While Barack Obama is busy formulating an Af-Pak policy, we are busy in melting-point informatics and "my brother Rahul will become PM one day"
kind of family employment schemes. The Prime Minister "revealed" to a group of journalists that he had decided to resign if the nuclear deal with the US was not passed in Parliament. To fulfil his "kasam" to Washington, he silently saw the lawmakers' highest body turn into a mandi.
For him, his "kasam" was more important than the "maryada" of his nation's parliament.
I wish he had honoured in the same way his "kasam" to the Indian people – the oath he took while taking the office of Prime Minister, that bound him to protecting the lives of his people and giving a government that treated all citizens equally.
Pota was removed to please Muslims. A special reservation scheme was implemented at Aligarh Muslim University to have seats for a particular religious group reserved.
The Planning Commission allocated Rs 3,000 crore for minority (read Muslim) development schemes and banks were directed to give loans to the minorities at a special consideration. To address Kashmiri Muslim "sentiments", Afzal's hanging was delayed till the next government is formed. Ram Sethu was brutally assaulted and Rama's existence was denied – all before the eyes of Mr Nice and Dr Decent. Not a single word was spoken to address the sentiments of Hindus.
He kept a studied silence seeing the butchers of 1984 being protected and promoted as party candidates for Lok Sabha elections till a shoe throw compelled the leader to delist them.
So much for his "kasam" to provide impartial governance.
The "kasam" to protect the people and safeguard the honour of soldiers was "fulfilled" in such a manner that soldiers returned their war decorations and had to demonstrate like pariahs at Jantar Mantar. The government was busy decorating the liars and voices of terrorists.
And now, there is a controversy regarding a story sourced to the Special Investigating Tribunal blaming certain NGOs for cooking up ghastly stories of barbarism, which, the report says, never occurred. The person who has been charged having helped file such "cooked up" stories became a darling of the secular media noises in Delhi who would present her stories like a constitutional tribunal's report.
There is a contradiction which is further confusing as SIT is still silent on it. For the sake of justice and fair play, the truth must be investigated and the honour of the people, whichever side they might belong to, be restored. If the Kausar Bi story was filed truthfully, the criminals must be hanged in public along with the perpetrators of Godhra. But if it was a fabrication, the "writer" must be punished because if a mind can cook up such ghastly scenes, what will be the difference between what Kasab and his gang did in Mumbai and what these pen-pushers of the secular chill club do to India and her people? A writer more known in London wrote a story as spine chilling as was the Godhra fire. It read, "A mob surrounded the house of former Congress MP Iqbal Ehsan Jaffri. His phone calls to the Director-General of Police, the Police Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) were ignored. The mobile police vans around his house did not intervene. The mob broke into the house. They stripped his daughters and burned them alive. Then they beheaded Ehsan Jaffri and dismembered him. Of course it’s only a coincidence that Jaffri was a trenchant critic of Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, during his campaign for the Rajkot Assembly by-election in February.'(Arundhati Roy’s article, Outlook, dated 6 May 2002).
Ehsaan was killed but the rest of the story was false for which Roy had to apologize. A people traumatized, painted black all over the globe, their character mutilated and just an apology?
And who were those killed in the Godhra train who never got a line from these "chroniclers of human tragedies"?
Just waste paper?
Read what the Union minister of state for home, Shriprakash Jaiswal, who belongs to the Congress, told Parliament on May 11, 2005: "790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed in the riots, 2,548 people were injured and 223 people were missing."
Who were those killed in Gujarat riots along with Muslims?
Just dirt?
The hate-Hindu cartel represents the hate of Ghaznis and Ghauris. They survive on the funds given to them by Congress-Communist groups and state powers controlled by them. Their social acceptability and glamour is enhanced by "praise for each other" societies. And Mr Nice and Dr Decent pats them with state awards.
Amid cacophony and intemperate language laced with shoe throws, criminals and convicted actors are having a field day canvassing for their parties and though a mature and stable democracy we pretend to be, the first casualty in this situation has been decency in public debate.
