There is no greater arrogance than the arrogance wrought by a sense of self-righteousness.

This quote accurately describes Yoginder Sikand’s textual barrage flowing over a course of 4373 words. So do we really need to care or pay any attention to his—with due respect—outpouring? No and yes. No because he’s not relevant anymore in the same sense as Ram Puniyani or Genocide Suzie aren’t relevant anymore, and paying him attention gives him undeserved and unnecessary prominence. Yes because his outpouring has brought him exactly that undeserved prominence, and more importantly, has exposed his opponents to be the uncritical and heedless idiots that they are—yet again.

Yoginder Sikand is one of the worthies who entered the Pseudosecularism Hall of Shame of this blog three years ago. Back then, I had recommended that he should be rescued from himself by

admitting him into an insane asylum.

In hindsight, I realize I was perhaps harsh. Actually no. And I’ve thought about it ever since his “confession” was published. And so, I can reasonably accurately conclude that this feeling that I was “harsh” developed within me after I read the said confession. Human psychology works like that. Had he written something like this or this or this, I’d have repeated my 2008 call to send him to that insane asylum. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sikand’s confession borders on the unbelievable but because we don’t have evidence to the contrary, let’s assume it’s honest. Despite that, it helps to keep our antennae up because his confession appeared in Countercurrents, an outfit that is by, for, and of rabid Communists of all hues of red. However, the biggest surprise is not that it appeared there but the fact that the Red Editors out there allowed it in the first place. Pick any piece at random on Countercurrents. It reeks of ActivistSpeak, a language which Sikand—by his own admission—spoke flawlessly for more than two decades. And now, when he’s 45, he turns turtle and says activism and social reform and revolution are delusions from which no real or lasting change can ensue. And yet, Countercurrents publishes this piece. But more importantly, anybody who has followed the Red Rackhams however briefly will know that once you decide to say goodbye permanently, you are out. The door closes shut behind the deserter. Forever. And so, although there’s no reason to doubt the intent or integrity of his confession, it still pays to be skeptical. That perhaps is the cheapest price Sikand needs to pay for two decades of disservice to the land whose traditions he abused and whose enemies he befriended. Eternal suspicion over a reformed Communist is also the price of liberty.

Yoginder Sikand’s emotional outpouring is extraordinary at several levels. It is an open admission of lying, committing fraud, indulging in hate speech, accepting money for indulging in spurious activities, and feeding off the misery of the oppressed sections of the society in the guise of helping them. In fact, Sikand explains in detail—the roots, the motivations, the mechanics, and the techniques that this gigantic deception involved. Here are some of the most representative exhibits:

…my contribution as a ‘social activist’ and in the cause of the ‘Revolution’ paid me well in material terms…I was assigned projects by several NGOs to study the ‘oppressed’, for which I was well rewarded financially.

…writing and conferencing about the ‘oppressed’ soon turned into a lucrative source of livelihood for me. I was actually, and quite literally, living off the misery of the ‘oppressed’, although I did not fully realise it then.

If you had to be counted as a ‘social activist’, you simply couldn’t see or find anything worthy at all in ‘upper’ caste Hindus or in Americans, and, if you did, your sincerity and commitment were gravely suspect. So deep-rooted was this negative mentality among ‘social activists’ supposedly committed to the ‘oppressed’ that for a ‘progressive’ to discern anything positive about ‘the present system’ or Indic spirituality, for instance, was about the most serious anathema conceivable.

The hatred that often passed for ‘progressivism’ in ‘activist’ circles was truly astounding, and I fell lock-stock-and-barrel for it. One was trained only to look for the negative in every nook and corner, and, if it didn’t exist where one looked, to imagine and fervently believe that it did.

A great many folk from these very same ‘oppressed’ communities– Muslims, Dalits and such others–were also heavily into the business of ‘social activism’, supposedly on behalf of their own people. They, too, set up their NGOs, often with hefty financial aid from generous foreign patrons. They, too, enjoyed their all-paid-for trips and conferencing stints abroad, and many of them made sure that their own children had built comfortable nests for themselves in Europe or West Asia or even in America, which, like us, they never ceased to revile as the fundamental cause of global oppression.

It is passages like these that convinced me that Sikand’s admission is perhaps rooted in honesty (but I still retain my skepticism for reasons explained later). It’s said that your enemy knows you better than you know yourself. However, here’s an insider spilling all the filthy inside secrets, lending more weight to what was already known anyway—the illicit nexus of the activist-media-NGO-Church mafia: the same things about grants, foreign trips, etc. Yoginder Sikand just fills us in on the details.

In my beef-festival piece, I had mentioned that the Communists always pick on the weakest sections of the society and pit them against the rest. Apart from their grotesque ideology, this also stems from an important factor—Communists—and in general, the do-gooders, the bleeding hearts, the society-changers—have an incredible sense of self-righteousness, a fact that Sikand himself attests from his own experiences. They can simply admit to no wrong and anybody who argues with them is in need of help or must be put down. This sense of self-righteousness was present in Mohandas Gandhi—by no means a Communist—to an extreme degree. The worse his every strategy flopped against the British, the more obstinate he became, and the deafer he became to sage counsel. However, misguided he was, he did it with genuine and patriotic feeling unlike the Sikands of the world who did it too, with equally genuine feeling—only it was guided by a murderous ideology. The other distinguishing mark of extremely self-righteous people is the fact that most of them have no sense of humour. In Sikand’s words, this translates to:

It was as if there was nothing at all good in the world to celebrate, and even as if celebration and joy were themselves an ‘unnecessary diversion’ or a ‘unaffordable luxury’ that truly committed ‘activists’ had to carefully shun..

Yoginder Sikand mentions troubled childhood and an assorted litany of psychological problems that led him to become an activist and a rebel serving a destructive cause. Without belittling his personal problems, this refrain, I’m afraid, is all too familiar in the times we live in. It is called Playing the Victim, something that seems to have become the modern day equivalent of Alladin’s magic lamp. You rub that and all doors open: there’s always something, somebody, some other reason why your problems happened—if it’s not your parents, it’s the bully in the school or the cop who spanked you in public leading to lifelong mental trauma or your school teacher or your employer or your skin colour or your caste…every reason other than the simple fact that you need to take responsibility for your own problems. Whatever Sikand’s childhood troubles, they were his own and he needed to deal with them. Projecting them to the society results precisely in the kind of disaster that his confession makes so eloquently clear. His inability to deal with his personal problems and tragedies resulted in him inflicting blows on the country and its society. For a detailed explanation on how this works, read this. His mountainous fulminations against the “dreaded Hindutva,” his positions on Kashmir, his goading of the Dalits and the rest have resulted in immeasurable damage.

Activism as understood and practiced by Sikand his ilk follows precisely this formula: your life’s problems are because of somebody else and you’re a victim and therefore, that entitles you to all the goodies in life, free of cost throughout your life. Thus minorities and adivasis and dalits and every other similar group in Sikand & Co’s eyes deserve entitlement, not upliftment. Activists like Yoginder Sikand do not preach the value of cultivating one’s character, developing a work ethic and the rest but egg them on in the direction of entitlement.

And despite this confession, there’s still an element that makes you doubt him. Exhibit 47:

The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn’t have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media)

The words in brackets are a big lie and Sikand cannot be excused of being naïve or ignorant because he knows the kind of clout his (former?) activist gang wields over the media. The Harsh Manders, the Teestas, and the Genocide Suzies of the world have on-demand access to media. These “very same folks” are his friends/fellow-travellers and knowing how incestuous their world is, a friendly word to Sikand is all it takes to get them access to any media anywhere in India. Why, Sikand could himself ghost write for them—remember “Walk the Queen Talk with Sonia” that Shekhar Gupta did where practically every question and answer was scripted? But habits die hard and besides, Sikand comes up with a redemptory line of sorts:

I had to admit that ‘minorities’ were often as guilty of it, in their own ways (such as victimising women and other minorities within their own communities) as were ‘majorities’, and that no community had a monopoly over virtue or vice.

And it took 27 years for Sikand to reach this commonsense conclusion (he became a revolutionary at 18 and he’s 45 now). Self-righteousness does that to you. However, better late than never. And so, Yoginder Sikand’s preferred approach to fully cure himself of this delusion is as comical as it is farcical.

I decided that there was nothing more that I wanted or needed now than to lead the rest of my life watching the clouds gently pass by and smiling at the birds chirping high up in the trees. That was how my ‘inner’ revolution was going to happen…

You’d almost think he’s the Communists’ answer to Angulimala. It’s like he’s chalked out a poetic plan to redeem himself. Be one with nature. Discover your inner self. Help ever, hurt never….All this after doing what? After decades of relentlessly inflicting major damage on the cherished heritage & traditions held by other people, after pitting the society against itself, after “speaking up” for the “rights” of Kashmiri separatists. What kind of penance is this, even?

If Sikand truly feels remorseful about his self-admitted hate-motivated activism, he needs to return the money he had taken to further this activism. All of it. Giving up a bad habit means ridding everything associated with it no matter the cost, no matter the consequences. That’s what Angulimala did. And died a saint. Will Sikand’s late realization undo the damage his writings and activism, over 20 years, did? Will he go back and apologize to every group or person that was hurt as a result of his hate-filled activism? What about those who were permanently displaced because Sikand justified an evil act by clothing it in the Tuxedo of Victimhood? Will he relinquish his Muslim identity and return to the Hindu fold as an “upper caste (sic)” Hindu? (As he himself says, he won’t because he considers himself a skeptic. Pretty convenient.) Will he now condemn the ideology that so blinded and deluded him? Will he offer an unconditional apology to all those oppressed groups he misled? Apparently, the clouds gently passing by and the birds chirping high up in the trees is a more agreeable alternative.

