Bhojshala in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh is the site of an ancient school of Sanskrit studies which houses the only Hindu temple in the world dedicated to Goddess Vagadevi (Saraswati). It was established around 1034 CE by Raja Bhoj, the the most celebrated ruler of the Paramāra dynasty. However, Bhojshala and the city of Dhar were ransacked by successive Muslim invaders and a mosque/dargah established in the erstwhile Bhojshala complex. The pratimaa of Maa Saraswati was taken away by the British Viceroy Lord Curzon in 1902 CE to be housed in the British Museum at London.
Ever since Independence, Hindus have been struggling to regain their right to worship in the Bhojshala temple and to reinstall the divine pratimaa of Maa Saraswati at the temple. A pratimaa is NOT a museum piece – It is sacred, divine.
As part of the movement to bring back the pratimaa from Britain, an open letter has been written by Swami Bharati Maharaj to Prime Minister Modi asking him to honour his promise of bringing back the Bhojshala pratimaa from British Museum.
The main allegation hurled at Hindus during the fake ‘Rising Intolerance‘ narrative peddled by mainstream media and Adarsh Liberals last year was that Modi’s ascent to the PM post had emboldened bigoted Hindus who were trampling all over the so-called religious minorities.
Before Lok Sabha elections 2014, each and every controversy involving Gujarat was highlighted without fail in media, and the buck stopped with Modi (then CM of Gujarat) – he was put squarely in the dock for anything and everything. For eg. this piece from 2013 makes Modi answerable for children from Rajasthan alleged to be working in cotton factories of Gujarat (for some reason, the Congress CM of Rajasthan escapes all questioning). Such razor sharp questioning of elected representatives is exactly what one expects from the media, and one thought that the advent of the Modi era would see all CMs across the nation being grilled with the same intensity to explain crime under their watch, growth figures, human indicators, policy decisions etc.
The NIA (National Investigation Agency) along with Telangana state police raided about 11 locations in Hyderabad last Wednesday and detained IS (Islamic State) terror suspects who were planning attacks on multiple locations. NIA has busted this IS module proactively and deserves applause for it as the attacks seemed imminent had these suspects not been detained.
Right to Education (RTE) continues to haunt the non-minority private schools across the nation. The problems and corruption related to RTE are already exposed in our previous articles. Under the RTE act, 25% seats from all private non-minority (aided or unaided) schools are reserved for children from underprivileged socio-economic backgrounds. The government reimburses fees of these students. Cases of corruption and malpractices in the root level of RTE have drawn out the real face of RTE, which is hidden behind the facade of social justice.
RTE has given birth to a new scam, where in order to get admissions under the RTE quota parents have started producing fake documents to show that they belong to Economically Weaker Section (EWS).
A troubling new documentary has revealed that a Hindu exodus similar to that in Kairana, West UP is currently underway in the Sundar Nagri area of the national capital, Delhi.
The documentary was created by Ravijot Singh, a video blogger, poet and speaker, and posted on his YouTube Channel with the title ‘Truth of Sunder Nagri – Are Hindu’s at risk?’ The 20 minute documentary can be seen below –
(This article is being presented as a 4-part series. It talks about the various forms of colonialism which thrive even today)
Part 1: Colonialism is Dead. Long Live Star-Dot-Star Colonialism?
Unguarded slips reveal an inner mindset. The Queen of England’s comment on Chinese rudeness was one such. And then there was one from Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, founder of Netscape and a Director at Facebook, was miffed when authorities in Bharat did not accept a Facebook proposal on grounds that it compromised net neutrality. In an exchange in twitter-world, Andreessen’s tweet termed anti-Colonialism as an ‘economic catastrophic for the Indian people for decades’ (see box below).
In the time and space between this tweet and its panic stricken deletion by Andreessen, a veritable storm blew up. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, applied some balm to calm things down. He issued politically correct comments and laced up sugary references to Indian ‘history and culture’. The incident got swept under the carpet in an attention deficit world.