The poll scene has turned the nation into a war room. The last 62 years have witnessed our motherland's vivisection, a million people killed, 1.25 lakh sq km of land illegally occupied by aliens, massacres by Pakistani marauders in Mirpur and in Bihar by Maoist terror outfits, the jeep purchase scandal in 1948, a humiliation like 1962 when ordnance factories were ordered to make coffee machines instead on rifles, the Nagarwala mystery, the submarine scandal, wheat import commissions, farmers' suicides, forced exile of Kashmiri Hindus and desecration of more than 172 temples. The list is ever-growing amid inspiring stories of Indian people’s perseverance and achievements.
Isn't it time we rose above fault lines, gave a chance to an India that would make every Indian of every denomination, faith, colour and creed an equally proud partner? Can't we think and vote on issues that overpower religious, caste-based and parochial concerns? Will this war room kind of atmosphere result in a decisive mandate?
(The author is director of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation)
Showing posts with label Tarun Vijay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tarun Vijay. Show all posts
An England in India goes to the polls
Tarun Vijay
After six decades of independence, India is virtually ruled by a lady who is originally a westerner and doesn’t have a command of any
Indian language unless supported by a written text in Roman. And she has become the only hope to bring back the remnants of what was once a grand old Congress party led by Mahatma Gandhi back to power through her speeches in broken Hindi addressed to India’s predominant rural voters.
She is credited with having helped the Congress win 145 Lok Sabha seats and 26.21% votes in elections held in 2000, became the head of a 219-member coalition drawn from 16 parties and ruled India from her home with Manmohan Singh acting as her nominee Prime Minister. So much so that an American embassy publication spread out her picture on one full page and Manmohan Singh was relegated to a corner passport size. It created embarrassment and corrections were made in later editions.
The flexibility of Indian voters, if one can describe this attribute modestly, is amazing. The west’s overpowering influence in recent times can be said to have begun in 1615, with a visit of Sir Thomas Roe, England's first official ambassador to India, who secured privileges for the East India Company from Jehangir, son of Akbar.
India would never be the same again.
The east, the far-east and the immediate neighbourhood, once such a hub of Indian cultural influence that it became known as Indochina, was turned to lesser importance and faded away from Indian priorities. It was only after five decades of independence that a look-east policy was devised but it still remains feeble compared with our western fixations.
The presence of a colonial power that set the cultural agenda too and gave new westward dreams of an upwardly mobile life to a common Indian drove the Indian journey and fixed our dreams to Vilayat.
It seriously affected the status of our languages. Once a nation that had the most scientific and ancient language, Sanskrit, perfect on parameters of grammar, vocabulary and phonetics, and had preserved the age-old reservoir of Hindu wisdom and scholarship – India was 80% literate before the British rule, with astounding contributions in astronomy, mathematics, life sciences, arts and theatre, literature, sea warfare, and mind-boggling wonders in architectural superiority, all attained in languages common Indians knew and spoke – India is run on a language that was never hers, was in fact imposed through coercion shutting the old and time-tested centres of Indian learning calling them as “dead, useless centres of obscurantism”.
The new contemporary rulers of any variety or colour or ideology, look at Sanskrit and other Indian languages with disdain and would never prescribe books of ancient wisdom like Vedas or the Upanishads to be taught in Indian schools under a heritage programme fearing loss of Muslim votes.
Bharat, the glorified “golden bird” famous in Arabic and Greek fables, has become a poor translation of Romanized western elitist ideas. An India, that’s what it is known as.
Though the world over our ancient books are highly respected as the gift of India, India and her politicians take them as merely Hindu scriptures, that may invite the wrath of the minorities if promoted through state apparatus and patronage. Though Sanskrit remains the language of solemnizing birth, marriage and ensuring a heaven-bound journey after death, an upwardly mobile elite of Gurgaon-Bangalore variety won’t have time or inclination to understand it. It’s of no use – no employment, no social status, no political benefit is gained through it.
In any elite circle of decision making, whether it is governance, media, arts and culture or literature, it’s simply elevating and profitable too, to shun speaking an Indian language and use English with a foreign accent to register a powerful presence and of course facilitate success. And more the American slang, the more “awfully impressive” it becomes.
