Long-term fall-out of the Mahatma murder

(FirstPost, 27 May 2022) + The +topic of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948 still comes up regularly for discussion. Mostly this is +to embarrass the RSS and the party associated with it, the BJP, which was actually founded in 1980, that too as reincarnation of the Jan Sangh, wh+ich had equally been founded after the murder, in 1951. This then is the best-known long-term effect: the unrelenting allegation that anything s+melling of Hindu nationalism, and certainly the RSS, necessarily leads to such crimes. But are we missing something? + Chitpavan massacre The first conseque+nce of the murder was immediate: Godse’s own community, the Chitpavan Brahmins, was targeted for mass murder. The comparison with the mass kil+ling of Sikhs by Congress secularists after Indira Gandhi’s murder in 1984 is fairly exact, except that that massacre is well-known (even ecli+psing the memory of the larger number of Panjabi Hindus murdered by Sikh separatists in the preceding years) whereas this one has been hushed up.+ The New York Times first drew attention to it, reporting 15 killings for the first day and only for the city of Mumbai. In fact the killing we+nt on for a week and all over Maharashtra, with VD Savarkar’s younger brother as best-known victim. Arti Agarwal,+ who leads the research in “Hindu genocide”, estimates the death toll at ca. 8,000. On mass murders, estimates are often overdramatiz+ed, but here we must count with a countervailing factor: the Government’s active suppression of these data, as they would throw a negative li+ght on Gandhism. But research on this painful episode has now started in earnest, and those presently trying to get at the real figures include Sa+varkar biographer Vikram Sampath. Crackdown+ The secon+d consequence came right after: the Government’s crackdown on the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Their offices were closed down, their office-b+earers imprisoned for a year or so, their stocks of literature impounded. It clipped their wings for years to come. The Hindu Mahasabha lost it+s president Shyam Prasad Mookerjee, who went on to found the Jana Sangh. The HMS would never recover from this blow. Its last MP was to be Mahant+ Avaidyanath, best known as a leader of the Rama Janmabhumi movement and as Guru of present UP CM Yogi Adityanath, defected to the BJP in 1991.+ By cont+rast, the RSS did survive quite well, and even generated a whole “family” of like-minded organizations, including a new political party. In a nume+rical sense, it was to thrive; but in two other senses, it paid a high price. The t+hird consequence was a drastic change in the political landscape. After Partition, the Hindutva movement had the wind in the sails. All Cong+ressite assurances that warnings against Islamic separatism were mere British-engineered paranoia, had been refuted by reality. Gandhi’s pro+mise that Partition would only come over his dead body, had proven false. The new-fangled ideology of secularism stood discredited at its bi+rth. And yet, overnight, the Hindutva current was marginalized and Nehruvian secularism started its triumphant march. By his murder, Godse had s+mashed the window of opportunity of his own political movement. + Amputated backbone Finally, the fo+urth consequence would only materialize over the long term: the Hindu movement began to lose its defining convictions. Rather than continuing to +see India as an essentially Hindu nation, it bought into the secularist notion of a mere “Hindu community” juxtaposed to “minority communities” +that were endowed with equal rights and increasingly with privileges vis-à-vis the Hindus. When Jawahar+lal Nehru was widely criticized for having facilitated the Chinese invasion, the RSS halted the publication of a Nehru-critical serial by Sita Ram+ Goel in Organiser: Rather than clamouring that its guest author’s judgment of Nehru stood vindicated, it feared that if anything were to happen +to Nehru, the RSS would again get the blame. As the Gandhi murder had shown, it wasn’t necessary to be actually guilty to still incur the punis+hment, viz. by “having created the atmosphere” for the crime. The RSS bought into the secularist narrative that the Hindu ideology had caused t+he murder and started amputating its own ideological backbone. When in+ 1980 the BJP was founded, the party flag it adopted was significantly divided in orange and green, in the communal sense (no, not green for gr+eenery). Not only the nation was to be partly Islamic, but even the Hindu party itself. This prefigured Mohan Bhagwat’s 2018 statement that a Hindu Rasthra is not complete without Islam. The RSS founded within its ranks a Muslim Morcha, abandoning its founding belief in national unity for c+ommunal appeasement. It became the RSS family’s most successful member, not by spreading the national idea in the Muslim community but by serv+ing the latter’s sectional interests. Ind+eed, under Narendra Modi, minorityism, once the BJP’s bogeyman, became the party’s principle of governance. All kinds of schemes of state la+rgesse favour the minorities; no, not real minorities like Parsis and Jews, but the India chapters of the Christian and Muslim multinationals. I+n its publicity campaigns, the party boasts that it has done more for the minorities than Congress ever has. The 1990s’ eminently secular BJP slogan “Justice for all, appeasement of none” has been given up in favour of: “I am better at appeasement than you!” If Nathuram Godse had foreseen these consequences of the act he contemplated, he might have thought twice about going through with it. +
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“I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history”

