05-22-2009, 04:52 PM
<b><span style='color:blue'>Election 2009 - The BJP got what it deserved - III </span></b>
<b>Abandoning Kurukshetra before the war is won</b>
The BJPâs loss in 2004 cast a pall of gloom over Hindu nationalists; for some of us even in 2004, the gloom came with intense anger. Five years later, the BJPâs loss in 2009 has caused more anger than gloom because five years is a long time for a determined person wielding state power to implement several agendas; and the BJP, criminally culpable for allowing the destructive ambitions of a few to subvert its raison dâetre, handed the Hindu nation back into the hands of the Italian Christian for another term of five years. The Congress, a British creature, may take Sonia Gandhi in its stride and look upon her as another Wedderburn or Hume, but for the Hindu nation, it was alien and oppressive colonial rule all over again. It is this knowledge that causes the despondency and the rage. There is an African-American adage which goes likes this: If you are cheated once, shame on them; if you are cheated again, shame on you.
Hindus, who are familiar only with Aurobindo the spiritualist, would be astonished by the content of a hitherto less known corpus of his political writings; Aurobindoâs writings from 1893 until 1908 are those of an angry Hindu nationalist. But it was an anger that produced his finest writings, a fiery, eternally inspirational nationalism that raises the mind from despondency and prepares it for war. Aurobindo was at war as much with the Indian National Congress of which he was a part, as he was with the colonial British government. He spared no one whom he considered serving the nation ill, organization or individuals â the Indian National Congress, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea - Aurobindo spared no one, not even Gandhi for whom he reserved his harshest criticism.
In 1903 Aurobindo was confronted by similar heartache and paralyzing gloom that we see descended on us today. But with characteristic anger, he denied himself and us the luxury of depression.
Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible; that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses; no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction. (Bhawani Mandir, India can be Reborn, page 65. Bhawani Mandir sometimes referred to as a âtractâ and sometimes as âpamphletâ was written in 1903)
It was obvious to Aurobindo in 1903 that the direction in which these leaders were taking the INC was heading nowhere and spelt only doom for the Hindu nation and that is why, exasperated by the general wimpishness of the leaders of the INC, he roared in anger â Politics is the work of the kshatriya; by implication Aurobindo meant politics was not for the faint-hearted or the opportunist. He also implied that politics essentially is the ever-preparedness for war. The brilliance of Aurobindoâs political writings is in the brevity. The sutra, Politics is the work of the kshatriya, is pregnant with an entire treatise on rajadharma and rajanithi.
That which Aurobindo saw in 1903, Hedgewar saw in 1920. On the eve of the Nagpur Congress, Dr. Hedgewar with Dr. Moonje, realizing with great disquiet the direction in which Gandhi was leading the INC, pleaded with Aurobindo to return to active politics and assume Presidentship of the Nagpur Congress. But Aurobindo, who for inexplicable reasons chose to abandon his political Kurukshetra to seek refuge in the safe haven of the French colony of Pondicherry, refused to return and Gandhi led the freedom struggle towards vivisection.
In the aftermath of the Moplah massacre which Gandhi refused to denounce even mildly, Dr. Hedgewar understood that the Gandhi-led Indian National Congress was not merely un-Hindu but was becoming positively anti-Hindu with no intention of stopping or dealing with an ascendant jihadi Islam embodied in the Muslim League and the Khilafat Committee. Hedgewar was not weak and did not choose extinction for the Hindus or the Hindu nation; with visionary foresight, within five years of the Moplah jihad against the Hindus of the Malabar, he founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Golwalkar, who inherited the mantle of leadership from Doctor Hedgewar, in the bloody aftermath of the vivisection of the Hindu nation by Islam, Britain, Gandhi and the Congress, picked Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee from the Hindu Mahasabha to create the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. Thus the RSS and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh were created to protect Hindus and the Hindu nation in specific times of our recent history when Hindus and the Hindu nation suffered grievous wounds.
