From
Khilafat to Godhra
Godhra
and the Gujarat explosion are the culmination of appeasement
policies rooted in dhimmitude. ‘Secularism’ is an illusion
that has collapsed. |
Godhra and the Nation
Future historians may see
Godhra and its aftermath as a watershed in the history of modern
India. The Hindu reaction to the burning alive of Ram Bhaktas
trapped in the Sabarmati Express has brought into focus both the
unchanging mindset of the Indian Muslims and the rapidly changing
ground realities in the Hindu world. It shatters several myths about
the people of India, Hindus in particular, that had become part and
parcel of the thinking of the so-called secular politicians and
intellectuals including the media. It may represent also the
collapse of ‘vote bank’ politics that has led to fragmentation
of political parties. Most importantly, we may be witnessing the
emergence of a concept of nationalism rooted in Indian history and
tradition rather than the one based on the Constitution and the laws
borrowed from the West.
This
last point is worth some elaboration. When the Parliament was
attacked by Pakistan sponsored terrorists on December 13, 2002,
there was national outrage to be sure, but it fades into
insignificance in the face of the public reaction to the Godhra
massacre of Rama Bhaktas returning from Ayodhya. This suggests that
for the great majority of Indians, symbols like Ayodhya, associated
with their history and tradition, resonate more powerfully than
constitutional symbols like the Parliament and the courts. Unlike
the United States, which is defined by its Constitution, the Indian
nation is defined by its history and tradition. Sri Aurobindo
expressed this truth nearly a century ago in his famous Uttarapara
speech:
“It is this
dharma that I am raising up before the world, it is this that I have
perfected and developed through the Rishis, saints and Avatars, and
is now going forth to do my work among the nations… When therefore
it is said that India shall rise, it is Sanatana Dharma that shall
rise. When it is said that India shall be great, it is Sanatana
Dharma that shall be great. When it is said that India shall expand
and extend itself, it is Sanatana Dharma that shall expand and
extend itself all over the world. It is for the Dharma and by the
Dharma that India exists… I say no longer that nationalism is a
creed, a religion, a faith; I say that it is the Sanatana Dharma
which for us is the nationalism.”
The
message is clear. India and Sanatana Dharma exist for each other.
Sanatana Dharma is Indian nationalism and Indian nationalism is
Sanatana Dharma. Any constitution or political system that ignores
this basic reality is unlikely to endure. The failure of leaders and
thinkers of the last half-century lies in the fact that they failed
to grasp this basic truth while trying to force on the people of
India a system of rules and beliefs that were hostile to this
millennia old tradition. They sought to justify this by appealing to
something they called ‘secularism’, which was turned into a
dogma that was never defined and placed above debate. (It is a
different matter that this secularism was a fraud having nothing to
do with secular polity.)
Further,
in order to make this alien transplant work, they sought to suppress
every Hindu aspiration as anti-secular and reactionary. This gave
rise to a class of politicians and intellectuals that flourished by
feeding on this anti-national growth in the name of secularism. It
was of course far from secular—for it was friendly to every alien
import like Arab Muslim Law (Sharia) in preference to Indian Law,
and Macaulayite education in opposition to education that sprang
from the soil. It culminated in the import of a ‘national’
leader with no roots or any stake in the nation. The idea was that
groups and individuals who felt no attachment to nationhood rooted
in the soil would be made loyal by uprooting tradition, distorting
history and replacing them with alien institutions that would suit
these alienated souls. So, if the people could not be loyal to the
nation, the nation would be erased and a new pseudo-secular
pseudo-nation created for their benefit. This way, mountain would be
brought to Mohammed.
Disenfranchising the Hindus
The
result of this ‘secularization’ was the virtual
disenfranchisement of the Hindus in their own country. The
Constitution and the laws were distorted to the point that loyalty
to the history and tradition was regarded as all but a crime. Anyone
who demanded that the law of the land should be the same for
everyone regardless of religion was denounced as a communal
chauvinist, while organizations like the Muslim Personal Law Board
that demanded laws created in Medieval Arabia (Shariat) were
accommodated. The same people who demanded the creation of Pakistan
but chose to stay in India were given concessions to make them feel
they were living in a Muslim country.
In
the process, a large group of politicians became prisoners of this
inexorable anti-national current. Politicians of the Congress party
and its offshoots soon began to feel that their very survival
depended on minority appeasement in the name of secularism.