Postscript: Ever since this piece was published, his opponents went soft in the heart. These are the usual suspects—the hordes of well-meaning but naïve, heedless and idiotic Hindus who he has so monumentally hurt—had tears in their eyes. I scoured at least 12 different forums and innumerable blogs and articles. The responses ranged from unconditional and instant forgiveness to “ah! good, he realized finally!” Nobody ever thought why Countercurrents allowed to run his piece in the first place. Not just this. He followed it up with another piece where he describes his dabbling in various religions, a la Augustine who fought with the temptations of the accursed flesh. Accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist but better a conspiracy theorist of my sort than getting my butt bitten when Sikand’s delusion strikes him again.

I’d have been surprised if this hadn’t happened at Osmania university.

It was past midnight on Sunday when the organisers of the festival located one of the students who strongly opposed inclusion of beef in the menu and stabbed him. They also torched a media van deployed at the university for covering the beef festival. Early on Monday, the protesting students set on fire a state road transport bus passing through the campus.

And I won’t be surprised if it happens again and again in future—either at Osmania or elsewhere. The logical outcome of decades of sustained social poisoning is violent eruption.

In hindsight, I think it’s superfluous to even write this piece because the idea, indeed, the raison d’etre for the Beef Festival says it all:

The Dalit students were celebrating the "Beef Festival" (Pedda Koora Panduga in Telugu) – cooking and serving of beef in the open – on the OU campus as an expression of their cultural identity and constitutional right.

The treacherous founding fathers of the Indian Left must be grinning triumphantly in their graves at this outburst of the latest instance of the fissiparousness that they worked so hard to drive into Hindu society. There’s a very important reason I invoked the Left, as we shall see.

The Marxist Hijack of Dalit Discourse

The Left hates history. Actually, let me modify that. The Left hates Truth. One of its strategies in dealing with history—apart from lying and twisting facts and appropriating—is to utterly pervert it. Nowhere has the Left attained such spectacular success as it has in completely perverting the history of, and consequently the discourse on Dalits. Kancha Ilaiah is perhaps their most prized accomplishment, the man who symbolizes why the Dalits—if their view of themselves and things around them remains the same—are their own worst enemies. In short, the Left pretty much undid everything the leading lights of our freedom struggle and people like them had done. The current discourse surrounding Dalits is a study in irrational hatred towards Brahmins and Hindus based entirely on false and twisted history.

There’s a significant reason I said Dalits are their own worst enemies. Ever since they came to control public discourse, the Marxists/Leftists have specialized in picking on and poisoning the minds of the weakest and the most powerless section of any society. The labels—workers, labourers, Dalits, deprived, downtrodden, poor, beggars—are largely secondary. In India, their task was already made really easy, thanks to the British policy of splintering Indian society first along communal (in the true meaning of the word) lines and then, within the Hindu society itself. For a detailed account of some of the methods they employed to do this, read the first three or four chapters of Falling Over Backwards and Breaking India in full.

Contemporary Dalit Discourse

I’ve been following Dalit narratives written both by Dalits and non-Dalits for nearly 12 years. The non-Dalit discourse about Dalits with very very very rare and honourable exceptions are centered around clichés and hypocrisy. The Dalit discourse about themselves typically features these broad strands:

• Intense hatred of Brahmins: Blaming their past and present plight on what they perceive as millennia-old “Brahmin hegemony.” This is markedly different from the Periyar guys, who found it politically expedient to blame Brahmins for everything whereas Dalits genuinely believe that Brahmins are at the root of their misfortune. The most visible and living instance of this visceral Brahmin hatred is again, Kancha Ilaiah who advocates among other things, that today’s Brahmins must be made to carry human feces on their heads as recompense for how Dalits of yesteryears were treated.
• The British as Dalit Saviours: Viewing the British colonization of India as an act of deliverance of Dalits from said Brahmin hegemony. A significant section of educated and articulate Dalits—Chandrabhan Prasad to name the most prominent one—hold the view that the British colonizers and more specifically, the English language as a liberating force of Dalits.
• Vocal Assertion of non-Hindu Identity: An increasingly insistent and forceful assertion of Dalit identity as separate and irreconcilable from Hindus. This discourse defines Hinduism as Brahminical. It isn’t too farfetched to conclude that in contemporary Dalit discourse, Hinduism=Brahminism. Some narratives refuse to classify Dalits as a part of Hindu society.
• Islam and Christianity as Egalitarian Faiths: Generally exhibiting a soft corner for Islam and Christianity because this discourse views these faiths as egalitarian, a view shaped by the Marxist history of India, and conversion propaganda that readily and willfully fed and in numerous cases, exaggerated the “evils” of the so-called caste system to Dalits whose voices began to reach farther and farther corners post the B.R. Ambedkar era.

Apart from these major and oft-repeated themes, we find pretty much the same things that we find in hardcore Leftist writings: how Hinduism is defined only by an unequal and oppressive caste system, how Hindu scriptures sanction the repression of women, support for the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory, and the rest.

Brahmin Communist Converts Set the Tone

The forefathers who poisoned Dalits against their brothers belonging to other castes, who in all the wisdom of their half-baked knowledge and extreme inferiority complex because of the caste they were born in, were hot-headed Brahmins enamoured by Communism. This breed continues to exist till date, and occupies powerful positions in public discourse.

Most of the “scholarly” papers, studies, and academic chicanery that have wide circulation internationally and passes as Dalit discourse, are written by non-Dalits whose concern for Dalits ends at how much these bleeding-heart Marxists can milk Dalits’ misery. This includes upper caste Hindus like Vijay Prashad who pontificates utter rot by peddling the outrageous lie that Dalits are the “Blacks of India.” Phony intellectuals and motivated academics like Prashad are the rightful heirs of the ugly Communist legacy founded in India by the likes of M.N. Roy, P.C. Joshi, and that entire class of Brahmin Communism-converts known as Poona Brahmins as well as members of the intellectual Bengali Bhadralok some of who still harbour fantasies of a Communist paradise and pen soulful poems about the Eden of Workers’ Milk and Honey protected by a vaporous shield of cigarette smoke.

Here is a short and sorry consequence of this toxic manure sown so early by P.C. Joshi & Co: today’s Dalits find a Brahmin conspiracy in everything wrong with India, and whatever good that is there is regarded by them as benefitting the Brahmins. In his epic novel Tantu,  Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa paints a very stark and poignant scene where a leader of Dalit youths tells the Brahmin protagonist, a newspaper editor: “when we desperately wanted to get inside the temple and worship God, you stopped us. Now, despite the fact that we can enter them, we won’t because we no longer need your God.” There’s really no grounds for arguing with this. However, the chain of events that led to this sorry (and dangerous) pass could have been broken had the Communists been stopped from such all-pervasive pollution.

Dalits as Pawns

There’s no other way to say it: Dalits, over the past two decades or so are being relentlessly, mercilessly, played by the very forces that claim to stand up for their justice but in reality are inimical to them and their motherland: India. The Marxists who continue to poison their minds in the garb of fighting for them. The Missionary parasites who claim to uphold Dalit traditions—what native tradition can a Dalit practice after he converts to Christianity? The Islamists who don’t (yet) have the academic/intellectual/media backing and lack the smooth wiles of the Missionary parasites are content to simply join the chorus of Marxists claims for Dalits’ justice for the sake of tokenism. However, over the last three years, this seems to be changing: if you’re in Bangalore, you can’t fail to miss those colossal hoardings on major roads and traffic junctions proclaiming DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ISLAM? CALL XXXXXXXXXX FOR A FREE COPY OF QURAN, or its most recent avatar, MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET FOR ALL. CALL XXXXXXXXXX FOR A FREE COPY OF QURAN. AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH, KANNADA, HINDI, TELUGU & TAMIL.

Both the Marxist and Missionary Mafia actively invoke the name of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and urge Dalits to treat them as confidants and friends. Their history of India is one where Brahmins devised a social order designed only to oppress Dalits and that at various points, external aggressors came to India to emancipate Dalits. In this phony history enterprise, bigoted genocidal maniacs like Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan become heroes and their religion, a religion of benignity and love. However, it appears doubtful that the Dalit leadership or intellectual class has actually read what Dr. Ambedkar wrote about Islam:

"Hinduism is said to divide people and in contrast Islam is said to bind people together. But this is only a half-truth. For Islam divides as inexorably as it binds. Islam is a close corporation and the distinction that it makes between Muslims and non-Muslims is a very real, very positive and very alienating distinction. The brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation there is nothing but contempt and enmity." [Thoughts on Pakistan, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, 1940]

According to Muslim Cannon Law, the world is divided into Dar-ul-Islam (Abode of Islam) and Dar-ul-Harb (Abode of War). A country is Dar-ul-Islam when it is ruled by Muslims. A country is Dar-ul-Harb when Muslims only reside in it but are not rulers of it. That being the Cannon Law of the Muslims, India cannot be the common motherland of Hindus and Mussalmans. It can be the land of Mussalmans— but it cannot be the land of Hindus and Mussalmans living as equal. The moment the land becomes subject to the authority of a non-Muslim power, it ceases to be the land of Muslims. Instead of being Dar-ul-Islam, it becomes Dar-ul-Harb.

And this is just by way of a small illustration. Little wonder that they are being preyed upon by the likes of Owaisi who had a “role” to play in the riots that ensued during the Beef “festival.” Perhaps Ambedkar was and remains till today, the only Dalit intellectual in the truest sense. His criticism of Brahmins and the Hindu society was rooted in an accurate, wide, and honest reading of history, his own experiences and reflection. But the period since his death gave birth to a history that can only be called toxic brainwashing.

Beef Eating is Not the Issue

The beef festival—or Dalits eating beef as part of their diet—is not the issue. India happens to be the third largest beef exporter for all the noise about bans on cow slaughter. In today’s times, things like regarding the cow as sacred and un-killable have primarily to do with sensibilities and feeling more than religious diktats or prescriptions. Today’s reality is that a typical Western education calls everything into question on the premises of rationality and science, and you simply cannot defend a ban on cow slaughter on these grounds no matter how lofty or well-intentioned the goal is.  This doesn’t imply an advocacy of indiscriminate cow slaughter but simply a reality check.  Hindus had the chance to preserve the status of the cow as a cultural handover—just like the Somanath temple was rebuilt—but squandered it long ago by bartering it for spurious secularism and a doctored history of our own people.

