“An Indian Prime Minister is never asked to give alms to the homeless sleeping on the stairs of St James in London”

So says Tarun Vijay in his “The Right View” column – “The new proselytizers”. And then-

It is this English-speaking elite that determines what India must be reading or thinking or how Hindus must be behaving. They read about Hindus through Oxford or Cambridge publishers and show the temerity to sermonize those Hindus who have imbibed their dharma in their genes and lived every bit of it, making Kumbh melas possible and taking dips in the Ganga on the chilling mornings of Kartik and Magh. The secular proselytizer visits Kumbh, not as a devotee but as a photographer to take pictures of bathing Hindu women and sadhus using mobile phones, as if being sadhus they ought to live as cavemen. The pictures they wire to press agencies essentially depict the weird, intoxicated, obscene and the unacceptable face of uncivilized Hindus to the west.

They don’t know a bit about our faith, or what Magh, Amavasya or Saptami means. They take Sanskrit degrees in English and tell us, what’s the use of such knowledge in today’s world? To be futuristic means denouncing all that you have preserved since ages. That’s an alienated crowd of people with an accent, detached from the Indian reality.

They tell us, you bad guys, you demolished our Babri. Yet, not a single political party can dare to promise in its election manifesto that if it is voted to power, it would rebuild Babri over the present makeshift temple of Ram in Ayodhya. Their influence on the Indian masses is hardly worth noticing, yet their control on the media and political power centres makes them important. Their intellectual terror is so overpowering that today most of the national parties in India execute their proceedings in English. Poor and often unauthorized translations are dished out in Hindi and other Indian languages. The language, idiom and attitude of this “secular” English-speaking elite, controlling the media, advertising and governance remain alien to the indigenous fragrances which they dismiss as folk or ethnic contours, only to be enjoyed in a Suraj Kund mela.

The secular code is: abuse and misrepresent the facts about the opponents, use a pub incident in Mangalore more importantly than the anguish and pains of the soldiers demonstrating at Jantar Mantar, turn every news desk and edit control station into Godhra, throttling the other view point.

Buddha aur Ram

My grandmother is 75. And she likes her gods. She did not like it one bit when Jayalalitha got the Shankaracharya arrested in the winter of 2004. Would they dare to do such a thing with the Pope or some Muslim holy man, she asked? And when Karunanidhi questioned Ram’s engineering abilities, that did not make her happy either. Just before someone complains, I have to say that she is not some Hindu ‘fundamentalist’. She is like most Indians, reasonably religious and interested in politics. She sees the Tehelka expose on tv and asks whether Modi is really involved; a rhetorical question; she knows just as well as everybody else what happened. After all, she does get her news from the same television channels and (tamil) magazines. I wonder what she would say if she heard that the West Bengal Chief Minister has reignited the Ram – Real or Fake debate (does he not have enough on his plate already?).

Buddhadeb has said that Ram is a fictional figure. I agree wholeheartedly. And I would have agreed more with him (or Karunanidhi, for that matter) if he had said similar things about Prophet Muhammed’s conversations with Allah during the Taslima Nasreen issue. Why is freedom of expression and feelings of Hindus any less important than the Sethusamudram project and the feelings of Muslims? There is no reason other than the fact that he and most Indian politicians are deeply pseudo-secular and indulge in doublespeak. I would have put freedom of expression miles above any possible benefit derived from the project any day because it is an extremely valuable and scarce commodity now-a-days. But that cannot be done as Muslim fundamentalists have shown time and again. While any sleight of Hindu gods or symbols might make the VHP or any of the numerous hindu fundamentalist groups carry out protests and bandhs for a couple of days, burn a few buses and kill a few people, a sleight of an Islamic symbol might trigger a worldwide protest and might even result in a fatwa by some cleric who has nothing else to do.

The BJP and everyone else who taunt pseudo-secularists should consider this fact and forgive Buddha, other politicians and that part of the intelligentsia which is pseudo-secularist. After all they are so because they are shit scared of the wrath of Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. But that is not going to happen, is it now? So, Buddha should watch out the next time he indulges in doublespeak. On the other hand, let Buddha say what he wants. My grandmother is not going to stop believing in Ram because Buddha said so. And I am not going to start believing in him because Buddha said so.