Secularism, instead of being a means of achieving harmony in a
multi-religious country, became the means of survival for a class of
politicians and intellectuals. In the event, it is hardly surprising
that the Congress and its leaders sound increasingly like the Muslim
League of pre-Partition days. For example, Sonia Gandhi’s speeches
are shown more on Pakistani television than on Indian television.
Minority appeasement
A
single statistic will suffice to show how far the country has
traveled in its course of minority appeasement and Hindu
disenfranchisement. Under Article 30 of the Constitution, the state
has control of Hindu institutions while Muslim and Christian
institutions are free to function without government interference.
In practice, this has gone much further, to the point of looting
Hindu institutions to fund Islamic ones. As Sri Sri Ravishankar
pointed out in a recent interview, in the state of Karnataka alone,
the Government takes Rs 40 crores from the temples, while only 50
lakhs are returned to them. On the other hand, mosques generate
about 40 lakhs but receive 8 crores from the Government. This means
that money taken from temples is used to subsidize mosques and
madrasas, many of which are engaged in anti-national activity!
Nationwide
this kind of cross subsidizing—by taking money from temples to
fund mosques and madrasas—must run into hundreds of crores. In
addition, under the Haj Bill introduced by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1959,
the Government of India spent Rs 125 crores in 2001 alone in the
form of subsidies to Haj pilgrims. No such help is available for
other religious groups even for pilgrimages within India. So why
blame Pakistan or Saudi Arabia for fomenting Islamic extremism in
India when the ‘secular’ governments in India are doing the
same, with a substantial part of the money coming from the temples?
The Governments have been able to get away with this patent fraud
only because the public was kept in the dark. With increasing
awareness among the Hindus, it is no longer possible to hide these.
Is
it any wonder that the Hindus feel discriminated against and even
disenfranchised in their own country?
Ignoring
history
In
the face of all this, it would be a serious error to look at Godhra
in isolation as a ‘communal riot’. To understand Godhra and its
bloody aftermath, we need to go back to 1920, when the Swadeshi
Movement of Sri Aurobindo and Tilak was abandoned for the theocratic
aims of the Khilafat. The facts are well known to historians, though
history books tend to gloss over the unpleasant reality of the
Moplah Rebellion. Soon after Tilak’s death, Mahatma Gandhi
launched the Non-Cooperation Movement in support of the Indian
Muslims’ demand for the Khilafat, or the restoration of the Sultan
of Turkey as the head of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which had been
defeated in the Great War (1914-1918). In launching it, Gandhi
proclaimed that the Khilafat was more important than Swaraj, which
had been the prior goal of the Congress under Tilak. (He also
diverted a large sum of money from the Tilak Swaraj Fund to the
Khilafat Committee.)
The
Khilafat Non-Cooperation Movement was an unmitigated disaster. The
Khilafat Movement, whose goal was to replace the British Raj with
‘Khilafat Raj’ failed to achieve its goal of “Swaraj within
the year” promised by Gandhi. The resulting Muslim anger was now
turned from the British towards innocent Hindus. There were riots
all over India. It was particularly violent in Kerala where a
full-scale rebellion called the Moplah Rebellion erupted, which took
the British several months to crush. Thousands of Hindus were
massacred, women outraged and many forcibly converted. But still
Gandhi, who had a good deal to answer for, claimed that the Moplahs
were only doing what their religion taught them and should be
regarded as god-fearing and devout! What is important to note is
that investigations made it clear that the Moplah Rebellion, like
the recent Godhra Massacre, was a carefully planned campaign and by
no means a spontaneous uprising.
An
immediate consequence of the Khilafat and the Moplah Rebellion was a
belief among Muslim leaders that Hindu leaders would buckle under
the threat of violence. This was to have catastrophic consequences
at the time of Independence. Feeling that the Congress had no
stomach for facing any threat of violence, M.A. Jinnah and the
Muslim League let loose an orgy of street violence in August 1946
under the name of ‘Direct Action’ to press their demand for
Pakistan. It took particularly virulent form in the Calcutta
Killings, which stopped only when the Hindus began to retaliate. But
Jinnah’s assessment of the Congress leaders was vindicated when
they readily agreed to his Pakistan demand though they had come to
power in the election promising that they would not allow India to
be partitioned.
Dhimmitude
The effect of Muslim violence,
first during the Khilafat and then the Direct Action went beyond
partitioning the country. It has left a permanent mark on the psyche
of a large section of the Indian political establishment and the
intelligentsia, especially the media. The result has been a state of
mind that is oversensitive to the potential of violence in the name
of any Muslim cause, leading ‘secular’ leaders to concede
demands even before they are made. The Haj Bill introduced by the
super secular Nehru in 1959 is a prime example. Nehru opposed also
the rebuilding of the Somnath Temple for fear that it might enrage
the Muslims. It reached its climax in Rajiv Gandhi’s ignoble
surrender to Muslim fundamentalist threats in denying support to a
poor Muslim woman—Shah Bano—divorced by her husband supposedly
according to Islamic Law (Shariat).
