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Hindutva: Analyzing the Ideology

It is not the question of being Happy. What Gujratis have done themselves......is hard to fathom. Have you watched Australia celebrating Sydney test?? Ponting being self-righteous? But do you think he knows what he has done for himself and the Australian cricket??

I don't really see the link between Australian team and Gujarat, but perhaps because i haven't been following the latest developments.

Titanium, before passing judgement, one must take history into account. Not merely as facts and figures, but as a study of attitudes and cultures.

Gujarat has a history of communal riots for several centuries....it needs a deeper study to find out why the people of Gujarat like Modi.

One of the major reasons is that Gujaratis have an especially acute sense of history.

Provide any history of before after this period, mentioning Hindu, Hindutva or any of its derivative mentioned.

Which period? Dude, atleast read the wikipedia article:

History of India - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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I don't really see the link between Australian team and Gujarat, but perhaps because i haven't been following the latest developments.
Well I expected.....never mind.

Titanium, before passing judgement, one must take history into account. Not merely as facts and figures, but as a study of attitudes and cultures.

Gujarat has a history of communal riots for several centuries....it needs a deeper study to find out why the people of Gujarat like Modi.

One of the major reasons is that Gujaratis have an especially acute sense of history.

It is not acute sense of History, it is knowing how impotent they were. It is upto you now to judge them .......of thair mob mentality revenge.

Do you really think that "Sense of History" will not catch Gujratis in turn????
Which period? Dude, atleast read the wikipedia article:

History of India - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well , what to discuss when your source of history start and ends with Wikipedia!!
 
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It is not acute sense of History, it is knowing how impotent they were. It is upto you now to judge them .......of thair mob mentality revenge.

Do you really think that "Sense of History" will not catch Gujratis in turn????

It will. It already is, infact.

Dude, I beg you not to jump to conclusions.

Atleast read my earlier posts before assuming what I am and what i think?

If you continue your pointless posts, I won't be replying to them again.

Well , what to discuss when your source of history start and ends with Wikipedia!!

Did I tell you to read wikipedia alone and nothing else?

I said, that atleast for a start, read wikipedia.

There is no need to get all your "information" from propaganda websites.
 
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Excellent thread. Sad to miss out on this.

Most of the discussion is quite sensible. Dispassionate and excellent.
 
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Do you really think that "Sense of History" will not catch Gujratis in turn????

Is it catching up with Arabs and Afghans and all those who lionize the likes of Gazani, Ghori and Abdali?

Is that why we see some of the things happening around us?

Well , what to discuss when your source of history start and ends with Wikipedia!!

Wikipedia is a killer internet site. Great user generated content.

May be a bit low on credibility in some areas but a great reference for most general topics.

Why would anyone have anything against Wikipedia?
 
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Is it catching up with Arabs and Afghans and all those who lionize the likes of Gazani, Ghori and Abdali?

Vinod, What happened was Act of person to loot and plunder. But here we are talking about a community wholesale involvement.

Am sure you can differentiate between two. Even if you have any doubt about Gujratis rather than individual's act, the election results were endorsement for the despicable act, not once but thrice.

Am sure sense of history will play surely.



Wikipedia is a killer internet site. Great user generated content.

May be a bit low on credibility in some areas but a great reference for most general topics.

Killer site:what:, yes for most of the time, for basic things and where Indian involvement is least.:enjoy:
 
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Vinod, What happened was Act of person to loot and plunder. But here we are talking about a community wholesale involvement.

Am sure you can differentiate between two. Even if you have any doubt about Gujratis rather than individual's act, the election results were endorsement for the despicable act, not once but thrice.

Am sure sense of history will play surely.

I am not sure it was an individual act. No individual can come and plunder a country, ravage thousands of religious sites, rape and murder millions of people, take slaves by the millions etc.

They are definitely the heroes of Afghans still and even Pakistanis for some difficult to understand reason. They ravaged the parts now called Pakistan and still are hero! :eek:

If you can understand the reason for calling the Pakistani missiles after these kind of people, Modi's victory should not be too difficult to understand.

Killer site:what:, yes for most of the time, for basic things and where Indian involvement is least.:enjoy:

If more Indians are contributing to the content, what's wrong about it. Surely no one stops Pakistanis from doing the same. And if you find any inaccuracies, pl. go and correct them.

You can always choose to ignore the site, but I find it a good place to start learning about most topics.
 
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Disclaimer: The following article is for discussion only.

Agno, its a long article, but I would appreciate your views on it.



HINDUTVA AND THE RELIGIOUS MINORITIES

ASHOK CHOWGULE

In all societies there is a certain stratification based on some pre-determined criteria. The population is divided by gender, age, education, occupation, etc. And, of course, religion. While this stratification has immense importance for studies in sociology, anthropology, etc., one needs to be more careful in case of the relationship between the state and the individual, particularly in a state which is supposed to be secular. There needs to be a clear understanding of whether the stratification falls in the secular criteria or communal. While a secular state should deal only with the secular issues, communal issues should be scrupulously avoided in determining state policy.

