by
Dr. Subramanian Swamy, Ph.D. (Harvard)
Former Cabinet Minister for Commerce, Law and Justice, Govt. of India September 28, 2013
1. THE IDENTITY OF AN INDIA AS HINDUSTAN
In Chapter 7 Sloka 5 in the
Gita, Bhagvan Krishna says that besides eight material elements , the
noble souls collectively empower him to control the world. Swami Vivekananda
is one such soul that Lord Krishna must have had in mind. As RSS senior
adhikari K. Suryanarayana Rao pointed out in his booklet, Swami Ramakrishna, the guru of Swami Vivekananda had prophesied that indeed Vivekananda
as Narendranath, a shishya of the guru, would one day through his
intellectual and spiritual powers shake the foundations of the world. Swami Vivekananda
indeed did so by his discourses and speeches. He spoke vigorously on
the need for a new Hindustan. He wanted the cultural unity of India to
be acknowledged openly by all Indians. Swamiji wanted a renaissance in
the Hindu outlook based on Vedanta scriptures, and from it outlined the
architecture of Hindu identity.
In his “Paper on Hinduism” read at the World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago on 19th Sept 1983, Swami Vivekananda emphasized the common points agreed by all the Indian-born religions (or Indic religions):
"From
the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the
latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of
idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of Buddhists,
and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's
religion."
Swami Vivekananda defined Hindutva, upon returning from Chicago in 1896, in an address in Lahore as follows:
“Mark
me, then and then alone you are a Hindu when the very name Hindu sends
through you a galvanic shock of strength. Then and then alone you are a
Hindu when every man and woman who bears the name Hindu, from any
country, speaking our language or any other language, becomes at once
the nearest and dearest to you. Then and then alone you are a Hindu when
the distress of anyone bearing the name Hindu comes to your heart and
makes you fell as if your own son or daughter were in distress” [Collected Works, vol 3, page 379].
Swamiji listed seven common points of Hindu and other Indic [India born] religions:
1.
Religion is received through revelation, the Vedas. By Vedas no books
are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws
discovered by different sages in different bodies.
2.
Creation is without beginning or end. Creation and creator can be
likened to two lines without beginning and without end.
3. We are a spirit living in a body. We are not the body.
4. The present is
determined by our past actions and the future by the present. There
must have been causes before the present birth to make a man miserable
or happy and those were his past actions. Also the natural habits of a
new-born soul must have come from past lives.
5.
The soul in its very essence is free, unbounded, holy, pure and
perfect. But the soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from
birth to birth and death to death.
6. Worship Him, the God Almighty, through love, love for the love's sake without pre-conditions or expectation.
7.
The whole object is by constant struggle to become perfect, to
become divine, to reach God and see God. We can have the experience of
God in this life.
And Deendayal Upadhyaya, an outstanding original thinker and President of the Jana Sangh, in hisIntegral Humanism following Swami Vivekananda, outlined how to modernize the concepts of Hindutva as follows:
“We have to discard the status quo mentality
and usher in a new era. Indeed our efforts at reconstruction need not
be clouded by prejudice or disregard for all that is inherited from our
past. On the other hand, there is no need to cling to past institutions
and traditions which have outlived their utility”. This is the essence of renaissance.
Dr.
B.R. Ambedkar who emerged later in 1916 as a young scholar just after
Swamji attained Samadhi, expressed much the same view in his forgotten
writings on Indian history. Presenting a research paper as long ago as
in l916, titled “Castes in India; Their Mechanism, Genesis, and
Development” at an Anthropology Department seminar at the prestigious
Columbia University in New York, Dr.Ambedkar stated:
“I
venture to say that there is no country that can rival the Indian
Peninsula with respect to the unity of its culture. It has not only a
geographical unity, but it has over and above all a deeper and much more
fundamental unity - the indubitable cultural unity that cover the land
from end to end”(Indian Antiquary. vol.XVL May, 1917. p.94).
Hindu culture is at the
root of the Indian civilization. After 1000 years of aggression against
Hindus, causing deprivation and subjugation, nevertheless the core Hindu
spirit remained undiminished, despite the consequential poverty and
destitution having dented the mindset of the average Hindu.
Thus, Swami Vivekananda
uplifted the Hindu mind which was since 1857 in a gloom to again throw
of the shackles of the mind. Hindu renaissance thus began in inclusive
best after Swamiji’s speech in Chacago in 1893.
Earlier,
Ram Mohan Roy who propounded the concept of Brahmo Samaj, tried to
import the Christian methodology of revival such as congregational
worship, and eschewing individualizing and personalizing the divinity.
Swamiji advocated the individual’s commitment to serve the downtrodden
as the real form of worship, and held the “Truth alone is my God”. Nor
did he agree to Swami Dayanand Sarasvati’s creation of a one dimensional deity, the fire, as the only way to worship.
Swami Vivekananda
thus focused his spiritual energy on liberation of the individual from
the shackles of the mind instilled by foreign rule and occupation of the
nation which he called Bharat Mata. In that sense Swamiji was the fore
runner of the national freedom fighters, opening the path for Sri
Aurobindo and later Mahatma Gandhi to shape the Indian identity.
The question "Who are we?"
is the first step in this search for that identity. It is an attempt to
seek the foundation stone for a new Hindu Renaissance, which is
necessary for discarding dysfunctional trappings of the past. We are
today on the verge of an Indian cultural revolution that draws its
sustenance and roots from our glorious past centuries of achievements,
and of valour while in bondage.
Swamiji
said: “If a Hindu is not spiritual, I do not call him a Hindu. National
union in India must be a gathering up of its scattered spiritual
forces. A nation of India must be a union of those whose hearts beats to
the same spiritual tune.”[Quoted I K. Suryanarayana Rao : Swami Vivekananda : India Condensed].