This attitude of conceding
Muslim demands to the point of abusing Hindu beliefs and aspirations
is of course not limited to politicians. The intelligentsia, the
media in particular, is especially sensitive to Muslim threats. For
example, an English language newspaper in Bangalore was vandalized
by a Muslim mob for publishing a perfectly innocent cartoon of the
Prophet. It immediately came out with an apology for “hurting
minority sentiments.” Other English papers in Bangalore (and other
cities) have been vandalized on similar pretexts and have reacted in
similar fashion. But the same papers vociferously upheld the
‘artistic right’ of M.F. Husain to paint nude portraits of Hindu
goddesses. This blatant double standard, rooted in cowardice, is not
lost on the Hindu community.
At the heart of this behavior is
a state of mind that the great Egyptian-born Islamic scholar Bat
Ye’or calls Dhimmitude (called Dhimmitva in India). It is the
outgrowth of centuries of Islamic imperialism, which, though
oppressive, provided a measure of protection to non-Muslim subjects
as long as they were willing to accept their status as second-class
citizens and live by the rules of the Shariat (Islamic Law). This
was enforced through terror. As the Pakistani writer Brigadier S.K
Malik wrote in his seminal The Quranic Concept of War, “Once
a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained,
hardly anything is left to be achieved… Terror is not a means of
imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we
wish to impose upon him.” This has clearly worked in the case of
Indian politicians and the intelligentsia.
We may therefore say that the
root cause of this perversion, of using an anti-Hindu posture to
protect against possible Muslim retaliation, is this state of mind
of Dhimmitude. Politicians try to justify this by appealing to
secularism, but most of them are not anti-Hindu when it comes to
personal beliefs. In fact, a secularist former prime minister that
is a devout Hindu, still opposed building the Rama Temple at Ayodhya
because he felt it would lead to street violence. This is a typical
manifestation of dhimmitude.
In the intelligentsia,
dhimmitude is often compounded by hatred of Hinduism and opportunism
arising from Macaulayite education. It has assumed extraordinary
proportions in the English language media with each publication and
reporter trying to outdo all others with sensational stories. In
this game of one-upmanship, the truth was all but lost in the
media’s coverage of the recent Gujarat riots. Some reporters went
to the point of fabricating stories simply to get headlines. As this
is getting exposed, part of the media has been forced to justify its
coverage instead of reporting the news. This has led to still more
absurd ‘reports’ being foisted on the public. This kind of
damage control exercise is unlikely to help what is left of its
credibility.
From Khilafat to Gujarat
The
Gujarat violence following the Godhra massacre is eerily like a
mirror image of the Moplah Rebellion: then it was the Muslim Moplahs
who rebelled, while in Gujarat it was the Hindus from all segments
of society. But the causes were different. The Muslims Moplahs were
rebelling in the cause of a foreign theocratic symbol—the defunct
Caliphate—while the Hindus of Gujarat were reacting to an assault
on a deeply held national symbol, their devotion to Rama. This is
neither theocratic nor anti-national, though the secularist
intellectuals and the media have spared no efforts to portray it as
such by reversing the truth. More significantly, the continuing
course of minority appeasement has led to a stage when the Hindus no
longer believe that the Constitution and the courts can protect
them. Many now feel that the government will not protect them, and
they must rise up to protect their own interests.
This
is the real significance of Godhra: the disenfranchised majority
community is rejecting national institutions like the Constitution
and the courts as pandering to anti-national forces. The suspicions
in the minds of the Hindus seem confirmed by the fact that each
amendment of the Constitution and several religious laws passed—as
in the Shah Bano case—as well as several court rulings appear to
be taking the country further away from them and further down the
road of appeasement. And all this is supposedly needed to safeguard
secularism. And now the Hindus are saying—enough is enough.