It does not stop at mere slips that emerge out of a façade of political correctness. There are outright apologists too. In his article, ‘Revisiting the British Raj’, in Swarajya Magazine, Jaitirth Rao states that Lord Curzon and Lord Irwin were more worthy than Baba Kharak Singh and Kasturba Gandhi. He goes on to paint Lord Curzon as the saviour of Historical Monuments of Bharat by enacting the Preservation of Ancient Monuments Act of 1904 which he says was instrumental in protecting ancient monuments of Bharat (this itself is scrutinized later). Elsewhere, Rao suggests that we should have a balanced look at British Rule. To rub salt further, he adds that such a balance would indicate a maturity that is lacking now. He conveniently attributes this imbalance to the leftists who have been perhaps the mildest critics of colonial rule. This is a red herring too. What he really desires is that the current efforts to correct our history should be kind to the colonizers: his comments come at a time when the influence of Leftists is on the wane and an emerging narrative detailing the perspective of Bharat is being developed.
These comments and incidents deserve a closer scrutiny and perhaps a deeper understanding of the Colonial forces at play.
Firstly what these incidents reveal is a mindset prevailing amongst many policy decision makers in government, politicians, bureaucracy, international bodies, business, social bodies, think tanks that span a vast , visible and vocal section of society, but by no means is it universal. This mindset is an integral part of an ecosystem that rationalizes, legitimizes and strengthens colonialism in different flavours, shapes, sizes and creates new forms when old colonial games have played out their life.
The term Star-dot-Star Colonialism is used in this article to cover all forms of past, existing and yet to be manifested colonialism. The prefix Star-dot-Star (*.*), a term familiar to computer geeks, refers to all forms of colonialism including post-colonial institutions which are merely sophisticated ways to apply paint lipstick to a colonial pig that has proliferated everywhere.
Star-dot-Star colonialism is a Win-Lose paradigm where the underlying rules ultimately crystallize into a Heads-I-win-Tails-you-lose scenario for the colonized classes. There is no win-win in any form of Star-dot-Star colonialism even though all initiatives of Star-dot-Star Colonialism are packaged to appear so whenever they are released in new versions. The Colonizers have developed great expertise, institutions and elaborate methods to confuse the lay public and ultimately inflict great damage on their targets.
Consider four examples from a large number of documented articles, books and accounts of our forefathers a mere four to eight generations ago:
(a) The creation of the Forest Department in Colonial British India in 1864 was presented as an outstanding effort to save forests. In practice, it accelerated the depletion of forests with ‘lip service to principles of sustainable harvest’[1]. Adivasis and tribals were isolated from their sources of sustenance, timber exploited, species hunted and sacred groves withered. This form of colonialism marginalized adivasis and tribal communities in one stroke, affecting the livelihood of millions and dismantling a large knowledge base of sustainable forestry that had been in existence for thousands of years. There were a series of wars fought between the British colonizers and tribals from the Malpahariya conflicts right upto the struggles of Lakshman Naik in Orissa in 1942. Ironically, the displaced and dispossessed tribal victims of such policies who had been living in mutual interdependency with agricultural and urbanised societies of Bharat from time immemorial are now represented as victims of Hindu ‘oppression’ by a leftist academia while the colonizers are depicted as saviours who worked against Hindu ‘caste’ oppression![2] It is also rather strange that Dr. Ambedkar, the Architect of the Constitution, and a champion of the oppressed chose to keep such an oppressive Act essentially intact in the new Constitution. Thus the forest dwellers felt that no material change had occurred despite Independence.
Source: The Globalization of Environmental Crisis –By Jan Oosthoek, Barry K. Gills pp 15. As taken from http://bit.ly/GllznOfEnvCrisesBook
b) A narrow, rigid Intellectual Property interpretation became the framework to ensure high profits in the Pharmaceutical Industry internationally. All other possible win-win forms are brow-beaten into submission and obscurity by the ferocity of opposition from ‘experts’ orchestrated for this very task. Bharat is an exception and a victim of this: it was ostracised and also a victim of active piracy of bio-resources and traditional knowledge. A Traditional Knowledge Digital Library “… expert group estimated that, annually, some 2,000 patents relating to Indian medicinal systems were being erroneously granted by patent offices around the world”[3]. The countries which champion rigid IP interpretations and have populations facing high medical costs, have well established barriers to pharmaceutical generics and a healthcare crisis.
