Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity) by BS Murthy (epub read online books .TXT) 📖

ensured they were made privy to the furies of Ghazni, Ghuri, Taimur, Aurangazeb et al that their progenitors had to face that is without raising their hackles.

Moreover, so as not to give raise to any doubts about the glorious Islamic order of Hindustan in the impressionable minds, he saw to it that the Indian history did not venture much into the south of the Vindhyas to peep at the Vijayanagara Empire in the Mogul period itself. It’s thus; he could drive the notion into the heads of the Hindu kids that India owes its glories to its Islamic rule, thereby perpetuating the Muslim dominance in the Hindu consciousness. Well, it is a testimony to his evil genius that he devised it all in such way, aided in no small measure by the similarly afflicted body of schoolteachers, that it never occurred to the Hindu kids in the secular schools, the author included, that something was odd in all that. Having been so conditioned, most Hindus spend the rest of their lives without ever brooding over their hurtful past.

Needless to say, the wily Maulana wouldn’t have been able to pursue his nefarious agenda without the blessings of the wooly Pandit (Nehru), who abhorred Hindu nationalism. Thus in a peculiar congruence of Azad’s communal bias and Nehru’s personal prejudice, in the former’s line of ‘educating’ the Hindu kids to India’s detriment, the latter saw an effective means to nip the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in its bud. Nevertheless, the paeans sung in madrasas for the Mogul rule that perpetuate the false sense of superiority in Muslim minds to the hurt of India’s unity, was fine for the Maulana, and Nehru, who couldn’t have been unaware that all that furthers Islamic obscurantism, didn’t care if it were to keep the Hindu nationalism under check. Well, all this suited his daughter Indira no less, and put together, as they ruled India for around 32 years, the wily Maulana was allowed to indoctrinate the Hindu kids from his grave as well, and that shows to this day. How?

It’s to be expected that the alien yoke besides robbing the Hindus of their self-esteem would have suppressed their self-interest. So, as India became free, while its political atmosphere turned conducive for Hindus to acquire their self-interest with vigour, as the Nehru-Azad combine constrained their intellectual sphere, they failed to retrieve their self-esteem of yore in any measure. It was thus, fifty years after India gained its independence, they still allowed themselves to be bossed over by Sonia Maino, the Italian daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi, as the dynastic head of the politically dominant Congress party for over two decades. That’s not all, when she so ill-treated the mortal remains of PV Narasimha Rao, the architect of India’s economic reforms, as an Indian equivalent of Achilles’ abuse of Hector’s, unlike the Trojans who avenged the insult to their valiant prince, the Hindus, bereft of any self-esteem whatsoever endured it all without a demur. More than this nothing illustrates the success of Azad’s insidious Islamist strategy to ‘demean Hindus in their own minds’, and that they, to this day, haven’t recognized the Goebblisian role he played to their enervation is something that their progeny should ponder over, and moreso, rejuvenate themselves.

Moreover, the way Hindus went about using and abusing their hard-earned freedom makes no rosy reading either. In what was left as the ‘secular’ India, the princes of democracy have come to rule the land as per the age-old Hindu political credo - unto each his own province. The Westminster model of governance that the Union of India adopted and its political devolution that the regional aspirations demanded, brought Bharat into the domain of a Samrāt in Nayi Dilli, the Indraprastha of yore, Sultans of its linguistic States and the Sarpanchs in its panchāyats, of course in tow with their hangers on, vying for its politico-economic pie. Besides, the democracy brought into the positions of power the jāgirdārs of the National Parliament and the thānedārs of the State Assemblies with their attendant minions for a like calling. 

And lest the favoured-lot of the powers that be should miss out to savor the cream of the world’s most populous democratic cake, there are the councils of ministers, chairmen politicians for assorted boards and numerous bodies; and not to leave out the lordships of its judicial wing, there are tribunals galore for the retired judges to head. Thus, even as the minor deities of the Indian politics are well propitiated, the edifices of Bharat’s democratic temples are being ruined by its political parties, barring exceptions, are but family-owned hereditary setups. That being the case, isn’t it stupid even to murmur that we are a democracy, leave alone proclaim that ours is the biggest, or is it the largest, democracy on earth?

Though, thanks to the British, Hindustan got rid of the Islamist misrule, it is as if the politicians of free India retained the governing ethos of the Musalmans as sarkāri legacy for posterity. After all, now as ever, it’s the personal interest of the regional political masters that prevails over the national interest, and what is worse, in the Indian democratic domain, the high ideal of ‘nursing the constituency’, though marketed in ugly packages of parochialism, is considered even a virtue! And coming to the public morality, we have it from Alberuni and others that Hindustan, in times gone by, was, by and large, populated by honest people, but then how come it had long metamorphosed itself into a nation of cheats!

As there is recorded history as such to facilitate any research, we are left to speculate about cause(s) of the abominable fall of a race as a whole. The millennia alien rule – first that of the Islamic invaders and then of the British colonizers – needless to say, would have been a cause of resentment for the Hindu natives, which inexorably could have developed into an enduring grudge against them. It’s a psychological possibility in that the impotent Hindu rage would have manifested itself into cheating the imposters of their royal monies through corrupt means so as to derive a vicarious pleasure for themselves, which over the centuries, insensibly became a norm that invariably tattered India’s moral fabric.

