FUNDAMENTALS OF HINDU UNITY (Part-I)

HINDU DHARMA ACHARYA SABHA

 

Second Meeting, October 16, 17, 18, 2005

in Mumbai, Maharashtra

 

 

Text of the Speech

               

By

 

Dr.SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY Ph.D(Harvard)

Chairman, Centre for National Renaissance, New Delhi                          

Fmr.Union Cabinet Minister for Commerce, Law & Justice

 

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Address of  Dr.Subramanian Swamy, Chairman, Center for National Renaissance, New Delhi to Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha Second Meeting at Mumbai on October 18, 2005.

 

FUNDAMENTALS OF HINDU UNITY

       AND

THE CONCEPT OF HINDUSTAN

 

His Holiness Dayananda Saraswati, and Heads of Mutts and Mandaleshwars and revered Acharyas. I thank His Holiness for the opportunity to address you all today.

                                                                               

I

 

                Hinduism, known as sanatana dharma is uniquely world’s unbroken, continuous and longest in time, and is a religion constituted by its theology, cultural ethos, and civilizational history. India’s Hindu society is founded on the content of these three constituents. Hindustan, as India is known abroad even today[e.g., Yindu guo in Chinese, Hind in Arabic], as a concept is defined as a nation of Hindus and those others in the nation who accept that their ancestors are Hindus and revere that legacy. Parsis, Jews, Syrian Christians come in a special category of Hindustanis, those who were welcomed by Hindus since they came to Hindustan seeking refuge from persecution in their own lands abroad, and who willingly accepted to abide by, and adopt certain cultural customs of Hindus. To the credit of Parsis, they have never demanded any special privileges as a minority. They had even rejected privileges and quotas offered to them by the British imperialists saying that they were comfortable with Hindus.

 

Over the last two millenniums, Hindu religion has been subjected to threats several times from other religious groups, but these threats have been met, the challenges faced and overcome.

 

Well before the birth of Christianity and Islam, Hindu religion had been intellectually dethroned by Hinayana Buddhism. But Adi Sankaracharya rethroned Hinduism through his famous shastrathas[religious debate] and caused a renaissance in Buddhism itself, which then came to be known as Mahayana Buddhism, conceptually in complete harmony with, if not indistinguishable from, Hindu theology. In south India, the azhwars and nayanmars also through shastrathas repositioned Hinduism after de-throning Jainism and Buddhism. Since then the Hindu dharmacharyas have always been looked up to when Hindu society faced a threat or crisis, for guidance to meet the challenge to the Hindu religion. Today, we again need the revered acharyas to show us the way. Hence this Sabha is of vital importance for the future of the nation.                                                                     

II

 

                Hindu ethos provided for sanctuary and home to those of other faiths fleeing from their countries due to religious persecution. As I stated earlier, Parsis, Jews and Syrian Christians are among those religious groups who had sought refuge in India, and survived because the Hindus looked after them. These three religious communities have had and have today a disproportionate share in power and wealth in Indian society, but Hindus have no resentment about it. These minorities had come to India in search of peace and found safe haven in the midst of Hindu society. Parsis migrated elsewhere in the world too, but disappeared as a community in those countries. Jews have openly acknowledged that India as the only country where they were not persecuted. Syrian Christians too are today completely integrated into India. Even early Arab Muslim travelers who came peacefully to settle in Kerala were taken into Hindu families, and hence called Mapillai[meaning son-inlaw-- Moplah in English]. That is the glorious Hindu tradition, the ethos of compassion and co-option that is unparalleled in world history. 

 

 

                However, militant Islam and later crusading Christianity came to India, and aggressively challenged Hinduism. They seized power in sequence and established their own state in India. But despite state patronage to the ensuing onslaught, plunder and victimisation, those of Hindu faith could not be decimated, and Hinduism remained the theology of the vast Indian majority.

 

                Defiant Hindus suffered persecution and economic deprivation during Islamic and Christian reigns, such as through differential taxation [e.g., jezia and zamindari land revenue appropriation] and plain brutality, but Hindus by and large refused to capitulate and convert. Even after almost a thousand years of such targeting by Muslims and Christian rulers, undivided India in 1947 was more than 75% Hindu. This was partly because of the victorious Vijayanagaram, the Sikh reign, and Mahratta kingdoms, and later the Freedom Movement, each inspired by sanyasis such Sringeri Shankaracharya, Swami Ramdas, Guru Nanak, Swami Vivekanada and Sri Aurobindo, who by their preaching about the Hindu identity ensured that the flame of Hindu defiance never dimmed. It was also due to individual defiance of Hindus such as of Rana Pratap, Rani Jhansi, Rani Bennur, Kattaboman and Netaji Subhas Bose. These icons are admired not because they led us to victory[ in fact they were defeated or killed], or had found out a safe compromise [they did not], but because of their courage of conviction in the face of huge odds not to submit to tyranny. That courageous defiance is also is part of Hindus’ glorious legacy. But those who capitulated like Raja Man Singh or Jai Chand or Pudukottai Raja in order to live in pomp and grandeur are despised today by the people.