Web link: http://bit.ly/WIPOArticleOnTKDL
(c) Climate related negotiations show that developed countries stall emission norms being applied to them and yet they label countries like Bharat as spoil sports despite Bharat contributing 3% to global greenhouse gases while having 16% of the world population[4] – in contrast to the US contributing 27% of global greenhouse gases with about 5% of the world population. The pattern of blaming the victims and allowing the real culprits to get away continues in all forms of Star-dot-Star colonialism.
(d) In his article referenced earlier, Jaitirth Rao mentions the Preservation of Ancient Monuments Act of 1904 sponsored by Lord Curzon. This merits a closer look. Contrary to what Rao points out, the Act was a blatant piece of legislation which put the onus of preservation on owners, ensured the Centre’s rights to acquire or even be ‘gifted’[5] Ancient Monuments or Assets and appropriate land and other areas by declaring properties as Ancient. The law had provisions that allow intervention like possession of assets on the basis of a mere apprehension. In recent times, Iraq was invaded and occupied on the apprehension that it ‘might be having’ weapons of mass destruction. Presumptive clauses such as this and how many properties could be defined as ‘Ownerless’ under Section 4[6] of this Act and appropriated by the Centre gave sanction for abuse. Ironically and as a consequence, there are more manuscripts and antiques to be found in the British Museum than the Indian National Museum: and much of this was facilitated under this Act. This Act was instrumental in removing live sacred practices as was an integral part of ancient shrines from the physical monument. Thus the worship at the inner sanctum sanctorum at Shringeri or at Mahabalipuram was ceased as soon as these places were taken up by the Archaeological Society of India[6] set up for this purpose. The parallels of this with the fate of the forest dweller Adivasis affected by the establishment of the Forest Department mentioned earlier is striking.
In the same article, Jaitirth Rao credits the British for giving us a ‘united’ nation. It is comically ironical to discuss this today when UK is itself faced with Brexit challenges, demands for the breaking away of Wales, Scotland and a call for an independent City-Country of London. Either Rao’s gratefulness to the British is misplaced or we are indeed immature and unbalanced in stating that Sardar Patel stitched together a united Bharat by bringing 576 princely states to give us the map of Bharat as we know it now. Rao conveniently forgets to mention that British had actually given us on the 15th of August, 1947, a moth eaten political reality with amputated, bleeding limbs and a lopped off head –which was attached to Bharat and a part which is under illegal Pakistani colonial occupation. The myth being fashionably perpetuated about the British uniting Bharat must be examined with facts as the political map of the set-up pre-1947[7] and a current map[8] of Bharat shows:
Bharat is mature and balanced enough to keep relationships with other countries and civilizations cordial and mutually beneficial in the present despite the sordid past. But to do so, one does not have to airbrush the terrible, gut wrenching misdeeds of colonizers – just one example is pictured alongside[9] – and paint the occupation as if
Bengal famine engineered by British; Picture source [9]
colonizers had come with oodles of goodies for the ‘barbaric’ masses. This is an error the colonizers and their enablers make – perhaps because they are yet to give up their colonial mindset or paradoxically, are neither balanced nor mature enough to see the brutal reality of what the common man was faced with during colonial rule. Worse, it makes the real victims appear to be terrible culprits and terrible culprits look like benign benefactors.
With so much distortion in the narratives, it is no surprise that the colonial mindset finds its way into many assumptions in plush corporate boardrooms – from strategy to product design to supply-chain management to human resource decisions. It oozes into investment decisions for private capital allocation. It flows into developmental policies in multilateral bodies. It shapes institutional programs. It warps perceptions and policies on Agriculture, Food, Water, Education, Urban Planning, Rural Development, Forestry and much more.
Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts (FUDs) are deliberately created to present challenges to ‘humanity’ by new versions of colonialism that create new win-lose scenarios. All current or emerging waves of colonialism appear as Saviours. Simultaneously, older hapless victims of earlier phases of Colonialism are faulted. Thus colonial historians depict Hindus as oppressors – a case of painting the real victims as the designated ‘villains’ in their narratives while British and other Colonizers are the agents of ‘progress’. This is why every school child today can effortlessly rattle off the ‘evils’ of Hinduism – Caste, Suttee, Dowry, Untouchability, Dalits, Adivasis and the ‘benefits’ of Colonialism – ‘unification’ of the country, English Language, ‘Education’, Railways, Technology, Science and ‘Institutions’. At the same time, they are hard pressed to remember anything positive about Hindus or Bharat’s living knowledge systems or their methods or the excesses and impact of Colonial policy on our people. It is this imbalance that Jaitirth Rao (and others – he shows up as an example in this case only) should spend his energies and intelligence around rather than the other way around – for that is the shocking reality elites in colonized countries have avoided.
