The Disillusioned Hindu Returns

A cursory glance at social media will reveal disillusionment among Hindus with the present supposedly Hindu-oriented government in India, having been exploited as nothing more than a consumable vote bank. The illusion that things would change from the previous Congress government has fast evaporated as the BJP has revealed itself to have the same self-serving agenda to stay in power, and throw the masses crumbs off the table by emphasising mere token issues.

The election of the BJP government of Narendra Modi was hailed by many Hindus as a victory for independent India now having a belated Hindu administration. Aside from the fact of defining exactly how ‘Hindu’ the Modi government is, any ‘victory’ was not due to any Hindu political activity.

Rather it was the result of the overwhelmingly anti-Hindu media, both in and outside India, building Modi up as some sort of dictator, fanatic, fascist leader and latter day Hitler. Of course this had the flipside of endearing him to millions who were disillusioned with openly corrupt politicians who have ruined India as their own personal fiefdom, and state assets as their own personal bank account. To these millions who were effectively shut out of the political process, Modi became their messiah.

Indeed one of Modi’s main platforms was to bring back the black money which had been siphoned out of India – just as the British Raj had siphoned raw materials and human fodder out of India, to feed their manufacturing centers and slave plantations. The election of Modi proved that here was a leader that could unite Hindus across region, sect and caste lines. The elusive Hindu unity did not look so elusive after all.

The recent events in NIT Srinagar is the best example of how India’s BJP government continues the previous administration’s policy despite being accused of its ideological commitment to ‘evil’ Hindu nationalism. The row erupted in NIT, Srinagar when non-Kashmiri students hoisted tricolour in response of celebration of India’s defeat against West Indies. This led to brutal action by police were called which had to lathicharge on the students who were chanting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ in India itself holding the flag of that country.

With nearly a billion Hindus one would have thought that there should exist literally thousands of Hindu institutions on par with Harvard or Oxford. But as things presently stand, the Hindus lack even one rudimentary professional media channel. So questions need to be asked why. Hindu failure has been manifest at the intellectual and active level.

Since the time Taxila was destroyed by invading White Huns in the fifth century, there has never been a Hindu intellectual center of any note – even if we include Nalanda which struggled on for a bit longer. There are a lack of Hindu think tanks that can deal with contemporary issues.

The cultural centers that do exist either live off some mythical past utopia, or digress into amorphous spiritual matters that again just make their hollow disciples feel temporarily warm and fluffy inside. An often heard Hindu complaint is that unlike Muslims and Christians, Hindus lack ‘unity’. Well this is not just a lame excuse, it is actually inaccurate. It was the very disunity of Christianity which gave us ‘secularism’ to stop Europe being turned into a continent devoid of human life as Catholic and Protestant armies devastated each other, the oppresses masses, and burnt women at the stake.

More recently the troubles in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants updated the fallout of that Thirty Years War into this century. Are Muslims united? Just look at how ISIS is presently massacring anyone that disagrees with its modernist and puritanical version of Islam, and destroys the Islamic past of Sufi shrines and Shia mosques in the process. Ask the Ahmaddiyas who are not just persecuted in Pakistan but suffer hate crime from other Muslims in Britain. Yet this has not stopped the proliferation of Christian and Islamic think tanks, cultural centres and media outlets such as the Christian Broadcasting Network and Peace TV. Faced with such pressures, Hindu look to the only available messianic body which will alleviate their plight: the RSS.

The RSS calls itself a voluntary self service organisation, the world’s largest such, and claims a commitment of selfless service to India. The initial impetus was to provide character training through Hindu discipline and to unite the Hindu community to form a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), by upholding Indian culture and civilizational values. This included work among depressed classes despised as untouchables, and more general relief work. Indeed to this day, whenever there are natural disasters or any man-made tragedies, RSS workers are among the first on the scene to provide help. This is invaluable in a country like India which lacks the safety net of a welfare state.

Yet this rarely gets reported by western media and their Anglophone Indian Marxist preachers who insist of labelling the RSS as a fascist movement. The reality is very different. On 2 June 2015, Koenraad Elst wrote ‘Savarkar and Modi, beginning and end of Hindutva‘:

The  RSS also does not take too kindly to any Hindu organisation or individuals outside its ambit. In Indian politics, what counts is not talent, intelligence or ideological commitment, but instead blind loyalty to the ‘tribe’. The reason why caste has remained an intractable issue is its hereditary entrenchment by reservation quotas, and because in a country where there is no effective state or rule of law, the assistance of one’s kinsmen is a necessity.