It bears mention that one of the central causes for the failure of the Cabinet Mission in 1946, which provoked Jinnah to call for Direct Action leading inexorably to vivisection was Gandhiâs insistence on including a Congress Muslim in the quota of five representatives given to the INC, in the Interim Government, a demand that incensed Jinnah. The Muslim League already had five League Muslims and Gandhiâs insistence on including a Congress Muslim, while it enraged the Muslim League, had it materialized, would have tilted the Interim Government in favour of the Muslims vis a vis the Hindus; this was typical Gandhian politics.
Just so did Murli Manohar Joshi react on television two days ago when asked why he thought the BJP failed so miserably at the hustings. Joshi, who prides himself on his scholarship, was so eager to throw his hat into the ring and succeed to the throne as secular leader of a secular party, that he failed to recall history to mind when he declared solemnly that the BJP leadership alone was to blame and the BJP lost because it had not fielded Muslims in significant numbers!
And just so did Arun Jaitley forget his partyâs history. The Times of India carried in February 2009, ahead of the elections, answers from different political parties to the question, âWho does your party representâ? Like Gandhi before him, who said the Congress was not a Hindu party and did not represent Hindu interests, Jaitley, deliberately choosing to forget the historical context in which the RSS and the Jana Sangh came into being answered, âBJP represents the common man, the underprivileged, the Dalit, minorities, agriculturists as well as industrialists. Despite the Congressâ efforts to brand BJP as a Hindu party and malign us as communal, more and more Muslims are coming to the party fold. Isnât it enough indication to prove that ours is truly a secular partyâ? The BJP had metamorphosed into a grotesque imitation of Gandhiâs Congress.
The Congress party, controlled by the iron fist of Sonia Gandhi was not described as a creature of colonial intent for nothing. The Sachar Committee, like the Minto-Morley âreformsâ aimed at empowering the Muslims on all fronts. Aurobindo then called it âencouraging Mahomeddan rowdyismâ. This was communal politics of the most brazen kind; to make sure that the Hindus got the message loud and clear, Manmohan Singh pronounced that Muslims had the first right to all resources in the country. Samuel Reddy had let loose the church to rampage across Andhra Pradesh while Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa not only vied with each other luring Christians and Muslims to their fold, they lured them additionally by mounting frontal attacks against Hindu dharma. The church and Islam have carved Southern Tamil Nadu and the Tamil Nadu coast equally between them.
Under Italian Sonia Gandhi, the UPA government has facilitated the phenomenal rise of the church and Islam in every part of the country. Sixty years after independence from colonial rule, independent Hindu-majority India has not reversed a single loss suffered by the Hindu nation in 1947, nor avenged vivisection and everything that came along with it. All political parties, the BJP included, have courted the Abrahamic minorities because irrespective of their actual numbers or population percentage, they constitute a decisive vote-bank. This minority vote-bank could have been rendered ineffective only by Hinduising the election agenda. Speaking for the Abrahamic minorities was âsecularâ while speaking for Hindus was âcommunalâ.
Farooq Abdullah, the arch communalist, in whose body there is not a drop of secular blood, former Chief Minister of a state whose state constitution refuses to accept secularism even in principle, a state which with its peculiar and Islamised electoral arrangement will not allow Hindus or Buddhists to become Chief Minister, hailing from a state whose jihadis genocided and threw out all Hindus from the Kashmir Valley, without batting an eyelid, when asked to comment on the election results, declared deadpan â the people of India have voted for secularism. This Sunni Muslim in whose state a Hindu cannot become a Chief Minister openly expresses his fierce ambition to be the President of this Hindu-majority nation.
The countryâs political discourse defines secularism in practice as being uncompromisingly anti-Hindu, which makes Hindu interests and Abrahamic minority interests a zero sum game. It was so under Nehruvian secularism and it continues to remain so in Nehru-Gandhian colonial rule.
Elections are about capturing state power and state power is intended to implement and fulfill well-planned agendas. If politics were only state and not nation, then politics would be mere governance sans ideology. But in Hindu tradition of statecraft politics is not merely governance it is also paritraana or protection of the good and the weak, as also sustaining dharma; while vinaasa was destroying or ending by force anything that violated dharma or hindered the state in carrying out its responsibility. Hindu rajya was not just about laying roads and planting trees it was also meant to be used to ensure the primacy of dharma on this bhumi.
