The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor as a Passage to Sanatana Cultural Resurgence

THE RESPLENDENT VISUAL OF NARENDRA MODI offering Puja to Sri Kalabhairava Devalaya to which Bharatavarsha woke up today is an emotional verse in our ongoing civilizational history, now engraved in gold in the hearts of countless Sanatanis across the globe. When we survey the event from this historical perspective, it clearly reveals a verifiable timeless truth: that our civilization has unfailingly honoured political leaders who have stood up for, safeguarded, and tried to rejuvenate its spiritual core.

In 1927, the learned scholar of Indian history and culture, Sri N.N. Law described the defining core of this civilization in marvellous phraseology:

When we cut to the present, we observe precisely this phenomenon playing out in the contemporary idiom: there is a sublime reason the heads of the countless Hindu sampradayas, panthas and Mathas have poured into Kashi in one body on this magnificent and hopefully, history-altering epoch.

Let’s First Praise the Wicked

Our ancient seers and philosophers were farsighted when they coined this enduring verse:

durjanaṃ prathamaṃ vande sajjanaṃ tadanantaram‍ । mukhaprakṣālanātpūrvaṃ gudaprakṣālanaṃ yathā ॥

Let us first praise the wicked and then exalt the good people.

I will not translate the latter half of the verse for reasons of propriety.

Following this ageless maxim, we shall first look at a random example in this context.

Perhaps the most vocal, nervous and backhanded compliment to Narendra Modi’s spectacular feat at the sacred Kashi Dhama comes from Akhilesh Yadav’s anxious rant claiming credit for it. Pity…is our only response.

However, another foundational Sanatana philosophical maxim says that people—species like Akhilesh Yadav—are nimitta-mātram, meaning, they are merely incidental, insignificant and inconsequential in the larger cosmic play. In this case, such species offer the living proof for the fact that you can’t wage war against your own culture and hope to win in the long term, and short term victories can only be sustained through brute force and dirty tricks. This statement applies in equal proportion to the relative infamy that all such civilizational-wreckers have earned by the dint of their sheer villainy.

In passing, let it be said that it was precisely Akhilesh Yadav’s father’s Government that ordered the heartless mini-genocide of Rama Bhaktas for the very crime of their Rama Bhakti. In fact, that barbaric episode is the clearest proof of the monster-like depravity that Nehruvian secularism has planted in the psyche of such Hindu political leaders: where Sanatana piety is bulldozed by bullets in the name of maintaining law and order. This is not law and order but its perversion. The same party that used naked violence to prevent the rebuilding of the Sri Rama Mandira is now eager to expropriate glory for Kashi Vishveshwara. Somewhere along the line, Akhilesh’s faithful head-companion, his white Chudamani, the Islamic skullcap has conspicuously vanished. It appears that Kashi, the Mahasmashana works through mysterious ways but always ensures that Sanatana-haters will eventually be reduced to Bhasma. Which is what the Samajvadi Party’s political career is today. Along with the original progenitor of Hindu-hatred: the Indian National Congress.

Lessons from the Kashi Dham

The ongoing work at the Kashi Dhama represents just the latest brick in the ongoing Sanatana civilizational restoration occurring over the last seven years. But it is seventy-five years too late, a sliding away of the dark Nehruvian eclipse. In fact, the eclipse would’ve never occurred if full population exchange had taken place at the time of Partition, or the loss of a substantial chunk of the original Hindu homeland. Sri Lokanath Misra, one of the forgotten heroes of Hindu Dharma in that era, had thundered as follows on the floor of the Constituent Assembly:

If population exchange had occurred back then, reclamation of Ayodhya, Kashi, Mathura and thousands of other Hindu temples and sacred Kshetras would have been a living, flourishing reality and not a malaise. The very sight and news of courts and culturally-alienated judges deciding the “fate” (sic) of our sacred spaces is a gross defilement of the innermost recesses of every Sanatana soul. There’s just no polite way of saying this.

But to direct the attention of milords to even the briefest glimpse of this aspect of our history, we can cite a random example from Kerala. For centuries, Hindu jurisprudence in that state prescribed something called the Karungal-Pariharam. Accordingly, high officials including the king had to subject themselves to trial in cases where they injured temples in any form: through haughty behaviour, embezzlement or other crimes. If found guilty, they would be sometimes stripped off their wealth or they were made to offer severe expiation or they would be publicly flogged or in rare cases, banished. A specific punishment entailed them to stand within the confines of a hard stone sculpted in human form in front of a temple for days and nights without food and water.

The other lesson from Narendra Modi’s efforts at cultural revival via the Kashi Dhama dates back to his seminal victory in 2014. The spectacular sight of Modi and Amit Shah witnessing the magnificent Ganga Arati immediately after the final results was actually a civilizational hint. What is now happening is its step-by-step realization.

