Dear BJP, I’m a Hindu and I reject Hindutva

Don’t teach me about my own religion. Who I should worship. How I should dress or what I should eat.

POLITICS |  Long-form | 12-09-2015

Suchitra Krishnamoorthi @suchitrak

I am like most other urban Indians. Apolitical. Or non political. A novice. An outsider. But a well wisher. Because I love my India.

And like most other urban Indians, other than election time, when we dutifully go and cast our votes silently, politics has no impact on our lives. Yes we gasp over scams and purported stories, but just as quickly dust the sand off our feet and move on. Politics never enters our homes - certainly not our bedrooms and kitchens. Yes we cursed much when Shiv Sena changed our beloved Bombay’s name to Mumbai when they came to power in 1995, but quickly saw the rationale behind the move. Desi euphoria and jingoism bloomed. With the luxury of life digested with a silver spoon, it was easy to see the virtue behind a Shivaji statue.

Even when vehicles were set ablaze in Marathi Manoos prejudice and Biharis asked to return to their home state, we ignored them with the hope that sense would soon prevail. It didn’t. Sadly. Hindutva ideology had started to seep in. To even the most neutral amongst us, it was unacceptable.

Never mind the disappointment. Manmohan Singh is a brilliant economist and will herald a new India we were told. After all as India’s finance minister in the 90’s, he had introduced to us the concept of India shining. But his failure as prime minister that he was ushered into in 2004 was soon apparent - what was the power Sonia Gandhi wielded over him? OMG and why? What on earth for? Why did he look like a deer trapped under the headlights?

Sycophancy was the giant ogre in this Congress government - everybody was getting swallowed and the whole country was dying. An Italian accent became the most despised sound in the Indian psyche - even senior leaders like Digvijaya Singh had fallen into the Gandhi scion brainwash. Rahul Gandhi? Really? But Pappu can’t dance saala. Oh and not to forget that Vadra boy. What did Priyanka see in him ya? Looks like a total goonda and how did his whole family die so mysteriously ya? OMG? What? Forbes has listed Sonia Gandhi as the third richest woman in the world? Baapre! And she still wears those cheap cotton sarees?  What an actress ya. Better than Shabana Azmi!

Uff India and its Bollywood fixation. Anyway to cut a long story short, when it was time to re-elect a new government in 2014, I, like most other urban Indians reeling under the corruption of dynastic politics and a failed Congress government, was filled with hope. Hope for a new India. Hope for change. Hope that things will finally get  better.

Arvind Kejriwal and his Gandhi delusion (remember how he went on a fast every time and for anything and tried to project that he is a Mahatma Gandhi reincarnate while trying to hide the fact that he is CIA (Ford Foundation) funded? Of course, his common man phonyism gave away his own opportunistic game way too soon and he fell by the wayside. Phew! He was India’s first anti-corruption hope dashed. Who could we turn to?

Narendra Modi-led BJP seemed like the only hope in April-May 2014. Were we wrong to expect?

India was desperate. We needed a leader. Badly. We needed progress. We needed a semblance of honesty. We desperately needed hope again. It came in the form of Narendra Modi. Brilliantly packaged. Karmachari. Brahmachari. Sanskaari.

So well was the Gujarat model marketed that Modi became the one man capable of delivering us – India – into the future. A future built on the foundation of tradition. Indian tradition. As anti-Italian as one could get.

The fact that the only other prior perception the public had of BJP as a party was its Karnataka ministers – CC Patil and Laxman Savadi watching porn in Assembly in 2012, or the ban on women wearing jeans in the state and being beaten for consuming alcohol,  but all that was soon obliterated by Modi’s own five-star charisma and his PR machinery. If anybody deserves an Oscar for PR, it is indeed Sri Narendra Modi’s team.

So, swayed by a desperate hope as we were, longing pleading and begging for a better India as we were, I, like every other urban Indian, even went out on a limb urging my friends and family to vote for Narendra Modi. Stated on social media that Narendra Modi’s greatest ally was Rahul Gandhi. And I wasn’t wrong.

The BJP government won because we Indians had become so soooo Gandhi family intolerant - any alternative seemed like manna from heaven in comparison.

Had the Congress propped some other leader of calibre other than the gora chitta Rahul Gandhi or his Maa, the votes would have been divided. But Rahul sealed it. BJP owes him a lot for their victory.

But what have they done with their victory? It’s been disappointing to say the least. Not just disappointing. Annoying. Frightening. Unacceptable. Totally. Totally, totally unacceptable. Despicable really.

