The contemporary Hindu predicament

The contemporary Hindu predicament
By Dr. Gautam Sen

The scandalous disarray of India’s political class has been highlighted in recent weeks, without Hindus apparently unable to even comprehend the unfolding drama affecting their destiny. The UPA has descended to treasonous co-ordination of its pending general election campaign with governmental agencies in Pakistan, including, in effect, the ISI. The diabolical enemy of Hindu India, the US, has brokered a deal between India and Pakistan that includes the disingenuous arrest of 124 jehadis and measures like the closure of their Internet web sites, contrived to provide respite to Manmohan Singh’s beleaguered government. David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary was evidently sent by the US to deliver a message that India must abandon, as a quid pro quo, its demand for the extradition of the planners of the Mumbai terror carnage. The idea that Pakistan will actually prosecute anyone and punish them for attacking India is laughable, but it will buy time for the UPA to apply the balm of forgetfulness to India. The Indian EAM, Pranab Mukherjee, of Murshidabad’s Jangipur Islamic constituency, which he bribed with 2100 crore rupees in 2006, obliged with alacrity, quite forgetting his periodic hypocritical belligerence towards Pakistan, all apparently intended to deceive. His subsequent delirious recanting of his initial surrender to India’s erstwhile colonial masters occurred because Congress Party managers evidently deemed such public acknowledgement impolitic.

Far from being indiscreet, British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has merely restated what has been British policy towards India since the 1940s, which has been to incite Islamic jehad to undermine it. The British Foreign Secretary rounded of his imperious visit to India by joining Rahul Gandhi on the campaign trail in Amethi, underlining the extent of India’s subordination to the Anglo-American imperialists. And Miliband, the lowly whippersnapper, gallingly added insult to injury by asserting that the Mumbai carnage was due to Indian policies in Kashmir. But this is all of a piece, which echoes the cynical and unflagging attempts of Britain’s elites since the late nineteenth century to damage Hindus as much as possible. Author Narinder Singh Sarila has documented the extent to which Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the butcher who sponsored the bloodletting in Calcutta on Direct Action Day in August 1946, was a mere pawn in British imperial designs to create a strategic hold over the Indian subcontinent. It is therefore cause for dismay that the NDA candidate for Prime Minister and his advisers have now embraced both the murderous Jinnah and the jehadi Deobandis. Where will it all end?

Alas, Hindus are in serious danger of reaching the point of no return in the very near future. Political circumstances are changing swiftly and will soon make it very difficult, if not impossible, for Hindus to recover from the onset of political, social and spiritual oblivion. The combination of modern communication technologies for brainwashing and political assault has placed Hindus in greater danger than at any time in their entire history. Hindus need to reflect deeply on the fact that their civilisational reach once included East, Southeast Asia and modern Iran and the latter itself encompassed territories today part of the Islamic Arab world. Islam and Christianity have subjugated all these regions in succession. Yet, no Hindu regards the fate of these vast lands as relevant to their current predicament and the political conquest threatening them. Most even dismiss the loss of vast additional territories in 1947 to murderous usurpers determined to destroy them and which includes areas once the cradle of their civilisation.

Hindus are also unable to grasp their effective dis-empowerment in significant areas of the Indian Union. Christians barely tolerate Hindus in the Northeast, which is an armed Christian enclave that will assert its political independence the moment the federal centre is embroiled in a crisis of authority. Muslims and Christians have long imposed a condominium in Kerala, but predictable rivalry between them for supremacy has arisen now that the common goal of curbing Hindus has been achieved. The initial political alliance between Muslims and Christians against Hindus followed by competition between them is the pattern likely to occur elsewhere in India. Tamil Nadu politics is dominated by Christians under the spurious guise of Dravidian irreligiousness and in concert with Islam. Andhra Pradesh is witnessing a remarkable surge of Christian conversions under an evangelical Chief Minister. However, Muslim resistance to Christian primacy will surface vengefully in the future since Muslims retain strong local historical roots, backed by significant numbers and ideological consciousness. The underlying dominance of Islam in West Bengal is obscured by the outward resilience of a superficially communist dispensation. At an opportune moment, a Muslim party will pose a deadly challenge to it in alliance with opportunistic scum like the Trinamul Congress. Many areas of UP, Bihar, Delhi as well as other states are effectively quasi-sovereign Muslims enclaves and access to them by legally constituted authorities minimal.

A number of inter-linked reasons account for the disastrous decline of Hindu civilisation. Some of them are internal to the Hindu tradition and arise from their very own spiritual identity and historical legacy. Still others are accidental though consequential, such as the misadventure of one individual’s diabolical role in their society and the constitutional structure of the Indian polity inherited after Independence. India is suffering from the disastrous impact of the usurpation of political power by one individual, whose loyalty to Indian sovereign interests is suspect and who, in addition, is mainly motivated by private family aspirations for wealth. The constitutional structure of Indian politics has also guaranteed national disunity, by articulating and amplifying every domestic division and dispute for electoral advantage. Finally, India is facing determined assault by imperialists, who are deploying the advantages of modern technology and economics to subordinate it. All of these factors in combination seem to outweigh the ability of Hindus to respond in a farsighted way to protect their civilisation and assure a legacy to their children and grandchildren as well as the wider world.