Secularism:
shattered illusions
The reaction to Godhra has
shattered several illusions, notably the belief that Hindu tolerance
and patience can be taken for granted, while Muslim sensibilities
have to be handled with care. (This is the central principal of
dhimmitva followed by Indian intellectuals and the media.) The folly
of this belief was exposed in the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992,
but the secularists were not willing to learn the lesson. Actually
the late K.M. Munshi warned against it more than fifty years ago. In
a letter he wrote to the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru,
Munshi observed:
“In its
(i.e., secularism’s) name, politicians again adopt a strange
attitude which, while it condones the susceptibilities, religious
and social of the minorities, it is too ready to brand similar
susceptibilities in the majority community as communalistic and
reactionary. How secularism sometimes becomes allergic to Hinduism
will be apparent from certain episodes relating to the
reconstruction of the Somnath Temple. …These unfortunate postures
have been creating a sense of frustration in the majority community.
If, however, the misuse of the term ‘secularism’ continues,
…if every time there is an inter-community conflict, the majority
is blamed regardless of the merits of the question, the springs
of traditional tolerance will dry up. …While the majority
exercises patience and tolerance, the minorities should adjust
themselves to the majority. Otherwise the future is uncertain and
an explosion cannot be avoided.”
This has now come to pass.
Another shattered illusion is the idea of the class conflict that is
implicit in the Indian intelligentsia. Both academics and
non-academics have long proclaimed that the lower castes and the
tribals together with the Muslims are in a perpetual state of
struggle against the ‘Brahminical’ oppression by upper caste
Hindus. The Gujarat riots have shown the opposite to be true. The
most violent reaction against the Muslims came from the dalits, the
depressed classes and the tribals. It appears the worst oppressors
of these people were not the caste Hindus, but Muslim moneylenders
and contractors, who in many instances did not scruple to take
advantage of the vulnerability of the women belonging to these
classes. The backlash to Godhra has come mainly from these people,
in rural and tribal areas.
In spite of this catastrophic
failure, there are no indications of the secularists coming out of
their self-made web of delusions. This is not surprising, for
intellectuals rarely re-examine the foundations of their belief and
convert. As Max Planck, one of the founders of Quantum Physics
observed in 1936:
“An important scientific
innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and
converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul.
What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that
the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the
beginning.”
This
will be the fate also of the secularists and their ideology: both
will become irrelevant and extinct through the passage of time, and
the succeeding generations will grasp the lessons of their failure
right from the start. In the meantime, in the few years of active
life still left for them, the secularists are likely to cause
considerable damage to society. The Hindus today are in an enraged
state, feeling that they have been disenfranchised in their own
country while the groups that have openly expressed their hostility
to their homeland have been continually appeased with nothing to
show in return. At a time like this, what is needed is a healing
touch, not more abuse heaped on the Hindus and their beliefs, adding
fuel to the fire. But this is precisely what the secularists are
engaged in: their concern now is not society but salvaging their own
shattered reputations. They are engaged in a massive face-saving
campaign in which truth has no place and logic has given way to
sophistry. It will get them nowhere, for they cannot fool everyone
forever and they will sink deeper into self-deception.
The
greatest mistake that any minority group can make is to place their
trust in these defeated souls. A drowning man doesn’t save
others— he will only take others down with him. This is what is
likely to happen to those who are taken in by their bluff, “sound
and fury signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare put it.
This
has a special lesson for Christians whose leaders seem to be acting
under the combination of an atavistic anti-Hinduism and unseemly
opportunism. As during the staged ‘Church bombings’ a couple of
years ago, some Christian leaders are trying to discredit Hinduism
and the Indian Government by indulging in an international
propaganda campaign on the issue of the Gujarat carnage. It has now
come to light that a leading Indian Christian propagandist—one
Father Cederick Prakash—was behind the recent European Union
report that gave wildly exaggerated stories about the atrocities
simply to discredit the Gujarat Government. He may feel clever for
having scored some propaganda points, but he has hardly helped
fellow Christians with his cleverness. Christians should understand
that their best safeguard is the goodwill of the majority. It is a
carefully nurtured illusion that European countries and America will
come to their rescue in times of trouble. This shows that they have
still not come out of their colonial mindset. But fools rush in
where angels fear to tread.
Europe
following India?
In analyzing the current world
situation, one basic fact stands out: the world is terrified of
Islam and the violence that it brings. If this fear is a recent
phenomenon, which did not come to the surface during the era of
European imperialism, it is only because the means of destruction
now available are far more lethal and extensive. Also, the European
military superiority, which was a major source of power in
colonization, has not been of much help in combating terrorism
today. It should be an object of humility to the West that both the
means of massive destruction—if not mass destruction—and the
training necessary for it were provided by the Western countries
themselves in pursuit of nebulous goals.
