Secularism has degenerated as the backbone of terrorists & evangelists

Secularism has degenerated as the backbone of terrorists & evangelists

By Dr Gautam Sen

Long before May 2004 the aspiration to create an Indian nation had begun to unravel. After it the process accelerated alarmingly owing to an accident of fate that allowed a foreign-born Catholic to seize political power in Delhi. An apt parallel is the beguiling of the Ottoman Emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent, by the enslaved daughter of a Ukrainian priest who subsequently conspired successfully to first marry him and then place her drunken, playboy son on the throne, precipitating ruination of the empire. In the case of India, the likelihood that the building of the nation would fail was already deeply embedded in the intellectual inadequacies of the independence movement itself. The historical antecedents of the presumed integrity of the geographical expanse of India and its supposed cultural unity turned out to be chimerical. Between the vicious machinations of the departing British, determined to injure India if they could not rule over it, and the refusal of Muslims to even experiment living as co-equals with Hindus in a democratic India put the seal on bloody political fragmentation. The Congress clung to its juvenile perspective that Indians would somehow manage to see sense though Partition had already put paid to this reverie comprehensively.

Building the nation in a partitioned India required a bold programme that Jawaharlal Nehru and his associates were neither able to comprehend nor would they have been prepared to embrace had they been able to do so. This India had to be a Hindu India. It did not need to accord any special political or other privileges to Hindus, however conceived, but a conscious programme would have had to confront the tortured past of Hindus as a conquered people. And revive their present on the basis of a specifically Hindu history. Such a process could not have been free of controversy or conflict and compromise would have been inevitable, with Hindus pragmatically giving up important claims. But it would have had to occur on the basis of a transparent examination of the truth of the depredations of Muslim conquests and rule. Instead the Nehruvian experiment reduced the complexity and contrariness of political life to the empty categories of economic progress and development, failing to reconstruct the identity of Indian society on the basis of its inherited cultural traditions, however imperfectly transmitted. It was never going to be an easy task, but Nehru did not have the capacity to even comprehend it.

Hindus urgently needed to exercise political power self-consciously to reform themselves in order to overcome a past in which they were largely impotent spectators to huge changes impacting on them. The specific reality of Caste, for example, inherited by Hindus that has acquired such prominence in their prevailing social life only had a tenuous basis in their own history and required bold political intervention to reformulate. Only then could Indians begin to realise their aspiration of social and political amity and a full settling of accounts with the distortions to their way of life that Muslim and British rule had inflicted. The rigidity of the contemporary Hindu Caste system and its primacy in Hindu social life was, it is now suspected, a product of British misinterpretation of its supposedly innate significance for Hindus and the consequent imposition of an inflexible Caste grid on Hindu life that was previously fluid.

The British also left behind in independent India a virulent disease in the shape of communist traitors, who had defected to their intelligence services in 1942 at Joseph Stalin’s behest. These communist spies and traitors have since collaborated with every conceivable enemy of India, including the British, the Americans, and the Chinese and, most shamefully, the genocidal murderers of the rapist Pakistani army during 1971. The idea that allegedly superior command of the Queen’s English, brandished aggressively on NDTV, is able to camouflage treason is no more persuasive than Mozart’s music being able to drown the screams of Jews being tortured to death by Nazis, their true cousins in mass murder during the twentieth century. Ironically, most of their principal ideologues have now found well-paid jobs in New York and Chicago as critics of human rights violations by Hindu India. It just so happens that their handsome salaries are paid in the country that has killed more non white people during the past sixty years than any other and on a scale that boggles the mind.

The wholesale political misunderstanding of Nehru and his cronies about how nations are created, combined, with the calamitous error of instituting a parliamentary rather than presidential system of government to grievously damage India’s viability. In the competitive political miasma that has resulted, criminal gangs occupy almost all of India’s political space and resort to ever-intensifying outrages to retain their hold on power. Politics in India is the swiftest path to vast wealth and status, legitimated by the corrupt device of periodic popular acclaim. The public is unable to articulate any shared desire for decency in national life and prey to the basest gratification of caste animus and fleeting rewards. Minorityism in India is in fact the only self-conscious political movement in it. Its goals may be damaging to the fabric of India and its motives reprehensible, but its success cannot be doubted. This is why Christian proselytisers seek to match through conversion the numbers of Muslim voters in India, which means another five percent or so (eight already in their own private assessment) in order to jointly corner Hindu voters once-and-for-all. Of course Hindus have never constituted a political community, leave alone comprise a majority voting bloc, since they do not vote together. Indeed they ally with Jihadists and evangelists against each other right across India.

The ideology of Indian secularism, misconceived from the very outset, has become the backbone of Islamic Jihad and fundamentalist evangelism. The one committing mass murder, the other attempting to transform India’s cultural and political landscape in order to re-impose foreign rule over it. And always to the chorus of minority rights, cynically guaranteed by Indian secularism. Union cabinet ministers are openly supporting Jihadi terror, mocking dead heroes and the Leftist intelligentsia fabricating the most egregious lies, suggesting that the bombers are all actually Hindu agent provocateurs and the assault on India’s Parliament the work of India’s own intelligence agencies. It is noteworthy that in the eyes of India’s secularists Hindus alone undertake alleged fascist communal activity, others almost never. Yet it is Islam that remains a proudly sectarian dispensation, which is why any Muslim, like former President Abdul Kalam, succeeding in and serving a secular India is viewed with suspicion by co-religionists and some subject to fatwas for apparently deviating from injunctions of the faith. Hence, the recent equation of Hindus, upholding their Dharmic traditions and expressing attachment to their way of life, with Islamic terrorists cannot be regarded as an unfortunate consequence of the dynamics of minorityism and vote bank politics, but open warfare to suppress their legitimate aspirations.

The immediate contingency haunting India is the accident of the marriage of one of the late scions of its quasi-royals. Stemming from this piquant twist of destiny, the prerogatives of India’s cabinet government have ceased. The Prime Minister and most of his Union Cabinet are subject to the extra-constitutional diktat of half-a-dozen individuals, none of whom are Hindus. Other Cabinet offices have been farmed out as private property to criminals in Parliament, who operate with utter contempt for any notion of propriety because they exercise a veto by virtue of the arithmetic of parliamentary seats. But worst of all, the great offices of state, including Home, Law, and Finance and most shockingly, the Prime Ministerial office itself, have little authority, largely carrying out commands originating elsewhere. These commands or orders are also subject to the covert influence of a number of foreign governments and the Roman Papacy itself. The august office of the Indian President, into which its present incumbent was publicly hauled by the hand in an undignified induction, barely possesses the self-respect to represent a billion Indians. And who will guarantee that the nation’s most vital secrets, the location of its strategic nuclear assets, their targets and the identity of its intelligence agents operating abroad, have not been revealed to Washington and Islamabad via the Papacy? India is no longer a sovereign independent country. The struggle for independence must begin anew.

(The writer taught at the London School of Economics for over two decades and now writes on international political economy).