THE FRUSTRATION OF ISLAM IN INDIA
Long ago, some 12 or 13 years before Partition, I had a chance to pass by a meeting of Muslims in Delhi. The chaste Urdu and the weighty voice of the man making the speech at the moment, made me stand and stare. It was a bearded mullah wearing a fez. He was narrating some history which was new for me.
The mullah mentioned several dates on which some decisive battles had been fought and won by the armies of Islam. I was not familiar with the names of the heroes and generals who had led those armies. But I knew the names of the countries which, according to the mullah, had been conquered and converted en masse to Islam in rather short spans of time - Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran, Khorasan, Turkistan and so on. There were repeated references to swords and spears and horses and hoofs and countless clashes in which human blood had flowed copiously. In between, some one from the audience stood up and shouted ‘năra-i-takbîr’. And the whole assembly roared back Allăh-o-Akbar with full-throated frenzy.
Then the speaker moved to Sind and Hind. He recounted the many ‘miracles’ which Islam had wrought here with the might of its sword as well as the spell of its Sufis, for more than a thousand years. I knew some of those ‘miracles’ from my own text-books of history, though I had never suspected that they could be made to sound so superhuman as in the mouth of this mullah. And then, all of a sudden, the mullah’s voice sank and became almost a whimper. His face too must have fallen, though I could not see it from the distance at which I was standing. He was now telling, in very mournful tones, how Islam had failed to fulfil its mission in this ‘kambakht (unfortunate) mulk (country)’ which was still crawling with kufr (infidelism) in spite of all those arduous endeavours undertaken by the heroes of Islam. A funeral silence fell on the audience, and no one now stood up any more to invite another năra-i-takbîr. I moved away from the meeting and sat down in another part of the same park where the mullah’s voice reached me no more. But after some time the atmosphere was rent again by another bout of Allăh-o-Akbar. I wondered what spell the mullah had spread over his audience again.
One thing that had puzzled me a good deal in the mullah’s speech was his description of the great Gańgă as a dahănă (rivulet) instead of as a daryă (river). I had not seen the Gańgă so far with my own eyes. But my text-books of geography had told me that it was a mighty river, one of the four or five biggest and longest in the world. The mullah’s description of it did not fit with a known fact. He was a middle-aged man, and sounded rather well-read in history and geography. I thought that he should have known better.
It was many years later that one day Professor Balraj Madhok cited to me the famous couplet of Altaf Husain Hali in which the Gańgă had been contemptuously described as a dahănă.1 I was suddenly reminded of the speech I had heard as a school boy. But by now I had acquired a good knowledge of medieval Indian history. A new image of medieval India had also emerged in my mind by reading K.M. Panikkar’s A Survey of Indian History. It was no more the India of Muslim monarchs ruling leisurely over a large empire, building mosques and mazărs and madrasas and mansions, and patronizing poets and other men of letters. On the contrary, it was the story of the long-drawn-out war which took a decisive turn to the disadvantage of Islamic imperialism with the rise of Shivaji. The war had ended in a victory for the Hindus by the middle of the 18th century. A few months earlier, I had finished a Hindi translation of Kincaid’s The Grand Rebel which I had named Shaktîputra Shivăjî. I had fully concurred with Kincaid’s conclusion that the British had taken over India not from the Muslims but from the Hindus.
Shri H.V. Seshadri has also quoted that couplet of Hali in The Tragic Story of Partition.2 He has also given a brief outline of the long war of liberation which Hindu society had fought and won against Islamic imperialism. He writes: “For 800 years Hindusthan waged a relentless freedom struggle - probably the most stirring saga of crusade for national freedom witnessed anywhere on the face of this earth. From Maharana Kumbha to Maharana Pratap Simha and Rajasimha in Rajasthan, from Hakka and Bukka to Krishnadevaraya in the South, from Chhatrapati Shivaji to the Peshwas in Maharashtra, from the various martyr Gurus of the Sikhs including Guru Govind Singh to Banda Bairagi and Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, from Chhatrasal in Bundelkhand to Lachit Barphukan in Assam, countless captains of the war of independence piloted the ship of freedom and steered her through perilous tides and tempests. As a result of their ceaseless and crushing blows, the conquering, sword of Islam lay in dust, shattered to pieces.”3
TWO VERSIONS OF MEDIEVAL INDIAN HISTORY
Obviously, there is a deep divide between the two versions of medieval Indian history - Hindu and Muslim. Hindu society may like to forget the first phase of this history during which it suffered defeat after defeat in spite of a succession of great heroes who tried to blunt the sword of Islam, and block the path of Islamic invasion. But Hindu society cannot help taking pride in the phase which opened with the rise of Shivaji, and unfolded further under Chhatrasal, Banda Bairagi, Surajmal and Ranjit Singh. On the other hand, the mullah’s gaze is galvanized on the period when the sword of Islam swept over the length and breadth of the Hindu homeland. He cannot help feeling humbled when he moves to a later period, and finds the hordes of Islam in hasty retreat before a Hindu counter-attack. The feeling in Hindu society at the end of it all is one of fulfilment; the feeling in the mullah’s mind, on the other hand, is one of utter frustration. Islam had suffered in India a second and serious defeat after its first and total rout in Spain.
