It seems there is an organised body of the so-called secularists at work in India which targets only Hindus and ignores everybody else, a body that is obviously financed by foreign agencies, if not foreign governments, including, one is compelled to say, Western governments and Western agencies who are either scared of Hindus and cannot contemplate the rise of Hindus and are determined to put it down. This explains the uproar over Ayodhya and the riots in Gujarat. As a matter of conjecture, had Muslims, rather than Sikhs, been massacre in Delhi, the secularists – including their brethren in the West – would be making so much noise that it would put the so-called Arab Spring, about which so much is being made, particularly by tub-thumpers like Fareed Zakaria, an apologist for Islam, to shame.
Ayodhya is not about a mosque, or even a temple. It is not even about who or what is secular and who or what is communal; Ayodhya is about liberty and freedom, and is essentially a continuation of our freedom movement.
It is also about who is a nationalist and who is not. When Narendra Modi said that he was a Hindu nationalist, because he was born a Hindu and was a nationalist, a storm broke out in the secularist press that, because he described himself as a Hindu, he was, ipso facto, a communalist. When a Muslim says he is a nationalist Muslim, he is singled out for praise; when a Hindu says the same thing, viz. he is a Hindu nationalist, he is pilloried. The explanation is very simple. A Hindu nationalist is the rule; a Muslim nationalist or nationalist Muslim is an exception. Muslims are Muslims first and everything else afterwards. So when you come across a nationalist Muslim, you automatically wonder why he is different from others. In the case of Hindus, you take it for granted that he must be a nationalist, for all Hindus are nationalists. If there are any who describe themselves as secularists and not Hindus, like Digvijay Singh, you at once assume that there must be something wrong with them, otherwise why would a Hindu say he is not a Hindu? Even Nehru did not do that!
It is wrong to say that our freedom movement is only a hundred years old and began, formally or otherwise, with the establishment of political institutions like the Indian National Congress, followed by other political parties. India’s freedom movement is at least a thousand years old and began, if you must give it a date, with the entry of the first aggressor into India – who happens to be a Muslim-beginning with the raid of Mahmud of Ghazni, the so-called “Sword of Islam” through the Khyber Pass in 997 AD, that is almost exactly a thousand years before the fall of the disputed structure in Ayodhya.
Since then, it has been nothing but fight, fight and fight between Hindus and assorted aggressors, a thousand-year war that has no parallel in the annals of world history. The Hindus have never accepted alien rule, beginning with the rule of Muslims from different countries and ending with the British rule in 1947. Neither the Moghuls nor the British have had it their own way. First came Chhatrapati Shivaji, initially a small Maratha chieftain in what came to be known as Maharashtra, who gave such a fight to the mighty Moghul “emperor” Aurangzeb Alamgir that the poor fellow, who himself had left Delhi to fight the Maratha king in Deccan, found the going so tough that he never went back again and died far from his capital. A couple of hundred years later, it was all over, and the Moghul empire went the way of all empires in India, unsung and unwept.
It was, as I said, fight, fight and fight, and the Hindus never relented. After the Moghuls came the British, the sly foxes from Europe, who believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the Hindus were no match for them, and they, the British, tried to play caste against caste, faith against faith, until things come to such a pass that they had no other alternative but to go home, with their tails between their legs after the war, but not without splitting the country and handing over a chunk to the Muslims, that is, the Muslim League, which was their own creation.
The game is not over. The latest weapon to harass Hindus is secularism and the creation of secularists, a kind of a fifth column which takes its cue from Westerners. The Muslim League before independence and the bogey of secularism after it are creations of Westerners and which they left behind before their departure. Secularism is essentially a Western secret weapon to deny Hindus their nationhood which they and others robbed or attempted to rob a thousand years ago and which they are still trying to deny through their secret agents – do I have to name them? – they left behind before they were kicked out.
This is where Ayodhya comes in. The Ayodhya movement is the continuation of the Thousand-Year War forced on us by the marauding foreigners. India can never really become free again unless it is Hindu, in form as well as spirit. Ayodhya, therefore, is as important as Gandhi’s Dandi March, and Quit India, and is as much a part of the freedom movement as the others. India’s freedom will never be complete unless the Hindus are able to assert themselves as a nation, without which the millennium – long struggle will not be complete.
All those who talk of Hindu nationalism as a kind of aberration are barking up the wrong tree. When a firm nationalist like Narendra Modi says he is a Hindu nationalist he puts the fear of God in the twisted minds of secularists, who cannot say they are Hindus, because that would offend their Muslim friends, and cannot say they are nationalists because, that would set them apart from their perverted anti-nationalists with whom they are ganging up to thwart genuine nationalists. A Hindu is, by definition, a nationalist, because India is a Hindu nation and he is its citizen. A citizen of the Hindu nation, that is India, is therefore automatically a Hindu nationalist. He cannot be a traitor, as secularists can, because Hindus cannot betray their own nation, unless they have taken leave of their senses. This is our country because we are its sons and daughters, and we have been fighting for it for a thousand years. And we shall continue to fight, for it is the only country we have, while others can always go elsewhere!
(This is the eighth and final article in the series on the Ayodhya movement)
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