After six decades of independence, India is virtually ruled by a lady who is originally a westerner and doesn’t have a command of any
Indian language unless supported by a written text in Roman. And she has become the only hope to bring back the remnants of what was once a grand old Congress party led by Mahatma Gandhi back to power through her speeches in broken Hindi addressed to India’s predominant rural voters.
She is credited with having helped the Congress win 145 Lok Sabha seats and 26.21% votes in elections held in 2000, became the head of a 219-member coalition drawn from 16 parties and ruled India from her home with Manmohan Singh acting as her nominee Prime Minister. So much so that an American embassy publication spread out her picture on one full page and Manmohan Singh was relegated to a corner passport size. It created embarrassment and corrections were made in later editions.
The flexibility of Indian voters, if one can describe this attribute modestly, is amazing. The west’s overpowering influence in recent times can be said to have begun in 1615, with a visit of Sir Thomas Roe, England's first official ambassador to India, who secured privileges for the East India Company from Jehangir, son of Akbar.
India would never be the same again.
The east, the far-east and the immediate neighbourhood, once such a hub of Indian cultural influence that it became known as Indochina, was turned to lesser importance and faded away from Indian priorities. It was only after five decades of independence that a look-east policy was devised but it still remains feeble compared with our western fixations.
The presence of a colonial power that set the cultural agenda too and gave new westward dreams of an upwardly mobile life to a common Indian drove the Indian journey and fixed our dreams to Vilayat.
It seriously affected the status of our languages. Once a nation that had the most scientific and ancient language, Sanskrit, perfect on parameters of grammar, vocabulary and phonetics, and had preserved the age-old reservoir of Hindu wisdom and scholarship – India was 80% literate before the British rule, with astounding contributions in astronomy, mathematics, life sciences, arts and theatre, literature, sea warfare, and mind-boggling wonders in architectural superiority, all attained in languages common Indians knew and spoke – India is run on a language that was never hers, was in fact imposed through coercion shutting the old and time-tested centres of Indian learning calling them as “dead, useless centres of obscurantism”.
The new contemporary rulers of any variety or colour or ideology, look at Sanskrit and other Indian languages with disdain and would never prescribe books of ancient wisdom like Vedas or the Upanishads to be taught in Indian schools under a heritage programme fearing loss of Muslim votes.
Bharat, the glorified “golden bird” famous in Arabic and Greek fables, has become a poor translation of Romanized western elitist ideas. An India, that’s what it is known as.
Though the world over our ancient books are highly respected as the gift of India, India and her politicians take them as merely Hindu scriptures, that may invite the wrath of the minorities if promoted through state apparatus and patronage. Though Sanskrit remains the language of solemnizing birth, marriage and ensuring a heaven-bound journey after death, an upwardly mobile elite of Gurgaon-Bangalore variety won’t have time or inclination to understand it. It’s of no use – no employment, no social status, no political benefit is gained through it.
In any elite circle of decision making, whether it is governance, media, arts and culture or literature, it’s simply elevating and profitable too, to shun speaking an Indian language and use English with a foreign accent to register a powerful presence and of course facilitate success. And more the American slang, the more “awfully impressive” it becomes.
Family legacy and the Varun effect
Tarun Vijay
Those who opposed the Ayodhya temple movement, wore silence over the plight of Kashmiri Hindus, damaged the Ram Sethu and denied Lord Rama ever existed, denied the violence at the Godhra railway station, and embraced the butchers of 1984, are collectively gunning at Varun Gandhi's political life.
Column after column by Padma Shris in the media have created an atmosphere where supporting Varun has become a sin. Why? The simple reason is that the farmhouse of Gandhi-Nehru politics has been broken and a scion of the family chose to speak out as his conscience directed.
More than what Varun said or didn't say, it is the hurt and bewilderment over the loss of a Gandhi to the saffron brigade that has made the media and anti-Hindutva politicos react with such venom and acid. He was not heard, not given a chance to present his case, nor did forensic experts examine the so-called proof in the form of a CD containing his speech.
Varun has suddenly dwarfed the media-supported Rahul.