There
is still an unwillingness to face the truth of the Islamist
threat—resulting in policies of appeasement and craven
opportunism. To take an example: by any logic, India should be an
invaluable ally in the fight against terrorism. But western
countries never miss an opportunity to condemn India for real or
imagined persecution of Muslims in the hope of gaining some Muslim
goodwill, which of course will never be forthcoming. On the other
hand, the West will continue to be the target of Islamic hatred,
while simultaneously losing the trust and goodwill of India. This is
exactly what happened soon after the sanctimonious utterances of the
European Union (led by Britain and France) over Gujarat— a car
bomb exploded in Karachi killing a dozen Frenchmen. The West should
learn a basic lesson: it cannot divert Muslim anger to India by
taking an anti-Hindu stand. It is both craven and unsound.
Recent developments suggest that
politically and intellectually Europeans are falling into the same
trap of appeasement and self-delusion that India is coming out of.
As Bat Ye’or pointed out: “Today, the United States and Europe
compete for the favor of the Muslim world by once again abandoning
the victimized peoples to its mercies. The Gulf War against Saddam
Hussein on the question of oil interests (1991) was redeemed by the
destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of new centers of
Islamist influence in the heart of the Balkans… The war to
annihilate Serbia was intended to punish the crimes of Milosevic and
his regime, but the media campaigns endeavored to calm the anti-Westernism
in the Muslim world and of Muslim immigrants in Europe. It also
helped to gain forgiveness for the war on Iraq by a strong
pro-Muslim counterbalancing policy in the Balkans.”
But this
appeasement—sacrificing innocent victims of Islamic imperialism to
save themselves—is unlikely to work. There is no sign of a
corresponding response of gratitude from the Muslim world. Appeasement
is a one-way street. The French have probably been the leaders
in this appeasement race, but they were themselves victims of
terrorist bombings in Karachi. European Christian organizations in
particular, beleaguered by declining fortunes in the ‘Christian’
West, are prepared to go to any length just to survive. The Church
lives in constant fear of losing Rome to Islam as it lost Jerusalem
to the Arabs in the first millennium and Constantinople to the
Ottoman Turks in the second. This existential fear is not helped by
the presence of Islamic armies in Kosovo, a hundred miles from
Trieste on the Italian border, aided and abetted by NATO and the US
with their lopsided priorities in the Balkans.
(This
shows the utter folly of Indian Christians antagonizing the Hindus
in the fantastic hope that the ‘Christian’ West will come to
their rescue! Neither Europe nor America has come to the rescue of
Christians in Pakistan and Indonesia.)
Conclusion: Look beyond
Godhra
We may now sum up: Godhra is a
symptom, not a culmination. It is a sign that the Hindus have had
enough of ‘secularism’. It is also a sign that a significant
section of Muslims—or at least its leadership—believes that
threat of violence always works. Any debate now must look beyond the
immediate events to search for the causes that led to the bloodbath.
And this debate must be directly between the participants, the
Hindus and Muslims, without ‘secular’ intermediaries who have a
stake in keeping alive old antagonisms. The facts however are
simple: the majority community has been made the scapegoat by an
opportunist group of appeasing politicians and self-serving
alienated intelligentsia. In the name of secularism, these products
of dhimmitude have sought to treat the Hindus as contented slaves
who should cooperate in their self-aggrandizement. The Hindus are
rejecting both their labels and their ‘secularism’, which they
have seen through as nothing but minority appeasement plus
dhimmitva.
What the reaction to Godhra
suggests is that the ancient civilization of India is recovering its
historical sense and begun to throw off the remnants of Islamic
imperialism. Secularist historians have been telling us that India
was under imperial rule for only two hundred years or so. The truth
is that a large part of India, especially North India was under
Islamic rule for nearly five hundred years, until it was replaced by
the British rule. The imperial mindset of Muslims however continues
to this day. This can be seen in their insistence on being ruled
according to Arab Law (Shariat), their insistence on the sacredness
of imperial symbols like the Babri Masjid among others. Many Muslim
leaders still believe that India should be run as an Islamic state,
with Shariat as the law of the land and Hindus as dhimmis. This is
essentially the attitude of the secularists also, superficially
Westernized, but who vociferously argue for special treatment for
Muslims. This is driven by fear of losing their privileged status
among the dhimmis. This is what makes them see rising Hindu
nationalism as the enemy— for Hindutva and dhimmitva are opposite
in vision.
Godhra is the beginning of the
end of dhimmitva. The first to disappear will be the secularists.
Then it will be a struggle for nationhood, of true nationalism based
on the vision of ancient sages down to modern ones like Sri
Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda, against dhimmitva and its
beneficiaries.
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