Basic Structure of the Indian Constitution - The Case of a Square Peg in the Round Hole

When Hindustan was partitioned on the basis of the Hindu-Muslim religious divide, pragmatism would have demanded, as proposed by Dr. BR Ambedkar, the latter-day architect of the Indian Constitution, to affect population exchange on communal lines between the successor countries, India and Pakistan. More so, as Ambedkar backed his proposition with the exposition of the Islamic ethos and the Muslim psyche thus: “The brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. 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 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, the largely Islamapoloic Hindu leadership at that critical juncture of its newfound freedom not only paid a deaf ear to Ambedkar’s Islamic warnings but also let Nehru the numero uno to bend over backwards to ensure that the bulk of the Muslims staid put in India to buttress its secular image. And sadly by the time Ambedkar sat down to formulate India’s Constitution, he himself had paid no heed to his own forebodings for he granted freedom to propagate religion as Indians’ fundamental right in its Part III – 25 thus: “Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion - 1. Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion”, which the Supreme Court later inferred as its inviolable Basic Structure.

Unfortunately for Bharat that is India, Nehru, who characterized himself as ‘English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by accident’, had held sway over the Indian polity then, and it was as if he wanted to make Muslims feel more at home in India than even in Pakistan their New Holy Land. What is worse, such was his hold over the psyche of the overwhelming Hindu majority that he succeeded in building a national narrative that in Muslim pleasing lay the soul of Indian secularism. However, it is seldom appreciated that whereas the Hindu sanatana dharma is of a social construct that is amenable for evolution, the Semitic social connect, more so of the Islamic kind, based on religious bond is made rigid by unwavering faith. So, while the right to practice religion enabled the dalit Hindus to gain entry into the thereto out of reach temples, the right to propagate their faith gave the legal protection to the Muslims and the Christians alike to poach into the tenuous Hindu religious arena of the tribal people and the scheduled castes. It’s thus, owing to the suicidal freedom of religious propagation, demographically speaking that is, the 9% or so of the post-partition India’s Muslim population has since swelled to 18% or more and if the harvest of around 10% crypto-Christian souls is accounted for, one can get the picture of the perilous state of the Indian demography, which, given the exclusivist and supremacist credo of the Semitic faiths, if left unaddressed, could lead to another partition down the wretched line of the Indian history.

Hence, as Supreme Court’s Basic Structure surmise, the case of a square peg in the round hole, is nothing but a Doctrine of Division that is bound to undermine India’s post-partition integrity, hope that WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA through our elected representatives would suitably amend the constitution meant for the Utopian Republic of India that is detrimental to our SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC before it is beyond redemption.

 

        

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.

 

 

 

 

The Electoral Psychology in the Indian Democracy

In 2014, it was on the plank of ‘high hope’ that Narendra Modi, with self-belief, sense of purpose and Herculean effort, had navigated his party to power through the stagnant Indian electoral waters. This extraordinary achievement, so to say, was unbelievable in the Indian electoral context that’s traditionally devoid of any semblance of nationalistic fervor for the callous politicians having nursed the majority community on divisive caste lines and groomed the minorities on unifying religious grounds for narrow electoral gains, any sense of nationalism failed to take roots in India’s pre-partitioned social soil. What’s worse the vote-bank politics of post-independent India fomented an Islamist mind-set amongst the formidable Muslim minority that turned it against Modi’s nationalist party for long. However, with his personal charisma and forceful oratory, he could alter the electoral psychology of the Hindu majority to get on to the Delhi gaddi to usher in systemic changes not only to address India’s social plight but also to uplift the Hindu self-worth, at a low for over thousand years.  

When Modi would seek reelection, circa 2019, what could be the electoral psychology of the Indian democracy then?

No denying, a majority of the Hindus gloat over the fact that, at long last, their ‘ruler’ does not shy away from exhibiting his Hindu religious inclinations in public that is besides wearing his patriotic nationalism on his sleeves. But it’s no guarantor that his re-election plank would sail through the polling booths as the Hindu nationalistic currents, besides being weak, are notoriously transient for they are afflicted by undercurrents of caste affiliations. It takes a while for Modi to forge the disparate castes in a unitary Hindu mould but that’s in the realms of the future, but what about the year after?

Well, he has to contend with the religious apathy of the majority of the Muslim and the Christian voters nurse towards him for the very reason that made him endearing to the majority of the Hindus. That an ‘overtly’ Hindu should lord over the land, lorded by their forefathers, fails to jell with their sense of history, and to avert repetition, they could be queuing up at the polling booths to see Modi’s back. And if you add up the closet Christians too to the overbearing Musalmans, maybe sans some of their womenfolk, thanks to his triple talaq stance, at some quarter of the electorate, they would be in no mean numbers.

