Prem Shankar Jha on the RSS threat.

I had previously commented on a foolish article by Prem Shankar Jha. I did not think it possible for anything more foolish to be penned, but Jha has managed it in the next article in the same series.

He now says 'Dharma prevented the growth of a Brahminical clergy in Hinduism'! He himself may be an atheist, but he must have noticed that most of his Hindu neighbors are visited by their family priest to conduct rituals. These priests are Brahmans just like his own priestly ancestors.

His understanding of 'Dharma' is truly bizarre.

Dharma is a way of life based upon a human being’s duty to her or his fellow human beings.

No. 'Nyaya'- Justice- is about duties and obligations. 'Niti' may be linked to Nyaya and refers to conduct or policy. Dharma means piety and concerns what is owed to the Gods (Devas) and the Manes (Pitra) and what is required for eternal Salvation or Liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

A person who observes Dharma- like Duryodhana- may be a villain. A hero may neglect Dharma. It could be argued that one who was truly devoted to Dharma would refrain from injustice. However, as Lord Krishna says, Dharma is difficult to know.

Every type of Dharma- Brahmanic, Shramanic, Agamic, Tantric, Bhakta or anything else- distinguishes between inter-personal ethics and piety with respect to the unseen and that which is beyond human ken.

But this is true of every type of Religion. It is also true of wholly atheistic ideologies like Marxism or Fascism. One could say- 'that man is a thief and a rogue but he is a committed and properly indoctrinated Party member.'

It has shaped the practice of religion in India for 2,500 years.

Dharma is the practice of religion. We may say, such and such legendary figure, though born before the foundation of our Religion nevertheless had such inborn piety that he may be considered naturaliter a member of it s communion. In Buddhism, only one category of Brahman was granted automatic admission into the Sangha.

It prevented the growth of a Brahminical clergy in Hinduism, and severely limited the power of the clergy in Indian Islam.

Dharma did not have any effect at all on Islam. The learned jurists and savants of Al Azhar or those of Holy Mecca have never said that Indian Islam has been altered or adulterated. Nor is it the case that the Muslim clergy in India has reduced powers save by operation of Indian Law. But, this does not mean the faithful impose any limit upon the powers of their preceptors over them. That is a purely voluntary matter beyond the scope of the Law. Look at the Dawoodi Bohras. Does Jha think the Bohra clergy has 'limited powers'? It is noteworthy that this community has increased in prosperity over a period when zealous obedience to the spiritual leader has increased.

It has even indigenised Christianity.

Which is why Indian Catholics spit at the Pope rather than show him reverence and obedience. In India, the eucharist is represented by 'paan' and 'gangajal'. Jha is an idiot!

By doing all this, it has, despite the shock of partition, kept India very largely free from religious strife.

The British kept India largely free from religious strife. But Indian Nationalism was based on Religion and it kicked Imperialism in the goolies.

Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra are synthetic concepts, created only 96 years ago.

The theory of Quantum Electro-dynamics is even more recent. So what? It is better than what went before.

Dharma, on the other hand, is entirely indigenous.

So, Jha subscribes to the 'out of India' Aryan theory. I thought only Hindutva fanatics did that.

The roots of Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra lie in an attempt to create a Hindu nation modelled on the European nation-state through the enforced cultural homogenisation of the entire population, especially religious minorities.

European nation-states are successful. Multi-national, polyglot Empires have bitten the dust. So has the Soviet Union. Why not simply say, after the Treaty of Laussane, nation states were created on the basis of religion and language with religion having greater salience. Thus, Greek speaking Muslims went to Turkey and Turkish speaking Greeks went to Greece. The Indian sub-continent was no exception to this rule.

Jha now goes on to single out Savarkar as the one true prophet in Indian political thought.

Savarkar’s role in the rise of Hindutva
This attempt sprang from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s passionate belief that the freedom movement had to harness Hinduism to nationalism to force the British out of India. At one stage in the freedom struggle, this was a widely-shared view. Bengalis had resorted to what the British called ‘revolutionary terrorism‘ after the 1905 partition of Bengal. Revolutionary terrorism had spread to Punjab after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. In Maharashtra, Bal Gangadhar Tilak had endorsed the use of violence and been imprisoned by the British for his pains.

Savarkar, who wrote his book, Hindutva, in 1923, had been deeply affected by the examples of Bengal and Punjab. But it was the rapid spread of the Khilafat movement among Indian Muslims after the fall of the Ottoman Empire that gave concrete shape to his concept of Hindutva.

The Treaty of Lausanne influenced the younger generation of Muslim intellectuals. That's why people like Liaquat Ali Khan or Shurawardy had no truck with Congress blandishments.

