an unalterable course for the Hindu ministers that came to occupy the vacated chair thereafter. If the idea of those Muslim worthies was to dress up the historical Islamic wounds to bring about Hindu-Muslim amity, still it would have been a welcome proposition, but given that all of them had turned their Islamic backs on the anti-Hindu tirades in the masjids, mohallas and madrasas that center on the Quranic hatred for the kafirs, and the abiding glory of the Islamic conquests of Hindustan, the modern Indian history must brand them as dubious and hold them as guilty.

Be that as it may, obviously oblivious of the inimicality of the Islamic credo, the erudite Hindus, dubbed as left-liberals, invariably have come to downplay the exclusivist Islamic penchant just as an aberration of the obscurantist Musalmans lying on the fringes of the marginalized Indian umma. So, as if to forestall any Hindu resentment against the ever multiplying Musalmans as well as the fast growing crypto Christians, owing allegiance to alien faiths, these Hindus began to solicit sympathy for them through every medium that came under their ‘liberal’ sway by picturing them as a sort of noble souls while at the same time depicting their fellow Hindus as incorrigibly regressive beings.   

So to say, the Macaulay Minute with Maulana’s add-ons thus shaped the fake Nehruvian ‘Idea of India’ based on the perverse narrative of tolerance of the intolerant and intolerance of the tolerant, which insensibly afflicted the Hindu mindset and the thought process in every sphere of India’s intellectual activity, exemplified by Raja Rao in my maiden novel Benign Flame: Saga of Love while picturing his traumatic experience in a Hindu-Muslim riot, started by the latter, thus: 

“When I was a few meters away from Wahab’s office, some Hindu hooligans seeking out the Muslims for slaughter, accosted me. Oh, I was so dazed by the frenzy of those hate-merchants that some of them felt I could be a Muslim in fright. After stripping me naked, to confirm my religion via circumcision, they advised me to run for safety. I was too shaken to comprehend whether I should thank the foreskin for having saved my skin, or feel ashamed of the crassness of my co-religionists.”

But given its overall reach and general impact, it’s the celluloid that afforded the maximum purchase to the false ‘Idea of India’ peddled by these macmauls (mac from Macaulay and maul from Maulana). Thus, in cinema after cinema, the Good Samaritan has always been either a Musalman or a Christian, wearing their religious identities on their sleeves, just in case the audiences were to be inattentive. That’s not all, in picture after picture, even as the bygone Hindu societal ills are deliberately dug out for universal ridicule, yet in the so-called Muslim socials, the prevailing Islamic evils like triple talaq and nikah halala get consciously hidden from the Hindu view. Not only that, the very fact that PK, the 2014 Hindi film that made crude fun of the Hindu gods to the peels of Hindu laughter, illustrates the Idea of India’s  degree of decadence.

Well, if only the Hindu audiences were privy to the fact that the Christians believe that in an improbable act of Immaculate Conception, Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, who in turn turned water into wine and cured lepers with touch of his hand! Likewise, if only they were wiser to the fact that Musalmans swear by Muhammad’s aerial flight to and fro Paradise on the back of a winged horse and they are prone to miss the irony that Allah promises them rivers of wine in the hereafter even as he prohibits a peg of it here! Whatever, the Islam-naïve Hindus celebrate the ‘creative mischief’ of the Abrahamites, like MF Husain’s artistic though biased nudes of the Hindu goddesses, never mind that all his life he desisted from voyering his prophet’s private chambers. Not content at that, these macmauls brand those who condemn him on the same grounds as communal minded, besmirching their haloed Idea of India.

The gravity of this Hindu default can be gauged from the fact that but for Ambedkar’s stray, though incisive, thoughts on the Islamic credo and Chamupati Lal’s Hindi booklet, Rangeela Rasool that was only about Muhammad’s unbridled libido, there was no book on Islam by a Hindu in the know that was till I, prompted by the vacuity of it all, penned Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n More) in 2003 that’s in the public domain now as a free e-book. Whatever, it is seldom appreciated that the personal Islam is cumbersome, even to the ardent believers, and it’s the pyrrhic glory of political Islam’s goal to turn the world green that motivates them to menace the others; so with ‘blame Islam not the believer’ credo, if the non-Muslim world gets united to curb the political Islam, then the subdued Musalmans start behaving themselves. But for now, as poetic justice would have it, ironically, the very celluloid that gave a fillip to the fake ‘Idea of India’ narrative could let Vivek Agnihotri’s sensational ‘The Kashmir Files’ become its death knell, thereby ushering in the overdue New India with the marginalized political Islam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Clueless Creation - A Satirical Poem

 

Told God man In Genesis One

Him He created in form of His

Not when asked as how He did

Thought He fit in Genesis Two

To tell He used the dust for that

But to change tack after that,

So in time Muhammad told

Made Jibrail recite him

In the name of One who makes

Man on earth from clot of blood,

Failed as he then to enquire

Wherefrom He gets all that blood

And since God hath sealed His mouth

Knows not man the true roots of his.

 

 

Have Hindus Become More Intolerant, Or less Indulgent?

 

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 with 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 the duo, 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.