At the same time, it is well recognised that a civilised state will endeavour to ensure that there is no discrimination on account of the communal characteristic of a person. He/she should have a freedom to practice his/her personal beliefs, provided, of course, it does not conflict with public order. While the individual practices his/her own beliefs, he/she will have no right to force it onto others. Denial of freedom of religious practice is essentially a law and order issue, which any state has a duty to uphold.

Over the past ten years, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP, a strong proponent of the Hindutva ideology at the level of electoral politics) has altered the terms of debate in society, particularly on the meaning of secularism. This it did by forcing the people to look at the practice of secularism and introduced two idioms in this discourse - "pseudo-secularism" and "justice for all and appeasement of none". Much has been written on the former, and many of the anti-Hindutva intellectuals have been forced to accept that the Hindutva's perspective on the issue has merit. Of course, to the left-wing intellectuals, anyone who agrees with even one programme of Hindutva (irrespective of the merit) is automatically communal. One of them wrote: "A couple of my critics have, however, jumped to the conclusion that, since I have reservations about secularism as presented in the prevailing discourse, I must therefore by a supporter of communalism. This is patently absurd." (T N Madan, Economic and Political Weekly, April 30, 1994.)

In this note we will address the second idiom that the BJP has placed in the political discourse - viz., justice for all and appeasement of none. The BJP is labeled as a political party which, if it comes to power, will ensure that the religious minorities will be in danger in our society. It is alleged that they will not be allowed to practice their religion, and will have to forcibly convert to the religion of their ancestors. The BJP leaders say that this is not what the party stands for, and that it is the calumny of their political adversaries that has created the impression of being anti-minorities. Some who have looked at the BJP dispassionately, but are not the political supporters of the party, would agree with this. "In the ultimate analysis, the BJP's religious fundamentalism will have to be judged by the performance of the party in power. In Delhi, not even the Congress accused the administration of Vijay Kumar Malhotra and Kedar Nath Sahni of communal bias. In the states administered by the BJP, either on its own or as a partner with other parties, Muslim officers were not victimised. Nor were Muslim religious functions suppressed or anti-Muslim riots encouraged. In fact the track record of the BJP governments in the matter of law and order and maintenance of communal peace is much better than that of the Congress, even within the states which had been BJP-ruled following upon Congress rule." (M N Buch, "The BJP versus the Congress", Independent, March 29, 1993.)

However, the anti-minority charge is so prevalent that it would be worthwhile to study some of the issues that the votaries of Hindutva has taken up based on which its opponents levy the anti-minority charge. We will look at four issues which we consider to be the most important ones. They are Ram Janmabhoomi, Article 370, Uniform Civil Code, and religious conversions. We will put forward the Hindutva perspective on each of these issues, and then discuss why they cannot be considered to be anti-minority.

RAM JANMABHOOMI

The temple at Ram Janmabhoomi is not one of bricks and mortar. It is an issue which is related to our culture and civilisation. The story of Lord Ram is not one of a mere human being. An American expert on the Ramayan says: "Valmiki's Ramayan is the central document of Indian culture. The book and its message express in an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally moving form what must be seen as the most powerfully hegemonic discourse of the brahmanical and kshatriya elites of India's epic age. It continues to be the basic and the founding statement of social and political order in India even today. Greek epics like Homer's Iliad is the book of a lost civilisation for today's Westerners. The Ramayan is unique in continuing unbroken over almost 3000 years as the living document of Indian civilisation.....It is no exaggeration to say that in India everyone knows the Ram story. In one sense, one has to know it to be part of Indian culture." (Robert Goldman, University of California, Berkeley.)

The temple issue has to be first looked at from the historical context of the site. It has been well established that in 1528 AD, at the instruction of the Moghul invader, Babur, an existing temple in honour of Lord Ram was destroyed and the Babri structure built in its place. The belief that this site is the Ram Janmabhoomi has a history of more than 3000 years, when there was no need to create a controversy if it was not a fact. We know that the leftist historian will not agree with this rendering of the history. But, they will then have to answer why the negotiations, held in December 90 and January 91, to determine the historical facts were broken off by the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee. The AIBMAC was supported by them. Having established the historical importance of the site for the Hindus, the right question that has to be answered is why the temple should NOT be built.

It stands to reason that any structure which has come up after destroying a temple, cannot have any religious significance. If such a significance is applied in this case, then clearly such people would like to uphold the memory of Babur over Lord Ram. The attachment of such people to our civilisation and culture should then be questioned. The Russian Orthodox Cathedral that was built in the centre of Warsaw, Poland, at the time of the first Russian occupation of the country, had a political objective. So also the Babri structure was an ocular reminder that there was an Islamic rule even over the holy Hindu sites. When Poland became free in the early twentieth century, they pulled the Cathedral down. The Babri structure should not have been allowed to stand in a free India.