We
shall therefore define India as "Hindustan, a nation of Hindus and
those others who proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus”.
India is therefore a spiritual country and not secular in the West
European sense.
In
this definition of identity of India as Hindustan, Parsis, Muslims and
Christians who accept the historical and scientific truth that their
ancestors were Hindus, are an integral part of the identity of
Hindustani [see my Virat Hindu Identity (2013), Harnanand Publications, New Delhi]
The late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington penned an influential book titled: Who We Are? to
define the American’s identity as a “White Anglo-Saxon Christian who
speaks English” even if a very large proportion of Americans are of
African, Mexican, Phillipines and Indian origin. For this Huntington
focused on two ingredients of identity: Salience and Substan
Salience is
the willing commitment of every citizen to place enlightened national
interests, security and integrity above any personal interests and
aspiration and thus be ready to make sacrifices, if necessary, for the
same.
Substance is
the existence and recognition of commonality of a citizen with other
citizens of the nation, an emotional bonding that is not possible with
citizens of other nations.
Fortunately,
we Indians do not have to contrive an identity as Huntington had to for
a multi-ethnic USA. The territory in which Hindus have lived has been
known for ages as Hindustan, i.e., a specific area of a collective of
persons who are bonded together by common culture, history, ethos,
aspirations.
As
recent researches on DNA of the Indian people shows, Indians are
ethnically one people. The Indian nation-nation is a modern Republic
today, whose roots are also in the long unbroken civilisational history.
It has been scientifically established in the research of Ramana Gutala and Denise Carvalhosilva (published in the renowned Human Genes journal,
Sept.2006, VI. 120 p.543-51), titled "A Shared Y-Chronoosomal Heritage
between Muslims and Hindus", that Hindus and Muslims have the same DNA
structure. Parsis, Indian Jews, and Christians do not deny Hindu
ancestry.
The
whole world has known our vast territory and millions of the
inhabitants for centuries as ‘India and Indians’ or ‘Hind and Hindi’ or
as the Chinese know us even today both as nation and people as ‘Yindu’.
The root word in all these terms is ‘Hindu’, which word for the
Persians, Arabs and Europeans meant a people living beyond the Sindhu
river, and for the Chinese a people living beyond the Himalayas and
bounded by the Indu Sagar [Indian Ocean].
The
theology and epistemology of Hindu religion, or Hinduism is codified in
the four Vedas and in the Vedanta scriptures, and the values contained
therein are the basis for the Substance of being an Indian.
India’s
glorious past in aptly summarized in the writings of Dr.Ambedkar, and
his oration in the Constituent Assembly for a strong united country.
Ambedkar wrote in this vein several such brilliant books, but alas,
Nehru and his cohorts so thoroughly frustrated him and electorally
humiliated him that in the end bitterness drove him to his sad end. We
must honour him now as a great Rajrishi and co-opt his writings as a
mandatory part of the patriotic Indians’ literature.
Jonah Blank, an American journalist curious about the “paradoxical” durability and the solidSubstance of
Indianness, took a journey in 1991-92 from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka on the
route taken by Lord Rama. He then wrote a book about titled: Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God—Retracing the Ramayana Through India [Houghton
Mifflin, Boston USA]. He writes: “India’s land may be ruled by aliens
from time to time, but never her mind, never her soul…..In the end, it
is always India that does the digesting”[p.217].
He
concludes: “But somehow a nebulous sense of ‘Indianness’ does exist,
and it binds together Gujaratis, Orissans, to Nagas who might seem to
have nothing at all in common. Perhaps it is this elusive, undefinable
[yet very real] link that has allowed the sub-continent’s multitude of
races to live in some rough semblance of harmony for four thousand
years”[p.218]. Despite Blank’s unthinking adherence to Indian ancient
and medieval history as written out by British colonialists, the reality
of his direct experiences from his travels in India makes him come to
the opposite conclusion to the British colonialists viz., India has
always existed because of the “Indian-ness” of the people.
Moreover,
the world knew of Indians in these millenniums not as nomads but as a
highly civilized people who produced exotic goods they had never seen
before and were hospitable to visitors of all religious persuasion from
abroad. Many travelers such as Fa Hsien, Yuan Chuang, Marco Polo, Vasco
d’Gama, and Mark Twain wrote glowingly then about the tolerant
behaviourial quality of the Hindus, which quality can be summarized as
the defining characteristic of the ancient Indian people.
Justice
Bharucha, a Parsi, who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
of India, wrote in his Babri Masjid judgment of 1993 [Reported in (1994)
6 SCC 378] that “…Hinduism is a tolerant faith. It is that tolerance that has enabled [emphasis added] Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism to find shelter and support upon this land.”
Throughout
this history Hindustan was a Republic in content and a monarchy in form
[a possible but weak exception being Asoka’s reign]. In this ancient
Republican concept, the king did not make policy or proclaim the law.
The intellectually accomplished elite in the society, known as Brahmins,
framed the laws and state policy and the King implemented it. Chanakya
[circa 1500 B.C.], one such Brahmin, propounded the concept of
‘Chakravartin’ to explain how a highly decentralized Indian polity
nevertheless united when the nation would face danger. Such unity, which
Huntington called Salience we saw many times in existence, more
recently for example, in 1857, in the Freedom Movement, 1962 Chinese
conflict, 1977 in the post-Emergency elections.
Brahmins,
contrary to the current practice in India, were not necessarily by
birth. They could be born in any family but had to become accomplished
in knowledge, learning including in the art of warfare but only for
teaching others and advising the monarch.
Not
only according Lord Krishna in Gita [Sloka 13, Chapter IV] but even
modern research of scholars such as M.N. Srinivas and M.V. Nadkarni, it
was this guna which defined the Brahmin. Vedas were to be learnt
and researched by Brahmins, and the values in particular which are the
pillars of Sanatana Dharma, were to be inculcated by all.
