TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

[Guest guest]

This inner voice too needs hearing

>Tavleen Singh

>Indian express

>June 13, 2004

>

> One of our new 'secular' ministers talks of making the Sindhu

>Darshan festival less communal. The new HRD Minister, the venerable

>Arjun Singh, constantly talks of detoxifying textbooks. Excuse me?

>

> My inner voice has been giving me a hard time again. In this new

>dawn of shining secularism, when ''succular'' (sic) thinkers, writers,

>artistes and politicians tell us daily that India's social fabric has

>been saved from being ripped asunder by the ''communal'' BJP, my inner

>voice has been urging me to speak up. Stand up, it says, and point out

>that the word Hindu is being used as a term of abuse.

>

> My inner voice is a bit of a nag and I might have told it to shut

>up had Madhu Kishwar not drawn my attention to the need for someone to

>examine how many times the word Hindu is used pejoratively. You might

>find, she said ominously, that it is used mostly in pejorative terms.

>After this I began to read and listen more carefully to ''succular''

>voices and found to my horror that Madhu was right. Hindu fanatic, Hindu

>fundamentalism, Hindu nationalist, Hindutva. Mostly, that is how the

>word Hindu gets used and nearly always pejoratively.

>

> I am not a Hindu, but with this I have a serious problem because

>the debate appears no longer confined to the cloistered world of

>priests, or even the self-serving one of politics, it has expanded into

>a challenge to Hindu civilisation. So, one of our new secular ministers

>tells us that the Sindhu Darshan festival, started by the last

>government to celebrate the river India gets her name from, will be made

>less communal. Excuse me?

>

> From the venerable Arjun Singh we hear constantly about the need

>to ''detoxify'' textbooks and from the Congress president and her

>progeny come endless references to the collapse of our social fabric.

>This idea is picked up by loyalists, so last week in this newspaper an

>ex-MP called Madan Bhatia said of Gujarat: ''What actually took place

>was an occurrence the like of which had never taken place in independent

>India. There was state-sponsored terrorism and riots in which thousands

>of innocents, Muslim men, women and children, were butchered.''

>

> Mr Bhatia must have been living in another country in 1984 or he

>may have noticed that exactly the same thing happened in Delhi with the

>Sikhs, only the toll was nearly double that of Gujarat and not a single

>Hindu was killed. He complains that the Army was not called out in time

>in Gujarat. Nor was it in Delhi until 3,000 ''innocent men, women and

>children were butchered'' and this despite former prime minister

>Chandrashekhar going personally to Rajiv Gandhi to beg him to deploy

>troops. As this column has pointed out before, under ''secular''

>Congress rule, there were many riots as bad as Gujarat (Bombay,

>Bhagalpur, Moradabad, Meerut), not to mention that the Babri Masjid came

>down under a Congress prime minister.

>

> But, let's get beyond this to the wider attack on Indian

>civilisation that this pejorative use of the word Hindu represents. It

>bothers me that I went to school and college in this country without any

>idea of the enormous contribution of Hindu civilisation to the history

>of the world. It bothers me that even today our children, whether they

>go to state schools or expensive private ones, come out without any

>knowledge of their own culture or civilisation. It bothers me that when

>I ask a priest in a temple the meaning of a ritual he has no idea, or

>when I go to the Vishwanath Mandir in Benares and listen to the most

>powerful, magical aarti I hear from the priests that the knowledge of it

>will probably die because the temple is now controlled by secular

>bureaucrats.

>

> It bothers me that when I wanted to do a profile of B K S Iyengar

>in my television programme, my young producer did not know who he was

>until Time magazine mentioned him as among the 100 most influential

>people of the last century. Young Indians have taken to yoga because it

>has come back to us from the West and because Madonna swears by it.

>

> You cannot be proud of a heritage you know nothing about, and in

>the name of secularism, we have spent 50 years in total denial of the

>Hindu roots of this civilisation. We have done nothing to change a

>colonial system of mass education founded on the principle that Indian

>civilisation had nothing to offer.

>

> For me, evidence of our contempt for our culture and civilisation

>manifests itself in the fact that there is not a single Indian city

>where you will find a major bookshop that sells books in Indian

>languages. Is this not evidence of a country that continues to be

>colonised to the core? Our contempt for who we are gets picked up these

>days by the Western press, which routinely uses the word Hindu in a

>pejorative sense. When Signora nearly became prime minister, respectable

>magazines and newspapers saw this as racism, which they equated with

>Hindu nationalism. For countries that gave us slavery and apartheid that

>really is rich, but who can blame them when we think so badly of

>ourselves.

>

> As for me I would like to state clearly that I believe that the

>Indic religions have made much less trouble for the world than the

>Semitic ones and that Hindu civilisation is something I am very proud

>of. If that is evidence of my being ''communal'', then, my inner voice

>tells me, so be it.

>

>

 

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