Ram Guha wants to defeat Hindutva- i.e. ecumenical Hinduism- and has written an article in the Telegraph towards this great end. Obviously, since he is as stupid as shit, the thing will backfire. The question is, how hilariously will it do so? To begin, we must understand that Guha is actually an Englishwoman-turned-Indian.
In its issue dated November 30, 1947, the journal, Harijan, printed an appeal from an Englishwoman-turned-Indian to the citizens of a country she had made her own. “Twenty two years ago I, a lost wanderer,” she wrote, “refound my spirit’s home in India — India, whose aeons of history were again repeating themselves in epics of spiritual grandeur.
The silly bint thought that Gandhi would found a great Religion like Lord Buddha or Jesus Christ. Romain Rolland, who had written a book on the composer, persuaded her to abandon a mania for Beethoven for thralldom to a wily Bania. Rolland himself, however, decided that Stalin was yet more sublime than some 'naked fakir'. Hero-worship deranges the mind.
With what boundless inspiration and enthusiasm I plunged into the great drama of Light and Hope, unfolding itself before the war-torn, sinking world. In Bapu I found the Guiding Star; in Hinduism, the word of Truth; in India, the Mother.”
A dozen years later she'd return to England and Beethoven-mania, before settling in the Vienna woods where she spent the last 22 years of her life. So, we are speaking of an Englishwoman-turned-Indian-turned-Austrian. Why is Guha quoting that crazy biddy? The answer is, he identifies with her. His daddy was actually a British Admiral. Soon he will go off to Vienna to join the other Guha- the every so subaltern Ranajit. Then ghost of Beethoven will appear to him and fuck him in the ass. The Joy!
Then she added: “Little did I know that twenty-two years later I should have to see the Mother’s breasts torn and bleeding with the gashes inflicted by her own children, and the word of Truth trampled underfoot by the very people who call themselves Hindus.”
Muslims started the violence and Sikhs joined in. Hindus retaliated in some places but were perfectly peaceful elsewhere- e.g. Guha's own ancestral Tamil Nadu.
This anguished Indian was Mira Behn, the daughter of a British admiral who had come to this country in November 1925 to work with and alongside Gandhi. She had lived with her ‘Bapu’ in his Sabarmati and Sevagram ashrams, made speaking tours in the United Kingdom and the United States of America canvassing for India’s freedom, and spent several long terms in prison in her adopted country’s cause. All this while she had committed herself, in theory and in practice, to the Gandhian ideals of the abolition of untouchability, the promotion of khadi, and the pursuit of Hindu-Muslim harmony.
Gandhi was a crackpot all of whose schemes failed. Naturally, other crackpots joined him in his crazy schemes which Banias and Marwaris funded so as to increase their own wealth and power.
The appeal written by Mira was addressed specifically to the last of these ideals. For the Partition of the subcontinent had been preceded and followed by a series of bloody riots in which Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were all victims as well as perpetrators. Mira’s mentor, Gandhi, was working heroically to stem the violence.
He was useless. It was in the interest of Mountbatten, Nehru and Suhrawardy to pretend that Gandhi had succeeded in Bengal. The truth is, he failed. Birla and other Marwaris had quietly funded the Hindu retaliation against Suhrawardy's 'Direct Action Day'. As for the Hindus of East Bengal- nobody gave a toss about them more especially if they themselves were Hindus from West Bengal. On the other hand, Gandhi said he knew which Congress members in Bihar had killed Muslims- Nehru threatened to send planes to bomb them!- but, of course, he didn't suspend any from the party. Instead he collected some money and moved on.
In September, after achieving success in calming Calcutta,
The Hindus had won there. The Marwaris weren't going to pay for any more murder. If East Bengali Hindus wanted to make space for themselves, they were welcome to do so- or, in the case of Mandal's Namasudras, not actually very welcome at all, as was discovered at Marichjhapi. Still, what mattered to Birla & Co was that Calcutta had been secured for India. It might as well be peaceful.
he proceeded to Delhi where the situation was alarming, with Hindu and Sikh refugees from Partition seeking revenge against the Muslims who still lived in Delhi.
Which they took in ample measure though it is true that some refugees started to return in 1948. The Constituent Assembly quickly passed a law preventing Muslims from returning to reclaim their property. Refugees from the West were awarded Muslim property but those from the East were ignored. Why? The Bengali was considered a coward. There was no point accommodating them because they contributed nothing to your collective security. Punjabis, on the other hand, were fighters.