Koenraad Elst: “I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history” (interview by Surajit Dasgupta- 5 June, 2016, Swarajya) 5 In this exclusive e-mail interview with Swarajya’s National Affairs Editor Surajit Dasgupta, the Belgian Indologist and writer calls the bluff of leftist historians while urging Indian students of history to pursue the subject with more rigour and scientific temper. Excerpts: While Swarajya has published articles exposing how Marxist historians hound peers who disagree with them out of academic institutions, we have got news from different sources that you are finding it difficult to get employed even in Belgium. What precisely is the objection of your detractors? I do not wish to offer much detail here. Firstly, I am not privileged to know the details of decision-making instances that lead to my own exclusion. Even when sending an official “regret letter”, they would not give in writing the real reason behind their decision (as anyone experienced with job applications knows). Secondly, even though no law was broken, going into this still has the character of an allegation, and that requires proof. Some cases of deliberate exclusion or disinvitation were simply obvious, but my standards of proof are higher than that. So, I just want to close this chapter. Let’s not bother, everybody has his problems, and these career hurdles are mine. In fact, I have had quite a bit of luck in my life, including help from individual Hindus whenever the need arose (air tickets paid, hospitality etc), so any fussing about this boycott against me would be disproportionate. Let’s just assume I missed those opportunities because I was not good enough. Or karma, whatever. The topic in general is important, though. The Leftist dominance of the Humanities departments in India, often amounting to total control, results from the wilful and systematic “ethnic cleansing” (to borrow Madhu Kishwar’s term) of any young scholar suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies. Exceptions are the people who entered on the strength of ideologically neutral work, or of initially toeing the line, but coming out with pro-Hindu convictions only after getting tenure. This cleansing of enemies stems from the old Marxist mentality: a war psychology, treating everyone with a different opinion as an enemy inviting merciless destruction; and a boundless self-righteousness rooted in the belief of being on the forward side of history. Marxism is waning even in India, but that attitude is still rife among the anti-Hindu forces, both in India and among Western India-watchers. You refer to Indian Marxist historians sarcastically as “eminent historians”. Why that particular term? “Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial age personalities, Eminent Victorians. “Eminence” in this case refers to their position and relative glory. The Communists always made sure to confer position and prestige, as opposed to the Sangh Parivar, which fawns over people with position but doesn’t realize that those people have only acquired their position by toeing the anti-Hindu line. In a way, you have to concede that the Left has honestly fought for its power position. But half their battle was already won by the Hindu side’s complete absence from the battlefield. One example of the Sangh’s ineptness at playing this game. In 2002, the supposedly Hindu government of A.B. Vajpayee founded the Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford. The media cried ‘saffronization’. However, the clueless time servers at the head of the BJP nominated a known and proven opponent of Hindu nationalism, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, who thus became the poster boy for ‘saffronization’. This way, they hoped to achieve their highest ambition in life: a pat on the shoulder from the secularists. That pat on the shoulder, already begged for so many times, remained elusive, but the tangible result was that they had conferred even more prestige on an “eminent historian”, all while denying it to their own scholars. What would you tell your peers who say that the “Out of India” Theory (OIT) is a fringe theory? Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity. As for the situation abroad: most scholars assume the invasionist paradigm, but only very few also argue in an informed manner for the invasionist theory, not many more than those who argue against it. But anyway, this ‘fringe’ aspect doesn’t impress me at all. When Copernicus put the sun rather than the earth at the centre of the solar system, he was in a minority of one, very ‘fringe’ indeed; but he won the day. What is the evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory? First of all: there is no evidence in its favour. Archaeologists have spent a century of well-funded excavations looking for a trace, any trace, of the Aryans moving into India. Even the invasionists concede that “as yet” no such thing has been found. The new genetic evidence, while still immature, generally goes in favour of emigrations from India and, while leaving room for immigrations too, is emphatically failing to pinpoint an invasion coinciding in time with the hypothetical Aryan invasion. Meanwhile, the written record clearly points to an emigration scenario. That the Iranians lived in India and had to leave westwards is reported in the Rig Veda, a text thoroughly analysed and shown to support an “Aryan emigration” by Shrikant Talageri. It can equally be deduced from the Avesta. Even earlier migrations are mentioned in the Puranas. These are of course very mixed and unreliable as a source of history, but it is a bad historian who discards them altogether. Their core, later fancifully embellished, consists in dynastic lists. Keeping that ancestral information was the proper job of court poets, and they devised mnemotechnical tricks to transmit it for many generations. In this case, it too does convey a basic scenario of indigenousness and emigration. Finally, there is the linguistic evidence. Many Indians believe the hearsay that it has somehow proven the invasion. It hasn’t. But permit me to forego discussing those data: too technical for an interview. Of late, the Marxist historians have revised ‘invasion’ to ‘migration’. They say that there might not have been a war when the so-called Aryans arrived here, but they have no doubt that the ancestors of today’s North Indians, especially the upper castes, by and large migrated from Central Asia into India. In other words, the Marxists say that we Indians were originally not Indians—invasion or no invasion. Does this ‘revision’ satisfy you? Exasperated at not finding a visible trace of this invasion, conformist scholars have theorized an alternative that doesn’t require such visible remains: a migration under the radar. Often, when they try to give details, they still mean a military invasion rather than a gradual migration, since they bring in the military advantage of horses and chariots to explain how such a large and civilized Harappan population could be overrun by a handful of outsiders. But even if they genuinely mean a migration, it still amounts to the same scenario as an invasion, that the Vedic Aryans came from abroad and the natives took over the language and religion of the intruders. So, anyone who thinks that the migration theory is a breakthrough away from the invasion theory really shows he doesn’t understand the issue. ‘Migration’ effectively means ‘invasion’ but avoids the burden of proof that the more dramatic term ‘invasion’ implies. To be sure, it doesn’t much matter who came from where. The so-called Adivasis (a British term coined circa 1930) or ‘natives’ of Nagalim in the North East have settled in their present habitat only a thousand years ago; which is fairly recent by Indian standards. So, ironically, they are genuine ‘immigrants’ or ‘invaders’, yet no Indian begrudges them their place inside India. Many countries have an immigration or conquest of their present territory as a proud part of their national myth: Madagascar, Romania, the Siberian part of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc. If the Indo-Aryans, or indeed the Dravidians (theorized to have come from Iran or even Central Asia), had really immigrated, that would then have been a pre-Vedic event, at least 3,500 years ago, and that time span ought to have been enough for integration into the national mainstream. So this ‘homeland’ debate ought to have been a non-issue, only of interest to ivory tower scholars. But different non- or anti-Hindu forces decided to politicize it. Abroad, these were the British colonialists, white supremacists in the US and Europe, and among them the Nazis, who considered the AIT as a cornerstone and eloquent illustration of their worldview. Inside India, first of all the Christian missionaries, followed by the non-Brahmin movement, the Dravidianists, Nehruvians and Ambedkarites, followed in turn by their western supporters. The AIT was used to break up Indian unity and pit upper castes against lower castes, non-tribals against tribals, and North Indians against South Indians. After this massive politicization, the partisans of Indian unity finally decided to give some feeble support to the fledgling Out of India (OIT) theory. Yet, scholars rejecting the OIT because of its alleged political use have no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for government policies. On the one hand, the unaffiliated or apolitical Indian student loves your theories; your passages are quoted widely in debates on ancient Indian history. On the other, you do not seem to get along well with the so-called right wing historians of this country either. You have written a blog against them. Well, I have nothing but good to say about some Indian researchers, both naturalized ones like Michel Danino and natives like Meenakshi Jain or Shrikant Talageri. But then, there are others too. Certainly the name P.N. Oak rings a bell? In the second half of last century, he spread all these theories that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple; that the Kaaba was built by Vikramaditya as a Shiva temple; that the Vatican (originally the Roman “Poets’ Hill”) is really “Veda-Vatika”; that my mother tongue, Dutch, is the language of the Daityas (demons), etc. The bad thing is that numerous Hindus have run away with these stories, and even some NRI surgeons and engineers of my acquaintance believe in diluted versions of the same. In a less extreme manner, this disdain for historical method is widespread among traditionalist Hindu “history rewriters”. They frequently put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Many of these rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, their time had come. I know, for instance, that many of them sent in proposals to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any student writing a thesis knows that before you can develop your own hypothesis, you first have to survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found or theorized. But these traditionalist history rewriters just don’t bother about the rest of the world, they are satisfied to have convinced themselves. Their horizon is not larger than an internet list of like-minded people. In itself, it is not a problem. People can learn. Unfortunately, they are too smug to do that. They actively misinform Hindus by claiming that the Aryan Invasion Theory has long been discarded. They also do a lot of harm to the bona fide historians with whom they get juxtaposed. So it is true that I have lost patience with them. Since the Modi government came to power in 2014, has there been an effort to revise the depiction of Indian history in academic curricula, which, many in India believe, is politically motivated? Has the Indian government approached you with the request of being a part of any such initiative? No, there has been no request at all. However, I myself have sent in an application to the ICHR, but that has run into technical difficulties, mainly to do with my foreign passport. So, the situation is and remains that institutionally, I have nothing to do with the Indian history scene. The version of history taught by the Nehruvians was politically motivated. The feeble Hindu attempt to counterbalance this (‘saffronization’) circa 2002 was confused and largely incompetent. Humbled by that experience, the BJP today is not even trying to impose its own version. Contrary to the Nehruvians’ hue and cry, allegations about the BJP’s interference in history teaching or more generally in academe are simply not true. We are only talking of changing some lines in the textbooks, and even that seems a Himalayan effort to the BJP. Yet, what is really needed is a far more thorough overhaul. Except for some scholars without any power, nobody is even thinking about this very-needed long-term job. “Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.” “Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.” Could the reason be that RSS-affiliated historians and you are not particularly fond of each other and this government is influenced by the Sangh? Sangh-affiliated historians would not need me to arrive at their positions or to devise a policy if called upon to do so by the present government. But again, I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting the distorted history propagated by the Nehruvians. I would welcome it if it happened, but so far the BJP, still begging to be recognized as ‘secular’, only has its eye on ‘development’. I am happy to report that there are some as-yet-insignificant private initiatives, though. Once they achieve results, there will be more to say on them. Would you say or agree that the Indian government, regardless of the political party that runs it, would be uncomfortable appointing or commissioning an academic who is perceived as being anti-Muslim? Certainly. Though it never had any problem with anti-Hindu candidates to even the highest post. Does the genesis of your problem with anti-left historians in India lie in the fact that on the issue of Babri Masjid, if you do not agree with the left, you do not agree with the right wing either? On Ayodhya, there has never been a conflict with any non-Left historian. To be sure, I have my disagreements on some minor points, but they have never been the object of a controversy. So, no, on Ayodhya, I may have minor and friendly differences of opinion with ‘right-wing’ historians, but no serious quarrel. In that debate, the longstanding quarrel has been with the “eminent historians”, their supporters in media and politics, and their foreign dupes. They were on the wrong side of the history debate all along, and it is time they concede it. In the case of the “eminent historians”, it is also time for the surviving ones to own up to their responsibility for the whole conflict. