Dwiwedi & Mohan's hoax on Hindus

India- like Nepal, where President Bhandari and  Prime Minister Oli have both recently performed rituals at the Pashupatinath Temple- is a country where Communist Ministers justify their performance of Hindu rituals by saying that it will help destroy 'those who blacken the Red Flag'.

CPI (M) Party Secretary, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, 'is widely believed to have had his wife and son perform the ‘Shatrusamhaara puja’, a ritual whose objective is to neutralise an enemy, if not entirely annihilate him, at a famous temple while he held the home portfolio in the V S Achuthanandan government. However, more recently, another Minister, Kadakampally Surendran, has publicly offered prayers at the Guruvayur Sree Krishna temple in Thrissur district on the auspicious day of Ashtami Rohini on 12 September.  He was shown on television channels as performing pushpanjali (offering flowers to God) and praying with folded hands at the sacred steps during his day-long visit to the famed temple. Temple officials said he had also contributed money for annadhanam, a long-held, sacred tradition followed by the temple of offering food.'

This has sparked of some debate among Leftist intellectuals but will have no impact on voters. All they care about is that the Communists provide meritorious candidates- like Shailaja, the Health Minister who has won international accolades for her handling of the Nipah and Covid outbreaks. 

Still, it is curious that J Reghu and Shaj Mohan, who are both from Kerala, have written an article for Caravan magazine (along with Divya Dwiwedi) in which they take objection to Narendra Modi, who isn't a Communist, participating in a Hindu religious ceremony.

They write- 

During a religious ceremony marking the inauguration of the construction of the Rama temple, the prime minister, who heads the government of a country with a secular constitution, participated in the religious ritual, acting like a priest.

However, Modi is not a priest and he did not 'act like a priest'. He was the chief guest of a private Trust. His action was perfectly constitutional. Any Indian may participate in any religious ceremony whatsoever. Communists may not be permitted to do so by their Politburo. But they are at liberty to defy the Party Line. 

The Caravan article makes a fatuous claim, which is that the Hindus wanted to be seen as a majority. Yet, because minorities have superior rights, the fact is Hindu organizations- e.g. Brahmo Samaj, Swami Narayan etc- have repeatedly approached the Courts to gain recognition as a Minority. Jainism has secured this valuable status. Lingayats did get this status in Karnataka but the Center refused to endorse it saying that Dalit Lingayats would then lose benefits. Still, given the power of this prosperous and forward thinking community, it is bound to prevail sooner or later. Then the floodgates would open. Every sect would claim minority status. 

However, having minority status as a matter of law does not change anything on the ground politically speaking. Jains will vote like their Hindu brethren. Lingayats will vote like the other prosperous communities with similar interests and aspirations. 

Given the advantage of minority status and 'reserved seats' (under the British) why did the founders of the Hindu Mahasabha (amongst whom Motilal Nehru was one.  Mahatma Gandhi, too, showed up.) in 1916 stress the essential unity of the various Indian sects? The answer has to do with the need for massive social and moral reform of a type which required the ending of 'wasteful competition' for ritual status such that life-chances for the young, and for women, were destroyed in the name of stricter adherence to some supposed orthopraxy. Loss of caste because one 'crossed the black water' or one's women gave up purdah or one decided to study Medicine instead of the Law or one took food from a lower caste- this type of stupidity was holding back Hindus of all backgrounds. It affected their occupational and marital prospects. It was a huge impediment to the development of rationality and patriotism. 

It is true that the formation of the Hindu Mahasabha had been preceded by the formation of the Muslim League and it is certainly true that Muslim domination had been a nightmare for Hindus. However, the Mahasabha's formation was also a reaction to the World War which spelled the end of Imperialism- it seemed the Kaiser was determined to rob his English and Russian cousins of their Empires just as they were determined to put an end to his dynasty. What was becoming clear, on the battlefields of Europe, was that War was no longer the sport of Kings. It was an industrial enterprise which ultimately depended on the productivity of each nation's proletariat. It was against this background that the Bolsheviks- as the party determined to establish the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'- gained international salience.

Sadly, India's Left appears to have forgotten the painstaking lessons previous generations of Communist intellectuals sought to impart. They are embracing a paranoid theory such that a few high caste Hindus invented Hinduism a hundred years ago and fooled everybody into thinking India is a Hindu majority nation. 

Their article is titled-

The Hindu Hoax

How upper castes invented a Hindu majority

This raises the question, how did Gandhi and Malviya and so forth know they were Hindu? One answer might be that the Brits, for some fell purpose, invented Hinduism. But, in that case, it was they who, through the Census, invented the Hindu majority. 

TODAY, IN INDIA, nearly all media have been co-opted into “Hindu nationalism,” which appears to be virtually the only permissible perspective on politics.

This is nonsense. There are plenty of Christian and Muslim and Communist magazines and TV channels. But, where Hindus are the majority, Hindus will be catered to more capaciously.  

According to this perspective, “Hindu” is both an ancient religion and an ethnic group mythically born with it, thus making “Hindus” the eternal natives of India.

Since religion is heritable it is perfectly sensible to align ethnicity with religion- more particularly because this is what the historical record confirms. However, no one has claimed that all Hindus have the same ethnicity or that all Muslims or Christians belong to the same race. It is obvious that a Sindhi is of different language and ethnicity to a Tamil or Manipuri. Moreover there are now African and European converts to Hinduism.  

This political project seeks to return India to an ahistorical past in which Hindus were supposedly free of external “mlechcha,” or impure, mixtures—from the ancient Greeks to the European colonial powers.`

This is a pure invention on the part of the authors. Converts to Hinduism have been welcomed more particularly where they, quite visibly, belong to a different race. But this is true of all Religions. It is an affirmation of the universal validity and soteriological power of the sect to see that it attracts converts from far off places.

The authors however believe that Hinduism is not a religion like Christianity or Islam. It is a 'hoax'. 

less has been written about the hoax of Hinduism. The definition of “Hindu” lacks objective reality

'Hindu' is well defined for all legal and soteriological purposes. 'Christian' is not well defined but 'Catholic' or 'Anglican' etc. are well defined.  

The fact is Hindus exist in Bali and Nepal and so forth. It can't be a 'hoax' perpetrated a hundred years ago by some seditious Indian barristers.

and runs contrary to recent scholarship in various disciplines.

There is no such scholarship as opposed to paranoid ranting. 

The religion has been used to suppress and control the political aspiration of the oppressed castes, who were slipped into the Hindu religious category in the last century without consultation

This is the crux of the matter. The authors want Dalits to vote against the BJP. The problem here is that the BJP is meritocratic and enables Dalits to rise up purely on the basis of their personal qualities and achievements. The Communists in Kerala are quite meritocratic but, in Bengal, they were casteist. All that the Dalits want is that they be able to rise on merit. They want Justice not paranoid ranting about hoaxes which assume that their ancestors were stupid and easily misled. It is interesting that Dr. Ambedkar never denied that he and his ancestors were born into Hinduism- though he suggested that they may have originally been Buddhists. Thus, these authors are saying 'Ambedkar was not a scholar. He was a fool. He fell for a high caste hoax. Don't listen to Ambedkar, listen to us.' Yet Dr. Ambedkar was far better academically qualified than these cretins. He was a great lawyer, a great politician as well as being a profound scholar with two Doctorates- one from Columbia and the other from the LSE. 

By contrast, whatever pedagogy Dwiwedi and Mohan can offer is a shameless hoax upon their students.