Chapter 32
The Hindu Rebound
The Hindu fundamentalism is a misnomer, coined by the cunning and subscribed by the naïve, which comes in handy to the Semitic proselytizers to undermine the Indian nationalism. Why, it should be apparent to the discerning that while Brahmanism is orthodox, the sanātana dharma, delineated by swadharma, is amorphous, and in them lay the social diversity of the Hindu spiritual ethos.
By the time Bharat gained independence, what with the gurukuls having given way to the missionary schools for long, the Brahmans, by and large, were an unemployed lot, and in spite of their depleted landholding, yet their exalted position in the polity precluded them from engaging in their non-traditional activities. What with the deprived social patronage adding to their economic woes, they became moribund to end up being the parasites, and it is probable that the prejudices that bedevil the Hindu spirituality might have been the products of the idle minds in those lazy Brahman bodies.
However, after the trauma of the partition was lived down, the Brahman exodus to the urban conglomerates started in earnest, which though eroded their village presence and with it their social influence as well. Just the same, settling in the urban settings, they, as McCauley’s chelas (what a fall for the Hindu gurus of yore) began bracing themselves to take up the clerical spaces that were up for grabs in the British administrative corridors in India. Consequently, the weakened Brahman hold on the village grassroots began to dent the power of the manu dharma on the Hindu polity for its guardians had begun to desert their swadharma. But eventually the ebb of sanātana dharma accompanied the Brahman economic tide brought about by their overwhelming absorption into Nehru’s public sector undertakings, the supposed pillars of independent India’s Soviet modeled socialist economy.
Exposed to the liberal ideas that held sway all over the world during the sixties of the last century, the Brahmans in urban dwellings began distancing themselves from the orthodox ways and the social mores of their forebears in increasing numbers. That was the beginning of the modern Hindu middle class phenomenon shaped by them that set the trend for the great Indian social upsurge of the later days. However, the Gangetic plains have been slow in catching up with the changing times, maybe because the Brahmans, in numbers, held on to their village lands and their old values alike to retain their socio-religious hold on the cow belt.
Whatever, with the easing of the Brahman social-yoke, even though the backward castes have come to breathe easier, yet they had to bear the brunt of the centuries-old neglect of India’s economy that was till the advent of the Green Revolution, which had put more money into more pockets of theirs for most of them to think in terms of educating their children. Moreover, even as the modern economy occasioned a fusion of the four varnas enabled the segregated Hindu society to shed a part of its past caste biases, it was Gandhi’s crusade for the upliftment of the downtrodden and finally the untouchable harijans, nay dalits, which eventually pushed all under the shade of the Hindu urban socio-religious umbrella.
Yet, it was the pragmatic policy of positive discrimination, adopted by the polity to lend dalits a helping hand with reservations in education and employment, which enabled them to emerge on the Indian economic scene as well. That’s about the leveling of Mother India’s lopsided socio-economic ground for making it a level playing field for its hitherto vulnerable offspring. However, the opposition plants sprouted by these backward caste-seeds couldn’t survive for long under the banyan tree of a political party that the Congress had been that was till the regional satraps began to have their electoral sway outside the Hindi-heartland.
Finally, the dalit resentment against the caste Hindus in the cow belt found its expression in the Kanshi Ram-Mayawati combine with the electoral slogan,
tilak tarāju aur talwār, / Brahmins, Banias ‘n Thākurs,
sabko māro jōte chār. / Bash them all with no respite.
Why that the old Hindu outcasts could resort to such sloganeering on the soil of Arya Varta underscores the changed Indian caste reality; isn’t it the payback time of sorts for the caste Hindus for their long suppression of the outcasts? This dalit resurgence in the end proved to be the undoing of the stranglehold of the Congress Party on the Indian polity.
Whatever, in India today, the backward classes that form the teeming Hindu multitudes, whose backs the Brahmanism had broken, no longer have to blame their karma, and instead they have every reason to thank the Hindu gods for their improved lot, which changed their religious attitude as well. What with the ever-growing middle class component from these castes making the bulk of the devout, in a curious phenomenon, the Hindu society began to unite itself religiously even as it retained its fractured caste quality. That was how the once insular Brahmanism had given way to the open-ended Hinduism with an expanded mass base to maintain its identity and protect its interests.
This newfound religious orientation among the backward classes and the other backward castes brought in, in its wake, the fellowship of Hindutva; it’s no longer the India of old where the Brahmans lived in their agrahārās and the kshatriyas in their forts, both insensitive to the happenings around. These new Hindu breeds have come to believe that the country is theirs own, and thus are in no mood to concede further demographic ground to India’s minorities so it seems.