The political pundits have so far failed to lay their fingers on the forces which led to India’s Partition, firstly because they have confined their purview to a brief period of 90 years - from 1857 to 1947. They would have to travel back in time for more than 900 years before they can hope to discover the springs of that deep-seated split - spiritual and cultural - which culminated in the formation of Pakistan. Secondly, they make a serious mistake when they pit a so-called Hindu revivalism against a so-called Muslim revivalism, and put both of them on par as equally guilty parties for making a mess of it all. They would have to undertake a deeper probe into the intrinsic character and inherent dynamics of each ‘revivalism’, before they can hope to acquire an adequate insight into the interaction of powerful and mutually hostile historical forces.
HINDU AND MUSLIM ‘REVIVALISM’
Hindu ‘revivalism’ in the 19th century was essentially a resurgence of the national spirit of a people who were native to the land, and who had suffered terribly and for a long time from successive foreign invasions. Hindu society was aspiring to reform and renew itself in the image of its ancient ideals which had endowed it with strength and stability and kept it immune from alien inroads. In the process, Hindu society had an inalienable right to pronounce its own judgments on imported ideologies which had coerced and corrupted it, as also on ‘heroes’ of the histories enacted by its inveterate enemies.
On the other hand, Muslim ‘revivalism’ was the frenzied reaction of a foreign fraternity which had finally failed to convert a majority of the native population to its own criminal creed, and which was, therefore, feeling terribly frustrated. The diehard descendants of Muslim swordsmen and sufis were now reviving dreams of an empire which their forefathers had built with so much bloodshed but which had been lost in the last round. They were calling upon their confused comrades and converted victims to revert to those medieval mores when Islam had moulded the pagan and peace-loving people of Arabia into a brotherhood of bandits. In the process, they were fast becoming the inmates of a lunatic asylum crowded with some of the most desperate characters.
The history of Arab and Turkish aggressions against India would have been no different from the history of earlier aggressions by the Greeks, the Sakas, the Kushanas, and the Hunas but for the presence of a new factor. A culturally superior and temperamentally compassionate Hindu society would have tamed these latter-day barbarians as well, and turned them into civilized members of its own household. What made the big difference and complicated matters was that the Arabs and the Turks had themselves become victims of the vicious ideology of Islam, and lost their own cultural identity before they came to this country.
THE PRISON-HOUSE OF ISLAMIC THEOLOGY
Islam was born as a totalitarian and terrorist cult, which it has remained ever since. Its only ‘religious’ achievement was to rationalize the lowest human passions, and stamp them with the supernatural seal of an almighty Allah. It was, therefore, inevitable for it to become an ideology of imperialism with a clean conscience. The followers of Islam thus found it easy to feel convinced that they were carrying out the commandments of Allah while they invaded other countries, indulged in mass slaughter, converted the conquered people by force, misappropriated other people’s properties, captured and sold into slavery countless men and women and children, and destroyed every vestige of culture and true spirituality. They could not but regard as legitimate rewards from Allah the loot and the slaves which they took whenever they were victorious.
But what made matters much worse, the same theology prevented the Muslims from coming to terms with reality in moments of defeat. They refused to renounce their claim to ill-gotten gains, and tended to become ever more fanatical and frantic in their efforts to recover what they were made to disgorge. The theology had laid down that Allah had mandated the whole world to the millat, and entrusted all its wealth and population to the custody of Islam. How could Allah wish otherwise? Every setback had, therefore, to be interpreted and proclaimed as due to a temporary estrangement of Allah simply because the millat had turned away from practising the pieties prescribed by the Prophet and the first four caliphs. The millat had only to return to those old mores, and Allah would restore to it whatever he had taken away in a fit of wrath. As the millat could not live without Allah, Allah also could not maintain himself without the millat. That is how the argument runs in commentary after commentary on the Quran and the Hadis. That is why the millat has alternated between a riotous living at other people’s expense, and an equally riotous return to piety.
THE PIETY OF ISLAM
There are many myths afloat about the piety of early Islam, particularly among those Hindus who want to prove that Islam is as good a religion as their own. Many people get impressed by the piety exhibited and exhorted by the Mullah and the Sufi. They do not know that Islamic piety has always been an inherent function of Islamic fanaticism. The more pious a Muslim, the more dangerous he becomes for his fellow human beings. It was the piety of Islam which made its swordsmen behave as they did, both in victory and defeat. It was the piety of Islam which installed the Mullah and the Sufi at the centre of the millat, and enabled them to control its mind as well as its heart.
When the armies of Islam rode roughshod over the Hindu homeland, the swordsman of Islam was very likely to relax and retreat from callous carnage after some time. He was likely to get satiated after the first few rounds of slaughter and pillage, or feel some sympathy for fellow human beings, or balk at the destruction of beautiful temples and monasteries, or turn away from burning the sacred and secular literature of non-Muslims, or acquire respect for the spirituality and culture of a people who had behaved so differently from his own comrades-in-arms. It was the Mullah and the Sufi who would not let him relax. They threatened him with hell if he tried to turn away from the work assigned by Allah. The more heinous the crimes which a Muslim monarch or mercenary committed, the higher the place in heaven which the Mullah and the Sufi reserved for him. The greater the slaughter and rapine in which a Muslim army indulged, the more plentiful the wines and houris which were promised to the ghăzîs.
But the sweep of the sword of Islam could not continue for ever. The Hindus who had been caught unprepared for this sort of ‘religion’ and this sort of ‘heroism’, were not made of clay. They organized a resistance for many years, and finally mounted a counter-attack. The swordsman of Islam was a mortal man in spite of all the praises which Muslim historians and poets had heaped upon him for his invincibility. He fell back as soon as he came in contact with equally sharp or superior steel, then threw away his sword, and finally accepted defeat. It was the Mullah and the Sufi who refused to get reconciled to the new reality. They compiled some more commentaries on the Quran and the Hadis and called upon the millat to conquer India once again. This time the claim was advanced on no better a basis than the right acquired from an earlier ‘conquest’.