In the next part, we shall examine the conditions that have made Star-dot-Star colonialism prevalent. We look at the key drivers that make normal human beings into becoming conditioned Pavlovian cogs in mechanisms organized to inflict slavery and pseudo-slavery, destruction of family & social structures, and creating trade & financial regimes that help perpetuate this win-lose asymmetry.
End of Part 1
[1] Buchy, 1993 as quoted in The Globalization of Environmental Crisis –By Jan Oosthoek, Barry K. Gills pp 15. Ref: http://bit.ly/GllznOfEnvCrisesBook.
[2] Many adivasi heroes like Birsa Munda, Kanhu Santhal, Tantya Bhil, Lakshman Naik, Ambul Reddi, Thalakkal Chandu are ignored in the official text books which hide the colonial wars against tribals. Also see: Tribal Contemporary Issues: Appraisal and Intervention – Ramaṇikā Guptā , p 14 (http://bit.ly/TrblCntpryIss-RGupta)
[3] Source: http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2011/03/article_0002.html ; India set up the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) in 2001 and since then it has recorded over 2 million traditional medicines to prevent their appropriation by modern day methods of asset appropriation.
[4] See: http://time.com/4138055/india-paris-talks-climate-change/ for a view explaining India’s position.
[5] The act of getting things ‘gifted’ has been used in many cases of colonial appropriation. The most famous act of such coercive ‘gifting’ was the appropriation of the Kohinoor Diamond.
[6] A discussion mentioning the separation of the sacred from Sanskrit and the adoption of Temples by ASI that made worship impossible can be seen in this Youtube discussion featuring Rajeev Malhotra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAdrrmjDZm8
[9] Picture taken from http://worldobserveronline.com/2014/08/20/bengal-famine-british-engineered-worst-genocide-human-history-profit/
Note: There was a minor typo in the original article published on 5 July which has now been corrected. “It is oozes..” has been changed to “It oozes..”
Tarishi Jain was just 19, a young adult enrolled in an economics course with one of the top colleges in the world, and with everything to look forward to in life. Like most urban Hindus/Indics she was most likely brought up believing the Sanskrit maxim ‘sarv dharm sambhav‘ popularly mis-interpreted as ‘all religions are equal’. Religion most likely played a peripheral role in her life. Tragically, this young girl’s life was brutally snuffed out sometime in the wee hours of Saturday by other young adults like her – well educated and hailing from privileged backgrounds, with one crucial difference – her murderers were fanatical followers of the religion they were born into, Islam.
“Sometime before 6 am on Saturday when 19-year-old Tarishi Jain’s phone went dead, her father Sanjiv Jain, who had been waiting outside Gulshan Cafe through most of the night after he got to know that heavily armed terrorists had stormed the restaurant in upscale Dhaka and were butchering guests, got a call.
It was from his daughter, cowering inside a toilet with two of her friends, Faraaz Ayaz Hossain and Abinta Kabir, hiding from the rat-tat-tat of gunfire outside the washroom’s door. ” Terrorists have entered the restaurant,” she told her father, who was planning just a day earlier to bring his wife and two children to Firozabad in UP for a short holiday before Tarishi headed back to the US where she was an Economics undergraduate at the University of California. “I am very afraid and not sure whether I will be able to come out alive. They are killing everyone here.“
It had been a long and harrowing night for Sanjiv as he gathered with dozens of anxious family and friends of those huddled in the cafe to know how the bloody strike on innocent and unarmed men and women would end. By the time the terrorists were neutralised, 20 people, mostly foreigners and among them Tarishi – the only Indian among the casualties – had died.
Tarishi was a recipient of an internship with a Bangladesh bank through the Institute for South Asia Studies at her university in California.”
Tarishi’s father runs a garment business in Bangladesh for the last 15-20 years. After graduating from the American school, Dhaka she had moved to the US for higher studies.
Tarishi was killed because she was a kafir (one who disbelieves, an infidel, non-Muslim). Quoting a rescued hostage, the Daily Star, a Bangladesh daily reportedthose who could recite a verse from the Quran were spared and the others were tortured before being killed.