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was on course towards a peaceful settlement, allotting the site to the Hindus and buying the militant Muslim leadership off with some typically Congressite horse trading. Not too principled, but at least with the virtue of avoiding bloodshed. It is the shrill and mendacious declaration of the “eminent historians” in 1989, amplified by all the vocal secularists, that made the politicians back off. Not only have they falsely alleged that no Rama temple ever stood on the contentious site, their more fundamental lie was to bring in history at all. Ayodhya belongs to the Hindus not because it was their pilgrimage site a thousand years ago, nor because of ‘revenge’ for a temple destruction effected 800 or 500 years ago, but because it is a Hindu sacred site today. No Muslim ever cares to go to Ayodhya, and in spite of being egged on by the “eminent historians”, enough Muslim leaders have expressed their willingness to leave the site to the Hindus. This whole controversy was unnecessary, but for the Nehruvians’ pathetic nomination of the Babri Masjid as the last bulwark of secularism. If all the archaeological findings from Ayodhya are arranged chronologically, what story of the disputed plot of land does one find? Did a temple of Lord Rama stand there, which Babar’s general Mir Baqi demolished to build the mosque? Or, did Mir Baqi find ruins on the spot? That a Hindu temple was demolished by Muslim invaders is certain, on that we all agree. But there is less consensus around, or even awareness of, the fact that this happened several times: by Salar Masud Ghaznavi in 1030 (the rebuilt Rajput temple after this must be one of the excavated pillar bases), by Qutbuddin Aibak’s troops in 1193, and by Mir Baqi on Babar’s behalf in 1526. “The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.” “The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.” What it was that was replaced by Babar’s mosque is not fully clear. I speculate that in the rough and tumble of the collapsing Delhi Sultanate, Hindus had managed to take over the site and started worship there, even though the building they used was a mosque imposed on the site. That was exactly the situation in 1949-92, and I think it also applied towards 1526. Babar destroyed a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a Hindu presence at the site, but not the Rajput temple from the 11th century of which the foundations were excavated in 2003. Was the temple’s demolition just an odd event, or was it the necessary materialization of an ideology, repeated many times and in many places? When Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghori and his lieutenants conquered the entire Ganga basin in 1192-94, they destroyed every Hindu temple they could find. Only a few survived, and that is because they lay out of the way of the Muslim armies, in the (then) forest, notably in Khajuraho and in Bodh Gaya. But all the Buddhist universities, all the temples in Varanasi etc were destroyed. Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is inconceivable that the Sultanate regime would have allowed a major temple to remain standing there. So, the narrative propagated by the Sangh Parivar, that Babar destroyed the 11th century temple, cannot be true, for that temple was no longer there. When Babar arrived on the scene, Hindus may have worshipped Rama in a makeshift temple, or in a mosque building provisionally used as a temple, but the main temple that used to be there had already been destroyed in 1193. See, Ayodhya’s history becomes more interesting once you discard the lies of the “eminent historians” as well as the naïve version of the Sangh Parivar. The controversial part lies herein, that the persistence of the temple all through the Sultanate period would have implied a certain tolerance even during the fiercest part of Muslim rule. In reality, the demolition of Rama’s birthplace temple was not an odd and single event, but a repeated event in application of a general theology of iconoclasm imposed by the Prophet. Was it a temple of Lord Vishnu rather? Or, were they quite a few temples of one or more deities built in different periods by different kings? In her 2013 book Rama and Ayodhya Prof Meenakshi Jain has detailed all the scholarly evidence and the debate around it, including the embarrassing collapse of the “eminent historian” case once they took the witness stand in Court. She shows that the Rama cult had already left traces more than 2,000 years ago. Attempts to make Rama worship a recent phenomenon were just part of the sabotage attempts by these historians. Also, the site of Ayodhya, though probably older, is at least beyond doubt since Vikramaditya in the first century BC. All indications are that the disputed site was already visited by pilgrims as Rama’s birthplace well before the Muslim conquest. So, this was a longstanding pilgrimage site for Rama. Against the utter simplicity of this scenario, anti-Hindu polemicists of various stripes have tried all kinds of diversionary tactics: saying that Rama was born elsewhere, or that the temple belonged to other cults. This Vishnu-but-not-his-incarnation-Rama theory, or the claim of a Shaiva or Buddhist origin, were some of those diversionary tactics; they are totally inauthentic and artificial. Alright, among historians we can discuss every possible hypothesis. But from the very relevant viewpoint of Islamic iconoclasm, all these distinctions don’t matter: all those sects were false, leading men astray, away from the one true religion, Islam, and therefore they all, and certainly their idols and idol houses, were to be destroyed. Whatever be the true story, which community do you believe has a greater right of ownership over that disputed site? The community that holds the site sacred. Muslims go through all this trouble to travel to faraway Mecca, why don’t they go on a cheap and easy pilgrimage to Ayodhya instead? It seems they have made their choice. So let us respect their choice, and also the choice of the Rama worshippers who do care for Ayodhya, by leaving the site to the latter. Case closed. Do you hate Muslims or Islam? No, I do not hate Muslims. They are people like ourselves. Having travelled in Pakistan and the Gulf states, I even dare say I feel good in Muslim environments. And if I desire the liberation of Muslims from Islam, that is precisely because I like them. Suppose you discover that a friend of yours still believes in fairy tales: wouldn’t you consider it your duty to set him straight and confront him with the true story, precisely because he is your friend? And I do not ‘hate’ Islam either. If a teacher uses his red pencil to cross out a grammatical mistake in a pupil’s homework, we do not say that he ‘hates’ the mistake. He simply notices very dispassionately that it is wrong. The use of the word ‘hate’ in this case stems from an attempt to distort the debate and misrepresent the argument by means of emotive language. The belief that someone heard the word of God, dictating the Quranic verses, is just one of the many irrational and mistaken beliefs that have plagued mankind since the beginning. I have been part of a massive walk-out from the Church. For intellectuals, the decisive reason was the dawning insight that Christian belief was irrational. But for the masses, it was mainly that it was no longer cool to be a believer. People started feeling embarrassed for still being associated with this untenable doctrine, and are none the worse for having left the beliefs they were brought up in. I wish Muslims a similar evolution, a similar liberation. I do not wish on them anything that I have not been through myself. How do you view the recent terrorist attack on Belgium? To what extent do you think is migration from Islamic countries responsible for terrorism on European soil? As Ché Guevara said, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In this case, the jihad fighters had found safety and comfort in the Muslim community. So the demographic Islamization of some neighbourhoods i000n Brussels (due to our own silly policies) has indeed played a role. But I expect you to retort that there were also other factors, and that is true. How do you react to the Muslim refrain that the terrorists in their community are a creation of America and NATO’s flawed foreign policy and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc? It is simply not true that Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb took to jihad and iconoclasm in reaction to British colonialism or American bombings. They were inspired by an older source—the Prophet’s precedent, Islam. However, it is true that many contemporary jihad fighters have indeed been fired up by a specific circumstance—western aggression against Muslim countries. Assenting to Quranic lessons about jihad is one thing, but actually volunteering for jihad it quite another. In most people, it needs a trigger. The illegal invasions of Iraq or Libya, or footage of an Afghan wedding bombed by American jets, provided such a trigger. I am very aware that being bombed is just as unpleasant for wedding guests in Kandahar as for commuters in Brussels or Mumbai. Right now, even little Belgium has five bomber planes in Iraq as part of the US-led war effort against IS. These bombers must already have killed, along with some jihad fighters, more civilians than were killed in the terrorist attacks in Brussels. In Belgium, I have drawn some attention with my defence of the Syria volunteers: young Muslims grown up in Brussels or Antwerp and going to fight for the Islamic State. Our politicians call them ‘monsters’, ‘crazy’ and other derogatory names, but in fact they are pious idealists. They may be misguided in their beliefs, and I daresay they are, but they do have the courage of their conviction. Without any pressure on them, they volunteer for putting their lives on the line in the Syrian desert. You cannot deny them bravery and self-sacrifice. The western invasions and bombings in Muslim countries have brought nothing but misery, and I have opposed them all along. What the Muslim world needs is not more civil wars, sectarian wars, foreign military interventions, which all serve to polarize the minds, to freeze them in existing antagonisms. What it needs is a thaw. Here again, I speak from my own experience: the post-war climate of peace and prosperity in Europe has allowed a genuine cultural revolution, an emancipation from the stranglehold of Christianity. The Muslim world will only evolve if it attains a modicum of peace and stability. Note that the military interventions have nothing to do with Islam criticism, nowadays slandered as ‘Islamophobia’. On the contrary. Without exception, all the politicians ordering interventions in Muslim countries have praised Islam, calling it “the religion of peace” that is being ‘misused’ by the terrorists. Not a single word of Islam criticism has ever crossed their lips. A legitimate Islam critic like the late historian Sita Ram Goel has never harmed a hair on the head of a Muslim. Islamophiles such as these politicians, by contrast, have killed many thousands of innocent Muslims. How would you advise Indians to fight terrorism? Security measures and repression are neither my field nor my favourite solution, but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. So I want to spare a moment to praise the men in uniform who risk their lives to provide safety. However, this approach won’t provide a lasting solution if it is not accompanied by a more fundamental ideological struggle. That is what I am working on.
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The truth about Ayodhya that many journalists seem to ignore

