And we shouldn’t lose sight of the even more slippery and sinister part of the RSS’s sinister agenda: The simultaneous conversion of a few hundred million people from Hinduism to Hindutva, the rancourous, intellectually and morally impoverished version of Hinduism that the RSS propagates.
This is a dour doctrine that — like other religious fundamentals — makes no distinction between myth and history, science and religious belief, and often comes close to caricature. It believes that Hinduism is a thought system perfect from its very origins, that all the problems of modernity and history were foreseen by Hindu sages 2,000 years ago, that all modern scientific achievement was prefigured in Hindu thought, that Indians of all faiths are “culturally Hindu,” that India’s four-fifths Hindu majority is under threat from minorities, and that all Hindus should fall in line with a singular interpretation of Hindu tradition controlled by a central authority. That body would be — surprise, surprise — the RSS.
What’s the view of the Modi government on all of this? In the firestorm that has erupted around the conversion issue, one man’s refusal to comment has come to seem as meaningful as any argument: Modi, who in recent months has taken his message of development and an economically resurgent India to many parts of the world, has remained shamefully silent. (As usual, his friends in the media have found inventive ways of coming to his defence.)
Perhaps this nongesture reflects Modi’s divided allegiance between the oaths and responsibilities of his present post and the convictions and prejudices of his often murky past. But there’s no getting past the truth that the evasion by this allegedly firm and decisive leader — the holder of the largest majority in India’s parliament in three decades — of the conversion debate holds profound implications for the freedom and future of all of India’s 1.2 billion people.
Our biggest enemies, speaking as a born Hindu who has turned agnostic and then atheist but still has sympathies with Hindus, are the Hindutvavadis - they are distorting Hinduism and twisting it into shapes and positions that have little to do with the religious practices or the ethics or ideals that Hinduism represents. I have no ambiguity in my position about them and have had to suffer enough public abuse from them and their representatives not to wish to say anything further. Those who are still in doubt about what I think of them can go stuff themselves.
Our second biggest enemies are you. You gave the extremists that we had so much to crow about, so much to point out, so many atrocities, so many brutalities, so many denials and refusals to acknowledge cruelty and bigotry that they are now a growing number, and an increasing percentage of Hindus are willing to go along with them on the grounds that if you could do X or Y or Z, so can they.
Not once have I heard a Muslim express contrition for the appalling savagery of some parts of the past, inflicted by those precise individuals whom they glorify even today. Instead, all of that nastiness is boxed up and kept aside as typical of the primitive practices of that day and age - all the glorious bits that can be salvaged are, of course, of immediate, contemporary relevance. Not once. Not by accident, certainly not deliberately, not thoughtfully; instead, all I have witnessed is an incredibly smug assumption of rightness in all things, an incredible persistence in saying of any unclean or perverted outrage that it could not have been committed by a Muslim, because - the 'No true Scotsmen' fallacy never fails - no true Muslim could ever have done whatever gruesome outrage it was that has people in despair.
As far as Jinnah is concerned, I have made no bones about being his admirer, for his integrity, his honesty and his unflagging resolution, even as he knew he was a dying man, to salvage a land for his co-religionists where Muslims could live without being swallowed by the majority. What he thought of the majority-ruled rump state that he left behind is shown clearly by his retention of his house in Bombay, which he wished to retire to, before he realised that he was far too ill to survive the strains of leading a new country. Yes, thank Heaven for Jinnah; he took the kind of communalists out of the system who have been thanking him in these posts on this thread, communalists who constitute the second biggest enemies by always ignoring moderate and secular Hindus, by denying their existence, by doing whatever little they can to get them into trouble, by responding only to the vileness of the extremist fringe
@HAIDER
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