VICHARAMALA no.21
These are thoughts on issues of current interest [my comments - as an Indian citizen - within square brackets], including instances of some double standards of our public figures, especially in the construction of Indian identity (all those Macaulayan myths, and the hypocrisy that is Nehruvian secularism) - Krishen Kak

[I have for some time been insisting that the unstated objective of the Nehru-Gandhi Secular Creed - V'mala 20 - or, for convenience, Nehruvian secularism, is the extermination of the Hindu (V'mala 6,9). My reason for this is the historical reality of the global experience of the two world-conquering prophetic monotheisms, our historical experience of them in this subcontinent, and our experience of Nehruvian secularism since 1947.

I cannot emphasize enough that nowhere, but nowhere, in the world that Christianity and Islam have conquered have they allowed unbelieving populations to survive in any significant measure. The subcontinental experience of Islam and Christianity, described in their own chronicles, is well-documented by KS Lal, Harsh Narain, SR Goel and others, but it is still negated by Nehruvian secularism.

Akhanda Bharat is a politically incorrect label in Nehruvian secularism because it exposes a historical reality of this experience - over the millennia large chunks of Bharat were sliced off and, post-1947, what remains of the dharma is being slowly and steadily squelched Kichaka-like.

It is Nehruvian secularism that further amputates Bharatvarsha. Hindus has been steadily exterminated in the Islamic States of Pakistan and Bangladesh and, within free India, terrorized out of Kashmir by Islam. Christianity has conquered our northeast, and Sandhya Jain is not the only one to have pointed out the danger of this to our territorial integrity (V'mala 6). Nehruvian secularists treacherously encourage into India and onto our electoral rolls millions of Muslim illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. And the Hindu decline continues, as documented by the scholarly "Religious Demography of India" by A.P.Joshi, M.D.Srinivas, J.K.Bajaj of the Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai.

I have insisted that both Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru approved of this extermination of the Hindu. The difference was only in the means to the end. That the anglicised Nehru was contemptuous of the sanatana dharma is understandable from his upbringing and education, and we see the success of his strategy especially in the reality of Kashmir today. But what about the Mahatma? His counsel to Hindus, and his exculpation of Muslim violence, was quite unambiguous and is an improvement on "lying back and enjoying the inevitability of rape" (see V'mala 16). Yet secularists who rightly would be angrily exercised over the preaching of this maxim to women have no hesitation in themselves applying it and Gandhism to the rape of the KP community - we are asked to rejoice at the increase in tourism even as you assault us into oblivion (V'mala 19).

This and the next two offerings of Vicharamala will look at some explanations for the Mahatma's morality in this matter. Here is one interpretation:]

The Pioneer, May 12, 2003
[letter to the editor]

"The two faces of Gandhi"
Like Mr AN Mitra in his article, 'Moral without authority' (April 29), I too would have liked to ask the Mahatma why he swallowed the bitter pill of Partition. Were not minimum follow-up steps needed to soothe the injured feelings of most Indians, at least by choosing the right Prime Minister? Why did he back a pampered, Westernised aristocrat, not a true son of the soil like Sardar Patel? Could he have foreseen the dynastic rule which would, generation after generation, hijack his name? These questions haunted me for decades. Then I had a chance meeting with Maharshi Durvasa in my dreams. He said, "Hindu fool! Do you know Aurangzeb had vowed to convert Hindustan into Dar-ul-Islam but died in Ahmednagar without fulfiling his vow? His soul wandered till Gabriel told him, 'Hindus cannot be finished from outside. They have to be attacked from within'!" Indeed, no one realised Aurangzeb's dreams better than Gandhi, and a Kashmiri Pandit family in Allahabad bearing the Nehru name. Gandhi's non-violence was meant only for Hindus. He claimed to be a staunch Sanatani Hindu, had the look of a sanyasi, but did not pray without the Quran. He chanted Ram-Naam, but did not believe in the historicity of Krishna. He once told a journalist Ram Rajya meant Nizam-e-Mustafa, or rule by Quranic precepts. Gandhi began his political career by launching the Khilafat movement in favour of the Turkish Caliph. He did speak against conversions by Christian missionaries, but never said a word against Muslim Tablighi jamats. He talked of banning cow slaughter, but not without the free consent of Muslims. He fasted against the British and Hindus, but never against Muslim marauders. He opposed partition but said India was joint family property and Muslims, as coparceners, had a right to seek division with a disproportionate share. All of one's questions about the past are answered once one begins to see Gandhi as a Muslim pir in a Hindu skin.

Ram Gopal
Paschim Vihar, New Delhi

[That last line also points to the fallacy in the much-quoted reverse situation of Swami Vivekananda envisioning an India of a Vedanta brain in a Muslim body.

On the Indian reality of Islam and Christianity, see SR Goel's "Hindu Temples: What Happened To Them" (2 vols) and " History of Hindu-Christian Encounters"AD 304 to 1996", and on negationism see Koenraad Elst, "Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam", all available from Voice of India, 2/18 Ansari Road, New Delhi 110002, tel 2327-8034, fax 2328-2047.]