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 6^th 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 

 

 

 

 Semitic Censure Of Sanatana Dharma, Or The Pot Calling The Kettle Black

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 11^th 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                

  

  

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