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And yet, none of this is accidental. As we have seen in the texts that we have surveyed in this book, it is all part of a line. India turns out to be… - Arun Shourie
" "And yet, none of this is accidental. As we have seen in the texts that we have surveyed in this book, it is all part of a line. India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation. Hinduism turns out to be an invention – surprised at the word? You won’t be a few pages hence – of the British in the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously, it has always been inherently intolerant. Pre-Islamic India was a den of iniquity, of oppression. Islamic rule liberated the oppressed. It was in this period that the Ganga-Jamuna culture, the ‘composite culture’ of India was formed, with Amir Khusro as the great exponent of it, and the Sufi savants as the founts. The sense of nationhood did not develop even in that period. It developed only in response to British rule, and because of ideas that came to us from the West. But even this – the sense of being a country, of being a nation, such as it was – remained confined to the upper crust of Indians. It is the communists who awakened the masses to awareness and spread these ideas among them.
In a word, India is not real – only the parts are real. Class is real. Religion is real – not the threads in it that are common and special to our religions but the aspects of religion that divide us, and thus ensure that we are not a nation, a country, those elements are real. Caste is real. Region is real. Language is real – actually, that is wrong: the line is that languages other than Sanskrit are real; Sanskrit is dead and gone; in any case, it was not, the averments in the great scholar, Horace Wilson to the House of Commons Select Committee notwithstanding, that it was the very basis, the living basis of other languages of the country; rather, it was the preserve of the upper layer, the instrument of domination and oppression; one of the vehicles of perpetuating false consciousness among the hapless masses.
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About Arun Shourie
Arun Shourie (born 2 November 1941) is a prominent journalist, author, and politician of India.
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Native Name:
ਅਰੁਣ ਸ਼ੌਰੀ
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And beware, the progressive judges have already put out the basis for extending reservations to Muslims or Christians as Muslims and Christians. The word that the Constitution uses is ‘communities’, the word it uses is ‘classes’, Justices Jeevan Reddy, Sawant and Thommen hold in Indra Sawhney. ‘Community’ and ‘class’ are wider than ‘caste’, they say. So, entities wider than ‘caste’ can certainly be subsumed under them, they say – the only proviso being that the groups so identified be ‘backward’. Second, in spite of the teachings of Islam, Christianity and Sikhism, castes persist in these religions also, they explain in justification. As that is the reality, it would be invidious to restrict access to reservations to the backward sections of Hindus alone...3
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‘Arrey bhai, but why don’t you write on Hindu fatwas?,’—that from a prominent intellectual who carries a haloed name. There is nothing like the fatwa among Hindus—but surely even our intellectuals know that. The point of such admonitions is different. In this view of the matter, a Hindu should stay clear of writing on Islam. Rather, that if he writes about matters Islamic or Muslim, he should only pen Hosannas—’the religion of tolerance, equality...’—he should only write books ‘understanding’, that is explaining away the ‘Muslim mind’. At the least, if he just has to allude to some unfortunate drawback in it, he must attribute it to some special time and place and exculpate Islam from it! Even more important, he must make sure that he ‘balances’ his remark about that point in Islam with denunciation about something in Hinduism, anything—the caste system, dowry deaths, looking upon foreigners as malechh, at least sati if nothing else fits the bill!
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