The manner in which Ram Janmabhoomi issue transcends the bricks and mortar perspective is best explained by Shri V S Naipaul. "What is happening in India is a new historical awakening....Indian intellectuals, who want to be secure in their liberal beliefs, may not understand what is going on. But every other Indian knows precisely what is happening: deep down he knows that a larger response is emerging even if at times this response appears in his eyes to be threatening." (The Times of India, July 18, 1993.)

A valid issue that comes about is where does one stop in recovering the religious sites of the Hindus. The answer can be obtained from the statement of the VHP in January 1991, at the time of the negotiation for the peaceful return of the Ram Janmabhoomi site. The essential message was: "We do not even demand the return of the thousands of places of worship that have been forcibly replaced with mosques.....We merely want three places back, three age-old sacred places. And we would prefer getting them back from the Muslim community, to getting them back by an official decree.....Muslims should understand what kind of message they are sending by insisting on continuing the occupation of our sacred places, an occupation started by fanatics and mass-murders like Babar and Aurangzeb. We do not like to think of our Muslim compatriots as heirs and followers of such invaders and tyrants. It is up to them to make a gesture that will signify a formal break with this painful past."


UNIFORM CIVIL CODE

One of the Directive Principles of our Constitution is that there will be a uniform civil code in this country. The different religious communities are governed by different civil laws relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, etc. This goes against the very grain of secularism since the state does look at the religion of a person before determining which of the laws are applicable to a him/her. After the Constitution was adopted, all the various Hindu personal laws were unified and the various Hindu Code Bills were passed. These Bills were based on the then prevailing egalitarian criteria, and was a major step forward in social reform. There was no reference to any of the religious scriptures of the Hindus. At the time, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru was asked why these laws were not made applicable to the other religious communities. His contention was that these communities had not asked for the changes and so he was not willing to make them. Necessarily these Bills had to be named as "Hindu", to distinguish them from the other personal laws. But, the definition of a Hindu was based on the constitutional negative criteria - that is one who is not a Muslim, not a Christian, not a Parsi, and not a Jew. Thus an atheist is governed by these laws, which clearly show that it is not based on the Hindu religion.

Even after 50 years of our independence, the non-BJP political parties propagate that the non-Hindus are still not supposed to be ready for a change in their acts. The recent experience of the Christian community would clearly show that this is a hollow contention. The Christian Marriages Act is clearly a regressive act. For example, in case of divorce, while a man has to establish a charge of only adultery, a woman has to establish an additional charge (like desertion, cruelty, etc.). The Christian laity took the lead and requested the government to make the changes. The government suggested that they can recommend the changes and, if they are accepted by the Christian churches, the same will be accepted. (Here one sees the communal approach of the politicians who have labeled themselves as secular.) A determined group in the laity undertook the challenge and presented the desired changes, with the blessing of the clergy. This is where things stand for the last three or four years. And every time the so-called secular government in power promises the laity that the necessary action will be taken.

We think that things are kept dormant because it will open a Pandora's box in terms of changing the laws in the case of other religious minorities, particularly those of the Muslims. The unfortunate part is that the secular intellectuals amongst the Muslims dare not raise their voices to demand the changes. So much are the politicians in league with the Muslim clergy, that the latter will make life difficult for any sane voice in the community. The ones who are most affected by the antiquated Muslim Personal Law are the women in the community. Yet the secularists only talk about gender justice in the various seminars and conferences that they organise, while keeping silent on the real changes needed.

We fully recognise that the Hindu personal laws have severe deficiencies. We think that the best way of approaching towards a solution to the problem is what has been proposed by the BJP. "When the BJP talks of a uniform civil code, it does not contemplate imposing the Hindu law on the country. Our party manifesto has very clearly stated that the BJP would ask the Law Commission to examine the Hindu law, the Muslim law, the Christian law and the Parsi law and cull out the modern, progressive, equitable ingredients of these laws and, on that basis, draw up a common civil code. If some of the laws relating to the Hindus today have to go on that account, they have to go. For example, the Hindu Undivided Family act may have to go. Whatever has to be done, has to be done for all." (Shri L K Advani, in The Illustrated Weekly of India, March 6, 1993.)

RELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS


Finally let us take the issue of religious conversions. India has been divided because those who converted to Islam decided that they do not wish to live in a nation where Hindus are in a majority. While Hinduism has time and again proved its assimilative and accommodating characteristics, those areas which had a Muslim majority decided that they should not be a part of an independent India, and so Pakistan was created. This clearly shows that this nation can have a danger from religions who are aggressively proselytisers. One can give quotes from Swami Vivekanand to Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar to explain what they thought of the danger of conversions.

