Turning to the Past

Barun Das Gupta

The Sangh Parivar has its division-of-labour chart put in place. One will mobilize votes on the professed agenda of development, good governance, job creation, controlling prices and inflation, Swachchha Bharat or a clean India and all the rest of it. The others will target the minority Muslims and Christians, indulge in unrestrained hate speeches, give communal provocation, incite communal riots and pursue the policy of communal polarization of the polity. Some others will attack the very concept of secularism and socialism.

Some will resort to re-conversion of Muslims and Christians into Hinduism and give it a preposterous name—ghar wapasi or home-coming. Some will assert that it was a mistake for Godse to kill Gandhi; he should have killed Nehru instead. Still others will hurl filthy abuses with gay abandon against their opponents—real or perceived—or against hapless government employees unable to stand up to the fury of a law-maker of the ruling party. Some of these abuses are so filthy and unprintable that even TV channels dare not telecast them live but only (hint at them by using initials like m.. .f...

This outrage is being inflicted day in and day out on an unsuspecting people who are slowly realizing that they had been taken for a ride and the party they had voted for had a hidden agenda which was deliberately kept hidden till the conquest of power. Now this hidden agenda is coming out into the open. And all this is being done in the pretentious name of defending, promoting and championing Hindu culture by those who could not get more than 31 percent of the votes polled.

They have not yet started targeting those Hindus—the overwhelming majority of the Hindus—who do not accept their definition of Hinduism, their representation of Hindu culture, Hindu tradition and traditional Hindu values or accept that Hindu culture demands that women should follow a dress code imposed by them, that co-education should be disallowed and that women should be deprived of the right to use mobile phones.

But rest assured, ere long they will start targeting the dissenting Hindus also just as the Taliban, the al Qaeda and the ISIS do not spare Muslims, even Sunni Muslims, who dare to refuse to fall in line with them. If a single ISIS militant could butcher 150 Muslim girls and women—some of them pregnant—in Fallujah in Iraq for refusing to marry the terrorists, there is no reason to believe that the Hindu zealots cannot commit barbarities of a similar or some other kind to impose their version of Hindutva by force. After all, they have the same mindset, the same fanatic zeal, the same burning hatred for 'them' and the same ruthlessness to impose their will.

Every fascist ideology has to invent an enemy and hold him responsible for every conceivable misery afflicting a society. Take Adolf Hitler for example. He blamed the Jews for every conceivable evil. In Mein Kamp he writes:
"The division created between employer and employee seems not to have extended to all branches of life. How far this Judaizing process has been allowed to take effect among our people is illustrated by the fact that manual labour not only receives practically no recognition but is even considered degrading. This is not a natural German attitude. It is due to the introduction of foreign element into our lives, and the foreign element is the Jewish spirit, one of the effects of which has been to transform the high esteem in which our handicrafts once were held into a definite feeling that all physical labour is something base and unworthy." (Italics mine—BDG)

So, it was the Jew who created the 'division between employer and employee'. But this is not all. It is the Jew again who organized the 'capitalistic methods of exploitation'. Let us hear Hitler's analysis:
"While our bourgeoisie [sic] middle class paid no attention at all to this momentous problem and indifferently allowed events to take their course, the Jew seized upon the manifold possibilities which the situation offered him for the future. While on the one hand he organized capitalistic methods of exploitation to their ultimate degree of efficiency he curried favour with the victims of his policy and his power and in a short while became the leader of their struggle against himself. ‘Against himself’ is here only a figurative way of speaking; for this 'Great Master of Lies' knows how to appear in the guise of the innocent and throw the guilt on the others. Since he had the impudence to take a personal lead among the masses, they never for a moment suspected that they were falling a prey to one of the most infamous deceits ever practised. And yet that is what it actually was." (It is an allusion to Marx who was a Jew.)

Any educated and rational man will laugh at these ravings and rantings. But these ravings had once fired up the youth of Germany to put Hitler into power. His dream of a ‘‘Thousand Year Reich’’ lasted only twelve years, from 1933 to 1945. But in those twelve years he put several million Jews into the gas chamber and unleashed the Second World War in which tens of millions were killed. Entire Europe lay in ruins. Fascist regimes do not last. But they do incalculable harm to civilization during their brief stay in power.

Today the mind of the youth is being sought to be poisoned by absurd ideas and outright lies. The history which the self-appointed champions of Hindutva have manufactured would have the people believe that the Aryans were not outsiders who came and conquered India. They were the original sons of the soil. It is the Muslims who came from outside and enslaved India and held the people in thrall for nearly a thousand years.

The youth are being told of the imagined heights of glory that Hindu science had scaled in ancient times. The ancient Hindus knew and practised plastic surgery. Proof—the elephant's head on Ganesh! They had invented the motor car and the aeroplane. What were the rathas readers read about in the Mahabharata if not aircraft? Instances of such absurd claims can be multiplied. But this is not necessary. Science is being supplanted by mythology.

About the advent of Hitler as the dictator of Germany, Winston Churchill wrote in the first volume of his History of the Second World War: "Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast—Corporal Hitler". The same 'virulent hatreds' corrode the breasts of the self-appointed agents of Hindutva today, portending disaster. Little wonder, they hold Hitler and Mussolini in high esteem.

The world has moved forward from the 1930. India has a Muslim population of close to 180 million—larger than that of Pakistan. It will not be possible for any ruling party to convert them wholesale into Hinduism or liquidate them en masse. The world will not tolerate such a genocide either. Any such attempt will lead to violence and the possible disintegration of India.

Frontier
Vol. 47, No. 27, Jan 11 - 17, 2015