True, for centuries, the hapless Hindu masses had to share the land of their forefathers with the antagonistic Musalmans, to whom their classes had foolhardily con ceded it but the new concept of the Indian nation-state occasioned in them an emotional attachment to it that the minorities don’t seem to recognize. Why for the new Hindu masses, India is no longer a mere piece of land that they happen to share with the Musalmans ‘n the Christians but it is a nation of theirs, which they would like to cherish and protect for all times to come. And it is in this mind-set that the Hindus are increasingly becoming sensitive to the omissions and commissions of the Indian Musalmans; more so, their excuses for family planning, which have begun making them wary of the Muslim intentions.
Hindus have come to believe that the Musalmans are out to multiply themselves with a long-term demographic goal, and the latter, for their part, began to accentuate the former’s fears not only by nearly doubling themselves in seven decades but by openly voicing their desire to turn India into Ghazwa-e-Hind, possible or otherwise. Moreover, the apathy of the Musalmans for a planned family betrays their insensitivity towards their own women; won’t their persistent refusal to adopt the family planning methods that avert the health-hampering carriages and miscarriages render their fair sex into despondency? Oh how the Musalmans burden their women with a child in the lap and another in the womb till they can bear no longer, and as the moulvis aver they have a duty to procreate for the sake of Islam regardless that is. Yet, the women don’t seem to be complaining either, well if they don’t comply, how they could ever be believers?
Though the moulvi imposed religious obligation to numerically strengthen Islam is at odds with the welfare of the umma itself, for the religiously blinded Musalmans, the deprivation that large families bring to their members is not something to lose sleep about! After all, for the believing souls, the life ‘here’ is of no avail and the purpose of being born a Musalman is to hope for the ‘hereafter’. Thus, as the religious bigotry of the Indian Musalmans, besides hurting their standard of living is upsetting the Indian demographic order, the Hindu patience with the Muslim obstinacy is seemingly running out as can be seen from Narendra Modi’s, ham pānch, hamārā pacĥis – We’re five, ours twenty-five – taunt as Gujarat Chief Minister. Nevertheless, in his later secular outreach, in the Prime Ministerial avatar, to the unforgiving Musalmans would exemplify his maturing as a statesman of stature.
What’s worse, the Islamic demographic design demonically suits the short-term vote bank politics of India’s self, or family serving political dispensations! What baffles them is that if checking the country’s population growth is in the national interest, how come the Congress-led band shies away from encouraging the umma to exercise restraint on the procreative front? Moreover, the obduracy of the Indian umma in adhering to their personal laws, abandoned even in the Islamic countries, in the Indian secular setting has been increasingly earning them the Hindu ill-will in good measure.
Maybe, the ideology of M.S. Golwalkar, the Brahman nationalist with a Muhammadan bias has begun to appeal to more and more Hindus owing to this Muslim indifference to matters of national interest. It was at this juncture of increasing Hindu misgivings about the Muslim intentions that Rajiv Gandhi so naively surrendered Shah Bano to the Islamic obscurantists, and the Sangh Parivar, of Golwalkar’s creed, sensed the outraged Hindu mood and went for the Congress kill. As if fortuitously, the decrepit Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, the birthplace of Lord Sri Rama, which was neither a functional masjid nor a structured mandir, came in handy for them to bring it onto the national agenda as Ram Janma Bhōmi movement.
Yet it might not have made any impact on the Hindu minds, long reconciled to the demolitions of their temples of yore, had not the appeasement brigade, who saw electoral dividends in this local dispute, egged on the umma not to yield an inch of the land to the Hindu sentiment. But for the ensuing Muslim objection to the Sangh Parivar’s floater, the Ram Janma Bhōmi issue could have never snowballed into a Hindu national movement that it turned out to be. And as if to direct the Hindu resentment in his tracks into the ballot boxes, Lal Krishna Advani, a la Bhagirath, flagged off his Rath Yathra from Somnath, the temple town once ransacked by Mahmud Ghazni, but rebuilt by the independent Hindustan that is under the aegis of Sardar Patel. Needless to say, this master move was meant to remind the Hindus, just in case they forgot about the age-old Musalman habit of pulling down the Hindu temples, nay the derogatory buth-khānās.
Not surprisingly, the opinion poll of ‘The India Today’, cited earlier, revealed the Muslim aversion for building the Ram Mandir at the disputed site; what is more, 21% of them, who are aware of the India history, consider Mahmud a hero, notwithstanding his vandalism at the venerated Hindu temples of that time. And yet, the Musalmans think that the Hindus, who pulled down the dilapidated masjid on 6th December 1992, are the villains, never mind the mandir demolition creed of Islam, and so have come to religiously observe that day as a Black Day! That itself speaks for the twisted sense of the Muslim logic and proves that they think with their Islamic heart but not with the Indian mind.