Augmenting the minorities’ ant-Modi votes would be the loose, but large, regional forces, the die-hard, though shrunk, Congress loyalists, the ‘secular’ ant-sangh parivar gang and the congenital Modi-maniacs, roughly accounting for another quarter of the electorate. But the saving grace for Modi would be there are too many in the electoral arena to share the spoils of his inimical half of India’s voters that is notwithstanding the tactical voting by the minorities to keep him out.   

However, those taking up cudgels on Modi’s behalf in his electoral battle would include the nation’s teeming youth, enthused like never before by any leader, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty haters and the rare breed of Hindu nationalists, all in all, adding up to, maybe, half of all Hindu voters. And that’s just one fourth of India’s total voters!    
   

It is thus, the electoral psychology of the other half of the Hindu voters that will decide Modi’s political fate in 2019 and determine India’s future course as a nation state thereafter. No denying, with his empathy for the poor and the foresight to improve their lot, he made friends and influenced people from these hapless folds. Enjoying the ease of living, for the first time that is, courtesy the gas cylinders and other goodies, the grateful lot backed him at the hustings in state after state, but as human gratitude is a fickle phenomenon, come 2019, the good will may as well evaporate. What is worse, having been spoiled by the largesse, they may even feel dissatisfied for what they are deprived off, thereby taking to the inimical though habitual caste routes.

And this is just one of the many psychological potholes that Modi has to contend with in the 2019 electoral path.

In 2014, Modi, so to say, had the entire Indian middleclass under his spell for they were enthused by his vows to bring the corrupt to book. Who won’t love to see the high and mighty of the dark alleys languishing in the dark cells? But instead of affording them a vicarious pleasure of seeing their corrupt netas in the country’s jails, Modi has left those suffocating in air of despondency as the dirty mighty are having it easy that too even as the ‘corrupt’ common men and women are made to suffer, first on account of demonetization and then owing to the GST, to their eternal hurt. What a let-down to be handed over the rough end of the anti-corruption stick. It is anybody’s guess that these would love the return of the UPA’s corrupt times for their self aggrandizement. Even some of the ‘clean’ middleclass-wallahs, swallowing media’s Goebbelsian lie on demonetization, have turned into inveterate Modi-critics, and who knows, the media, with concocted popularity ratings,  may be leading Modi on the garden path.

Come 2019, if the much publicized corrupt deeds of Sonia, Rahul, Vadra, Chidambaram et al won’t make it to the court rooms at the least, and instead gather dust in the investigating offices, Modi may as well kiss goodbye to the bulk of the middleclass voters for they are bound to feel cheated by his duplicity in the fight against ‘real’ corruption. After all, five years is a long period to surmount the odds even in our snail paced judicial process that is if Modi were true to his word, so goes the grapevine. Yet, they won’t vote for the corrupt Congress etc., in a volte face, but would surely stay away from the polling booths, leaving Modi to fend for himself. And the shortfall in the vote share, if it won’t cause his ouster, would certainly diminish his prime ministerial stature, setting the opposition in motion.  

But what if, Sonia and her sinister ilk are made to sweat in the court halls or cool their heels in jail cells, won’t that alter the electoral psychology of the country, electrifying the political atmosphere for Modi’s thumping victory in the Indian electoral arena.

Let’s wait and see what’s in store for Modi’s New India.

[This piece was written before Narendra Modi’s triumphant electoral victory in 2019]

          

India’s Chase of the Secular Mirage

The secular cliché of ‘unity in diversity’ is the political myth that at long last has been done in the postcolonial India. But in reality, India is a habitat of disparate groups with varied agendas, often at conflict with the rest; here are the Hindus, the original inhabitants of the ancient Aryavarta, who form the generic majority in its partitioned portion of modern India, who are a fragmented lot on regional grounds, stratified by iron-cast caste system, though united in denying even the basic human rights to the dalits amongst them. Besides, its predominant Muslim minority, positions India in the Islamic universe as Dar Al-‘Ahd, an infidel territory with an unwritten treaty of non-aggression or peace with the faithful, its indomitable Christian evangelists are ever eager to convert the marginalized sections of the majority community to their religious dispensation, for ostensible salvation.

