Secularism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary India
by Saradindu Mukherji on 14 Jun 2010 13 Comments

The implicit logic underlying Indian “secularist” discourse is that Hindus have no right to life and dignity, and they should quietly accept whatever is inflicted on them.

 

Why is this so? Because it is immensely profitable to do so for the main actors, and this is brazenly done to accommodate and promote the growing clout of pan-Islamic interests. Hence, the “secularists” are actually foot-soldiers of Islam. Their insensitivity and crude propaganda defy all principles of objectivity and fair play, and Goebbels, if alive, would have been envious of them.  

 

Just a few incidents and viewpoints clearly indicate the larger picture. During one Hindu-Muslim riot in Gujarat in May 2010, one Vijay Dantaniya was killed in the Shahpur locality of Ahmedabad. The “secularists” kept quiet because this was an organized riot, and the casualty being a Hindu, had no political value for them. As it was a victory for the others, they had no reason to shout and shriek.

 

If a Muslim had been killed by a Hindu mob, they would have called it another gory display of Hindu fascism and a genocidal attack. They would have flooded the NHRC with petitions and stopped the proceedings of Parliament; TV anchors would have held unending rounds of discussion on the growing menace of the Hindu Right. All murders, whoever the perpetrators, irrespective of religion, are heinous crimes. But the grim reality in contemporary India is that loss of Hindu life is OK.

 

Just a week or so later, not far from that place of murder, a Hindu bridegroom Bharat Ghalchar was kidnapped by three people bearing Arabic names. The unpardonable sin of the kafir was that his brother Sanjay had married a Muslim girl a few months previously, and now Bharat’s abductors (her brothers or their allies) wanted them to restore Sanjay’s wife to her natal family. Though VHP called for a bandh in Banaskantha, we did not see any TV anchor shrieking and shouting about the menace of the Islamic “Right”. Whether this issue has come up before the NHRC or the Women’s Commission is not yet known. Fortunately, the Gujarat police, unlike the police of West Bengal or UP or Kerala, was able to free Bharat.

 

Despite centuries of Islamic attack on Gujarat, desecration of temples, forced conversion of thousands, and the dastardly attack in Godhra and on the Akshardham temple, the rape of a Hindu girl by some ‘minority’ members some months ago, and numerous incidents of Muslim aggression, Congressmen and their ‘secular” collaborators go on mischievously mentioning the spectre of the Hindu “Right” and the pitiable plight of “persecuted” Muslims in Gujarat. For them, Muslims from the first attack on Gujarat and the destruction of the Somnath temple right up to the Godhra massacre and thereafter have an unsullied peace-loving reputation!

 

A former Chief Minister and Congressman openly said, “We don’t trust the police in BJP-ruled states”, but his party and bosses in New Delhi have complete faith in the Pakistani police and their investigative agencies, despite their known reluctance to initiate action against various terrorists operating from their soil against India. Firstly, it is an utterly laughable idea and an absurd expectation from a “criminal enterprise” (Pakistan) a la Naipaul. Secondly, despite the fact that many of the decision-makers in government are refugees from Pakistan, they seem to have forgotten the crude behaviour from the Pakistani police and armed forces in throwing them out after inflicting all kinds of humiliation and trauma on them. Far from guiding the authorities, many of these refugees from Pakistan are preparing mind boggling recommendations and manufacturing absurd logic and insisting on their implementation to further divide India on religious basis and thus consolidate Islamic expansion. They have almost embraced the programme of the Deobandis.

 

This “high-profile” former Chief Minster went on to say that the terrorists were only “coming from across the borders”, thereby suppressing the existence of home-grown Jihadis. The reality is that dangerous “sleeper cells” are flourishing in every nook and corner of India, and his bosses in New Delhi have been banning many of these made-in-India Jihadi outfits. This is typical Congress “secularism” at its “glorious” best.

 

In West Bengal, the pan-Islamic forces are notching up one success after another. Hindus are suffering at the hands of Muslims too frequently in Bengal; local politicians and media keep mum. Who has bothered to know how a young man Sujit Ghosh was killed by a rampaging mob in Pancthupi village of Muslim-majority Murshidabad district in April 2010? The growing clout of a lady politician who has a habit of putting Islamic robes and offering namaaz at the drop of a hat bodes ill for the national/Hindu interest. She is likely to be a bigger asset to the pan Islamists than late Jyoti Basu.

