By BS Murthy
For starters, India that came under the Islamic onslaught in the early 8th Century culminating in the Mogul rule over it in the late 15th Century carries the oldest extant civilization on earth. Then, at the beginning of the 17th Century, the British landed in the sub-continent as spice traders to end up pitching their colonial tents under the British Raj upon which the sun had never set that was until the mid 20th Century. That was when the clamor of the Musalmans for a nation of the faithful in the subcontinent increased even as the Hindu zeal for India’s independence picked up speed. So, unable to bear the native azadi heat, the English vacated the place, giving separate space to the Indian Musalmans by carving out Pakistan exclusively for Islam, however, leaving the Hindus to decide India’s religio-cultural fate for themselves. But the then Hindu polity was devoid of the urge to resurrect sanatana dharma, the ancient ethos of the land, in their national share, and what’s worse, its leadership too lacked the foresight even in the hindsight, a la not being ‘once bitten twice shy’. So, in a never before kind of betrayal of a nation by its classes and masses alike, they opted to cook the toxic Hindu-Muslim kichdi in India’s hearth. What’s worse, in a continuing saga, the Hindus of the day too remain unmindful of the inimical demographic designs of the Islamists and the evangelicals alike in their land that would portend its geographical doom should baffle the historians and the laymen alike. So this exercise is to decipher the peculiarity of the suicidal Hindu mindset that set India on its ruinous course, and continues to do so.
Though the Indian Musalmans’ insistence that they cannot co-exist with the Hindus was the raison d'etre for dividing the ancient landmass and despite Ambedkar’s articulation of Hindu-Muslim transmigration over the partitioned lines on that very score, yet the then Islam-naive Hindu leadership, headed by the Muslim-partial Gandhi Nehru duo, rooted for the Islamic presence in India. Thus, while the then Jaichand’s perfidious collusion with the intruding Muhammad Ghori to undermine his rival king Prithviraj laid the foundation for the Islamic rule in Hindustan; it’s the paucity of Hindu leadership at the time of its partition that precluded the mainland to regain its pristine Hindu character, and worse. But the moot point is how was it that the Hindu educated classes too had failed to see the irrationality of granting the Musalmans their Islamic space in Pakistan with one hand while with the other enable them to constrain the Hindu ethos in India! And true to their Islamic character, the Indian Musalmans were at it, so to say from the word go, vetoing vandemataram as the national anthem, refusing to hail the motherland, objecting the salutation to Surya the sun god, obstructing prayers to Saraswathi the goddess of learning, citing Islamic credos in India (!) even as its Secular State was at conditioning its Hindu subjects to remain helpless. Wonder if there’s such a parallel in the annals of human history, the Hinduphobics of the world must tell.
Well, so as to grasp the self-defeating Hindu psyche, we may have to delve into The Macaulay Minute dated the 2nd February 1835 that laid the foundation for the edifice of the Indian education system under the British Raj.
“[8] .. the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them…
[31] .. But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. … We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. …..can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?
[34] ….. it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. [We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population].” ([..] Emphasis supplied)
Thus, needless to say, unaware of the cynical British agenda for them, then the Hindus in general, began to let their children embrace Macaulayism to obtain new sarkari naukaris (the propagated purpose of English education) while, by and large, the Musalmans, true to their character, went along with their madrasas, worried as they were about the dilution of their faith the very education might occasion in their kids. No wonder then that at the critical juncture of India’s sunder, the Hindu elites - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect – moulded in a century-old Macaulay brainwash to totally disregard their religion and develop a near contempt for their culture, were naturally devoid of any dharmic wherewithal to guide Bharat in a proper post-partition sanatana direction. So, the by then rootless Hindu masses too saw nothing amiss in placing their fate and that of their newly independent nation, albeit after a millennial slavery, in the palpable hands of Nehru though he made no secret of his personal disposition by proclaiming that “I’m English by education, a Muslim by culture, just born a Hindu by accident.”
So, sadly for the Hindus, Nehru’s Muslim-oriented mindset was such that for him, “Mahmud (Ghazni) was far more a warrior than a man of faith and like many other conquerors he used and exploited the name of religion for his conquests. India was to him just a place from which he could carry off treasures and material to his homeland” (p235, Discovery of India) that is against Alberuni’s eyewitness account that “He utterly ruined the prosperity of the country (India), and performed those wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people”, and for him “the Hindus were infidels to be dispatched to hell as soon as they refused to be plundered”.
Thus, it was Nehru’s Islamapologia, to condescend to descend to the Musalmans regardless, which made him pass on the baton of India’s Macaulayised education system to the Saudi Arabia born Islamic theologian Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who had all along opposed India’s partition lest its depleted post-partition umma should lose its socio-political clout in the new Hindu-tilted nation. So, manning the Indian educational mechanism for nearly ten years, he cleverly steered it clear of the Islamic excesses of yore and parked it in the garage of ganga jamuna tehjeeb, the make-believe Hindu-Muslim hunky-dory, under the latter’s benign reign over the former barring the solitary Aurangzeb aberration. Surely, Azad’s idea was not to raise the Hindu hackles against the Musalmans’ past atrocities against them, but given the reality of the live Hindu-Muslim divide, so the legends of the latter’s crudities were ingeniously transferred into the British ‘divide and rule’ account to entitle the Indian umma to the benefit of the Hindu doubt.
