Continued from “Constitutional Amnesia”

Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife
A critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n more

The Indian State with its dominant Muslim minority and its short-sighted constitution was destined to be politically stymied to the hurt of its Hindu majority. And the minority-centric politics of the country as it evolved over the years – stretched to incredulous lengths by Prime Minister Minoan Singh in averring that its minorities have the first right on national resources – has been increasingly compounding the Hindu emotional misery. Why blame Singh, as Muslim Appeasement, owing to the wooly Nehru has been the policy of the Indian State, to start with.

Thus, though it was but natural that Bunkum Chandra’s vande maataram, the theme song of the Indian freedom movement, should have logically become the Indian national anthem, yet it was not to be for the Musalmans had an Islamic allergy to it as it eulogizes Bharat Mata. So, Rabindranath Tagore’s janagana mana was brought to the fore and vande maataram was relegated to the backbench as a national song, whatever it means. Just imagine how the U.S. politicians would have handled if, say its Hispanics and Latinos took exception to the ‘America is Great’ salutation to the newfound land on the specious ground that it hurts their sentiment for the older lands of their forebears.

This about sums up the religio-political dynamics of post-colonial India – its Muslim remnants are accorded the privilege to exercise their veto in formulating the State policy - that is after they had forced its partition to create a separate homeland for its Musalmans in Pakistan! And it makes a sad commentary on the Nehru-led leadership of the ‘independent’ India that it neither had the gall nor the gumption to tell its Musalmans that having forced the country’s partition on religious grounds, they had no moral right to impose their Islamic whims upon what is essentially the Hindu portion of the divided land.

However, it’s nobody’s case though that those Musalmans who chose to stay back in India had no right to do so but surely the Hindu India had a legitimate right to ask them to think and behave like Indians as at any rate it’s not the case with its sanaatana dharma to interfere with the value systems of the other faiths. But instead, and in spite of Ambedkar’s words of caution that - the allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country which is his but on the faith to which he belongs - Nehru so directed the State policy as to nurse the Musalmans’ ‘social self-government that is incompatible with local self-government’. So, it was not long before the lure for the minorities’ votes tempted India’s self-serving politicians to make the Hindu emotions subservient not only to the Islamic whims of the Musalmans but also to the proselytizing fancies of the Christians.

That is not all; though it’s in the nature of history to grant the captors to tilt it against the captives, but once freed, it permits the latter to turn the bend, ironically, in independent India’s case, Nehru, who was thrust upon its head by Gandhi, coerced it to bend backwards, so to say by two turns, to resurrect its slavish ethos of its Islamic times in its textbooks. So, he chose as its education minister, out of all his cabinet colleagues, the one who had all along voiced his opposition to India’s partition, not for any holistic reasons, but as that would diminish the dominance of those Musalmans, who would be left behindin its Hindu-dominated part! That too he was a Saudi born Islamic theologian, with the tongue twisting name of Maulana Sayyid Abul Kalam Ghulam Muhiyuddin Ahmed bin Khairuddin Al-Hussaini Azad, shortened to Abul Kalam Azad for the Indian ears! It’s only to be expected that the Maulana would grab the Islamic opportunity in Hindu India to hit the ‘partitioned’ ground running, and that’s what he did. So as to bolster the morale of the reduced-in-size Indian umma, and moreso to forestall that of the Hindus, just freed from thousand years of slavery, he devised an appropriate ‘educational’ mechanism, and that was the proverbial last straw on the Indian history’s back, which happenstance is seldom appreciated.

As post-colonial India’s educational in-charge, for nearly ten years that is, he evolved its school curriculum, replete with the life and times of Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, and Sha Jahan, not to forget his Taj Mahal, touted as the eighth wonder of the world, so as to enable the Hindu kids to feel good about their glorious Islamic past. Besides, to drive home their martial inadequacies as well, lest they should entertain any valorous ideas for their ‘independent’ future, he ensured they were made privy to the furies of Ghazni, Ghuri, Taimur, Aurangazeb et al that their progenitors had to face that is without raising their hackles.

