Then we have our seedy Leftists busy abusing each other. And finally we have the liberals - busy rearranging furniture on the deck of theTitanic, nay… - Arun Shourie

How far we have descended! Today progressives dress up their casteism as secularism! The benefits of reservation shall be extended to Muslims and Christians also, they proudly announce. In Andhra the decision of the government has had to be twice struck down by the courts – the government had decreed reservations for Muslims qua Muslims. Even as moves are afoot to get that judgment reversed, the Central government directed the armed forces to count soldiers and officers by their religion. Nor was the move an inadvertence. It arose as a result of a committee that the government had appointed under a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. Each member of the committee has been carefully selected for his ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ beliefs. Each term of reference on which the committee has been asked to supply information and make recommendations has been just as carefully selected to justify reservations and other concessions to Muslims as a religious group:

And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously, they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?

He did not heckle and spit at our tradition as an outsider. He never made truck with the conquerors and subjugators of India. He attained the highest states of spiritual awareness by immersing himself in the teachings of the Upanishads. He attained those states by practising the austerities and following the methods which our great seers had uncovered. As he attained these states, his entire life became a refutation of the claims of the orthodox as to their superiority, his beatific state became a refutation of the assertions of the orthodox that the esoteric lore was closed to the lower castes. And as he had attained those states, he received universal homage.