Gandhi’s hope was that after he was able to restore the security of the Muslim minority in North India, he would cross over the border and work to ensure the safety of the Hindus and Sikhs who still remained in Pakistan.
Hilarious! If the East Bengalis had chased him away so easily, what hope had he in West Punjab? Nehru had to turn tail and run when he tried to visit 'the Frontier Gandhi' in Peshawar.
However, the restoration of peace in Delhi and its surroundings proved much harder than Gandhi had anticipated. Already angry, the Hindu and Sikh refugees had their feelings further inflamed by extremist organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which were actively engaged in fomenting hatred against the Muslims who had chosen to stay behind in India.
Just as Guha is still actively engaged in fomenting hatred against Hindutva. But the effort is otiose. Muslims hate Hindutva because they hate Kaffirs. Hindus and Sikhs- like everybody else- don't like people who are trying to kill them and take their property.
A Delhi police report dated October 24, 1947 had this to say about the designs of the RSS: “According to the Sangh volunteers, the Muslims would quit India only when another movement for their total extermination similar to the one which was started in Delhi sometime back would take place… They were waiting for the departure of Mahatma Gandhi from Delhi as they believed that so long as the Mahatma was in Delhi, they would not be able to precipitate their designs into action.”
Police reports contain the sort of information policemen believe their masters want to hear. Moreover, if your job is to prevent people being killed, it is quite convenient to be able to say that the presence of such and such Saint obviated any need for special measures. God does not permit bad things to happen if a Mahatma is in the vicinity.
And an Intelligence Bureau report dated November 15, 1947 observed: “[T]he workers of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh, especially those coming from West Punjab as refugees, intend starting communal trouble in Delhi after the Diwali festival. They say they could not tolerate the sight of Muslims moving about in Delhi...”
But if they saw the Mahatma they would immediately start cuddling and kissing Muslims.
Mira was living in Delhi through the months of October and November 1947, watching with horror as this hate-filled ideology was taking root in the minds of more and more Hindus.
She was probably very happy when Muslim tribesmen massacred Belgian Nuns in Baramulla in October 1947.
Moved to act, she issued her appeal to Indians in general and to Hindus in particular.
Why did she not tell her own people- as the Mahatma had done- to meekly submit to Herr Hitler?
“Is it for this that we have taken our Freedom?” she asked:
She spent the last 22 years of her life in Austria. That's where her Freedom took her. Hitler came from Austria. Sadly, her people had not shown the fellow much love. Instead they kept trying to blow him up with their bombs.
“Not to be the Land of Light, but to be the Land of Darkness?”
India continued to be the Land of Blathershites till 1962. Then, it occurred to Indians that maybe Gandhi and Nehru & Co. were hypocritical cunts who had indulged their own ego at the expense of their country.
What was the end game of these religious fundamentalists calling themselves ‘Hindus’? What was the sort of country they would create if they triumphed?
An India with a smaller Muslim population and a stronger Army and Economy.
The India that Hindu extremists dreamed of, wrote Mira, “would be peopled by a race of self-styled, Superior Beings,
a Mahatma is a very Superior Being indeed.
whose spiritual intolerance
Gandhi was spiritually intolerant.
would be the very negation of true Hinduism.
as represented by the Bhagavad Gita which the lady- like the Mahacrackpot- had been introduced to in an English translation.
All Muslims would be ruthlessly uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven out, and in this state of affairs it would be surprising if the other non-Hindus did not share the same fate.”
Lots of Muslims were ruthless uprooted from their ancestral homes by the Custodian of Evacuee Property under Nehru through the Fifties and into the Sixties.
Mira ended her appeal with this stirring paragraph, which I must quote in full: “But my heart and mind refuse to accept this repulsive picture as inevitable.
Did that heart and mind accept the repulsive picture of the Mahacrackpot sleeping naked with his own grand-niece?
The Hindu nature will first regain its balance,
said an unbalanced English woman
and realize that it has been led into the darkness by
Romain Rolland, who ended up worshipping Stalin
a fanatical group of people who have become poisoned by the very thing they detest. It is no remedy for an evil to try and outdo it in its own line.
Vinobha Bhave and JP and other such nutters did try to outdo the Mahacrackpot in his own line.
The public must call a halt and think for themselves what is happening to them. Under the influence of fanatical propaganda they are blindly reviling the great leaders who brought them out of the Slough of Despond on to the dizzy heights of Freedom.
