http://www.firstpost.com/india/digvijayas-secularism-hindu-dilemma-and-indias-mo ral-crisis-965791.

html Digvijaya s secularism, Hindu dilemma, and India s moral crisis By Anil Athale In response to accusations that he is anti-Hindu, Congress general secretary Dig vijaya Singh has come up with a long list of Hindu things he does to prove he is n t a Hindu-phobe. Among other things, he says in his blog that his home in Guna d istrict has nine temples, where pooja is performed every day; he is chairman of a trust that runs a Ved pathshala; he fasts on every ekadashi. All night kirtans are held on every ekadashi at my residence . He says this in order to prove that being a Hindu he is the exact opposite of th e Hindutva preached by the Sangh Parivar. The Parivar, for its part, sees the Co ngress brand of secularism as essentially intended to demean Hindus and panderin g to minorities. But his post shows that he equates Hinduism with rituals more t han anything else. Then we had Union Minister of State for HRD, Shashi Tharoor, pitching in. We did not want India to become a Hindu Pakistan as unfortunately one particular politi cal tendency in our country wanted it to become. We are not a Hindu Pakistan, Tha roor said. This was in the context of Narendra Modi s burkha of secularism remark. Congress leader Digvijaya Singh. PTICongress leader Digvijaya Singh. PTI Now hear what Sir Mark Tully, a former BBC journalist who s made India is home, ha s to say in his book, No full stops in India. India is a Hindu nation forced to wear the ugly, formless garb of Western secula rism. Hindu nationalism is a backlash against this pedantic Nehruvian aspiration , the 50-year-old soulless construct that sunders religion from its natural plac e in Indian public life. It is good that in the run-up to the next elections, some basic issues about the idea of India are being raised. Unfortunately, while politicians with half-baked ideas and acumen and a vocabulary relevant only to tweets have monopolised the deb ate, no attempt has been made to put the current secularism versus communalism d ebate in a historical context. This writer believes that India octored past, and our inability ous reform. By leaving caste to h caste, and society is rotting s civilisation is in crisis as the result of our d to abolish the menace of casteism through religi politicians, we have compounded our problems wit at the core.

We should start with the history of the difficult relationships between Hindus a nd Muslims. Riots between Hindus and Muslims have had a long history even before independence. The riots in Jabalpur city of Madhya Pradesh in 1961 were particu larly savage. India s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was a true liberal and was distressed by the events. He was wedded to building an India that would giv e freedom to all and discriminate against none on the basis of caste, creed or g ender. When these riots took place he himself went into the causes and the reaso ns for hatred between Hindus and Muslims in India. He came to a conclusion that it was the history of constant invasions and past atrocities committed by Muslim s, and the memory of it reinforced by school text books, that was at the root of it all. However, in this writer s view, Nehru s understanding of his own country s history (an d even geography) was deficient. He arrogated credit for Indian pluralism to himse lf and the Constitution he drafted. He ignored the fact that the concept of plur

alism and individual freedom was in-built in Indian civilisation. It was one of its fundamental beliefs. He never paused to consider as to how and why a Hindu m ajority country did not have any takers for a narrow concept of a Hindu state. I nstead of giving credit where it was due, he went about systematically destroyin g the very philosophy that made India adopt a liberal constitution and remain a functioning democracy, while elsewhere in the third world it failed. Nehru then gave a directive to the education department to revise history to play down the sordid past. The Communists and Leftists enthusiastically supported him . He then handed over the entire apparatus of education to Left-leaning individu als. The Left had its own agenda and believed that it must first deconstruct India before it could build its Marxist Utopia. The whole government apparatus went s ystematically on a sustained campaign to deny, distort, and ridicule India s cultu ral, philosophical and scientific heritage. Thousands of years of history were d ismissed in a few paragraphs while the authors went on to glorify the British an d the Nehru family. Located amidst states of South Asia like Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Banglade sh, which are at various stages of being failed states , India is thought to be the only stabilising factor. Yet unknown to most is the fact that the Indian state and its society are rapidly rotting at the core. Our political structure was borrowed from Britain with its two-party system. It failed to work in the Indian setting, with the sub-continent s diversity and multi plicity of parties. In most Indian elections, voting has not exceeded 60 percent and the winning candidate often secures less than 40 percent of the polled vote s. Winning parties often have vote shares of a bare 24 percent of the total elec torate, voting and non-voting. This, combined with the apathy of the middle clas s and the majority Hindus, means that well organised minorities have begun to wi eld disproportionate influence on the state. While India, in the last decades of the 20th century and in the early 21st centu ry, was making great strides in economic development, the core of its society wa s being slowly eaten away by the cancer of corruption not just material (which w as rampant), but moral too. The soul of India was being systematically destroyed . India s fundamental belief system stresses the individual and his free choice in m atters of faith. This resulted in an atomised society, which had no corporate exis tence. Social cohesion was destroyed by the caste system based on birth. The onl y field of activity that had a unifying force was politics, as Gandhi showed wit h his extraordinary mobilisation of the masses for the freedom movement. But pos t-independence, politics revolved around dividing society in ever-increasing cas te groups; all vying for concessions and job quotas. Towards the end of the last century India has begun to resemble African nations like Rwanda and Burundi, wi th a resurrected tribalism. One must realise that Indians in the 21st century are still prisoners of a docto red past, a past that was shaped to serve the ends of the ruling clique. Our pol iticians have gone about dividing society in a manner that put even the British imperialists to shame. As George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four: But where did that knowledge of past exist. And if all others accepted the lie wh ich the party imposed if all records told the same tale then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past ran the party slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past . One of the dominant philosophical world-views in India is that objects and thoug