This network is all important as against the aspirations of the atomised individual who is powerless against the forces of the vampire state. For this reason those with ambition who lack the necessary connections find their aspirations blocked if they use legitimate means. The only escape are crime and politics. The two are not mutually exclusive. Indeed they merge into one another.

While the RSS may have been started with noble intentions, and indeed does retain much of its voluntary NGO nature in helping relief efforts, the sad fact of the matter is that it has been unable to remove itself from the colonialist environment in which it was created. It has never seen the need to understand the parameters set by its detractors, or to challenge them. For that reason the outfit has become to all intents and purposes largely defunct for what it was set out to do.

By becoming such a dead weight, it actually brings other Hindu activists down as well, seeing them as a greater challenge for its monopoly on Hindu thought. In this context, the election victory by Narendra Modi was not the result of some great media strategy by the Hindus or namely the Sangh.

If they were that savvy then they would be able to take on media hostility now, rather than the slipshod unprofessional efforts which has been their hallmark. For example the anti-cow slaughter movement started way back in the 1960s and still yielded ineffectual results in a country where most inhabitants avoid consuming beef.

The Hindu movement has not even managed to achieve control of the temples or having control of the education system left over from the British which even modern day Britain has discarded. The so-called Hindu movement rarely mentions RSS volunteers getting killed on a daily basis. So how can this outdated movement save the whole Hindu community?

The RSS is not very much of a Hindu organisation, preferring instead to align with western concepts of secularism and nationalism. It is certainly not a terrorist group like the anti-Hindus imagine, but just a boy scouts group in oversized colonial khaki shorts. Hindus will need to do activity by themselves then relying on the RSS or anyone else to save them which will mean practical self-effort. Presently we have the BJP obsessed by token issues, and RSS affiliates giving the illusion of actually doing anything by having trumpet blowing march parades or  World Hindu conferences  which are just another excuse to get free food and business cards. The only beneficiaries are the catering firm, cleaning contractors and venue managers.

No surprise then that Sita Ram Goel and his mentor Ram Swarup (1920-98) did not belong to the RSS tradition. Instead they took inspiration from the British liberal tradition of Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell, and later the Hindu debating tradition of Yajnavalkya and Shankara.
For them free debate was the norm. Unlike Hindutva organizations, such as the RSS and Hindu Jagruti Samiti, who react to every insulting book or film or painting with calls for banning; an almost mirror image of  Islamic organizations demanding a ban on the Danish cartoons or The Satanic Verses. Calls for banning unpalatable opinions stem from an inability to meet the challenge intellectually, which was never Shankara’s problem but is very much the Sangh’s.

The important issues affecting Hindus such as Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Fiji, drug problems, street gangs and much else were either ignored or utilised for the leverage they gave to gain access to ministers and government departments.

Again this was not for actual Hindu issues, but very much business deals and commercial ventures. In many respects this only reflected the growing power of lobbying by the ultra-rich and an utter desperation to be part of this scene, as pioneered by Jimmy Goldmith’s proto-Thatcherite Mayfair Set. This explains the exuberation which greeted Narendra Modi on his visit to Britain.

It was not as protesters claimed that Modi was bringing religious intolerance and attracting hardcore Hindu fundamentalists to his speech. It was the hope of being part of an Indian economic miracle, or at least somewhere safe to stash all that cash. In an environment where now even charities have become big multinationals that pay their bosses six figure salaries, the obsession in a culture saturated with narcissism and the temporary celebrity cults that are entwined with it mean that important social and other issues are shut out like some unwanted lumpen element.

If you are the victim of domestic abuse, dysfunctional social environment, gang culture, poverty, homelessness, disability, old age, and a host of other issues, you are destined to be cast out like a leper from this elite Hindu scene dominated by the HSS, NHSF, City Hindus and similar groups in Britain.

As with human rights issues of rape, genocide, ethnic cleansing and forcible conversion, these issues are only of use if they can be used as units of commercial exchange and political advancement as part of some business deal. That is why Hindu issues never get taken seriously. The irony is that in India it is the RSS that is often first on the scene during natural disasters to help with relief work.

But the mental sclerosis it had infected its members with is a lifelong curse, as seen by the incompetence of the present BJP government with what has happened in Kashmir in the aftermath of a cricket match – let alone with tackling terrorism and forced displacement of Hindus from that state for the last quarter of a century.