Vedic values hence form our innate nature, the Substance, while India is our territorial body, while our republican soul , the Salience, is in today’s Hindustan. Hindu panth [religion]
is however a theology of faith rooted in the Vedas. Even if an Indian
has a different faith from a Hindu, he or she can still be possessed of
Vedic values.
Since
India was 100 percent Hindu a millennium ago, the only way any
significant group could have a different faith in today’s India is if
there was religious conversion from Hindu faith, hence today those are
whose ancestors were Hindus.
Conversion
of faith does not have to imply conversion to another culture or
language or nature. In Iran, the converted Muslims have continued with
Persian, the language of the Zoroastrians, as their own. Hence in India
too the Sanskrit language can remain to be sacred for a non-Hindu in
India.
Thus, we can say that Hindustan is a country not only of Hindus but also of those others who accept that their ancestors were Hindus.
Acceptance with pride this reality is to accept the Vedic legacy of
values even if like the Jains and others, they do not accept the Vedas. A
republican nation of Hindustan is therefore of Hindus and of those of
other faiths who have assimilated Vedic values in them. This formulation of salience and substance settles the question of identity of the Hindustani or Indian. An
Indian is a Hindu rooted in Vedic values or is one who proudly admits
that his ancestors were Hindus and thus imbibed with Vedic values.
This is what Swami Vivekananda meant by Vedanta philosophy, and which is the only way that Hindustan can become a modern Rashtra, thereby, as Parmacharya had wanted, achieving Independence after having recovered our Freedom in 1947.
However,
Vedic values relevant today have to be inculcated in our people from
values and norms that emerge out of a renaissance, that is, shorn of
the accumulated but unacceptable baggage of the past as also by
co-opting new scientific discoveries, perceptions and by synergizing
with modernity.Its implementation of course requires political action
with public consent. This thus is the goal of this address: to chart a
road map for India that is Hindustan to become a Rashtra based on Vedic
values.
I was inspired in preparing this address by the comment of the greatest sage and sanyasi of the 20th century,
namely Chandrashekharendra Sarasvati, the Shankaracharya of Kanchi
Kamakoti Mutt at Kanchipuram, TN, who is reverentially referred to as
the Parmacharya.
That
great sage had counseled the Indian leadership on August 15, 1947 that
“having become free, we must translate that freedom into independence”.
It is the content of that independence that should have concerned all
thinkers since then, but did not. The then Establishment and political
dispensation disregarded Parmacharya’s advice, ignorantly perhaps
thinking that freedom and independence were synonymous words. These
words are however not synonyms, and moreover, without independence we
cannot retain freedom either for long. That is the danger today of
failing to follow the wise counsel of the Parmacharya.
Freedom
is a physical attribute of a citizen’s rights, such as the right to a
livelihood, the freedom of travel etc., while Independence of a nation
rests on the quality of the citizen’s values such as his or her attitude
to duties, morality, inter-personal relations, social commitment, and
nationalism. This requires knowledge of the correct history of
Hindustan. Vedic values embody all these aspects.
I shall now make the presentation of such an Agenda in three parts: First, I will highlight the structural parameters of Hindu theology which circumscribe any Vedic values Renaissance Agenda;Second, I will discuss the Five Point Agenda to adopt as a road map for political action today; Third, I will raise some issues for consideration in the implementation of this Agenda.
VEDANTIC VALUES: THE STRUCTURAL PARAMETERS
Structurally, there is no
scope for a theology based on Vedantic values to be fundamentalist. For
fundamentalism, by definition, requires an unquestioning commitment to the scripture in
its pristine original version. For Hindus, there is no one scripture to
revert to for theological purity since there are many scriptures which
raise a plethora of beliefs and sustain faith, debates, and profound
speculations on basic questions[e.g., Upanishads], such as on advaita, dvaita, astika and nastika.
Questioning, debating and synthesizing are an integral part of Vedic values. Nor does Sanatana Dharma have
just one prophet to revere, or prohibits anyone from holding any other
view of religious experience. But most of all, Vedic values are
committed to the search for truth [including knowing what is truth] for
which incessant debate is permitted, while fundamentalists are committed
to a Book and brook no debate.
We
Hindus even tolerate and passively suffer the most lewd and blasphemous
interpretation of the Vedic tradition as recently witnessed in the
paintings of M.F. Hussain or the writings of Wendy Doniger. This
democratic temperament induced by Vedic values is why Vedanta can never
lead to fundamentalism.
This
is because Vedic philosophy is not a theology founded on the revelation
of a single prophet or constituted by a single scripture that which all
adherents have to blindly believe in. It is instead accumulated wisdom
of sages. Hence, the synergy between the Vedic values and a national
renaissance.
There is in Vedanta no ‘Church’ to belong to, or to obey dictums or fatwas,
or to believe in a ‘Pope’ who is held to be infallible, or to regard a
‘Bible’ or Koran as the sole Holy Book to specify a mandatory code of
what to believe in and what not to. Nor is there the likes of a Hadith or a Sura in
Vedanta to goad the faithful into submission to God to commit, as His
direction, violence against unbelievers termed as Kafirs and Dhimmis.
Vedas
also formally acknowledges that that there are many paths to reach God
and hence treats other religions with respect on the principle of Sarva Pantha Sama Bhava even if these paths are not considered equally efficacious for reaching the Divine. That is why in Hindu civilisational history, there has never
been burning of religious books of others, destructing places of these
other religions, crucifying of prophets of other religions, holding of
inquisitions, or even disrespecting other schools of thought. Jews
and Zoroastrians suffering persecution in their own countries and
elsewhere, found safe refuge only in Hindu India and were assisted by
Hindus to practice their religion freely. No other religion has this
compassionate track record or proud legacy.
