|
Ayodhya and after - issues before
Hindu society
- Introduction of the book by Koenraad Elst
Source: http://www.bharatvani.org
Delhi, 5th February 1991
I am not a Hindu. And I am certainly not a Muslim. So, when I started
writing my earlier book Ram Janmabhoomi v/s Babri Masjid, a Case Study
in Hindu-Muslim Conflict, in the spring of 1990, I was an outsider to
this conflict between Hindus and Muslims. But as I ventured deeper into
the unique configuration of forces now existing in India, I saw that this
was not a conflict between just any two communities. It is not just a
struggle between one self-interest and another self-interest. It is a
struggle between very unequal contenders, with unequal motives for waging
this struggle at all.
On the one hand, there is the society that has continued the age-old
civilization of this country. It has been badly bruised by centuries of
foreign rule and oppression, with the moral losses more serious than the
territorial and cultural ones: it suffers of self- forgetfulness and lack
of self-respect. But it is still far better off than most of the cultures
that have been overrun by the Muslim conquerors or the European colonizers.
It has a real chance of coming through.
On the other hand, there is a community, which is allowed to function
within this larger society, but which has the roots of its separate identity
outside this society's age-old civilization. These people's ancestors
were in many cases pulled out of Hindu society and made members of the
Muslim community under duress. Now, they would automatically evolve back
into Hindu society, were it not for some politicians and theologians who
instill a separate communal identity in them.
The Ayodhya movement, which wants to reintegrate the sacred place of
Ram Janmabhoomi into the living Hindu tradition by building a Mandir on
it, is at the same time an invitation to the Muslim Indians to reintegrate
themselves into the society and the culture from which their ancestors
were cut off by fanatical rulers and their thought police, the theologians.
It is thus an exercise in national integration.
The struggle of Hindu society is not primarily with the Muslim community.
The most important opponents of Hindu society today are not the Islamic
communal leaders, but the interiorized colonial rulers of India, the alternated
English-educated and mostly Left-leaning elite that noisily advertises
its secularism. It is these people who impose anti-Hindu policies on Hindu
society, and who keep Hinduism down and prevent it from proudly raising
its head after a thousand years of oppression.
The worst torment for Hindu society today is not the arrogant and often
violent agitation from certain minority groups, or the handful of privileges,
which the non-Hindu communities are getting. The worst problem is this
mental slavery, this sense of inferiority which Leftist intellectuals,
through their power positions in education and the media, and their direct
influence on the public and political arena, keep on inflicting on the
Hindu mind.
These Leftist intellectuals work in a strange collusion with the Islamic
fanatics. Normally, the atheist Left should be the sharpest opponent of
religious obscurantism and dogmatic adherence to anti-universalistic belief
systems like Islam. But in India, the two work happily together for the
destruction of their common enemy: Hindu Dharma. Of course, the Leftists
are mistaken if they think they can use the Muslims for their own ends.
It is a one-way collaboration, and increasingly so, as
the Left is put on the defensive while Islam is still on the offensive.
So far, the Left has rendered some fine intellectual services to the cause
of Islam. It has strongly supported the movement for the Partition of
India on the basis of the Islamic Two-Nation Theory. After Partition,
it has used its increasing hold on the entire intellectual and educational
scene in India to paralyze all criticism of the historical record and
ideological character of Islam.
Then again, the impression that this westernized elite is
merely being used for Islamic communal designs may be superficial. This
elite itself is quite confident that it is in no way threatened by Islamic
self-assertion. And rightfully so : Islam cannot seriously challenge modernity
once it has really taken off and shaped the polity (as it has in India,
far more than in the Shah's Iran). While Islamic resurgence may pose a
physical threat to Hindu society, the deeper challenge and the sharpest
disdain are coming from the Left-leaning westernized (short : Nehruvian)
establishment.
So, one of the first tasks in the awakening of Hindu society
is to scrutinize and expose the Nehruvian establishment, it its political
and in, more fundamentally, its intellectual dimensions. Today, that is
becoming easy. When in the fifties people like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram
Goel were waging an intellectual struggle against Communism, they were
up against a dense fog of widespread fascination with this intrusive ideology.
But in the nineties the sky is clearing up, and we witness the swan song
of the once so arrogant Leftist intellectuals even in their last strongholds.
