The Alarming Shrinkage of the Hindu Physical Space

In 1947, India’s political leadership meekly acquiesced to the Partition of the sacred Bharatavarsha. The Hindu Samaj continues to bear the horrific costs of the cowardice of a few people in the Congress party. With no exaggeration, the political independence of India paved the way for the systematic dismantling of every facet of the Sanatana civilization. The dismantling was done through legislation.

India’s political freedom replaced an ancient civilization – which was built on the foundation of Dharma and not paper-laws – with opaque and undefined slogans about secularism and socialism. It stressed on the necessity to completely abandon Hinduism, as we shall see. Speaking about the character of this political leadership, here is what RC Majumdar says :

The tragedy of Gandhi’s life was that [the] members of his inner council who followed him for more than twenty years with unquestioned obedience, took the fatal steps leading to the partition of India without his knowledge, not to speak of his consent… [Jinnah’s fight] was…a fight not for the freedom of India…but for the freedom of the Muslims from the tyrannical yoke of the Hindus, as he put it. He won the fight; the cult of violence decided the issue. To what extent Gandhi’s cult of non-violence may claim credit for the freedom of India is a matter of opinion. But there is no doubt that the creation of Pakistan was the triumph of violence – in its naked and most brutal form – and of the leadership of Jinnah. Nobody can be reasonably sure that India would have surely attained Independence…even without Gandhi, but it is extremely doubtful whether there would have been a Pakistan without Jinnah. So, if we are to judge by the result alone, the events of 1946-7 testify to the superiority of violence to non-violence in practical politics, and of Jinnah to the leaders of the Congress.

India’s political freedom was the dark, epochal event that completely cut off her Hindu cultural roots with the active patronage of the Nehruvian state. As one of the vilest ironies of his life, Nawab Nehru who rallied against colonialism throughout his Prime Ministerial tenure, retained that most visible symbol of colonialism : The English language. Likewise, as a great champion of Democracy, he heralded Dynasty in Indian Democracy to the extent that after seventy long years, the pathetic fate of his Congress party is the fact that its supreme commander is a white foreign woman.

Apart from the socialist seeds of India’s economic impoverishment that he sowed, his coopting of the Communists who systematically set the intellectual, educational, and cultural agenda proved equally destructive. Dr David Frawley provides a glimpse into how this agenda has panned out :

One of the main purposes of history books, as taught in different countries in the world, is to instill a sense of national pride and honor – in short, to inculcate a sense of patriotism and nationalism. Whether it is the United States, Great Britain, Russia, Germany or China, this is certainly the case today and has been so as long as these countries have existed as modern Nations… However, India is a strange and unique country in which history books are often anti-national in nature. India has largely kept intact the British approach to Indian history devised in the colonial era. Students of such textbooks come away apologetic or confused about their country and its traditions. Textbooks in Marxist ruled States of India like West Bengal and Kerala leave their students with a sense of the greatness of Communism… History books in India try to ignore the dominant Hindu ethos of the country and its history before the Islamic period… The real danger in India is not the arising of a chauvinistic nationalism like that of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy…but a lack of national spirit and historical consciousness that keeps people alienated from their roots and the country divided.

Indeed, till the late 1980s, this Nehruvian discourse ensured that Hindus were continually put on the defensive. Thanks to having a stranglehold over avenues for the dissemination of information, the purveyors of this discourse, also acting as the gatekeepers of information, actively suppressed the airing of contrary or alternative views. Two well-researched books that illustrate in firsthand detail as to how this was accomplished include ‘Secular Theocracy Versus Liberal Democracy’ and ‘Perversion of India’s Political Parlance’.

The Renewal of the 1990s and Contemporary Challenges

However, as a parallel development, a much-maligned and unpopular section of activists, academics, scholars, thinkers, and writers worked silently and at great professional and personal cost. Over a course of nearly five decades, they achieved two things : They produced well-researched volumes in the defence of Sanatana Dharma and exposed imperialistic ideologies like Islam, Christianity, and Communism. This in itself is a story meriting an independent scholarly study.