The earlier media report goes on to add –
“Her brother Sanchit, who has done his engineering from Canada, had landed in Delhi a day earlier so that the family of four, along with mother Tulika, could all head to Firozabad — where Sanjiv’s three brothers Rakesh, Rajiv and Ajit have a flourishing trade in glass — on Saturday. That family reunion was never to be. At the Jains’ Suhag Nagar home in Firozabad, there is both anger and deep grief. “We don’t want her to be cremated in the land where she was brutally murdered. Terrorists killed her for being a Hindu,” Sanjiv’s younger brother Rakesh Mohan Jain told TOI.”
The Softening of the Hindu mind
Over the last 100 years, Hindus, especially English educated ones, have gradually drifted away from their religio-cultural roots. They have started believing the secularist propaganda fed by the Nehruvian school that their religion is intrinsically backward, regressive and anti-modern. To make matters worse, Hindus have been led to believe that Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christianity (which are organized, well funded and aggressively proselytizing global religions) are more egalitarian and accessible, and that being minorities in Bharat followers of these religions are always at risk of persecution by the orthodox Hindu majority.
Our media is at the forefront of this well-oiled propaganda machinery, and hence events like the murder of Mohammed Akhlak in Dadri are incessantly portrayed as brute Hindu majority attacking the defenceless innocent Muslim minority, disregarding the fact that Akhlak had stolen and killed a calf (an illegal act in UP, as in 24 out of 29 states of the Union of Bharat) which inflamed passions leading to his unfortunate lynching.
But Tarishi’s murder will get a fraction of the coverage that Akhlak did – in any case, reference to the fact that Tarishi was brutally hacked to death only because she was a Hindu and not a Muslim will be muted at best. Another fact that will be suppressed is that most of the terrorists involved in the Dhaka atrocity were well-educated Bangladeshi Muslims from well to-do families. And that most Muslims continue to deny that IS (Islamic State) derives its legitimacy from authentic Islamic sources.
In fact, taqiya (Islamic doctrine of deception) artists like Shahid Siddiqui continue to deflect attention from IS and blame the usual trinity of CIA, Mossad and RAW for defaming Muslims by ‘staging’ attacks like the recent Florida shooting.
Shahid Siddique preaches secularism in english & then spreads venom in his Urdu papers.Very very imp this is shared https://t.co/YdJGb0YKoj
Till the time a critical mass of Hindus acknowledge the harsh reality that they are completely misinformed and unaware of the danger posed by Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christianity (and their communist allies in Bharat), they will continue to bleed, both literally and figuratively. We cannot rely on educated & ‘moderate’ Muslims to introspect and reform their religion – we will have to play an equal part in the debate.
Bangladesh is a nation which is over 90% Muslim, where Islam is recognized as the state religion, and Islamists dominate socio-political life to such an extent that Hindus have fallen from 22% of the total population in 1951 to less than 8% today. Yet Bangladesh is not ‘Islamic enough’ for outfits like Islamic State, Al Qaeda in the Indian Sub-continent, Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), and JeI’s electoral alliance partner Bangladesh Nationalist Party (also the nation’s chief Opposition party).
For the last few years, Bangladesh has been fighting a grim war with Islamists of various hues who are opposed to even the bare minimum rule of law which allows minorities like Hindus, Buddhists etc the freedom to practise their religion. And events over this weekend should leave no one in doubt that Bangladesh today is under siege by Islamists; it is a nation on the brink and the warning bells should be ringing loud and clear in Bharat and the rest of the world.
If you do not value your own tradition, other people will not value it either, however important it may be. If you do not have any real conviction as to the relevance of your spiritual path for the entire world, no one else will either, even if the path that they follow is much more limited.
Hindu Dharma is the planet’s representative of Sanatana Dharma, the universal tradition of cosmic knowledge and Self-realization. It shows us how to discover the entire universe as a manifestation of our own deepest Self and consciousness. Such a profound view of life is almost unheard of in any other religion, science or philosophy.
Yet after many centuries of foreign rule and sustained forceful efforts to convert them, Hindus have lost much of the confidence and breadth of thought that goes along with Sanatana Dharma. They may appreciate their own particular guru, sect or sampradaya, but seldom recognize the common background tradition of Sanatana Dharma and its overall supreme value.
