In an attempt to save our society from its present confusion, many present day thinkers run the risk of planning it into the likeness of a hell and ultimately into complete destruction. And all this under the cover of good intentions, which are not enough to save the world today. This is the predicament of several intellectuals in our country who are ill-informed quite often about their own roots. At times it is a result of sterile academic mind with little or no matching wavelength for the social content in their exercises.

It all began with a systematic bid to cause and magnify slowly disabilities, anxieties and fears in the minorities. The same set of writers claimed a right on scheduled castes and tribes and bracket them with minorities, away from the Hindu fold, in the name of concern for them. This game has, over the years, sought to wreck respect for majority religion in this country and caused tremendous disharmony. The willingness to suspend judgement is a characteristic of the despised academic habit of mind. And their articulation through media undermines belief, saps the power of action and causes cynicism amongst people about their own faith. This is the tragedy of our times. Even in the western world where social ghettos, minority pockets and alien wedges are not unknown, the print media does not incite so much disaffection and disharmony against the majority faith and sub-cultural groups as in India.

The core of Bipan Chandra’s book ‘Communalism in Modern India’ is unconcealed hatred for Hinduism. He seems to be following a single track cult of despair and hypocrisy, acting invariably both as judge and jury. The gist of his thesis can be summed up: “While before 1947 the main damage to national unity was done by Muslim Communalism, since 1947 it is Hindu Communalism, which poses the Fascist threat and which has to be made the main target of attack by the secular forces. The existence of minority communalism should not detract from this fact”.

The contemporary Indian mind as exemplified by Pal justifying minority communalism has been vitiated by mischievous exercises at self-destruction. In a bid to fling itself on every manifestation of Hinduism, constant efforts are made, mostly in English media to distort the thought patterns forming a deep alliance between the gullible and diabolic rationalisation. We have obviously grown in slanted, stereotyped knowledge with rolling forth of an avalanche of new myths but have been far away from the wisdom of our own land. The need to be secular, with a drift from religious beliefs and snapping of all existing binding threads has been dinned in the ears of one set of people only. The Hindu collective mind was hitherto benumbed because of this constant onslaught. Since our religion so far did not appease those who held power and manipulative groups, the things went on merrily. Of late it certainly posed a threat to the frightened defenders of fake ideologies; the over-reaction is quite visible. The arrogance of secularist writers tend to defend themselves today with a bitterness in proportion to their vulnerability.

A prejudiced mind can sink very low indeed when its questionable objectives of denigrating a faith take over and act as blinkers, tainting their vision and judgement. It is not difficult to see through the pressures, intrigues and orchestration amongst some of the Indian intellectuals when they write about Hinduism. They are erecting ceaselessly a wall between people and their religion. It is the wall of an implacable and escalating warfare against the whole heritage. It is a wall of senseless propaganda that we are inert and immobile race, our religion is amorphous, non-descript and decrepit. This has been a barrier that always threatened with its long arm that reaches and strikes everywhere in myriad forms.

How long will we face the walls of suspicion, of rejection, of fear, of hallucinations and myths which are being arduously constructed around us. Let us identify those from amongst us who have been acting as advance guards, miners and sappers of other religious groups enjoying sheltered existence and patronage of the entrenched lobbies, pouring forth the eloquent yet venomous vituperation against our religion. Self-respect, without doubt, is the last mental prop under such all-round attack on our sensibilities. It can never be right to pronounce upon a whole society, on the majority community a sentence of doom by those who have neither a sense of history nor respect for their heritage.