Nobody has ever heard a dynasty member to say with understandable assertion that he or she is a Hindu. Rather, they have always tried to look differently at things. They banned Hindu organisations, imposed the Emergency, removed basic human rights, never willingly facilitated the Sikh massacre probe, rewarded hardened criminals, made alliance with those who were convicted for murder or were facing scandalous charges, had the Muslim League join the government after Partition. Yet, they are nice, decent, peace-loving, patriotic democrats who love to tell others: 'Go read the Gita.'
When Indian soldiers were fighting Pakistani marauders in 1947, we didn't have enough jeeps. So orders were placed with the British company and supply demanded immediately. Our high commissioner in London V K Krishna Menon, Pandit Nehru's blue-eyed boy, messed it up. The jeeps reached a year late.
That was the first scandal in independent India.
We lost Gilgit, Baltistan and Skardu. We lost Aksai Chin because the government in New Delhi didn't know the exact boundaries and so no patrolling was being done there.
In all we have lost 125,000 square km to the Pakistanis and Chinese during Congress rule.
Plus we had a bad dream called 1962.
At that time our ordnance factories were making coffee machines as Pandit Nehru openly argued against having a well-equipped large army for defence. 'Who is going to attack us?' he would ask.
And people still remember the mysterious death of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who simply wanted Kashmir to be a part of India like Bihar or Bengal and the permit system to enter the valley be abolished. Kashmir had two rulers then, its ruler was called Sadr e Riyasat or 'head of state', and it had a prime minister. Mookerjee's martyrdom compelled the Nehru government to remove the permit system and the two heads of state.
Then we had the Mundhra scandal, the Nagarwala case, the L N Mishra murder. The Jana Sangh's fast-emerging leader Deendayal Upadhyaya was murdered. A Congress leader canvassed openly against the official Presidential candidate and supported her own choice as independent nominee. The original Congress symbol was a pair of oxen. After the official Congress broke up, they got the hand as a temporary symbol till the case is finally settled. It would never be.
Those who opposed the Ayodhya temple movement, wore silence over the plight of Kashmiri Hindus, damaged the Ram Sethu and denied Lord Rama ever existed, denied the violence at the Godhra railway station, and embraced the butchers of 1984, are collectively gunning at Varun Gandhi's political life.
Column after column by Padma Shris in the media have created an atmosphere where supporting Varun has become a sin. Why? The simple reason is that the farmhouse of Gandhi-Nehru politics has been broken and a scion of the family chose to speak out as his conscience directed.
More than what Varun said or didn't say, it is the hurt and bewilderment over the loss of a Gandhi to the saffron brigade that has made the media and anti-Hindutva politicos react with such venom and acid. He was not heard, not given a chance to present his case, nor did forensic experts examine the so-called proof in the form of a CD containing his speech.
Varun has suddenly dwarfed the media-supported Rahul.
Nobody has ever heard a dynasty member to say with understandable assertion that he or she is a Hindu. Rather, they have always tried to look differently at things. They banned Hindu organisations, imposed the Emergency, removed basic human rights, never willingly facilitated the Sikh massacre probe, rewarded hardened criminals, made alliance with those who were convicted for murder or were facing scandalous charges, had the Muslim League join the government after Partition. Yet, they are nice, decent, peace-loving, patriotic democrats who love to tell others: 'Go read the Gita.'
When Indian soldiers were fighting Pakistani marauders in 1947, we didn't have enough jeeps. So orders were placed with the British company and supply demanded immediately. Our high commissioner in London V K Krishna Menon, Pandit Nehru's blue-eyed boy, messed it up. The jeeps reached a year late.
That was the first scandal in independent India.
We lost Gilgit, Baltistan and Skardu. We lost Aksai Chin because the government in New Delhi didn't know the exact boundaries and so no patrolling was being done there.
In all we have lost 125,000 square km to the Pakistanis and Chinese during Congress rule.
Plus we had a bad dream called 1962.
At that time our ordnance factories were making coffee machines as Pandit Nehru openly argued against having a well-equipped large army for defence. 'Who is going to attack us?' he would ask.
And people still remember the mysterious death of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who simply wanted Kashmir to be a part of India like Bihar or Bengal and the permit system to enter the valley be abolished. Kashmir had two rulers then, its ruler was called Sadr e Riyasat or 'head of state', and it had a prime minister. Mookerjee's martyrdom compelled the Nehru government to remove the permit system and the two heads of state.