Moreover, so as not to give raise to any doubts about the glorious Islamic order of Hindustan in the impressionable minds, he saw to it that the Indian history did not venture much into the south of the Vindhyas to peep at the Vijayanagara Empire in the Mogul period itself. It’s thus; he could drive the notion into the heads of the Hindu kids that India owes its glories to its Islamic rule, thereby perpetuating the Muslim dominance in the Hindu consciousness. Well, it is a testimony to his evil genius that he devised it all in such way, aided in no small measure by the similarly afflicted body of schoolteachers, that it never occurred to the Hindu kids in the secular schools, the author included, that something was odd in all that. Having been so conditioned, most Hindus spend the rest of their lives without ever brooding over their hurtful past.

Needless to say, the wily Maulana wouldn’t have been able to pursue his nefarious agenda without the blessings of the wooly Pandit (Nehru), who abhorred Hindu nationalism. Thus in a peculiar congruence of Azad’s communal bias and Nehru’s personal prejudice, in the former’s line of ‘educating’ the Hindu kids to India’s detriment, the latter saw an effective means to nip the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in its bud. Nevertheless, the paeans sung in madrasas for the Mogul rule that perpetuate the false sense of superiority in Muslim minds to the hurt of India’s unity, was fine for the Maulana, and Nehru, who couldn’t have been unaware that all that furthers Islamic obscurantism, didn’t care if it were to keep the Hindu nationalism under check. Well, all this suited his daughter Indira no less, and put together, as they ruled India for around 32 years, the wily Maulana was allowed to indoctrinate the Hindu kids from his grave as well, and that shows to this day. How?

It’s to be expected that the alien yoke besides robbing the Hindus of their self-esteem would have suppressed their self-interest. So, as India became free, while its political atmosphere turned conducive for Hindus to acquire their self-interest with vigour, as the Nehru-Azad combine constrained their intellectual sphere, they failed to retrieve their self-esteem of yore in any measure. It was thus, fifty years after India gained its independence, they still allowed themselves to be bossed over by Sonia Maino, the Italian daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, as the dynastic head of the politically dominant Congress party for over two decades. That’s not all, when she so ill-treated the mortal remains of PV Narasimha Rao, the architect of India’s economic reforms, as an Indian equivalent of Achilles’ abuse of Hector’s, unlike the Trojans who avenged the insult to their valiant prince, the Hindus, bereft of any self-esteem whatsoever endured it all without a demur. More than this nothing illustrates the success of Azad’s insidious Islamist strategy to ‘demean Hindus in their own minds’, and that they, to this day, haven’t recognized the Goebblisian role he played to their enervation is something that their progeny should ponder over, and moreso, rejuvenate themselves.

Moreover, the way Hindus went about using and abusing their hard-earned freedom makes no rosy reading either. In what was left as the ‘secular’ India, the princes of democracy have come to rule the land as per the age-old Hindu political credo - unto each his own province. The Westminster model of governance that the Union of India adopted and its political devolution that the regional aspirations demanded, brought Bharat into the domain of a Samraat in Nayi Dilli, the Indraprastha of yore, Sultans of its linguistic States and the Sarpanchs in its panchaayats, of course in tow with their hangers on, vying for its politico-economic pie. Besides, the democracy brought into the positions of power the jaagirdaars of the National Parliament and the thaanedaars of the State Assemblies with their attendant minions for a like calling.

And lest the favoured-lot of the powers that be should miss out to savor the cream of the world’s most populous democratic cake, there are the councils of ministers, chairmen politicians for assorted boards and numerous bodies; and not to leave out the lordships of its judicial wing, there are tribunals galore for the retired judges to head. Thus, even as the minor deities of the Indian politics are well propitiated, the edifices of Bharat’s democratic temples are being ruined by its political parties, barring exceptions, are but family-owned hereditary setups. That being the case, isn’t it stupid even to murmur that we are a democracy, leave alone proclaim that ours is the biggest, or is it the largest, democracy on earth?