It is a foregone conclusion that their empire is nearing
its end; it is just a matter of not letting their exit drag on for longer
than necessary, and being prepared to fill the vacuum. At the intellectual
level, Hindus will son be able to breathe freely. They will be able to
rediscover and reformulate the numerous valuable expressions of the one
Sanatan Dharma. They will be able to affirm the unity and integrity of
this Sanatan Dharma, without being falsely accused of assimilative communalism
when they restate the scientific fact that Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism
are full members of the one Hindu commonwealth of schools and sects.
They will be able to reaffirm the unity and integrity of
Hindu society, and to debunk the casteist and regionalist separatisms
that have been fostered by its enemies and equipped with a pseudo- historical
basis. They will be able to put the evils of Hindu society into the correct
historical perspective on the basis of the real facts, and judge them
by universal standards rather than by the hostile ad hoc standards that
have been applied to Hindu society by its enemies.
Equipped with a renewed self-awareness, Hindus will be able
to face the challenge posed by the increasingly militant Muslim world.
So far, with the help of the leftists, Islam has been able to impose a
kind of Emergency on India.
During Indira Gandhi's Emergency rule, everyone was perfectly
free to sing the praise of Nehru's daughter, but criticizing her was a
dangerous thing to do. All the Indian intellectuals refer with indignation
to this episode (during which the Constitution was amended to make India
a secular socialist republic). Similarly, it is allowed to eulogize Islam
as a religion of peace and brotherhood, but scrutinizing Islamic history
and doctrine, or merely asking some critical questions, is quite out of
bounds. Books that do these things have a good change of getting banned,
with the tacit or explicit approval of the secularists, and newspaper
editors have interiorized this bank on critical writings about Islam.
At the intellectual level it is very easy to put Islam on
the defensive and cool down its arrogance, just by doing those very things,
which this Emergency wants to prevent. If Hindus take cognizance of the
real texts of Islam, the real doctrines they embody, the real story of
the Prophet's mission and career, and the real story of the application
of these doctrines in the Islamic conquest of India, then they will soon
shed their habit of eulogizing this imperialist ideology. If moreover
they apply the precise psychological categories, which Hindu tradition
has developed, to understand the quality of consciousness that has generated
the central texts and doctrines of Islam, they will soon be cured of their
mental subservience to Islam.
It is my conviction that Islam will not last very much longer.
In the confrontation with the rational spirit, which was present in Hindu,
thought since millennia, but which has been brought centre-stage in modern
culture and education by the West, the dogmas of Islam cannot survive.
The universalistic attitude of science revolts against the belief that
one man could get a special message from none less than the Creator of
the Universe, while others are excluded from any such direct contact.
The critical attitude of science rejects the demand that we accept Mohammed's
claim to prophethood without verification. Islam has no satisfying reply
to this challenge of science and rationality.
Moreover, the present upsurge in Islamic activism, no matter
how threatening it may look, will not be able to deliver the goods. It
may mobilize popular aggression against the non-Muslims of the world,
but when it comes to running a country, it will note fare better than
Communism. Of course, it has more roots in the soul of the people. But
it is faced with material needs and popular attitudes and expectations
that modernity has spread to all the countries of the world. Even Islamic
rulers, even in a dictatorship, somehow have to please their people. To
do this, they need the material products of modernity, if only because
in the overpopulated countries of today, a modern infrastructure is indispensable
to feed the people (we needn't even mention the fondness of Islamic as
much as Kafir rulers for modern weaponry).
So, they cannot avoid bringing in modern technology, therefore
modern science, therefore modern thinking. While modern thinking is certainly
not the final word in the progress of humanity, it is quite sufficient
to undermine the exclusivist beliefs central to Islam. With that, we have
only demonstrated the weakness of Islam. It cannot possibly win against
the culture of rationality and humanism. However, it can hold out for
some time and still gain a lot in numbers and power. How fat it will crumble,
depends partly on the emergence of people, especially born Muslims, who
go in and actively criticize Islam in forums with Muslims audiences.
It also depends on the frankness and serenity with which
non-Muslims who are in regular contact with Muslims, such as the Hindus,
express their skepticism regarding the central claims of Islam, and the
logic and humanity with which they present alternative views. Confronting
Islam with rational criticism will constitute a turning point, very delicate
but inevitable. But it is the positive attraction of superior (i.e. more
rational and humanist) thought and culture that will be the single most
important factor in the inescapable decline of Islam.
|
|