The BJPâs fall was imminent because it entered the political arena without a commitment to Hindu rajya to protect the Hindu rashtra. It captured power with the Hindu vote and then kicked the Hindus in their teeth. The BJP kicked the ladder that lifted it up. It was expected of the BJP to â
* Reclaim PoK
* Annex Bangladesh
* End separatism in J&K by de-legitimising the state constitution; Article 370 would have disappeared automatically
* Check the influx of Bangladeshi Muslims
* Stop all foreign funds for NGOs
* Halt the uncontrolled mushrooming of churches, prayer houses and madarasas
* Ban religious conversion altogether
* Bring in a central legislation to free all Hindu temples from government control
* Ban cow slaughter and protect cattle wealth
The BJP was expected to do all this step by measured step in the seven years that it remained in Delhi. But coalition politics de-Hinduised the BJP beyond recognition. The BJP did nothing for the Hindus who catapulted it to power when it ruled the country; in the opposition for four years between 2004 and 2009, it did even less. To make sure the BJP was not given the time to go back to its Hindu agenda, the UPA and the hands that pull the UPA strings, threw one red herring after another under the BJP nose. First they ran mindlessly behind the Volcker Report, then they ran behind the Mitrokhin Report, and then they ran behind the invisible Ram Setu.
The BJP was like several animal rights activists I know; they will not lift a finger to put a little crow back in its nest, nor feed the street dog or the cow at the gate; but they will form a human chain to stop killing of the distant whale or the seals in the Antarctic. Coalition politics and the comprehensive failure of in-house Hindu intellectuals to formulate and articulate the contours of Hindu Rajya made it just that much easier for the BJP to abandon the Ramjanmabhumi and gosamrakshana and take up Volcker and Mitrokhin. The distant cause called for no effort from the BJP except stall parliament and shout a few slogans.
The BJP had abandoned its Kurukshetra even before the war was won, leaving the foot-soldiers behind to fight the war. Now, as always, Hindus of this nation had been betrayed and let down only by their leaders. A large measure of the blame for the BJPâs fall has to be laid at the RSS door.
19th May, 2009
(To be continued)
<b>Abandoning Kurukshetra before the war is won</b>
The BJPâs loss in 2004 cast a pall of gloom over Hindu nationalists; for some of us even in 2004, the gloom came with intense anger. Five years later, the BJPâs loss in 2009 has caused more anger than gloom because five years is a long time for a determined person wielding state power to implement several agendas; and the BJP, criminally culpable for allowing the destructive ambitions of a few to subvert its raison dâetre, handed the Hindu nation back into the hands of the Italian Christian for another term of five years. The Congress, a British creature, may take Sonia Gandhi in its stride and look upon her as another Wedderburn or Hume, but for the Hindu nation, it was alien and oppressive colonial rule all over again. It is this knowledge that causes the despondency and the rage. There is an African-American adage which goes likes this: If you are cheated once, shame on them; if you are cheated again, shame on you.
Hindus, who are familiar only with Aurobindo the spiritualist, would be astonished by the content of a hitherto less known corpus of his political writings; Aurobindoâs writings from 1893 until 1908 are those of an angry Hindu nationalist. But it was an anger that produced his finest writings, a fiery, eternally inspirational nationalism that raises the mind from despondency and prepares it for war. Aurobindo was at war as much with the Indian National Congress of which he was a part, as he was with the colonial British government. He spared no one whom he considered serving the nation ill, organization or individuals â the Indian National Congress, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea - Aurobindo spared no one, not even Gandhi for whom he reserved his harshest criticism.
In 1903 Aurobindo was confronted by similar heartache and paralyzing gloom that we see descended on us today. But with characteristic anger, he denied himself and us the luxury of depression.
Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible; that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses; no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction. (Bhawani Mandir, India can be Reborn, page 65. Bhawani Mandir sometimes referred to as a âtractâ and sometimes as âpamphletâ was written in 1903)
It was obvious to Aurobindo in 1903 that the direction in which these leaders were taking the INC was heading nowhere and spelt only doom for the Hindu nation and that is why, exasperated by the general wimpishness of the leaders of the INC, he roared in anger â Politics is the work of the kshatriya; by implication Aurobindo meant politics was not for the faint-hearted or the opportunist. He also implied that politics essentially is the ever-preparedness for war. The brilliance of Aurobindoâs political writings is in the brevity. The sutra, Politics is the work of the kshatriya, is pregnant with an entire treatise on rajadharma and rajanithi.