                                                                                III           

 

In 1947, temporal power was defacto restored to the Hindu majority. But the Indian state formally adopted secularism, which concept however was never properly defined or debated. For example, it left vague what an Indian’s connection was with the nation’s Hindu past and legacy. In the name of secularism, it was taboo for a public servant even to break a coconut or light a oil lamp to inaugurate an official function on the ground that religious symbols must not invade public life. Such orthodoxy was promoted by Jawarharlal Nehru and his Leftist advisers. But then government took over supervision of temples, legislated on Hindu personal laws, and regulated religious festivals, but kept aloof from the Muslim and Christian religious affairs.  The secularism principle was foisted on the Hindu masses without making him understand why they had to abide by legislation but not Muslims and Christians.

 

As a result, the renaissance that had begun in the late nineteenth century to redefine the Hindu identity [in contemporary terms and norms valid in a pluralistic society], was aborted by the confusion thus created in Hindu minds by a vaguely understood concept of secularism.

  

Electoral politics further confounded the issues arising out of secularism, and hence the Indian society became gradually and increasingly fragmented in outlook and of confused perspective. Hindu society became divided by caste that became increasingly mutually antagonistic.  Attempts were made through falsification in history texts adopted for curriculum in the education system to disconnect and disinherit the contemporary Indian from the past glory of Hindu India. The intrinsic Hindu unity was sought to be undone by legitimizing such bogus concepts as Aryan-Dravidian racial divide theory, or that India as a concept never existed till the British imperialists put it together, or that Indians have always been ruled by invaders from abroad.  There is no such word as Aryan in Sanskrit literature [closest is ‘arya’ meaning honourable person, and ndot community] or Dravidian [Adi Sankara had in his shasthrath with Mandana Mishra at Varanasi, called himself as a ‘dravida shishu’ that is a child of where three oceans meet, i.e., south India].  The theory was deliberate distortion by British imperialists and propagated by their Indian witting and unwitting mental slaves. Incidentally, the Aryan-Dravidian myth has now been exploded by modern research on DNA of Indians and Europeans conducted by Professor C.Panse of Newton, Mass. USA and other scholars.  In light of such new research, the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] service in it’s October 6, 2005 service completely debunked the Aryan—Dravidian race theory stating that: “Theory was not just wrong, it included unacceptably racist ideas” [www.bbc.co.uk, religion & ethics homepage, Thursday, 6/10/05].

 

                Modern India has been sought to be portrayed by foreign interests through the educational curriculum as a discontinuity in history and as a new entity much as are today’s Greece, Egypt or Iraq. That curriculum is largely intact today. On the contrary efforts are afoot to bolster the disparagement of our past in the new dispensation today. A rudderless India, disconnected from her past has, as a consequence, become a fertile field for religious poachers and neo-imperialists from abroad who paint India as a mosaic of immigrants much like a crowd on a platform in a railway junction. That is, it is clandestinely propagated that India has belonged to those who forcibly occupied it. This is the theme around which the Islamic fundamentalists and fraud Christian crusaders are again at work, much as they were a thousand years ago, but of course in new dispensations, sophistication, and media forms. Thus the concept of intrinsic Hindu unity, and India’s Hindu foundation are dangerously under challenge by these forces. Tragically most Hindus today are not even cognizant of it.

 

                The challenge today confronting Hindus is however much more difficult to meet than was earlier in history because the forces at work to erode and undermine Hindu faith, unlike before, are unseen, clandestine, pernicious, deceptive but most of all sophisticated and media-savvy. Tragically therefore, a much more educated and larger numbers of Hindus have been unwittingly co-opted in this sinister conspiracy directed by foreigners who have no love for India and who also see much as Lord Macauley saw in the nineteenth century, that the hoary Hindu foundation of India is a stumbling block for the furtherance of their nefarious perfidious game.

 

                Adherence to Hinduism is also being sought to be diluted in the name of modernity and this dilution is made a norm of secularism. Religion, it is advocated, is personal. To be a good Hindu today is conceptually being reduced to just praying, piety, visiting temples, and celebrating religious festivals. The concept of a collective Hindu mindset is being ridiculed as chauvinist and retrograde, even fundamentalist.

 

IV

 

The concept of a corporate Hindu unity and identity however is that of a collective mindset that identifies us with a motherland from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean and it’s glorious past, and the concomitant resolve of it’s representative leadership defined as “chakravartin”  earlier by Chanakya, to defend that vision. It is this concept and resolve that is being discarded or is just evaporating under the onslaught of the Nehruvian secularists.