Ever since, the Mullah has sedulously maintained and spread the myth of a Muslim empire in India which was ‘stolen slyly’ by the ‘wily’ British. As an after-thought, he adds that Islam has a message for India and that its ‘spiritual mission’ in India is still unfulfilled. Shri Seshadri has quoted a passage from the preface to F.K. Khan Durrani’s Meaning of Pakistan which reveals the mind of the Mullah. It says: “There is not an inch of the soil of India which our forefathers did not once purchase with blood. We cannot be false to the blood of our forefathers. India, the whole of it, is therefore our heritage and it must be reconquered for Islam. Expansion in the spiritual sense in an inherent necessity of our faith and implies no hatred or enmity towards the Hindus. Rather the reverse. Our ultimate ideal should be the unification of India, spiritually and politically, under the banner of Islam. The final salvation of India is not otherwise possible.”4 Perversity loses all limits once the human mind passes under the spell of Islam. India is to be enslaved again for the ‘spiritual salvation’ of Hindu society!
There have been many Mullahs and Muslim scholars in India, Pakistan and the wide world of Islam who have been making similar statements, every now and then. The heroics conveyed was heralded by Shah Waliullah, soon after the Mughal empire started crumbling in the first half of the 18th century. It acquired a feverish pitch after Ahmed shah Abdali, whom Waliullah had invited to wipe out the Marathas and the Jats, also failed to save the situation. The heroes of Islam had disappeared. But the heroics had remained.
The harangues of Waliullah and company were addressed not to an advancing army but to a demoralised crowd of stragglers beating a fast retreat. The retreat would have soon become a rout if the British had not intervened at a critical juncture. The British did not steal any empire from Islam. On the contrary, they saved the residues of Islamic imperialism from being reduced to their real status vis-a-vis a resurgent Hindu society. The residues used the respite to reassemble their ranks, and get ready for another rearguard action. This is the unmistakable impression left on one’s mind by a reflective reading of Indian history during that period. The rest is only secularist make-belief relished by the Mullah and the Marxist.
THE ‘SPIRITUAL MISSION’ OF ISLAM
The ‘spiritual mission’ of Islam needs no comment. The residues of Islamic imperialism were not in search of spiritual solace which they could share with their ‘countrymen’. On the contrary, they were missing the very mundane monopolization of power and pelf which they had enjoyed earlier. This becomes quite clear as one reads the Presidential Address of Janab R.M. Sayani delivered in 1896 at the 12th Session of the Indian National Congress in Allahabad. Speaking of Muslim psychology, he had said: “Before the advent of the British in India, the Musalmans were the rulers of the country. The Musalmans had therefore all the advantages appertaining to it as the ruling class. The sovereigns and the chiefs were their co-religionists and so were the great landlords and great officials. The court language was their own. Every place of trust and responsibility, or carrying influence and high emoluments was by birthright theirs. The Hindus did occupy some position but the Hindus were tenants-at-will of the Musalmans. The Hindus stood in awe of them. Enjoyment and influence and all good things of the world were theirs. By a stroke of misfortune, the Musalmans had to abdicate their position and descend to the level of their Hindu fellow-countrymen. The Hindus, from a subservient state, came into land, offices and other worldly advantages of their former masters. The Musalmans would have nothing to do with anything in which they might have to come into contact with the Hindus.”5
A spectre had started haunting the residues of Islamic imperialism - the spectre of British withdrawal from India leaving the Muslims to find their natural and normal place in a nation which had regained its freedom and initiative. That explains the pathetic appeals of the Muslim League to the British rulers to divide India before they quit.
Had our national leaders understood the historical situation and had they perceived the paralysis behind the heroics, there would have been no partition, no Pakistan, and no Bangladesh. Why and how the national leaders failed to face and defeat a frustrated Islamic fraternity is a story still to be told.
Footnotes:
1 Hati had mourned in his most famous poem that though the invincible armada of Islam had crossed many mighty rivers and seas, it got drowned in the rivulet that was the Gańgă!
2 The Tragic Story of Partition, p. 2.
3 Ibid., p. 1-2.
4 Quoted in Ibid., p. 250.
5 History and Culture of the Indian People, edited by R.C. Majumdar, Volume XI, The Struggle for Freedom, Bombay, 1981, pp. 296-97.
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(This article was written in 1981. Now the Soviet Union has disappeared from the scene and the Communist movement in India does not know whom to serve. But its hostility towards Hindu society and culture remains undiminished. It is quite on the cards that this mercenary outfit will be bought over, in due course, by some other power or powers hostile to positive Indian nationalism. A Communist cannot help being a traitor to his country and his people.)
We have so far discussed the role of the residues of foreign rule in India vis-a-vis Hindu society. We have characterised Islamism as malevolent, Christianism as mischievous, and Macaulayism as mild, though like a slow poison. Now we shall take up Communism which, though not exactly a residue of foreign rule, is yet a foreign imposition of the most malignant character.
But before we proceed, we wish to make it clear that nothing in this article should be construed as a hostile criticism of Indo-Soviet relations. Our friendship with the Soviet Union has matured in the midst of a fast moving world. We value that friendship, though we would like to emphasize that the Soviet Union needs India’s friendship as much as India needs hers. We also warn that neither the Soviet Union nor the Communist movement in our country should be permitted to close our other options while we are faced and have to deal with American interventionism.