Hindu acharyas instead have always believed in shashtrathas[debate] to
convert others to their point of view. Hence, even when Buddha
challenged the ritualistic practices of Hindus, or Mahavira and Nanak
gave fresh perspectives on Hindu concepts, there was never any
persecution of these Prophets. Indeed these Prophets were considered
Hindu avataras and their teachings challenged in debates and then synthesized into Hindu theology itself.
That
is why the Indian Constitution defines Hindus to include Jains,
Buddhists and Sikhs, and in the theological framework Hinduism accepted
by these other religions even if the concepts of Vedic theology was
challenged or even rejected . Religious intolerance and sustained
persecution however later came to India with Islam and Christianity and
through their instrumentalities.
Vedic
philosophy thus founded on a vast rainbow spectrum of scriptures and a
monumental accumulated wisdom of many sages that is contained in the
Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas etc., all of which intellectually hold that
the Ultimate Truth is manifested in manifold ways.
Hence,
the essentiality of Vedic values, or alternatively the core quality of
being a Hindu, which we may call as our Hindu-ness [i.e., Hindutva],
is that structurally there is no danger in the advocacy ever
degenerating into fundamentalism. In fact, so liberal, sophisticated,
and focused on inward evolution is Vedanta, that in a series of Supreme
Court judgments, various Constitutional Benches have not held Hindutva
as a communal outlook, as we discover from an useful review of these
judgments by Bal Apte MP [in Supreme Court on Hindutva, India First Foundation, 2005].
All
the apex court judgments since 1951 on the subject have rejected the
notion that Hindutva is either an antonym of secularism or held that per
se an appeal to voters by a candidate to poll for him on the ground
that he believes in Hindutva, will constitute an offence under the
electoral law of the country than bans appeal to religion in elections.
Hence, we can rest here our case for defence of Vedic values as an ideology incapable of becoming fundamentalist,
and proceed now with the larger issues of Vedic values for nation
building and national renaissance. This is often described as
Hindu-ness or Hindutva.
Hindu-ness of outlook on life had been termed Hindutva by Swami Vivekananda.
Hindutva’s political perspective has been developed by Veer Savarkar.
Deendayal Upadhaya briefly dealt with the concept of Hindutva when he
wrote about chiti in his seminal work: Integral Humanism.
The
focus of all three profound thinkers was the multi-dimensional
development of the Hindus as an individuals harmonizing material
pursuits with spiritual advancement, and on how to aggregate
individualistic Hindus into an united community or a vibrant collective
on the concept of Hindutva.
Because of the individual-centric distinctiveness of Vedanta, it is
possible to see millions of Hindus, for example, come to Kumbh Mela on
their own, without a direction in the nature of a fatwa, or
invitation, peacefully and without any imposition, perform their pujas
and then depart. It is purely voluntary and disciplined even as the
state does not provide any organization or subsidy for travel expenses.
This is individualism par excellence inculcated by Vedic values.
With
this kind of widespread voluntary commitment of Hindus, seen not only
in Kumbh Mela, but in other pilgrimage occasions such as in Sabarimalai,
Vaishno Devi, etc., and the reality of our tolerant civilisational
history, can we feel secure that we Hindus can and will unite when it becomes necessary to defend against sinister, sophisticated, and violent threats that the religion faces today?
We cannot be sure, because the Kumbh Mela spirit not only represents the innate strength of Vedic values, but also the main weakness of Hindus as a society.
That is, those who assemble at Kumbh Mela do it as an act of individual
piety. Hindus do not go to Kumbh Mela to be with other Hindus in a
religious congregation, but because they believe that their individual
salvation lies in going there.
Patriotic
Hindus should understand this structural limitation in the theology
that individualism, mistakenly taken nowadays as apathy, and find ways
to rectify it for the national good. Collectively, Hindus today lack the
necessary modern mindset that can pro-actively bond the community in an
inclusive virile wholesome unity, which unity is necessary today for
meeting the threats that the Hindu religion faces from terrorism,
conversions, religious minority appeasement, and distortions in the
history textbooks [ for a discussion of the nature of this siege see my Hindus Under Siege: The Way Out(Haranand, New Delhi, 2005)].
This limitation must not only be overcome but we must try rectify it, not on an ad hoc basis, but
on a durable foundation that is sustainable, because Hinduism is being
targeted today as never before by terrorism, religious conversion,
minority appeasement, debasement in history textbooks, and distortions
in the mass media.
It
is worthy of notice that, recognizing this limitation, Hindu spiritual
leaders in the past have from time to time come forward to rectify it,
whenever the need arose e.g., as the Sringeri Shankaracharya did by
founding the Vijayanagaram dynasty or Swami
Ramdas did with Shivaji and the Mahratta campaign. In the Ramjanmabhoomi
Mandir campaign, and the Rama Setu Raksha Abhiyan, the VHP had
demonstrated that this individualism is not apathy and that this
limitation can be overcome by mass action, by mobilizing most of the
sants and acharyas of the Hindu faith.
Such involvement of sanyasis is
required even more urgently today, and thus the mobilization of the
sants and sadhus for social action has become crucial for our spiritual
consolidation. In fact, Swami Vivekananda
had aptly put it when he stated that: “National union of India must be a
gathering up of its scattered spiritual forces. A Nation in India must
be a union of those whose hearts beat to the same spiritual tune….The
common ground that we have is our sacred traditions, our religion. That
is the only common ground… upon that we shall have to build”.
The recent efforts in this direction of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in forming the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha that
includes all the Shankaracharyas, Mahamandaleshwars, Akharas, and
others as members, for the first time as a body corporate, is highly
necessary and noteworthy.