The real issue is the disturbing fact that the Dalit students had to eat beef as a way to assert their identity, a very portentous event that shows yet again the extent of the schism that has been driven by the Marxist Mafia within Hindu society. And it’s not just with Dalits: every single group that seeks to assert its identity today does it by defining it in terms of an opposition to the other. This is again a device pioneered, perfected, and injected into the system by the Marxists: Females versus Males, Brahmins versus Dalits, Muslims verus Hindus, Christians verus Hindus, Dravidians versus Aryans… The idea is to assert identity by emphasizing the so-called irreconcilable differences, a surefire way, in the long run, to tear the nation into pieces.

And yet, not very distant in the past were people like Gandhi, and Patel who sought out and worked with the Dalits in a spirit of reconciliation, sought their forgiveness and tried to earn their goodwill with genuine feeling for their plight and an honest desire to uplift them. Thus it’s no surprise that thanks yet again to the Left, the Dalits came to regard the term Harijan as an insult, adopted the term Dalit to define themselves, and developed a passionate dislike for Gandhi. Equally, their view of the freedom struggle can be summed up in the following line I read several years ago in one of the Dalit Internet forums: freedom struggle for who? for what? from what? who benefitted from this struggle? Dalits are still slaves in “free” India.

Among other things, food always has—and continues to have—a special place in pretty much all religions. It is thus entirely consistent with the Left’s tactic of bait-and-pit: they know that a “festival” like this will anger countless Hindus who will obviously take to the streets. In the ensuing clash, the Left will proclaim through its media, academic and intellectual stooges: see, we told you so! Fanatical upper caste Hindus continue to oppress the Dalits and deprive them of their right to follow their diet, all in the name of religion.

The University as an Indoctrination Complex

The Arts and Humanities department in Indian universities are gigantic Indoctrination Complexes where negativity is aroused, and vile politicking is systematically injected into the minds of young people. Scholars and professors have zero distinction in any field and are unfit to hold any position requiring the application of critical faculties—even basic commonsense. The research papers and books they produce are pamphlets for disseminating divisive ideologies. When they’re not doing this, they spend their time pitting students against a rival academician or devising such beef eating festivals. It’s like a parent telling his ward, “Son, throw this rock at Sharma’s son because Sharma has prevented my promotion at work for 15 years. See how good you’ll feel about yourself!”

It is pretty hard to believe that the students who organized the beef festival did it without the full blessings and support of these wretched professors and other university staff. Their own testimony says as much—that they fully support this festival. The students who did this will graduate and perhaps take up a teaching position in the selfsame university and if they’re sufficiently brainwashed, will continue the selfsame “identity assertion activities.” The same applies in equal or differing measures to others who will join the media or politics or any other sphere of activity.

In the end, Dalits have been let down by their own intellectuals and leadership. What noteworthy results has a Mayawati, who rode to power on a very vocal Dalit-upliftment plank, delivered in at least 3 stints as Chief Minister? And what prompted her speedy cozying up to Brahmins, the oppressors of her caste? Or Baragur Ramachandrappa, the Kannada huckster who painted himself as a Dalit champion, but showed no shame in garnering plum government posts by getting into bed with upper caste politicians? I’m sure every state has one or several such toadies.

A lasting effort at bettering the lives of these long-suffering people will come about by adopting  honest, reconciliatory, and not confrontational approaches. That road leads to certain ruin. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that today’s Dalits don’t know what they are really fighting for: things like getting justice sound fine en route to achieving it but once they get there, what then? Again, Mayawati is the classic example of how very wrong this can go.

But we live in a public climate where the noise of the rabble-rousers is always more popular than the voices of sanity.

This woman is the worst thing ever to happen to the Office of the President of India. Worse even than that deceased dynasty-server who pompously declared that “If my leader [Indira Gandhi] had said I should pick up a broom and be a sweeper, I would have done that. She chose me to be President.”

Everything she’s touched in the past five years has turned to ashes. This nation has forgiven most of its past Presidents who invariably took sustenance from the peanuts thrown by the Dynasty, and behaved like cheapsters—begging not to be evacuated from posh government residences, demanding taxpayer-funded privileges for their families, trying to hush up the murder committed by their grand-relatives and so on. But none of our past Presidents have done what this woman has done: she has snatched 2,61,000 square feet of land allotted to build a housing colony for our armed forces.

It is people like Pratibha Patil—I can’t get myself to use the word “President” and her name in the same breath—who epitomize the truth of the Kannada proverb, which means that the fence itself grazes the field, which it’s supposed to guard. The President, who’s also the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces has gobbled up land meant to provide housing for our soldiers. Nobody can and should visualize Pratibha Patil wielding an AK 56 and leading the charge from the frontlines in case India goes to war. However, as Commander-in-Chief, the least she can do is honour the lives and dignities of the people who’re sworn to die if necessary for their country under her token stewardship.

Of course, like every 2-bit crook who declares that he’s innocent, Pratibha Patil has issued the mandatory denial. Moneylife, which first broke this story narrates exactly what she’s done:

Eight hundred jawans of the Territorial Army (TA) are presently posted in Pune but there is residential accommodation for only 14. This being a family posting (a bonanza offered after a harsh fieldstation posting), each jawan desires to bring his family, otherwise left behind in his hometown, when he is guarding the nation’s frontiers, often in a challenging geographical terrain. However, due to lack of officialaccommodation, a jawan is asked by his seniors to refrain from getting his family to Pune. Those jawans who decide to get their families to Pune nevertheless, live in slum-like conditions in one-room dwellings, near the Pune cantonment, with no drinking water facility….Pratibha Patil, president of India and the supreme commander of the armed forces is building a palatial home for herself on a whopping 261,000 sq ft of land in Khadki Cantonment in Pune (out of which the bungalow occupies about 4,500 sq ft). The land belongs to the defence. It will now have a fortified home, the construction of which is nearing completion … Two defence bungalows have been pulled down to make way for Ms Patil’s bungalow and the vast expanse of land, over 2 lakh sq ft has been fortified for her. We are saying that let her keep the 2,000 sq ft she is entitled to and give away the remaining land forconstructing official accommodation for soldiers and officers. Otherwise, there are numerous bungalows in the three cantonments of Pune and she could have been given accommodation in one of these.

But this is only the latest instance of Patil’s numerous sleights of hand ever since she was anointed by St. Maino to become President. Of course, Arun Shourie’s fact-filled expose of what Pratibha Patil Inc had done to the people of Maharashtra didn’t deter Maino’s Sacrificing Sensibilities. This woman’s “career” as President is distinguished by prolonged periods of silence, which she broke only to deny any shady dealing that was pinned to her name.

From the day she set foot in Rashtrapati Bhavan, Patil seems to have embarked on a singular mission to milk the taxpayer to the extent her capacity, ingenuity, and family “advice” affords her. First, her extended family trooped into the Presidential house and had it “renovated” at the cost of a few crores. Then, within two years, she did a performance appraisal on herself and announced a 300% salary hike for herself as well as to the Vice President. This is apart from the Rs. 22.5 crores allocated by the government for the upkeep of the President. Needless, this 22.5 crores doesn’t cover the expenses of maintaining the President’s extended family. That comes from the taxpayer’s pocket, too. But there’s more.

At the time when the economy-wreckers of Patil’s party redefined poverty at Rs. 32 per day, Pratibha “James Bond” Patil got herself an armoured Mercedes that cost Rs. 6 Crores. About a year after that, her son Rao Saheb Shekhawat was summoned to the police station to explain the Rs. 1 crore cash that was found in his car on the eve of civic elections in Maharashtra. He “explained” that it was meant for the poor but we know it was the cash for votes business as usual. Patil followed this up with an even bigger feat: of spending Rs. 205 Crores on her various foreign trips, leaving all her predecessors light years behind.

And now, this land grab. 2,61,000 Sq Ft of land, whose cost we can only fathom in terms of the number of zeros. And guess what the mainstream media did about this? Nothing. It simply didn’t report this scandal. A financial advisory magazine called Moneylife reported this first after which the mainstream media was forced to pick it up. Which shouldn’t surprise us given its record with respect to the UP Elections. Pratibha Patil may not be St. Maino but well, she had at one time, served in the Family Kitchen.

But the real issue here is not money—it’s about ethics, morals, basic humanity, and something called respect of the law. We can only liken Patil’s act to the powerful robber barons of medieval Europe who would just point to everything their eye could see and order their minions to usurp it. A land meant for those who might die protecting us, protecting people like her.  A land meant for those who are largely uncomplaining about the terrible living conditions they endure everyday. And why not? Patil’s party comprises men and women who don’t care a whit about wantonly humiliating a decorated Army General for weeks without end in public. 800 jawans and officers are a piddling lot in comparison.

Among other reasons, this is why Indians think of their country as weak and cowardly: it’s really a matter of principle. When you have a government that berates its nation’s armed forces, creates schisms, promotes the undeserving, and rewards corruption, land grabbing is the least of crimes.

The term “Kitchen Cabinet” just took on a whole new ugly meaning.

The latest example is how Mamata Banerjee, who on April 6 thundered that she’d banish Marx from high school history textbooks, softened a little in just three days and said that Marx & Co were not “untouchables.” This softening is what illustrates my note on the Left’s evil tentacles remaining pervasive even now, and even in a state where Didi has all but decimated it.

But history rewriting is just one, but very significant part of the whole story.

Even at a political level, the Left’s hold remains significant in numerous and seemingly-insignificant ways. Recall the AMRI tragedy? As horrible as it was, as callous it got, and as irresponsibly as it was handled, it isn’t the whole story. We can have a glimpse of the whole story by observing exactly one phenomenon. For some reason, only bad news seems to be emanating from West Bengal ever since Mamata took over in 2011. It appears that for 34 long years, West Bengal was a land of milk and honey, which Didi set about poisoning upon coming to power. Unbelievable because it is unbelievable. Because it is a Big Lie perpetrated by the Left, which has its stooges scattered widely across the media spectrum. And so the image of Mamata we get is that of a troublemaker, rabble-rouser, ruckus-creator, spanner-thrower, and generally a nuisance with whoever she aligns. Mamata might be all this and worse or some of these or none of these at all but this image has been firmly imprinted in people’s minds. Mission accomplished.

