UNTIL LIBERALISATION, the greatest threats to the Hindu societal unity were the periodic eruptions of Muslim street violence, predatory evangelism and English education.
As the twentieth century sprinted towards the finishing line, a dangerous new element slithered into this lethal mix and it emerged from within the Hindu fold. This was the American mindset of the mindless and unrestrained pursuit of money as an end in itself by the Hindu middle class whose parents had typically been government employees, bank officials, school teachers or college lecturers during the prolonged Nehruvian socialist regime. This Hindu middle class suddenly found that the world was their oyster and began gorging on it as if there was no tomorrow. In the process, one of the first things that they abandoned was their profound spiritual heritage. Whereas their parents had visited temples and Mathas almost everyday — sometimes twice a day even in big cities — they frequented pubs and went on expensive weekend holidays.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, this reckless embrace of crass materialism by middle class urban Hindus had become the most powerful agent of de-Hinduisation right on the sacred soil of Bharatavarsha. Hindu employees of MNCs were now revelling in playing clownish games like Secret Santa and delighting in wishing each other Merry Christmas.
In a parallel development, the Islamist, evangelical and Far Left lobbies working in tandem, had silently acquired wider and deeper clout at all levels of the governmental, bureaucratic and judicial apparatus. This frightening power is the zeitgeist of the decade-long UPA regime.
Among others, its decisive moment arrived in 2008 with the heartless assassination of Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, an eighty-year-old monk who was working to prevent Christian conversions as well as reconverting hapless tribals in Odisha. The conspiracy and the assassination led all the way to the doorstep of a Congress MP who was himself a converted Christian and was a prominent leader of World Vision, a global Evangelical organisation. The actual killing was done by a death squad comprising seven converted Christians and one Maoist. But Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati was just the preface.
Twelve years later, a similar barbaric episode recurred in Palghar where two Sadhus were lynched by a hungry mob of — again tribal — converted Christians in full public view. What made this slaughter more gruesome was the fact that the police handed over the Sadhus to the waiting mob. We are assured that no justice will be done. The outrage that erupted back then was largely confined to TV studios and social media before it was dumped in favour of a juicier controversy.
All that remains is this fundamental question: since when did we as the inheritors of the grandest spiritual tradition known to humankind, become so unfeeling to the plight of one of our own — Sadhus at that?
What is sickeningly glaring in the executions of both Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati and the Palghar Sadhus is the fact that former Hindus carried them out. But the outcome couldn’t be otherwise. It is the logical culmination of three centuries of sustained Christian propaganda, which dates back to the initial batches of European missionaries who branded Hindu Sadhus, Sanyasins, Swamis, Bairagis and Munis who deserved painful death because they were the agents of Satan. The horrific Goa Inquisition is the single largest genocide not only of Sadhus but tens of thousands of innocent Hindus because they were Hindus.
The cruel reality embedded in the inherent message of both the aforementioned incidents is the same. Both Abrahamic creeds have their God-ordained right to convert or kill Kaffirs at will and usurp the Heathen land known as Hindustan or India. Every attempt at resistance or reconversion will be crushed using physical violence or the might of Indian laws or both. The confident but empty bluster from the Hindu side that “India has always been a Hindu nation” is met with derisive guffaws by an ethics-free, world-gobbling enemy who knows he has the upper hand.
HISTORY UNERRINGLY SHOWS us that Hindus were never as fragmented, scattered, disunited, isolated, helpless, defenceless and apathetic as they’ve been since 1947. The fact that Hindus formed about ninety percent of truncated Bharatavarsha is one of the surest proofs of this. One is reminded of K.M. Munshi’s inspiring words written after the British departed.
The role of alien invasions in the history of India, hitherto exaggerated, deserves to be reduced to its appropriate proportions…But during all this period, the vitality of the race and culture…expressed itself with unabated vigour. The history of India is not the story of how she underwent foreign invasions, but how she resisted them and eventually triumphed over them.
Seventy-five years later, the triumph that Munshi mentions has thawed away decade after decade. The last nationwide Hindu consolidation occurred during the epochal Rama Janmabhoomi Movement three decades ago. It clearly showed what unstinted Hindu unity could really accomplish.
The aforementioned embrace of rank materialism has created one and a half generation of Hindus who have become averse to risk-taking; who value self-preservation over the extinction of their spiritual heritage. It is equally true that a good percentage of this generation genuinely venerates say, the Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita but only inside the safety of its gated community.
While the situation has definitely improved since 2014, the real battle needs to be fought at the very roots. This is what Sita Ram Goel meant when he memorably said that
An ideological battle has to be waged in order to avoid the other battle, the physical battle. Societies which fail to fight an ideological battle, which refuse to repel ideological aggression, invite physical aggression sooner or later.
It took only one term of Jaganmohan Reddy to hollow out the Hindu community in Andhra Pradesh by christianising it on an industrial scale. And he accomplished it entirely by staying within the operative framework of Indian democracy. When we observe the recent history of other South Indian states, we derive pretty much the same conclusion.
Kerala has been neatly carved out into Islamic and Christian enclaves to the north and south of Thrissur respectively.
Over the last century, Tamil Nadu has become one of the most active evangelical hubs with global tentacles; and in the last two decades, it has emerged as the latest Jihadi laboratory.
The ongoing spate of Christian conversions is Karnataka’s best-kept secret not to mention the burgeoning Jihadi activity in the Old Mysore region.
To be continued
The Dharma Dispatch is now available on Telegram! For original and insightful narratives on Indian Culture and History, subscribe to us on Telegram.