The Muslims were capable of uniting rapidly to defend an institution located a quarter of a world away that they barely understood, he reasoned. Yet, Hindus had no such capability. And they needed to develop it if they wished to free their motherland from slavery.

The British had abolished slavery. However, it was true that if the British Empire went the way of the Hapsburg Empire, then either Hindu India would be balkanized- perhaps with existing Princes expanding their domains- or else it would be a Hindu Nation.

The three essentials of Hindutva, he concluded, were a common nation (rashtra), a common race (jati) and a common culture or civilisation (sanskriti). The impress of Europe on his thinking is reflected by the similarity of this slogan with the German Nazi party’s ein volk (one people), ein reich (one nation), ein Fuhrer (one leader).

But no one had heard of the Nazis at that time. Incidentally, Gobind Vallabh Pant described Mahatma Gandhi as India's Il Duce and Fuhrer.

No doubt, Jha thinks, a Nation should say it is many nations having disparate cultures and civilizations and thus should have many leaders and thus should be in a constant state of civil war.

And just as the Nazis decided that Jews could not be a part of this ‘volk’, Muslims and Christians could not belong to the Hindu jati, because their sanskriti and their prophets originated outside of the Hindu civilisation.

However, they could be patriotic citizens and support institutions and norms of Hindu origin. This is what Europe is increasingly requiring of its immigrant populations.

Hindutva – the antithesis of dharma
Savarkar did not exclude non-Hindus from the Hindutva fold. But to belong, they had to first accept that they belonged to the Hindu sanskriti. This has remained the core requirement of Hindutva down to the present day.

Just as the French say Muslims should not wear the hijab or cut themselves off from French culture. What is so strange about this? Since 9/11 the whole world has seen that 'multi-culti' poses an existential threat to the polity. China, of course, has been even more extreme in its forcible 're-education' of the Uighurs.

Its corollary is the need to exclude those who do not wish to belong. Those who wish to belong have to profess their ‘Hinduness’ and allegiance to the Hindu Rashtra. As in Catholicism and Islam, the reward for accepting the true faith was the promise of absolution for sins committed in the name of Hinduism.

Jha has a bee in his bonnet about absolution. He probably thinks the Pope is making money by selling indulgences.

Thus Babu Bajrangi, leader of the Gujarat-wing of the Bajrang Dal, who was at the centre of the massacre of Muslims in 2002, boasted to Ashish Khetan of Tehelka in a secretly-filmed video interview that he had felt immense satisfaction at doing God’s work while he killed innocent, unarmed Muslim men, women and children.

That hoodlum thought he was talking to a guy who would give him money for doing things of that sort. If I walk into a bar and flash some cash and inquire where I could hire some anti-Iyengar fanatics, I'll soon attract one or two sociopaths who will claim to have spent their lives chopping up and eating Iyengars.

Similarly, in the course of four interviews lasting more than nine hours that he gave to Leena Reghunath at Ambala central jail in 2013 and 2014, ‘Swami’ Aseemanand – once the principal accused but now exonerated in the Samjhauta Express bomb blast case – did not once condemn the killing of more than 200 Muslims on board the train and in the Malegaon and Ajmer mosque bombings. Instead, he repeatedly insisted that jo hua, wo theek hi hua (what happened was correct).

The guy was desperate to get out of jail and was saying that he could turn approver so the Govt. could go after the RSS chief. If I were in an Indian jail on some trumped up charge, I'd happily give interviews showing myself to be a big money-launderer who could help the Govt. recover trillions in black money and permit them to jail plenty of their opponents.

This is what makes Hindutva the antithesis of dharma. For what it preaches and what Aseemanand, Pragya Thakur, Babu Bajrangi and now millions of others who consider themselves Hindus, have been converted to is adharma: it is paap (sin).

What has Jha been preaching all these years? Sheer nonsense. It is 'paap' to go on writing stupid nonsense while pretending to know from Econ.

RSS’s goal of a Hindu India
In the 1920s, Hindutva could perhaps be condoned because it was a counsel of despair. The Congress was still a middle-class debating society, Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of satyagraha was still largely untried and the British had taken to shooting down and summarily hanging freedom fighters after labelling them terrorists. But the last shred of justification for its adharma ended after India gained its freedom. For the creation of Pakistan had fulfilled at least one of the goals of the RSS – it had rid India of all the Muslims who did not accept that they were part of the ‘Hindu sanskriti’.

No. There were plenty of Muslims left who wanted a further partition. As C.M Nain records their motto was 'hanske liye Pakistan, ladke lenge Hindustan' (we gained Pakistan laughing, now we will gain Hindustan by fighting)

The 12% who stayed in India had chosen consciously to do so.