There’s also another important reason why the media is going hammer and tongs against her. The Marxists are having nightmares at the rate at which Mamata has been going about dismantling its ugly legacy—in fact, the legacy of her political opponents in Bengal. And one of the ugliest facets of the ugly legacy of the Left is, indisputably, history. One of the ugliest, and one where they’ve still managed to retain a lot of clout. And one, which in a way, can be described as the backbone of the success and longevity of their vile ideology post-Independence. We can only imagine the kind of pressure that would’ve been put on someone like Mamata Banerjee, which finally got her to soften her “erase Marx” stand in just three days.

Anything anybody writes about the Left’s near-irreparable damage to Indian history pales in comparison to Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians. That book should, in my opinion, be made required reading as part of their Class 11 & 12 curriculum across all academic disciplines. The Left’s singular “contribution” to Indian history is its systematic dismantling of the true Indian history by peddling half-truths, distortion, and open lies as historical facts. One of the sorry results of this wretched “approach” to history is the fact that a public road in Delhi is named to honour an Islamic zealot: Aurangzeb, the Gold Standard of secular Islamic rule, whose crimes are justified because kaffir Hindus deserved their deaths.  Not very different from how the cold-blooded murder of kar sevaks aboard the Sabarmati Express was justified.

It’s perhaps this nation’s fortune not to mention the spirited fight that scholars like Sitaram Goel put up that we were still able to rescue the true history of India from 30+ years of relentless assault by the Left. The damage they did nationally—through the NCERT and ICHR—brainwashed at least three generations of Indian children. If this is their national record, one can not even imagine the kind of mind control they exercised in their bastion of three-plus decades: West Bengal. It’s nothing short of a colossal tragedy that most of today’s scholars who have their roots in that state hate India because some really stellar nationalists and patriots during the freedom struggle emerged from West Bengal.

That this willful deception was in the service of a murderous ideology makes it even worse. And the Prophet of this murderous ideology was an absolute ignoramus as far as India was concerned. Despite the long-ago rejection of this Prophet of Darkness even by the most vocal Leftists around the world, the Indian mutants continue to feed Marxnamah to unwitting kids of West Bengal schools. This is also known as Marxist Educational Jihad. But then, it has paid them rich dividends as we’ve seen. And Mamata’s very welcome decision to boot him out of the history syllabus is therefore laudable. Remember that people like Somini Sengupta, Pankaj Mishra, Salil Tripathi, and the rest of the pack expand eloquently about Indian history based exactly on a history education they received, whose foundation and ultimate aim is the imposition of Marxism in India. 

This kind of history writing has ensured that at least three generations of Indians hate their native culture and indeed, take pride in denigrating it. This kind of history writing has made the word “patriotism” a term of abuse. This kind of history writing has made millions of Indians hate the things about their culture they should actually feel proud about.

All this said, I’m not in favour of Mamata obliterating Marx completely from the history textbooks. What makes more sense is to tell the real truth of Marx’s violent ideology, how it played out in actual practice, and the staggering instances of genocides committed by its followers.

Mamata Banerjee might be headstrong and whimsical but this “whim” of hers has our hearty approbation.

"An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex." ~ Aldous Huxley

Everybody is not a Narendra Modi who treads the life of a warrior monk. Most politicians are normal people who have joined politics to get rich quick or wield power, and they have normal sexual instincts just as everybody else. Had they no power they would have fantasized about a sexy Vidya Balan just like the guy next door. Now, because of their political position, they can actually realize all their lecherous dreams (read: Amar Singh, Mulayam Singh, Kamal Nath etc). This is the truth, and the Indian masses know that our so called leaders have rather colorful lives; yet we hanker after this image of chastity and poverty that our leaders should have. Its a vicious circle of the hypocritical expectations of society and the corresponding hypocritical behaviour of our politicians.

When you’re born and brought up in India sex, sexuality and porn more so, are taboo words. Inevitably curiosity gets the better of most adolescents, and most of us did satisfy our curiosity by reading, viewing whatever sexual information we could clandestinely. We were sure that our parents, teachers, neighbours and society at large would look down upon us if we were caught even thinking anything sexual. The unfortunate adolescent who does get caught gets a rundown by everyone from the grocer, to the watchman, to the nosy old aunty next door and of course his own saintly parents.

But then one grows up, matures, experiences life, and our heavily indoctrinated views on the morality of sex and all things sexual undergoes a very natural change. But it seems the Indian Politician is still stuck in the adolescent stage. Whether it is an old ND Tiwari or a young (well now that’s debatable I know) Rahul Gandhi, they all seem to be stuck in this time warp. To catch an MP watching porn seems to be the biggest deal to the opposition. If you analyze this a wee bit, it stems from the belief that a politician has to adhere to this prefixed image of an ideal family man with high morals. The Karnataka MP accused in the first porngate scandal bought every newspaper in his constituency to protect his image. Rahul Gandhi is forty plus, and it’s really ok if he has a Columbian/Venezuelan…now I think it’s an Afghanistani girlfriend. But the Congress party will go to any length to hide this fact to maintain his ‘image’. The Gujarat MLA accused of watching porn empathetically wailed that he ‘never’ watched porn. Practically nobody believes him. But why use the word ‘never?’

When one is in public life, one has to maintain an image, and adhere to societal norms. But then that’s what differentiates the real leaders, the great men from the usual political rabble. A Rahul Gandhi has the whole Congress party trying to build and maintain his image according to what should be, and not what is. Whispers are rampant about his Afghanistani girlfriend (in my eyes that’s perfectly alright, he has the right to date who ever he fancies), but the image his coterie of advisors are building is that of a selfless worker dedicated to the nation who has no place for these personal life shenanigans. The Congress should look back to their own great leaders MK Gandhi and Nehru and their lives.

Do todays politicians think they honor Gandhi by wearing Khadi? Do they honor Nehru by wearing a Nehru cap? It is an insult to the memory of these great men who were so individualistic, so firm and steadfast in their beliefs. If you want to honor them, be man enough to follow what you truly believe in. How can a people-pleaser or someone who is so unsure of his owns morals that he needs the party agenda to adhere to, be my leader?

For Gandhi, sex was an obstacle to the kind of puritan life he aspired to live. Yet there was no hypocrisy there because he freely wrote about his experimentation. And Nehru the dapper widower, finding love again in the arms of a married woman, the Viceroy’s wife not less! For him it was something very normal, very natural. There was nothing murky, clandestine about his relationship with Edwina. Neither of these great men cared about their so called ‘image’ so as to modify their lives according to what would be more acceptable.

The control of the sexual urge is perhaps the most difficult form of spiritual/disciplinary practice. It is advised for highly evolved souls. Can every man in whom the animal instinct is dominant, succeed in subduing it? Can every man be a Swami Vivekananda? Well, according to the great Swami himself, the answer is yes. But for every Narendra Modi who single mindedly tries, there are a million Shankar Chaudhry’s and Jetha Bharwads who single mindedly concentrate on farcical image building. Only if they would concentrate on character building instead! Reminds me of Margaret Thatchers brilliant quote

“Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become…habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny! What we think we become.”

Being the long-time Congress-cultivated Pavlovian breed that they are, the media wasted no time in giving wide coverage to the Congress party’s trashing of Modi instead of actually examining what the piece says.

In a line, the Time piece authored by some Jyoti Thottam repeats the same lies about Modi’s involvement in the Gujarat riots, grudgingly admits his development work and record of governance, and says that he has the potential to lead India in 2014.

It’s very evident that Jyoti Thottam’s main sources for writing this piece again comes from the selfsame media that continues to bait him although with diminished vigour. And consequently, Jyoti repeats and rehashes these selfsame biases: here are a couple of representative lines:

It’s Modi in makeover mode: an act of self-purification, humility and bridge building in a state that is still traumatized by the Hindu-led anti-Muslim massacres of 10 years ago and the flawed investigations in their wake…This image of Modi — the triumphant technocrat — has overtaken that of Modi the Hindu ultra-nationalist….India has seen other leaders overcome scandal or bloodshed, but none has been recast as completely as Modi.

Now this would qualify as reasonable analysis except that it suffers from exactly one defect: it is completely false. It is a spurious concoction brewed with the ingredient of dishonesty. It is a stellar structure of deception built on the edifice of fraud. Equally, it is yet another desperate attempt to keep the flames of secular divisiveness alive.

The whole theory of Narendra Modi’s “image makeover” is a grand myth. This article will show you with precise facts and in detail how.

The word makeover is synonymous with refashion, renovate, restore, remake, recast, and remodel. Which means X has been remade as Y. If you look at this in yet another way, it means X is still X but it has been altered in some way(s) so it appears—or is made to appear—different now. This is exactly what is behind all those cunning but nice-sounding phrases such as, “This image of Modi — the triumphant technocrat — has overtaken that of Modi the Hindu ultra-nationalist” applied to Modi. What the media is still saying is: Modi is the man who hates Muslims, he’s the one who committed the “genocide (sic)” against Muslims in 2002, and assorted venom. Same toxin, different packaging, flavour, and aroma.

To understand how the media has presented a metamorphosed but yet the same deceptive picture of Modi, we need to revisit exactly two prominent and oft-repeated myths surrounding the mass-murder of Hindus on Sabarmati Express and the consequent riots.

Myth 1: 58 Hindus were killed in that train
Truth: 58 Hindus were roasted alive, murdered because they were Hindus and dared to proclaim that they worshipped Rama. Those roasted alive include women and children, babies even. That was a pre-planned, premeditated mass-murder, the perpetrators of which were motivated by religious bigotry. Various media outlets reporting this incident back then were more or less consistent: that it was a preplanned murder. And then something happened that caused the media to systematically obscure and then bury this grave provocation for the riots that followed. Myth 2 explains that something.

