Hindu Being Used As a Term of Abuse

[Guest guest]

7. Commentator Tavleen Singh Speaks Out Against "Hindu" Being Used As a

Term of Abuse

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=48854

 

INDIA, June 14, 2004: Tavleen Singh writes in the Indian Express:

 

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 civilization. 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 civilization

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 civilization. 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 program, 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 civilization. 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

colonized 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.