Let us recall here that well before the birth of Christianity and
Islam, Hindu religion had been intellectually dethroned by Hinayana
Buddhism. But Adi Sankaracharya rethroned Hinduism through his famous shastrathas [religious
debate] and caused a renaissance in Buddhism itself, which later came
to be known as Mahayana Buddhism, conceptually in complete harmony with,
if not indistinguishable from Hindu theology. It is Mahayana Buddhism
that spread to China, Cambodia and Vietnam.
In Tamil Nadu, the Azhwars and Nayanmars, also through shastrathas,
repositioned Hinduism after dethroning Jainism and Buddhism. Since
then the Hindu dharmacharyas have always been looked up to whenever
Hindu society faced a threat or crisis, for guidance to meet these
dangers.
Moreover, the facts of our
history have to be well understood so that we are not condemned to
re-live it. Militant Islam and later crusading Christianity had come to
India, and aggressively had challenged Hinduism. Because Hindus had
then very civilized Vedic rules of warfare such as fighting only on open
barren fields, and between sunrise and sunset, besides forgiving the
loser and sending him back with due honour, therefore these Muslim and
Christian invaders despite being much smaller in numbers, seized power
in sequence by the changing the rules of combat, and established their
own state in India that lasted several centuries.
This
change of rules is what Prithviraj Chauhan had not realized while
repeatedly defeating Mohammed Ghori and then forgiving him. But
Chhatrapati Shivaji had fully understood the perfidy of these
aggressors, and accordingly improvised new tactics while dealing with
the likes of Aurangzeb and Afzal Khan. The difference [in outcomes
achieved] between Chauhan and Shivaji thus speaks for itself.
Today
the terrorists and religious missionaries are doing precisely that
again of playing by new and even more clandestine and deceptive rules.
We Hindus have to accordingly devise our strategy for dealing with them,
and will be successful only after understanding the rules by which
these enemy forces will scheme against us.
In 1947, temporal power and freedom were defacto restored
to the Hindu majority. But the Indian state formally adopted
secularism, which concept however was never properly defined or
debated. For example, it left vague what a modern Indian's connection was with the nation's Hindu past and legacy.
What Nehru grafted on the nation was a vague concept of secularism
which operationally meant that anything European in mores and manners
was good and anything Hindu was obscurantist.
In
the name of secularism, it was taboo for a public servant even to break
a coconut or light an oil lamp to inaugurate an official function on
the ground that religious symbols must not invade public life! This
orthodox concept of secularism has debilitated the civilisational
independence of the nation since 1947 when we recovered our freedom.
Secular
orthodoxy promoted by Jawarharlal Nehru and his Leftist advisers led
the government to take over supervision of temples, legislate on Hindu
personal laws, and regulate religious festivals, but kept aloof from the
Muslim and Christian religious affairs. In fact, data from Karnataka
show that during 1997-2002, over 25,000 temples under state government
administration had appropriated Rs 391.40 crores in revenue from devotee
offerings, but only Rs.84.00 crores of that was spent on the temples
for its upkeep.
As
a consequence of this meager expenditure, over 8000 temples went into
disuse. Madrasas and Haj travel however received Rs. 180.60 crores from
these temple funds! Churches got Rs.44.00 crores, thus diverting a total
of 78.58% of Hindu temple donations to Muslim, Christian and other
non-Hindu activities!! Is this not incredible in a nation of 83% Hindu
even in the name of secularism? The secularism principle was thus
foisted on the Hindu masses without making him understand why they had
to abide by such legislation, but not Muslims and Christians.
As
a result of the Nehruvian secularist’s chicanery, the renaissance that
had begun in the late nineteenth century to redefine the national
identity [in contemporary terms and norms valid in a pluralistic
society], was aborted by the confusion thus created in Hindu minds by a
vaguely understood concept of secularism. Confusion causes debilitation
of one’s strength.
The Agenda of Vedantic Values for National Renaissance
Therefore
my call today is first and foremost for undiluted unity of Hindus, and
those others who proudly accept that their ancestor were Hindus, a unity
based on a mindset that is nurtured and fostered on the fundamentals of
a renaissance.
First, the concept of Hindustan defines the identity of India. That
is, Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and those others who proudly accept
that their ancestors are Hindus. Muslims and Christians are a part of
the Hindustan if they accept this truth and revere it. That is the first dimension of national renaissance. In
this inclusive concept of Indianness, we have to examine and determine
if the present divisive caste system can be considered as sustainable or
we must seek ways to jettison.
Modern
India is portrayed by foreign interests through school and college
curriculum as a discontinuity in history and as a new entity much as are
today's Greece, Egypt or Iraq. That curriculum is largely intact today.
On the contrary efforts are afoot to bolster the disparagement of our
past in the new dispensation today. A rudderless India, disconnected
from her past has, as a consequence, becomes a fertile field for
religious poachers and neo-imperialists from abroad who paint India as a
mosaic of immigrants not as a nation but much like a crowd on a
platform in a railway station. But instead the reality is that today’s
India is connected to her hoary past because this India is a nation of
Hindus and those others [such as Muslims and Christians] whose ancestors
were Hindus. That definition applies to Jews and Parsis too because of
inter-marriage and now proved by DNA testing.
The
identity of India is thus Hindustan, a nation of Hindus with Vedic
values and those others who acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus
thus respect Vedic values. It is this acknowledgement that remains pending today,
delays the unity of the nation on a historic identity based Vedic
values. We can accept Muslims and Christians as part of our Vedic family
when they proudly acknowledge this fact and accept that change religion
does not require change of culture or values. Thus the cultural
identity of India is undeniably, immutably, and obviously its Hinduness,
that is rooted in Vedic values.
But
the challenge today confronting Hindus is much more difficult to meet
than it was ever earlier in history, because the forces at work to erode
Vedic values and undermine Hindu faith, unlike before, are unseen,
clandestine, pernicious, deceptive but most of all sophisticated and
media-savvy.