Myth 2: Post-Godhra riots were state and/or Modi-sponsored
Truth: This myth is the vile and the only foundation on which the fast-crumbling Gujarat Riots Cottage Industry stands. The truth however, is that the post-Godhra riots were a spontaneous backlash against the mass-murder of Hindus in Sabarmati Express. After much digging, I’ve created a site that showcases media reports filed back then about the riots. In the initial week or so since the riots began, almost every media outlet reported that the riots were a backlash. And then both the tone and script varied: the media quickly woke up to the fact that these riots were a God-sent opportunity to further tarnish the BJP, which was ruling at the Centre. Additionally, unlike all earlier riots, there had emerged a strong leader out of nowhere, who had managed to get the army in within 20 hours and had clamped down the entire state much to the media’s frustration. Until the Gujarat riots, every other communal riot had happened only under Congress governments at state and/or Centre. The final nail in the secular media’s spin-coffin was the fact that the Centre allowed Narendra Modi to continue as Chief Minister even when he had offered to resign at the BJP party meeting Goa. Even worse, he conclusively won the 2002 Gujarat state elections with a gargantuan number of seats and continued as Chief Minister. Suddenly things were not going according to the Secular Plan. The script had to be altered now and peddled aggressively, extensively and widely. What was even worse was the fact that Modi showed nary a care for the media: he didn’t treat them with the “respect” they were used to receiving. He called their bluff routinely. He ignored them.

And thus, the grand charade of deception that began more or less when the Human Rights vultures descended on Gujarat was greatly intensified. Every two-bit secular scavenger of human misery wanted a slice of the pie: from plunderer-filmmakers like Anand Patwardhan to two-bit feminists who wrote copious poetry about the state of “our Muslim sisters in Gujarat” to Inhuman Rights Champions like Teesta Setalvad to Bollywood-certified lunatics like Mahesh Bhatt to “Ripped Foetus” Genocide Suzie to insane psychiatrists like Ashis Nandy…everybody heartily gorged in that orgy of wealth that flowed from the pile of dead riot victims. The media loudly condemned the arrival of a new “saffron (sic) fundamentalist (sic) Hitler (sic)” and peddled it far and wide, adding all sorts of ugly hues to it everyday. Not everybody—even today—understands the importance of the role television played in the Gujarat riots. Gory images were repeatedly telecast resembling an eerie preface of the kind of mass brainwashing techniques described in dystopian novels. The Gujarat riots were the first riots to be telecast (sic) on near-live TV every single day, relentlessly for months. The image of Narendra Modi as the orchestrator of the Gujarat riots stuck in the minds of the public. And it stuck for quite a long time. 

And this image was created by the media. At no point in all these years did Modi himself issue any clarification about his “image.” On the contrary, his behaviour and conduct has been consistent in all these 10 years: he has stuck to his stand that he has followed the law of the land and respects it.

And the tide began to slowly but certainly turn. And before the media could realize what was happening, the tide had completely bypassed the media, which didn’t know how to react to it let alone counter it. Gujarat’s success story was suddenly everywhere. People with serious money were talking about Modi with immense respect. They proclaimed that they were proud to do business with him. A panicked media tried to blank out all news of Gujarat’s development story but in today’s age, complete information suppression is near impossible. The Internet was teeming with large legions of selfless, genuine Modi admirers. Of late, Twitter has continued to heap misery on Modi-baiters of every hue. And so they began to look for excuses to say that Gujarat’s development was fake and it was no big deal but the ground reality told the opposite story. The poisonous mammaries of the Gujarat Cottage Industry were now dry while simultaneously Modi was scaling height after new height. The real wake up call came when his name began to be uttered in the same breath as “Prime Minister.” If that was not enough, India Today published its survey that sent devastating ripples across the stinky sea of the secular media. A fresh wave of media-sponsored attack on Modi began. It was free season again for hypocritical opportunists like Salil Tripathi to the regular Outlook scum to that pretender at Caravan among others.

And now Modi’s picture has made it to the cover page of the Time magazine.

The media has run out of tactics to bait him. To be sure, from day one, the secular media could never quite figure out exactly how to deal with Narendra Modi. They’ve pretty much tried everything from trial-by-media to baiting to cloak-and-dagger to open abuse. They’ve openly gloated in sadistic pleasure each time some misfortune befell him. Despite all this, nothing has worked. When every case, every attempt to implicate him failed, at last, the media, in an admission of defeat of sorts, called for him to “apologize” or “feel remorse” for 2002. As is characteristic of Modi, he responded by simply ignoring it. Narendra Modi is perhaps the only BJP leader who hasn’t acted according to the media’s script. Which is why every new piece on Modi tries to invent newer and more innovative variants of the same “Hindu fundamentalist/hardline leader” "image that they’ve created for him.  The whole “image makeover” nonsense is just that: another attempt to bait him. And as is characteristic of Modi, he has simply ignored it. Again. 

It is a great fortune of sorts that this country is not ruled by the media. We can’t trust people who spend a major part of their day suffering from and tending to perpetual loose bowels.

First, Uttar Pradesh: I won’t peddle the now-familiar and banal media and pundit-theories about castes and formations and campaign strategies for a very fundamental reason, which has to do with the nature of politics that’s in vogue. It’s the politics of divide and rule. It’s the politics of deception, which has been elevated to an art form to such a vile degree of refinement that everybody has taken it for granted and nobody even questions it anymore.

Needless, it is the Congress party that sowed the seeds of this deception whose harvest it reaped till that fatal and irreversible defeat in 1989 at the hands of the same Mulayam Singh Yadav (then Janata Dal), whose party (now, SP) won so spectacularly today. However, Mulayam’s tenure back then was short-lived in face of the wave of resurgent Hinduism that altered the entire political landscape as well as because the Congress party yanked the rug off under poor Chandrashekar’s feet in Delhi. And then it was the BJP’s turn at the UP helm. If the Congress party lost due to sheer arrogance—as is its wont pretty much whenever and wherever it’s in power—the BJP lost due to infighting and its penchant for scoring self-goals. Forget Chief Ministership, it never returned anywhere close to electoral respectability after 2002. Ever since, UP became a football alternating between the BSP and SP. In other words, the two national parties were rendered irrelevant in a state that gave India most of its Prime Ministers. This mini history lesson holds an important instruction: both the BSP and SP needed some 15 years to groom themselves. Once that was done, they had perfected the art of gaming the numbers-system in UP in a way the Congress and the BJP hadn’t done and are unlikely to do anytime in the near future. The comparison of UP to Tamil Nadu is both fair and warranted: in TN, this numbers-game had been perfected more than three decades ago largely because the “Dravidian(sic)” identity brainwashing had begun in pre-Independence days followed by the anti-Hindi (which translated to anti-Congress) agitation and the rest. The SP and BSP script was different, tailored to local climatic conditions. Thus, it doesn’t matter that Mayawati is voted in because the UP junta was fed up of Mulayam’s goonda raj and the same junta votes her out because she’s perceived as arrogant and megalomaniacal. Thus, it doesn’t matter that the same goonda raj was in full display today, the very day SP won. As for the national parties, the BJP simply wasn’t in the reckoning while the Congress party was smashed to bits in both its home grounds: Rae Bareli and Amethi. 

Now, Goa is a state that holds a record for political instability with 14 governments in 15 years. Yet, it voted in an indisputably clean Manohar Parrikar as Chief Minister only to lose him to the Congress party’s practiced skullduggery. For which the people of and Mother Nature in Goa paid dearly. The gory story of the rape and loot of Goa under the active watch of the Congress party is only too well-known to repeat here. It would have been a surprise if the result was anything less than an absolute rout of the Congress party.

Which brings us to the arch-villain of these Assembly elections: the English media. The English media no longer cares for things like shame simply because it knows that the public knows that it’s firmly on the Dynasty’s side. So it went right ahead and campaigned for the Congress party. Right from cleaning up after Rahul’s mess as early as during the Bhatta Parsaul episode. And then when he landed from that perfumed Pushpakcopter, it opened fire and assaulted us relentlessly, sans a commercial break, making it appear as though the UP elections was only about His Impending Coronation. Like I’ve always maintained, if you thought something was the lowest that anybody could plumb, the media manages to prove you wrong every single time. And so we ransacked the lexicon to find an appropriate word to describe a Sheela Bhatt who wrote stuff about how Priyanka Gandhi is:

…the fair-skinned, graceful, lady from the Nehru-Gandhi family….the most charismatic member of the first family of the Congress party. She is sheer magic when seen through the eyes of a television camera in news footage…Her slim figure, her flawless European skin tone, her thick black hair and her resemblance to her grandmother Indira Gandhi is accentuated by the camera and loved by the television viewing urban middle-class. Every time she is shown on television screens, the myth around her deepens…No doubt, through the camera lens, she emerges as the beautiful mix of grace, wisdom and spontaneity. Her charm is evident when she responds to television journalists’ nagging questions.

And when the lexicon gave up on us, the next involuntary response was…well, the word starts with “V” and its synonymn starts with “P.” In UP 2012 polls, no other party existed. Hell, no other Congress party candidate existed for these paid pen-pushers who committed journalistic perjury right from the poll run-up to today. What these pen-pushing party pamphleteers didn’t disclose was the fact that the Congress party’s fate was sealed the day those “backward” village women questioned the selfsame slim-figured, fair-skinned, black-haired embodiment of Nehru-Gandhi Family charisma, “kaa bitiya teen saal ke baad aai ho phir teen saal ke baad aaogi?”

If there’s anything you need to praise the media for, it is its well-honed capability for dressing up denial as fact. The media has successfully kept the Congress party in denial mode about its weakness and failings, the standard hallmarks of an accomplished sycophant. Thus, despite Rahul Gandhi’s belated—and fake—admission that the UP defeat was his responsibility, the media will manage to find a yarn that will tie the Congress party’s rout in UP to Narendra Modi.

