The BJP'srise in national politics, to the point where it led a national coalition in 1998, was both the triumph of Hindu nationalism for the first time since 1947 and a powerful affirmation of the RSS? goal of empowering the Hindu community. Naturally, this was bad news for our native secularists and for the United States, which perceives Hindu nationalism as a threat to its vision of a US-dominated post-Cold-War world order.
There is a veritable industry of activists and NGOs that serves this US agenda, forging an alliance with India'sreligious minorities to ensure Hindu powerlessness in the polity. In a powerful expose of some of these Hindu-baiters, Radha Rajan argues that Hindu political disempowerment is both the cause and the result of the growing power of ?minorities? to influence Indian polity (NGOs, Activists & Foreign Funds. Anti-Nation Industry, Ed. Radha Rajan and Krishen Kak, Vigil Public Opinion Forum, 2006).
Rajan argues that the RSS rose from a need to articulate and protect Hindu interests once it became clear that the independence movement was diverging from the Hindu character of the nation. The Indian National Congress early on revealed a bias towards ?secularizing? the freedom movement, and this trend could not be reversed even by Mahatma Gandhi. This was largely because the British quickly began to deal with Jawaharlal Nehru separately from Gandhiji, and with Jinnah independently of Gandhiji and the Congress. It is, with hindsight, no coincidence that the anti-Hindu Communist and Dravidian movements struck roots in India around this very time.
The anti-Hindu NGOs operate in the fields of education, healthcare, human rights, all of which are essentially a fa?ade for the transfer of huge sums of money from abroad, either as support funds for their ?charity? work or as peace and human rights awards. Rajan contends that the funds find their way into political channels for political objectives. NGO activism is perfectly tailored for the politics of containment, she argues, as their shrill cries and demonstrations can paralyse a government or at least inhibit it from acting as it ought to in the national interest. The Narmada dam, as is well known, has been held up for over a decade because of the activities of Medha Patkar in Madhya Pradesh, and it is only recently, after the Supreme Court took interest in the matter, that an enquiry has been ordered into the foreign sources of her funds.
That the anti-Hindu NGOs have a political agenda can be readily seen in the diligence with which they parrot the US-Western position on myriad issues pertaining to India. Thus, the agenda of the National Alliance of Peoples? Movements (NAPM), an umbrella organisation of communist NGOs, includes resolving the Kashmir dispute; internationalising the Dalit issue with the slogan ?Dalit rights as human rights? in order to sever Dalits from the Hindu community; propagating the slogan ?Women'srights as human rights? to delink Hindu women from their families and religion; and education with emphasis on church-run rural and mofussil schools, writing of history and teaching social sciences from a so-called subaltern, minority and gender perspective.
There is, says Rajan, a correlation between the removal of the offending Babri structure in December 1992, the coming to power of the BJP-led NDA, the emergence of India as a nuclear weapons state, and the liberal sprouting of anti-Hindu NGOs and freelance political activists. What unites them is a congenital hatred of the RSS, the BJP, Hindu nationalism and Hindu empowerment.
The anti-Hindu features of the polity, therefore, take the shape of looting Hindu temples and distributing their finances to non-Hindu religions (thereby facilitating conversions to anti-Hindu faiths); failure to check or even audit the huge foreign funds received by churches and mosques for conversion activities; discriminating against Hindus by permitting only non-Hindus to run educational institutions; delegitimising and destroying Sanskrit and Indological studies; assiduously promoting a negative Marxist interpretation of Hindu dharma; insulting Hindu tradition by calling it primitive and superstitious whereas it is highly rational and scientific; negating Hindu history and whitewashing the horrendous Islamic iconoclasm and genocide and Christian assault upon it; ignoring all human rights violations against Hindus; and promoting ?secularism? as a means of oppressing Hindus.
Worse, these NGO-activists often double up as intellectuals with the sole objective of delinking certain groups like Dalits from the Hindu community, in order to fragment the Hindu fraternity. The purpose of insisting that Dalits and tribals are not Hindus is to legitimise and even actively encourage religious conversion, mostly to Christianity, since their funding comes mostly from the Christian West, particularly America. The rich diversity of the Hindu civilisation is ignored in favour of an artificial concept called ?pluralism?, the objective of which is to undermine the Hindu nation and facilitate the rise of sub-national and pan-national religious identities, which will eventually challenge the unity and integrity of the country.
It goes without saying that our NGO-activists could hardly permit the Hindu people to rebuild the Ram temple at Ayodhya, abolish Article 370, ban cow slaughter nationwide and enact a uniform civil code. Sita is also a metaphor for the earth; the anti-Hindus have laid a prolonged siege; Hindus have their task cut out for them.
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