That which Aurobindo saw in 1903, Hedgewar saw in 1920. On the eve of the Nagpur Congress, Dr. Hedgewar with Dr. Moonje, realizing with great disquiet the direction in which Gandhi was leading the INC, pleaded with Aurobindo to return to active politics and assume Presidentship of the Nagpur Congress. But Aurobindo, who for inexplicable reasons chose to abandon his political Kurukshetra to seek refuge in the safe haven of the French colony of Pondicherry, refused to return and Gandhi led the freedom struggle towards vivisection.
In the aftermath of the Moplah massacre which Gandhi refused to denounce even mildly, Dr. Hedgewar understood that the Gandhi-led Indian National Congress was not merely un-Hindu but was becoming positively anti-Hindu with no intention of stopping or dealing with an ascendant jihadi Islam embodied in the Muslim League and the Khilafat Committee. Hedgewar was not weak and did not choose extinction for the Hindus or the Hindu nation; with visionary foresight, within five years of the Moplah jihad against the Hindus of the Malabar, he founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Golwalkar, who inherited the mantle of leadership from Doctor Hedgewar, in the bloody aftermath of the vivisection of the Hindu nation by Islam, Britain, Gandhi and the Congress, picked Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee from the Hindu Mahasabha to create the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. Thus the RSS and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh were created to protect Hindus and the Hindu nation in specific times of our recent history when Hindus and the Hindu nation suffered grievous wounds.
It bears mention that one of the central causes for the failure of the Cabinet Mission in 1946, which provoked Jinnah to call for Direct Action leading inexorably to vivisection was Gandhiâs insistence on including a Congress Muslim in the quota of five representatives given to the INC, in the Interim Government, a demand that incensed Jinnah. The Muslim League already had five League Muslims and Gandhiâs insistence on including a Congress Muslim, while it enraged the Muslim League, had it materialized, would have tilted the Interim Government in favour of the Muslims vis a vis the Hindus; this was typical Gandhian politics.
Just so did Murli Manohar Joshi react on television two days ago when asked why he thought the BJP failed so miserably at the hustings. Joshi, who prides himself on his scholarship, was so eager to throw his hat into the ring and succeed to the throne as secular leader of a secular party, that he failed to recall history to mind when he declared solemnly that the BJP leadership alone was to blame and the BJP lost because it had not fielded Muslims in significant numbers!
And just so did Arun Jaitley forget his partyâs history. The Times of India carried in February 2009, ahead of the elections, answers from different political parties to the question, âWho does your party representâ? Like Gandhi before him, who said the Congress was not a Hindu party and did not represent Hindu interests, Jaitley, deliberately choosing to forget the historical context in which the RSS and the Jana Sangh came into being answered, âBJP represents the common man, the underprivileged, the Dalit, minorities, agriculturists as well as industrialists. Despite the Congressâ efforts to brand BJP as a Hindu party and malign us as communal, more and more Muslims are coming to the party fold. Isnât it enough indication to prove that ours is truly a secular partyâ? The BJP had metamorphosed into a grotesque imitation of Gandhiâs Congress.
The Congress party, controlled by the iron fist of Sonia Gandhi was not described as a creature of colonial intent for nothing. The Sachar Committee, like the Minto-Morley âreformsâ aimed at empowering the Muslims on all fronts. Aurobindo then called it âencouraging Mahomeddan rowdyismâ. This was communal politics of the most brazen kind; to make sure that the Hindus got the message loud and clear, Manmohan Singh pronounced that Muslims had the first right to all resources in the country. Samuel Reddy had let loose the church to rampage across Andhra Pradesh while Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa not only vied with each other luring Christians and Muslims to their fold, they lured them additionally by mounting frontal attacks against Hindu dharma. The church and Islam have carved Southern Tamil Nadu and the Tamil Nadu coast equally between them.