Which by itself provides another hint. As I tweeted yesterday, aside from Narendra Modi, the BJP has a whopping 302 MPs. Like them, even Narendra Modi is first an MP, then a PM. It is thus a continuing wonder as to what exactly prevents these MPs from rediscovering and rejuvenating the rich and substantial heritage-treasures in their own constituencies. One answer could be hidden in this phrase: yad bhavam tad bhavati, or as we perceive, so the world appears to us. If an MP perceives his constituency as a Dharmakshetra instead of as a vote-farm, he or she will start to identify precisely those elements that foster and help sustain our Dharma. In the latter case, every element in the constituency will appear as a mass of fingers that presses EVM buttons. But the transformation from constituency to a Dharmakshetra must first occur in the antaranga (or the Inner Life) of the MP. Perhaps the most urgent need in our country’s political life is an immediate and all-encompassing cultural re-education of the people who live it. In my limited researches, I can confidently say that on average, every MP constituency has a minimum of two hundred sites, spaces and stories of lived Sanatana cultural heritage. The continued neglect of this heritage is precisely what leads to civilizational tragedies like Kashmir, Bengal and Kerala.

It appears that by choosing Kashi as his primary Karma-Kshetra, Narendra Modi has demonstrated that he has his fingers on our majestic cultural pulse.

This brings us to another fundamental truth which “education” has deliberately made us forget. This is the way of viewing our own past. That way is through our Veda, Purana and Itihasa. Instead, we continue to view it through the Western political prism which isolates and divides. Our way unambiguously shows that not a single alien culture has been able to influence let alone alter our foundational philosophy whereas there are countless Islamic and Christian practices in India which are directly derived from Sanatana Dharma’s acharas, cultural practices, symbolism, etc.

But purely on the political plane, the rejuvenation of the Kashi Dhama once again makes it clear that Narendra Modi understands both the inevitability and centrality of wielding and keeping political power in order to usher in change for the better. His rabid critics since 2001 are the best proof of this fact. They fire the first shot of pure hatred against any policy announcement aimed at improving India, broadly speaking. Wielding political power in such an astute fashion is one of the most effective methods through which he has de-poisoned these serpents. Once they used to bite, now they merely slither. To understand the enormity of this facet of Modi’s achievement, I sincerely recommend everyone to read the history of the Congress party and the Communists after 1947.

Another perspective to understand this is to also analyse the history of the BJP itself. The BJP of Narendra Modi’s time represents perhaps the sharpest departure from the Vajpayee era which not only forgave but allowed itself to be bulldozed by a vile opponent whose mantra has been ruthless backstabbing. The BJP of that era perhaps forgot or overlooked a key element in the practical politics of India: if the Congress could heartlessly sacrifice its own loyalists of decades (Natwar Singh is the most high-profile recent victim), why would it spare its declared enemy, the BJP? In fact, Congress politics is a ruthless violation of the Hindu code. If anything, it is the democratic extension counter of the Islamic way where father-murderers and sibling-slaughterers were respected for this sole reason: power. Absolute, unchallengeable, brutal power for its own sake.

Thus, keeping sacred Hindu sites in a state of permanent boil, suppressing and obliterating the best and the most virtuous elements of the Sanatana spiritual civilization is entirely consistent with this Islamic method.

The Ayodhya Liberation, and now the liberation of Kashi seeded through the inauguration of the first leg of the corridor project represent the twin objectives of undoing a millennium of civilizational damage and recovering our original wealth buried under this debris. This ongoing Rashtra-Yajna will not ensue in assured victories in the short term. Which is why we must be willing to become Samits in it, willing to work for a victory that we might not witness in our own lifetimes.

The Kashi Dhama is definitely one such victory and a fruition of the penance of centuries. It is not just a corridor but a spiritual passage that should ideally lead to an all-encompassing cultural renaissance.

That renaissance will attain a Himalayan peak when the original kernel of Jnana, now an alien structure erected by a bigoted barbarian who broke the Visveshwara Devasthana, is liberated.

But on the broader plane, the ultimate fulfilment of all such liberations will and should be this exalted vision recorded by Sri Aurobindo:

Postscript

Ātmā tvaṁ girijā matiḥ sahacarāḥ prāṇāḥ śarīraṁ gṛhaṁ pūjā te viṣayopabhogaracanā nidrā samādhisthitiḥ|

Sañcāraḥ padayoḥ pradakṣiṇavidhiḥ stotrāṇi sarvā giro yadyatkarma karomi tattadakhilaṁ śambho tavārādhanam||

You are my Self; Parvati is my reason. My five pranas are Your attendants,
my body is Your Dwelling, all the pleasures of my senses are offerings for Your worship. My sleep is Your state of Samadhi. Wherever I walk, I circumambulate You, everything I utter is Your praise, everything I do is to honor You, O Shambhu!