Tragically
therefore, a much larger numbers and more educated of Hindus have been
unwittingly co-opted in this sinister conspiracy directed by foreigners
who have no love for India and who also see much as Lord Macaulay did in
the nineteenth century, that the hoary Hindu foundation of India is a
stumbling block for the furtherance of their nefarious perfidious game.
The
concept of a collective Hindu mindset is being ridiculed as chauvinist
and retrograde, even fundamentalist. The BJP is regularly advised by its
enemies to purge out Hindutva from its poll plank to become more
“acceptable”. This fatuous advice from enemies however deserves to
thrown into the dustbin where it belongs. There is nothing to debate in
this because such a debate would only be dysfunctional and will disrupt
the synergy between voter appeal and cadre morale that is necessary for
electoral success of the patriotic forces..
The
corporate Hindu unity and identity based on Vedic values, is that of a
collective mindset that identifies us all, Hindus and others, with a
motherland from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean and it's glorious
civilisational past, and the concomitant resolve of it's representative
leadership, defined as "chakravartin" earlier by Chanakya, to defend
that vision. It is this concept and resolve that is being sought to be
discarded or is just evaporating under the onslaught of the Nehruvian
secularists and the corroding forces of materialistic globalisation.
However
pious a Hindu becomes, or how many millions come to Kumbh mela,
Sabarimala etc., however prosperous Hindu temples and ashrams become
from doting devotees' offerings, when the nation is in danger it is this
collective mindset of the people that matters, and not the piety of the
individual in that collective.
Otherwise
we may be numerous like goats and sheep but run helter skelter at the
sight of just one tiger or hyena. Or we can be individually strong and
well fed like circus lions, but obey the commands of a physically much
weaker circus ring master. Hindu society today lacking a cohesive
corporate identity, is thus in the process of becoming fragmented, and
hence increasingly in disarray. This fission process is on
simultaneously with the reality of millions of Hindus going to temples
regularly.
That
is, by a failure to usher a renaissance after 1947 India has lost her
opportunity to cleanse the accumulated dirt and unwanted baggage of the
past. The nation missed a chance to demolish the birth-based caste
theory as Ambedkar had wanted to do. The battering that the concept of
Hindu unity and Indian identity based on Vedic values has taken at the
hands of Nehruvian secularists since 1947 has led to the present social
malaise. Thus, even though Hindus are above 80 percent of the population
in India, they have not been able to understand their roots in, and
obligations to, the society in a pluralistic democracy.
Today the sacrilege of Hindu concepts and hoary institutions, is being carried out not with the
crude brutality of past invasions, but with the sophistication of the
constitutional instruments of law. The desecration of Hindu icons, for
example the Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt, is being made to look legal, thereby
completely confusing the Hindu people, and thus making them unable to
recognize the danger, or to realize that Hindus have to unite to defend
against the threats to their legacy.
But,
if this degeneration and disconnect are not rectified and repaired by a
resolve to unite people, the Indian nation may go into a tail spin and
ultimately fade away like other civilizations, like Greece and Egypt,
have for much the same reason.
To
resist this siege, we need a reaffirmation of Vedic values through a
national renaissance. Numbers [of those claiming to be adherents to
Hinduism] do not matter in today's information society. It is the
durability and clarity of the mindset and quality of commitment to
values of those who unite that matters in the forging of an instrument
to fight this creeping danger.
However, today the Indian mind suffers from a cognitive dissonance, that
is, a mental disorientation that arises from conflicting modes of
thought because it lacks a framework of consistent beliefs. Today’s
Hindu suffers from equivocation and temporization in his mindset in his
craze to appear to be impartial and sound secular. We cannot be
impartial or equivocate for example between the fire brigade and the
fire. The Vedic civilization of India is under a siege and we
have to break through it and get it lifted. Equivocation and nonchalance
at this juncture will destroy us. I can do no better here than quote Swami Dayananda Sarasvati of the Arsha Vidyalaya Gurukulam:
"Faced
with militants and missionaries. Hinduism has to show that its
plurality and all-encompassing acceptance are not signs of disparateness
or disunity. For that, a collective voice is needed."
Second, resolve
that Sanskrit and the Devanagari script, will be learnt by all in
addition to the mother tongue and its script, and which will one day in
the future be Hindustan’s link language. As Shri Suryanarayana
points out[op.cit.,] Swamiji was vehement that Sanskrit must be widely
taught for fostering Indian identity. All the main Indian languages have already a large percentage of their vocabulary common with Sanskrit. Hence, the second item of the Agenda has to be a commitment to re-throne Sanskrit as Hindustan’s link language, achieved through a 3-language formula and by a steady sanskritization of Hindi’s vocabulary till Sanskritized Hindi becomes indistinguishable from Sanskrit.
English thanks to the Americans and globalization has now become an
essential international language, and must be learnt as a third language
by all Indians.
Third, Hindus, and those others who are proud of their Hindu past and origins, learn the correct history of India. That
history which records that Hindus have always been, and are one; that
caste is not birth-based nor immutable but a code of discipline by
choice and adherence. India is a continuum, sanatana. That is,
ancient Hindus and their descendents have always lived in this area from
the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, an area called Akhand Hindustan, and
did not come from outside; and that there is no truth in the
Aryan-Dravidian race theory. Instead Hindus had gone abroad to spread
learning.
But
most all this history must record the valiant and continuous struggle
against the foreign invaders whether Islamic or Christian and the
ultimate victory in 1947.
It must be said at this juncture that Hindus committed to Vedic values, and barring a small exception, despite being duped by perfidy of the aggressors for the last thousand years,
and even in defeat, remained steadfast in their individual commitment
to defend the Hindu religion. Thus, despite state patronage to the
ensuing onslaught, plunder, impoverishment and victimisation, spread
over a thousand years, those of Hindu faith could not be decimated, and
thus today, Hinduism remains today the theology of the vast Indian
majority in the length and breadth of the terrain of India.
