In any Kulturkampf (culture war), control over the curriculum fed to the next generation is the primary issue. Note however that in India today, this is a war with only one warring camp. On the Hindu side, there is some grumbling on Twitter about biased textbooks, but nothing at the official level. Five years of BJP government (2014-19) have not yielded any impact at all on the curriculum, not even an attempt, and BJP ministers have expressed themselves as proud of that: “Look how secularist I am!” Their highest goal in life is a pat on the shoulder from the secularists, but they live in a fool’s paradise if they expect ever to get it. In the expression “BJP secularism”, the latter word has its acquired Indian meaning. In its original meaning, a “secular state” would be one where all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of religion. It would therefore not have a concept of “minority”. Statisticians are free to divide a population in any number of groups fit for their purposes, but in politics and law, the concept of “minority” has no place. In India, its impact is downright evil. So, I believe, India is a blatantly unsecular state, with separate Civil Codes according to religion, with Constitutional discriminations against the Hindus, and with numerous policies privileging this or that minority or the minorities collectively. When in office, the BJP (both under AB Vajpayee and under Modi) has kept on toeing the line laid down by the dominant Nehruvian discourse. It has not abolished any of these anti-secular arrangements in law or politics, and has continued to apply the Nehruvian categories in its own policies. In its election Manifesto 2019, it does not even pay lip-service to the interests of secular democracy in its original sense, let alone to those of Hinduism, but devoutly promises to work for the welfare of the enumerated minorities. Because in the rest of the world it is unambiguous: “secular” means disregarding the citizens’ religious identities. In India, by contrast, it means an endless concern with religious identities, at least of the minorities (who are hardly the poor, hapless groups suggested by that term, but are the Indian chapters of wealthy multinationals). It effectively means “anti-Hindu”, nothing else. That is why minority clerics whose Arab colleagues would abhor “secularism”, call themselves secularists in India. Deep down, many votaries of Nehruvian secularism have a bad conscience about their mendacious use of the term, and so they cackle endlessly about it.
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And here too, there are other, non-controversial parts that get overlooked. Thus, the hymn opens by saying that the Universal Man (Purusha) has a thousand heads. That means: the Universal Man is a community of ordinary individual men. Hindus sometimes felt the need for a leader, but hey, the Purusha Sukta rightly prescribes: we together are that leader. When we put our limited heads together, we together become the Cosmic Man. Isn’t that profound? If I were a Hindu, I would be proud of my Purusha Sukta. I would never want it to be a mere interpolation from an obscure foreign source.
Ostensibly the hymn is from the final stage of Rig-Vedic composition, shortly before Veda-Vyasa’s final editing of the hymns into the fully-formed Vedas. It soon became the Vedic bedrock of varna doctrine and gets reproduced or quoted to that effect in younger Vedic writings, including the Atharva & Yajur Veda (so, there also interpolations?), the Panchavimsha Brahmana, Taittitiya Aranyaka, Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana.
Rather, the Iranian division of society has a similar origin as the same division in Indian society. The Iranians came from India, as Shrikant Talageri has convincingly demonstrated. Moreover, the division is a natural one, present in every society. It may be tempting to push responsibility far from you, preferably to a foreign source, but in this case the Iranian option doesn’t fulfil your wish. Their status of “foreigner” is ambiguous, given that they came from India and are one of the “five peoples” alongside the Vedic tribe, deemed to descend from the two brothers Anu c.q. Puru, two of the five sons of Yayati. Iranians are quite present in the Veda, such as through the sages Bhrigu and Cyavana.
Do keep in mind that both parties had the same goal: Islamic world conquest. The wrongly called “nationalist Muslims” went straight for it, largely because the modern world was unfamiliar to them, while the separatists made temporary concessions to the new circumstances and first wanted to consolidate Muslim power in Pakistan. Initially they were even willing to settle for Dr. BR Ambedkar’s proposal to exchange populations, so that no Muslim would stay behind in remainder-India. They couldn’t believe their luck when on this score, India’s hands were tied by Gandhi and Nehru, so that while the Paki Hindus had to flee, the Indian Muslims could stay where they were, thus forming a fifth column for the next phase of Islamic expansion.
Anyway, during the discussion, I used the Indian word “tamasic” rather than the English equivalent “deluded” and “slothful”.... Falling back on the nationalist paradigm makes Hindus misunderstand issues. It is of course far easier to separate people by skin colour than by ideology, very appealing to the lazy, tamasic mind. But it is sure to make you mistake enemies for friends, and friends for enemies. If you think you can afford that on a battlefield, suit yourselves.
India only calls itself secular since 1975, when Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship inserted the words ‘secular, socialist’ into the Constitutional description of India as a ‘democratic, federal republic’. That makes these two words the only ones in the Constitution that never went through a proper parliamentary debate; the least democratic part of it. In the days of the Constituent Assembly, by contrast, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee, explicitly refused to include ‘secular’. When, twenty-eight years later, the term did get inserted, it had acquired the meaning ‘anti-Hindu’, yet most Hindus accept the term because they naïvely assume it still has the meaning ‘secular’.