This silly woman came to India in 1925. She did not understand that Gandhi's unilateral surrender in February of 1922 was the reason that Hindu-Muslim unity dissolved and also that India didn't get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan got in that very year. Gandhi's every big political campaign ended with the Viceroy being more firmly in the saddle than before.
If they heed not those men today, they will slip over the precipice into the dark abyss.”
Heeding Gandhi turned out to have been the worst mistake India could make. That is the lesson History teaches all Indians save those, like Guha, who are condemned to teach it.
Mira’s appeal to her fellow Indians was published in the last weeks of 1947.
A dozen years later she returned to Europe and Beethoven mania. Guha, too, we fondly hope, will move to Vienna once Ranajit pops his clogs.
As I write this column, seventy-five years later, her appeal seems strikingly relevant to the country we now live in.
This silly fellow thinks Modi is Hitler.
Her statement about “the word of Truth trampled underfoot by the very people who call themselves Hindus” applies, word for word, to the activities of the BJP’s IT cell.
Guha, thankfully, is not a Hindu. He is a British Admiral's daughter and soon he will go and settle in the Vienna Woods and Ghost of Beethoven will fuck him in the ass. Oh! The Joy!
Her description of the imaginary Hindutva nation as “peopled by a race of self-styled, Superior Beings, whose spiritual intolerance would be the very negation of true Hinduism” perfectly describes the ideology of the party in power in India today.
Some mean people are saying to Guha- 'You are not really an aristocratic European lady. You are Indian. What's worse, you are Hindu by birth and heritage.' He replies, 'If I were really Indian- as you wickedly aver- would I find the best description of India today was actually given by a crazy White lady 75 years ago?'
In the immediate aftermath of Partition, Hindutva ideologues wished that “all Muslims would be ruthlessly uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven out” to Pakistan; now, they have modified that ambition to ensuring that Muslims who are Indian citizens must acknowledge their theological, cultural, political, and social subordination to Hindus.
That was Nehru's achievement. Come to think of it, Indira was pretty quick to put Muslims in their place in the Eighties.
Can the Hindu mind regain its balance, shed its belief in its religious and political supremacy, and truly embrace the secular and pluralistic ideals of the freedom struggle?
The INC should have left Annie Beasant in charge. There should have been a deal such that Muslims gave up cow-slaughter in return for support on Khilafat. India would then have got provincial autonomy in 1922 and Independence in 1924 once Labor was in power. But Gandhi didn't like Beasant. He thought he was a bigger Mahatma than any the Theosophical Society venerated. So he promised devotion to Khilafat without any reciprocal commitment on cow-slaughter. But, in Indian law, such a transaction (i.e. one where no consideration passes) is considered 'benami'- bogus. The Muslims realized this in 1922 when Gandhi unilaterally surrendered. Moreover, it turned out that the Viceroy had been lobbying Whitehall on their behalf. Muslims- like the Ali brothers- had fallen for a cheap Bania trick.
Back in the winter of 1947-48, it was able to do so for two reasons; first, a fast by Gandhi, where the extraordinary moral and physical courage of a seventy-eight-year-old man shamed the citizens of Delhi into a vow of communal amity;
Which was wholly bogus. Muslims were still having to flee and those who wanted to return were turned back. Emigration from Delhi and surrounding areas continued till 1971 when the border was closed. Muslim Delhites had seen the writing on the wall in 1923 itself. They knew what their fate would be once the Brits left. From being a third of the population in 1947 (which was still much lower than what it had been in 1857) Muslims fell to being around five percent. That was under Congress. It is a myth that the INC pampered or protected Muslims. But that is why Congress was popular with Hindus! It was the muscular right arm of Hinduism. The RSS was merely a provincial copy of the Seva Dal. Indeed, Hegdewar was a pal of Hardikar and only set up his outfit as an 'over-ground' alternative to the Congress outfit.
and second, the assassination of Gandhi, which shamed Hindus everywhere into shunning organisations such as the RSS and the Mahasabha,
Congress killed or destroyed the property of plenty of Brahmins in Pune. Later, in 1984, it was the turn of the Sikhs in Delhi to feel the wrath of the Seva Dal- headed by Jagdish Tytler.
in whose crucible the killers of the Mahatma had been raised.
Congress violence against Maharashtrian Brahmins was mindless. Theirs was a Gandhian crucible- right?
Apart from shaming ordinary Hindus, Gandhi’s assassination had the further, and vital, consequence of bringing Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel back together.
