Most of the time political logic assumes a shape of perversion when a politician keeps a short-sighted view before him. In the recent no trust move against NDA government, in course of debate in the parliament Ram Vilas Paswan had the audacity to tell that the word ‘Hindustan’ itself should be banned from usage and only India or Bharat should be used. To such rootless, semi-literate politicians, possibly the very smell of the word ‘Hindu’ is probably horrendous. Such persons are always uncomfortable with the words like Hindu or nationalism which in their view is narrow and predatory in nature.

Similarly noted writer Salman Rushdie once called India a nation which was still in the making and not taken definite form. He seemed to be contending with self-doubt and called this country an imaginary land. Shorn of verbiage, all such epithets are reflecting their self-deception. Even the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen seems to be reluctant to accept the need for national identity. Such a celebrity after getting acclaim in the west surprisingly suggests that all of us have multiple identities which should be preserved. Identity is a matter of reasoned choice, he says. No sing song of plural human spirit. He condemns the issue of religious identity but only for Hindus; he has no courage to apply his logic to Muslims and Christians.

Most of the writers who swear by Nehru’s legacy deprecate the tendency that modern India continued to hark back to a glorious ancient past. They say : neo-obscurantist India needed to look back to the dynamism of Nehruvian era. But on a hindsight, people also call his contribution an evil legacy whose consequences are there for everybody to see in our time. With his declaration that majority communalism is far more dangerous than minority communalism, he encouraged a fragmented view of the country, putting Hindus in altogether new category.  He preferred to choose one face, ignoring the other. It might have been the first streak of minority-appeasement.

According to J.K.Galbraith, Nehru once told him, “You realise, I am the last Englishman to rule in India”. That sums up Nehru and his understanding of India’s problems in its formative year. He never understood or addressed minorityism. The refusal to lay the real foundations of a secular polity through a uniform civil code and other necessary measures created fissures in the country’s social structure.

The word ‘Hindutva’ is being used in English media to ridicule those whose faith happens to be Hindu. Without comprehending what Hinduism is, they heap innuendos and invectives and hurt the feelings of an ordinary Hindu with impunity. They are blind to religious bigotry of semitic religions and scared of even touching the references to their present day degeneration reflected in the world-wide political strife. The very mention of Hinduism and Buddhism generates pathological anger in the minds of the adherents of these faiths. Religion that ought to have most civilising effect on human beings has degenerated into a capital source of bloodshed. But our writers and journalists, impervious to see this reality, show cowardice while referring to them but single out only ‘Hinduism’ for their sarcastic comments. What a  degeneration..

Hindutva, an abstract noun of the word Hindu, truly means the ‘essence of Hinduism’ and there can be nothing unfair or discriminatory in that. Hindutva, on which Hinduism has been founded has welcomed all faiths and cultures with open arms, something which is unparalleled and without example anywhere in the world. The tolerance which Hindus are proud to have is a legacy of Hindutva itself. The freedom exercised by minorities in this country is exemplary and perhaps no other country could boast of the same. Take the case of Pakistan and Bangladesh where Hindus and Sikhs are always persecuted. In Iraq the Kurds have been victimised and in Spain, the Basque movement. Why, even the great democracy of the US was ruthless as it pinned down Muslims after 9/11. So, where does not discrimination exist? On the contrary, there is a general feeling that the minorities are unduly appeased, in fact, at the expense of the majority community. The fact that the BJP decimated its opposition in the Gujarat polls is testimony to the legitimacy and appeal of Hindutva.

The politicians of all shades very well know that the future of Hindu awareness is no longer dependent on whether or not the BJP wins the next poll. Hindutva as a way of making sense of the everyday social world has already gained far greater currency than what support for it in electoral terms would imply. More and more people are today buying into the views about minorities, without necessarily voting for the BJP. This is what the VHP means when it says that Hindutva must ultimately transcend the logic of party politics.

The Congress, sensing the mood also jumped the band wagon. This was the height of hypocrisy. Sometime back Congress veteran Vasant Sathe wore his saffron heart on his sleeve. Speaking at a function at the prime minister’s house, he demanded that the government confer the Bharat Ratna on Savarkar, rename Bharat as Hindustan by introducing a constitutional amendment, and replace the word ‘Hindi’ with ‘Hindu’ in Iqbal’s Sare Jahan Se Achcha. While Mr. Sathe’s endorsement in what Hindu organisations believe could hardly have been more emphatic or complete, his party has been doing something similar, albeit more discreetly and in a piecemeal fashion. From Indira’s ‘martyrdom’ speeches just before her assassination to Rajiv’s ‘when a big tree falls’ line shortly afterwards. From the opening of the Babri locks in 1986 to the shilanyas in 1989. from Rao’s fiddling in 1992 to Sonia’s loss of nerve in Gujarat 2002 – it has often fought so called communalism by making common cause with so called Hindu outfits.