Sindh, the province around the lower Indus River, happens to be the root of the name ‘India’ itself, derivative from the Greek river-name Indos, from the Persian form ‘Hindu’ of Sanskrit ‘Sindhu’, i.e., the Indus river. It contains Mohenjo-Daro, with the Priest King, the Dancing Girl and Shiva Pashupati, famous icons not of ‘5,000 years of Pakistan’ but of Hindu civilization. Of course, Sindh deserves to return to India. One day, when Pakistan has lost its reason for existing, it will.
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The middle strip is white, a colour that plays a role in both (actually, in all) religions and suggests purity. Mahatma Gandhi tried to adorn it with his pet spinning wheel, but the Nehruvian alternative won through: ‘Ashoka’s wheel’, in blue. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘India’s last viceroy’, was a champion of both the Moghul and the British colonial cultures and quite ignorant of the native culture, so he did not know that the twenty-four-spoked wheel long predated Ashoka. It was the symbol of the Chakravarti, or the ‘wheel turner’, the axis in the wheel of the samrajya, ‘unified rule’, ‘empire’, a principle already sung in the epics. Making India into a Chakravarti-kshetra was an old ideal, and Ashoka admittedly came close to realizing it: He was almost a ‘pan-Indian’ ruler. However, he did not originate this notion. The spoked wheel embodies the relation between a single centre and numerous (‘twenty-four’) secondary centres on the periphery, i.e., the central authority spreading its umbrella over the several states with their swadharma (ca. ‘own mores’) and swatantra (‘autonomy’). As such, it is a fine symbol of India’s federalism, for ‘unity in diversity’.
When the freedom movement started thinking in terms of a future independent state, then conceived according to the prevailing model of the nation-state, it became aware of the need for national symbols. For the flag, quite sensibly, it toyed with the idea of reusing Shivaji’s saffron flag, as uniformly orange as Moammar al-Qadhafi’s Libyan flag was uniformly green. But a movement courting Muslims for support preferred to keep this crystal-clear symbol at a distance. But the Congress chose the tricolour, a communal flag of a composite culture with orange on top standing for Hinduism and green at the bottom for Islam, an embodiment of Swami Vivekananda’s success formula: ‘Vedantic brain and Islamic body.’ Like with the green colour in more recent political flags, Hindus need not stick to the communal interpretation of the Muslims and Nehruvians: Long before Islam existed, green was already around and had a natural meaning: opulence, prosperity, as well as nature. Likewise, orange forever remains the colour of fire, of tapas (‘heat’, asceticism), of spirituality.
With my limited means, I used to assume I had something to contribute there, viz. a more accurate picture of Indian history compared to the facile or plainly mischievous assumptions that the Left has tried to instil in the next generations. Then there is the reason Sir Edmund Hillary gave for climbing the Everest: “Because it was there.” When I noticed the big power-wielders in the Indian landscape with their rope tricks fooling people on the Ayodhya temple or the Aryan debate, the adventurous White man in me was awakened to go “hunting tigers out in Indiah”. That is, at least, if you try to think up a subsconscious personal reason. My conscious reason was that so much bluff as was spread by the Indian intellectual establishment simply had to be answered and defeated... Me, I only see specific errors being made, and I am simply the much-needed schoolteacher wielding his red pencil. If that can lead anyone to his Promised Land, fine, but I don’t even look that far, I just want those errors out of the way. Perhaps Bhangi (sweeper) would be a good caste for me.(21. A diversity of white saviours )
Wendy Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psycho-analytical “deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had guzzled down big doses of this psycho-analytical framework, pontificate that a Guru is followed because he is a “father figure”. You could see him savour this expression, as if he considered what he had said as very profound. Well, there are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities needed to be a Guru; and psycho-analysis has never been able to turn anyone into a Guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.
Now that our mythographer has gone off track, he extemporizes all at once about “White Knights” with a “Hindutva obsession”, opposing “multiple truths” and waging a “Crusade against Muslims”, out to “dehumanise” the opposition. Here I confess, I simply can’t keep up with his cannonade. I think he is referring to himself when he speaks of “rejecting the model of conversation”.
Being placed on a high pedestal is central to both strategies. Criticism also evokes a similar reaction in both sides – they quickly declare themselves as misunderstood heroes and martyrs, and stir up their legion of followers. Doniger and Pollock have inspired an army of activist-academicians who sign petitions to keep ‘dangerous’ Indian leaders and intellectuals out of American universities and even American soil”: Subramanian Swamy, Narendra Modi, and in similar controversies Rajiv Malhotra, the Dharma Civilization Foundation and others. Indeed, the Indological community’s touching (occasional) concern for freedom of speech is not erga omnes.