Then we had the Mundhra scandal, the Nagarwala case, the L N Mishra murder. The Jana Sangh's fast-emerging leader Deendayal Upadhyaya was murdered. A Congress leader canvassed openly against the official Presidential candidate and supported her own choice as independent nominee. The original Congress symbol was a pair of oxen. After the official Congress broke up, they got the hand as a temporary symbol till the case is finally settled. It would never be.
Why are Hindus angry?
Tarun Vijay
In Srinagar, a Muslim women’s organization – the Dukhtaran-e-Millat – vows to impose the strict Islamic code on women through violence and
declares that it is in the interests of women. The leader of this outfit, Asiyah Andrabi, was jailed several times for working against the nation and for being a conduit for money to jihadi groups who used that help to kill Hindus and create disaffection among people against India. The US State Department Report of 1995 held a Dukhtaran-e-Millat activist responsible for a parcel bomb blast at the BBC office in Srinagar in which one person was killed and two injured.
The DeM has recently been linked to certain money laundering cases. Andrabi was booked under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) for receiving ISI money through hawala channels. Whenever she speaks against India, there is no emotion or any sense of regret.
She was never subjected to a narco test nor did the media feel anything bad about her. Instead, women's groups interviewed her, called her the “new face of Muslim feminism”, and glossy magazines splashed her interviews with a tinge of revolutionary romanticism.
For Indian seculars, the Srinagar crowd working against India brings added fizz, a thrill and a heroism that has to be “understood” rather than condemned. Serious academic columns are published saying that if they are so passionately and aggressively pursuing separatism, why shouldn't we give the Kashmir valley to them?
It’s only when a lady monk is killed in Kandhamal or arrested in Nashik and appears to be wearing saffron rather than green that expressions become stern, the law becomes the guiding force, narco tests are immediately ordered and before anything can be even remotely established, the person is pronounced guilty. No women’s organization comes out openly to say she is a woman and hence the police must protect her honour and religious obligations at all cost.
Her father says she is innocent. No one gives any importance to that statement.
She cooperates during the narco test and nothing incriminatory is proved. The police say she practices yoga, hence the narco test didn't work.
The bike, the RDX, the targets – nothing is proved. Yet, she is tortured in police custody.
The women's commission that swung into action when an item girl used it to get cheap publicity and hot assignments maintains a studied silence.
The Human Rights Commission remains unfazed and the red sirens of the Marxist class look the other way. They had been demanding a pardon for Afzal although the Supreme Court convicted him. But the issues involved were of secular nature; hence they had to speak.
Nobody still knows what Pragya actually did or didn't do. She has to be severely dealt with just because the colour she wears is not registered as secular in the government's registry of protection where rapists, extortionists and scandalous criminals get a cabinet berth and a murder accused jailbird becomes a chief minister for being on the correct side politically.
First they said an army officer used 60 kg of RDX to blow up the Samjhauta Express. Then the denial comes; no RDX was used, it was ammonium nitrate, oh no perhaps IEDs. Then the Mecca Masjid blasts are linked with Malegaon, then the Hyderabad police issue an official statement that nothing has been found to link the two. The motorbike, the disfigured numbers on the chassis, the absconding person, the real mastermind, the saffron terror guru ... Remember when the Kanchi Shankaracharya was arrested, what kind of charges were levelled against him? Rape, murder, financial fraud and womanizing. And women came foreword to issue statements about how they were “lured”. What happened afterwards? Even “nothing” won’t convey the nothingness of the entire plot.
But the damage to the great seat of Hindu reverence had been done.
In Srinagar, a Muslim women’s organization – the Dukhtaran-e-Millat – vows to impose the strict Islamic code on women through violence and
declares that it is in the interests of women. The leader of this outfit, Asiyah Andrabi, was jailed several times for working against the nation and for being a conduit for money to jihadi groups who used that help to kill Hindus and create disaffection among people against India. The US State Department Report of 1995 held a Dukhtaran-e-Millat activist responsible for a parcel bomb blast at the BBC office in Srinagar in which one person was killed and two injured.
