V SUNDARAM
The fact that 'WE HINDUS ARE A NATION' is by no means a new idea. This idea has been with us from the dawn of history. The saint, sage and seer Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) made the most powerful pronouncement of this idea in 1893. In his brief 5-minute first address, Swami Vivekananda declared at the inaugural session of the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893: 'I thank you in the name of the millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects'. Then he spoke THREE SENTENCES which were most significant. First, he said: 'I am proud to belong to a RELIGION which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.' In the second sentence he said: 'I am proud to belong to a NATION which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth'. In this context, he cited an example, namely, that when the sacred temple of the Jews was demolished by the Romans, we Hindus gave shelter to the Jewish refugees and took care of them in India. In the third sentence, Swamiji said: 'I am proud to belong to a RELIGION which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnants of the grand Zoroastrian nation'. In these three consecutive sentences, Swami Vivekananda proclaimed his pride of belonging first 'to a religion', then second 'to a nation' and third again 'to a religion'.
(1863-1902) | It will be clear that Swami Vivekananda used the words 'Religion' and 'Nation' as synonymous terms. No pseudo-secularist in India today can have any doubt about what religion or nation SWAMIJI was talking about and what his perception of nationhood was. Swami Vivekananda was emphatically clear that the essential feature of Hindu Nationhood was the Hindu religion, the 'Sanatana Dharma'. He was only declaring 'We Hindus are a Nation'. The cardinal fact that 'We Hindus are a Nation' unto ourselves and not just a religious community formed the crucial plank of our first national movement in 1905, viz. the 'Swadeshi Movement' in undivided Bengal. When Bengal was partitioned by Lord Curzon in 1905, the entire society rose up as one MAN with solid determination at a moment of great and unprecedented national upsurge. No one at that time had the slightest doubt that 'We Hindus are a Nation'. That is why in Calcutta city, on the first day of the agitation 50,000 people took a collective oath before Goddess Kali in the Holy Kalighat Temple to the effect that 'we shall throw the British out of our homeland'. The famous historian R.C. Majumdar rightly concluded that he saw no difference in those days between Sanatana Dharma and Indian Nationalism. When Lord Minto conspired and plotted against the Hindu freedom fighters of Bengal in 1906, he roped in the Muslims under Agah Khan to create the Muslim League in order to divide the country. The era of Muslim appeasement started by Lord Minto, reached its climax in 1920 when Mahatma Gandhi became the Chairman of the Kilafat Movement for the restoration of the Turkish Monarchy and Empire. Thereafter, at every stage in our struggle for freedom, Muslims were appeased by Congress Leaders and Mahatma Gandhi for the next 25 years. The sad fact is that despite this deferential attitude towards the Muslims, the Congress and Mahatma Gandhi miserably failed to convince Mohammed Ali Jinnah about the need for the continued existence of a United India even after the British withdrawal from India. It has to be sadly borne in mind that after 1933, Jinnah was continuously proclaiming 'We Muslims are a Nation' till the birth of Pakistan on 14 August, 1947. |
This alternate concept of perverted 'Nehruvian Nationhood' as opposed to 'Sanatana Dharma', meant State-engineered opposition to the Hindus in all walks of life. ANTAGONISM TO HINDUS EMERGED AS THE CORNER STONE OF STATE POLICY. The ideology of Nehruism came to be lauded, acclaimed, promoted and propagated under the name 'Secularism' till it came to be treated beyond reproach, beyond debate and beyond discussion. In short, all the Hindus of India became second class citizens depending upon the sufferance�even patronage�of the minority. Dressed in brief mortal authority, Nehru's purblind audacity reached its climax when he wrote to Kailash Nath Katju in 1953: 'In practice the individual Hindu is more intolerant and more narrow-minded than almost any person in any other country'.
Thus we have before us two alternate perceptions of our 'Nation' and 'Nationhood'; one of Swami Vivekananda and the other of Jawaharlal Nehru. Swami Vivekananda represented the time-defying sources and forces of truth; Jawaharlal Nehru represented the sources and forces of falsehood, fraud and ignorance based upon communal votebank politics. Swami Vivekananda says that Hindu Dharma is the quintessence of our national life, hold fast to it if you want your country to survive, or else you would be wiped out in three generations. Jawaharlal Nehru, a mere 50 years later, tells us that if the Hindu Dharma thrives, the country will smash to pieces. To quote the telling words of Abhas Chatterjee: 'Swami Vivekananda says that Hindu culture is the life-current of our nation, Jawaharlal Nehru says it would injure the nation even to talk of Hindu culture. One was supremely proud of being a Hindu, the other so ashamed of it that he rejected it as an accident of birth'.
The greatest tragedy in our national life after 1947, much more disastrous than the invasion of India by Muslim Marauders like Timur in 1398, Babar in 1526, Nadir Shah in 1739 and Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1761, has been the invasion of Nehruvian Secularism which started on August 15, 1947 and is still continuing unabated and unchallenged, clothed in the aura of official authority of the Government of India, now institutionalized into a hereditary Nehru family heirloom in perpetuity.
Nehru's viciously political concept of a geographical or composite nation, Nehruism or secularism, whichever way you call it, was nothing but a pernicious anti-Hindu ideology, which came to be lauded, acclaimed, promoted and propagated by most political parties after 1950 and the mafia of mass media in India and abroad, under the name of 'Secularism' till it came to be treated as something beyond any reproach, beyond any public debate and discussion. Nehru and his family used the might of their public offices for three generations to implant this poisonous weed of 'Secularism' in the national psyche. This has led to some disastrous socio-political consequences for the very survival of Hindus, Hindu Culture, Hindu Society, Hindu Religion and above all Sanatana Dharma.
To sum up, after our independence, we were taught to look at the history of Bharatvarsha from a new angle of State-sponsored distorted vision. We were asked to regard Indian history as one of pseudo-secular synthesis. To quote Abhas Chatterjee once again:
'We were asked to overlook the barbaric tyranny that was perpetrated on us in order to force Islam down our throats from 1025 AD till 1707 AD. The horrible persecution, the blunder, the vandalism, and the massacres should all be forgotten. Or we should assume these acts of Islamic compassion to have been the personal aberrations of a few Rulers. In order to project the history of India as a history of synthesis, an imaginary course of events was constructed, viz. that from olden days foreigners kept on coming to India and settling down by and by, so that they kept getting mingled with one another and a new 'Nation' was formed, a new 'Culture' was thus created. So, we don't really have a 'National Culture' of our own but only a 'Hybrid Composite Culture' politically manufactured by the Government.'
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