I am not a Hindu

8/8/2019 I am not a Hindu

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I am not a Hindu. And I am certainly not a Muslim. So, when I started writing my

earlier book Ram Janmabhoomi vs Babri Masjid, a Case Study in Hindu -Muslim

Conflict, in the spring of 1990, I was an outsider to this conflict between Hindus

and Muslims. But as I ventured deeper into the unique configuration of forces now

existing in India, I saw that this was not a conflict between just any two

communities. It is not just a struggle between one self-interest and another self-interest. It is a struggle between very unequal contenders, with unequal motives for

waging this struggle at all.

On the one hand, there is the society that has continued the age-old civilization of

this country. It has been badly bruised by centuries of foreign rule and oppression,

with the moral losses more serious than the territorial and cultural ones : it suffers

of self- forgetfulness and lack of self-respect. But it is still far better off than most

of the cultures that have been overrun by the Muslim conquerors or the European

colonizers. It has a real chance of coming through.

On the other hand, there is a community, which is allowed to function within thislarger society, but which has the roots of its separate identity outside this society's

age-old civilization. These people's ancestors were in may cases pulled out of

Hindu society and made members of the Muslim community under duress. Now,

they would automatically evolve back into Hindu society, were it not for some

politicians and theologians who instill a separate communal identity in them.

The Ayodhya movement, which wants to reintegrate the sacred place of Ram

Janmabhoomi into the living Hindu tradition by building a Mandir on it, is at the

same time an invitation to the Muslim Indians to reintegrate themselves into the

society and the culture from which their ancestors were cut off by fanatical rulers

and their thought police, the theologians. It is thus an exercise in national

integration.

The struggle of Hindu society is not primarily with the Muslim community. The

most important opponents of Hindu society today are not the Islamic communal

leaders, but the interiorized colonial rulers of India, the alternated English -

educated and mostly Left-leaning elite that noisily advertises its secularism. It is

these people who impose anti-Hindu policies on Hindu society, and who keep

Hinduism down and prevent it from proudly raising its head after a thousand years

of oppression. The worst torment for Hindu society today is not the arrogant and

often violent agitation from certain mino rity groups, nor the handful of privilegeswhich the non-Hindu communities are getting. The worst problem is this mental

slavery, this sense of inferiority which Leftist intellectuals, through their power

positions in education and the media, and their dir ect influence on the public and

political arena, keep on inflicting on the Hindu mind.

These Leftist intellectuals work in a strange collusion with the Islamic fanatics.

Normally, the atheist Left should be the sharpest opponent of religious


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obscurantism and dogmatic adherence to anti-universalist belief systems like

Islam. But in India, the two work happily together for the destruction of their

common enemy: Hindu Dharma. Of course, the Leftists are mistaken if they think

they can use the Muslims for their own ends. It is a one-way collaboration, and

increasingly so, as the Left is put on the defensive while Islam is still on the

offensive. So far, the Left has rendered some fine intellectual services to the causeof Islam. It has strongly supported the movement for the Partition of India on the

basis of the Islamic Two-Nation Theory. After Partition, it has used its increasing

hold on the entire intellectual and educational scene in India to paralyze all

criticism of the historical record and ideological ch aracter of Islam.

Then again, the impression that this westernized elite is merely being used for

Islamic communal designs, may be superficial. This elite itself is quite confident

that it is in no way threatened by Islamic self-assertion. And rightfully so : Islam

cannot seriously challenge modernity once it has really taken off and shaped the

polity (as it has in India, far more than in the Shah's Iran). While Islamic

resurgence may pose a physical threat to Hindu society, the deeper challenge andthe sharpest disdain are coming from the Left-leaning westernized (short :

Nehruvian) establishment.

So, one of the first tasks in the awakening of Hindu society is to scrutinize and

expose the Nehruvian establishment, it its political and in, more fundamentally, its

intellectual dimensions. Today, that is becoming easy. When in the fifties people

like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel were waging an intellectual struggle against

Communism, they were up against a dense fog of widespread fascination with this

intrusive ideology. But in the nineties the sky is clearing up, and we witness the

swan song of the once so arrogant Leftist intellectuals even in their laststrongholds. It is a foregone conclusion that their empire is nearing its end, it is just

a matter of not letting their exit drag on for longer than necessary, and being

prepared to fill the vacuum.

At the intellectual level, Hindus will son be able to breathe freely. They will be

able to rediscover and reformulate the numerous valuable expressions of the one

Sanatana Dharma. They will be able to affirm the unity and integrity of this

Sanatana Dharma, without being falsely accused ofassimilative

communalism when they restate the scientific fact that Buddhism, Jainism and

Sikhism are full members of the one Hindu commonwealth of schools and sects.

They will be able to reaffirm the unity and integrity of Hindu society, and todebunk the casteist and regionalist separatisms that have been fostered by its

enemies and equipped with a pseudo- historical basis. They will be able to put

the evils of Hindu society into the correct historical perspective on the basis of the

real facts, and judge them by universal standards rather than by the hostile ad hoc

standards that have been applied to Hindu society by its enemies.


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Equipped with a renewed self-awareness, Hindus will be able to face the challenge

posed by the increasingly militant Muslim world. So far, with the help of the

leftists, Islam has been able to impose a kind of Emergency on India. During Indira

Gandhi's Emergency rule, everyone was perfectly free to sing the praise of Nehru's

daughter, but criticizing her was a dangerous thing to do. All the Indian

intellectuals refer with indignation to this episode (during which the Constitutionwas amended to make India asecular socialist republic). Similarly, it is allowed to

eulogize Islam as a religion of peace and brotherhood, but scrutinizing Islamic

history and doctrine, or merely asking some critical questions, is quite out of

bounds. Books that do these things, have a good change of getting banned, with the

tacit or explicit approval of the secularists, and newspaper editors have interiorized

this bank on critical writings about Islam. At the intellectual level it is very easy to

put Islam on the defensive and cool down its arrogance, just by doing those very

things which this Emergency wants to prevent. If Hindus take cognizance of the

real texts of Islam, the real doctrines they embody, the real story of the Prophet's

mission and career, and the real story of the application of these doctrines in the

Islamic conquest of India, then they will soon shed their habit of eulogizing thisimperialist ideology. If moreover they apply the precise psychological categories,

which Hindu tradition has developed, to understand the quality of consciousness

that has generated the central texts and doctrines of Islam, they will soon be cured

of their mental subservience to Islam.