In a parallel development, various private organizations also defended and championed Hindu causes in the political, social and other spheres. This paved way for yet another resurgence of Sanatana Dharma in the 1990s. Long-forgotten but valuable Hindu traditions, texts, and knowledge bodies were revived, and focused research began in areas like Ayurveda, astronomy, metallurgy, education, architecture, etc.

Most importantly, the resurgence of Sanatana Dharma that began in the 1990s has given significant international exposure and support for Hindu causes to the extent that India is now in a truly post-Nehruvian era although the power centers for disseminating the discourse of this resurgence continue to be in the thrall of the Reinvented Marxists. This difficulty is compounded by two other prominent factors.

The first of these has its roots in the mental colonization of Hindus who are genuinely proud of their traditions and heritage but are on the defensive, offering kneejerk and emotionally-charged reactions when faced with intentional provocation about their traditions, arts, practices, traditions, history, and indeed, their very identity. It will take decades of quiet, sustained and confid-ent effort to completely cut off this mental colonization.

The other, greater threat is the fact that Sanatana Dharma today, more than at any other time in history, is being relentlessly assaulted from almost all quarters : The ongoing global and local Jihad with Hindu India as a prime target, the worldwide Christian conversion industry, the Reincarnated Marxists, the English media, minority-vote-bank-pandering politicians, compromised academics, think tanks and NGOs. Unlike the earlier periods where physical force formed a major arsenal, today, the name of the game is infiltration and subversion from within.

This is how it works.

Take a random example of a promising young intern working on a prestigious project at a think tank located and based in India. This intern would have no idea that the output of his/her research will be used by the said think tank as raw input to manufacture a negative opinion against his/her own country. Thanks to the ease of instant publishing and a global audience, this will be amplified and relentlessly pushed for months if not years. The next stage would be manufacturing a narrative that justifies the fomenting of violent internal disturbances. When this cycle repeats often enough and acquires enough steam, a physical ‘revolution’ will be engineered through which regime change will be implemented. We’re already living through this scary phenomenon.

And so, this is a new front of a civilizational battle that India is little equipped to fight as things currently stand. How easily we forget ! The aforementioned nexus of internal subversion was successful in denying the US visa to Narendra Modi, the then Gujarat Chief Minister. It was part of a deep state cabal working overtime to desperately stop him from becoming the Prime Minister of India. Now, the same forces have grown even more desperate to topple him at all costs.

The other undeniable fact that is that a good number of these attacks originate from Indians who are born as Hindus. They are either on the payroll of a foreign paymaster or are indoctrinated or have deep-seated and uncured issues. There is yet another crucial front of this relentless assault against Hindu India. As the eminent scholar and demographer, Dr JK Bajaj notes, the physical space of Hindus has been shrinking continually under their very noses.

Hindus have irretrievably lost large parts of the North East to Christianity. They remain helpless witnesses to the consequences of a massive, ongoing conversion drive in Andhra Pradesh. Meanwhile, Islam continues to gain ground through the power of prolific breeding and illegal immigration. West Bengal represents the basket case of this phenomenon, thanks to a ruthless policy of encouraging illegal immigration over a protracted period. Especially during the last decade, the State Government has become complicit in this assault by surrendering to an all-encompassing Jihad against the Hindu society.

The comparative Hindu response at various levels to these atrocities and threats falls woefully short to say the least. In terms of sheer numbers, the best minds that can mount an effective counter to such a multi-pronged assault have been lost to lucrative careers in engineering, management, medicine, etc.

And despite these visible and physical doomsday assaults, Hindu voices that warn and speak out against all these are branded as alarmist !

History is the surest guide as always. We need to relentlessly disseminate the profound and heroic lessons that enabled Hindus for hundreds of years to survive, adapt, and bounce back. However, the current situation presents an existential threat unlike anything that the Hindu Samaj has seen before. And we continue to largely clutch at the straws and grope blindly for some sort of ‘permanent’ solutions. A comprehensive rethinking about the fundamentals is the need of the hour.

(Courtesy : Sandeep Balakrishna on dharmadispatch.in; 19.9.2024)

We need to disseminate the profound lessons that enabled Hindus for hundreds of years to survive, adapt, and bounce back !