But it is not the Hindus alone who are concerned about conversions. The Roman Catholic Church is most unhappy when its members defect to other Christian churches. The Houston Chronicle, (October 13, 1992) reported: "Pope John Paul II (in the Dominican Republic) said that he must protect his flock from the 'wolves' of evangelical Protestantism wooing Latin Americans away from the Roman Catholic Church.....As shepherd to Latin America's 395 million Catholics, the Pope said he must 'take care of the sheep who have been put in my care and protect them from rapacious wolves'." If the Protestants in Latin America are rapacious wolves because of their proselytising activities, they must be so classified in this country as well.

The Pope is also unhappy when Christians (not due to any missionary activity, but of their own volition) embrace Hinduism or Buddhism. In his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, he said: "One should know one's own spiritual heritage well and consider whether it is right to set it aside lightly." The Pope is disturbed when a Catholic wants to pray to Christ in another church, and asks the Christians not to set aside their Christian heritage lightly. Yet, he has no compunction of asking Hindus to change completely their mode of worship and set aside their Hindu heritage which has an antiquity more ancient than Christianity.

Similarly, Islamic countries makes life very difficult for people of other faiths, let alone allowing them to continue their proselytising activities. The issue of conversion goes beyond being a communal issue - it has to do with the nation as it exists. Wherever the proselytisers have gone, they have not only converted the indigenous population, but also destroyed their culture. Very little exists of the civilisations of the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Aztecs, etc. In case of the South Americans, the destruction took place less than 500 years ago. And so complete has it been, that we know very little of their economy, sociology, politics, etc. All we see is the stones, which clearly show that they were great civilisations.

SECULAR ISSUES

At the same time, it is interesting to see what these anti-Hindutvavadis have to say on the secular issues propagated by the Sangh. Many of them have quite a high regard for the Swadeshi programme undertaken by it. They mention (albeit reluctantly) about the various seva activities, which are undertaken irrespective of the religion or caste of the person, and without any government assistance. They have recognised that the economic programme set out in the BJP manifesto is one of the best amongst all political parties. They have had to recognise that the BJP governments have given an administration better than the other parties - it may well not be the best, but comparisons are important. This list can go on and on. The growing support for the BJP attests to the contention that their programme on secular issues is the one that has sustained the party.

INTELLECTUALS

The charge against the Sangh of being anti-minorities is made not only by the political parties. It is authenticated by those who call themselves as intellectuals. Thus, one sees most of the English media as being anti-Sangh. Those who live in Delhi on the largesse granted by the government to run their various so-called development institutes, are also in the forefront of the bandwagon of the anti-Sangh tirade. The academics brigade is masterminded by the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Without this authentication, the charge against the Sangh could have not lasted so long. While one can justify the actions of the political parties to spread misinformation, the role played by the intellectuals is really vicious.

The bankruptcy of intellectualism in this country can be seen in the way they deal with the issue of uniform civil code. Some of them are today going around saying that they were for such a code, but now that the votaries of Hindutva have 'communalised' the issue, they have decided that they do not wish that such a code be brought in. Nothing must be done for the minorities to feel insecure, and if in the process the women have to suffer, this would be a small price to pay! In this perverse logic, they refuse to look into the merits of the issue. Instead of castigating the anti-Hindutvavadis for not standing up for true secularism, they go around spreading confusion.

But then, one should not be surprised at the way the debates in this country are conducted. During his Suvarna Jyoti, Shri L K Advani, the President of the BJP, called for a debate on the partition of this country. The Asian Age (June 14, 1997) reports an unnamed Janata Dal minister as saying: "All (Advani's) comments have only one implication: anti-Muslim, and should be taken seriously. They are not worth our attention." This is called argument by labels.

FIFTY YEARS OF MISRULE

The anti-Hindutvavadis allege that the charge of appeasement of the minorities is false given that the latter are poor, less educated, very little representation in the economic sectors, etc. At the same time the various non-BJP political parties will compete with each other in proclaiming that each will be a better protector and benefactor of the minorities than the other. They will go to the obscurantist Muslim religious leaders like the Shahi Imam of Delhi to get the list of their Muslim candidates whetted by him.

The events at the Jamia Millia University, near Delhi, also highlight the devious behaviour of the pseudo-secularists. The rightful claim of Prof Mishirul Hasan, the present pro-Vice Chancellor, to be elevated to the post of the Vice Chancellor is being ignored because he upheld Shri Salman Rushdie's right to freedom of speech. There have been many pseudo-secular intellectuals who helped to aggravate the controversy. Similarly, many of the Muslim politicians, belonging to the alleged secular parties, have expressed strong views against Prof Hasan. All of them are abetting the game of the Muslim religious leaders in ensuring that the community stays backward, not only economically but also intellectually.

What is not recognised is that the ones who have been guiding the destiny of this nation for the last nearly 50 years are these very anti-Hindutvavadi politicians and intellectuals. They are the ones who have set out the economic direction that the country has to follow. They are the ones who worked out the education policy, etc. And they are the ones whom the minorities voted for, because of the promise of being the protectors and benefactors. The fault for the condition that these minorities find themselves in has to be laid entirely at the doorsteps of these anti-Hindutvavadis.

