On Semitic Upswing ‘n Hindu Downturn
Walter Mendez’s ad, branding Kerala as God’s Own Country, in the land of Hindu gods and goddesses, intended or otherwise, was as much an advertising gimmick as a Semitic statement, for India’s tryst with the monotheistic faiths began there – first with the Jewish traders in the 6th century BCE, then with the Christian evangelists in 52 CE, followed by Arab Muslims around 629 CE. However, as the pre-Islamic Arab traders too were polytheists like them, and their monotheistic Jewish cousins chose to keep their religious wares to themselves, the Hindu Keralites have had no inkling of the Christian evangelic agenda or the Muslim Dar-al-Islam obsession.
However, having imbibed the Hindu philosophy
of
ekam sadviprā bahudhā vadanti (what is right
is One only, describe it wise variedly), presumably, the Keralites would have assumed
that all religions affirm the same (still the refrain of the naive Hindus without
hindsight) without a clue to the Christian credo that “salvation is only
through Christ". It’s that erroneous presumption that might have led the
Hindus then to let the alien evangelists to convert the native souls without any
let or hindrance. Whatever, it is seldom appreciated that Jesus was, as is
evident from his Sermon on the Mount, in essence was a Jewish social reformer,
eager to ease the rigor of the unremitting Mosaic Laws, with no provisions for penitence
or clemency in Judaism. That apart, had not Jesus, unambiguously told the
Commissioned Twelve – “Don’t go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but only to
the people of Israel – God’s lost sheep. Go and announce to them that the
Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure the lepers, and
cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received!”
All the same, but for Peter, the rest
of the apostles, like ‘lost sheep’, instead of reaching out to the ‘people of
Israel’, loitered everywhere else to spread his ‘message’ among the
‘prohibited’ gentiles. So, even as Paul, took it to the nearby Roman mainland,
Thomas reached the distant Kerala shores, far-off Jesus’ radar, with the same. Not
just that, the later-day Gospels of Mark, Mathews, and the others that
followed, transformed Jesus the social reformer, into Christ the religious
preacher, of divine descent, which in itself is a travesty of the Christianity.
Whatever, the legend of Christ, cemented by the Gospels that followed, with
additional miracles, became the handmaiden of the gospellers. But to what avail!
In a ghastly irony of Christianity, some of the gentiles, brought into its fold
against Jesus’ command, persecuted his ‘God’s lost sheep’ for centuries, by way
of numerous pogroms, and eventually sought to exterminate them all in the
holocaust!
Now, back to the Keralites; reared in the utopian, Sanatana credo of, Vasudhaiva kutumbakam (holds world all in one household), not
only they let the eager Arab Muslim traders to settle down in their midst but
also made them their moplahs (sons-in-law), thereby enabling the later to father
their Islamic footholds in the Hindu motherland. Oh, how it was lost on the Keralites
that for centuries, the very Arabs, in the pre-Islamic era, were uninclined to
settle on their shores! Eventually, this thoughtless lapse proved fatal to
their progeny as many of them were mercilessly massacred by the moplah
descendants as if to demonstrate that it’s not just history, but irony too
repeats itself!
If anything, the Northern princelings had
fared worse on the Islamic front. So as to settle political scores with the fellow
royals, some of them had entered into military alliances with the alien Muslim warlords,
maybe failing to reckon that by then, the nations the Muslim armies overran,
were all transformed into Islamic countries. But had they been privy to the
Quranic credo - “It is not for any Prophet to have captives until he hath made
slaughter in the land…”, arguably, they would have developed second thoughts,
and the Islamic horror that followed in Hindustan would have been well averted.
Whatever, Maryam Jameela, a Jewish
convert to Islam, lamented in her 1971 book,
Islam and Orientalism - “If the Mughal monarchs had assumed
their responsibilities as Muslim rulers and organized intensive tabliq
or missionary work, the majority of Indians would have embraced Islam and hence
the necessity for partition and all the disasters that followed in its wake,
never would have arisen.”* If only she
had realized that, if anything, Quran is more of a War Manual than a
religious scripture, and thus tried to drive home that Islamic reality into the
Muslim heads, she would have done a
world of good, not just for the Ummah. But then, that’s not the way with the
competing Semitic faiths, for juxtaposing Maryam’s Islamic lament, Pope John Paul II, exuded his Christian
hope in Ecclesia in Asia, of 1999, in New Delhi - "Just as the first millennium saw the
cross firmly planted in the soil of Europe, and the second in that of America
and Africa, so may the third Christian millennium witness a great harvest of
faith on this vast and vital continent."
By the way, these very missionaries, invariably
shy away from the Muslims, for Muhammad had taught his faithful how to shoo them
away with Quranic quotes such as – “When Allah saith: O Jesus, son of Mary!
Didst thou say unto mankind: Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah?
He saith: Be glorified! It was not mine to utter that to which I had no right.