Though Communism in India cannot be characterised as a residue of the British rule, the British Government did make some substantial contributions to its growth. In the ‘thirties, that Government encouraged non-Communist revolutionaries in its jails to read Communist literature. This was done in order to wean them away from “terrorism.” Many of them came out as convinced Communists while still wearing the halo of national heroes. Again, during the Second World War, that Government partronised, financed and fraternised with the Communist Party of India and helped it attain the stature of an independent political party.
Ideologically, Communism in India is, in several respects, a sort of extension of Macaulayism, a residue of the British rule. That is why Communism is strongest today in those areas where Macaulayism had earlier spread its widest spell. That is why Macaulayism has always been on the defensive and apologetic vis-a-vis Communism. Macaulayism has always tried to understand and explain away the misdeeds of Communism in this country. It has sadly deplored, if not condoned, as misguided idealism even the most heinous crimes of the Communists. The long record of our parliamentary debates is a witness of how, after the death of Sardar Patel, die treasury benches have always evinced an awed deference towards utterly unparliamentary and downright demagogic vituperations from Communist members.
This ideological affinity between Communism and Macaulayism is ultimately derived from a common source in the modern West-materialistic metaphysics, evolutionistic sociology, utilitarian ethics, hedonistic psychology, etc. In this world-view, man is essentially a homo fabricus, a tool-maker or mechanic. A centralised economy and an urbanised society are a natural follow-up of this world-view. In this larger ideological context, Marxism is a logical culmination of Capitalism. Marx reserved his choicest praise for Capitalism and his choicest abuse for what he denounced as Utopian Socialism. The only crime of this other school of Socialism was that it objected to the relentless drive of Capitalism towards total mechanisation, industrialisation and centralisation, reducing the individual human being to a helpless entity.
The difference between Capitalism in the West and Communism in the East of Europe arose because Capitalist societies retained philosophical eclecticism and political pluralism as expressed in parliamentary democracy, a free press and free trade unions. Communist societies, on the other hand, froze Marxist philosophy into a closed system of orthodoxy. This led to heresy-hunting which in due course reduced Marxism to the status of a Semitic creed like Christianity and Islam. Bertrand Russell was not far wrong when he identified Communism as a Christian heresy. It has acquired all the characteristic features of the Christian Church such as the only Saviour, the only Revelation, the only Pope, the only priesthood, the only baptism, and the only sacraments. Communist regimes could not help becoming totalitarian enemies of human freedom.
Yet, and in spite of all ideological affinities, Communism is not a variety of Macaulayism, though the former fattens on the latter. The inspiration of Communism did not derive from the West. Its gospel as well guidance emanated from an opposite direction, the Soviet Union, except for a brief period when China also shared the honour of being a hallowed land.
This is not the occasion to dwell on the philosophy of Marxism or the strategy and tactics of Leninism or Stalinism or Maoism. Here we are dealing with the problem which Communism poses before Hindu society and culture. In any case, Communism in India, has never had much use for Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism except as an ideological window-dressing to impress the intelligentsia at large and hoodwink the party cadres whenever the Party line has to be shifted swiftly.
What, then, is Communism?
Scholars and historians of Communism far more competent than the present writer have documented it beyond a shadow of doubt that Communism has been an instrument of Soviet foreign policy in its drive towards world domination, particularly since Stalin emerged as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union as well as the world Communist movement. The unmasking of Stalin as a mass-murderer by Khruschev has blown up the myth of Soviet Russia as a proletarian paradise. The split with China has splintered the world Communist monolith. But, by and large, the movement has recovered from these shocks, retained its self-righteousness and resumed its role in the service of Soviet foreign policy.
It is, therefore, natural and inevitable that Communism should come into conflict with positive nationalism in every country. India cannot be an exception. By positive nationalism we mean a nationalism which draws its inspiration from its own cultural heritage and socio-political traditions. Such a nationalism has its own way of looking at world events and evaluating the alignment of world forces. Such a nationalism is guided by its own past experience in safeguarding its interests and pursuing its goals. These interests and goals may coincide or agree with the interests and goals of Soviet foreign policy at some particular stage of world politics. But it is equally likely that they may not.
This basic dissonance between Communism and positive nationalism in India was fully and finally dramatised during the Second World War. The Communist Party of India had, since its inception, opposed British imperialism in India and stood for its immediate and violent overthrow. The Party had also opposed the Muslim League which it had characterised as a collaborationist conspiracy of landed interests. In the eyes of Indian freedom fighters, therefore, the Party represented a revolutionary fringe of the nationalist movement. The Congress Socialist Party even allowed its platform to be used by the Communist Party of India which was working under a British ban. But the curtain was raised suddenly in 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the real face of Communism was revealed for all who could see.
The Congress leadership had tried to negotiate a settlement with the British for two long years. Finding the British attitude adamant, the Congress decided in August 1942 to launch the Quit India Movement. The Communists in the Congress opposed the Quit India resolution in the AICC Session at Bombay. They propounded that the imperialist war had been transformed into a people’s war simply because the Soviet Union had been invaded by an enemy of Britain.
The freedom movement forged ahead under its own inspiration. But the Communist Party of India moved full steam in the opposite direction. British imperialism now became British bureaucracy for the Communists, the Muslim League a spokesman of the Muslim mass upsurge, and the demand for Pakistan a legitimate expression of Muslim nationalism which the Congress should concede immediately. The rest of the story is well-known-the story of how the freedom movement was branded as a movement for collaboration with Fascism, how Subhash Chandra Bose was denounced as a Nazi dog and a Japanese rat, how Communist cadres spied for the British secret police on Socialists and Forward Blocists who had organised an underground movement, and how the Communist intellectuals like Adhikari and Ashraf blueprinted the case for Pakistan with facts, figures, academic arguments and sentimental slogans.