This incident is so funny that it makes a great joke – Buddha says Ram is fictional. I just hope buddhists don’t take offence.

Secularism and India

The other day, I poured out my displeasure at the way artistic freedom was being trampled in India. After writing that post, I was tag surfing and came across Satyameva Jayate. The blogger, B. Shantanu, blogs about many things, one of them being how Hinduism has been maligned over the years (I read a few posts – most of them related to artistic freedom. Anything religious, I always swallow with a pinch of salt). And it struck a chord with me because I am an atheist who previously followed Hinduism (I still have a soft corner for the religion, particularly its mythology), and I too have been noticing the manner in which mainstream political parties, media and a whole bunch of people have defined secularism. That is the reason behind this post.

India is a secular country. Its constitution says so. And secularism is normally defined as something that is non-religious (secularism). But the Indian definition – that of mainstream political parties, significant portions of the media as well as a small but influential section of educated people (I have my doubts as to whether they are really educated) – has changed over the years to anything that is anti-hinduism. The BJP and other saffron parties have coined a term for it – pseudo-secularism. And as much as I hate saffron politics, I have to say that I am in complete agreement with them on this issue.

In every election, the Congress, Left parties, the remnants of the erstwhile Janata Dal (which itself was a remnant of the Janata Party) and various regional satraps will band together to fight against a ‘communal’ BJP whose only consistent allies have been Bal Thakrey’s Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal. Congress & Co. don’t see eye to eye and are mortal enemies of each other at the state level. But when keeping out the BJP is the preferred result, the age old proverb – your enemy’s enemy is your friend is applied.

Hindus, in spite of accounting for over 80% of the billion plus population, are not a homogeneous populace. The age old caste system (supposedly) based on The Laws Of Manu (which are irrational to the core I must add. If these laws were applied today, every single Hindu would have violated at least ten of them. The lack of an authoritative text, like the Bible for Christians and the Koran for Muslims, has always been a curse – or a possible blessing – for Hinduism, because everything is in the air. While there are the vedas and upanishads, and laws and treatises written by various people – Chanakya’s Arthashastra being a very interesting one, there is no single book that dictates this is what a Hindu should do. The Bhagwadgita is the closest one can come to it. So people did what they thought was right at that time) and the resultant Brahmin vs. Kshatritya vs. Vaishya vs. Shudra duels have resulted in a fracture that runs deep. It is a fact that the lowest castes and out-castes have been denied their rights for too long. And it continues in unenlightened parts of rural India. But it has resulted in the politics of caste which effectively prevents a combined Hindu vote.

The BJP has been able to work around this issue at the state level in some of the northern states. The one time it did come to power in the centre, it did so under Atal Behari Vajpayee who is a well-respected statesman, and by shelving its Ram Temple agenda which was what led to the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 (and the subsequent riots and terror attacks in Mumbai). The Babri Masjid fiasco has irreparably damaged the saffron colour as every party that even hints at working for the welfare of Hindus in general automatically becomes communal. Other parties, meanwhile can solicit Muslim votes, Dalit votes and votes based on many other criteria without being tainted. Sometimes, this discrimination is used to good effect by the BJP which can approach people claiming double standards (best example being Gujarat 2002). This is the truth of ‘secular’ India.

The thing that amuses me is this – none of them are satisfied. The Brahmins feel discriminated against because of the reservation policy applied by successive governments. And they do not enjoy speeches given by leaders of various Dalit and other caste based parties which target them. The Dalits and other backward castes are not satisfied as they feel they have not been given their due in spite of continued efforts. Hindus resent the government’s pussyfooting on the issue of Islamist terrorism. Muslims feel threatened in spite of forming such a huge part of the population because of terrorism being connected with Islam as well as because of the feeling that they are still made to swear allegiance to the country even 60 years after partition. The only people who seem to benefit are the politicians. But even they have been targeted on numerous occasions (the attack on parliament in 2001 being one of them). Considering all this, any rational person would mend his ways. But since politics and religion thrive on irrationality, expecting them to change is a waste of the time.

A secular country will not make decisions based on a person’s religion and the citizens of such a country will be free to practise any religion of their choice. While the second part is more or less true in India, it still has a long way to go as far as the first part goes. It would be nice to see the change happen within my lifetime. But I am not holding my breath.