With the Sangh Parivar's animosity towards Muslims is well-known, its attitude towards Christians has taken many people by surprise. But, Vishwa Hindu Parishad general secretary Giriraj Kishore said in Chandigarh on November 25: "Today the Christians constitute a greater threat than the collective threat from separatist Muslim elements." Describing G.S. Tohra, president of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, as a "separatist", he said, "all minorities including Muslims and Christians must accept that their ancestors were Hindus". Ergo, they must all return to the Hindu fold.
Violence in speech inevitably inspires violent acts ..Those who spread hate re the real perpetrators of violence. The ones who wield the weapons are their mindless agents.
We have tended to ignore a fact that brooks no neglect - the real cause of the communal riots is the rise of the Sangh Parivar. There was communal peace even in the early years after Partition. A Home Ministry review presented to the National Integration Council in 1968 noted: "From 1954 to 1960, there was a clear and consistent downward trend, 1960 being a remarkably good year with only 26 communal incidents in the whole country. This trend was sharply reversed in 1961. "That was when riots erupted in Jabalpur -thanks to the Jan Sangh, the BJP's ancestors. Communal violence has not "looked back" since.
Report after report has indicted the RSS specifically or its affiliates (Ahmedabad 1969, Bhiwandi 1970; Tellicherry 1971; Jamshedpur 1981; and Mumbai 1993). Violence is an integral part of the RSS credo. "It should be used as a surgeon's knife ... to cure the society ... Sometimes to protect non-violence itself violence becomes necessary," RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar said in 1952. (Spotlights: Guruji Answers, pages 110 and 188). In his fine work India as a Secular State, Donald Eugene Smith recalled the desecration of a church in Bihar in 1955 and the almost total destruction in 1957 of the Gass Memorial Centre at Raipur.
V.D. Savarkar wrote repeatedly in his book Hindutva (1923): "Hindutva is different from Hinduism". For once, he was right. Hinduism is a religion, it is ancient. Hindutva is an ideology of hate. It is recent. He grouped Muslims and Christians together as ones who do not share "the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilisation - our Hindu culture". He added: "Christian and Mohammedan communities who were but very recently Hindus ... cannot be recognised as Hindus as since their adoption of the new cult they had ceased to own Hindu civilisation (Sanskriti) as a whole ... For though Hindustan to them is Fatherland, as to any other Hindu, yet it is not to them a Holyland too. Their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine."
Golwalkar revealed on May 15, 1963 that his first book We or Our Nationhood Defined was based on Savarkar's brother Babarao's book in Marathi on the same theme, Rashtra Mimamsa. Golwalkar's second book, Bunch of Thoughts, praised the book Hindutva and amplified its ideology. The BJP has used it as a political weapon with dangerous consequences. Chapter XII of Bunch of Thoughts is devoted to three "Internal Threats" -Muslims, Christians and the Communists. Of the first two he wrote: "Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation. Nor does it end there. They have also developed a feeling of identification with the enemies of this land. They look to some foreign lands as their holy places." They are asked to return to the Hindu fold.
Not that that will be of much help. "For a Hindu, he gets the first sanskar when he is still in his mother's womb ... We are, therefore, born as Hindus. About the others, they are born to this world as simple unnamed human beings and later on, either circumcised or baptised, they become Muslims or Christians." The hatred is unconcealed. They have no right to proselytise. Hindus alone have it, for, "returning to one's ancestral faith is not conversion at all, it.is merely home-coming."
Bunch of Thoughts first appeared in 1966 but the good work has been stepped up since. To the three "internal threats", a fourth is added - "Nehruism" – and among the perils we face is "Macaulayism"
Hindustani literature is intolerant of any cultural and religious diversity. It fosters a siege mentality among Hindus and speaks disparagingly of all others – not excluding Sikhs and Jews. That is not all. A Hindu who does not share its bigotry is attacked as being "anti-Hindu". Its literature represents the spirit, outlook and ethos of the Sangh Parivar ...
One is reminded of the loonies of California, the minutemen who lived in dread of a Soviet conquest of the U.S ... In the US, the minutemen belonged to the lunatic fringe. In India, the Parivar's ideology is espoused by the party in power, even if it be through dubious alliances. Scruples are not the Parivar" strongpoint ...
The virulence of the language reveals the depths of the hatred. This is what Indians are up against – a powerful hatred group, enjoying the patronage of many politicians in power and in the administration, which is out to wipe out all traces not only of secularism and democracy but of religious tolerance, religious and cultural diversity and, indeed, of decency itself from India.
It shall not come to pass. The answer lies not in forging a united front of the minorities; it lies in a renewal of the secular ideal in our politics and in the nation at large. (Source: The Frontline, 1 January, 1999)
