The Great Indian Political Debate - 2

[acharya]

IDEOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS

Nation building is not for the faint hearted
By Dr Gautam Sen

The RSS is perhaps exceptional, as the one body that has escaped the epidemic of absurdity that has overtaken India, though it could do with some organisational reform and the self-conscious acquisition of intellectual horsepower. The communists have abandoned all pretence of believing anything at all, like their counterparts everywhere, except nurturing anti-national vote-banks and a growing economic empire.

Nation building is not for the faint-hearted. Unfortunately, India’s political culture is suffused with farcical vote-bank politics and prodigious nonsense. All sorts of mediocre, corrupt and dangerous people are strutting about the political stage engaged in low theatre. The nasty virus, which could eventually cost India its independence and what remains of its traditional cultural identity, has infected virtually every national institution. Not everybody is either an idiot or engaged in criminal activity in the name of the public good though a majority of politicians are indeed. In addition, too many people imagine that the Almighty bestowed timeless VVIP status on them and the advancement of their own crass personal and family interests somehow benefits the nation.

Nations have only been built by breaking bones and worse. Worrying about what CNN, the BBC or NDTV will say about one’s political actions is a virtual guarantee of national suicide. Those who wish to preserve India’s territorial integrity and restore its rich cultural heritage, which only exists now in a most truncated form, and advance its political interests as a nation will need to re-write the script. The RSS is perhaps exceptional, as the one body that has escaped the epidemic of absurdity that has overtaken India, though it could do with some organisational reform and the self-conscious acquisition of intellectual horsepower. The communists have abandoned all pretence of believing anything at all, like their counterparts everywhere, except nurturing anti-national vote-banks and a growing economic empire though they threaten to partition India again and halt the little economic progress it has made.

Now is the time for action, harsh words and firm deeds across the board. Such decisive engagement will galvanise and unite the country rather than divide it, as the dimwits of the bartered national media, in hock to foreign interests, would have us believe. The RSS leadership alone is capable of sponsoring this since even the political movement it spawned is almost beyond redemption, as the founding fathers of the RSS presciently feared would happen. Pussyfooting and telling tall tales about good intentions and promises of great deeds will no longer do. India is in too much serious danger to entertain the balm of political correctness.

India’s principal enemy remains the US because it is the most powerful actor on the world stage and intrusive Christian imperialist, reaching deep into India today. For all their many sins, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi disapproved of American influence in India. By contrast, their successors have thrown all caution to the winds. Instead of dealing with the US cynically to gain advantage for India they have decided to turn India into a Pakistan, ready to do American bidding and encouraging the spread of Christianity. The NDA started the rot, which the thoroughly Christianised Sonia Congress is aiding with alacrity. All of them have conveniently forgotten that India’s Chinese and Pakistani tormentors were armed and put in place by the US. Both China and Pakistan acquired their nuclear weapons prowess with assiduous American succour and the latter has been trained and armed by it since the 1950s. And at every juncture, the British and US establishments decry everything Indian and Hindu, equating their mildest protest against Islamo-Christian imperialism with fascism.

Islam and Christianity are on the march against everything Indian tradition represents. Their nefarious designs within India are unambiguously co-ordinated since they first seek to eliminate what remains of the Hindu opposition to them. This is an old colonial ploy of cutting off the head in order to control the body, which the Portuguese did by engaging in orgies of mass murder of Brahmins. This slender group and other alleged upper caste oppressors are the groups the would-be conquerors of India first wish to dis-empower because they regard others as more manageable. The supposed Dalit uprising is being manipulated by an Islamo-Christian conspiracy, the bitter harvest of which is evident in the social extermination of upper castes in Tamil Nadu. India’s Marxists are a mere conspiratorial appendage to this subversion. However, it is not at all clear the so-called oppressed castes will exchange the miasma of Islamo-Christian slavery for the real and imagined grievances they have accumulated against the Hindu upper castes.

Of course the actual unfolding of this story is more complicated because the biggest collaborators with Islamo-Christian conquest are a significant body of the upper castes themselves. And it is they who have brought India to its current sorry state with unequalled malignancy and stupidity since Independence. Yet, paradoxically, the upper castes have surrendered many of their privileges, though also prompted by some determined protest by the least privileged in India themselves. But the very bundling of the upper castes as an undifferentiated object of hatred by the collaborationist secular bourgeoisie of India and Islamo-Christian terrorists is very similar to the Nazi depiction of Jewry. Eventually, that ended in genocide against the Jews. The incumbent upper caste collaborators will be fully complicit in their own destruction because it is their removal as a social and political presence in India that has always been the real goal of Islam and Christianity.

Decades of experience suggests that the attempt to awaken Hindus in sufficient numbers to combat the growing threat to India has not enjoyed sustained success though they could be mobilised more effectively in terms of their local, regional affiliations as Hindus (rather than a united body of people nationally). The hostile and predatory forces arrayed all around now, including those in government, wish to extinguish both Hinduism and the Indian nation. Although these two national identities are intimately linked, they are not synonymous. It may therefore be worthwhile to highlight the challenge posed to India by its enemies rather than their threat to Hinduism per se. At the same time, defending India patriotically has the great merit of also advancing the cause of Hinduism, most of the time.

Thus, the enemies of Hindus, secular politicians, the Church and Islam, should be exposed in terms of their threat to India and its cultural, territorial and political integrity. A varied and rich seam can be mined in this respect, from the diabolical activities of foreign NGOs and the loss of Indian territory, everywhere from J&K to Assam, to ‘foreign’ perversion of Indian traditions and White, Christian imperialism, the principal enemy of India. Such a strategy has the potential of eliciting a wider positive response from Hindus as a whole, especially the growing numbers in urban India who tend to leave behind their rural parochialism to become conscious of themselves as Indians. It may even capture the imagination of a good many non-Hindus, especially non-Hindu women to whose interests Islam, for one, is deeply inimical. This pattern of political mobilisation, on behalf of India, is already evident in practice, but needs to become a conscious and systematic political strategy.

(The writer taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science until 2004.)