Nonsense! They had no choice. Many a would be 'mujahir' had to return home finding that the promised land had no place for him. Something similar happened after the 'hijrat' to Afghanistan some thirty years previously.

They had, therefore, demonstrated their allegiance to India – which the Hindutva advocates equated to Hindu sanskriti – with their feet.

According to Jha's theory, terrorist inflitrators are demonstrating their allegiance to India. Yet India hanged Ajmal Kasab! What glaring adharma!

So what fuelled the frantic rage against Partition that the RSS vented in its immediate aftermath? What made Hindutva fanatics condone and later glorify the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and want to deify his assassin, Nathuram Godse? And what has made them demonise the Muslims who had chosen India in 1947 so consistently in the ensuing seven decades?

Most sensible people- like Ambedkar- thought Gandhi's death a blessing in disguise. Godse was as stupid as Gandhi, so his action had a double dividend. It gave ordinary people a chance to beat and burn down the houses of Chitpavans even in their stronghold of Pune. Similarly, the assassination of Indira was a blessing in disguise.

The explanation is that from its inception, the RSS’s goal was not simply the ‘negative freedom’ India would get from the departure of the British, but the ‘positive freedom’ of creating a Hindu India moulded to fit their image of Hindu Rashtra. Nothing less would satisfy them.

If India were a Hindu Rashtra, Hindus would be able to demand that the Government raise their standard of living, secure the borders, and so forth. The big advantage of 'Socialist Secularism' is that it allows the Government to say 'no, first we have to uplift the minorities because, speaking generally, they are poorer than you. Thus, to help them we have to dismantle the one thing making them a minority viz the identity the majority possesses as being Hindu.' This is what Jha is doing here with his ludicrous notion that 'Dharma' wasn't about a large, largely Brahman, priestly caste laying down absurd or mischievous rules of various types.

Today, the Sangh parivar is trying to pass off Savarkar and Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, as freedom fighters.

If Savarkar wasn't a freedom fighter why did the British imprison him for so many years? Hedgewar was a freedom fighter. He just didn't go around broadcasting the fact.

But as the biographer of Hedgewar, and some of the remarks of his successor Golwalkar show, from the Dandi Salt March in 1929 till Gandhi’s Quit India call in 1940, the RSS stoutly opposed every attempt to secure freedom through satyagraha and even offered its cohorts to the government to act as civil guards to quell the unrest that Gandhi’s call would generate.

Because satyagraha failed completely. It was a nuisance simply.

To the RSS, freedom was less important than power. It needed more time to create the Hindutva legions with which it hoped to storm to power. And as with fascism in Europe, it required an enemy that it could persuade people to hate and fear, to facilitate their creation. In Europe, the fascists targeted the Jews. In India, the RSS targeted the Muslims.

How is it that Islamophobia has become politically important in America and Europe and, now, Sri Lanka? It is because of the actions of some Muslims.

Caught by surprise by Partition, which Mountbatten announced only in March 1947, the RSS made an attempt, nonetheless, to seize power in the wake of the turmoil unleashed by it and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, which it certainly welcomed and might even have instigated.

Utter nonsense! The Congress Seva Dal- also started by a Doctor- was far more fearsome than the RSS which is why the Brits banned it. Indeed, after Independence, it was banned in West Bengal till Nehru had the ban lifted. The RSS would have been made mincemeat off it had tried to wag its tail. The fact is Chitpavan Brahmans got beaten and had to watch their houses being burned down after the Mahtatma's assassination. Incidentally, Jagdish Tytler was a former head of the Congress Seva Dal. Compare the anti-Sikh pogroms with the post-Godhra riots. Congress clearly wins when it comes to Fascist gangsterism. Currently, that accolade has gone to Mamta's goons. Fascism is about kicking in the heads of Commies. When has the RSS ever done that? By contrast Congress and, its offshoot, TMC have a great track-record in this area.

After Independence, the Commies tried to wag their tail. They were hammered. The RSS, since it posed no threat, was allowed to regroup.

That got it banned for several years, but power remained its unswerving goal through all its vicissitudes then, and its violent rebirth after the Congress opened the locks on the Babri Masjid in 1985.

Jha knows that the RSS played an important part in the NavNirman campaign in Gujarat and achieved respectability, under the auspices of Jayprakash Narayan, for its role in resisting Indira Gandhi's Emergency. That was a dozen years before the cretin, Rajiv, meddled with the Ramjanmabhoomi issue.

What happens now?
Today, the RSS has finally achieved its goal.