Every party is today in one way or the other knows that the rise of Hindu awareness is tagged with the great middle class revolution in India. This fact cannot be denied. No party ultimately can survive without Hindu vote. Minority votes are fractured and casting their lot with them will hound out such parties from the political scene. It is because of this slowly that the opposition to Hindu organisations will peter out.

It is a tragedy that there is hardly any soul-searching amongst politicians in India who are quite often flippant and casual and their hate vocabulary is equally interesting and counter-productive. The charges of genocide, calling Hindu organisations neo-Nazi or Fascist, frequently made, do not stick and are laughable. In a parrot-like dramatic performance some politicians often in their local idiom and badly spoken dialect would exert to call the opponents Nazi who are like 1930 Germany or sometimes charging them with Balkanisation of the country. Not comprehending the perception of world history and modern trends many of them try to unsuccessfully learn from leftists their vocabulary of yesteryears and make a fool of themselves. There are a host of such persons even in Parliament many of them with shady and criminal background and at best be called mobsters.

Another political embarrassment of opposition is that all Hindu organisations and those who have faith in them are mostly urban, striving middle class which is articulate and techno-savvy. Buoyed economically by country’s economic liberalisation and software success, they are none-the-less keen to keep traditional values alive. The success of NRIs and emerging diaspora in the west, from which even financial support comes, has panicked so called minority baiters. If Hinduism is equated with progress, it panics so-called secularists and their charge of revivalism and obscurantism against them looks like a cheap joke.

Sir Mark Tully, renowned BBC correspondent in India for 22 years, has a different dream of India. He finds that India has been content to balance its deep spiritualism with modernity. Sir Mark Tully is often called ‘Voice of India’ and is a credible authority on South Asian affairs. He speaks Hindi and has recently presented an exhaustive forty-five minute report on British Television during our Independence week.

What he has said about India in his TV programme called ‘Hindu Nation’ can be an eye-opener for our pseudo-secularist crowd and a host of politicians who obviously value their vote-banks more than the future of the country. He says : ‘India is a Hindu nation forced to wear the ugly formless garb of Western secularism. Hindu nationalism is a backlash against this pedantic Nehruvian aspiration, the 50-year-old soulless construct that sunders religion from its natural place in Indian public life. The Congress needs to recognise that public religiosity, not the private spiritual search, was Gandhi’s way. And this is the one true way for India.’

Even when he held very clear views about our country as referred to above, our own newspapers like The Times of India has been very sarcastic in its comments on his programme : ‘Was Sir Mark acting as a lightning rod, a conductor of our deeply suppressed emotions? Or was he, the ultimate burra sahib?’ This is what the correspondent of The Times of India wrote from London and was prominently displayed in a box alongside the report. This was what we expected from those who are flag-bearer of secularism. They are keen to preserve countries assiduously or painstakingly constructed thorough fuzzy concept of secularism. For them what Mark Tully said must have been a blasphemy and a terrifying thought.

There have been a spate of articles published recently in a section of English press which either assail the concept of nationalism, suggesting that its negative aspects would threaten the very structure of state and that the best course left to us now is to rediscover Nehru and a new scientific temper to rise above the namby-pamby nationalism propagated by Hindu organisations.

Such scribes in their enthusiasm to condemn the majority community for their sins of being increasingly conscious of their identity, at times even predict a doom for the very idea of unified India making it appear that it is under siege because Hindus, according to them, have gone berserk and have hijacked the concept of plural society.

In plain language, the so-called secularists have been crying wolf far too long that the majority’s demand for homogeneity or social uniformity, uniform civil code will slowly wreck multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-lingual country. Another popular charge is that Indian society is a plural society and cannot be reduced to dull uniformity. Diversity must not only be tolerated but whole-heartedly accepted.

In their charge- sheet against Hindus another recurring theme is that the Muslim community today is at a loss to understand, being already cornered. What was expected from the Hindus, in order to deserve the protection of its life, liberty and honour. The provocative postures exhibited with the help of intemperate language even accuse Hindus that they are expecting unconditional and deliberate assimilation from Muslims in the so-called mainstream which demands their loss of identity and abject surrender and slavery. Going to absurd length, a writer recently went to the extent that in the name of modernisation, the minority should accept blasphemy in good humour, deviation from religious injunctions, a voluntary limit on the number of mosques and madarsas etc. The future of Muslims was uncertain, as they were under pressure, it was stated. They have already shared the local culture in various parts of the country but to the extent their religion is an element in the cultural and social make up, he shall not share it. This is an invented chargesheet where facts get unruly and distorted. This is part of a self-deprecating inferiority complex of a so-called secular Hindu, though in minority, but hell-bent on spitting on his own face.