The Issue of Hindu Identity
As Hindu Dharma is formulated as a universal tradition, Hindus can be too quickly inclusive of other spiritual and religious formulations, even those trying to convert them. Hindus do not assert their identity; in fact, they are often apologetic about it. I have heard a number of Hindus state when asked about their religion, “I am a Hindu but I accept all the other religions also.” This is usually said, one should note, without such Hindus having actually studied other religions in any detail.
To preserve Sanatana Dharma for all humanity, a strong Hindu identity must prevail – first in Bharat and then globally – affording Hindus the confidence to learn about, practice and share their vast tradition. Unfortunately, Hindu identity is compromised in the world, even in Bharat. It has been making a revival in the recent decades of the Hindu movement, but still has far to go. Even today we find some who follow Hindu traditions like Yoga, Vedanta, Vaishnavism or Shaivism, stating that they are not Hindus.
Others claim that Hindu is just a geographical term. What do you tell Hindu children in the West – who certainly cannot be called Hindus in the geographical sense – when they are asked about their religion? If the term Hindu is not appropriate to use, what term is better? There is no other religious box they can mark that can substitute for it, when they are asked to fill out common information forms about their background. Western society recognizes their religion as Hindu and relates to it accordingly.
Having Hindu Dharma accepted as a religion in the West affords many benefits to Hindus, socially and politically, which cannot be underestimated, extending to marriage, institutions, education and other social and legal protections. Whatever qualifications one may have about the accuracy of the Hindu word, one must accept that it is how Sanatana Dharma is best represented in common discourse in the world today.
Hindu Dharma and Tolerance
Hindu Dharma is tolerant by nature of its universal teaching. Hindus do not become intolerant by saying that they are Hindus, but instead help make others aware of the vast scope and relevance of Hindu Dharma. To say “I am a Hindu”, is a way of breaking down religious barriers and taking humanity back to its common spiritual origins in the great seers and yogis of ancient times. Hindus should be proud of their identity and their preservation of Sanatana Dharma that other peoples and cultures have lost and replaced with more limited beliefs.
Unfortunately, Bharat’s leftist media intentionally gives the impression that even to call oneself Hindu is intolerant and communal, but to call yourself Christian or Islamic is progressive and tolerant. Yet the fact is that Hindus are still targeted for humiliation and conversion by those who follow exclusive and intolerant forms of Christianity and Islam – and this is occurring regularly throughout Bharat itself! It is not that Hindus have a comparable predatory agenda and funding to convert non-Hindus!
How do you tolerate someone, whose primary principle is that “we will not tolerate you.” How do you include someone in a universal vision of truth, who has a contrary exclusive view and considers that truth belongs to their prophet, book or deity alone and all others are either false or inferior?
Such convictions are not simply personal or intellectual but allied with global missionary movements and global jihad. Saudi Arabia funded Madrasas, which are now spread throughout Africa and Asia and are the main education centers globally for Islam, certainly do not teach an honoring of Hindu Dharma. Nor do the Catholic Church or Evangelical Christians respect Hindu Dharma and its extraordinary yogic and philosophical teachings.
Uniqueness of Hindu Dharma
Hindu Dharma cannot be simply equated with other religions – particularly conversion and belief-oriented traditions – as simply one path among many, with all being part of one happy family of the world’s great religions. The goal of Hindu Dharma is God realization and Self-realization. This is not the goal of western religions, though there may be rare mystics among them who are oriented in this direction because it is the ultimate goal of all human life.
Hindu Dharma is inclusive of all sincere religious and spiritual practices. It can accept use of images or non-use of images, elaborate rituals or no rituals, devotional worship or a purely philosophical approach. Hindu Dharma is a spiritual art and science that seeks to preserve and make available to all sincere seekers all genuine approaches to the universal truth and happiness, which vary at an individual level according to spiritual growth and karma.
Indeed, there is probably a greater variety of spiritual and religious views within Hindu Dharma than in all other religions of the world combined. That is how Hindu Dharma reflects its origin in the idea of Sanatana Dharma – a universal and eternal path that is perpetually renewed. Sanatana Dharma cannot be sustained or preserved without a Hindu identity that honors it and remains rooted in its ancient origins. Its corpus of knowledge and wealth of history requires a tremendous effort to uphold in every generation.