It is my conviction that Islam will not last very much longer. In the confrontation

with the rational spirit, which was present in Hindu, thought since millennia, but

which has been brought centre-stage in modern culture and education by the West,

the dogmas of Islam cannot survive. The universalist attitude of science revolts

against the belief that one man could get a special message from none less than theCreator of the Universe, while others are excluded from any such direct contact.

The critical attitude of science rejects the demand that we accept Mohammed's

claim to prophethood without verification. Isl am has no satisfying reply to this

challenge of science and rationality.

Moreover, the present upsurge in Islamic activism, no matter how threatening it

may look, will not be able to deliver the goods. It may mobilize popular aggression

against the non-Muslims of the world, but when it comes to running a country, it

will note fare better than Communism. Of course, it has more roots in the soul of

the people. But it is faced with material needs and popular attitudes and

expectations that modernity has spread to all the countries of the world. EvenIslamic rulers, even in a dictatorship, somehow have to please their people. To do

this, they need the material products of modernity, if only because in the

overpopulated countries of today, a modern infrastructure is indispensable to feed

the people (we needn't even mention the fondness of Islamic as much as Kafir

rulers for modern weaponry). So, they cannot avoid bringing in modern

technology, therefore modern science, therefore modern thinking.


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While modern thinking is certainly not the final word in the progress of humanity,

it is quite sufficient to undermine the exclusivist beliefs central to Islam.

With that, we have only demonstrated the weakness of Islam. It cannot possibly

win against the culture of rationality and humanism. However, it can hold out for

some time and still gain a lot in numbers and power. How fat it will crumble,depends partly on the emergence of people, especially born Muslims, who go in

and actively criticize Islam in forums with Muslims audiences. It also depends on

the frankness and serenity with which non-Muslims who are in regular contact

with Muslims, such as the Hindus, express their skepsis regarding the central

claims of Islam, and the logic and humanity with which they present alt ernative

views. Confronting Islam with rational criticism will constitute a turning-point,

very delicate but inevitable. But it is the positive attraction of superior (i.e. more

rational and humanist) thought and culture that will be the single most import ant

factor in the inescapable decline of Islam.

The Hindu reply to Islam should consist mostly in a positive attitude ofunderstanding, rooted in Hindu humanism and springing from the knowledge of

the soul which Hindu tradition has been cultivating since ages. It should, for

instance, make a careful distinction between the two cultural components of the

present Islamic upsurge : one is the self-assertion against the imposition of the

spiritually impoverished (secularized), reductionist culture of the West, which is a

stand Hindus may share; the other is the fanatical imposition of the Islamic belief

system. The Hindu should understand the mental and the social processes that tie

people to such irrational belief systems, and maintain in his attitude and judgm ent

a scrupulous distinction between the human beings that have been caught in this

belief system, and the Islamic belief system itself. This will be easier, morecredible and less hostile, if he takes an equally sobre look at the state of his own

culture, dropping both the self- depreciation and the compensatory self-

glorification so prevalent in contemporary Hindu rhetoric.

This critique of Islam, it should be clearly understood, is a critique of a belief

system and its concomitant code of behaviour, and not an attack on a community

of people. It is also not a goal in itself. at the political level, it is merely a practical

diagnosis of an acute problem: the cause of the persistent communal tension in

India is Islam. After all, any two communities, religious or other, can pick a

quarrel, but it remains occasional; while the tension between Muslims and all other

religious is chronic and systematic. At the intellectual level, the critique of Islam ismerely an exercise or case study in the pathology of religion, as part of a general

exploration and mapping of man's religious history, which in turn is part of the

groundwork for the integral human education in the global civilization of

tomorrow. I for one have no intention of spending my life crusading against Islam

or any other It is just that we have to free ourselves from illusions about certain

intrusive and pretentious belief systems, and once that is done, we can concentrate

on more positive dimensions of social and spiritual life.


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The same thing counts for the critique of the contentions put forward by the

secularists. It is thoughts, not people, that are the problem. However, people who

have been practising slander with so much gusto and self - righteousness, will only

understand if the proper name- tags are attached to the criticism of their thought. I

have dealt with them at rather great length in this volume, and I have not spared

them. They pretend to be the champions of modernity, rationality and democracy,and that makes their distortions and their anti- democratic and even totalitarian

stand on important issues all the more unacceptable. They have to be exposed, and

I have made my contribution to the discharge of this fairly unpleasant job. I wish

and intend it to be the last time that I have to go af ter them. Once Hindu society

has shaken off these Hindu-baiting leeches, i.e. when it is no longer under their

mental spell, it can concentrate on developing and actualizing the treasures it has to

offer to mankind, and achieving genuine national integration.

Actually, this national integration that every talking body in India talks about, is a

very natural condition and needs no achieving. Rather, it requires dropping a few

things. It requires dropping the anti-Hindu separatist doctrines that have largelybeen created for the purposes of several imperialisms, and are now being kept

afloat with a lot of distortive intellectual and propagandistic effort. Just drop this

effort, and this country will naturally find back its unity. Delhi, 5th February, 1991.

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I am not a Hindu