A mortal external danger facing Hindus and India is the Christian Crusader State, the US. The US and its British, German and Scandinavian allies are assiduously engaged in evangelical conversion to destroy Hinduism once-and-for-all. As Sitaram Goel averred, Christianity and Islam are both political ideologies and, one should add, their fervent claims to divine inspiration subterfuge to deceive. The US hatred for India is long-standing, having begun more or less from the moment India became independent in 1947. It has been the principal sponsor of India’s enemies in the region, with some sterling help from Britain’s duplicitous political elites. In the late 1960s, the US joined with China to undermine India, with Henry Kissinger in 1971 inviting the Chinese ambassador to the UN, Huang Hua, to advise his country to attack India. But Pakistan remained the main US instrument to torment it and collusion with its merciless butchers to commit genocide in Bangladesh was the most blatant example of evil US predilections towards Hindu India. Even at this very moment, the US government and its liberal media are working overtime to stop India punishing Pakistan by resorting to intrigues about a common enemy and pretending to chastise Pakistan when the Pakistani ISI was created in fact as an outsourced branch of the CIA.

Contemporary evangelism is the modern offspring of Nazism, which sought to implement a programme of racial subjugation in a pattern with long antecedents in the history of Christian nations. Christianity highlights an unbroken history of torture and mass murder to achieve imperialist political goals. From the sixth century onwards it showed its true colours once it had suborned the Roman State and began a programme of extirpation against all rivals. From Charlemagne’s cold-blooded execution of tens of thousands of pagans and the subsequent killing spree in the Christian expansion into Eastern Europe to the mass murder of Cathars and the unrelenting persecution of Jews, the Church was the unequivocal progenitor of modern Nazism. The instances of the complicity of most major denominations in murder and enslavement is endless, from active participation in the genocide of Amerindians and Africans, to the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention to defend US slavery and their Absolution for apartheid in South Africa. But in India they have appeared to liberate so-called oppressed groups who are merely going to become instruments for the introduction of modern slavery for all Indians.

This is the life-and-death struggle that Hindus are unable to comprehend and resist. Instead the outflow of educated Hindus to a militantly evangelical US has created a diabolical situation in which they are overwhelmingly dependent on the US, and to a lesser degree the British market, for their livelihoods. Virtually every author from Mumbai, writing for the English speaking market, sought to downplay the role of terrorism per se in the recent murderous assault against its people. They engaged instead in self-flagellation and deviously advanced the idea that there were deeper causes of terrorism and for which of course India was allegedly responsible. All this cynical hand wringing is really designed to validate the fervent US desire to shield its dastardly ally from the consequences of terrorism against innocent Indians. And of course it does no harm to the book sales of these distinctly second-rate wordsmiths.

As any reasonable observer is aware, there is no such thing as Hindu except to locate them geographically as a people. And to also differentiate Hindus in the negative sense from the imperious monotheisms of Christianity and Islam. Hindu practices do share some features, the central attribute of which is the ability to accommodate what other faiths denounce as the heresy of rivals. Of course most Hindus do privilege some common practices and beliefs, especially the singular importance of certain key texts. There is also a willingness to accord recognition to deities privileged by competing sects even as they continue to accord primacy to their own particular form of worship. However, one striking commonality for Hindus is a feeling of affinity that they experience entering temples anywhere within India and beyond. The most significant aspect of Hindu religious life remains its ingrained tolerance towards each other’s spiritual beliefs. It is important to note that Hindus instinctively react in the same way to Islam and Christianity despite the fact that both are determined to extirpate Hinduism and impose their own exclusive faith on them.

The result of Hindu eclecticism and its admixture of the divine and secular make it difficult to create an overarching sense of political belonging. In the absence of the kind of rigid beliefs that define Semitic religious identity, accompanied by a single text and clear prescriptions and proscriptions, Hindu consciousness remains determinedly local. The philosophical scepticism of the Adi Shankaracharya co-exists with the assertion of a later successor, Swami Vivekananda, who argued that belief in a Supreme Being was necessary for attaining Moksha. But it was Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and their acolytes who inadvertently, in the first case and actively, in the second, who have instigated the worst damage to the possibilities inherent in Hinduism. Gandhiji’s misguided insistence on neutering any manifestation of Hinduism that might be found provocative by Islam and Nehru’s illiterate, Anglicised socialism created a devastating moral vacuum in Indian society. This was a huge and many-sided emptiness that socialist nonsense has failed to fill anywhere in the world and which the passionate reversion to religious faith across former socialist countries is demonstrating. In India, the expulsion of all Hindu sensibility from public life in the name of secularism resulted in its substitution by crass materialism and a pitiable sentimentality, both deriving from Bollywood. The Hindu moral universe, in both its secular and specifically religious variants, has been all but destroyed except for what endures in the private sphere since Hindus still crave for transcendental meaning even as they lose their moorings in possessive individualism and materialism.

(Taught at the London School of Economics for more than two decades and now writes on international political economy). The writer can be contacted at gautam.sen@gmail.com)