The Communist contribution towards the creation of Pakistan was next only to that of the Muslim League. The Soviet Union was in search of a base from which it could operate for capturing the rest of India after the departure of the British. That plan did not succeed and Pakistan became a base for American interventionism instead. Ever since, the Communists in India have been blaming the Partition on those very forces of positive nationalism which had fought the Muslim League tooth and nail. Communist slogans may change but their hostility to positive nationalism is permanent.
The source of positive nationalism in India is Sanătana Dharma and the long saga of Hindu history. Hindu society provides the only base for positive nationalism. The Muslim and the Christian communities can share in positive nationalism only by revising the premises of their exclusive creeds in favour of the universal principles laid down by Sanătana Dharma. Communism in India is bent upon destroying Sanătana Dharma and Hindu society. It is, therefore, in its interest to prevent the Muslims and the Christians from moving towards the mainstream of positive nationalism. This is a point with which we shall deal when we expose the united front between various forces hostile to the Hindus. Here we shall simply specify some prime targets of Communism in its battle against Hindu society and culture. They are as follows:
1. The first and foremost target of Communism is Sanătana Dharma enshrined in Hindu literature and made living by a long line of saints, mystics and bhaktas. Communism ridicules all this wealth of unrivalled spiritual splendour as a conglomeration of sterile superstition, obnoxious obscurantism and puerile priescraft;
2. Next, Communism makes an aggressive move towards Hindu Dharmashăstras which have their source in Sanătana Dharma and which lay down the moral and social principles by which a wholesome social and individual life is sustained. Communism denounces these Dharmashăstras as respositories of primitive prescriptions, Machiavellian morality, caste oppression, untouchability, degradation of women, Brahmin domination, lack of social responsibility, and what not;
3. Thirdly, Communism concentrates on Hindu philosophies which expound, compare, contrast, fortify and defend the manifold metaphysical points of view flowing into several streams from the self-same Sanătana Dharma. It condemns all these philosophies as Brahminical conspiracies to suppress the Lokăyata, “the only scientific philosophy pulsating with a revolutionary principle”. Rahul Sankrityayana was a great pedlar of this Communist lore among the Hindi reading public. Some of his works have been translated into other languages also. He was very enterprising indeed. He postulated that the Buddha was preaching Marxism for all practical purposes except for his unmindful lapse into the unproved doctrine of transmigration;
4. Fourthly-and here Communism has really invested some herculean endeavours-it ransacks the annals of Hindu history and Hindu heroism. A whole battalion of Communist historians have been busy for years battering the walls of Hindu historiography “behind which Hindu communalism and chauvinism is hiding its ugly face”. They have ridiculed every hero, every period, every episode, and every precedent in which Hindus can take pride. The Golden Age of the Imperial Guptas in which Hindu achievements attained their acme in the fields of art, literature and science is dismissed as a myth by D.N. Jha whose Ancient India: An Introductory Outline has just been reprinted by the People’s Publishing House, New Delhi. Other Communist historians have portrayed Maharana Pratap, Shivaji and Guru Govind Singh as local rebels against pax moslemanica for petty personal ends. The same historians whitewash bloodthirsty Islamic conquerors and despicable despots, and condone their crimes either by balancing them with “great good deeds which they did in some other direction” or by explaining them away as conforming to the prevailing pattern of empire-building;
5. Lastly, the Communist anthropologists and sociologists dive deep into Hindu social institutions, customs, mores and manners and come up with some class interest hiding inside the core in each case. We are told that Hindu society has always been an unhealthy society except perhaps during the Vedic period when, according to Romila Thapar, our Aryan ancestors ate beef. Beef-eating by the ancient Aryans has been such an obsession with Miss Thapar that she returns to the theme again and again, even when discussing the dancing girl found in the ruins of Mohenjo-daro.
How hostile Communism can be to everything Hindu is proved by an incident in which S.A. Dange and his son-in-law, Deshpande, got involved a few years ago. Deshpande wrote quite a scholarly book in which he propounded that several important principles of modern mathematics and science (including dialectical materialism which is the greatest principle of modern science according to Communism) were first discovered by systems of Hindu philosophy, notably SăMkhya and Vedănta. Several other Communist savants had earlier indulged in a similar exercise of casting ancient Hindu philosophies into a materialist mould. The party had paraded them as expert explorers and authentic interpreters of the revolutionary undercurrents in India’s philosophical heritage. Where Deshpande went wrong was that he took a genuine pride in the ancient Hindu past and expressed it in no mean measure. Dange himself contributed a Preface to the book and presented it as quite an academic achievement. Little did they know the consequences of what they had done. The Party came down upon them like a ton of bricks. It called a seminar, “Marxism on Vedanta”, in which Dange had to confess his errors and cat crow. Deshpande’s book published by a society in Bombay was withdrawn from circulation.