Though, thanks to the British, Hindustan got rid of the Islamist misrule, it is as if the politicians of free India retained the governing ethos of the Musalmans as sarkaari legacy for posterity. After all, now as ever, it’s the personal interest of the regional political masters that prevails over the national interest, and what is worse, in the Indian democratic domain, the high ideal of ‘nursing the constituency’, though marketed in ugly packages of parochialism, is considered even a virtue! And coming to the public morality, we have it from Alberuni and others that Hindustan, in times gone by, was, by and large, populated by honest people, but then how come it had long metamorphosed itself into a nation of cheats!

As there is recorded history as such to facilitate any research, we are left to speculate about cause(s) of the abominable fall of a race as a whole. The millennia alien rule – first that of the Islamic invaders and then of the British colonizers – needless to say, would have been a cause of resentment for the Hindu natives, which inexorably could have developed into an enduring grudge against them. It’s a psychological possibility in that the impotent Hindu rage would have manifested itself into cheating the imposters of their royal monies through corrupt means so as to derive a vicarious pleasure for themselves, which over the centuries, insensibly became a norm that invariably tattered India’s moral fabric.

Maybe, the presidential form of democracy on the American lines would have served India better but then that would have made so many sundry politicians irrelevant, a scary prospect for the political class, which turned politics into the best business that there is. Thus, for that very reason, the founders of the nation State could have chosen the survival route that every generation of politicians would find it expedient not to deviate from. So, one can expect the political satraps to keep the legislative circuses on, for everyone knows whose interest in the end prevails in the mobocracy of India. After all, in the land of Bharat, the privileged class had always been apart, and that came to be a part of its socio-political ethos, and since the Brahmans are, anyway out, let the politicians be in, so seems the rationale of the Indian democratic process.

Yet this faulty political model lifted the morale of the depleted stock of the Indian Musalmans in an unexpectedly way! Since their vote mattered in numerous constituencies, the politicians grasped the electoral merit in playing the Islamic fundamentalist footsie with the mullahs and the moulvis, umma’s vote traders that is besides being the conscience keepers. However, to start with, the Congress political lenience towards the Islamic religious sentiment, conceived by the Nehruvian mischief, charitably approached, could have been well-intended to reach out to the masses of the Indian Musalmans, orphaned by the exodus of their classes to Pakistan. It was as though Nehru wanted to be a Jinnah to the Musalmans of Bharat, oblivious to the fact that the Hindus too were sorely in need of a leader to address their hurt at the loss of a fourth of their ancient land to Pakistan.

Though for centuries, the gods, who paid a deaf ear to the Hindu prayers to get them rid of the Muslim rule, granted them their ‘man for the moment’ in Sardar Patel but they had to contend with Gandhi the autocrat, who by then was deified by them as the Mahatma of the time. Well, Gandhi had cleaned the public toilets alright but did he not force his reluctant wife to do the same against her will, and in embracing celibacy prematurely, had he not deprived Kasturba the warmth of his marital embrace. Won’t that make food for thought?

Whatever, Patel, who filled the Hindu emotional space like a colossus, should have made it to the Dilli gaddi, but Gandhi’s ‘peculiar’ weakness for Nehru, bordering on physical love, ensured that it didn’t happen. That was, in spite of the overwhelming support the Sardar received from the congressmen and women of that era, from all over India. That’s about Gandhi’s democratic ethos, and fondness for the favoured, not discounting his prejudice towards Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Prakasam et al, who tended to be independent of him. Wonder how in the Gandhi-thrall, the world glosses over the fact that while his steely resolve helped India to get rid of the British yoke, yet his naivety of Hindu-Muslim amity had imposed many an Islamic constraint on ‘free’ India.