It is this infinite capacity for denial that blinds the media to Manohar Parrikar’s deserved victory. Goa is the only state to post a record voting turnout of 81%. It is also the state where the BJP fielded 5 Christian candidates, all victorious. Manohar Parrikar is the exactly the kind of man that the media loves: the only IIT graduate set to become Chief Minister for a fourth term. He is cultivated and non-corrupt with a record of good governance. Oh and he speaks English. Yet, all he—and Goa—gets is a perfunctory “electoral victory” coverage while the Prince’s grief is mourned as a national tragedy (earlier today, Barkha Dutt was almost choking at Rahul Gandhi’s plight). No prizes for guessing why. 

Now you see why I said psephology reduces democracy to a savage farce of a triumph of numbers over ideas and ideals? Corrupt but powerful losers find handmaidens who make sorry excuses on their behalf. Goonda Raj returns in the garb of electoral victory. Genuine do-gooders get ignored. The nation loses yet again.

Of all the responses I read to this piece, only Kanchan Gupta’s two-part series that takes apart Salil’s hitjob on Modi is the best.

Salil Tripathi’s entire article on Mint seems to be motivated by the singular agenda of maligning Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. All of us are entitled to our biases about persons, and ideas and it’s good to express our biases openly because that fosters honest debate and discussion. That doesn’t mean we must allow our personal biases to triumph over facts like Salil Tripathi has demonstrated.

The first instance of bending facts is in the opening sentence where Salil Tripathi claims that Modi failed to protect the lives of “thousands of Gujaratis (a large majority of them being Muslims.)” The official death toll is 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus, a fact that Sriprakash Jaiswal, the then Union Minister of State for Home Affairs told the Upper House in May 2005. One also wonders why Salil Tripathi found the need to include the religion of a certain group of people who were killed especially after his note that Gujaratis were killed. Salil Tripathi also casually claims that 58 Hindus were “killed,” which is a gross understatement: those 58 Hindus were burnt alive in cold blood.

And then he says that it’s unfair to compare the post-Godhra riots with the 1984 Sikh massacre in Delhi. And it’s true: the two cannot be compared not because of the reason Salil Tripathi gives but for something that’s more fundamental. The 1984 Sikh massacre was an organized pogrom by the Congress party while the post-Godhra riots was a reaction whose provocation was the ghastly roasting alive of 58 innocent Hindus. A pogrom is where members of a specific religious/ethnic group are singled out for mass murder. This definition applies 100% to the 1984 Sikh pogrom. In case of the Gujarat riots, 58 Hindus were first roasted alive and then in the riots that followed, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed. Calling this a pogrom is twisting the definition of the term. Among others, Amnesty International called the Gujarat riots a pogrom against Muslims. And Salil Tripathi is an ex-employee of Amnesty International. Even if you don’t link these two together, it’s still inexplicable why Salil Tripathi has swallowed their terminology uncritically. Sans the train-burning provocation, the Gujarat riots wouldn’t have occurred.

Salil Tripathi who chastises Modi while sounding like a Rajiv Gandhi-apologist, conveniently omits one important fact: while losing his mother to the bullets of her own bodyguards is terrible, as Prime Minister, he could’ve conducted himself with dignity by appealing to and ensuring peace by taking preventive measures instead of proclaiming that the 3000-odd innocent Sikhs deserved their death with “When a giant tree falls, the earth below shakes.” We also wonder why Salil Tripathi thought it fit to mention the religious identity of Indira Gandhi’s bodyguards. Apparently, for Salil Tripathi, Modi deploying the army within 20 hours since the riots began is not enough but the 3 days of relentless Sikh-bloodletting—no police or army was deployed –is somehow excusable because Rajiv Gandhi was in grief, a grief that cost 3000 Sikhs their lives and left the survivors and their future generations scarred. If only Salil Tripathi had read Jarnail Singh’s I Accuse… he would not—if he was human—muster the guts to write stuff like Rajiv Gandhi was in grief.

It also helps to have a historical sense: since Independence, every communal riot that has occurred in different states has occurred when there was a Congress government ruling those states:

· 1969 Gujarat riots where 65% of the riot victims were Muslims

· 1983 Assam riots where 2000 Muslims were killed because Indira Gandhi wanted early elections

· 1989 Bhagalpur riots where 800 Muslims were killed

· Of course, the 1984 pogrom against Sikhs

· 1992 Mumbai riots where 575 Muslims were killed.

The post-riot investigation reports in each case hold the Government machinery responsible for not controlling the riots in a timely manner. Salil Tripathi ignores all these documented instances and seems to be on a mission to demonize Modi for his perceived incompetence in managing the riots even when there’s evidence to the contrary.

This sort of selective quoting and concealing inconvenient facts runs rampant throughout Salil Tripathi’s piece. In trying to take credit away from Narendra Modi for Gujarat’s economic success, Salil Tripathi uses higher GDP to “prove” that Maharashtra is better than Gujarat. But let’s look at the ground reality. Maharashtra’s infrastructure is horrid—horrid roads, power shortage (this was once a power-surplus state), farmer suicides, stagnant agriculture and political scams galore. Salil Tripathi’s claim that “several states besides Gujarat have shown triple digit growth” is outright false. He needs to name exactly one state that has attained triple digit growth. He follows this up with a selective claim that Gujarat faces a deficit without mentioning the fact that in 2010, RBI has named the selfsame Maharashtra as the state with the highest fiscal deficit. And Uttar Pradesh, which comes next in Salil Tripathi’s list of “high economies” ranks #2 in the deficit department. Equally selective is his final claim that several states including some in the North East have surplus power, so it’s not a big deal for Gujarat. The states that have surplus power apart from Gujarat include Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Tripura, Delhi, and Dadra & Nagar Haveli. The combined population of these states is about 27 million while Gujarat’s population alone is 60 million. Kanchan Gupta nails Salil Tripathi’s power-surplus jugglery even better:

Mr Tripathi mocks at Mr Narendra Modi’s claim that Gujarat will soon be in a position to provide power to power-starved States. He overlooks the fact that Gujarat is the only State which can today boast of 24×7 power supply to industry, farms and homes. It’s absurd to compare Gujarat’s power generation capacity (GSEB alone produces 4,996 MW) to that of north-eastern States. The former has heavy industrial and agricultural demand for power; the latter has virtually none.

Salil Tripathi then asserts something that clearly reveals his irrational hatred of Modi. Salil Tripathi, by asserting that some people “excuse” Modi’s “role in the 2002 riots,” assumes that Modi was personally involved and/or was complicit in orchestrating the riots. That he states this despite the fact that not one court has named him even an accused shows how much Salil Tripathi respects Indian judicial processes. And in the same breath, he also says that 

SIT’s report, not yet public, appears to suggest that a case implicating Modi in the Ehsan Jafri murder may be difficult. Threshold for evidence in criminal trials is understandably high, and proving complicity is not easy.

What kind of a circus clown-act is this? Modi is responsible for the riots. It is difficult to prove Modi’s complicity. What exactly is your position, Salil Tripathi? If that’s not enough, he further says how the riot-victims shouldn’t let bygones be bygones because it insults their justice-seeking quest. But pronouncing a person as guilty when he’s not named in even one case is a worse insult. Or is there a separate yardstick for justice where Modi is concerned, Salil Tripathi? Indeed, compared to all other riots, the Gujarat riot cases have moved speedily with convictions taking place. Throughout the investigations, trials and depositions, Modi has always maintained that he has faith in the law of the land and is willing to abide by it. But Salil Tripathi disregards all this and paints Teesta Setalvad as a victim of Modi. Again, the same cloak-and-dagger trick: why doesn’t he mention that Teesta now faces several charges, which puts her on equal footing with extortionists and criminal intimidators? But no: in Salil Tripathi’s selective spectacle she’s a “victims’ rights activist (sic).”   Which is consistent because in Salil Tripathi’s world, nothing that Modi ever does can be good despite evidence to the contrary.

Salil Tripathi ostensibly goes about in a long-winded way to contend that Narendra Modi is not a fit candidate for being the next Prime Minister. However, this contention appears in his piece towards the end as an afterthought. It appears that the Modi as a candidate for Prime Minister was simply an excuse for Salil to indulge in mindless Modi-bashing built on a vile edifice of distorted facts, selective quoting of facts, skullduggery with numbers, and using allegations as truth. It’s in poor taste and insults the intelligence of his readers. And reinforces our faith in Salil Tripathi as a spin-master who by writing this piece has lost his spinning abilities.

Yet, for that filthy conglomerate of human scavengers who make up the Gujarat Riots Cottage Industry, the 700-odd dead Muslims presented them a lifetime opportunity to feed off their deaths. What else explains such shameless, and almost sadistically gloating headlines as this sample Google search shows?

Let’s call it by its name: not one black heart in that sullied secular-liberal galaxy genuinely bleeds for those who were murdered: in Sabarmati Express or in the riots that followed as a consequence. They simply want to continue their cushy lives  built over the foundation of these dead bodies by keeping the issue alive and by relentlessly attacking Narendra Modi. Actually, if there’s anybody who really cares about getting justice to the victims, it is the man who is unfairly accused of unleashing the riots: Narendra Modi. You call that a stretch? Answer these questions honestly:

• Which political party was in power for the longest time (both in state and centre) in the long history of communal riots in India?
• Under which political party’s rule has the maximum number of riots occurred across various Indian states?
• What was the average response time in each case to quell the riots?
• How many of these riot-tainted politicians have even faced an inquiry of the kind Narendra Modi has been facing for the last 10 years? Jagadish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar don’t really count. Hell, the whole “getting justice for 1984 riots victims” is yet another cruel joke played by the Congress party. 

There’s not a single instance in these 10 years where Modi has refused to comply with the law or tried to influence or scuttle inquiry proceedings in any manner. And inquiry after inquiry has yielded the exact opposite result of what these Riot Scavengers continue to allege.

