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

He further thundered that the Gujarat incident was just the beginning and sounded ominous when he declared,

“the valour showed by the Hindus in Gujarat is unprecedented. If they are attacked again they will stand in self-defence. This will not end here. The VHP will take this message across the country through its Ram Naam Jap and other programs.”

History has its own ironies, so it seems, for Gujarat, where Mahmud Ghazni started it all for the Musalmans, became the first retreat of the Indian Musalmans.

However, Ram Lalla (Ram as Child), sheltered under a shāmiana over the Babri debris, was made to wait for the Indian judicial verdict to grant or deny him a bhavya mandir (magnificent temple) in Ayodhya that the Vishva Hindu Parishad was itching to build. What if the Supreme Lordships fail to construe that which all three Allahabad High Court Judges felt was incontrovertible evidence in Ram Lalla’s cause; then should not the established Muslim guilt of demolishing many a Hindu mandir make a compelling case for Sri Rama’s entitlement to ‘the benefit of doubt’, so thought Hindus. But then, after a decade-long secular dithering that too in the times of its judicial activism, a five judge constitution bench of India’s Supreme Court, which included a Musalman for secular affect, had delivered its unanimous judgment on 9th November 2019 in Ram Lalla’s favour. It goes to the credit of the umma that it accepted the verdict with grace though the same cannot be said about some of its community leaders, religious as well as political. But when Hindus were all set to begin the construction of a bhavya mandir for Ram Lalla, ironically the national lockdown forced by the novel corona virus to put it in the pause mode.

Chapter33

Italian Interregnum

When fate wedded an Italian, Antonia Maino, to Rajiv Gandhi, and ensconced her as Sonia Gandhi in his mother’s 1, Safdarjung Road bungalow, Lutyens’ Delhi, as badi bahu, it’s as if history woke up to the amusing fact that even though it granted the tiny Portugal a ‘Goan’ foothold in India under the British Raj, when it came to enslaving its ancient people, by oversight, it overlooked the mighty medieval Italy. So, it set things in motion, so it seems.

BY then, however, Indira had her dynastic grip on the democratic India firmly clasped by the Congress party; to achieve which, she castrated the party men into enervation as family eunuchs. So when she anointed Sanjay Gandhi, her second son, as her heir apparent, albeit bypassing Rajiv the elder, for lack of aptitude, it’s no wonder that congressmen to one man began prostrating before him. But fate, seemingly at history’s behest, dragged the reckless ruffian to death in a plane crash, thereby paving the way for his pilot brother to step into his princely shoes.

It’s thus, when upon her assassination, the credulous Rajiv, whom her sycophantic party men thrust upon the nation, a la Gandhi, as its ‘credulous’ head, he only tried to copy from her political text book, which by then became the Congress Bible. So, naivety following the Islamapologic sermons enshrined therein, he allowed himself to be caught between two emotive stools - that of Shah Bano’s sharia and Ayodhya’s Ram Lalla – which heralded his political downfall. That’s not all, as if to follow the Italian script of ‘history’ he ventured into the vicious web of the Tamil Elam in the neighbouring Sri Lanka on the ‘to its own hurt ant grows wings’ line. It was thus his IPKF misadventure, meant to tame the ruthless Velupillai Prabhakaran, the overlord of the Tamil Tigers, which eventually exploded in his face at Sriperumbudur.

Even though ‘history’ beckoned Sonia to take the reins of the Congress mantle, thereby the prime ministerial handle, her decency as just widowed made her pass on the scepter into the skilful hands of PV Narasimha Rao. So, as ‘history’ was made to wait, the intellectuality of that veteran polyglot began scripting his own history to be remembered as the ‘architect of economic reforms’. Having seen the imperative need for reforming the style and structure of the Indian economy that Nehru thought it fit to mould in the socialistic pattern, he started breaking its Licence-Permit model with his de-licence hammer. But, as the Sangh Parivar’s, Ram Janma Bhōmi Mandir Āndolan with ‘saugandh rām ki khāte hai, mandir wahi banāyenge’ (swear by Ram to build it there) chants and the Babri Masjid Action Committee’s ‘banāne nahi daenge’ (won’t let that happen) counter were diverting the national political focus and the public attention from his ‘reforms agenda’, he might have wished that Allah Ta’ala would somehow shift the dilapidated masjid to Pakistan for renovation. However, his wish to see the back of the vexatious issue to fulfill his destiny was fulfilled, not by divine means but by the temporal tools of the Kar Sevaks, who pulled down the contentious structure that 6th December 1992.

Whatever, he not only removed many a Nehruvian hurdle in India’s policy track that put its economy on a galloping course, from which it never looked back, but also managed to run his minority government with finesse for a full five-year term. Equally significantly, having seen the democratic need to free the grand old party of India from its constraining dynastic clutches, once and for all, he, slowly but steadily, began working in that direction to Sonia’s chagrin that she eventually vented in an abominable manner that deservedly earned her an eternal infamy. What is more, he sought to usher in a new political culture by not protecting his party men accused of graft in those Jain Hawala Dairies that contained the names of ‘who’s who’ of Indian politics.

