Who Killed the Pride in My Hindu Identity?

(Without malice towards any sycophant of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty)

Islamic imperialism had inflicted deep wounds on Hindu religion, culture, society, polity, economy, and environment. The gravest injury which Hindus had suffered at the hands of Islam was the destruction of their temples and monasteries, and the slaughter of Brahmins and Sages who were not only priests and spiritual practitioners; but also leaders of larger Hindu thought.

A new imperialism from the West succeeded the Islamic imperialism. This new imperialism was like the three Gorgon sisters, had three faces - Christian, British, and Communist.

This trio-faced imperialism was an enchanting citadel with multiple gates - Anthropology, Sociology, Historiography, Linguistics, Comparative Religion, Indology, German Idealism, French Positivism, British Utilitarianism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, and others. Because this scholarship surfaced as a cohort of Modern Science, it pretended sharing similar scientific spirit. Marxism-Leninism was the culmination of this deception. More competent than Islamic imperialism in terms of both means and methods, it wielded a new type of scholarship which it used in progressive stages for disarming the Hindus ideologically.

The vilified portrait of Hindus and Hinduism which this scholarship ensued to paint and to the tragedy of Hindus, did majorly succeed through its intense bombardment of new-found-intellectualism propagated deceptions like:

1. that a race of blood-thirsty barbarians, calling themselves as Aryans, invaded this country in the second millennium BC, and settled down to live on this fertile land for all time to come.
2. Aryans created a caste system, assigned themselves the higher strata – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas – and relegated the conquered populace to the lowest stratum of Shudras.
3. Aryans concocted a priest craft, presided over by the cunning Brahmins and couched in the complex Sanskrit literature, in order to legitimize and safeguard the caste system.
4. Thus the essence of ‘Brahmanism’ alias ‘Hinduism’ has been, and remains, the economically exploitative, socially oppressive, and culturally moribund caste system.
5. ‘Hindus’ alias ‘the high caste descendants of the Aryan invaders’ tango with any reactionary ideology and force - feudalism, capitalism, colonialism, American imperialism, etc. - to safeguard its stranglehold on the toiling masses of India.

Such vitriolic, bogus and slanderous was the ‘new-knowledge’ which Christian, British and Communist imperialists sold with varying degrees of sophistication, in a large number of tomes, treatises, and articles in learned journals published by prestigious publishing houses and made available to ordinary citizens nearly free through (developmental) subsidy programmes.

The word “Hindu” no more designated the vast majority of this country’s population; on the contrary, it became the hallmark of a small minority which had conspired to masquerade as the majority. The ‘Buddhists’, the ‘Jains’, and the ‘Sikhs’ were taken out of the fold of ‘Hinduism’ at one fell sweep. Finally, the “Dravidian South” was given a call to revolt against everything associated with the word “Hindu” - religion, culture, language, etc.

This was the lore which was taught in school and college textbooks of an educational system which had been designed and was being controlled by the British establishment and the Christian missions. This was the lore propagated through Communist pamphlets and periodicals which started to proliferate from the 1920s onwards; and mouthing which a section in the Indian National Congress started strutting around as “progressive”, “radical”, “revolutionary”, and "socialist.” Nehru became the leader of this section after a brief visit to the Soviet Union in 1927.

Meanwhile, Muslim historians of the Marxist schools had polished up a subsidiary thesis. Their main purpose was to salvage Islam from its blood-soaked history, and present the medieval Muslim rule in India as a native dispensation. Mohammad Habib of the Aligarh Muslim University came out with the thesis that the Islamic invaders had destroyed Hindu temples not in obedience to the tenets of Islam but out of their lust for loot. This thesis was lapped up immediately by Nehru and his progressive host in the Congress.

But the word “Hindu” had not yet become a dirty word. It still covered the ‘Buddhists’, the ‘Jains’, and the Sikhs except for some separatist fringes which had imbibed the monotheistic theology of the Muslim-Christian combine or the Leftist lore. Stalwarts of Hindu re-awakening - Swami Dayananda, Bankim Chandra, Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo - had seen through the Christian and the British game and given a strong lead which had not yet been exhausted.

With the rise of Nehru to supreme power in the post-independence period, the word “Hindu” started being brought into contempt in the cut up and abbreviated Hindu homeland. Nehru was a combined spokesman of all imperialist ideologies which had visited this country uninvited, in the past - Islamic, Christian, British, and Communist. No surprise; he placed the Ministry of Education (predecessor to MHRD of today) in the hands of a Muslim-Marxist combine headed by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

Christian missions were given full facilities to educate the Hindus, and convert as many of them as they could manage. The missionary apparatus started building itself anew, after a brief hiatus when the British Raj was drawing to its end. Meanwhile, Mohammad Habib had come out with another thesis in 1954, that the so-called Muslim conquest of India was really a “turn of public opinion” or an “urban revolution” in which the Indian “working class” had preferred the “Shariat” in place of the “Smiriti” and the “Turks” in place of the “Thukuris.” Nehru approved the thesis in a Preface.

At the same time, Nehru patronized the Communist Party of India, so that it very soon became a formidable force. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, carried her father’s game much farther. She made a common cause with the Communists. Well-known Communists and fellow-travellers were given positions of power in the ruling Congress Party, in the Government at the Centre as well in the States, and in prestigious institutions all over the country.

The Muslim-Marxist combine of “historians” had already captured the Indian History Congress during the days of Nehru, and many honest historians had been hounded out of it. Now this combine was placed in control of the Indian Council of Historical Research and entrusted with extensive patronage. The combine took over the National Council of Educational Research and Training also, and laid down the guidelines for producing school textbooks on various subjects.

The smokescreen for this Stalinist operation was provided by the slogan of “Secularism” which nobody was supposed to question or examine, as to what it had come to mean. Its meaning had to be accepted ex-cathedra, and as laid down by the Muslim-Marxist combine.

In the new political parlance that emerged, Hinduism and the nationalism it inspired became blackened as “Communal-ism”. The word “Hindu” started becoming a dirty word in the academia as well as the media. The ‘Sikhs’ had already opted out of the ‘Hindu’ fold. The ‘Jains’ started saying more and more loudly that they were not ‘Hindus’. The climax came when the ‘Ramakrishna Mission’ and the ‘Arya Samaj’ petitioned the High Courts for obtaining the status of non-Hindu religions. Nobody who thought he was somebody was prepared to be known as a “Hindu” by the 1980s anymore.

Any pride in being a ‘Hindu’ if it ever existed, was dead even before I was adult enough to be drinking alcohol legally, and I completely failed in recognising its importance in my spiritual well being.
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Adapted from “Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them” Vol-II (Second Enlarged Edition) by Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie, Harsh Narain, Jay Dubashi and Ram Swarup, ISBN 81-85990-03-4 (Volume 2). The inspirational source is acknowledged with highest reverence and gratefulness.
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