Even a very cursory look at Modi’s timeline from 2002 to the present explains it all:

In other words, the discourse around Narendra Modi has done an almost 360-degree turn within a decade. Today the same people in the selfsame media that had casually painted him in the ugliest of hues is finding it increasingly difficult to use words like mass-murderer, fascist, and the rest. In the past, a media hitjob on Modi was as easy as breathing for these Scavengers of Human Misery. But now, a hitjob—like the one the motivated moron at Caravan did recently—has to be carefully couched by taking recourse to secondary sources, and hearsay, and quoting allegations against Modi by X person who heard a similar allegation by Y person who thought Modi was a bad man. Despite this, there’s not one solid, provable fact that Modi was behind the post-Godhra riots.

If the court judgments exonerating him is one strong reason for this drastic shift in affairs, there are also other important reasons. Several influential business houses, retired bureaucrats and other people with social standing and influence have shown a favourable tilt towards Narendra Modi in light of new facts emerging over the years about the post-Godhra riots. It was a little late in the coming but it has occurred. Another prominent reason is Narendra Modi’s tremendous success in making Gujarat an economic superpower state in India. A state that was first torn by the Bhuj earthquake in 2001 almost immediately followed by large-scale violence had to recuperate its finances quickly. That under Modi’s Chief Ministership, it not only recuperated but made astonishing gains in a short span speaks volumes about his leadership. Modi’s economic success is not on paper: it has been demonstrated, and demonstrated repeatedly. Apparently, Congress-ruled states run their economies on the strength of secularism on paper and in speeches and hoardings. It is a truism that an accomplished politician is one who improves (and increases) the wealth of his subjects by wise and farsighted policies. It’s not surprising that Kautilya said that wealth was the root of dharma (Dharmasya moolam arthah). The Congress party’s numerous “poverty-alleviation” schemes are simply evil designs to create more and more vote banks not to mention that they’re primarily blueprints for large scale corruption. In contrast, Modi created his “vote bank” by fattening the wallets of Gujaratis more and more through well-thought policies. As an exercise, compare the issues and promises on which UP elections and Gujarat elections are fought. You don’t need an advertisement or scholarly paper to show that creating the Golden Quadrilateral boosted the economy in myriad ways.

That 2002-2012 is truly Gujarat’s Decade of Peace and Prosperity is hardly an exaggeration. For a state that is supposed to be a Fascist Hindutva Laboratory intent on exterminating Muslims, there hasn’t been a single communal riot or organized violence since the post-Godhra riots. That Modi has managed to accomplish all this in the face of extreme, and relentless hostility is truly a marvel. In the excellent Atanu Dey’s words,

Modi is [a] study of how to meet adversity and overcome them with grace, intelligence and single-minded dedication to the goal of advancing the national interest. He epitomizes the strength that a warrior gains from the attacks by his opponents. The greater his achievements, the larger the threat he poses for those who want India and Indians to be backward and poor, and the more intense their vicious attacks on him.

If you look at the vast world of Modi-bashers, you’ll find that all roads finally lead to 10 Janpath. It is not so much Modi-hate as much as it is Modi-fear among his political and other opponents. The Congress party’s Dynastic leadership thrives because—as I explained in my political ecosystem piece—it wants slavish people under it both within the party and even among its political opponents. The BJP is no exception to this. It willingly plays the game by the rules set by the Congress party and routinely falls into traps set for it by the Congress party. Narendra Modi is perhaps the lone exception to this. He takes the Congress party’s threats headon but refuses to bite their bait. He doesn’t talk to the media in English, a fact that only annoys them all the more. He refuses to give them interviews not because he wants only good things to be written about him but because he knows the exact nature of the English media.

The most important reason why he has earned a groundswell of support from tens of thousands of people who want to see him as India’s next Prime Minister is because you cannot say “corruption” and “Narendra Modi” in the same breath. He has demonstrated that it’s possible to achieve prosperity without corruption and by using the same administrative machinery the rest of the country uses. Small wonder that tons of ordinary Indians have created fan pages and similar initiatives on various social media networks devoted to Narendra Modi. Small wonder that he attracts huge crowds wherever he goes. These aren’t people who come to attend because they’re promised biryani meals + 500 rupees. The underlying sentiment behind all this can be described in exactly one word: hope. If you want to call it blind belief in and hero-worship of the man, so be it because the alternative—UPA 3.0—is truly frightening.

This blind belief applies in equal measure to the legions of Modi-haters who seem to be glued to a fraudulent stuck record. No matter what proof, no matter what amount of proof, the Devotees of Secular Fundamentalism and Scavengers of Human Misery prefer to side by the likes of the Banerjee Report prepared at the behest of a known thug and conman like Lalu Prasad Yadav. It doesn’t matter to them if you point out the fact that the 2002 riot cases are the only ones where speedy and fair trials have been conducted and convictions have taken place. These blind Secular Fundamentalists number few and their noise-making quotient has reduced over the decade but they still remain in circulation. And will continue to remain until a final judgment is pronounced by the court on the riots. Which is exactly what they don’t want. The day the Gujarat riots case sees a closure is the day a permanent source of dead meat for these Human Misery-Scavengers will dry up. It is the day Communalism Combat, Tehelka and similar outfits of gutter journalism will scamper for newer miseries to exploit—and wind up in the process. Hell, you know Modi is doing something right when Genocide Suzie has stopped talking about him.

And there lies a lesson, and a truth reinforced: never trust the Indian English media. Because if you do, all you would still see is 10 years of relentless Human Misery Scavenging with a grudging and obfuscated mention of Narendra Modi’s achievements.

Postscript: The Gujarat Riots of 2002 marked a definitive turning point for this blog.  It was truly the episode that made me realize a simple truth: that a coin has two sides. It made me look at this other side and examine every word that the English media used—words whose meanings were twisted beyond shape and their usage was taken for granted as the Truth. It was a really remarkable and shattering discovery, one that continues. The next few posts will be dedicated to the memory of the unfortunate people who died in the riots. And most of all to do shraaddha to the souls of all those unfortunate kar sevaks whose only fault was to believe in Lord Rama. And about whose justice nobody ever talks.

Preface

A certain Father Dominic Emmanuel seems to have taken it upon himself to educate the Honourable Justices of the Bhopal high court about whether the Bhagavad Gita is a philosophical book or a religious book.  What is it with the preachers of Prophetic religions who seem to possess an itch-powder, the main effect of which is to interfere with the followers and teachings of other religions? What or who gives them the right to tell people of other faiths what their books mean, their Gods mean, their practices mean, and how they should regard their holy people? Anyway, the power of the itch-powder being very…powerful, Father Dominic (Hereinafter referred to as Fr Dom. Don’t think dirty, you filthy sinners!) does what the itch-powder directs him to do. And we do have Itch Guard.  Okay, bad joke.

This is the specific phrase in the Bhopal high court’s judgement that got Fr Dom’s frocks in a twist:

Surprisingly, however, there was no reaction from anyone when the Bhopal high court recently ruled that the Gita “is essentially a book on Indian philosophy and not a book on Indian religion”.

The reason, in Fr Dom’s own words is:

The bench of justices, Ajit Singh and Sanjay Yadav, held this view while dismissing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by the spokesperson of the Catholic Church, Father Anand Muttungal, seeking to include summaries of sacred books of all other religions in the academic curriculum following the BJP state government’s announcement to include a summary of Bhagvad Gita in school curriculum.

I bet you already guessed that it had something to do with the BJP. Right? So how does Fr Dom go about educating the judges? By claiming that he did his “own research,” and that his said research

…suggests that the honourable justices themselves need a thorough re-reading on the origin of the Holy Book and its contents through the many commentaries on it, including that of Adi Shankaracharya.

Lord! I bet feels heady to stand on that High Pulpit delivering suggestions to high court judges! Only, the reality is that courts in India don’t deliver judgments based on what ill-informed Fathers spout as the findings of their research.

Father Dominic’s Research Revealed

Let’s look at Fr Dom’s research in full.

Research Item	Comment
Hindu scriptures in India come under two categories: the Sruti and the Smriti. It is true that the Gita technically does not belong to Sruti, acknowledged by the Hindu tradition as eternal (the sacred texts comprising the central canon of Hinduism, the Vedas and the Upanishads), but to Smriti (literally, that which is remembered), as it is a section of the Mahabharata.	Awesome! Tell us something we don’t already know, Fr. Dom.
Gispert-Sauch, an emeritus professor of Indology and a well- known scholar of Indian religions in Delhi, holds, “Adi Shankaracharya himself and the Indian tradition in general include the Gita among the prasthana-traya of the Vedanta tradition (i.e., the Upanishads [Veda], the Gita [smrti] and Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras, which may be considered ‘philosophy’, although they summarise the teachings of the Upanishads). These three ‘foundational’ texts are often appealed to as authoritative in religious, legal, ritual and philosophical texts.”	Who is Gispert-Sauch and why should we take his word as authority? Quoting unheard-of scholars with fancy titles next to their name makes not a black crow white. I’m surprised Fr Dom didn’t quote Wendy Doniger who called the Bhagavad Gita a “dishonest book.”
In the introduction to his commentary of the Bhagvad Gita, Shankaracharya tells us that it was declared in the Kurukshetra by the Supreme Lord and Creator (Bhagvan and Iswara) to ensure the sustenance and well-being of the “brahma” world and all its people. Mahatma Gandhi considered the Gita as the summary of the whole Vedic revelation.	So?
Gispert further avers, “In my opinion, the ‘Song of the Lord’ or, more accurately according to the traditional colophons at the end of each of the 18 chapters, the Gita Upanishad sung by the Lord is primarily a religious text, but it is also simultaneously a great philosophical text, even if it is not sruti but smriti. After all, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, no less than the six darsanas, are all smritis, and they are the foundation of most religious life, both in South and North India. The Gita is not a mere philosophical text as, for example, the bhashyas of Shankara or Ramanuja are. It is much higher, authentically religious and I would add, mystical.”	Ah! Now we thank Fr Dom for introducing us to the brilliance of this Indology-ignoramus-Emeritus, Gispert. More on that in a bit.

