Eid Mubarak!
I’m writing this article on the eve of Eid. Two weeks after the Modi 2.0 government was installed in India.
When the election results came out on May 23 I was baffled. How come a government which put India through enormous pain through its anti-people policies like Demonetisation which killed over 200 people and destroying small scale industries with job loss for millions, ignoring of farmer’s distress which killed over 300,000 farmers through suicide, divisive policies which divided India on religious, ethnic and linguistic lines, painful Good and Services Tax (GST) which put small traders under severe stress, can come back to power?
Several theories were floated. Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) tampering, the willful support of Election Commission of India for the ruling regime, money power, mass media support, fake news….All these must have played a part. However, none of these arguments are convincing.
Then why? How?
I believe the RSS project of Hindu Rashtra is reaping rich dividends for their loyal work for over nine decades. RSS or Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh has about 60,000 branches across India and its ideology is to make India into a Hindu Rashtra. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of RSS.
RSS openly challenges the constitution of India and wants to make Manusmriti (Manu’s code) as the constitution of India. Manusmriti dehumanizes everyone except the upper castes, including women of all castes.
RSS ideologue Golwalkar wrote in his book “Bunch of Thoughts”
“The most important and effective step will be to bury deep for good all talk of a federal structure of our country’s Constitution, to sweep away the existence of all ‘autonomous’ or semi-autonomous ‘states’ within the one state viz., Bharat and proclaim ‘One Country, One State, One Legislature, One Executive’ with no trace of fragmentational, regional, sectarian, linguistic or other types of pride being given a scope for playing havoc with our integrated harmony. Let the Constitution be re-examined and re-drafted, so as to establish this Unitary form of Government and thus effectively disprove the mischievous propaganda indulged in by the British and so unwittingly imbibed by the present leaders, about our being just a juxtaposition of so many distinct ‘ethnic groups’ or ‘nationalities’ happening to live side by side and grouped together by the accident of geographical contiguity and one uniform supreme foreign domination.”
Golwalker also wrote in his book “We or our nationhood defined”,
“From the standpoint sanctioned by the experience of shrewd nations, the non-Hindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of Hindu nation i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ingratitude towards this land and its age long traditions, but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead; in one word, they must cease to be foreigners or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, for less any preferential treatment, not even the citizen’s rights.”
This is actually happening NOW. A de facto HINDU RASHTRA is here. Whether it will stay or not is OUR choice.
By the way who are the Indians? The name India is derived from Indus river, which originates from the Old Persian word Hindush. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi which translates as “The people of the Indus”. Actually it was the colonial westerners gave the name “India” to the subcontinent. There is no historical evidence that India belongs to Hindus.
Tony Joseph in his path breaking book “Early Indians” proved that India is a land of migrants. All Indians are migrants. The earliest civilization, “The Indus Valley civilization” was kick started by West Asian migrants. All others, including the Aryan Hindus are migrants. India in its millennia old history has accepted migrants from all parts of the world and absorbed religion, culture and languages. This is this history that RSS and BJP want to rub aside.
India is a land of varied cultures. Originator of great religions like Budhism and Jainism and Sikhism. A great number of Indians adopted Islam, making it the second-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. Indian constitution has recognized 22 official languages. Thousands of other languages are being spoken by, from a few thousand to many millions. RSS and BJP want to rub it all away. Their motto is ‘’HINDU, HINDI, HINDUSTAN’’.
This kind of monolithic culture is the foundation of the Hindu Rashtra envisioned by the RSS ideologues. It seems like decades long hard work by RSS is coming to fruition. Unless we step up!
Only way to keep India as we know it is to celebrate the cultural, linguistic, religious diversity of India. That’s the only way we can undermine the Hindu Rashtra project by the RSS. If we cannot do it we can say good bye to India and welcome HINDUSTAN.
So, once again I say Eid Mubarak. Let’s celebrate each other’s festivals more than ours. That’s the only way we can save India from falling into a fascist, Hindu theocratic, failed state.
Binu Mathew is the Editor of www.countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org