Maybe, the presidential form of democracy on the American lines would have served India better but then that would have made so many sundry politicians irrelevant, a scary prospect for the political class, which turned politics into the best business that there is. Thus, for that very reason, the founders of the nation State could have chosen the survival route that every generation of politicians would find it expedient not to deviate from. So, one can expect the political satraps to keep the legislative circuses on, for everyone knows whose interest in the end prevails in the mobocracy of India. After all, in the land of Bharat, the privileged class had always been apart, and that came to be a part of its socio-political ethos, and since the Brahmans are, anyway out, let the politicians be in, so seems the rationale of the Indian democratic process.

Yet this faulty political model lifted the morale of the depleted stock of the Indian Musalmans in an unexpectedly way! Since their vote mattered in numerous constituencies, the politicians grasped the electoral merit in playing the Islamic fundamentalist footsie with the mullahs and the moulvis, umma’s vote traders that is besides being the conscience keepers. However, to start with, the Congress political lenience towards the Islamic religious sentiment, conceived by the Nehruvian mischief, charitably approached, could have been well-intended to reach out to the masses of the Indian Musalmans, orphaned by the exodus of their classes to Pakistan. It was as though Nehru wanted to be a Jinnah to the Musalmans of Bharat, oblivious to the fact that the Hindus too were sorely in need of a leader to address their hurt at the loss of a fourth of their ancient land to Pakistan.

Though for centuries, the gods, who paid a deaf ear to the Hindu prayers to get them rid of the Muslim rule, granted them their ‘man for the moment’ in Sardar Patel but they had to contend with Gandhi the autocrat, who by then was deified by them as the Mahatma of the time. Well, Gandhi had cleaned the public toilets alright but did he not force his reluctant wife to do the same against her will, and in embracing celibacy prematurely, had he not deprived Kasturba the warmth of his marital embrace. Won’t that make food for thought?

Whatever, Patel, who filled the Hindu emotional space like a colossus, should have made it to the Dilli gaddi, but Gandhi’s ‘peculiar’ weakness for Nehru, bordering on physical love, ensured that it didn’t happen. That was, in spite of the overwhelming support the Sardar received from the congressmen and women of that era, from all over India. That’s about Gandhi’s democratic ethos, and fondness for the favoured, not discounting his prejudice towards Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Prakasam et al, who tended to be independent of him. Wonder how in the Gandhi-thrall, the world glosses over the fact that while his steely resolve helped India to get rid of the British yoke, yet his naivety of Hindu-Muslim amity had imposed many an Islamic constraint on ‘free’ India.

While Nehru’s foolhardy in taking the Kashmir issue all the way to the United Nations and his credulity in taking a plebiscite pledge therein, it was Patel, who had coerced the recalcitrant Nizam and other vacillating Rajas, into the Union of India. It is another ‘foolhardy’ matter though that Nehru relinquished the offer of the powers that be to India to take a permanent seat in the all-powerful Security Council of the same world body, insisting that it was China’s due, as if to highlight his Hindi Chini bhai bhai myth! Whatever, in trying to be a world leader, while Nehru sacrificed his country’s interests, China that sits in the Security Council by default is ever at blocking India’s entry into it in its national interest; and that’s some contribution by the one whom Gandhi thrust upon India as its ‘wooly’ head of state! While the Sardar was not destined to live long enough to see Bharat Māta bear the fruits of his sagacity, Nehru had survived long enough to witness the divisive affects of his plebiscite folly in the Kashmiri valley that gave Pakistan a potent stick to beat India with at every international fora that was till his daughter Indira forced Bhutto to revise the rules of the ongoing game at Shimla. Thus, while Nehru deservedly earned the disregard of the Indian nation, Patel became a living legend of its nationalist sentiment.

If Jinnah couldn’t consolidate the gains for Islam in Pakistan, Nehru failed to formulate a socio-political code in India that took into account the Hindu sensitivities and the Muslim interests in the same nationalistic vein. And to add insult to the Hindu injury, the Nehruvian foreign policy was fashioned to address the fundamentalist ethos of the Muslim minority rather than to serve the national interests of the new India. Thus at best, Nehru was a sophist in shaping the foreign policy that understandably became the political Bible for the Congress party, and at worst, it can be said that he eyed for a secular slot in the pan-Islamic history, but to no avail. However, in spite of his innumerable flaws, his place in the Indian history should be secure as the founding father of its democracy, though he could have become the Caesar, and what is more, besides diligently nursing it in its infancy, he meticulously guided it into its adulthood; if Gandhi got freedom to India then Nehru mothered it into a democracy, which later his daughter Indira had set on a dynastic course.

When Nehru died broken-hearted, after the demise of his pet panchshēl in the ignominy of a defeat at the Chinese hands in the Himalayas, the Indian democracy had had its first triumph as the humble Lal