While Nehru’s foolhardy in taking the Kashmir issue all the way to the United Nations and his credulity in taking a plebiscite pledge therein, it was Patel, who had coerced the recalcitrant Nizam and other vacillating Rajas, into the Union of India. It is another ‘foolhardy’ matter though that Nehru relinquished the offer of the powers that be to India to take a permanent seat in the all-powerful Security Council of the same world body, insisting that it was China’s due, as if to highlight his Hindi Chini bhai bhai myth! Whatever, in trying to be a world leader, while Nehru sacrificed his country’s interests, China that sits in the Security Council by default is ever at blocking India’s entry into it in its national interest; and that’s some contribution by the one whom Gandhi thrust upon India as its ‘wooly’ head of state! While the Sardar was not destined to live long enough to see Bharat Maata bear the fruits of his sagacity, Nehru had survived long enough to witness the divisive affects of his plebiscite folly in the Kashmiri valley that gave Pakistan a potent stick to beat India with at every international fora that was till his daughter Indira forced Bhutto to revise the rules of the ongoing game at Shimla. Thus, while Nehru deservedly earned the disregard of the Indian nation, Patel became a living legend of its nationalist sentiment.

If Jinnah couldn’t consolidate the gains for Islam in Pakistan, Nehru failed to formulate a socio-political code in India that took into account the Hindu sensitivities and the Muslim interests in the same nationalistic vein. And to add insult to the Hindu injury, the Nehruvian foreign policy was fashioned to address the fundamentalist ethos of the Muslim minority rather than to serve the national interests of the new India. Thus at best, Nehru was a sophist in shaping the foreign policy that understandably became the political Bible for the Congress party, and at worst, it can be said that he eyed for a secular slot in the pan-Islamic history, but to no avail. However, in spite of his innumerable flaws, his place in the Indian history should be secure as the founding father of its democracy, though he could have become the Caesar, and what is more, besides diligently nursing it in its infancy, he meticulously guided it into its adulthood; if Gandhi got freedom to India then Nehru mothered it into a democracy, which later his daughter Indira had set on a dynastic course.

When Nehru died broken-hearted, after the demise of his pet panchsheel in the ignominy of a defeat at the Chinese hands in the Himalayas, the Indian democracy had had its first triumph as the humble Lal Bahadur Shastri made it to the premier post. After his brief rein though, the Congress and India came into the dynastic clutches of Nehru’s devious daughter, delivered to her on a platter by the petty Syndicate to deny Morarji Desai his political due. Predictably, Indira stretched her father’s Muslim leanings to ludicrous lengths in claiming the membership for India in the Organization of Islamic Countries on the premise that it was the home for a large body of umma in the world! Naturally, the Rabbat snub, engineered by Pakistan, rubbed salt into the wounded Hindu pride, which the Congress party didn’t mind to amend.

Whatever, Indira exhibited both courage and conviction at times, and became the apple of the Hindu eye and the solace of the Hindu hurt for the way she exploited the brewing Bangladesh crisis to dismember Pakistan. And that ‘allegedly’ made Vajpayee deify her as Durga that he denied, even as the media dubbed her as the Empress of India. But her maternal weakness for her roguish younger son Sanjay, in time, afflicted her personal character and affected her political judgment, pushing Mother India into the political abyss of her Emergency Rule. That was before Sanjay’s death, and it was only a matter of time before the ‘political devi’ became the ‘devil’s advocate of graft’ by infamously stating that corruption was a global phenomenon.

Nevertheless, her death was as poignant as her life itself, which had put the thoughts of the East and the West on the same philosophical page. While it was her destiny of a violent death that could have earlier made her nurture the Frankenstein Monster of a Sant Bhindranwale to politically browbeat the Akali Dal, proves the karma siddhaanta – governs destiny one’s nature -, her insistence on retaining her ‘religiously agitated’ Sikh bodyguards in the aftermath of the ‘Operation Blue Star’, to set an example of secular conviction and personal courage, would prove the Western philosophy true in that – one’s nature dictates his fate.