 

News from the land of Karunanidhi was most encouraging from the “secularist” angle. This concerns a senior IAS officer, Syed Munir Hoda, new Election Commissioner of the state. He again has an impeccable “secular” track record. According to media reports, as Home Secretary of Tamil Nadu under Ms Jayalalithaa, he allegedly helped Abdul Nasser Madani, a high-profile “progressive” ideologue accused in the Coimbatore blast case in which 53 persons were killed. The said Home Secretary had reportedly lifted the ban on Madani’s movement and ensured that he could get the medical help he needed.

 

Such was the incompetence of the administration that the Chief Minster remained unaware of this “humanitarian” gesture for quite some time. Only after the Home Secretary’s pious “mission” had been accomplished, was Hoda suspended by the then Chief Minister. Immediately upon his accession to the throne in Fort St. George, the rabid anti-Hindu who wanted to know from which engineering college Lord Rama had qualified, reinstated Hoda. This great “patriarch” who refrains from doing anything substantial for the suffering Tamils of Sri Lanka and can’t utter a word for the persecuted Tamil (Hindus) of Malaysia, and remains unmoved by mega-scams involving his trusted ones, had thus added another feather in his “secular” cap.

 

The “glorious” beginning of this unique “secular” mindset in India, which we must not brush under the carpet any more, may be attributed to M.K. Gandhi’s Khilafat movement, which sought to strengthen the primordial and extraterritorial concerns of Indian Muslims to restore the Turkish Ottoman Emperor, also the Khalifa (Caliph) of Sunni Muslims. He was expected to rid the world of polytheists! 

 

Henceforth, everything anti-Hindu was okay, provided the interests of the Ummah were advanced. Given this background, it was no surprise that the Muslims of Kerala (Moplahs) raped hundreds of Hindu women, killed about 600 Hindus, destroyed and desecrated 100 temples and converted by force about 2500 Hindus to Islam, besides looting and destroying Hindu property. It was an inevitable fallout Gandhi’s first major political experiment – violent, inhuman, fanatical, and a “success” – all in the name of anti-colonial non- cooperation movement. Since the majority of the leaders of that time had little problem with such savagery, the Indian National Congress went on to become stronger and stronger. Congress had realized it could take the Hindus for granted, even after inflicting horrific trauma on them. Its only concern was to ensure that Muslims gain from every strategic move made by them. And they succeeded. This is the foundation stone of contemporary “Secularism”, and sanctification of bloody Jihad. 

 

The India of the 1920s is not totally dead. Occasional checks or reprimands were not unknown at that time, as has become accepted practice now. When Gandhiji rationlised, if not so much justified, the dastardly assassination of Swami Shraddhanand in Delhi in 1926, it was Tagore who refused to accept the Gandhian line and severely condemned it without hiding his reverence for the venerable Swami. There were people of the stature of Veer Savarkar, and subsequently people like Syama Prasad Mookerji, Nirmal Chatterjee, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Lok Nayak Jaya Prakash Narayan, who could speak the truth on such matters.

 

Hence it was never a surprise that the Indian National Congress would always inflict irreparable damage on Hindus while promoting and favouring the Islamic cause and the Muslims. Hence the frequent visits to Azamgarh, expression of sympathy with the family members of dreaded terrorists, occasionally raking up the Batla House encounter and calling it fake, and deliberately concocting words like “Hindu-terror”. Appeasement of Pakistan a la the shameful surrender at Sharm-el-Sheikh, downplaying all acts of Islamic terrorism, are part of a comprehensive package. The same mindset makes government provide Rs 20 lakhs to Pakistani victims of a railway accident but not even a fraction of that to the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy, or to Hindu refugees from the Kashmir Valley. Must not this end?

 

As long as Hindus who are still the majority do not shake off this mental lethargy and wake up to the life-and-death question confronting them, they have no future. Having already lost political power, after having fought for it for thousand years, within 60 years of independence, they must decide on which side of the civilisational divide they stand. They cannot meekly submit to everything that goes against them, and this happens almost every day.
 

The writer teaches History at Delhi University

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