The methods which Communism employs in India to denigrate and denounce the votaries of positive nationalism are the standard Communist methods it uses everywhere around the world. Here we shall concretise three of its chief methods under Indian conditions:
1. Communism in India has developed a language which George Orwell has described as doublespeak. In this language, the traitorous and totalitarian forces represented by the Communist movement are presented as patriotic and democratic forces, collaborators with Communism as progressive people, Islamic imperialism as secularism, and positive nationalism as Hindu communalism and chauvinism. Many people do not know how to decipher this doublespeak and are, therefore, trapped by it;1
2. Communism in India constantly practises what Karl Popper so aptly expounded “as the conspiracy theory of society”. It goes on digging up one conspiracy after another against the working class, the peasantry, the middle class, the toiling masses, Secularism, and so on. In this scheme, it links up “Hindu communalism and chauvinism” with capitalism, landlordism, forces of obscurantism, revivalism and reaction and, finally, all of them with “American imperialism”. The forces of “democracy and progress” are then called upon to rally round the Communist movement to defeat the “grand conspiracy between American imperialism outside and reactionary Hindu communalism within”. This helps the Communist cadres to acquire a rare depth of perception without exercising their brains. The less they know and think, the better they feel and function. Recently, Communism has discovered a conspiracy of “Hindu communalism” to kill Muslims and destroy Muslim property whenever and wherever Muslims show some signs of prosperity;
3. Communism in India wields a strong-worded swearology which it hurls at its adversaries. Some samples of this swearology will illumine the venom which it can carry. During the Ranadive party-line in 1948-50, Mahatma Gandhi was “unmasked” as the cleverest bourgeois scoundrel and Rabindranath as măgeer dălăl, that is, a pimp. But the choicest reprimand was reserved for Sardar Patel and Pandit Nehru “the fascist duo”. Parichaya, the prestigious Bengali monthly, came out with a long poem on the two of them “conspiring together in the service of American imperialism”. One of the lines exposed them as shyălă shooarer băcchă, birlă tatăr jăroja shontăna, that is, sons of swine and the bastard progeny of Birlas and Tatas. But, then, you cannot pin the Communists to any of their past performances. They always “admit their mistakes” publicly and do a bit of chest-beating whenever they receive orders to change the Party line. At present, the bulk of Communist swearology is being mobilised against the camp of positive nationalism. People belonging to this camp are being daily denounced as communalists, chauvinists, fascist murderers of minorities, perpetrators of genocide, reactionaries and revivalists. The tone is still mild, keeping in mind how mendacious it could easily become at a moment’s notice. But there are intimations that it may resume its full powers of rhetoric as and when required.2
Hindu society is basically a sane society which can smile with tolerance at every variety of venomous as well as tall talk. Hindus could have dismissed the Communists as a band of lunatics and morons, had not Communism acquired the power and prestige it enjoys in India today. Communism has, of course, fattened itself on widespread Macaulayism and a negative nationalism driven by nothing better than an anti-Western animus and inflated ideas about India’s role in world affairs. But the main strength of Communism in India springs from colossal Soviet finances which pour into its coffers through many channels and in increasing amounts. This is not the place to identify the channels through which the Soviet Union finances its fifth-column in India. Here we are concerned with what the Communist movement does with this money. The following deserve our particular attention:
1. The Communist movement in India has built up the largest press in English as well as Indian languages. It runs many dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, quarterlies and irregular periodicals. Most of these papers and journals do not care for commercial and other advertisements which are the main source of income in normal press establishments. The losses that are incurred by these party organs run into crores of rupees every year,
2. The movement controls the largest number of publishing houses. They publish Communist literature in English as well as Indian languages. Most of this literature is in the form of pamphlets, presenting the Party line on all issues of importance, national and international. Recently, Communist publishing houses have undertaken publication of heavier intellectual fare as well, provided it carries a Communist slant or is authored by a Communist or a fellow-traveller. A new line is publication of text-books, particularly on Indian history. These are prescribed by Communist professors whenever and wherever they control university departments, which is not unoften. Departments of history in the Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru universities, for instance, have become pocket boroughs of Communism for all practical purposes. All this literature, light as well as heavy, is sold at prices which cannot meet even a fraction of the cost. The large discounts allowed to retailers increase this disparity a good deal. The publishing houses which are housed in spacious places, owned or rented by the movement, maintain large salaried staff of all levels. The losses incurred in this enterprise are also colossal;
3. The movement is a cadre-based movement. It has a farflung hierarchy of leaders and workers. All of them are paid activists. Some of them are whole-timers, others part-timers. The leaders are paid and maintained much better than the workers. But salaries and allowances of workers are not inadequate either, if we take into account the communes which the movement maintains for its activists. These expenses on salaries, rents, food, clothing, transport and sundries account for another colossal sum spent from month to month and year after year;
4. The movement maintains and mans many front organisations among trade unions, peasantry, students, youth, women, children, writers, artists, for “peace”, for fighting “imperialism”, for opposing “communalism”. Most of these front organisations have their own offices and their own staff. They also publish their own pamphlets and periodicals. The costs involved on maintaining and turning these transmission belts, as Lenin called them, are considerable;
5. The Communist movement in India is well-known for the frequency of conferences, congresses, mass meetings and demonstrations. A large number of people, many times from long distances, are paid to travel to these gatherings, pass the Party resolutions and shout the Party slogans. Many participants in Communist demonstrations, particularly in big cities like Calcutta, are hired on the basis of payment per head per day. The lodging, board and transport costs for mobilising these crowds are paid by the movement. Posters, placards and buntings abound on these occasions. Again, the costs are colossal.
We are not counting the routine expenses which every political movement or party has to incur in its normal functioning. The parties which do not control a government know it very well how difficult it is to find finances even for these normal expenses. The expenses incurred by the Communist movement are abnormal when compared to its size and significance in India’s body-politic. In comparison, the ruling Congress Party is a poor party. And it has to find itself in an embarassing position when some of its methods for collecting money are exposed.