It’s time the Indian Musalmans contemplate whether they could hero-worship the marauders of the Hindu mandirs (Aurangzeb, the despoiler of the Kashi Vishwanāth temple, the next most revered after Somnath, has a Muslim approval rating of 39%) and in the same vein condemn those that pulled down the decrepit Babri masjid! Well, all this won’t be amusing to the Hindus; the mind-set of double standards is troublesome even in the majority community but it would be eminently unwise for the minorities to develop the proclivity of reading the Indian history from the Pakistani text books.
When the jihadi driven amongst the Indian Musalmans, in lieu of the Babri debris, turned some of Bombay’s buildings into rubble, the equally bigoted Shiv Sainiks rioted to pay them back with Islamic body bags. Be that as it may, one wonders whether it was the Hindu apologia, the Muslim hypocrisy, or the Indian intellectual naivety that was on display in the media in the wake of the communal riots! One of the reasons why the communal riots raise their ugly head at intervals in India is the tendency of the intellectuals, from both the communities, to push the issue of the Hindu-Muslim divide under the secular carpet lest their honest views should be misconstrued as the anti-other. Whatever, the Decommissioned Adult of the fanatic Muhammadan, for his part, wouldn’t appreciate that the Hindu-Muslim disputes tend to be subjected to the Moses’ Law Square - two eyes for an eye, two teeth for one and two slain for one killed.
However, after a relatively long lull on the communal front, a bunch of fanatical, thus stupid, Indian Musalman zealots targeted some Ram Sevaks, returning from a rally at Ayodhya, for the cause of the Ram temple, which lost its momentum by then that was before its eventual dissipation. Reminiscent of their Naokhali barbarity, the Musalman mob torched a railway coach at Godhra in which 58 Hindus, 40 of whom were women and children, had perished; it’s as if these bigots had for inspiration Mahmud’s butchery of the Hindus at Somnath in the same province.
But unlike in the times gone by, led by the Sangh Parivar, the Gujarati Hindu retaliation that followed accounted for 790 Musalmans dead (amplified by the Congress eco system through the idiot boxes to 2000-odd to politically hurt the irrepressible Narendra Modi) in which rioting 254 Hindus too perished, most of them in police firing, which fact was equally glossed over by the pseudo-secular Islamapologic media. Yet in a weird way, some of the body bags had revealed the changed face of the Hindutva; that the backward dalits, ever averse to the Hindutva cause, and more so, the tribal poor, hitherto lukewarm to the same, too participated in the carnage against the Musalmans had put the Hindu consolidation on display for all to see.
Why, didn’t Ashok Singhal of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, echo all this by blowing the Sangh Parivar’s pānchajanya thus:
“It was for the first time in thousand years the Hindus got united and gave a befitting reply to those who attacked them in Godhra.”
He further thundered that the Gujarat incident was just the beginning and sounded ominous when he declared,
“the valour showed by the Hindus in Gujarat is unprecedented. If they are attacked again they will stand in self-defence. This will not end here. The VHP will take this message across the country through its Ram Naam Jap and other programs.”
History has its own ironies, so it seems, for Gujarat, where Mahmud Ghazni started it all for the Musalmans, became the first retreat of the Indian Musalmans.
However, Ram Lalla (Ram as Child), sheltered under a shāmiana over the Babri debris, was made to wait for the Indian judicial verdict to grant or deny him a bhavya mandir (magnificent temple) in Ayodhya that the Vishva Hindu Parishad was itching to build. What if the Supreme Lordships fail to construe that which all three Allahabad High Court Judges felt was incontrovertible evidence in Ram Lalla’s cause; then should not the established Muslim guilt of demolishing many a Hindu mandir make a compelling case for Sri Rama’s entitlement to ‘the benefit of doubt’, so thought Hindus. But then, after a decade-long secular dithering that too in the times of its judicial activism, a five judge constitution bench of India’s Supreme Court, which included a Musalman for secular affect, had delivered its unanimous judgment on 9th November 2019 in Ram Lalla’s favour. It goes to the credit of the umma that it accepted the verdict with grace though the same cannot be said about some of its community leaders, religious as well as political. But when Hindus were all set to begin the construction of a bhavya mandir for Ram Lalla, ironically the national lockdown forced by the novel corona virus to put it in the pause mode.