I remember whilst urging my friends to vote for Narendra Modi, a Muslim friend had joked that if BJP comes to power he will have to get on a boat to Karachi. So real loomed the spectre of the Godhra riots in everyone’s head, and so real the feeling of Muslim persecution. Was he wrong?

At that point I had reprimanded my Muslim friend that his fear rose from the fact that his allegiance was with the Islamic state in the first place; so he shouldn’t use the minority card to gain undeserved rights and privileges. If Karachi is emotionally a boatride away, surely it’s where he belonged? "You don’t understand SK,” he sighed. In retrospect I think he might have been right.

Reservation and minority status for the Muslims in my view was nothing but vote bank politics. The Congress party policy of divide and rule. But hey... I admit, I don’t really understand everything. Like I said I’m a novice. But hey.. I’m also an artist enough to understand that even a novice is entitled to her worldview and I’m common enough to understand that I express what a large number of people feel but are unable to elucidate. So, here goes.

It’s been barely over a year of the BJP government and just how disappointed are we? God OMG - more than disappointed, I believe. We are shocked and hoping it’s still all a mistake. Did we ever imagine we are voting for a despotic fascist regime? What exactly is going on? WTF!

*Beef Ban* – Dear BJP! Can u please explain what wrong did the chicken or the goat do that they deserve to be killed and not the cow? Yes, yes, Congress imposed it before you, but how come they didn’t bombard it on us as much as you? Why am I suddenly feeling embarrassed about being a Hindu?

*Meat Ban* – Yes, you want revenge and oneupmanship on your Congress counterparts and distract us from the fact that you are failing completely in governance. Farmer suicides, rape, children dying by falling into potholes, Gajendra Chauhan ... need I say more!

Meat ban looks like a cheap shot at making us forget about the governance failure on all counts.

Did you say sedition charges were to be slapped against those who dare to speak up!!! I mean really? I dare you, seriously.

And what was that drivel about eliminating western culture and reclaiming Indian culture?

What exactly do you mean by that dear education minister (HRD), Smriti Irani, you who is not even sure of what education degree you have acquired yourself or in what language? For someone, who doesn’t herself know if she is a BA by correspondence or a BCom by imagination, is not likely to know the difference between Hinduism and Hindutva, is she now?

Hinduism is a philosophy. The doctrine of which allows me the choice of acceptance or rejection. Ram or Ganpati or even atheism. Upanishads or Gita or tantra or mantra. Hindutva, on the other hand, is militant imposition of wrongly interpreted tenets of Hinduism. Hindutva is a political tool - nothing to do with the religion itself.

I’m not showing off or being patronising, I promise you. My grandfather and my ancestors were temple priests - my father still recites the Vedas verbatim. My sister recites them without having ever studied them - it is so in my bloodline. That’s how Hindu my lineage is.

So do not teach me about my own religion, dear BJP. Don’t tell me how I should think. Who I should worship. How I should dress or what I should eat.

I am a Hindu - by definition purer and a higher form than you can ever b e- and I reject your Hindutva. Just as Islam must reject the Taliban or Isis.

To be a Hindu is to be tolerant. It’s why we have survived as a race in spite of invasion, conversion and unimaginable attempted destruction. If you do not understand that tolerance or exercise that compassion so intrinsic to our religion, you do not deserve to call yourself Hindu. Or a leader of a democratic nation.

So dear BJP. I reject your Hindutva.  I reject your fascism. I reject your despotism.

Dare me if you will. For I speak for all of India.

Mind it! :-)

Source: dailyo

Sad, sorry state of Indian liberals under Modi sarkar

The need of the hour is to save the Indian liberalism from its Left-liberal elite.

POLITICS  |   Long-form |   05-12-2014

Shekhar Gupta  @ShekharGupta

National interest

By the time this week's India Today hits the stands, one thing would have become clearer: whether Narendra Modi is essentially an old-style politician under an extroverted modern gloss or a game changer. Because an old-timer would be a partisan to the core, defending the indefensible to the very logical end, that is, the loss of an argument and some political capital. If he is an original new phenomenon, one of a kind, or sui generis as the more scholarly people prefer to say (my venerable first news editor, late DN Singh, had banned the use of "foreign" words), he would have fired Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti. Earlier she is sent back to prayer and penance, rather than waste public money in the ministry of food processing, making a pickle of the BJP's image, the better it will be.