 

However pious a Hindu becomes, however prosperous Hindu temples become from doting devotees’ offerings, when the nation is in danger it is this collective mindset of the people that matters, and not the piety of the individual in that collective.

 

         Hindu society today lacking a cohesive corporate identity, is thus in the process of becoming fragmented, and hence increasingly in disarray. This fission process is on simultaneously with the reality of millions of Hindus who go to temples regularly or walk to Sabarimalai or participate in Kumbh Mela. This is not what I mean when I speak of Hindu unity to this august gathering today.

 

I am instead referring to the Hindu consciousness which encompasses the willingness and determination to collectively defend the faith from the erosion that is being induced by the disconnect with our glorious past. What Swami Vivekananda, Bankim Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, and Subramania Bharati had achieved by raising Hindu consciousness to that end, has now been depleted and dissipated over the last six decades.

 

         Even the patriotic and anguished writings of Dr.Ambedkar, and his oration in the Constituent Assembly for a strong united country have been vulgarized to advocate Hindu society’s disintegration. In his scholarly paper presented in a 1916 Columbia University seminar [and published in Indian Antiquary, vol. XLI, May 1917 p.81-95] Dr. Ambedkar stated: “It is the unity of culture that is the basis of homogeneity. Taking this for granted, I venture to say that there is no country that can rival the Indian Peninsula with respect to the unity of it’s culture. It has not only a geographic unity, but it has over and above all a deeper and much more fundamental unity---the indubitable cultural unity that covers the land from end to end”. Ambedkar wrote several such brilliant books, but alas, Nehru and his cohorts so thoroughly frustrated him that in the end bitterness drove him to Buddhism.

 

Thus, if this degeneration and disconnect are not rectified and repaired by a resolve to unite Hindustanis [Hindus and those others who proudly identify with India’s Hindu past], the Hindu civilization may go into a tail spin and ultimately fade away like other civilizations have for much the same reason.

 

         Of course, this sorry state has come about as a cumulative effect of a thousand years past of Islamic invasions, occupation and Imperialist colonization. But we failed to rectify the damage after the Hindus overwhelmingly got defacto power in 1947. For this transfer of power, we sacrificed one quarter of Akhand Hindustan territory to settle those Muslims who could not bear to live or adjust with the Hindu majority.

 

That is, by a failure to usher a renaissance after 1947 India lost her opportunity to cleanse the accumulated dirt and unwanted baggage of the past. The nation missed a chance to demolish the birth-based caste theory as Ambedkar had wanted to do. The battering that the concept of Hindu unity and Indian identity has taken at the hands of Nehruvian secularists since 1947 has led to the present social malaise. Thus, even though Hindus are above 80 percent of the population in India, they have not been able to understand their roots in, and obligations to, the nation in a pluralistic Hindustani democracy.

 

Today the sacrilege of Hindu concepts and hoary institutions, is being carried out not with the crude brutality of a Ghazni or Ghori, but with the sophistication of the constitutional instruments of law. The desecration of Hindu icons, for example the Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt, is being made to look legal, thereby completely confusing the Hindu people, and thus making them unable to recognize the danger, or to realize that Hindus have to unite to defend against the threats to their legacy. We Hindus are under siege today, and we do not know it!!  That is, what is truly alarming is that Hindu society could be dissembled today without much protest since we have been lulled or lost the capacity to think collectively as Hindus.

 

To resist this siege we first need Hindu unity. Numbers [of those claiming to be adherents to Hinduism] do not matter in today’s information society. It is the durability and clarity of the Hindu mindset of those who unite that matters in the forging of an instrument to fight this creeping danger.

 

For example, we had a near disaster in Ayodhya recently. Pakistan--trained foreign terrorists slipped into India and traveled to Ayodhya to blow up the Ram Mandir. Their attempt was foiled by courageous elements of the police. But did the representative government of 870 million Hindus of India react in a meaningful way, that is retaliate to deter future such attacks? Did anyone raise it in Parliament and demand deterrent retaliation? On the contrary, the Prime Minister assured Pakistan that the peace talks will not be affected by such acts. But what retaliation was there to be for the sponsors of those terrorists who dared to think about blowing Sri Ram’s birth place?

 

Hindus are thus being today systematically prepared for psychological enslavement and conceptual capture. Indians are being subtly brain-washed. Hindus are being lulled, while Muslims and Christians are being subject to relentless propaganda that they are different, and are citizens of India as would be a shareholder in a company run for profit.

 

We Hindus cannot fight this unless we first identify what we have to fight. We cannot effectively respond unless we understand the nature and complexity of the challenge. What makes the task of defending Hinduism much more difficult today is that the oppressors are not obvious maraudring entities as were Ghazni, Ghori, or Clive. The means of communication and the supply of funds in the hands of our enemies are multiples of that available in the past, for camouflaging their evil purposes.

                                                                                                                                       ...Contd II