The DeM has recently been linked to certain money laundering cases. Andrabi was booked under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) for receiving ISI money through hawala channels. Whenever she speaks against India, there is no emotion or any sense of regret.
She was never subjected to a narco test nor did the media feel anything bad about her. Instead, women's groups interviewed her, called her the “new face of Muslim feminism”, and glossy magazines splashed her interviews with a tinge of revolutionary romanticism.
For Indian seculars, the Srinagar crowd working against India brings added fizz, a thrill and a heroism that has to be “understood” rather than condemned. Serious academic columns are published saying that if they are so passionately and aggressively pursuing separatism, why shouldn't we give the Kashmir valley to them?
It’s only when a lady monk is killed in Kandhamal or arrested in Nashik and appears to be wearing saffron rather than green that expressions become stern, the law becomes the guiding force, narco tests are immediately ordered and before anything can be even remotely established, the person is pronounced guilty. No women’s organization comes out openly to say she is a woman and hence the police must protect her honour and religious obligations at all cost.
Her father says she is innocent. No one gives any importance to that statement.
She cooperates during the narco test and nothing incriminatory is proved. The police say she practices yoga, hence the narco test didn't work.
The bike, the RDX, the targets – nothing is proved. Yet, she is tortured in police custody.
The women's commission that swung into action when an item girl used it to get cheap publicity and hot assignments maintains a studied silence.
The Human Rights Commission remains unfazed and the red sirens of the Marxist class look the other way. They had been demanding a pardon for Afzal although the Supreme Court convicted him. But the issues involved were of secular nature; hence they had to speak.
Nobody still knows what Pragya actually did or didn't do. She has to be severely dealt with just because the colour she wears is not registered as secular in the government's registry of protection where rapists, extortionists and scandalous criminals get a cabinet berth and a murder accused jailbird becomes a chief minister for being on the correct side politically.
First they said an army officer used 60 kg of RDX to blow up the Samjhauta Express. Then the denial comes; no RDX was used, it was ammonium nitrate, oh no perhaps IEDs. Then the Mecca Masjid blasts are linked with Malegaon, then the Hyderabad police issue an official statement that nothing has been found to link the two. The motorbike, the disfigured numbers on the chassis, the absconding person, the real mastermind, the saffron terror guru ... Remember when the Kanchi Shankaracharya was arrested, what kind of charges were levelled against him? Rape, murder, financial fraud and womanizing. And women came foreword to issue statements about how they were “lured”. What happened afterwards? Even “nothing” won’t convey the nothingness of the entire plot.
But the damage to the great seat of Hindu reverence had been done.
Aspire and Assert
Tarun Vijay
Let the people take over the spirit of the Red Fort and declare from its ramparts: "Honourable leaders, having cheated us for the last six decades and made politics a business of scoundrels, for once give India her due in the form of a nation-centric polity beyond family lords and stinking mafiosi of castiests, extortionists and murderers."
India certainly deserves a better lot to be elected members of a parliament which saw shameful scenes last time when a nuclear deal was being pushed to win the vote.
It’s meaningless to boast of our most ancient civilization, culture and values if we see what we have today. Bragging about a past that has no bearing on our behaviour today is worse than running after a mirage. Only the insecure get into it. Even if you forget all the great leaders of the past and stop reading their memoirs and prescriptions for the nation’s ills but keep a straight spine to live for India’s better future with honesty and transparency that would suffice. We will surely build new leaders but for once please strive to free your beloved nation of those who have survived far too long on peoples' lethargy and inaction.
A Hindu nation never cared who wrote the Vedas, how they were revealed or conceived and who authored the Upanishads. The only element that made us survive the vicissitudes of history was the strength to live the ideals and values that were worth living for this nation called Bharat Varsha.
We have been electing representatives who hardly have an idea of the nation they are tasked to protect and help flower. They have no sense of history, a history of our people and civilization, and do not any idea why we had to go through too many assaults by foreigners and how we were able to resist them so valiantly for centuries. Yet why has speaking about it has become a matter of hesitation for the neo-scholarship? We insult retired decorated soldiers when they are forced to agitate for a mere uniformity in pensions and scales though the lawmakers increase their salaries astronomically at the fag end of the session. That’s our patriotism.