But really? Think again, and think hard. Do we, the currently besieged and cornered minority of Indian liberals, even want the story to end that way, and this soon? Do we want it to end at all? A sadhvi in the BJP ministry, even if a junior minister in charge of achar and chutney, while I presume her senior, Harsimrat Kaur of the Akali Dal, takes care of jams and juices, brings such solace to us liberals. It is living proof that we are intellectually right and morally superior. And most importantly, that we are losing. Poor us. Is there any future left for the Indian liberal with the rise of Narendra Modi? Why isn't the rest of the world feeling sorry for us? How can we, such a small, brave but increasingly disenfranchised community of liberals, be expected to rectify the consequence of the stupidity of crores of voters? The future is lost, a mythical past is upon us, the barbarians are at the gates. Where is my ticket to a genuinely liberal American East Coast campus or think tank?

Even for a bout of self-flagellation, this sounds harsh. If Modi lacks the political wisdom to cut his losses early enough, it is his problem and not that of his critics. In fact, the longer he perpetuates this, the more the Indian Left-liberal, will say, I told you so. From Niranjan Jyoti to Adityanath, the new saffron-robes are welcome evidence of all our warnings gone unheeded. Just as Sadhvi Rithambhara and Ashok Singhal were in the early 1990s, and Praveen Togadia and Pramod Muthalik of Sri Ram Sene in the interregnum. It would be such disappointment if Modi did the right thing now and sent Sadhvi Jyoti home. He can't deny us this living, walking and talking evidence for our unheeded warnings.

Credit must be given where it's duly deserved. In this case to American liberal academic Steve Almond, whose June 8, 2012 article ("Liberals are ruining America, I know because I am one") in the New York Times triggered this week's central thought of liberal masochism, self-isolation, mourning or, in the more apt Indian usage, rona-dhona, or even better, in Punjabi, syapa. Almond talked of how he briefly acquired liberal martyrdom in 2006 by resigning his teaching job at Boston College to protest the selection of then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker. His biggest reward, he said, was an invitation to appear on an abusive Right-wing chat show on Fox News, and he thought then that he had paid his liberal dues by standing up to sour-mouthed, shouty anchor Sean Hannity. By 2012, he said, he saw that action as less heroic. "I hadn't spoken truth to power or caused anyone to reassess secretary Rice's record. I merely provided a few minutes of gladiatorial stimulation for Fox News. In seeking to assert my moral superiority, I enabled Hannity."

If you recall 2012 America, the Right-Left polarisation cut across American society. But in 2014, six months into Modi's reign, India sounds quite similar. Almond's self-diagnosis seems to fit us too now: "This, to be blunt, is the tragic flaw of the American liberal," he said. "We choose to see ourselves as innocent victims of an escalating Right-wing fanaticism. But too often we serve as willing accomplices... and to the resulting degradation of our civic discourse." Then, turning the sword into his own belly he said: "We do this, without even meaning to, by consuming conservative folly as mass entertainment."

It is challenging for me to delve deeper into the marginalisation of the liberal in western democracies because I do not know those societies enough. But in India, the issue is compounded by the deeprooted, terminal elitism of the liberal. I have fretted for years that politically our liberal constituency is shrinking because it had become, post-independence, hyphenated with the word Left. Our national ideology emerged from the freedom movement, which was very liberal. The Congress then was a political umbrella wide enough to give room to liberals of the Left as well as the Right, and also intellectual space for them to argue. Remember, Syama Prasad Mookerjee was even a member of Nehru's cabinet, and Sardar Patel his deputy. But over the next two decades, the right was purged, artfully by Nehru and then crudely by his daughter. India's only truly liberal party therefore morphed into a Left-liberal party. You need to read Ramachandra Guha to learn more about it. But people of my generation do remember the "star" symbol of C Rajagopalachari's Swatantra Party, where much of the old Congress right collected and which once was a formidable opposition force, netting 44 Lok Sabha seats in 1967. Indira Gandhi destroyed it, and thereby India's liberal right, with her post-1969 "revolutionary" push.

This reduced liberalism to a Left monopoly as the right merged into saffron. It lasted as long as Indian politics and popular mind were dominated by old, anti-imperialist, non-aligned, West-phobic ideas of the Cold War. But it did not have the flexibility to change with new realities as the Cold War ended, global power and economic equations were rewritten and successive generations of aspirational, ambitious, impatient and post-ideological Indians rose. I am not sure Dr Manmohan Singh quite looked at it this way, but post-1991, he was probably the only famous liberal of old who thought it was time to delete the hyphenated left. By the middle of 2009, with a bigger second mandate, he was winning this campaign of ideological correction. But he was defeated by the party's embedded pinko immune system.