The one thing which, next to slogans, never gets scarce in the Communist movement is money. That is how it is always in a position to prove that it is a movement of the poor, maintained by the poor, and for the benefit of the poor. Shankar had once drawn a cartoon in which a well-dressed upper class Communist worker was demanding a donation for peace from a naked and blind beggar, and denouncing the latter as a warmongering agent of American imperialism who would not part with his paisa.
Footnotes:
1 See Sita Ram Goel, Perversion of India’s Political Parlance, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1984.
2 The Communists who control The Times of India at present have already come out with this rhetoric.
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Decadent elite, incapable of leadership
This brings me back to the point I made earlier: in the candidates spring up willing to brave the odds and serve the country. In India, the situation seems to be the reverse of this. Politicians look to someone else to assume leadership whom they can serve as courtiers and enjoy the United States, at every presidential election, dozens of crumbs of office. This has now reached the absurd point of a great national party being unable to find a single leader in the country. So it wants to import one!
There is another extraordinary sight. The people who want to serve as servile courtiers of this foreign woman are products of India’s elite institutions! Just go to 10 Janpath where Smt Sonai Gandhi holds court, and you will see a glut of convent school and Doon School products. Many of them boast degrees from St Stephen’s College and other holdovers from the colonial era, but not one of them seems to have the courage or the character to assume leadership. Their highest aspiration is to serve this foreign woman with barely a high school education! In contrast, elite institutions in Europe and America keep producing leaders. For example, Roosevelt and Kennedy graduated from Harvard, while Bush and Clinton are from Yale. So there must be something wrong with Indian education — at least what passes for ‘elite’ education — that it can produce servants but few leaders. This is the sign of a decadent elite with a servile mentality.
On the other hand, individuals who are not products of these supposedly elite institutions, true children of the soil, seem to suffer from no such debility. When we look at the Mulayam Singhs, the Mayavaties, the Kalyan Singhs and others, whatever their methods and ethics, they are willing to take responsibility and go to the people. If they are misguided and overly aggressive, it is because the system is stacked against them. In the last fifty years, the national scene has come to be dominated by the decadent elite that I just mentioned. When we look at the nation today, the civil service, the English language media and higher education are the monopoly of this urban, upper class educated at convents and similar ‘elite’ institutions. They are in fact a colonial elite. They form the core of support for Smt Sonia Gandhi. As a just noted, they want to not lead but serve.
Actually it is no mystery. The higher education system in India was created by the British with the specific goal of producing colonial servants — not thinkers or leaders. Macaulay, the founder of the higher education system that is still followed in India, stated what the British goals were:
"We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."
What is the result of such an education? Here is how Sir Charles Trevelyan described the products of such education as far back as 1838:
"Educated in the same way, interested in the same objects, engaged in the same pursuits with ourselves, they become more English than Hindu... The young men brought up in our seminaries, turn with contempt from the barbarous despotisms under which their ancestors groaned... Instead of regarding us with dislike, they court our society, ... the summit of their ambition is, to resemble us."
A more infuriatingly condescending — if not contemptuous — description would be hard to find. And yet, this passage, written in 1838, accurately reflects the state of mind of much of the intellectual elite even today.
This is not education, it is spiritual emasculation. Their conduct of avoiding leadership, but desperately eager to serve in the family court of Smt Sonia Gandhi, is testimony to this. The misfortune is that this alienated elite — created by the rulers of a bygone age — still dominates and controls India's education and intellectual life. An alternative must be found. This alternative must be through a thorough revamping of the education system from the ground up.
At the same time, I want to emphasize that the problem is mainly in the humanities, for in science and technology India is progressing well. But leadership must come from the humanities, which should be rooted in the culture and history of a nation. (Science and technology have no national or cultural boundaries.) But Indian scholars from ‘elite’ institutions only copy outdated Western fashions. How many departments of linguistics teach Panini or Yaska? Also, why teach Freud and Jung in psychology to the exclusion of Patanjali and the Upanishads? The result is that there is no independent Indian school of thought that is taken seriously in the world today. All the important work in the humanities in India is being done by scholars outside the establishment. This problem was diagnosed by Sri Aurobindo long ago when he wrote:
"That ... Indian scholars have not been able to form themselves into a great and independent school of learning is due to two causes, the miserable scantiness of the mastery in Sanskrit provided by our universities, ... and our lack of a sturdy independence which makes us oveready to defer to European opinion."
It is for this reason that most of the important thinking in India is being done by individuals outside the establishment. Fortunately, there is a great national vision for India, created by ancient sages, resurrected by moderns sages like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. This is what I want to examine next.
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A : An*l orifice. This is what the writer of the post Ka Kha Gha is
B : Beiman or Traitor. 1st characteristic of a M*slim living in a non-M*slim country
C : Chor, or Thief. What asylum seeking M*slims do, when they scrounge off the social security of host nations
D : Demonic. What the M*slim fetus turns in to after 6 months
E : Eden. Where the M*slim dreams he will go after death, where 72 prozzies await him. (There is no equivalent heaven for the M*slim female gender. Sorry ladies)
F : Feces. What is festering inside the cranial shell of the guy who composed Ka Kha Ga
G : Gadhe. The title conferred to the winner of the most intelligent M*slim of the year contest
H : Houri. One of the 72 prozzies each M*slim believes will get if he dies while murdering innocent Jews and Hindus for his faith
I : Idiot. The title conferred on the runner up in the most intelligent M*slim of the year contest
J : Janwaar. A higher state that a M*slim will evolve in to after 6 lifecycles of piety
K : Kill. What a M*slim mother teaches her 8 kids to do
L : Last. The position a M*slim student inevitably ends up in, in a mixed class.
