The Hindus of India are an agglomeration of peoples, not a united nation with a common language or cultural heritage anchored in consanguinity. But most do share some attributes that crucially connote reverence towards the same ancient scriptures and epics as well as historical memories deriving from sacred landmarks. In fact the Hindu universe encompasses other sub continental faiths like Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism because sectarian loyalty has not usually meant mutual intolerance.
This openness has generally also allowed adherents of different dispensations to co-mingle in space and time without internecine ideological fratricide. Significantly, they also shared the profound experience of quasi slavery under iconoclastic Islamic rule and ruthless economic exploitation during British colonialism. The latter instituted wage slavery, superseding the cruder immediate variety during Islamic conquest though a major element of material greed underlay both. Unfortunately, a contemporary regional nationalism has taken root in India to instigate discord among Hindus, fuelled by the mundane imperatives of electoral politics.
The Hindu experience of Muslim rule was largely one of pure terror, especially in the north and west of the country. Inhabitants of defeated cities suffered routine enslavement, with all the implied horrors of mass killings, transportation, break-up of families and sexual slavery. Emperor Akbar sought to end the practice but failed. Many Indian historians seek to conceal this bitter truth, though their pseudo-intellectual enterprise is politically inspired. Neither truth nor untruth is considered relevant to their alluded greater purpose in rescuing Indians from class rule. Devastating wars of succession and the brutal extraction of revenues also punctuated Islamic rule at every juncture. The scale of exploitation under Muslim rule entailed near starvation for the peasantry, intensified by regular famines that were worsened by revenue demands that left no cushion for hard times. One such famine in 1630-32 in the Deccan reduced the population by ninety per cent.
The constant flight of villagers, escaping beyond the reach of merciless imperial tax collectors, confirms the dire state of India’s hapless peasants. Duplicitous Islamist historians of supposed Leftist pedigree are quick to point out that Hindu gentry behaved with merciless greed as well. But they decline to connect this behaviour to what they highlight elsewhere themselves, which is enslavement and death for failure to meet prescribed imperial tax demands. Late in his life even the merciless Aurangzeb lamented the desperate condition of the peasantry. His concern was mainly due to the fact that it was they who filled imperial coffers to defray the cost of a life of luxurious excess for the Mughal court and nobility and finance constant warfare on which the Moghul nobility miss-spent nearly 80 per cent of all allotted revenues.
Deep in their heart of hearts most Europeans have always considered Hindus aboriginal and view their unwillingness to accept European racial supremacy as an intolerable affront. It was a sentiment that intensified in the 19th century because Indians acquiring modern education began to protest British misrule. In fact a particular dislike of Brahmins, which had prompted Portuguese pogroms against them after they conquered Goa in the sixteenth century, was commonplace among British bureaucrats in the aftermath of the Indian mutiny. Brahmins were distrusted for alleged deviousness and inflexibility, which meant many of them refused to accede to British primacy. When Lord Sinha resigned from the Governor General’s Executive Council, Secretary for India Morley reacted with undisguised contempt that the name of another Brahmin, Ashutosh Mukherjee, the renowned educator, had been suggested to succeed him. This loathing of vigilant Brahmins, nurtured by the British, especially missionaries, became equivalent to historic anti-Semitism.
However, the British and their malicious missionary surrogates also employ Brahmin and Hindu interchangeably to demonise Indians more broadly. In fact Brahmin is an abusive term for inciting the generality of Indians against the alleged self-serving behaviour of their rulers, indiscriminately accused of possessing a Brahminical mindset. Dalit Internet web sites, actually run by vindictive American and European evangelical Christians, overflow with abuse against alleged Brahmin conspirators and openly advocate killing them en masse. However, cursing Indians as Hindu was the more inclusive term when political imperatives like the Cold War dictated the need to target the Indian polity. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were regularly accused of deficiencies because of their purported Brahmin origins since both declined to kneel before the British and the Americans in deference.
Many Brahmins themselves have internalised Christian evangelical and British fulmination demonising of them as irredeemably racist. This phenomenon of Hindu self-hatred is unsurprising since centuries of successive defeat and slavery subverted their antecedent cultural identity, sense of self-worth and damaged their psyche. It instituted a phenomenon psychologists describe as the Stockholm syndrome though they suffer a collective affliction in their case. The success of this diabolical venture is emphatically captured by the absurd attempt of the déraciné UNHCR Commissioner Navenetham Pillay, to embarrass India for alleged Caste discrimination. Despite being a lawyer she fails to comprehend that all legal discrimination under the law in India applies only to so-called upper castes. And it unjustly ignores indices of deprivation any individuals of a higher caste may exhibit. In the words of the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, in an analogous context ”The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents: they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of Western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to their teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home whitewashed”.
The reflexive desire to adapt when constantly threatened by mortal danger stems from powerlessness and the instinct for survival. Such conduct may combine with periodic acts of cathartic violence and rebellion, but it simultaneously incubates a deep human impulse to survive at any cost to pass on one’s genes to future generations. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s supine world-view was the product of a 1,000-year history of Hindu retreat. This kind of pathology can acquire additional, even outwardly ennobling features in an unconscious attempt to obscure its real meaning, which is the humiliation of capitulation. Gandhi’s attempted to cloak a dishonourable desire for accommodation at all cost (offering Jinnah untrammelled political power in Independent India) by claiming transcendental inspiration in a wholly whimsical reading of the Bhagavad Gita. He also eccentrically urged all victims of heinous violence to commit mass suicide rather than resort to self-defence, presumably because it could cause the Mahatma heartburn.
After a thousand and more years of relentless assault by Muslims and Christians many Brahmins have now concluded that short of migrating to the US, as many do, they might seek to shield themselves by upholding precepts established by India’s erstwhile Islamic and Christian rulers. Indeed they have become the storm troopers in post-Independent India of an Anglo-Islamic political dispensation, in much the way many Indians earlier served foreign conquerors over a thousand years. They do not now even attempt to argue that there is a viable case for their illogical and insufferable conduct and only mouth slogans since they possess a virtual monopoly over the means of communication. In a similar counterpoint, serving British colonial purposes after their mid-nineteenth century defeat and incorporation as mercenaries of the Raj corrupted Sikh political culture and seeded some of the resentment that continues to fester today. Something similar unfolded once the British turned Nepalis into mercenaries as well after defeating them in the Anglo-Nepali War of 1814-16. Both these nations had become accustomed to disciplining other colonial subjects on behalf of their British overseers. And they never quite overcame the contempt for Hindu India that their unenviable role implanted in them.
In the second half of the twentieth century, a class of English-educated Indians took up the cudgels on behalf of India’s enemies, helped by its own venal politicians, who will descend to pretty much anything for political power and the loaves and fishes of office. Everything Hindu became an object of ridicule, venom and outright lies and all with the imprimatur of leading Anglo-American and European universities.
They employed Indian academics as coolies to undertake the spadework on behalf of their White Christian overlords to sponsor a virulent campaign to further their Cold War objectives in favour of Islamo fascist Pakistan. These Indian coolies either kept quiet or supported Pakistani genocide in East Pakistan in 1971. Nor was any adverse dissection inflicted on monstrosities allied to the West, including Chinese communists, who are reputed to have killed or caused the deaths of 100 million people since 1949. But a wayward statement about German nationalism uttered by a Hindu leader, even preceding Kristallnacht in November 1938 and long before the Nazis revealed their genocidal intentions in late 1942, is used incessantly to demonise Indian nationalism. This pernicious class of Indians can only be regarded as traitors. The apparent respectability of exalted academic status and achievements should not be allowed to cloud one’s negative judgement about their treasonous conduct.
Comments