Under Italian Sonia Gandhi, the UPA government has facilitated the phenomenal rise of the church and Islam in every part of the country. Sixty years after independence from colonial rule, independent Hindu-majority India has not reversed a single loss suffered by the Hindu nation in 1947, nor avenged vivisection and everything that came along with it. All political parties, the BJP included, have courted the Abrahamic minorities because irrespective of their actual numbers or population percentage, they constitute a decisive vote-bank. This minority vote-bank could have been rendered ineffective only by Hinduising the election agenda. Speaking for the Abrahamic minorities was âsecularâ while speaking for Hindus was âcommunalâ.
Farooq Abdullah, the arch communalist, in whose body there is not a drop of secular blood, former Chief Minister of a state whose state constitution refuses to accept secularism even in principle, a state which with its peculiar and Islamised electoral arrangement will not allow Hindus or Buddhists to become Chief Minister, hailing from a state whose jihadis genocided and threw out all Hindus from the Kashmir Valley, without batting an eyelid, when asked to comment on the election results, declared deadpan â the people of India have voted for secularism. This Sunni Muslim in whose state a Hindu cannot become a Chief Minister openly expresses his fierce ambition to be the President of this Hindu-majority nation.
The countryâs political discourse defines secularism in practice as being uncompromisingly anti-Hindu, which makes Hindu interests and Abrahamic minority interests a zero sum game. It was so under Nehruvian secularism and it continues to remain so in Nehru-Gandhian colonial rule.
Elections are about capturing state power and state power is intended to implement and fulfill well-planned agendas. If politics were only state and not nation, then politics would be mere governance sans ideology. But in Hindu tradition of statecraft politics is not merely governance it is also paritraana or protection of the good and the weak, as also sustaining dharma; while vinaasa was destroying or ending by force anything that violated dharma or hindered the state in carrying out its responsibility. Hindu rajya was not just about laying roads and planting trees it was also meant to be used to ensure the primacy of dharma on this bhumi.
The BJPâs fall was imminent because it entered the political arena without a commitment to Hindu rajya to protect the Hindu rashtra. It captured power with the Hindu vote and then kicked the Hindus in their teeth. The BJP kicked the ladder that lifted it up. It was expected of the BJP to â
* Reclaim PoK
* Annex Bangladesh
* End separatism in J&K by de-legitimising the state constitution; Article 370 would have disappeared automatically
* Check the influx of Bangladeshi Muslims
* Stop all foreign funds for NGOs
* Halt the uncontrolled mushrooming of churches, prayer houses and madarasas
* Ban religious conversion altogether
* Bring in a central legislation to free all Hindu temples from government control
* Ban cow slaughter and protect cattle wealth
The BJP was expected to do all this step by measured step in the seven years that it remained in Delhi. But coalition politics de-Hinduised the BJP beyond recognition. The BJP did nothing for the Hindus who catapulted it to power when it ruled the country; in the opposition for four years between 2004 and 2009, it did even less. To make sure the BJP was not given the time to go back to its Hindu agenda, the UPA and the hands that pull the UPA strings, threw one red herring after another under the BJP nose. First they ran mindlessly behind the Volcker Report, then they ran behind the Mitrokhin Report, and then they ran behind the invisible Ram Setu.
The BJP was like several animal rights activists I know; they will not lift a finger to put a little crow back in its nest, nor feed the street dog or the cow at the gate; but they will form a human chain to stop killing of the distant whale or the seals in the Antarctic. Coalition politics and the comprehensive failure of in-house Hindu intellectuals to formulate and articulate the contours of Hindu Rajya made it just that much easier for the BJP to abandon the Ramjanmabhumi and gosamrakshana and take up Volcker and Mitrokhin. The distant cause called for no effort from the BJP except stall parliament and shout a few slogans.
The BJP had abandoned its Kurukshetra even before the war was won, leaving the foot-soldiers behind to fight the war. Now, as always, Hindus of this nation had been betrayed and let down only by their leaders. A large measure of the blame for the BJPâs fall has to be laid at the RSS door.
19th May, 2009
(To be continued)