Does India Need A Militant Hindutva?
By Shubhda Chaudhary
20 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org
A famous anti-war poem by Bertolt Brecht states:
“General, your tank is a powerful vehicle
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver!”
The growing militant Hindutva phenomenon emerging in India is obnoxious and in the league of following the Zionist project in Israel, where hundreds of innocents are man-slaughtered in the name of religion. The proponents of this ideology, RSS, the ‘para-military Hindu Organization’ stringently believes that Islam is a fascist and supremacist religion which should be dealt with through abominable and obnoxious ways, so that justice for the so-called ‘greater good’ can be served. Members of RSS believe that ‘There were “church attacks”, which turned out to be entirely bogus. There was the apparently horrible rape of nuns in Kolkata, which turned out to be fake too. Perhaps, they have forgotten than when these nuns were being raped, people were shouting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. Shameful indeed, not because the reality is not considered by them, but because the reality is being annihilated by them!
They forget that if educational institutions like JNU are being run on tax-payers money, so are the jails, which also run on subsidy and these student leaders have been captured and arrested on the draconian laws of sedition and criminal conspiracy without any tangible proof. Once again, before law could take its own course, the idea of being an ‘Indian’, that too vehemently a ‘patriotic’ Indian has become a political tool. The more you opinionate, the more Indian you are. The more you speak against Dalits, Muslims, women, labourers, adivasis; the more ‘Hindu’ you become. The same RSS gets shady when it comes to getting public about its alliance with Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi, because this sensitive issue could malign their image, created after years of hard-work.
In this militant Hindutva model, be it Muslims, Sikhs, Jains or Christians, their identity and existence has become a threat to Hindus. In spite of being a majority, the RSS swayamsevaks suffer from deep-rooted inferiority complex? Instead of promoting democracy, debates, discussions and arguments, the protagonists of militant Hindutva believe in brainwashing minds, with their irrational ideologies, thinking that their verbatim will be easily accepted without questioning.
The scary question today is that are we losing the ‘Idea of India’ which is secular, meant for Muslims, Jains, Sikhs and Christians? Since when did India become an authoritarian monarchy where dissent was punished? Since when India became so intolerant? Since when India became so scared of thinking minds? Since when India became such a platform where discussion was punished?
Militant Hindutva does not have any future in India. Any form of fundamentalism has its own decay, with time. The same fate would be met with the RSS and other organizations when they continue to harp on a tune which, one day, they would realize, would cause their own demise. The India of today is cerebral, it thinks, it questions, it debates. It does not ridicule.
It's RSS which is a supremacist, fascist ideology! It brings back the war pogroms of Germany’s Hilter and Italty’s Mussolini. It's RSS that needs to be destroyed for the ‘Idea of India’ to survive. So, does India need a militant Hindutva? No, it does not. The unity, vibrancy and culture of India will fight, be it through student movements of intellectual underpinnings to corrode this emergence away. We shall fight, we shall win!
Shubhda Chaudhary is a PhD Scholar at JNU. She can be reached at [email protected]