Pop sociology has its hazards, but I have got away with it often enough in the past, so here we go again. While Singh had the intellectual honesty to acknowledge, or to borrow the words of his political mentor Narasimha Rao, do "what to do when the ground under your feet is moving", he failed to see the very formidable elitism underpinning this left-liberalism. To be liberal, you had to be left, and to be left-liberal, your parents should have done very well, given you Doon-Stephen's-Oxbridge education, a Delhi Golf Club membership and definitely a home in the capital's Little Kremlins, Diplomatic Enclave and couple more neighbourhoods to its immediate south, in bequest. Singh and Rao didn't check out on this, and failed. That is why the liberals are back in their lefty, but also elitist, hole, or rather their ivory bunker. Why bunker, not tower, we will just get to.

It is now an uch-koti (superior) brahminical club (I use that purely in its intellectual manifestation, not a Manuwadi one). "Outsiders" are rejected. And so what if its ranks continue to shrink. A reminder was served on me very recently in a very exhaustive profile of me in a self-avowedly liberal publication that traced my apparent success over four decades and marvelled that I could get here despite being the son of a "minor bureaucrat from Haryana" and "lacking the eloquence" of my Oxbridge peers. Now, the second is a fact, but the first an exaggeration. My late father, in fact, would have been quite flattered to be described as a minor bureaucrat. He slogged all his life to rise to become one, a gazetted officer, even if a day before his retirement, so he would also have the "power" to attest somebody's certificates. He was mostly a clerk, or rather an assistant, despite his relatively high education. He struggled with money, with his tiny salary sent his children mostly to sarkari Hindi medium schools and colleges, but still made sure we bought two English and Hindi newspapers, three magazines and listened to cricket commentary on BBC regularly in English.

I say all this not to praise him, or to write belatedly an obit he was not famous, powerful or rich enough to deserve when he passed away in 1998, but to provide the sociological point of this week's National Interest.

I say this because I now believe that my parents' generation (my father would have been 85 today) was not atypical of post-independence liberal Indians, mostly Congress voters, who were willing to challenge earlier acceptance of elite domination with "Bhagwan teri maya, kahin dhoop kahin chhaya" resignation. They believed early enough that education would bring equality. Economic reform brought opportunity and then suddenly, it was no longer so life-and-death, that your parents should have done very well for you to be taken seriously. That is the reality India's elite liberals have failed to understand or embrace. In defining liberalism as an exclusive "brahminical" value of the intellectual, economic and academic upper crust, they have closed their doors to the enormously more numerous rest, as our ancestors had shut them out of Sanskrit scholarship and even science. If Mahabharata is a reality, so is the legend of Eklavya.

One of the most stirring speeches in defence of Indian secularism was once made by Ram Vilas Paswan when Vajpayee's short-lived government was seeking a confidence vote. How many Muslims came with Babur, he asked, and then answered, only 40. So how did they swell to crores? Because "people like us", he said, Dalits and lower castes, were not allowed entry in the temples, "so we went to the mosques". This is precisely what today's liberal elites have done to the tens of crores of rising, aspirational, we-don't-owe-nobody-nothing Indians, children of poorer parents like mine who beg, steal, borrow, scrounge, starve, deny themselves that pack of cigarettes to give them opportunity, if not houses in Shanti Niketan or Kautilya Marg or Golf Club memberships. Instead, Modi has embraced them and now enjoys power that no Indian prime minister has since Indira in 1971. They are now coming, smashing the defences of the elite liberal ivory, well, bunker.

Source: dailyo

India, the world’s first astro-nuclear power?

Our ancient knowledge and aviation supremacy was destroyed in the nuclear test conducted by sage Kanad in 2 BC.

HUMOUR  |   6-minute read |   05-12-2014

Kamlesh Singh @kamleshksingh

BREAKING NEWS INTO PIECES

Ajay Devgn would be so proud, his chest would become blouse if he knew about the house that meets, adjourns and meets again to engage in the fruitless exercise of writing India’s destiny. Because our destiny lies in the stars. Man may have reached the moon and may know all about stars but never as much as the stars know about us. An honourable member of our Lok Sabha thumped the desk when he said astrology is the No 1 science. Wipe that smirk off your face because he did not make it up. He read it in an astrology book. You can doubt him, but can you doubt a book?

Ramesh Pokhriyal informed the Lok Sabha about how Indians conducted a nuclear test lakhs of years before Indira Gandhi. "Today we are talking about nuclear tests. Lakhs of years ago, sage Kanad had conducted a nuclear test. Our knowledge and science do not lack anything," he said with his chest expanding to 55 inches in diameter and stopping there, owing to chest expansion restrictions in his party. By the way, this rishi Kanad is not a canard. He actually lived in the 2nd century BC. He died and evaporated with mushroom cloud as a result of the first nuclear explosion.