Not Just Azad, four more Musalmans, all appointed by either by Nehru or Indira, his daughter who succeeded him shortly after his death, continued to ‘guide’ the Hindu students that way for nine more years, whereby setting an unalterable course for the Hindu ministers that came to occupy the vacated chair thereafter. If the idea of those Muslim worthies was to dress up the historical Islamic wounds to bring about Hindu-Muslim amity, still it would have been a welcome proposition, but given that all of them had turned their Islamic backs on the anti-Hindu tirades in the masjids, mohallas and madrasas that center on the Quranic hatred for the kafirs, and the abiding glory of the Islamic conquests of Hindustan, the modern Indian history must brand them as dubious and hold them as guilty.
Be that as it may, obviously oblivious of the inimicality of the Islamic credo, the erudite Hindus, dubbed as left-liberals, invariably have come to downplay the exclusivist Islamic penchant just as an aberration of the obscurantist Musalmans lying on the fringes of the marginalized Indian umma. So, as if to forestall any Hindu resentment against the ever multiplying Musalmans as well as the fast growing crypto Christians, owing allegiance to alien faiths, these Hindus began to solicit sympathy for them through every medium that came under their ‘liberal’ sway by picturing them as a sort of noble souls while at the same time depicting their fellow Hindus as incorrigibly regressive beings.
So to say, the Macaulay Minute with Maulana’s add-ons thus shaped the fake Nehruvian ‘Idea of India’ based on the perverse narrative of tolerance of the intolerant and intolerance of the tolerant, which insensibly afflicted the Hindu mindset and the thought process in every sphere of India’s intellectual activity, exemplified by Raja Rao in my maiden novel Benign Flame: Saga of Love while picturing his traumatic experience in a Hindu-Muslim riot, started by the latter, thus:
“When I was a few meters away from Wahab’s office, some Hindu hooligans seeking out the Muslims for slaughter, accosted me. Oh, I was so dazed by the frenzy of those hate-merchants that some of them felt I could be a Muslim in fright. After stripping me naked, to confirm my religion via circumcision, they advised me to run for safety. I was too shaken to comprehend whether I should thank the foreskin for having saved my skin, or feel ashamed of the crassness of my co-religionists.”
But given its overall reach and general impact, it’s the celluloid that afforded the maximum purchase to the false ‘Idea of India’ peddled by these macmauls (mac from Macaulay and maul from Maulana). Thus, in cinema after cinema, the Good Samaritan has always been either a Musalman or a Christian, wearing their religious identities on their sleeves, just in case the audiences were to be inattentive. That’s not all, in picture after picture, even as the bygone Hindu societal ills are deliberately dug out for universal ridicule, yet in the so-called Muslim socials, the prevailing Islamic evils like triple talaq and nikah halala get consciously hidden from the Hindu view. Not only that, the very fact that PK, the 2014 Hindi film that made crude fun of the Hindu gods to the peels of Hindu laughter, illustrates the Idea of India’s degree of decadence.
Well, if only the Hindu audiences were privy to the fact that the Christians believe that in an improbable act of Immaculate Conception, Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, who in turn turned water into wine and cured lepers with touch of his hand! Likewise, if only they were wiser to the fact that Musalmans swear by Muhammad’s aerial flight to and fro Paradise on the back of a winged horse and they are prone to miss the irony that Allah promises them rivers of wine in the hereafter even as he prohibits a peg of it here! Whatever, the Islam-naïve Hindus celebrate the ‘creative mischief’ of the Abrahamites, like MF Husain’s artistic though biased nudes of the Hindu goddesses, never mind that all his life he desisted from voyering his prophet’s private chambers. Not content at that, these macmauls brand those who condemn him on the same grounds as communal minded, besmirching their haloed Idea of India.
The gravity of this Hindu default can be gauged from the fact that but for Ambedkar’s stray, though incisive, thoughts on the Islamic credo and Chamupati Lal’s Hindi booklet, Rangeela Rasool that was only about Muhammad’s unbridled libido, there was no book on Islam by a Hindu in the know that was till I, prompted by the vacuity of it all, penned Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity ‘n More) in 2003 that’s in the public domain now as a free e-book. Whatever, it is seldom appreciated that the personal Islam is cumbersome, even to the ardent believers, and it’s the pyrrhic glory of political Islam’s goal to turn the world green that motivates them to menace the others; so with ‘blame Islam not the believer’ credo, if the non-Muslim world gets united to curb the political Islam, then the subdued Musalmans start behaving themselves. But for now, as poetic justice would have it, ironically, the very celluloid that gave a fillip to the fake ‘Idea of India’ narrative could let Vivek Agnihotri’s sensational ‘The Kashmir Files’ become its death knell, thereby ushering in the overdue New India with the marginalized political Islam.