  

(Published in MyIndMakers, 10 Aug 2020)

 

Ayodhya: City of Faith, City of Discord (Aleph, Delhi 2018) is the first book by Valay Singh. It is a journalistic overview of the developments pertaining to the Ayodhya affairs of the last years. The book is full of interesting anecdotes, both about the recent Ayodhya agitation and how the locals experienced it, and about the late Middle Ages.

 

Balanced?

On the cover, the book is announced as “a balanced chronicle of faith, fanaticism and the war between secularism and religious fundamentalism in a key battleground in modern India". Balanced?

Even before reading the book itself, we can form an idea by checking its index and bibliography. There we find that the main scholarly writers arguing for the Hindu claim to the site and about the fact and foundation of the Islamic iconoclasm that created the dispute in the first place, are simply absent. There is no mention of the very key to understanding the whole affair, viz. the 1990 book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them by historian Sita Ram Goel, which catalogues 1836 destroyed temples replaced by mosques, and presents the theology of Iconoclasm that explains it all.

There is only one mention of Prof. Meenakshi Jain. Perhaps her last Ayodhya book and certainly her book about the Hindu reaction to Islamic iconoclasm (2017, 2019) came a little too late for our author, but most certainly her earlier book (Rama and Ayodhya, Aryan Books, Delhi 2013) should have been a prime source for any later book on the Ayodhya affair. For one, by 2018 it was the only book that detailed how badly the Eminent Historians, Singh’s main source of faithfully parroted information, fared when put on the witness stand in Court. So, he only quotes Meenakshi  Jain (p.60) about a 5th-century Shiva linga, quite peripheral to the debate, though perhaps meant as useful to Rama deniers for asserting that Shiva was worshipped there and not Vishnu through his incarnations.

As a report, it is formally rather up to standard: when claims are made about living persons, he has contacted them for their version, as a journalist should. Thus, when the Shia Waqf Board became a party to the Ayodhya dispute very shortly before its conclusion, observers found it suspiciously close to the Hindu wish of weakening the Sunni position: “The desire of the Shia Waqf board members to ingratiate themselves to the Yogi or Modi govenments cannot be ruled out.” Valay Singh is a de facto supporter of the Sunni Waqf Board’s claim, so he has an interest in presenting all factors that may thwart it as suspect. Yet he admits, after due verification at the source: “The chairman of the Board, Wasim Rizvi, denied that this is the case.” (p.368) But then, Jesuits and journalists are known for wrong-footing the reader without brazen-faced lies but with selectively citing otherwise genuine facts.

 

 

The author

On the back cover, Singh is introduced as ”an independent journalist” who has launched himself by working for “NDTV as a researcher and editor” (not exactly a guarantee of objectivity) and has since become a widely-published columnist. Not a professional historian, and ever since the controversial intervention of the “eminent historians” in the Ayodhya affair, this might count as a good thing.

                His position in the ideological spectrum can also be deduced from the description (p.268) of  Irfan Habib as one of the “independent historians like Irfan Habib who had opposed the VHP”. The anti-temple historians representing the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) since December 1990 ludicrously called themselves “independent historians”, though they were statutorily and ideologically in the BMAC’s employ. An objective journalist would have taken his distance from this transparent camouflage, but Valay Singh has no qualms about showing on what side he stands.

By contrast, he sidelines the evidence dug up in the early 1970s by the dean of Indian archaeology, Prof. Braj Basi Lal, or rather, “pro-temple archaeologists like BB Lal” (p.268). No, first Lal did neutral excavations, and after that he stood by his findings; then, more than a decade later, the VHP showed interest in them. Note also that in the 1970s when he had made his discovery, PM Indira Gandhi emphatically ordered him to keep it secret. It is only when the debate came in focus in 1989 that he went public with it.

Unlike Irhan Habib, BB Lal has a record of going where the evidence leads him, regardless of partisan loyalties. Thus, when his diggings had found a human presence at the disputed site down to the -2nd millennium, this refuted the Eminent Historians’ claim that the Masjid had been built on virgin land, but it also conflicted with many Dharmacharyas’s belief that Rama had lived in the -6th or -13th millennium or even a million years back. He stood firm against their protests by replying: “I am not saying this, but my spade tells me so.” Likewise, in the Indo-European Homeland debate, he is nowadays falsely decried as “a convert to Hindu nationalism” for supporting the Vedic nature of the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilization, but for decades he was cited as the lone archaeologist who had given physical proof for the hypothetical Aryan Immigration. As a junior scholar in the 1950s, he had made his name by documenting the Painted Grey Ware and fitting it into the dominant immigrationist paradigm by identifying it as a sign of the Aryan movement deeper into India. Since the 1990s, however, he has gone public with the insight that he had only force-fitted his findings into the reigning paradigm without ever proving it, and that the accumulated evidence of the last decades points in the opposite direction: “The Vedas and Harappa are but two sides of the same coin.” That may be to the VHP’s liking, but the development of this insight was demonstrably independent from any ideological loyalty.

                Finally, note that at the time of the Supreme Court’s final verdict the BBC selected Valay Singh to report the reactions in Ayodhya. There was nothing to report: the carefully crafted stereotype that Kar Sevaks express their joy by organizing massacres of poor hapless Muslims turned out to be false, probably to the BBC’s disappointment. Indeed, this was representative of the cold shower felt throughout anti-Hindu circles: the controversy had been so much fun for them, with plenty of opportunities for virtue-signalling (“look how free I am from this superstitious Hinduism”) and an enemy you’d love to hate.  At any rate, the Mendacious Media only hand out such plum posts to people whom they deem ideologically reliable, i.c. “secularist”. 