The Hindus of this country gave sufficient opportunity to these pseudo-secularists to prove themselves. Jawaharlal Nehru was fond of saying that majority communalism is a greater danger than minority communalism. The Hindus accepted this thesis and voted for him. So secure were these pseudo-secularists of their own importance that when the BJP got only two seats in the 1984 general elections, they wrote obituaries of Hindutva. Ku Chitra Subramaniam, in her book, India is for sale, writes: "India is probably the only democracy in the world where intellectuals wear their brain on their sleeves. In other parts of the civilised world, thinkers draw attention away from themselves and light-seekers are identified for what they are. In other parts intellectuals come from all walks and all sections of societies. In India they come from circles so closed and incestuous that ultimately they become irrelevant to the country's needs." In the process they have become alienated from the rest of the society. And when the society started to reject them, they evolved the tactics of apportioning the blame somewhere else. So we have statements like:

"The tragic legacy of Nehru era was that it made all sane Hindu voices of the intelligentsia deny their Hindu roots, speak in an alien voice not rooted in Indian society and inflict their imported notions of culture on the people in a most contemptuous way". (Shri Amitabh Mattoo in The Independent, December 19,1992.)

"I really believe that one of the failures of Congress secularism was that it treated everything Hindu, thereby Indian, with disdain. (Smt Tavleen Singh, "Forget the drivel, get fiscal", Indian Express, Oct 15, 1995.)

"The State's ostrich attitude towards God has led to the hijacking of the Hindu religion by illiberal men, and portions between faiths have hardened, perhaps irreparably." (Ramesh Menon, "Expelling God", Indian Express, Nov 19, 1995.)

India has remained a secular country - unlike its truncated parts - because it has a Hindu majority. In his book, India - The Siege Within. (Penguin, UK, 1985, p 24), Shri M J Akbar wrote: "It needs to be pointed out that India remains a secular state, not because one-fifths of the population is Muslim, Sikh or Christian, and, therefore, obviously has a vested interest in secular constitution, but because nine out of ten Hindus do not believe in violence against the minorities. If all the Hindus had been zealots, no law-and-order machinery in the world could have prevented the massacre of Muslims who are scattered in villages and towns all across the country."

CONCLUSION


As much as it is the responsibility of the Hindus to ensure that this county remains a secular country, it is also incumbent upon the minorities to determine what will be their contribution to this effort. We will conclude this note by quoting by what the RSS has to say: "In 1943, the suggestion (to ask for separate registration in various legislatures) was emphatically spurned in a representation signed by nearly 2000 leading Parsis, and affirming that 'our interests are safe in the hands of sister communities'. Recalling this episode, Shri R K Sidhwa, a prominent Parsi member of the Constituent Assembly, said that if minorities were encouraged to think in terms of permanent safeguards, 'there will be a kind of perpetual instinct in the mind of the minority community representatives that the safeguards are to remain forever, and it will be difficult for these small communities to come nearer to major communities....The ultimate phase of political life of all Indians should be one nation, no community.' This, verily, is the call of Hindu Rashtra." (Why Hindu Rashtra? , Shri K S Sudarshan, Joint General Secretary of the RSS.)
 
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Here's an article by LK Advani in 1993:

One of the Directive Principles of our Constitution is that there will be a uniform civil code in this country. The different religious communities are governed by different civil laws relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, etc. This goes against the very grain of secularism since the state does look at the religion of a person before determining which of the laws are applicable to a him/her. After the Constitution was adopted, all the various Hindu personal laws were unified and the various Hindu Code Bills were passed. These Bills were based on the then prevailing egalitarian criteria, and was a major step forward in social reform. There was no reference to any of the religious scriptures of the Hindus. At the time, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru was asked why these laws were not made applicable to the other religious communities. His contention was that these communities had not asked for the changes and so he was not willing to make them. Necessarily these Bills had to be named as "Hindu", to distinguish them from the other personal laws. But, the definition of a Hindu was based on the constitutional negative criteria - that is one who is not a Muslim, not a Christian, not a Parsi, and not a Jew. Thus an atheist is governed by these laws, which clearly show that it is not based on the Hindu religion.

Even after 50 years of our independence, the non-BJP political parties propagate that the non-Hindus are still not supposed to be ready for a change in their acts. The recent experience of the Christian community would clearly show that this is a hollow contention. The Christian Marriages Act is clearly a regressive act. For example, in case of divorce, while a man has to establish a charge of only adultery, a woman has to establish an additional charge (like desertion, cruelty, etc.). The Christian laity took the lead and requested the government to make the changes. The government suggested that they can recommend the changes and, if they are accepted by the Christian churches, the same will be accepted. (Here one sees the communal approach of the politicians who have labeled themselves as secular.) A determined group in the laity undertook the challenge and presented the desired changes, with the blessing of the clergy. This is where things stand for the last three or four years. And every time the so-called secular government in power promises the laity that the necessary action will be taken.

