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Resurgence Of Tagore’s India!

By M.Ashraf

18 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org

The spark in JNU is the beginning of the end for the Golwalkar’s India!

A columnist friend recently opined that a spark was born in JNU and the spark was from the raging fire in Kashmir. It is true; the sparks from the burning Kashmir are going all over and setting fire to the bastions of the neo-imperialists and the neo-colonialists. India has two images. One is of a progressive, secular and modern country based on the sublime thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore. The other is of a retrograde Hindu Brahmin India of the Chandragupta Mauraya’s timeconceived and promoted by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar.Arundhati Roy calls this India which is being thrust by the Hindutva Brigade as an Upper Caste Hindu Corporate Republic. It is the Brahmin class which constitutes about 5% of the total population that is in reality the ruling class. Notwithstanding the fact that 65 percent Brahmin households in India, with about 40 million people, live on less than $100 a month, according to a 2007 Wall Street Journal report.

After the departure of the British, the elite of this class took over the governance of the country and continued the system which had been established by the British Imperialists. The entire system of administration, law and order and so on was the system set up by the British as colonialists to keep under their control the colony of India. All the laws, the retributive justice systems and other state apparatuses which were needed by the foreign rulers to keep the people under their oppressive control were not only continued but made more stringent. Newer laws were enacted to keep the people down.

After the independence of the country, Congress which too had Brahmins as its members outwardly pursued a progressive and secular policy but in essence they too allowed slow resurgence of the Hindutva polity. Again it was the Brahmins which occupied the important positions. Dalits and other lower castes were in a minuscule minority in the decision making process. The control of all important institutions, and the state organisations was with Brahmins. Lower castes were like sprinkling here and there. This covert discrimination came into open once the power was virtually usurped by the followers of Golwalkar through a Hindutva wave. Not only are they targeting the minorities especially Muslims but members of all the lower castes in their own religion.

Over a period of time, the lower castes had started asserting themselves. However, the Upper Caste again manipulated the lower castes and did not allow a full resurgence. The weapon used was the highlighting of the Hindu religion as the basis of being true Indian. The deprived illiterate masses were given, in the words of Marx, the opium of the poor, the religion! Instead of taking India to a modern progressive goal, efforts both covert and overt were made to retrograde it to the Hindu period of Vedic times. The main weapon being used is the hatred of the Muslim minority. All the ills and wrong doings are being labelled on them. The process which had earlier remained covert and low key is being now continued with greater vigour openly!

But all Hindus are not bad. It is a particular class of the Chanakya or Kautilya genre which dominates all bad ones. Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru too were Hindus but poles apart from the Golwalkar’s kind! In the meantime, the younger generation among all the classes of the people continued its progressive march with the rest of the world in different institutions including the now controversial JNU. The rabid Hindutva brigades remain mostly confined to the so called “Cow Belt”. The greatest obstacle in their march has been these progressive institutions like the JNU. All this time Kashmiris have been subjugated in a manner worse than the one adopted by the British to sub-due India. The new generation did realise this tyranny and started protesting and resisting it both within Kashmir and outside. The President of the JNU Students Union Khanaiya Kumar recently detained for “Sedition” for raising the issue of Afzal Guru’s illegal hanging, had visited Kashmir sometime back and addressed the Kashmir University students. He had fully sympathised with them for all the oppression they were suffering at the hands of security forces unleashed on them by the Golwalkar’s India. The JNU spark has already started raging fires in many other institutions in different parts of India. It is in fact, the beginning of the end to Golwalkar’s India and the resurgence of Tagore’s India. Tagore’s lines from Geetanjali may truly usher in the India of his dreams through the spark of JNU!

• “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free;
• Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
• Where words come out from the depth of truth;
• Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
• Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
• Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action ---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake”.

Mohammad Ashraf, I.A.S. (Retired), Former Director General Tourism, Jammu & Kashmir



 



 

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