 

 

History and myth

The drawback of Valay Singh’s journalistic approach is that he has to rely on others and isn’t sure of his grip on the less obvious elements, hence many instances of “it is said that” and similar hazy claims. Hence also some writing mistakes against technical terminology and historical names, e.g. “Puspamitra Sung” (p.7) for Pushyamitra Shunga.

If these corrections could still be dismissed as pedantry, more consequential is his unsophisticated understanding of the basic categories of history and mythology. On the first page of text already, he shows reliance on the secularist superficialism that “the Ramayana is an epic of mythology and scripture and not a historically verifiable document” (p.3). In fact, a text that is pure fantasy or “myth” is a modern invention. Ancient epics were typically rooted in real history, but with a lot of embellishment. Pitting mythology against history is a 19th-century childhood disease of the scientist worldview, when anything scriptural was laughed off as “obviously unhistorical”,-- until amateur Heinrich Schliemann dug up Troy and showed that Homer’s “fanciful legend” did have a basis in real history.

Here and there, Singh has dug up interesting anecdotes, though always in the service of an anti-Hindu agenda. Thus, we learn that in 1938, the Vaishnava Pandit Ramtahal Das wrote a “hagiograpical” biography of Akbar-age Vaishnava saint Devmurari. Yet he claims: “Pandit Ramtahal Das, himself a Vaishnava, displays remarkable neutrality when writing about the historicity of the Vaishnava tradition. He asserts that if there was indeed a Ram or Vaishnava centre in Awadh at the time of Nabhadas (circa 1600) it would certainly have been mentioned in his Bhaktamal.” (p.60) “Neutrality” is of course code for a viewpoint that comes in handy for Singh’s own narrative. So when Babar’s contemporary Guru Nanak does report his pilgrimage to Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, we are expected to consider this testimony “neutralized” by the alleged non-mention in this Nabhadas’ writings almost a century later?

“According to a legend, corroborated by interviews with several Vaishnava saints in Ayodhya, ‘if 500 Vaishnavs used to go to the north, only 50 would return.’ Ramtahal Das also confirms this in Devmurari’s biography: ‘the Dashnamis, with the help of north Indian kings, started attacking Vaishnav saints who used to venture northwards for pilgrimages. It was the time of Muslim rulers and they had decreed that the sects be allowed to settle their scores without interference.” (p.60) No close sources are given, only a “legend”, that is (in spite of his claming otherwise) not corroborated by any real sources. A 20th-century writer is quoted as alleging only that Vaishnava pilgrims got “attacked”, yet Valay claims that 95% of the Vaishnava pilgrims were “killed”, a pretty sensational phenomenon that ought to have left tangible traces in the record.

 

 

Casteism

Valay Singh’s desire to belittle Hindus and predictably reduce Hinduism to “caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste” makes him put a casteist spin on many stories. Describing a controversy between the purely Brahmin Ramanujis (followers of Ramanuja, the medieval philosopher crucial in the tradition of Rama worship) and the Ramanandi order, he quotes the Dutch scholar Peter van der Veer as certifying that a particular Ramanandi leader, Lakshmandas, had been humiliated by a Ramanuji teacher of Sanskrit. This proved that the Ramanujis looked down on the Ramanandis simply because, according to Van der Veer, “he belonged to the Ramanandi community.”

But a sectarian conflict can exist within any religion, and for a Hindu-basher, that is not good enough: Hinduism must be confirmed to be blacker than the rest, viz. through caste. So: “However, the possibility that van der Veer leaves out of his anthropological study is that (…)  Lakshmandas was perhaps not a high-caste Brahmin and as his guru knew that, he could not have given him the same pot that was used in his kitchen.” (p.177) This Singh writes less than one page after he himself had written that Lakshmandas had been “born in UP in a Brahmin family”.

The Ramanandis, because of their association with the Janmabhumi temple association, tend to be back-projected as the bad guys, yet Valay Singh reports that in 1813-14, “Francis Buchanan found that the Ramanandi priests ‘stressed upon their followers a strict moral code and adherence to a daily regimen of prayer and physical exercise; they also forbade meat and alcohol. Observance of their Vaishnava traditions gave them, untouchables included, a substantial amount of self-respect’, he concluded.” (p.94)

Unlike the secularists, who have demonized the Rama devotees, the British (who must have recognized much of their own Protestant innovation of Methodism in the Ramanandis) actually liked them: “The British found the Vaishnava values of complete devotion to a personal god to be more in line with their own idea of religion. As opposed to the militant, extremely ambitious and warlike Shaiva ascetics, the British found common ground with Vaishnavas.” (p.92)

Singh even admits that throughout the Vaishnava world, a fermentation of caste reform was taking place ca. 1900. Far from leading the peasant revolt of 1921, MK Gandhi actually tried to rein it in: “You, the peasants, should bear a little if the zamindar torments you.” (p.151) In their quest for social justice, the Vaishnavas went farther than upper-Bania Gandhi was willing to go.

 

 

The much-maligned British

Valay Singh of course rehashes the very popular lie (not just among secularists and Indologists, but also among Hindu sentimentalists) that British policies “result[ed] in the partition of the subcontinent on religious lines”. (p.180) No, it was the Muslim League’s policy that did so. There were only two significant opinion currents in the Muslim community, both Muslim supremacist: the traditionalists like Maulana Azad who felt that, like until the 18th century, Muslims could take full power in India in spite of being the minority (silly secularists call them “nationalist Muslims” because they tried to use Congress as their vehicle); and the modernists who took the new wave of democratic thinking into account and calculated that the Muslims should first settle for geographically limited sovereignty and only prepare for the conquest of the rest of the Subcontinent once the demographic equation had evolved in their favour.  The British involvement was limited to unwittingly creating circumstances favouring the second party over the first.

So, Singh misrepresents Muslim attacks on Hindus, such as the “Great Calcutta Killing”, which took place when the British were on their way out and the provinces had native autonomy. This pogrom, which convinced the British that their resistance to the Partition plan was useless, was planned by the Muslim League, with the passive connivance of the police which was under control of the Muslim League state government. He, however, denies Muslim agency by calling it a “large-scale riot” and a “massacre of Hindus and Muslims” (p.181). This is the usual media discourse: two-sided violence or even one-sided Muslim violence is presented as a Hindu attack on the poor hapless Muslims (as in late February 2020, when the Wall Street Journal and Scroll.in notoriously misrepresented a photograph of a Muslim rioters’ attack in Delhi as showing a Hindu attack), and only when the Muslim initiative is too glaring to be denied, their rearguard tactic is to present it as two-sided. In the case of the Great Calcutta Killing, this was purely a one-sided attack by the Muslim League on the Hindus, with the passive complicity of the state police, which only started to intervene as soon as the Hindu side managed to mobilize for self-defence.

All manner of probably true statements are spun to convey some anti-Hindu or at least Hindu-belittling messages. Thus, “given the late development of Ayodhya as a pilgrim centre, it was not surprising that most Hindus had never been to Ayodhya.” (p.234) Not too late for Guru Nanak to go on pilgrimage there in 1510-11 as per his Janam Sakhi biography, at any rate. But alright, even in the present age of trains and airplanes, it is still only a minority that has actually gone there, let alone in the age before high-tech. In those days, how many Muslims had been to Mecca and earned the title Hajji (someone who has performed the Hajj)? And does this prove that Mecca “developed only late as a pilgrim centre”? Journeying was long and difficult, only available to well-to-do people, mostly only in the latter part of their lives if their health still permitted it. For every lay pilgrim who made it to Ayodhya, there were a hundred Rama devotees back home.