Nonsense! That happened in 1998 when Atal Behari conducted the nuclear test and got comfortable in the Prime Minister's chair.

Narendra Modi has brought it to power on a wave that will almost certainly sweep through the states and give it the two-thirds majority that it needs to change the constitution of India. The closest parallel in history to BJP’s victory this year is Hitler’s return to power in March 1933.

Rubbish! The parallel is with Indira's amending the Constitution. Hitler was backed by the German General Staff. Indeed, had Ludendorff not refused to go to jail after the Munich putsch, Hitler would have remained a nonentity. General Schleicher engineered Hitler's rise, but Schleicher was opposed by General Blomberg. Hitler killed Schleicher and Blomberg immediately got the German Army to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler.

Why is this senile old fool talking such nonsense?

The Nazi campaign too was based upon hatred and paranoia. Its targets were principally the Jews, but also the Gypsies whom they considered another inferior, polluting, race and the Communists.

Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws within a couple of years of coming to power. Why did neither Vajpayee nor Modi do anything similar? The answer is because there is no similarity at all between the RSS and the Nazi, or Communist, party. India has nothing in common with Germany then or now. Jha is a fool to suggest otherwise.

Like the BJP today, the Nazis took advantage of the collapse of the German economy after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to seize power in 1930 with 33% of the vote.

What Economic Crash brought the BJP to power? How deluded is this cretin?

Three years later, their hate rhetoric had pushed up their vote to 43%. Within days of the January 1933 results, its storm troopers duped a Communist sympathiser into setting the German parliament building on fire and helped him do it. In the anti-Communist hysteria that followed, Hitler was able to win the March 1933 elections persuade the German parliament to pass an enabling act giving him extraordinary powers and thus destroying the Weimar Republic. His storm troopers then systematically attacked Jews, Gypsies and Communists, set up internment camps and when these became too expensive to maintain, sent them to the gas chambers.
While history seldom repeats itself, the new BJP government has already taken its first steps down the road to tyranny. The arrest by the UP Police of four journalists on defamation charges, for simply reporting the claims of one woman, has not only broken every guarantee of free speech and reporting in the constitution, but has also sent a warning to the media that anything they report that can be construed to be disrespectful to a BJP leader or government, will land them in jail.

So stupid UP cops acting stupidly is proof that Modi is Hitler! Why has Jha not himself been arrested?

During its previous avatar, the Modi government had already opened detention centres in Assam for those whom the courts declared to be illegal residents in the state.

So what? America and Europe similarly detain illegal migrants.

Today, such centres are proliferating in Assam. But for the Hindu Rashtra, that is not enough. It has followed this up within days of coming back to power, with an enactment that “allows” district magistrates to open similar camps in any or all of India’s 724 districts.

So? That is entirely in accordance with the law.

Is it too early to ask Modi what he will do with those whom the police in the BJP-ruled states will intern when Bangladesh refuses to take them back?
Amit Shah has not hidden the ultimate intention: the search for ‘illegal immigrants’, i.e. the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Bangladeshis who have come to India in search of work and made it their home, is about to commence.

Is it too early to ask Modi what he will do with those whom the police in the BJP-ruled states will intern when Bangladesh refuses to take them back? What solution will he then propose?
Readers sceptical about this reading of recent would do well to study the findings of a recent US-based study of ‘Facebook In India – towards the Tipping Point of Violence, Caste and Religious Hate Speech’. This has meticulously charted how the Sangh parivar has used the same social media that it has warned its opponents against using to infect the youth of this country with fear and animosity towards Muslims and Christians across the country.

Jha is whipping up feelings of fear and animosity towards the RSS and Sangh Parivar. The previous Congress administration sought to whip up fear of 'Hindutva terror'. But voters couldn't be fooled. Sadhvi Pragya roundly defeated her tormentor, Digvijay Singh. As for Jha's stupidity, its only remaining function is to confirm people of his own class in their belief that the Left is utterly senile and has nothing to offer.

Such false news designed to make them credible make up 62% of posts on it. So numerous and violent are the postings that the study had to separate India from what was initially intended to be a global study of the impact of Facebook, and to create a separate classification for it.
The Modi government has another four years and eleven months to go.

This 'study' has no impact because it is obvious shite. I don't know how long Jha has to go, but- it is clear- the direction in which he is going is towards is an egregiously ignorant type of paranoia.  No doubt, he hopes to be a Guru to Rahul in his 'ideological' struggle which, the lad sweetly tells us, will be ten times more spirited than anything he had previously achieved. Still ten times zero is still zero. Oxbridge must be so proud of alumni like Jha and Rahul Baba.