However, the Nehru dynasty’s real disservice to India lay in denying the due political space for the leadership of the backward classes in the Congress arena, and that hurt the Indian democracy, rather, grievously at that. The independence that saw the beginning of the end of the Brahmanical order, and with it the advent of the universal literacy, in time, raised the abilities as well as aspirations of the teeming millions of the backward classes and the other backward castes. If only their legitimate aspirations of political ascendancy were allowed to come to fruition under the Congress banner, the politics of the day would not have degenerated into caste combinations and communal permutations. While the dynastic order blocked the top slots for the emerging leaders of the backward castes, what is worse, it blotted the lower rungs of the party with the sycophantic upper caste men and women.

It was thus, the aspirants from these classes began to see beyond the Congress, and it was not long before two wily Yadavs - Mulayam Singh of U.P and Lalu Prasad of Bihar - floated their own political outfits by tailoring their own caste suits with Muslim Apparel for better affect, and that altered the old electoral order in the strategic cow belt in the Hindi heartland, seemingly forever. After all, it doesn’t require the brains of an Einstein to realize that an electoral alliance between the Musalmans andthe Yadavs (M-Y in political parlance) in these two States wouldensure political dividends in many a constituency. What with these two Yadavs successfully calling the minority bluff of the Congress at the hustings, the secret was out; that it is the 15% or so Muslim vote of the Indian democracy, which is vital to the Hindu politicians to enter into the portals of power. That the Mayawatis and the Nitish Kumars too have come to master the winning formula and what is worse; down the Vindhyas too as the politicians are not taking chances any more with even the inconsiderable Muslim vote that is there, tells the ugly story of the Indian democracy.

That the cynical Hindu politicians have made the time-tested tactic – give the poor Musalmans more of Islam that keeps them calm – of the Muhammadandespots their own, they have come to hurt the umma’s economic well-being, that is besides debilitating India’s democratic vitality, hampering its social integration, and degrading its intellectual integrity. What might even be worse for the country is that as calamities follow the follies of man, more and more of India’s political future could be mortgaged in the Muslim Vote-Banks. So, when the minority vote swells up to a healthy 25% or more, as it may be sooner than later, that is if the umma is not compelled to procreate less, this ‘power at all costs’ electoral pursuit of the short-sighted politicians, Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal being the worst example to date, is bound to boomerang on them not to speak of the Indian nation. Why vote for a Hindu when we have the numbers to elect our own, so could be the logic of the Indian Musalmans at some point of time in the years to come. Who cares about that, anyway, as the Hindu wisdom was never known to factor the Islamic expansionist credo into the Indian realpolitik.

So, the majority community’s cynical ‘minority politics’ is bound to facilitate the growth of Muslim separatism, which in turn would bring about the inevitable disorder of the Indian political order. And nearer to our times, we might as well see the spectacle of the de facto merger of the six districts of Assam namely Angoon, Dhobi, Catcher, Barletta, Sniper, and Karuk with Bangladesh, which to build the Muslim vote-bank, the Congress allowed them to be infested with the illegal Muslim intruders. And ditto with West Bengal’s districts bordering Bangladesh, but with a difference in that it was the Communists, who paid a blind eye to the illegal Muslim influx into it that added to their vote bank. No wonder that Mamata Banerjee, who upturned them in time, in turn holds on to the 27% Muslim votes as one would his lifeline, without pretence at that. That being the case, one would expect that the future travails of Bharat should be scaring the Hindus, but then they are a different kind of an ‘indifferent’ people.

But then how does India fare on the intellectual front in this regard? Why the left-liberal spearheads of the Hindu ‘intellectualism’ of the day, are no less constrained by their ignorance of Islam and Christianity as ‘spreading’ cults. These gullible guys bite the ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ ‘n ‘terrorism has no religion’ bullet and end up being Islamapologists to join the Islamist chorus that it’s all the fault of ‘the others’, the Hindu fundamentalists included. No wonder all these tend to ignore the religious urge of the Musalmans to procreate in plentiful and the evangelical zeal of the Christians to proselytize more and more to the Hindu hurt. That being the case in this information age, why blame the Brahmans of yore for messing up things on the socio-political front to turn it into a fertile ground for the Islamic spread in Hindustan? They too were human after all.

Continued to “The Wages of God”