hts or ideas in the universe can be divided into three Gunas, or attributes; Sat (moral and righteous), Raj (material) and Tam (literally meaning darkness, but pointing to the undesirable attributes of aggression, violence and other animal instincts). These are not water-tight categories every individual and all living beings are said to have these three attributes in varying degrees. Thus the rea lity of the world is never black or white but complex. This is at the base of ce lebrated Indian tolerance. Tolerance has a wider connotation. Every living being, in the Hindu view, has a soul that is divine; God is not something external, but a part of us all. We hav e 330 million Gods, was an old saying, when Indians (who had a great head for nu mbers) thought that number to be the figure of living species. To a Hindu, all l ife, not just human life, is divine. Since divinity is all-pervading and univers al, Indian philosophers have always accepted that there can be several paths to the realisation of God or the ultimate truth. Thus diversity in religious belief is accepted by Hindus as normal and natural, and not merely tolerated. From thi s basic acceptance of diversity springs the tolerance that Indians seem to have in such abundance. Indians accept that the main function of the state is to uphold Dharma, which in this context is defined not as religion, but one s duty in life. This is in direc t contrast with the Western view that sees the state as a necessity to control a nd regulate the competition between men. In the Indian view, contentment is the ultimate goal that leads to happiness. In the materialist concept of the West, c onstant progress is the goal. There is no room for self-satisfaction and constan t striving for bigger, better, and deadlier is rational. It is possibly this fac tor of rationality that saw the West emerge dominant in the world from the 16th century onwards. In philosophical terms the Western goal is conquest of nature. Human existence is thus a constant struggle either with nature or with other hum an beings. In contrast to this, the Eastern ideal is coexistence with nature. O nce the conflict model is adopted, then violence either against nature or anothe r of the species is inevitable. The old world civilisations of India and China face a dilemma. While the people ha ve given up the old concept of Dharma, or the goal of contentment, society is st ill suffering from a hangover of the past. If Indians desire the fruits of progre ss , then the next logical step is to accept the Western view of rationality and a lso structures of state. A society then has to be ready to deal with conflict an d violence. This basic issue has ramifications for both internal as well and ext ernal relations. It is an Indian s inability to see this clearly that is at the ro ot of current intellectual confusion that makes Indian leaders and society unpre pared to face the challenges to unity. Hindus of India face a cruel dilemma: how to counter intolerance without being i ntolerant? A dilemma being faced by the West today is similar when it counters m ilitant and sometimes violent Islam. It is not that Indians lacked a model. In the 1 7th century, Shivaji the Great in Maharashtra successfully fought intolerance an d the political domination of Islam while scrupulously respecting religious Isla m. His army had several Muslims at very responsible positions (The Admiral of hi s fleet, for instance, was Daulat Khan), who remained loyal to him in this fight . But Shivaji, the Great, was an embarrassment and any mention of his struggle i s politically incorrect today. This has something to do with the fact that the b ulk of the Indian population in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal (the very areas where the Islamic revolution was stronger) had no tradition of resistance to opp ression and felt uneasy at the thought of their own past. Shivaji was inconveni ent and was to be ignored as an aberration. It is easy to blame the British or Islam for all our ills, but casteism is the gre atest curse of Hinduism. Unfortunately, all the efforts at eradicating this evil from Hindu society have been the work of modernists or reformers. The religious h

ierarchy has remained aloof from it. Mere laws or social reforms could not chang e the status of the lower caste people. What was needed was a religious revoluti on, which never happened. The problem was that in a unorganised faith like Hinduis m, there is no way one can issue a Papal Bull to end retrograde practices. Such a society is vulnerable when faced with an organised enemy who knew its goals. India and its civilisation are endangered not by any external force but by India ns themselves. Towards the end of the 20th century, India resembled a candle tha t was burning at both ends. The single biggest factor in this dilemma is the sel f- hatred of Hindu intellectuals, who percolated this to the masses. No one feel s that they have any stake in the survival of the faith, society or the nation. Hinduism is secular to the core, in the sense that it has no single prophet, uni fied dogma or concept of being a chosen race. Its basic tenets accept all prophe ts and all faiths and stress on the ultimate unity. What this gave Hindus was a fundamental right to choose their own paths of life, salvation and duty. This led to cultural relativism and a multilingual society. But as Dharma degenerated, the relativism was carried to the moral/ethical fiel d, giving rise to the all-pervasive chalta hai (anything goes) philosophy of life. In a fundamental sense, the death of India is inevitable once this virus of amo rality caught on and the country becomes a vast ethical slum, wallowing in moral squalor. The corruption, treachery, betrayal and cowardice that took place in t he past were all by-products of this basic malady. Militant ideologies will mere ly kick a door that was already rotten to the core. The author is a former soldier and military historian.