Also, L for Liar. What a M*slim is when he is awake
M : Murder. What a M*slim father teaches his 32 kids to do (4 mothers per man)
N : Non compos mentis. Of unsound mind. Aka M*slim
O : Oxymoron, like “Isl*m is a peaceful religion”. “Is*am is a religion” is another oxymoron.
P : P*d*phil* : Ideal pleasure dreamt about by M*slim man
Q : Q*ran or Queer-an: Book of evil. Contains weird ranting of a desert illiterate possessed by a demon called All*h
R : Reeking. What you realize a M*slim is doing when you stand next to him
S : Satan. Another name for All*h. Also Sh*t : The contents of the Queer-un
T : Transmogrify. What happens to a M*slim man’s d*ck
U : Uncouth. The winner of the ‘Most cultured M*slim of the year contest’
V : Vaccinate. What you should definitely do after shaking hands with a M*slim.
W : Wailing. What M*slim terrorists do when confronted with a camera
X : Xenophobia. Chief preaching of Isl*m
Y : Yellow. Color of a M*slim’s belly when you’ve stripped him of his grenades and machetes
Z : Zombie. What you will become if you enter a mosque
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Hindu fundamentalists not only openly declare their "Aryan superiority," their origin is explicitly fascist.
Following the rise to power of Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini fascists in Europe, the backbone of Hindu fundamentalism, the RSS, was organized during the 1930s, modeled after the German brownshirts (Sturmabteilung, "Storm Division").
Like in Germany and Italy, British interests played a central role in organizing the fascist movement in India to serve as a counter-weight to socialism. The anti-colonial liberation movement, led by Mohandas Gandhi, embraced peoples of all linguistic and religious groups and had a clearly socialist alternative vision for India.
Just as in Europe, when the socialist movements were getting strong enough to overthrow capitalism, the capitalists, led by Britain, organized armies of fanatical thugs maintain power, Britain tried to do the same in India to keep a portion of its economic control.
There were two sides to this coin: divide India into a predominantly Hindu and a predominantly Muslim portion, organize extremists on both sides to attack each other and most importantly, to attack anyone who supported unity among India's people against the British.
Divide and conquer partially worked: from the beginning of independence in 1948, the armies of India and Pakistan have been fighting each other, and common people being pitted against each other. In the Muslim areas (Pakistan and Bangladesh), the feudal landlords became the backbone of opposition to socialism and unity, funding the Islamic fundamentalist movement. However, in the Hindu-majority area (India), for several decades the socialist unity movement, under the banner of the Congress Party, was too strong to be easily defeated.
Under Congress Party leadership, India organized the nonaligned block of nations, deeply threatening British-American world hegemony. Within India, millions got access to water and education for the first time; dalits (untouchables) received protection and affirmative action; land redistribution occurred, blunting the British from using landlord to promote religious and ethnic hatred.
But over time, one party rule led to corruption; the more corrupt, capitalist-leaning elements within the Congress Party were actively promoted by British and America as a means to undermine India's independence and sideline the socialist-leaning forces, with a view to ultimately knock the liberation movement out of power entirely.
In the meantime, while landlords from the privileged Hindu castes were used by the British (just like the small shopkeepers of Germany) to form the backbone of the RSS, Britain handed over a portion of colonial industries to local Hindu capitalists whose interests would be mostly aligned with British capitalists and would oversee the fascist movement in India.
With the destruction of the Soviet Union, the liberation movement in India found staying nonaligned more and more difficult, with the movement itself suffering from severe internal fractures and growing corruption among the dominant leadership of the Congress Party. This, combined with the post-Soviet push of British and American interests to establish total global hegemony through the World Trade Organization, made the overthrow of the Congress Party an inviting target.
By making sure that the Congress Party's leadership during the 1990s followed the Clinton/Blair formula of supporting structural adjustment (destroying socialism) and free trade (colonial investment protection), British and American interests set the stage for their takeover, getting the Congress Party's leadership to attack its own base and commit political suicide.
Through riots and and organized crime, the RSS's political wings, the BJP and the Shiv Sena, came to power in states across India, and finally won the national elections as well.
Since coming to power, the BJP and the Shiv Sena have been promoting themselves not just as pro-business but actively attempting to fuse private industrial trusts and government into a corporate state, along the fascist lines from which they were born. In terms of foreign policy, the BJP has turned India from being the leading opponent to the WTO and military intervention to being one of America's few backers on biotechnology, global warming and pollution, privatization, and the "war on terrorism."
Note that the RSS is a fundamentally terrorist organization.
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Excllent article on the Savarkar Movie (see link). Author has examined historical facts and blasted Savarkar and Sangh Parivar for hypocrisy. Sangh Parivar is a tragedy for India.
Quotes:
"Two kinds of revolutionaries fought for India's freedom. One was of the Gandhian kind, who suffered and courted imprisonment, all peacefully. The other was of the Bhagat Singh and Bagha Jatin variety, who fought the British with arms, and had the courage to go to the gallows for his acts. Savarkar, who fit neither category, was unique. He instigated and incited others to die for his beliefs, quite happy to avoid the gallows himself."
"For all its faults, this film should be mandatory viewing for every Indian for one simple reason. So strong an indictment of VD Savarkar and what he represents would be hard to make by any critic -- the director has inadvertantly managed it. The Swatantrayaveer comes out as an egotist, a self-involved if precocious man-child who never outgrows the stage of pre-adolescent score-settling."