So this is the full extent of Fr Dom’s “research” on the Bhagavad Gita. Let’s look at what some other folks have said about the Gita:

"The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity." ~ Aldous Huxley

"The Bhagavad-Gita is a true scripture of the human race a living creation rather than a book, with a new message for every age and a new meaning for every civilization." ~ Rishi Aurobindo

"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"The Bhagavad-Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanisadic absolute." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fr Dom wants us to hold the utterances of an obscure and ill-informed scholar over and above what these eminent men have said about the Gita? Everybody in the aforementioned list have unfailingly called it a philosophical work. But you could argue that I’m appealing to authority. However, I’m merely doing what  Fr Dom has done. Bad idea no? So let’s discard all this and look at the issue as is.

How Not to Understand the Bhagavad Gita

If you look at it, the Bhagavad Gita is everything to everybody. To Adi Shankara, Madhva and Ramanuja, it was a philosophical work of the highest order and reverence. So lofty that they dedicated their tremendous intellects to write elaborate commentaries upon it. To a Wendy Doniger and spurious scholars like her, it is a work that preaches war. A woman is a woman: whether you look at every woman as a mother or a whore tells a lot about how you think.

The whole “debate” of religion versus philosophy was largely limited to a very narrow sphere within “Sanskrit studies” (later known as Indology) dominated by Western scholars roughly till the first half of the previous century. It became more widespread in Indian academic and intellectual circles when Macaulay’s intellectual progeny who obtained tertiary knowledge about their own country and traditions from their Western Masters began to gain prominence in the public space.

Religion vs Philosophy always means the Christian Religion versus Philosophy. Purely within the realm of Hinduism, there is no equivalent of the word “religion” in the same sense as it’s used in Western discourse. The darshanas that Fr Dom mentions are actually philosophical schools, each school trying to seek answers to the Ultimate Truth in their own way. Which is where our Ignoramus-Emeritus comes in.

Exhibit A:

“Adi Shankaracharya himself and the Indian tradition in general include the Gita among the prasthana-traya of the Vedanta tradition (i.e., the Upanishads [Veda], the Gita [smrti] and Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras, which may be considered ‘philosophy’, although they summarise the teachings of the Upanishads). These three ‘foundational’ texts are often appealed to as authoritative in religious, legal, ritual and philosophical texts.”

The fact that this Ignoramus-Emeritus says “which may be considered philosophy” and puts ‘philosophy’ in quotation marks displays his ignorance. Every single work dealing with Indian philosophical traditions over at least 2000 years by thousands of scholars unambiguously terms these works as works of philosophy. Yet to this obscure ignoramus, it’s doubtful whether it deals with philosophy! And Fr Dom appeals to his authority. Also, Ignoramus-Emeritus needs to show us exactly one ritual text, which appeals to the Bhagavad Gita. Exactly one ritual text. And further,

“In my opinion, the ‘Song of the Lord’ or, more accurately according to the traditional colophons at the end of each of the 18 chapters, the Gita Upanishad sung by the Lord is primarily a religious text, but it is also simultaneously a great philosophical text, even if it is not sruti but smriti.”

The first person to decipher the meaning of this piece of textual confoundedness gets a grand dinner treat from me. Not content, Gispert pounds away at his ignorance with unstoppable fury:

The Gita is not a mere philosophical text as, for example, the bhashyas of Shankara or Ramanuja are. It is much higher, authentically religious and I would add, mystical.”

This line is again a classic manifestation of Western scholarship on Hinduism: it simply cannot look at philosophy as is: that is, separate from the Christian religion. If something falls beyond the pale of these two categories, a third category is brought in: mysticism. Traditional schools of Indian philosophy actually warn against mysticism saying it’s a dangerous path to tread upon. Indeed, Swami Vivekananda rather charitably, calls Mohammed a misguided Yogi. Now, the bhashyas of Shankara et al are related to their own specific school of Indian philosophy: Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita—and all these schools unanimously uphold the greatness of the Bhagavad Gita as an exalted philosophical work. If this is the case, Gispert’s claim that “The Gita is not a mere philosophical text as, for example, the bhashyas of Shankara or Ramanuja are” is utterly ignorant. This is like writing a paper on particle physics without being aware of such a thing as particle physics. And the fact that he makes this claim with the Emeritus title is proof of my claim that he’s Emeritus-Ignoramus. And what does this make Fr Dom?

The Power of Ignorance

The answer is found here, in his own flippant statement calling upon the honourable judges to

…consider Lord Krishna a mere philosopher and the festival of Janmashtami (the birth of Lord Krishna) to be celebrated in universities?

Why not? Hindus are perfectly content to consider Krishna as a philosopher. Forget philosopher: Hindus are okay to call him a cunning goatherd, a thief of women’s clothes, and a deceiver, and still worship him with the same reverence. And why stop at only Krishna? Millions of Hindus worship that Ultimate Beggar and Graveyard-Dweller, Shiva in much the same way as Brahma, a God who doesn’t have a visual representation at all. The point, Fr Dom, is that one of the basic tenets of Hindu philosophy is this: all life and even non-life is sacred and worthy of celebration, worship, and reverence. Almost every major Hindu philosophical school regards life as a unified whole: from birth to death. Ever wonder why there’s a festival and/or celebration when a child is born, or its head is shaved for the first time, or when a girl attains puberty, or marriage or the nuptial night, or childbirth? Or why when someone dies, he or she is said to attain immortality? Or why harvest is celebrated? Or why Holi or Vasant-utsav is celebrated? Or why even have the festival of lights? You name the occasion in a person’s or a community’s life, there’s a festival attached to it. The philosophical underpinnings of these celebrations are exactly the same: the unity and sanctity of life and creation.

Which is why on the one side Hindus worship Krishna as the Giver of he Celestial Song and in the same breath, a Purandara Dasa castigates the same Krishna by asking him, “Show me one person who has been happy by believing in You?” Which is why Hindus can easily say that the fierce evil demon, Hiranyakashyapa was doing the same thing that his son did: constantly chanting Vishnu’s name albeit in a different way. Which is why the “Problem of Evil,” which has exerted thousands of Western philosophers finds nary a mention in any school of Hindu philosophy.

Dear Fr Dom: the secret of why Hinduism has survived for so long without resorting to conversion by force and/or fraud is this: it personalizes the concept of God by giving it a human or any form. Why is it that the Son of God has to be spoken in nothing but the most Glowing, Reverential and Holy terms, especially if he’s all-powerful? Why does one need to fear an all-merciful God? Why is it that He must be born immaculately? And if he is indeed born immaculately, why the need even for a human..err…Mother? And granted even that, why should the Mother be a virgin? Why deny the pleasure of sex to both the Holy Mother and Holier Son? Why do you feel a need to maintain that “holy” distance? I mean, don’t you find it too tedious: Human—> God’s Son –> God? Why can’t there be more than one Son of God given that there are millions of souls to be saved? Why doesn’t the Son of God and the Holy Father have a sense of humour? Even the most Faithful sometimes need to vent out their anger generally against life: can’t they even say Damn you God! at least once without incurring a sin and then coming over to Fathers like you on Sunday for Confession?

Final Points

Oh wait, you’re not done yet, Fr Dom. You further ask in that self-righteous tone that characterizes your ilk:

Would the justices then please explain why the temple worshippers at Vrindavan deify Lord Krishna?

Why is it the job of these justices to explain why temple worshippers at Vrindavan deify Lord Krishna? That wasn’t the case brought to their court. Fr Dom might have as well asked why isn’t it raining in Kolkata.

And why on earth do our courts ask witnesses to place their hand on the Gita to swear, if it is not a religious book?

This is completely hilarious and downright ignorant. One wonders if Fr Dom has ever stepped into a courtroom. I suppose he’s been watching too many B-grade Hindi movies featuring highly-charged courtroom scenes. No religious or other book is ever given: all you need to do is swear that you’ll speak nothing but the truth: whether you swear on God or no doesn’t matter.

Would they also hold that Meera Bai’s experience of total mystical union with Lord Krishna was just a moment of philosophical delusion?

Again, is it the job of these judges to rule on Meera Bai’s mystical experiences? Even if it was her philosophical delusion, how is it related to the nature of the Bhagavad Gita? And why isn’t she allowed to have her delusions when some human being 2000-odd years ago claimed stuff like the following:

• I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life!
• Blessed is he who is NOT offended because of Me
• I AM the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life
• I AM the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies

What’s even more delusional is the fact that you, Fr Dom actually believe that this is true. No wonder, your conclusions are similarly confounded:

It is a little more than surprising and indeed intriguing that neither the religious leaders nor the philosophers or indeed the secularists of our country expressed their views on this ruling of the Madhya Pradesh high court.

Because they’re not Fr Dom. That’s the only way to say it.

Like I said, the Bhagavad Gita is everything to everybody. It is primarily a philosophical work for the puny minds that think that religion and philosophy are separate. It is also a religious work for the same puny minds that want a readymade but incomplete definition of religion is. In much the same way, Hindus worship Krishna not just because he gave the Bhagavad Gita but for countless other reasons, the chief of which is the fact that his life is a study in and demonstration of upholding Dharma.

Now going by that other Father Anand Muttungal’s petition “seeking to include summaries of sacred books of all other religions in the academic curriculum,” I’m all for it. I mean, why just stop at teaching children the good stuff in the Bhagavad Gita. Why don’t we teach schoolchildren the Bible? You know, the stories of how:

• Cain slept with his own sister
• Abraham married his half-sister, Sara
• Nachor, Abraham’s brother, married his own niece
• The two daughters of Lot had sex with their father to preserve their family line
• Amnon tried to have sex with his sister, Thomar and when she tried to defend herself, was raped by Amnon.

Postscript: Father Dominic Emmanuel, before you try and research stuff about other faiths to suit your foregone conclusions, remember this Biblical advice:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:1-5)