We think that things are kept dormant because it will open a Pandora's box in terms of changing the laws in the case of other religious minorities, particularly those of the Muslims. The unfortunate part is that the secular intellectuals amongst the Muslims dare not raise their voices to demand the changes. So much are the politicians in league with the Muslim clergy, that the latter will make life difficult for any sane voice in the community. The ones who are most affected by the antiquated Muslim Personal Law are the women in the community. Yet the secularists only talk about gender justice in the various seminars and conferences that they organise, while keeping silent on the real changes needed.

We fully recognise that the Hindu personal laws have severe deficiencies. We think that the best way of approaching towards a solution to the problem is what has been proposed by the BJP. "When the BJP talks of a uniform civil code, it does not contemplate imposing the Hindu law on the country. Our party manifesto has very clearly stated that the BJP would ask the Law Commission to examine the Hindu law, the Muslim law, the Christian law and the Parsi law and cull out the modern, progressive, equitable ingredients of these laws and, on that basis, draw up a common civil code. If some of the laws relating to the Hindus today have to go on that account, they have to go. For example, the Hindu Undivided Family act may have to go. Whatever has to be done, has to be done for all." (Shri L K Advani, in The Illustrated Weekly of India, March 6, 1993.)
 
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Another interview with Naipaul from 1999.
Frankly, I'm yet to find a man who is as undiplomatic as Naipaul. His thoughts are always subjective, and always carry the ring of truth.


Magazine| Nov 15, 1999

Interview

'Christianity Didn't Damage India Like Islam'


Widely regarded as the world's greatest living writer in English, Trinidad-born Sir Vidiadhar talks to Tarun J. Tejpal in what he claims is his "last"interview on India


TARUN J. TEJPAL

India has a fractured past and a fissured present. What do you think is India’s future? Is it a civilisation in decay?

"Fractured past"is too polite a way to describe India’s calamitous millennium. The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people still have to find polite, destiny-defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims "arriving"in India, as though the Muslims came on a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of idols and temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves, so cheap and numerous that they were being sold for a few rupees. The architectural evidence-the absence of Hindu monuments in the north-is convincing enough. This conquest was unlike any other that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history. The victors write the history. The victors were Muslims. For people on the other side it is a period of darkness.

Indian history is written about as a matter of rulers and kingdoms shifting and changing. This is why it all seems petty and boring to read and hard to remember. But there is a larger and more tragic and more illuminating theme. That theme is the grinding down of Hindu India. Let us consider two late dates. In 1565, the year after the birth of Shakespeare, Vijayanagar in the south is destroyed and its great capital city laid waste. In 1592, the terrible Akbar ravages Orissa in the east. This means that while a country like England is preparing for greatness under its great queen, old India, in its sixth century of retreat, is still being reduced to nonentity. The wealth and creativity, the artisans and architects of the kingdoms of Vijayanagar and Orissa would have been destroyed, their light put out. Those regions are still now among the poorest in India.

The theme of the last two or three centuries of the millennium-with the Sikhs, the Maharashtrians, and, above all, the British-has been one of slow recovery. This is of course looking at it from the Hindu side. The Muslims see it as a period of decay.

Your three books on India summed up three separate aspects of India-an area of darkness, a wounded civilisation and a million mutinies now. In a sense these are the negatives. What are the positives that help India hang together?

We are not born with full knowledge and people of my background were granted very little of it at school. Writing is a process of learning. The writer writes himself into an understanding of his world and it has taken me many years and much writing to arrive at the understanding which I now have. Somerset Maugham said something like that about his time as a playwright. He said he felt he should apologise to the public for practising on them. My Indian books were written over a period of 27 years. An Area of Darkness is a personal book. A book of shock and concern. A Wounded Civilisation deals with the beginnings of my understandings of the effects of the invasions. A Million Mutinies Now is about a country more than ever like India at present: a country in revolt at many levels, a country, in fact, beginning to deal with its bad past. I don’t think of it as a negative book.

You reckon that India’s civilisational wholeness was shattered by the incursions of Islam and then Christianity. What do you make of the school of thought that asserts these invasions, and later influences, actually enriched Indian culture and life?

Here again I find in the question an element of political politeness. Christianity did not damage India the way Islam had.There are two sides to Christianity in India. There is the fine source of the New Learning that came with the British. There is another, more petty Christianity that came as the personal faith of the rulers and then the missionaries.

When you talk of Islam’s enriching of Indian culture, you are thinking of things like the food and the music and the poetry. But there is a profounder thing to be said. The two great revealed religions, Islam and Christianity, have altered the world forever, and we all, whatever our faith, walk in their light. Over and above their theology, these religions gave the world social ideas-brotherhood, charity, the feeling of man for man-which we now all take for granted. They are the basis of our political ideas and our ideas of morality. Those ideas didn’t exist before, not in the classical world, not in Hinduism or Buddhism.It may be that these two revealed religions have done their work and have little more to offer. But that’s another matter.