Elect India this time. People who would try sincerely to make for the lost years of development and raise the value of our citizenship. It must be a matter of great confidence and pride to be an Indian citizen. Leaders and the administration must look at our people with respect and love, which we lack completely today as the nation is still run on British laws and the colonial attitude. No police reforms, no electoral corrections, no administrative changes in the environment of governance. The same hateful arrogance is seen in the bureaucrats and ministers who get a chance to find a seat of power. The way an officer of Emergency fame and thoroughly partisan was chosen, and supported by a section of the media and politicians, to handle elections, ignoring the advice of a man of integrity, speaks volumes of the depths we have fallen to.
Bribing is a matter of routine, piling of files is a thumb rule, small measures of publicity like increasing Haj subsidy or providing Ganga Jal on Shivratri become great milestones of political achievements while primary schools, village health centres and energy and water resources management are left to the mercy of sidelined ministers. The "profitable" departments are coal, mining and rural development, which are less checked and monitored but have enough meat to enjoy. We have a media whose brilliance comes to the fore in trivialities like the Mangalore pub incidence and which is completely hooked to Washington-London mania. We forget that for India the Middle East, Asia and especially East Asia with China taking a natural prominence are the regions that weigh more than anything else.
East is our natural constituency of diplomacy which is nurtured by age-old affinities. Similarly, at home we ignore the northeast. More than English, we must emphasize on learning Japanese and Chinese. That’s the future, not the US. It’s no use saying Hindus were ever a proselytizing religion. Declare with a truly Indian confidence that this world would be a better place to live if it follows the Hindu way of life and send missionaries of Hinduism to make people appreciate the Vedic way of a happy and mutually respectful society. Be a proud missionary yourself and take some inspiration from the times when Asoka the great, who has given us our national motif, sent his son to spread the message of Dharma. Why hesitate now? But we have learnt to live with all wrongs like we lived calmly during the British colonial period. Only a handful, less than 5%, participated in the freedom struggle. That’s the bare bitter truth. Should we not wake up even now?
Should our personal egos and likings be a deciding factor, or in a critical time like this can we rise above them and decide?
I was at Allahabad University sometime ago to address a students’ convention and have a Q&A session that ran for more than two hours in the Deligacy campus. They all wanted change. Give us clean rivers, easily available drinking water (since the advent of the mineral-water bottle culture, which is neither mineral water nor safe ones, one quipped), get rid of illiterate priests and a mindset that feels ashamed at just and rightful Hindu assertions that teaching Vedas is considered a Hindu, and hence, a communal and discardable act. They were enamoured with the youth chant but wanted a leadership that has a spine. In the evening the octogenarian leader of Vishwa Hindu Parishad Shri Ashok Singhal invited me to join a discussion on the agenda for Arundhati-Vashishtha Trust he has created to disseminate the scientific and Indic civilisational knowledge among the people. When we were leaving he said: "It’s time to forget our internal differences for the sake of greater unity among Hindu nationalists." We will be sinning if driven by personal egos, we work to defeat our own ilk. An India led by an Indian nationalist whom we know would be preferable to one led by a lady of a foreign origin.
If that happens we will finally have a post-Nehruvian raj that is more connected with the soil and people's aspirations. Is it too much to ask to have cleaner and honest members of Parliament who would ensure better roads, bridges, primary schools, women’s empowerment and a scheduled caste-scheduled tribe upsurge that will take our nation miles ahead and unshackle us from the redundant ritualism and caste-based differences and atrocities.
Why can’t we have, unhesitatingly the best models of pilgrim centres and temple management that cater to the needs of the young and mobile and do not resist any new reform? Let us have a leadership with spine that will make India the strongest military power on earth without any apologies.
After all, we have a burden on our shoulders to keep India free from traitors and terrorists and defend borders with a few unfinished vows to be completed as directed by the unanimous resolutions of Parliament. The platform people, with one leg abroad and one in the stinking wealth in Swiss accounts can’t do that. Let a new Chanakya create a Chandra Gupta to uproot the denationalized politicians and give us hope.
(Tarun Vijay is director of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation)
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