If I used say it, then Thou knewest it. Thou knowest what is in my mind, and I
know not what is in thy mind. Lo! Thou, only Thou art the Knower of Things
Hidden”. So to say, by rechristening Jehovah as Allah and positioning Quran as a
grand sequel to Torah and Bible, Muhammad had cleverly taken away the religious
winds out of the Jewish and the Christian sails. Not just that, when it comes
to religious marketing, he bettered all the Gospels put together, by telling Amr ibn al, upon his conversion into Islam - "Do you not
know that Islam destroys that which came before it?" – implying that he
can start his life afresh with a clean slate as Allah forgiveth all his
previous sins. Call it poetic justice or treat it as a religious irony, this prophetic
ploy that exploits the Gospel’s ‘sin overkill’ has become the Islamic conversion
tool in the Christian west to its bane, that is even as it busies itself in ‘harvesting’
the Asian souls that include the gullible Hindus!
However, owing to the Hindu demographic indifference and the ‘secular’
political chicanery, neither the Pope’s hope became a total dupe nor Maryam’s despair a complete dud. While the state sarkars in
the south, run by ‘secular’ parties, tend to pay a blind eye to the insidious evangelism
to forestall the Hindutva forces with the Christian votes, their counterparts in
the eastern parts have
been expanding their Muslim vote-banks through the infiltration of Bangladeshis,
with a like motive. Now that the Christian closets are brimming with Hindu
recruits and the Muslim influx became a deluge, both Paul and Maryam can really
rest in ‘peaceful anticipation’ in their graves as India’s self-serving
politicians are leaving no stone unturned to fulfill their wishes,
paradoxically aided by the slumbering Hindus.
Whatever, after the religious partition of India, the
Muslims who stayed put in its Hindu portion, have been handicapped when it came
to effecting fresh conversions, owing to the contempt the long familiarity had already
bred. Nevertheless, as the formation of Pakistan, instead of quenching their Quranic
thirst, furthered their Ghazwa-e-Hind zeal, they took the procreative route to
augment their Islamic numbers in the Hindu India. That apart, as if to further speed
up the demographic change, they started a concerted ‘love jihad’ on
unsuspecting Hindu and Christian females to convert them as Quranic ‘farm
fields’ to augment the Islamic yields. Well, the other side of their ‘religious
fertility’ coin is etched with the Muslim glee that the Imaran Khan - Jemima Goldsmith nikah
elicited - One Jewess less! In spite of
all that, but for the foresighted few, Hindus pay no heed to the Muslim ‘goings
on’ amidst them, for they were so conditioned by Gandhi, who said, “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.” Oh, how ludicrous he
was! Well, how naive are they he still awes!!
However, in the same vein, Gandhi had opposed the
missionary practice of trying to convert others, especially through methods he
considered coercive or based on material incentives, and philosophised as well
- “I disbelieve in the conversion of one person by another. My effort should
never be to undermine another’s faith but to make him a better follower of his
own faith”. But yet, when he, the
‘father of the nation’, made
Nehru the ‘Son of India’, the latter set out to make his motherland, a
Christian nursery as well as an Islamic Zannat on earth, which, in later years,
Sonia, the Italian entrant into his dynasty, sought to turn into the Christian Paradise
that is besides making it a sort of a Hindu Narak. Just recall the
arrest of the revered Shankaracharya that Deepawali night, on a trumped-up
murder charge, that too, lo, without a Hindu whimper, for the cast feathers
remained unruffled!
But at long last,
like a ray of hope for the dispirited Hindus, Narendra Modi appeared on the
Indian political firmament to hit the ground running to transform their nation
in ways beyond dreams. Not resting on his decade-long laurels, he has even envisioned
the Vikasit Bharat yagna, with the vikas - virasat mantra. However,
realizing that his mantra would be ineffective in the existing Macaulay altar,
he seeks to transform it into a Sanatana mandap over a decade. Though he hasn’t
yet spelt out ‘the go abouts’ of his laudable project, given that he emotionally
stands on the incompatible stools of Hindu Nationalism and Gandhian meandering,
he is likely to fall in between them, failing in his mission, and that would be
sad for India that is Bharat. Why, he castigates Nehru for truncating vande mataram but keeps
mum about Gandhi’s debasement of raghupathi raghava rajaram; he cries
hoarse over our virasat but bows before the very constitution that seeks
to negate it in every which way. Besides, even as he extols Chhatrapati Shivaji,
Lachit
Borphukan, and such valiant Hindu warriors against the Islamic invaders, he inexplicably
venerates Gandhi, the foremost Islamapologist and an inveterate Muslim appeaser.
That’s not all,
while applauding the revolutionaries such as Netaji Bose, Veer Savarkar and
Birsa Munda and others, who were the scourge of the British, he erroneously eulogizes
Gandhi the pacifist of the freedom struggle, whose ‘Quit India’ role in gaining
independence was described as ‘m-i-n-i-m-a-l’, in a drawling manner at that, by
none other than Clement Attlee, who granted it. Likewise, he rightly condemns the
anti-Sanatani Nehru but wrongly condones the nepotistic Gandhi, who knowingly promoted
him, that too unethically. Thus, his inconsistent ‘virtue signalling’, devoid
of moral base and ideological focus, besides being confusing, is bereft of any
USP (for starters, unique selling proposition), so essential for the effective promotion
of his mission Virasat. It's
not as if Modi wouldn’t be unaware of these political aberrations that make him
seem as a ‘hesitant nationalist’, for he, besides being extremely intelligent,
is an extraordinary thinker.