It was Gandhi’s Congress, which helped India earn its freedom from the British yoke that shaped the secular theme of the nebulous Indian democracy, which under Nehru’s progeny degenerated into a cynical strategy to politically divide the Hindus on their caste-fault lines, cunningly unite the Muslims in the Islamic separatist fold and covertly support the Christian mission to convert the gullible, all for its electoral gain. This self-serving idea to divide the majority votes and rally with the minority ballots in the electoral arena, which the post-Mandal political outfits in the Cow-belt borrowed, had inculcated the debilitating non-nationalism in India’s collective consciousness, which, being  is in the realms of our every day experience, needs no detailing.

And now, at long last, the majority community, which, by far, has the highest stake in India’s unity and integrity, seems to have seen through this pseudo-secular game to bust the nationalist forces at the hustings. But stunned by the new-found nationalism, which is surging into the country’s polling booths, resulting in their ouster from the pinnacles of power, the political false elements have started crying wolf about the majoritarianism threat in the making to the so-called secular idea of India. However, it is another matter that notwithstanding its inimical caste system that needs more vigorous redressal, it is Hindu sanatana dharma that swears by sarva dharma sama bhav, all faiths have same the same footing, and vasudhaika kutumbakam, the world is but one family. But by casting aspersions on the Hindu nationalism, willy-nilly, the so-called secularists fuel the fundamentalist urges of those Muslims and the Christians, who vouch for the insular togetherness of the faithful based on the divisive diktats of their religions. Thus, notwithstanding the Hindu ethos of togetherness, given the intellectual sophism that aids and abets the Semitic system of separateness, India has come to chase the secular mirage in its own heartland.

But thankfully there are oases in the cantonments of our ‘majoritarian’ defense forces, in which Masjids, Churches, and Gurudwaras abound with Mandirs, bound by the common faith - to live to serve the Indian nation and die for preserving its sovereignty. Well, the Sikhs have been doing just that for centuries now, and there is no denying that Islam exhorts the believers to go after infidels’ throats, but nevertheless, Muslims-in-arms fight, arm in arm, with the Hindu soldiers to slay the intruders from across the borders, who happen to be their co-religionists. True, but for the naïve Hindus, the pastors could cry hoarse from the pulpits of the Churches that there is no scope for salvation for the heathen Hindus, yet the Christian soldiers vie with the Hindus of their regiment to attain martyrdom at India’s borders. Mind you, the members of the Indian Armed Forces are no mean in number. 

All this, besides proving the bogusness of the secular bogy of Hindu majoritarianism, only brings to the fore the fact that these seculars, along with their liberal cohorts, have been barking up the wrong ‘Hindutva’ tree to exhibit their exaggerated anxiety over India’s religious tolerance allegedly under threat. Maybe owing to ignorance they fail to realize that the Islamic preaching and the Christian teachings, of course based on their scriptures, are unflattering to the Hindu culture and beliefs and that is to say the least. And on that count, there is no faulting the Muslims and the Christians, but at the same time there is no denying that their belief system bleeds India, inhabited by over a billion Hindus. However, Dr. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian Professor, in his ‘Islam in Modern History’ (1977) was hopeful that the Indian Muslims would reform and transform Islam thus:

“The question of political power and social organization, so central to Islam, has in the past always been considered in yes or no terms. Muslims have either had political power or they have not. Never before have they shared it with others. Close to the heart of Islam has been the conviction that its purpose includes the structuring of a social community, the organization of the Muslim group into a closed body obedient to the law. It is this conception that seems finally to be proving itself inept in India. The Muslims in India, in fact, face what is a radically new and profound problem: namely how to live with others as equals. Yet it is a question on which the past expression of Islam offers no immediate guidance. Imperative is the willingness to admit that there are problems waiting to be solved.

This awareness has been rare in recent Islam, which has tended to believe that problems have been solved already. That the answers have somehow, somewhere been given and do not have to be worked out afresh with creative intelligence - this idea had deeply gripped, almost imprisoned the minds and souls of many Muslims. The Quran has been regarded as presenting a perfected pattern to be applied rather than as an imperative to seek perfection. Islamic law and Islamic history have been felt to be a storehouse of solutions to today’s difficulties to be ransacked for binding precedent rather than a record of brave dealing with yesterday’s difficulties, to be emulated as liberating challenge. Religion has seemed to confine behavior rather than inspire it. The fundamental fallacy of Muslims has been to interpret Islam as a closed system. And that system has been closed not only from outside truth but also from outside people.