Singh claims about Walter Hamilton’s gazette of 1928: “It is noteworthy that Hamilton finds not one temple to be described in detail.(...) His account makes no mention of Rama’s birthplace temple or of the Hanumangarhi or even the ancient Nageshwarnath temple.” (p.97) So he himself admits at least the existence of the Hanumangarhi and Nageshwarnath temples, yet notes that Hamilton doesn’t care to mention them. Rather than taking this non-mention as proof of how unimportant Rama’s birthplace is, he should merely have drawn the obvious conclusion that Hamilton never sought to give a description of Ayodhya’s religious landscape. So the non-mention of Rama Janmabhumi cannot even be used as an argument from silence (as non-historian Valay Singh does here), which would still be the weakest type of argument anyway.

By contrast, other British sources are conceded to mention the Hanumangarhi, but he still finds fault with those: “In 1855, curiously enough, no extant British record of the Hanumangarhi identifies the said mosque as Ram Janmabhumi.” (p.111)  Well, of course, because it wasn’t.

He adds facts that might become important the day a real history of the Ayodhya movement is written, e.g. that Hindutva stalwarts MS Golwalkar and Nana Deshmukh had been present for the installation of the idols in 1949. The strong involvement of the Hindu Mahâsabhâ from the beginning was already known, but recently the RSS has been magnifying its own role in the early Ayodhya agitation. Here Singh maintains a proper distance, qualifying this claim with “if true”. (p.189)

 

 

Me

There is a mention of myself (p.29), where I discuss Ramacharitmanas poet Tulsidas’s perfectly explainable non-mention of the purported temple demolition by his contemporary Akbar’s grandfather Babar. (I later learned that in a lesser-known text of his, the Doha Shataka from 1590, verse 85-92, deposed before the Allahabad High Court in 2003, Tulsidas does mention Babar’s destruction.) This is a rather peripheral historical argument within my book Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, which he has apparently read. The central thesis of the book, which he studiously ignores, consists of scholarly arguments for the temple, and a refutation of all the secularists’ and Eminent Historians’ attempts to escape this evidence.

Moreover, that book of mine also treats of a few parallel cases. Thus, it is where Singh could have found the demolition of the well-known false claim that Pushyamitra Shunga awarded a prize for the head of every Buddhist. Yet, he faithfully reproduces this false claim: “In Ayodhya, local tradition says that he declared a price of one gold coin for the head of one Buddhist. He is believed to have led a Brahmin campain to wipe out Buddhist rule from north India.” (p.7) The claim is not just wrong, but is also misattributed: his local informers have not expressed some “local tradition”. Being located far from Pushyamitra’s capital, the locals have merely parroted the Nehruvian story megaphoned through the textbooks and media. In history courses, you learn about the need for “origin criticism”; once you have some experience with this, you can, even before delving into the books or the dusty manuscripts, already see that in the present case, the claim is not based on some mysteriously preserved local tradition but on the (carefully engineered) received wisdom.

At any rate, Singh has been caught in the act of denying pro-temple evidence which he must have learned about as per his own testimony. So it doesn’t surprise us that he feigns unfamiliarity with the scholarly state of the art. According to him, the VHP sought “the cover of scientifically gathered evidence”  and “is said to have surmised that if the excavation proved (which it did in the minds of some Hindus) that there was a Hindu temple at the site prior to the Babri Masjid, then the demolition of the Babri Masjid was justified.” (p.270) No, proof from the excavations (converging with that from many documentary sources) did not just show the temple’s existence “in the mind of some Hindus”; this variegated proof is the scientific state of the art. Those who deny it, even if they boast academic titles, are ipso facto anti-science.

 

 

Some good things

Let’s not be overly pedantic. Some good things can be reported about this book. We learn here that Narasimha Rao (who, as PM, followed in Rajiv Gandhi’s footsteps by promising a solution in consonance with the historical evidence, a neutral way of saying: in accordance with the Hindu preference), according to a Congress politician, was “India’s first BJP Prime Minister”. (p.257) He certainly was India’s best PM so far, for he patronized the decisive move away from the Nehruvian socialist policies that had bankrupted India, and he sat unmoved through the news of Kar Sevaks demolishing the disputed structure without ordering the only thing that could have saved the Masjid: an intervention by the army. This actually saved many lives, for a standing Masjid would have swayed millions of fence-sitting Muslims to go on claiming this otherwise unimportant building, and would have dissuaded the Supreme Court from finally closing the controversy by letting common sense prevail: leave a Hindu sacred site to the Hindus.  

On p.82-83, he faithfully quotes the Austrian Jesuit Josepf Tieffenthaler, an eye-witness to the religious practices in Ayodhya. Like all witnesses in the first centuries after Babar, he reports plenty of Hindu activity at the site, esp. celebrations of his incarnation on Ram Navami; and conspicuously omits mentioning any Muslim activity there. Perhaps Akbar, who sought to curry favour with the Hindus as a counterweight to the sectarian and ethnic Muslim lobbies threatening his power, had reached a compromise with the Hindus to the effect that they could worship Rama there on condition of not offending the Muslims by demolishing the mosque architecture. The details about that period, probably ending with or interrupted by Aurangzeb’s iconoclastic fury, remain to be explored by the historians, who are all the more free to do so now that the burden of a momentous controversy has been lifted. 

Singh also approaches honesty when he reports: “On 27 February 2002, more than fifty karsevaks were burnt to death reportedly by a ‘Muslim mob’.” (p.262) These scare quotes were unnecessary, the facts have been established and even confirmed by the judiciary, but at least the true story is more or less explicitated.

This is his farewell sentence: “Ayodhya has come a long way in its journey over millennia, and while today it is called the graveyard of Inda’s composite culture and rule of law, I am hopeful that this label, too, will not stick forever. Ayodhya will keep changing its course with the river Sarayu as its eternal witness.” (p.369) We retain that the false label on Ayodhya as graveyard of pluralism will, in spite of frantic attempts by the secularists, not stick forever.

 

 

Read more!

In support of Satyapal Singh’s Private Bill against anti-Hindu discriminations

On 22 September 2018, an ad hoc group of Hindu citizens led (to my knowledge) by Rahul Dewan, Bala Ramya Rohini and Pushkar Agnihotri, will work out a charter of Hindu demands and present it to the Narendra Modi government, the public and the media. The text will be finalized during the conference, but in essence, it is a move in support of a Private Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha by Dr. Satyapal Singh prior to his becoming a Minister. It is Private Member’s Bill No. 226 of 2016 to amend Articles 26 to 30 of the Constitution, of which a copy can be found at https://mail.telenet.be/service/home/~/?auth=co&loc=nl&id=926118&part=2.2, or below. The central request from the Government is to get it passed by the current Parliament itself at the earliest. The organizers emphasize that “this does not take any rights away from any groups, but ensures that all sections including Hindus are treated equally under the law”.

This initiative for a public statement in support of Satyapal Singh's Private ill for amendments annulling the anti-Hindu discriminations is correct and potentially historic. If the media pick it up, the government will not be able to ignore and stonewall it (which it otherwise probably would do). I had been advocating a policy in this sense since my book On Modi Time in 2015, but like so much free and unsolicited advice by pen-pushers, this had been to no effect at all. I had been wondering why, during this historic window of opportunity which may never come back, so few Indians take this issue up. Now I am relieved to note that news of Hindu society's death was premature after all. Congrats to those who took the initiative.

The Private Bill and the present initiative will surprise a part of the Indian public and the vast majority of the foreign India-watchers, as they don’t know (or the knaves among them feign not to know) that there exists any anti-Hindu discrimination at all. They are even less prepared for the fact of BJP secularism, an ideological development (described by me since a decade or so) that pin-pricks their whipped-up depiction of the BJP as a fanatically Hindu party.