However, all that was of no avail as instead of giving him a second term to further fillip the economy and rid the Congress party of its baneful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and thereby India, its ignoramus masses, egged on by the antique socialists and caste crusaders, ousted the ‘architect of change’ from the gaddi, rather unceremoniously. What’s worse as his ‘cleansing’ move earned him enemies across the political spectrum, not excluding within his party, he was embroiled in corruption cases indicating that his end was near the end. Maybe underscoring the Hindu adage satyameva jayate (truth triumphs), he was exonerated of every change by the country’s judiciary enabling him to die clean though sad. However, as poetic justice would have it, that catapulted Deve Gowda, somebody, with the backing of the regional satraps like Chandra Babu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh, into the Dilli Kursi.

But then India had soon to contend with Sonia the new player in its political arena. While upon the untimely death of her bother-in-law, the dynastic compulsions of her mother-in-law put the party’s reins in her husband’s hands, the brutal killing of the old despot by her own bodyguards afforded her man the reign of the land; and that brought her closer to the seat of political power than ever before. As if it is her twisted destiny to get ever closer to power over the dead of her family, tragically, she lost her husband in the midst of an election that, anyway, was about to undo his Congress. Though the sentimental turnaround at the hustings put the Congress back into the reckoning, her decency as a widow kept her away from the kursi that was hers for taking, but only till decency demanded.

But, as time is the great healer of grief for the living and as the dead too wouldn’t be taking away with them the proclivities of their dears, the ‘Italian child of Indian destiny’ seemingly found the purpose of her life to usurp, in a palace coup, the reins of the Congress party from the ungrateful hands of Sitaram Kesari, who by then had back-stabbed Narasimha Rao his mentor. At the hustings thereafter, though she led her party to defeat, yet, abetted by the anti-BJP elements beguiled by the age-old Indian realpolitik of settling the native scores with alien hands, she staked her claim to become India’s Prime Minister after the short-lived AB Vajpayee’s mili juli sarkar (coalition government)! However, in the end, it was the principled opposition from a handful of otherwise self-serving Congressmen, led by Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and Tariq Anwar not to have a ‘foreign’ person as India’s political head that put paid to her eagerness to ascend the Dilli gaddi.

At long last, vexed with the Congress-created political mess that followed, the nation entrusted its political reins once again to AB Vajpayee’s BJP-led NDA, that served it as best as it could in its full term. However, it is worth noting AB’s reasoning for letting Sonia off the Bofors’ hook in his long second innings, ostensibly as barter for her good behaviour towards his mili juli sarkar – so long as a Roman Catholic heads the Congress, he prophesied, BJP would remain in the seat of power in Dilli. And, for his part, he did make ‘India Shine’ with brand new highways and made it self-assured with Pokhran-2 nuclear explosion, which eventually opened the vistas for India’s nuclear trade through the Indo-US Nuclear Deal. All the same, having taken the Hindus for granted, he sought to buttress his secular image, post-Godhra, with an adharmic advice to Narendra Modi on Raj Dharma, which was rightly retorted by the latter that he was following ‘just that’.

So, when Vajpayee the ‘infrastructure builder’ sought his re-election in 2004, Indian voters were not impressed, as they were indifferent to Narasimha Rao the ‘economic reformer’ before. Moreover, as the Sangh Parivar too turned its back on him for his omissions and commissions on the Hindu nationalistic front, it turned out to be a near stalemate of an election (Sonia’s UPA - 145 ‘n Vajpayee’s NDA -138). It’s another matter though in the ensuing scramble for power even as the anti-BJP forces ganged up to let Sonia Gandhi usurp Dilli gaddi, the media hailed her for leading her party to historic victory! So, when it seemed Sonia was second time lucky, the public outcry at her impending coronation or the troubled conscience of APJ Abdul Kalam, the country’s President, and / or both, made her retreat, albeit, in the artificial halo of ‘sacrifice’, prompted by her ‘inner voice’, that is even as the morons in the media and the sycophants of her party vied with each other to picture her as a saint. Thus, going by her twice aborted attempts at taking over the reins of the nation, it would appear that the Hindu EQ at last scored over the media IQ as well as the Congress SQ, i.e. the Sycophancy Quotient.

But, hypothetically approached, would have the Hindu majority, recovering from the humiliation of a thousand years of alien rule like to suffer an Italian taking the capital seat of Hindustan? The Congressmen as hostages to fortune seem not to mind, unmindful of the perils of having a person of foreign origin as India’s Prime Minister! Wouldn’t every nation be a hostage to its own history that lends itself to colour its citizens’ thinking towards the other countries and their peoples? That being the case, if it comes to that, could an Israelite origin Prime Minister be objective in India’s ties with the Palestine? What about India’s relations with the Western world under the premiership of some naturalized Iranian or an Iraqi? Wouldn’t an Indian political head of Bangladeshi origin, nursing a grouse of his sister’s molestation by some Punjabi fauzis during the crisis in his parent country be tempted to settle scores with Pakistan with India’s military might? Why, could any such one be what he or she should be as India’s mukhiya? Without a native Indian at the helm of affairs, won’t its detractors exploit the handicaps of a foreign origin numero uno to jeopardize its national interests?

More ominously, what about war and peace that national leaders may be called upon to decide, especially in India, which had fought many