Adieu, Asat

One of the cruellest tragedies of our times is the fad of an overwhelming majority of Bharat’s public intellectuals to faithfully orbit around the predictable path when it comes to their diction and exposition. Beginning with the first generation Nehruvian literati and up to their successors of the present time, always dutifully depended on their “in-house” processed grind for their narrative setting mills. Even by a slip-up, the raw material was never sourced from its origin, in “as is – what is” form. The self-imposed servitude of this variety is something unique to our geography.

But alas! There seems to be a novel challenge in Sarsanghachalak Shri Mohan Bhagwat’s three days’ discourse series on ‘Future of Bharat – An RSS Perspective”, for it compellingly infuses the untainted primal matter in the public intellectual domain. There was no causticity or cosmetics. And more interestingly, there was no obscurantism. So, even if our intelligentsia tries to corrupt the original material with colonial colouration, the tampering and tinkering can easily be detectable by non-specialists, and also by the honest variety among the ordained.

 

Nothing was alienating or polemical in Sarsanghachalak’s speech. Naturally, those engaged in the business of ‘othering’ will feel emptied and unemployed. The discourse was a looking glass, and at the same time, it was transparent enough to lead to discoveries – both inside and exterior. Essentially, there were no bystanders; the whole world was an insider to the discourse. All said, there will be definite efforts by our indomitable intelligentsia to fill this clean water in opaque containers. But since the seekers have tasted it from its source, the gullibility is largely reduced to a large extent.

 

 

Sarsanghachalak was neither laying down any new law nor was he writing a lexicon to decipher anything novel; he only echoed the eternal. No stick was swirled against darkness; simply a tiny lamp was lit most inconspicuously. The speaker was a real Guru for he asked not to believe something just he said, just because “he said”. The talk was not a sermon but a spark for self-discovery.

Nothing material was left untouched in the discourse, but it was far from tedious verbosity. The speech was extempore, but it sprang from the depths of meditative pondering. Nothing was repetitive or predictable, but there was a discernible thread that ran through the whole discourse. The erudition in it was universal in every sense of the term.

 

The discourse echoed not just the ancient wisdom but also its modern manifestation found in our Constitution as expounded by several judicial pronouncements. What the Sarsanghachalak said is resoundingly contained in 1995, a three-judge bench of Supreme Court of India, which in turn cites several Constitution Bench judgements:

“These Constitution Bench decisions, after a detailed discussion, indicate that no precise meaning can be ascribed to the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindutva’ and ‘Hinduism’; and no meaning in the abstract can confine it to the narrow limits of religion alone, excluding the content of Indian culture and heritage. It is also indicated that the term ‘Hindutva’ is related more to the way of life of the people in the subcontinent. It is difficult to appreciate how in the face of these decisions the term ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hinduism’ per se, in the abstract, can be assumed to mean and be equated with narrow fundamentalist Hindu religious bigotry…”

 

Ramesh Yeshwant Prabhoo and Ors. Vs Prabhakar Kashinath Kunte and Ors. (11.12.1995 – SC): (1996)1 SCC 130

The discourse epitomised deepening of democracy through dialogue. Shri Bhagwat demonstrated that Articles of the Constitution form the articles of faith for the Sangh. But there was no shying away from recording dissent to provisions like Article 35A, which found backdoor entry through a Presidential Order. There was assertiveness in place of artificialness and appeasement. His logic was irrefutable; but above all, there was all-encompassing compassion and everlasting embrace of fraternity that dissolved all duality.

 

Intellectualism in our country is incredibly deceptive. There is an Old Russian saying that if geometrical axioms affected human interests, attempts would certainly be made to refute them. Living up this old wisdom, reams and reams will be emptied in repudiation to the Sarsanghachalak’s address. However, the fact remains that refutation of what he said would simply mean the refutation of self and Bharat.