The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Unmindful of the old adage, when you point a finger at someone else, there are three pointing back to you, Udhayanidhi, the Christian son of the atheist Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin and his devout Hindu wife, had raged an unseemly controversy through his clarion call for the eradication of sanatana dharma aka Hinduism that he likened to dengue, malaria and corona. It is another matter though that he has no issues with the ethics of the Christianity that required him to get baptized into its fold to wed his believing beloved. Be that as it may, his closet Christian party colleague A. Raja pitched in with AIDS and leprosy tags to picture Hinduism as a menace to the world at large for it is a synonym of casteism.

But who were to ask the Indian Church as to why it won’t deem encouraging Crypto-Christianity, which is the secret practice of Christianity, in places and time periods where Christians were persecuted or Christianity was outlawed, as a fraud in the secular Bharat, whose constitution naively grants its citizens, read Christians and Muslims, the right to propagate their faith, which is but the license to convert the gullible Hindus. Likewise, who were to question the morality of the closet Christians, who allegedly follow the teaching of Jesus and yet have no compunction in hiding their changed faith to fool the public and deceive the State to derive undue benefits to gain illegally? That the Church is hands in glove with these duplicitous evangelical ways is of no credit either to their God or His Son is somehow lost on the born-again Christians as well as the eager converts.  In so far as the caste in the Christianity is concerned, the segregated Churches stand tall to testify the same. That being the Indian Christian reality, there’s no gainsaying for the dalits to embrace the alien faith on the sly but yet the onus is on the Hindu samaaj to make them feel at home in the Sanatana tent.

However, the Hindu intellectual response to the malicious Semitic attack on their dharmic ethos was stymied for the caste has always been the Achilles heel of their social chore. Hence, it is imperative to probe the Hindu social ills and delve into the Church’s religious ill-wills so as to bring the lopsided discourse onto an even keel. It may be noted that even as naro naarayana (man is but God) is the integral maxim of sanatana dharma, the Christian credo suffers no qualms about the inhuman slavery as averred in the Bible (1 Peter 2.18) – “Slaves, be subject to your masters with all reverence, not only to those who are good and equitable but also to those who are perverse” and such. Also, whereas Hinduism espouses the eclectic concept of ekam sadvipraa bahudhaa vadanti (what is right is One only, describe it wise variedly), the Church holds the narrow view that only faith in Jesus portends salvation and the choice against him results in eternal doom. That’s not all, while sanatana dharma postulates vasudhaiva kutumbakam (holds world all in one household) in the Christian scheme of things, all non-Semites are heathens; if anything, Islam debunks all other faiths, Christianity included, and vilifies all non-Muslims, not exempting the Christians, as kafirs destined to eternally burn in the hell of a hell.

It’s no wonder thus, in the times of yore, while the Hindus soft-sold their eclectic dharma for the greater good of the mankind, the my-way or the high-way Christianity, averred Edward Gibbon, ‘was the harbinger of the destabilization of the religious harmony of the ancient world, achieved by the facility with which the most different and even hostile nations embraced, or at least respected, each other’s superstitions’. If anything, the Muslims made it worse in medieval times by thrusting their even more intolerant Islamic dogma on much of the then hapless world. However, the irony of the Abrahamic religions is that whereas their common God freed the Jews, his chosen people, from slavery of the Pharaohs, the followers of His Christian Son and the believers in His Islamic Messenger came to enslave the conquered peoples besides commoditizing them for the slave market! That apart, if only these convert-censurers of sanatana dharma were to be mindful of the Christian treatment of the Black Americans well into middle of the last century besides the prevalence of the Jewish hatred, the racial abuse and the religious atrocities in the Christian as well as the Islamic societies, they would have probably held their vicious tongues in their cheeks and desisted from spewing religious venom against the dharma of their forebears.

Whatever, the Hindu social aberration that is the abhorrent dalit slight was never as dehumanizing as the Abrahamic slavery, and thus the ranting of Udhayanidhi & Co to eradicate the sanatana dharma is akin to the Semitic pot calling the Hindu kettle black. Just the same, there is a cynical method in the Semitic madness to deride Hinduism and that is to turn the disgruntled Hindu castes into an evangelic feed to try to fulfill the fond hope of Pope John Paul II expressed in New Delhi in November 1999, “may the third Christian Millennium witness a great harvest of faith on this vast and vital continent”. If anything, and despite the Papal threat to their national interests, first the Hindu cadres of the Congress party followed by the sanatana voters naively vested, for two decades or so, the political power in the Christian hands of Sonia Gandhi, who unabashedly gave a fillip to his evangelical agenda like never before to try to disturb Bharat’s demographic balance.

However, as Bharat’s destiny would have it, in 2014, when the reign of power passed onto Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist, he slowly but steadily reined in the non-governmental organizations engaged in surreptitious conversion programs facilitated by the Western Christian entities through illegal monetary support for the same. That apart, the introduction of the anti-conversion laws by his party-ruled States to check fraudulent conversions, and more so, the increasing Hindu awareness of the Semitic threat to their demographic order, have begun to pique the crypto and the closet Christians to the hilt. But this is only half an anti-evangelical measure, and the tougher half lies in Hindus themselves admitting the inequalities in the caste order and redressing the same.

Well, to begin with, it is inconceivable that sanatana dharma with naro narayana (man is but God) ethos would have conceptualized the exalted uchch and untouchable neech amongst men, and yet this abominable disparity had become the caste reality of the Hindu polity, the why, how, and when of which is rarely analyzed and hardly researched. What is worse is the Hindu hypocrisy which proclaims that in fact caste is not about birth but is all about one’s guna (character) or that all are Shudras at birth, and it is guna that enables one to become a Brahmin, a Kshatriya, or a Vysya, as the case may be. While this absurd ‘Shudras at birth’ thesis belies the naivety of the savarna minds, the alleged guna-aided ascent on the caste ladder exhibits their intellectual dishonesty but for which Dr. BR Ambedkar would have been anointed as Brahmarshi by them. Whatever, as such homilies to humour the disgruntled dalits have come to naught, it is imperative that a level playing caste ground is provided to alleviate their justifiable bitterness. 

In this regard, it is worth noting that in the early 11th Century as Al-Beruni noticed, the Vysyas the agriculturist-traders and Shudras the artisan-labour force lived in the same quarters, which happenstance underscores that the varna vyavastha of yore was not that caste-tight after all. But sadly, so it seems, at some point thereafter, Shudras, based on their respective occupations, came to sub-divide themselves into numerous caste groups in what can be called vruththi vyavastha, an imitation of the hierarchical varna vyavastha, which not only relegated the dalits to the lower rungs of the caste-ladder but also pushed their habitats to the village fringes. Needless to say, the genesis of this inimical sectarianism that facilitated the fruition of the alien Islamic and the Christian dogmas by way of conversion of the marginalized Hindu sections beg for a robust academic research and a wider public debate to understand our chequered history.

There is yet another dimension to the Shudric antagonism and that is the scriptural distortions brought about by inane interpolations in Purusha Sukta and Bhagavad-Gita that are highlighted in the author’s free e-book ‘Inane Interpolations in Bhagvad-Gita (An Invocation for their Revocation)’ available in the internet that is besides the much maligned Manu Smriti, unfairly though, as brought out in his essay ‘On Bashing Manu Smriti, Or Flogging A Dead Horse Riding A Blind Ass’ that can be Googled for reading. Last but not the least, as for the embittered Hindu souls, they may realize that their true path to salvation is not becoming Crypto-Christians but through their social ‘Dalit as Deva - à la Black is Beautiful’ assertion, accessible through the net.
 

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