What in your opinion is the most debilitating thing about the Hindu way of life?

The philosophical idea of the beauty of surrender, made much worse by the centuries of defeat, and expressed today in the widespread feeling that men should not get above themselves, that men should not make too many demands.

And what is the most enriching?

I feel nailed to the mast of your questions. I have to think about this one. But it isn’t the way my mind works.

Do you think the Gandhian prescription, harking back to an ascetic and pure past, has proven a mistake? Do you think Gandhi, and all he stood for, has resulted in a schizophrenic India, trapped in hypocrisies?

Gandhi shouldn’t be considered as laying down a prescription for anything. He was uneducated and never a thinker. He is an historical figure. He came at a particular moment; he turned all his drawbacks into religion; and he used religion to awaken the country in a way that none of the educated leaders could have done. He has absolutely no message today. People talk too much about Gandhi and study him too little. His first book, Hind Swaraj, written at white heat in two weeks in 1909, is so nonsensical it would curl the hair of even the most devoted admirer. I don’t know Indians who actually read Gandhi. They take from him some vague idea of a great redeeming holiness and they are free ignore the practical side-Gandhi the hater of dirt, the hater of public defecation. That last is still very much an Indian sport. In fact, the Gandhian idea of piety and a very holy poverty is used now to excuse the dirt of the cities, the shoddiness of the architecture. By some inversion, Indians have used the very idea of Gandhi to turn dirt and backwardness into much-loved deities.

At the same time, would you agree that were it not for a modern cosmopolitan leader like Nehru, India would have had trouble establishing itself as a secular democracy?

It is India’s luck that-unlike, say, revolutionary Iran-Gandhi never was responsible for the running of the country. Full tribute has to be paid to Nehru and the others for establishing and extending in independence the British-given liberal institutions.

What do you make of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty? Providing continuity and stability or enfeebling the democratic process and the Congress?

We mustn’t waste too much time talking about that. The position of India in 1947 was roughly like the position of the Spanish South American countries after the withdrawal of Spain in about 1810. The big question for many people at that time-the question leading very often to a civil war, which still in some places goes on-the big question was: "Who among the local people is now going to rule us?"The Nehru dynasty provided this assurance for India for a long time.India was lucky to have them but now that democratic institutions have to some extent taken root India no longer needs them. A liberal dynasty like that in a country like Yugoslavia would have greatly helped that unhappy country.

Of all Indian prime ministers, Indira Gandhi remains the greatest enigma. What is your judgement on her: a tough purposeful leader or a wrecker of all national institutions?

To some extent she was created by Indian need.

Though you grew up in faraway Trinidad, two generations removed from India, you carry a lot of India around in you. Where in your personality do you think is it most apparent?
A writer should never review himself. It is really for other people to say.

Also, how has your being Indian shaped you as a man and a writer, particularly the latter?

It has been fundamental. I was born in 1932. So I was always concerned about the independence movement. I was very soon aware that our small Indian community in Trinidad had very little political protection. The easy way out would have been to complain about British imperialism. I preferred to look inwards, to find out why a country like India had been so helpless and so indifferent to its people. That was where my writing began. That was my quest. Even my Islamic books have been part of that same quest.

What do you think of the Hindu resurgence that has been taking place in India over the last decade? Do you think it’s a dangerous militancy that will eventually destroy India’s secular character?

You have asked a loaded question. You say that India has a secular character, which is historically unsound. You say that Hindu militancy is dangerous. Dangerous or not, it is a necessary corrective to the history I have been talking about. It is a creative force and it will prove to be so.

Do you think an unpartitioned India would have worked? Why?

No. As soon as the poet Iqbal, the convert, had made his speech calling for a separate state, that state more or less became inevitable. And considering the Islamic movements of the last 30 years, nearly all the energy of an unpartitioned India would have fruitlessly gone into holding itself together.

Why is it that Pakistan so easily slips into martial/dictatorial ways, while democracy is never threatened in India?

West Pakistan was not particularly well educated. It had almost no political thinkers. It had had only about 90 years of British rule and institutions. It was easy for those institutions to be brushed aside. Jinnah was in many ways an attractive, secular man, but the snare of the Islamic movement he unleashed was like the snare of the Islamic movement in Iran. It assumed that out of a perfect Islam everything would flow: good institutions, good laws and a model citizenry. There was no need to think further; everything would come with the faith.They were also converts and therefore fanatical. Among Arabs, there can be people like the Syrian poet Adonis for whom Islam is only an aspect of his Mediterranean identity. The convert doesn’t have that kind of security. It is also worth remembering that Islamic societies are not democratic in the modern way. They reflect to an amazing degree the state created by the Prophet. Islamic societies need the Quran, the Law and a severe ruler.