But give it Nehru,
for he was focussed, at least in advancing his self-interests, in that in the
aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination, he promoted the ‘martyr’ as an apostle of peace
and targeted the nationalist forces, political and cultural, as votaries of
violence. It’s his this USP, that he was the sole upholder of the Gandhian
values (fabricated by his propaganda machinery) and only his congress party,
read his fiefdom, that can bring peace and stability to the country. It’s thus,
he kept the nationalist forces at bay for over fifteen years after Gandhi’s
death, while his legacy, cleverly conjoined with that his mentor, served his
dynasty for five more decades before the Hindu nationalist Modi overcame that false
political barrier. However,
it pays Modi to realize that Gandhi is a congress patent, pictured as a national
asset, and the royalties of his promotions, if any, will go there.
However, is it is inconceivable that Modi
may not privy to the universal truth that there are no half-measures for
success. But yet, maybe reckoning that the prevailing nationalistic winds are
not strong enough to subdue the Islamapologic currents within and to stall the
Hinduphobic waves without, he, in a waiting game, is at facilitating a
patriotic tide, over a period of time, for him or his successors to ride over
its nationalist flood. Whatever, it takes a mean man to suggest that he too,
like Gandhi and Nehru, has subserved the Hindu interests for international acclaim.
Be that as it may, It is not much appreciated that in the duty-bound era of yore, the gamut of Sanatana dharma, with the varna centric swa-dharmas, catered to the Hindu social diversity rather harmoniously, though, on the flip side, the lack of edictal unity, precluded the evolution of a unified Hindu polity. What’s worse, as times passed by, with the varnas splitting into sub-sects, castes and sub-cases, the swa-dharmas became redundant, enfeebling the Sanatana dharma itself. It’s thus the Hindu social structure became culturally feeble and politically vulnerable. If not, the Hindu-inimical congress dynasty could not have lasted in power for that long, leaving the then Jan Sangh and its reincarnated Bharatiya Janata party, in the political lurch all along.
Whatever, now or never is the time for the Hindus to come out of their constitutional slumber to visualize the religious incongruities in the hybrid tome**, that was structured, devoid of hindsight and lacking in foresight, which facilitates the Semitic upsurge in India that is supposed to be Bharat. Why, as if to let India remain a country of perennial conversions, it jolly well grants its citizens, read the proselyting Muslims and the Christians, the ‘freedom of propagation of religion’, which, in effect, is the Semitic right to poach in the Hindu religious arenas. Maybe, seemingly, it hasn’t occurred, even to Modi, why an ordinary Indian citizen should be concerned about the propagation of his faith for the constitution to grant it to him. Besides, where does the right of an Indian citizen for propagation of his faith leave his fellow citizen’s cultural need for the preservation of his own order. Moreover, the right of propagation is but the right to spread one’s religion, and one cannot do that without coming into direct conflict with another’s religious faith.
Well, the inevitable constitutional amendment has to wait, but
what prevents the current Modi dispensation from bringing the questionable
conversion tactics into the ambit of the Bharat Nyaya Samhita, with prohibitive
fines and deterrent jail-terms, such as - of denigrating other faiths and derogating
their followers (false faith, fake gods, heathens, kafirs) or offering monetary
incentives and exploitation of vulnerable
human emotions, or through deceitful oracles / fake miracles / false
attributions. Besides, to set right the distorted social order, each and every religious
preaching or education involving the inculcation of enmity towards other faiths
or its followers should also be treated as a criminal activity. That’s not all,
faking religious identities in pursuance of hidden personal or religious
agendas or non-disclosure of religious conversions to retain or obtain ineligible
social or state benefits should also be accounted for, along with the above
and such, under the hitherto side-lined sub-heads of our very
conversion-friendly constitution.
Above all else, the social treatment of
the Semitic plague lies in the mass education
of the Hindus, more so the vulnerable ones, about the exclusivist, intolerant
and expansionist precepts of Christianity and Islam. Needless to say, a
comparative religious profile of the basic tenets of the Indian-origin
religions and that of the alien Semitic faiths should be made part of the school curriculum, so that Hindus,
for generations to come, won’t be falling prey to the Abrahamic deceptions. Last
but not the least, Gandhi, the main hurdle to the Hindu upturn, must be brought
down to earth from the Mahatma (ask Ambedkar) pedestals, in all our school
grounds that is, as it is his falsified legacy that has been the root cause of
the Hindu apathy of our times.
*
Analysed in Chapter 22, The Number Game, of the author’s free ebook ‘Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A
critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n More)
** Detailed in the author’s article, 'Incongruities in
Indian Constitution’ in this blog
Labels: India's partition, Indian demography, Indian freedom movement, Indian History, Indian Muslims, Multi-religious society, Religion and poliitcs, Religious conversions, Religious propagation, Religious Studies