For the record, I am publishing another piece of free and unsolicited advice, viz. the one I wrote on the Indic Academy forum: about how to formulate this demand towards the public.

’It is vital to publicize this as a demand for equality and secularism, rather than to focus on its importance for Hinduism. On Hindu forums like this one, you can of course discuss the beneficial implications for Hindu civilization, such as conferring the freedom to impart your own inheritance to the young generation and abolishing the main reason why Hindu communities seek to leave the sinking ship of the legal category "Hindu". Towards non-Hindus, in contrast, it will be necessary to emphasize not the way the amendments will serve Hindu interests, but why they are a necessary application of secularism and legal equality.

‘The non-Hindus are not concerned with any Hindu benefits. As far as Christians and Muslims are concerned, the only good Hindu is a converted ex-Hindu. For all the predators feasting upon the dying body of Hindu society, there is nothing valuable in trying to revive it. But in the Indian context, they are more or less forced to pay lip-service to the principle of secularity. Now, it is not hard to remind them that "secular" implies "equal before the law regardless of religion". Going by that principle, it becomes obvious that they should support (rather than oppose) the abolition of religious discriminations.

‘Since decades I hear Hindutvavadis pontificate how all Hindu problems will be solved by declaring India a Hindu Rashtra. Really? Instead, it is purely a waste of energy on an impotent symbol that had better been expended on substantial Hindu gains. The Hindu Rashtra demand can only make you enemies, or strengthen their enmity and confirm their anti-Hindu prejudices ("Hindu Taliban"). Chandragupta, Vikramaditya, Raja Bhoja and all the other Hindu kings didn't waste anything at all on declaring a "Hindu Rashtra". (Though admittedly, the Maratha "Hindu Pad Padshahi" or “Haindava Swarajya” comes close.) This is an example of how contemporary Hindus will to better to follow Chanakya rather than Golwalkar, and to go for Hindu Dharma rather than Hindutva. And in this case, for law reform rather than for hollow rhetoric.

‘As for the BJP leadership, unconcerned with Hindu interests nor with degrees of secularity but certainly understanding the language of electoral calculus, to them it must be emphasized that a principled stand is a vote-getter. You see it all the time: parties shouting lofty principles from the rooftops during election campaigns, only to relapse in humdrum everyday dealings once in office. To be sure, instituting these purely secular amendments won't endear you to the contractors of the Christian or Muslim vote-banks, who will not give the BJP their votes; but then, everybody except the occasional BJP buffoon knows that they have not done so in the past election either, no matter how secular the promise of Development. (Well, there may have been one or two, but if they could value development over their own religion, they can likewise see the fairness of equality before the law.)  Only the Hindus will ever vote for the BJP, and it is they who will turn out in vast numbers to cast their vote for the party that has freed Hindu Dharma from the legal discriminations that presently hold it back.

‘On this list, we have heard some voices pleading that the vast majority is too busy with their daily needs and duties to concern itself with this issue. It seems that there are always Hindus (BJP men and others) ready to thwart any initiative that threatens to serve Hindu interests. And indeed, Hindus are selfish and think of their own families' interests before those of their society. As a polite outsider, I would never dare to say this, but then I am only quoting what numerous Hindus have confided to me. Moreover, to whisper to you a little secret, Westerners are not much more public-spirited either. Anyway, it is true that the multitudes are not going to move a finger for this consequential matter of principle. Nor, for good measure, will they move a finger to get a toilet for their neighbour built, or any other item on the public development agenda.

‘But for those things, you have the elected political and the self-appointed intellectual leadership class. It is this class that expends effort and time to devise and execute development policies, or to work out matters of principle. What the overly busy multitudes are expected to do, is only to cast their votes, which is a very brief effort and in which voting for the one party takes no more breath than voting for the other. In representative democracies, people are quite accustomed to leave policy-making to a selected leadership class. Even in Switzerland with its referendum democracy, common people do a bit more deliberating on policy matters, but apart from casting their votes a few times per year, they too leave the nitty-gritty of politics to the professionals. So, the priorities on the multitudes' busy agenda do not come in the way of this Delhi conference on policy-making regarding the anti-Hindu and un-secular parts of India's legislation.’

Appendix 1: full text of Satyapal Singh’s Private Bill

THE CONSTITUTION (AMENDMENT) BILL, 2016

By

DR. SATYA PAL SINGH, M.P.

BILL No. 226 of  2016

Short title.

Amendment of article 15.

Amendment of article 26.

AS INTRODUCED IN LOK SABHA

further to amend the Constitution of India.

BE it enacted by Parliament in the Sixty-seventh Year of Republic of India as follows:—

1.  This Act may be called the Constitution (Amendment) Act, 2016.

2. In article 15 of the Constitution, clause (5) shall be omitted.

3. The existing article 26 of the Constitution shall be renumbered as clause (1) thereof and after clause (1) as so renumbered, the following clauses shall be inserted, namely:—

"(2) Notwithstanding anything contained in article 25, the State shall not control, administer or manage, whatsoever, any institution, including its properties, established or maintained for religious or charitable purposes by a religious denomination or any section thereof.

(3) All laws in force in the territory of India in so far as they are inconsistent with the provisions of this article shall, to the extent of such inconsistency, be void.

(4) The State shall not make any law which enables it to control, administer or manage, whatsoever, any institution, including its properties, established or maintained for religious or charitable purposes by a religious denomination or any section thereof, and, any law made in contravention of this clause shall, to the extent of such contravention, be void.

(5) In this article the expressions "law" and "laws in force" have same meaning as respectively assigned to them in clause (3) of article 13.".

4. The existing article 27 of the Constitution shall be renumbered as clause (1) thereof and after clause (1) as so renumbered, the following clause shall be inserted, namely:—

"(2) No moneys out of the Consolidated Fund of India, the Consolidated Fund of a State, the Contingency Fund of India or the Contingency Fund of a State or out of the fund of any public body shall be appropriated for advancement or promotion of a section of citizens solely or primarily on the basis of their religious affiliation or belonging to one or more religious or linguistic denomination.".

5. In article 28 of the Constitution, after clause (3), the following clause shall be inserted, namely:—

"(4) Nothing in this Constitution shall be deemed to forbid the teaching of traditional Indian knowledge or ancient texts of India in any educational institution, wholly or partly maintained out of State Funds.".

 6. In article 29 of the Constitution, in the marginal heading, for the words "interests of minorities", the words "cultural and educational rights" shall be substituted.

7. In article 30 of the Constitution—

(a) in the marginal heading for the word "minorities", the words "all sections of citizens, whether based on religion or language", shall be substituted;

(b) in clause (1), for the word "minorities", the words " sections of citizens" shall be substituted;

(c) in clause (1A) for the words "a minority", the words "a section of citizens" shall be substituted; and

(d) in clause (2), for the words "a minority", the words "a section of citizens" shall be substituted.

Amendment of article 27.

Amendment of article 28.

Amendment of article 29.

Amendment of article 30.

5

10

15

20

25

30

3

STATEMENT OF OBJECTS AND REASONS

As per our Constitution, the State has no religion. The State has to treat all religions and religious people equally and with equal respect without, in any manner, interfering with their right to freedom of religion, faith and worship. As evident from the sub-text of the debates of the Constituent Assembly, the rights assumed for the majority were only made explicit to the minorities as an assurance to the latter in the backdrop of the peculiar circumstances then prevailing in the aftermath of partition. In any case, it was never the intention of the makers of our Constitution to deny to the majority the rights expressly provided to the minority. Yet, it gradually led to interpretations that only the minorities were given rights withheld from the majority generating an unhealthy feeling of discrimination among the majority community. It goes without saying that nursing any real or perceived grievance against the State by any section of citizens, majority or minority, is detrimental to the unity and integrity of the country.