How do you see Islam working out a reconciliation with other religions and faiths on the subcontinent?

There can be no reconciliation. Islam is a religion of fixed laws. This goes contrary to everything in modern India. Also, the convert’s deepest impulse is the rejection of his origins.

Do you think India would be better off Balkanising into smaller, more manageable units
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This will be very foolish.People have not been free for very long and they can get carried away by various kinds of populism. The larger association enables these people to be saved from themselves. The people of Bihar and Tamil Nadu have constantly to be saved from themselves. Going further afield, the people of Iran might have been glad of some mechanism that enabled them to be saved from themselves, two or three years after their revolution.

Indians do brilliantly abroad but remain mediocre at home. What is the particular Indian neurosis that accounts for this?

People do well in Europe and in the US because the societies there require excellence. India as yet does not require excellence and people shrink accordingly.

You visit India often. What about it repels you the most?

The old deity of dirt and the modern deity of very brown motor smoke on the streets.

Is it true that by the end of every trip to India, you’re exhausted of the country and eager to return to England, your home? What tires you?

That brown smoke.

Did we make a mistake by going nuclear? What should India’s position be vis-a-vis the rest of the world?

It is important for India to operate at the limit of technology. India must never again fall behind. I actually think that the subcontinent is safer now.

Do you think over time the great Indian aesthetic-architecture, art, music-too has suffered? That India is no longer original in its artistic impulses?

This is actually a very important question. This is where we come face to face with the Indian calamity. When places like Vijayanagar and Orissa were laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current was broken. We have no means of knowing what architecture existed in the north before the Muslims. We can only be certain that there would have been splendours like Konarak and Kancheepuram. Since the current has been broken, there can be no revival. I am thinking principally of course of architecture. The Mughal buildings are foreign buildings. They are a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan. In India they speak of the desert. They cover enormous spaces and they make me think of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up. Humayun’s tomb is, I suppose, the chastest and the best. The Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people. And it is much worse if you think of the nation-building that was going on in Europe at the same time.But, in a way, to have no past is for an architect in India also a kind of liberation. He can’t do a Lutyens: a little Indian or Mughal motif here and there. The architect, having no past, is free to make the best buildings he can at this time. And that’s very hard to do.

So far as painting goes, it depends on patrons. If we have out Ajanta and places like that, painting came with the Mughals. They were patrons, the Rajput princes were patrons, the British for a short time up to 1820 were also patrons. So there is now no tradition of painting, no continuation of a particular sensibility. Painting as a result is all over the place in India. But there are patrons now; for the first time, art is a public affair and not something done in palaces; and the situation may right itself.

Who’d be your nominees for the three most significant Indians of this century? And why?

The first two are inescapable: Gandhi for awakening a country that had been torpid for centuries, Nehru for being a democrat and a humane man who did not abuse his power. I cannot think of a third figure of this stature and I would like instead in a spirit of mischief to nominate two buffoon figures who might stand as a warning to India of the dangers of mimicry.There is the half-witted Vinoba Bhave, the mimic mahatma. And there is Mr Basu in Calcutta, the mimic Marxist. I suppose when he goes his followers might want to embalm him like Lenin and put him on show in the Maidan.
 
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Guys, any comments?

One of the reasons I'm always posting on this site, is because I like my thoughts and opinions challenged.

Please do let your opinions known, who knows, you might open a fresh line of reasoning!!

I am also an avid debater, so I guess arguing is part and parcel of my daily life!!
 
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I hope your wishes come true, because in the very end slave theory will be true.

Oh I had kind of missed your point there.

See, this is exactly the kind of mindset I'm talking about, which has taken over Indians.

Even after reading this, at first I didn't understand what you were trying to say.

i.e.....Hindus are predestined to be slaves.

Well, why don't we just sit back, relax, and watch what happens?;)
 
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Killer site:what:, yes for most of the time, for basic things and where Indian involvement is least.:enjoy:

I'm sure the articles contradict your version of history.

And I couldn't possibly be more happy about that.
 
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Stealth is right as far as the apologist nature forced upon Hindus for a millenia is concerned. You don't have to look further than your TV screens even now. Most of our media and elite would rather have us behave like dhimmis than show an iota of spine. People around my area have a comic but piercing observation in this regard. "Hindus have been under the boots of foreigners for a thousand years, and as soon as we gain power, we become pseudo-secularists. We are destined to slavery it seems".

India was under slavery, but she still managed to survive.

Look at Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan....they all fell to the arabic ideology.

Their history has been wiped out so effectively that they now identify with their conquerers!!
 
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This is the tragedy. They didn't just forget their history but effectively obliterated it and hate it.

The only reason it is changing to some extent and some people want to come out of the Arab charm is that the Arabs have been exposed by the Israelis for what they are.

If the Arabs had been able to destory Israel and throw the Jews in the sea as they wanted in all the wars, you won't have had the discussion we had regarding the Indian history in the other thread.
 
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