Defiant
Hindus thus suffered persecution and economic deprivation during
Islamic and Christian reigns, such as through differential taxation
[e.g., jezia and zamindari land revenue appropriation] and plain
brutality, but by and large refused to capitulate and convert.
This is an unprecedented achievement in any civilisational history of any nation.
Compare this with the historical fact that Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq,
Egypt crumbled to become 100% Islamic within three decades of Islamic
aggression, and so did Europe become 100% Christian within five decades
of the Crusades.
Even
after almost a thousand years of such targeting by Muslims and
Christian rulers, undivided India in 1947 was more than 75 % Hindu. This
was partly because of the victorious Vijayanagaram [which lasted twice
as long and over a larger area than Mughal rule from Akbar to
Aurangzeb], the Sikh reign, and Mahratta kingdoms, and later the Freedom
Movement, each inspired by sanyasis such Sringeri Shankaracharya, Swami Ramdas, Guru Nanak, Swami Vivekananda, Swami
Dayanand Sarasvati of Arya Samaj, and Sri Aurobindo, besides patriots
like Bankim Chatterjee and Subramania Bharati, who by their preaching
about the Hindu identity ensured that the flame of Hindu defiance never
dimmed.
It
was also due to individual defiance of Hindus such as of Rana Pratap,
Rani Jhansi, Rani Chennamma, Kattaboman and Netaji Subhas Bose. These
icons are admired not because they led us to victory [in fact they were
defeated or killed], or had found out for us Hindus a safe compromise
with the aggressors [they did not!], but because of their courage of
conviction in the face of huge odds not to submit to tyranny.
That
courageous defiance is also is part of Hindus' glorious legacy. But
those who capitulated like Raja Man Singh or Jai Chand or Pudukottai
Raja in order to live in pomp and grandeur by capitulating before the
invader for selfish motives and betraying our heroes in war with the
aggressor, are despised today by the people. Thus, Hindus safeguarded
the nation remembering their heroes even those who lost, and rejecting
those who had capitulated to the invader even if they prospered.
But
such passive defiance or intermittent victories in the battlefield to
safeguard the nation is not sufficient for the future survival of the
Vedic civilization. Bharat Mata today have won her freedom but it has
not been translated into civilisational independence as Parmacharya had
wanted.
Attempts
at Hindu debilitation are also being made through falsification in
history texts adopted for curriculum in the education system, to
disconnect and disinherit the contemporary Indian from the past glory of
Hindu India. The intrinsic Hindu unity has been sought to be undone by
legitimizing such bogus concepts as Aryan-Dravidian racial divide theory
[AIT], or that India as a concept never existed till the British
imperialists invented it, or that Indians have always been ruled by
invaders from abroad.
There
is no such word as ‘Aryan’ in Sanskrit literature [closest is 'arya'
meaning honourable person, and not community] or Dravidian [Adi Sankara
had in his shasthratha with Mandana Mishra at Varanasi, called
himself as a 'dravida shishu’ that is a child of where three coastlines
meet, i.e., south India].
The
theory was deliberate distortion by British imperialists and propagated
by their witting and unwitting mental slaves of India. Incidentally,
the Aryan-Dravidian myth has now been exploded by modern research on DNA
of Indians and Europeans conducted by Professor C.Panse of Newton,
Mass. USA, Dr. Ms. Patel of Houston, Texas USA, and other scholars.
Most recently, Dr. Toomas Kivisild of Cambridge University, U.K., and
Dr. Gyaneshwar Chaubey of the University of Tartu in Estonia, have
concluded after four years of research on 12,000 samples that all
Indians “had common genetic traits irrespective of the regions of India
to which they belonged.” Thus they rule out the so-called AIT [Aryan
Invasion Theory].
In
light of such new research, the British Broadcasting Corporation[BBC]
service in it's October 6, 2005 service completely debunked the
Aryan—Dravidian race theory stating that: "Theory was not just wrong, it
included unacceptably racist ideas" [www.bbc.co.uk, religionðics homepage, Thursday, 6/10/05].
So
the third item of the Hindutva Agenda item has to be a total and
complete re-writing of history text books, which books are then
prescribed as texts in educational institutions.
Fourth, the virat mindset committed to Vedic values is prepared to retaliate when attacked.
This defensive retaliation must be massive enough to deter future
attacks. If terrorists come from training camps in Pakistan, Bangla Desh
or Sri Lanka, India must seek to carpet bomb those training camps, no
matter the consequences. If 5 lakh Kashmiri Hindus are driven out of the
Valley by Islamic terrorists, we must arm and financially equip 10
lakhs of the able-bodied ex-servicemen Hindus to go with their families
and settle in the former residences of the driven-out Hindus to keep the
Constitutional guarantee under Article 370 of not maintaining the
religious composition of the state.
If
Bangla Desh permits its population to infiltrate into Hindustan, then
India must demand territorial compensation within the meaning of the
Indian Independence Act of June 1947 passed by the British Parliament to
legitimize Partition. The Act was framed on the principle that Muslims
not wanting to live under what Jinnah called as the ‘hegemony’ of the
Hindus, be carved out of undivided India, called as Pakistan, in
proportion to it. One-third of Bangla Desh Muslims now, after six
decades after Partition, have already infiltrated back into Hindustan to
live under Hindu ‘hegemony’.
Thus,
the fourth item of the Hindutva Agenda has to be a commitment of ‘zero
tolerance’ for terrorists of all hues, as also for those who forcibly
or by inducements, seek to convert Hindus to other religion, and to
never negotiate with such forces, and to retaliate massively to nullify
the political objectives of these violent enemies.