The fundamental hopefulness about Indian Muslims, and therefore Indian Islam, is that this community may break through this. It may be forced to have the courage and humility to seek new insights. It may find the humanity to strive for brotherhood with those of other forms of faith. In the past, civilizations have lived in isolation, juxtaposition or conflict. Today we must learn to live in collaboration. Islam, like the others, must prove creative at this point and perhaps it will learn this in India.”

But Nehru’s secular failure to prod the Indian Muslims into evolving an Indian Islam enabled the Mullah-Maulvi nexus to insensibly push them into the separatist Salahi clutches, the effects of which India Today pictured, by way of its survey published in its August 26, 2002 issue, thus: 

“In the past six months communalism and Pakistan-sponsored terrorism have grabbed the national headlines. On these issues there is a definite Hindu-Muslim rift. Take the on-again-off-again Ayodhya dispute. On this issue, there seems to be a hardening of stand in favour of building a Ram temple immediately - 43 per cent were in favour six months ago, today it is 47 per cent. Even among Congress voters, 43 per cent want the temple now. Predictably, this is not a solution favoured by Muslims. Equally, support for the temple isn’t as enthusiastic in the South and East as in the North and West.

Likewise, while 70 per cent of Hindus regard Pakistan as an enemy - a rare expression of national unity - only 37 per cent of Muslims do so. Indeed, 49 per cent of Muslims have a rather charitable view of Pakistan as an estranged brother, a friend and a future ally. What complicates matters is that among Muslims who are aware, Mohammed Ali Jinnah is regarded as a hero, along with Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb. The weight of Hindu opinion treats these historical figures as villains.

These are worrying signs and pointers to the emotional gulf between the majority community and the most significant minority. Nor is this rift a persisting relic. The poll indicates that it is the youth (18 to 24-year-olds) that is more aware and belligerent than their elders. This raw, untapped energy is yet to find focus. A positive outlet may take India to new heights; in the wrong hands, it could plunge the country in civil strife. A divided India can swing either way.”

That was in 2002, and fifteen years hence, while the Indian Muslims in general have become more faithful in their inward beliefs and outward exhibitions of Islamic tenets, the youth in particular are enamoured of the annihilative adventurism of radical Islam, with some of them even laying their lives for the cause of Baghdadi’s Caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Arguably, the gradual upsurge of radical Islamism in postcolonial India owes in no small measure to the legacy of Nehru’s intellectual backing to the Islamic religious rigidity, augmented, in recent times, by Saudi Arabia’s political urge to bring about a Wahabi Umma.

Maybe, history beckons Narendra Modi to help bring about the Indian Islam into the realms of Wilfred’s dream, and paradoxically, the opportunity could as well lie in Ayodhya’s vexed Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. Let us face the fact that while the Islamic precepts and practices make Muslims the religious square pegs in India’s Hindu cultural round holes, its religious callings such as haj and its cultural moorings in Arabic moulds ensure their emotional distance from the very land in which their ancestors lived as Hindus. Thus, for the Indian Islam to evolve, it is imperative that the Muslims should have their unique Islamic icon on the Indian soil to rival Kabaa, the pilgrimage to which is within the reach of every believer in this land that is unlike the haj to Mecca that is the privilege of a faithful few. And what can be a better place to host that than the banks of Sarayu across Ayodhya, the janma bhoomi of Rama, the ethical mascot of India? What is more, if the pilgrims of Ayodhya and the hajis across the river are encouraged to visit each other’s place of worship, won’t that become an enabling tradition to break the Hindu-Muslim religious barriers in the long run? Possible, but the Mullah-driven Arabic-centered Muslim mindset would be averse to that, and yet, the State and the society alike should push and prod the recalcitrant towards that goal, which, when achieved, is bound to usher in Indian Islam.

That way, as and when Indian Islam takes roots in India, then Indian Muslims would regard Abdul Hamid the soldier, who sacrificed his life for India in its war against Pakistan, as a hero and not Mahmud of Ghazni the pillager of Somnath. Likewise, APJ Abdul Kalam the Bhagvad-Gita-reading Muslim, and not Aurangzeb the bigoted Musalman, who would inspire  the Indian Muslims to come out of their Semitic scriptural shell to venture into the arena of Hindu philosophy. As for the Christian evangelism, it should be made loud and clear that belittling the Hindu dieties and deriding the native customs is not the way to voice the gospel and proselytizing by means fair or foul for harvesting the poor Hindu souls should cease forthwith for India’s demographic good. That is when; living in the all-encompassing oasis of Hindutva, India would stop its futile chase of the secular mirage.