Our forefathers were definitely far ahead of westerners, in writing fantastic books about technology. All the mathematics of the world is dwarfed by Vedic maths. You hear of cargo flights today. Lord Hanuman flew with a mountain in his hand from here to Sri Lanka 10,000 years ago. In fact, most Indians could fly lakhs of years before Wright Brothers wrongly appropriated the technology. The Ganga was brought to earth from Shiva’s locks by a man called Bhagirath, a grand-old from the Raghuvanshi family of Ayodhya. BJP is reviving the plan to interlink rivers because the technology to create rivers was lost in the nuclear explosion that wiped out all over knowledge, skills and science.

Nuclear radiation is one of the most dangerous things and it can affect generations. The radiation affected the thinking faculties of a generation of Indians and continues to warp some honourable members of parliament. It made Pokhriyal a poet and forced him to adopt a pen name: Nishank. Doubtless. The man doesn’t doubt anything he reads. He is not into questioning literature. You give him Harry Potter and tomorrow he would inform the Lok Sabha about how young school students in the United Kingdom use the broom to fly. “Our prime minister uses it to clean India, Aam Aadmi Party uses it as a symbol but pupils of Hogwarts fly brooms. Vroom!” he would say, conscious of his shrinking chest.

You know where his belief comes from. He became the chief minister of Uttarakhand by accident. For an average speaker and below-average poet, this was an achievement he couldn’t explain. In ancient times, cavemen blamed it on God whenever they couldn’t explain something because their brains had not evolved to understand the universe. So when lightning struck, they said God’s angry. Much later when we understood the ways of nature, we got to know that the flash you see is God clicking your photo because you are wet. Nishank couldn’t convince himself that he could become chief minister, so he blamed it on the stars. And to really believe he was eligible for the post, he blamed it on specific stars. His stars.

But you can’t blame everything on God and Nishank when our prime minister believes Indians pioneered plastic surgery and genetic science before plastic came into being or genetics was a subject. He referred to Lord Ganesha getting an elephant trunk and the birth of Karna.

According to the holy books, Lord Ganesha was guarding the door when his mother was taking a bath. Lord Shiva arrived and he asked him not to enter the house. Shiva, being the angry man he was, beheaded him. When Parvati told him that the little boy was their son, Shiva brought Ganesha’s body back to life by surgically planting a baby elephant’s head. According to Nishank: "It was actually a surgery. The science available to us is not available elsewhere in the world… science or knowledge to transplant a severed head existed only in India."

There’s one problem here. We are what we think and we think from our heads. So when our head is planted on some other body, the head acquires the body, not the other way round. But please stop thinking scientifically or logically because we are supposed to think mythologically. Gods could do anything and Lord Shiva is the biggest God in the pantheon.

One could always ask LK Advani but contrary to popular belief, I don’t think he’s that ancient. I would rather go by authentic books. Karna was conceived because the Sun God impregnated Kunti in a makeshift genetic lab. Or fertility clinic of old days. The Sun not only provides us with light and energy but also children. Please perform a surya namaskar before reading the next paragraph.

I grew up in Bihar, where people love discussing current affairs over there at the tea stall. In the days of the jungle raj, things were worse. The state of affairs was so bad, we would start talking about how glorious our history was. The discussion would veer to facts like Bihar gave India its first president. Then we would go back further into the annals of history to dig out gems like GT Road, first republic on earth, the largest university, Buddha, Mahavir, Arthshastra, Aryabhatta and, of course, Karna, the first IVF baby.

Later I learnt that we Biharis had nothing but our past to hold on to. The present was all goons and guns without glory. The future was dark, like its villages in the night. Both present and future had nothing pleasant to offer that could go with the kadak tea. So we always relied on history and seamlessly crossed over to mythology to feel good about it. Those were the achchhe din. Bharat sone ki chidiya tha. Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere moti. Then I read Ghaus Khwamkhwah’s Deccani couplet.

Apne desh mein kyan ki mitti sona-chandi kab ugli ji,

kaay ku jhooti baatan kar rae, kuchh bhi nahin hai kya bhi nahin hai.

This is the best time India has ever had. We are a thriving democracy with a vibrant economy. India is a knowledge powerhouse like it has never been. We are a confident of going far and competing with the best in the world. These are the most achche din and this government needs to focus on making it better for us as Prime Minister Modi has promised. Our present and future is not at all bleak so as to force us to rely on some glorious period in the past. Period.

Source: dailyo