Both Patel and Nehru knew that the Army wouldn't fire on Hindus. So there was little they could do except wait things out and tell lies about what was happening. I suppose, they had finally understood that the Freedom Struggle hadn't actually produced Freedom at all. Still, they had done a deal with the Brits and it was in their interest to pretend that sulking in jail was actually 'fighting for Independence'. One new enemy enabled this- viz. the challenge posed by the Communists. That's when Nehru secured his hold on power. He showed ruthlessness in dealing with the Reds but, in compensation, moved Congress to the Left.
The prime minister and the home minister had been on testy terms in the months following Independence; however, following the murder of their mutual Master, they nobly chose to bury their differences.
Patel was in the weaker position. Without the Mahatma he was nothing. Nehru could always lurch to the left and leave the old Gandhians stranded.
Much as BJP propagandists may try, they cannot efface the historical truth that in those crucial years, 1948 to1950, Nehru and Patel were comrades, not rivals, working shoulder-to-shoulder in uniting a nation from its fragments and building an institutional template for its democratic future.
Had Jinnah lived a little longer, the same may have been said of Jinnah and Liaquat.
Gandhi’s fast, Gandhi’s murder, and the coming together of Nehru and Patel all played their part in vanquishing the forces of Hindutva in those first, fraught years of Indian independence.
Congress wasn't 'Hindutva' only because it was Casteist. Brahmins and Kayasthas grabbed everything. The OBCs were treated with disdain. One reason Nehru wanted free food from America- though Truman had humiliated him- was that an agricultural country which can feed and defend itself is one where farmers take power away from Barristocrats.
Are there any lessons from that distant past for our contentious present?
Yes. Guha will go to Vienna- once Ranajit dies- and Ghost of Beethoven will bugger him senseless. Oh! The Joy!
In 1947-48, Hindutva was an insurgent force, attacking the State from the outside;
No. Hindutva was an insurgent force at the time of Vivekananda and Aurobindo and Savarkar and Subramaniyam Bharati. But the Great War changed things. The age of Empires was over. The treaty of Lausanne had shown that Religion mattered more than Language in determining Nationality. Greek speaking Muslims went to Turkey. Turkish speaking Christians went to Greece. Thus, the only question was whether India could gain Independence without Partition. The Mahacrackpot claimed to have a magical way to bring this about which involved spinning wheels and everybody giving each other enemas while chanting Ahimsa and going meekly to jail every now and then. Meanwhile his financiers gained wealth and power. Nehru, taking a Socialist tack, brought the money-men under control. That was why the Brahmins and Kayasthas liked him.
now, it commands the very levers of State power, and
India is doing better than ever before- at least where the BJP is well entrenched.
is seeking to bend every institution (including the judiciary and the military) to its will.
Guha thinks the military should have a will of its own. We must catch up with Pakistan in that respect. As for a self-selecting Judiciary- why does England or America or Europe not have any such thing? The answer, I suppose, has to do with Ghost of Beethoven.
What combination of crises, catastrophes and visionary leadership will it take for Hindutva to be dislodged from power?
All Indians ask is to have a better alternative to whichever bunch of politicians is currently fucking up their State. At the National level, would it be too much to ask to have a rival Prime Ministerial candidate other than, the moon-calf, Rahul?
Or could it be that the Hindu mind shall never regain its balance, condemning us all to a divisive and destructive future?
Not all of us. Once Ranajit dies, Guha can go off to the Vienna woods where he will be buggered by the Ghost of Beethoven. Oh! The Joy!
On how those questions shall be answered in the months and years ahead the future of our Republic may depend.
The future of the Indian Republic depends on getting girls out of the countryside into big factory dormitories. Boys can do construction or security or migrate to join the unorganized sector. That's it. That's the whole story. Religion doesn't matter. Doing sensible things for the Economy is all that matters.
Guha is a Tambram. Thanks to the Brahmin attachment to the Mahacrackpot, Brahmins became pariahs in Tamil Nadu. But the economy did better as the non-Brahmin majority took control. Brahmins gained because T.N became more educated and more prosperous. It is not a bad thing for a minority to lose a superiority complex and for them to learn to rub along with everybody else. Muslims in non-Muslim countries understand this perfectly well. So do Hindus. There is no point spending all your time cultivating a sense of grievance or a Manichean world view according to which 'majoritarianism' is always evil. Still, for Guha one final apotheosis awaits- buggery at the hands of the Ghost of Beethoven in the Vienna Woods. Oh! The Joy!
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