Article 26 bestows rights on all religious denominations, irrespective of majority or minority, to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes, to manage their own affairs, and to own, acquire and administer property thereof. In a catena of judgements, the Supreme Court iterated the same. In Ratilal Panachand Gandhi  v. State of Bombay, it was held "in regard to affairs in matters of religion, the right of management given to a religious body is a guaranteed fundamental right which no legislation can take away. On the other hand, as regards administration of property which a religious denomination is entitled to own and acquire, it has undoubtedly the right to administer such property but only in accordance with law. This means that the State can regulate the administration of trust properties by means of laws validly enacted; but here again it should be remembered that under article 26(d), it is the religious denomination itself which has been given the right to administer its property in accordance with any law which the, State may validly impose. A law, which takes away the right of administration altogether from the religious denomination and vests it in any other or secular authority, would amount to violation of the right which is guaranteed by article 26(d) of the Constitution". The apex Court in Pannalal Bansilal Pitti v. State of Andhra Pradesh opined "While articles 25 and 26 granted religious freedom to minority religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism, they do not intend to deny the same guarantee to Hindus. Therefore, protection under articles 25 and 26 is available to the people professing Hindu religion, subject to the law therein. The right to establish a religious and charitable institution is a part of religious belief or faith and, though law made under clause (2) of article 25 may impose restrictions on the exercise of that right, the right to administer and maintain such institution cannot altogether be taken away and vested in other party; more particularly, in the officers of a secular Government".

There has been widespread legitimate grievance and feeling of discrimination among Hindus that despite the Constitutional provisions and judicial decisions, Hindu temples and religious and charitable institutions are routinely taken over by  the secular State on the pretext of maladministration, mismangement, etc., whereas mosques and churches of the minorities are allowed to be exclusively managed by the respective communities even though article 26 confers right equally upon all sections of citizens. Hindus also genuinely feel that such State control results in despoiling the Hindu religious centres, large scale misappropriation of the temples' income and properties and its redirection to secular purposes by the State, which is a major factor in the grinding poverty afflicting most Hindu temples, priests and their families. In order to maintain the secular character of the State and prevent it from usurping the religious and charitable institutions of any religious denomination or a section thereof, it is felt necessary to amend article 26 of the Constitution.

Article 27 provides that no person shall be compelled to pay any taxes, the proceeds of which are specifically appropriated in payment of expenses for the promotion or maintenance of any particular religion or religious denomination. Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi as the then Chief Minister of Gujarat had in his speech to the National Developmental Council on 19th December 2007 took the stand that discrimination amongst the eligible beneficiaries based on religion will not help the cause of taking the people of India together on the path of development, and the correct criteria for flow of funds for various schemes and programmes should be based on principles of equity by taking only socio-economic criteria alone. In the interest of maintaining true secular character of the State, there is imperative need for amendment of article 27 forbidding expenditure from the Consolidated or Contingency Fund of Union or any State or from the funds of any public body for any purpose premised solely or primarily on the religious affiliation or language. Language as a primary or sole consideration should also be excluded as certain languages have exclusive association with certain religions which may be used as subterfuge to circumvent the proposed embargo.

Article 28 rightly keeps religious instructions out of public educational system in the country. However, it was never the intention of the framers of the Constitution to keep the study and learning of traditional knowledge systems and civilizational heritage including study of such great texts like the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, etc. from out of public education system, yet, these have been completely kept out of education system leading to deracination of Indians from their cultural and civilizational moorings which does not augur well for the future of the country. There is thus a case for amendment of article 28 to provide for teaching of our traditional knowledge and ancient texts.

Article 29 confers cultural and educational rights to all sections of citizens, majority or minority, having distinct language, script or culture of their own. However, the word 'minorities' in the marginal heading of article 29 is incongruent with the body of its contents as also with the group heading 'cultural and educational rights'. Such incongruence has the potential for misunderstanding as if these rights are conferred only on minorities. It is, therefore, felt necessary to amend article 29 to remove any doubts.

Our Constitution mandates that the State shall not discriminate on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them. Article 30, as it stands, confers educational rights on religious and linguistic minorities without saying anything about the majority. If it had not assumed the same rights for the majority, it would not had been passed by the Constituent Assembly. An eleven-Judge Bench of the Supreme Court in T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka expressed an expansive opinion when it said, "The right to establish and maintain educational institutions may also be sourced to article 26(a), which grants, in positive terms, the right to every religious denomination or any section thereof to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes, subject to public order, morality and health". Further, the aspirations for conserving and communicating religious and cultural traditions  and language to succeeding generations is legitimate and applies to all groups, big or small. It is, therefore, felt that the scope of article 30 of the Constitution should be widened to include all communities and sections of citizens who form a distinct religious or linguistic group. Consequent to such proposed amendment, clause (5) of article 15, inserted by the Constitution (Ninety-third) Amendment Act, 2005, loses its relevance and accordingly it is proposed to omit clause (5) of article 15 of the Constitution.

Hence this Bill.

NEW DELHI; SATYA PAL SINGH

July 6, 2016.

Appendix 2: Syed Shahabuddin’s Private Bill

(A Private Bill with similar implications had been proposed before by a Muslim MP deemed a religious fundamentalist, the late Syed Shahabuddin.)

Bill No. 36 of 1995 LOK SABHA A Bill further to amend the Constitution of India. Be it enacted by Parliament in the forty-sixth year of Republic of India as follows: 1. This Act may be called the Constitution (Amendment) Act, 1995.  2. For article 30 of the Constitution, the following article shall be substituted, namely:—  “30. (1) Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof professing a distinct religion or having a distinct language, script or culture of its own or forming a distinct social group shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of its choice.  (2) In making any law providing for the compulsory acquisition of any property of an educational institution established and administered by a section of citizens, referred to in clause (I), the State shall ensure that the amount fixed by or determined under such law for the acquisition of such property is such as would not restrict or abrogate the right guaranteed under that clause.  (3) The State shall not, in granting aid to educational institutions, discriminate against any educational institution on the ground that it is under the management of a particular section of citizens referred to in clause (1).”. 

STATEMENT OF OBJECTS AND REASONS  Article 30 of the Constitution, as it stands, applies to religious and linguistic minorities. By judicial interpretation, the term ‘minority’ has been extended to include identifiable social groups which form a minority in the population of a State even if they form a majority in the Union as a whole. Similarly, the meaning of the term ‘minority’ has been broadened to include denominations and sects which are generally considered to be part of a larger religious group. In a vast and complex plural society, almost every identifiable group, whether identifiable by religion, including denomination or sect, or by language, including dialects, forms a minority at some operational or functional level, even if it forms a majority at some other levels. In the age of ethnicity that has dawned in the world, all identifiable groups are equally anxious to maintain their identity and they too wish to have the privilege of the right to establish educational institutions of their choice. Indeed, many caste groups have established educational institutions primarily for their own community and, in practice, enjoy the same privileges in matters of administration and management as were originally envisaged for religious and linguistic minorities.  The aspiration for conserving and communicating religious and cultural traditions and language to succeeding generations is legitimate and applies to all groups, big or small. It is, therefore, felt that the scope of article 30 of the Constitution should be widened to include all communities and all sections of citizens who form a distinct social group at any level. Of late, article 30 has been criticised as bestowing a privilege on the minority communities which the majority community does not enjov. The majority community or any section thereof should also be allowed to establish and administer educational institutions of its choice, if it so desires.  Hence this Bill. 

NEW DELHI;

SYED SHAHABUDDIN; 

April 20, 1995.

 

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