Truly speaking these secularists have lost their way in a world where events no longer answer to any logic. Their world view is distorted, against the long term interests of their own country and aims to cut down their own roots.

Another recent editorial in a mainline daily has commented that Indian nationalism is increasingly defining itself in adversarial terms, the adversary of course, being Pakistan. Irrespective of hostilities against this country right from 1947 resulting into full-scale past wars and unabashed export of cross border terrorism for more than a decade, our own writers accuse us of a wave of nationalism which is not positive and essentially negative. In plain words, they accuse Hindus as a community for inventing this type of nationalism. They are irked and feel extremely uncomfortable even if Pakistan is called the “enemy of the nation”. As if such Indian writers have undertaken a new mission to defend Pakistan, they would even accuse war-monger and chauvinist Hindu organisations of political rhetoric. The Indian nationhood, they say, has come to be seen in terms of competition with Pakistan.

We often see how guilty do such writers feel when India burst nuclear bombs or indeed when there is widespread rejoicing on the success of our cricket team. They are indeed sad that Indians were being continuously urged to compare themselves with Pakistan. Such people in their myopic interpretation forget that the existence of Pakistan always depended on the hatred for India. Right from the beginning Pakistan has defined themselves and their nation principally in terms of hostility to India.

In a nutshell, such writers wail over a situation where according to them the idea of India is being reduced to a mirror image of the idea of Pakistan. It is so easy today to spot apologists for Pakistan amongst our celebrities, particularly after returning from there recently. 

Those who write for the mass media, often in the garb of social scientist, touch a few basic issues about the country more to provoke and sensationalise. This explains why articles with such titles appeared recently in the main newspapers such as ‘Does India Exist?’, ‘The Idea of India’, ‘India Under Siege’, ‘Hollow Hinduism’, ‘Namby-Pamby Nationalism Unleashed’, ‘Liberals Battle against Siege of Minds’, ‘The Awesome Tidal Passions’, ‘When Hindutva Reigned Supreme’, etc., etc.

All such politically inspired articles refer to their own perspectives on history, limits of nationalism and have a lot to say on why we headed for a doom. But seeing through the garbage dished out on these fundamental issues, we can safely say that the social truths and reality have always eluded them. Those who predict worst for this country go at lengths to scare us by telling that they were not sure that India would remain hundred years hence. They hold out before us a possibility that we would disintegrate; balkanisation is awaiting us. This wishful thinking is the agenda of some of the politically motivated anti-national writers and journalists today and they are in most cases indeed our co-religionists!

There are some writers who have temerity to say that India’s culture might change in the next fifty years. That it would not be recognisable. Our culture, they remind us, is the collective baggage of our uncertain past. We can change our mind. If fifty years from now we define India’s historical culture differently from what we do it today, there should be no surprise.

This is indeed a hogwash, intended to denigrate a 5000 year old civilization. Such logic is patently flippant and casual. We cannot say what is more exasperating – the banality of what such writers say or the effrontery of the way these so called secularist scribes dish it out.

We certainly do not need such social thinkers or journalists to warn us that the passage of time can change our views of the past and that the future is always full of surprises. We know that none of those most adept at using much-vaunted Marxist tools of analysis prepared us for any of the major events that have made the post-war world what it is. In fact leftists have been extremely poor in their political predictions and assessment of social realities. In the context of India, their judgements have always been false, misleading and irrelevant.

The Marxists have perfected the art of disinformation through orchestration at two levels as far as India is concerned. These internationalists and champions of the poor have no compunctions to align themselves with the so called capitalist press like The Times of India, etc. in heaping choicest abuses on Hindus these days. Riding on the shoulders of their class-enemy whom they have given choicest epithets, they want to put down the rise of cultural nationalism in India. What a strategy!

Such papers have thrown open their columns to anyone who can abuse Hindu organisations, can compare Giriraj Kishore with Mullah Omar or RSS outfits with Taliban. Noble Laureate V.S.Naipaul had called ‘a pinko and fake historian and an avowed antagonist of India’s past’ Romila Thapar ‘a fraud’ but newspapers like The Times of India can allow her endlessly to revile Hindu revivalism. How such papers waste their columns and even resources on Marxist ideological assault on Hinduism is as surprising as shocking. Hogging the media the so called Marxists keep exerting pressure at two levels – there is a clamorous siege of the street with lumpen elements hurling epithets on Hindu organisations and the quieter siege of the mind where the airing of prejudice and venom has become acceptable. And it is the latter that is far more dangerous.