 

 

 

 

Rousseau’s Feminist Chains

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out to determine ‘whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people’s interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at in the state of nature, even though living in isolation’. Consequently, he had formulated The Social Contract ‘as the best way to establish a political community, in the face of the problems of commercial society’, with the immortal opening line, Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, that is literally true for over two centuries now.

However, the socio-religious circles of individual freedom came to vary from society to society, in times to times; and the objective of this piece is to take a cursory look at the same. In this context, it should be noted that traditionally, societies world over, for the most part, tended to restrain women in chains that are far too shorter than Rousseau’s Chains that bound men, and that ensues female freedoms are encapsulated within the realms of male constraints. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this exercise, we may examine the changes in female ‘freedom’ circles in the Christian, Islamic and the Hindu societies.

Christian Ultra- feminism

The conservative Christian world, like much of the globe, had always been a man’s world, though not religiously inimical to women, that is till the early twentieth century, when it was shaken, on the legal ground, by the first wave of feminism, seeking the voting and property rights to underscore the gender equality. But it was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that ushered in The Women’s Liberation Movement, in the middle of that century, which set the course for enabling women to gain equal rights with men in every human activity and social sphere. However, as the impact of the third feminist wave that ushered in ultra-feminism, which in my view, besides being detrimental to femininity, the charm of womanhood, began to uproot the family system, the fulcrum of social stability, a debate about it is bound to abound in its fourth wave, as and when it tends.

Muslim Male Chauvinism

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” those were the words of Jesus Christ (John 8.7) when he was asked by a group of men whether the punishment to a woman accused of adultery should be stoning to death as prescribed by the Mosaic Law (of the Jews).

Given that none of them ventured to harm that woman, the New Testament  avers that “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John. 3.17).

Whereas Jesus broke the God’s rule thus, in later days, the Jews, His chosen people, having been driven out of their promised land and dispersed  all over the Christian lands, had no way to stone their adulteresses to death in the alien lands as commanded by Him.

Maybe it was thus, the Jealous God of the Jews, some six hundred years after His Son’s death, sent Muhammad as His Messenger into their cousins’ land to get tougher than ever with the fair sex; so, much so that His ‘brand new’ religion branded women as an inferior species in ways many, whereby, to cite an example, the witness of four Muslim women equals that of one male Muslim that is besides granting the men of the faith the right to take as many women to cohabit with, that too, on a contractual basis, of course, with an unfettered right to beat, and an inalienable right to divorce them, to name only two.

But as time passed by, the wisdom of some modern Muslim rulers, in countries such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan, set aside the God’s Quranic diktats to grant their women-subjects what the rest of the world gave its womenfolk. But sadly, though not surprisingly, given the intensity of the Islamic belief-system and the ghetto-construct of the Musalmans, the gate-keepers of the faith were outraged for the female modernism began to alter Islam’s patriarchal ethos, the fulcrum of its dogma. So, in time, to the hurt of the Muslim women, by uprooting the progressive rulers and undermining the egalitarian measures, they had ensured that the very character of the faith that afforded them primacy in the scheme of all things Islamic was restored. Intended or otherwise, that Islamic regression gave raise to Wahabism, in turn fuelling Islamic extremism the world over, rendering the golden period of Muslim feminism into a transient rainbow lost in the gathering clouds in the God’s own dark skies.

Hindu Swayamvaram

In the Aryavarta of yore, girls were groomed in gurukulas to become satyavadini by the time they turned fifteen, and some of them pursued higher studies to blossom into scholars such as Maitreyi, Ghosa, Gargi, Lopamudra et al.

Even when India was Bharat, still a bride was entitled to choose her man from among her suitors, known in Sanskrit is swayamvaram, which only proves that the ancient Hindu men were wise enough to realize that woman’s liberation lay in her right over her body to entrust it to the man she coveted; that is proof enough if it were ever required.

The sum and substance of woman’s life in the Hindu ethos was that she was on an equal footing with that of her male counterpart in the social and religious spheres, which more or less held ground till the eleventh century as captured by Al-Biruni in his Indica.

However, slowly but surely, from that feminist pinnacle, women were insensibly and progressively pushed into the abyss of subservience and worse. Though no historical research is in place that delves into this inexplicable Hindu social degradation, exemplified by female-inimical sati, child marriage, illiteracy to name a few, it can be speculated that so as to spare their fair sex from the glad eyes of the Muslim invaders, the Hindu society would have felt the need to protect its women in ways that proved to be inimical to their well-being in the long run. However, as Islam began to spread its male chauvinistic wings, its corruptive influence on the Hindu male propensities could have exacerbated the feminist interests.

If anything, the evangelic thrust in British India, with its accent on sin and tirade against sex, further dented feminism in the Hindu society that was wont to celebrate female sexuality.

Nevertheless, after India gained its independence, it was only a matter of time before the Hindu society began to yearn for its feminist moorings of yore. But brainwashed by the leftist ideology, by then, it had thrown the Hindu baby with the ‘Brahmanical’ bathwater, whereby ensuing a cultural vacuum. And ironically the same is increasingly sough to be filled with the Christian ultra feminist setting, which, given the contrasting social moorings and the sexual ethos, has proved to be a square peg in the round hole.

If only Indian women look back into Vedic times, they would be able to gather enough cultural implements to wriggle themselves out of Rousseau’s Feminist Chains, once and for all.