Fifth, renaissance has to be based on Ekatma Manavad or Integral Humanism. There
has to be a harmonisation of material progress with spiritual
development of any human being for a happy contented individual.
Deendayal Upadhyaya articulated as far back as 1965 the Vedic view that
the world cannot be a happier place solely through material progress.
This reality has now dawned after centuries on Christians and even
Communists.
The
Chinese President Hu Jintao actually got a resolution passed in a
special session of the Communist Party of China in October 2006 stating
that Chinese progress is sustainable only if China adopts the concept of
“Harmonious Society” blending material progress with spiritual values
drawn from Confucious and Buddha. In 2007 China convened an
international conference on Buddhism and now the Chinese government is
setting up Confucious Centres of Study around the world.!
The
far-sighted Deendayal Upadhyaya advocated the concept of the ‘Integral
Human’, which concept is squarely within the Vedic values and ethos.
Ekatma Manavad or Integral Humanism as he termed it contrasts this
harmonization as it differs from capitalism and communism. The tabular
presentation in Annexure 3 brings this out.
Some Comments on the Implementation of the Agenda
Adherence
to Hinduism today is also being sought to be diluted and debilitated in
the name of modernity and this dilution is made a norm of secularism.
Religion, it is advocated, is personal. To be a good Hindu today is
conceptually being reduced to just praying, piety, visiting temples, and
celebrating religious festivals.
Electoral
politics further confounded the issues arising out of secularism, and
hence the Indian society is becoming gradually and increasingly
fragmented in outlook and of confused perspective. Hindu society,
divided by caste, is becoming increasingly mutually antagonistic. The
nation’s enemies are easily gaining simply by leveraging secularism and
modernity in this era of mass communication and globalization.
Hence, time has arrived to completely reject this confused and confounded concept of secularism,and not even attempt to re-define it, as
a choice between authentic and pseudo-secularism. We need instead to
make a clean break for the implementation of the Agenda, by simply
saying that we reject secularism as being vague and instead want India
to be a spiritual society based on Vedic values.
Vedic values encompasses sarva
pantha sama bhava and hence Hindu theology is no threat to any other
religion as Justice Bharucha had pointed out[op.cit.]. Since the
task to defeat the nefarious forces ranged today against Hindu society
is not going to be easy, we cannot therefore trust those amongst in our
midst whose commitment to the motherland is ambivalent or ad hoc or those who feel no kinship to the Hindu past of the nation.
We
partitioned a quarter of Hindustan to enable those who could not live
even in a democratic framework of Constitutionally guaranteed equality
and in fraternity with Hindus. We now know such appeasement does not
work. The national renaissance is possible if patriotic Indians accept
this reality.
Nor we can fight the existential threat to the nation unless we first identify what we have to fight. We
cannot effectively respond unless we understand the nature and
complexity of the challenge. What makes the task of defending Hinduism
much more difficult today is that the oppressors are not the obvious
murderous entities as were Ghazni, Ghori, or Clive, but sophisticated
mind-manipulators. The means of communication and the supply of funds in
the hands of these enemies are multiples of that available in the past,
for camouflaging their evil purposes.
That
basic strategy of those who want to see a weak and pliant India remains
the same as before: Making Indians to lose their self esteem by
disparaging their tradition-- the strategy of British imperialists for
the conquest of India. Only the tactics have changed. Now the target is
the Hindu institutions and Hindu icons, and the route is not the
creation of a comprador class of civil servants and Zamindar-revenue
collectors as the British did to subdue the nation, but fostering a
psychological milieu to denigrate the heritage and to delink the Hindu
from his past legacy thereby causing a loss of self esteem and a pride
in the nation's past, as had been attempted in the Rama Setu issue.
At the same time, the lack of Hindu unity and the determined bloc
voting in elections by Muslims and Christians has created a
significantly large leverage for these two religious communities in
economic, social and foreign policy making.
Thus,
although uniform civil code is a Directive Principle of state policy in
the Constitution, it is taboo to ask for it because of this leverage.
It is not as if Muslims will not accept uniform laws when it suits them,
even if it is against the Sharia. For example, Muslims accept uniform criminal code under the IPC even though it infringes the Sharia, but resist uniform civil code because it violates the same Sharia.
But we must see clearly
what Muslim majority anywhere will mean to Hindus when we look at the
situation in Kashmir or in the districts of Meerut or Mau in UP, or in
Mallapuram in Kerala, or even in the tiny town panchayat of Melvisharam
near Vellore. There Muslims in majority behave toward Hindu minority
much as Saudi Arabian rulers behave with Hindu migrant workers in denial
of their religious rights that are supposed to be guaranteed by the UN
Human Rights Charter.
Moreover,
patriots concerned with the safeguarding of the Vedic foundation of the
nation have to take note that conversion to Christian faith has been
put on a war footing by religious entrepreneurs. In Dallas, Texas USA,
the Global Pastors Network[GPN] held a conference in 2006 and resolved
that over the next fifteen years, the organization will support
financially worldwide the construction of five million churches and
conversion of one billion persons to Christianity. From India alone the
target, according the Evangelist Pat Robertson, is 100 million persons.
What a
monumental journey we have been till today from the depression of the
defeat in the First War of Independence in 1857 to Swami Vivekananda
birth in 1863 to Independence in 1947. In just 90 years to 1947, the
British imperialists had brainwashed us Indians to acquiesce in destroy
the sacred memories.
Hence,
in a democracy, fighting elections are very important part of the
struggle for implementation of an agenda for national renaissance. For
this it is necessary for formation of a bloc vote of all those who
cherish Vedic values and who accept the Hindu civilisational heritage.
In India even if half of the Hindu population decides to vote as a bloc
in elections, a government will be formed by a two-thirds majority.
Therein is embedded the salvation for us who cherish Vedic values and
aspire for a national renaissance.
