Pseudo-Secularism

Hindu dharma is implicitly at odds with monotheistic intolerance. What is happening in India is a new historical awakening... Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening.

Thursday, June 30, 2005

How Hindus Look At History

Publication: Vigil
June 25, 2005

Advani’s startling pronouncements in Pakistan about Jinnah, about December 6 and about Pakistan being a reality of history and RSS chief KS Sudarshan’s opinion about Indira Gandhi have created a furore in political circles. Attempts have been made to explain away these statements – by the save-Advani cabal on behalf of Advani and by the RSS spokesperson on behalf of the RSS. While the first is a comical exercise in futility, the second raises the all-important question about how Hindu nationalists should view history in retrospect.

Hindu nationalism implies both the territory of the nation and 85% of its Hindu population. Hindu nationalism will therefore battle for and protect the territory of the nation, and will battle for establishing those structures and institutions which will make for a Hindu nation. Hindu nationalists will interpret history and judge persons who created this history only from the point of view of Hindu interests. Therefore whether Gandhi or Jinnah, Indira Gandhi or Advani, politics, economics, history or social science, religious leaders or scholars, politicians or academics, Hindu nationalists will henceforth look at events and history only on the basis of whether these have served the Hindu nation or caused it great harm. Hindu nationalists should henceforth reject the politically correct uni-dimensional narration of ‘secularist’ history.

By that yardstick alone, unless Hindus are ready to forget the bloody history of Muslim conquest of their nation, unless Hindus are ready to forget the bloody history of partition, Advani and the save-Advani cabal will never sell us the fiction of a repentant Jinnah who desired to create a Pakistan which would be secular in its polity and generous towards its minorities. Similarly Advani cannot blithely declare that dividing the Hindu nation to create a Muslim state is a reality of history and that December 6 was the saddest day in his life; not unless Advani like those of the Abrahamic faith thinks time and history are linear and therefore what has been done can never be undone. Hindus do not subscribe to the linear approach to history or life.

But perhaps Advani and Jaswant Singh and the unholy cabal around Advani which quoted HV Seshadri’s book to legitimize Advani’s callous opinions will better understand Hindu outrage if I were to draw a parallel with Jewish history. I wonder if the mastermind within the cabal who crafted the save-Advani campaign pictured this grotesque scenario – that a high Israeli Jewish politician would travel to Germany and there proclaim that perhaps, just perhaps Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy after all. He did what he did maybe because he had an alcoholic father and a lousy childhood and Jews should now stop nurturing this persecution complex and accept the holocaust and their genocide as a reality of history. He would then return to Israel and there defend his radically new opinion of Hitler by telling his people that in 1952 when he was 18 years old a Rabbi recommended to him a biography of Hitler which attested to his traumatic childhood that caused his warped mind.

If this scenario is grotesque I wonder how Advani’s pronouncements about the Babri Masjid, partition and the creation of Pakistan are not equally grotesque to those who are defending him including the Pejawara Swami Vishwesha Teertha of Udipi; the same Swamiji who did not take a stand when Benny Hinn staged the obscene Christian evangelical burlesque in Bangalore or when Pujya Kanchi Acharya was arrested. Full marks to the Advani cabal for creating a rift between the VHP and this important Sanyasi and for getting this Swamiji from a distinguished and hoary traditional matha to defend, of all things, a politician who had betrayed the Hindu cause.

Hindu nationalists are beginning to take a good hard look at the tenet of ‘ahimsa’ and Gandhiji’s use of this tenet in fighting the war against the colonialists. Can this powerful, mind-boggling tenet be applicable in our dealings with the adharmic and the aasuric and does Hindu ithihaasa support Gandhiji’s understanding and use of the concept? Therefore if Gandhiji’s ahimsa can come under the scanner of Hindu nationalism, then the merits or demerits of Advani and his cabal and Shri Sudarshan’s remark that Indira Gandhi was a leader with ‘courage and firm determination’ too must be consistent with Hindu nationalist parameters of judging our history and the creators of history.

George Fernandes was hopping mad at Shri Sudarshan’s praise for Indira Gandhi and the RSS spokesperson promptly denied that the RSS chief had praised Indira Gandhi and offered a weak explanation which didn’t convince Hindu nationalists. The BJP wiffled and waffled and typical of its intellectual pusillanimity, it didn’t have the courage to refute Sudarshan and didn’t have the courage to praise Indira Gandhi. It simply went ahead and performed the ritual annual shrardha for civil liberties. Hindu nationalists reject this uni-dimensional assessment of Indira Gandhi and the uncritical eulogy of Jayaprakash Narayan. There is more to Indira Gandhi than the Emergency. While Hindu nationalists will rejoice in her determination to go ahead and break Pakistan, we will also take a hard and critical look at her decision to permit Tamil Nadu to offer funds and training to the LTTE during the MGR regime for short-sighted regional political benefits. Similarly Hindu nationalists will also question her wisdom in encouraging Bhindaranwale for the very same short-sighted regional political benefits both of which decisions had catastrophic consequences for the nation and for her family.

Likewise Hindu nationalists bemoan her folly in readily squandering away all the gains made in the war to liberate Bangladesh when she signed the Shimla Agreement with Bhutto. She not only gave away all the territory won by the blood of our soldiers in that war, she also failed to re-take all of the territory forcibly occupied by Pakistan in J&K since 1947. And then she went ahead and made the biggest mistake of her life with regard to Pakistan when she made Pakistan a legitimate party to the J&K ‘dispute-that-never-was’ by making the resolution of the ‘dispute’ a bilateral affair between the two countries.

Therefore while the RSS must now publicly insist that history will be judged by the parameters of Hindu interests and critique Indira Gandhi for those decisions that harmed Hindu interests, it must not be apologetic about any praise for her decision to break Pakistan. And that is why Advani’s remarks in Pakistan are unforgivable and even obscene. If the offence is so big that we consider it obscene then the defense mounted to whitewash it is a bigger obscenity. There can be no redeeming context, explanation or perception of history which can sweep the bloody partition of our nation from people’s memory. And partition was just one event in the bloody history of Muslim conquest and occupation of the Hindu nation.

Hindu nationalists will judge Jayalalithaa, Ram Vilas Paswan, Sonia Gandhi and Lalu Yadav only by the criterion of Hindu sensibilities, Hindu dignity and Hindu interests. There can be no other yardstick for Hindus. Hindu interest alone is national interest. I am ready to listen to any argument which wants to prove me wrong.

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