Hindu Dharma’s profound teachings about the universal nature of consciousness will not reach the world unless Hindus are willing to make the effort to share and express them. Hindus should honor their identity in this universal Vedic tradition of spiritual knowledge, and promote it for the benefit of all humanity. Otherwise the loss will be irreparable for everyone and for many centuries to come.
On May 28, 2016 when Bharat was celebrating another successful year of PM Modi’s ever progressive administration, a unique ceremony was unfolding hundreds of miles from its shores at ‘Central Cellular Jail’ of Port Blair in Andaman Islands.
Unveiling of Savarkar Jyot by Amit Shah, President of BJP and other dignitaries
On this day, in presence of Amit Shah, President of BJP and other dignitaries, the long awaited honor of one of Bharat’s greatest freedom fighters– Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, popularly known as Swatantryaveer Savarkar was once again being restored.
It was not only a tribute to his sacrifices for Bharat, but also, to his pioneering social efforts to build a nationalistic unified society. It was also the 133rd birth anniversary of this iconic revolutionary.
PM Modi paying his respect to Veer Savarkar
By rededicating ‘Veer Savarkar Jyot’ on this day, PM Modi was rewriting a dark hurtful episode that created a national fire-storm, a decade earlier. Then, the Congress Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, as an appeasement to his leadership had misguidedly removed the Plaque dedicated to Savarkar from the ‘Memorial for Bharatiya Revolutionaries’ at the Cellular Jail and replaced it with the one for Mahatma Gandhi.
The fact of the matter is, though Mahatma Gandhi was an iconic freedom fighter, he was not a revolutionary (‘Krantikaari’) nor had he ever been into Andaman’s draconic ‘kala-paani’ Jail. With this event, PM Modi also fulfilled the promise he had made to the electorates.
Port Blair Airport of Andaman Islands was already named as ‘Veer Savarkar International Airport’ by former PM Vajpayee during his administration. It is worth assessing why Savarkar has a place of reverence in Bharat’s history.
In the galaxy of Bharatiya revolutionaries, the words ‘Swatantryaveer’ and ‘Savarkar’ are almost synonymous with each other. Born on May 28, 1883, he was so much consumed with passion to liberate Bharat from British rule that at the tender age of 8, he took the oath to liberate his country with all possible means and to fight for it till the end.
While studying Law (Barrister) in London on scholarship, he not only sowed the seeds of Independence-movement among the Bharatiya students studying there, but also created an international support forum for it.
It was there that he wrote his ground-breaking famous book “1857 – First War of Independence” on an epic historic chapter of collective bravery of Princely states of Bharat to overthrow the British Raj. Savarkar, with his painstaking research, showed to the world that this entire episode which the British had derided as nothing short of a ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, was in fact the most courageous effort of gallantry to liberate the country. At the time, this book had the distinction of being proscribed (banished) by two governments, even before it was published.
This fearless patriot shook the mighty British rule in Bharat so much so that he was sentenced to two life-terms of 25 years each on trumped-up charges for his relentless activities against the British-Raj. Savarkar’s dramatic daring escape to the shores of Marseilles, France from the porthole of the ship that was to carry him to Bharat for the trial is now a part of heroic folklore.
His subsequent arrest by the British on French soil became cause-célèbre in the International Court of Law at Hague setting the stage for the then French government to topple. At his trial, where he was denied all personal representation, Savarkar, on hearing his sentence courageously rebuked the Judge with, “what makes you think that you are going to last that long in my motherland”. That is exactly what happened. Savarkar went on to live in Free Bharat for years to come.
Madanlal Dhingra, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Shaheed Bhagat Singh and scores of others took counseling and inspiration from him during the Independence Struggle. He was the first political leader to demand absolute political independence for Bharat – not just independence – as the only goal for the country’s liberation.
Savarkar remains the only Bharatiya to forfeit his degree of ‘Barrister’ because of his refusal to take the pledge of allegiance to the British throne. He was not only a gifted writer, inspiring orator, outstanding poet-dramatist, but also a comprehensive social reformer. He created an active crusade against untouchability and religious demagoguery. As a brilliant visionary, Savarkar’s prophesies of the pre-independence period are now modern-day Bharat’s stark sociopolitical realities.
Savarkar was the ultimate prince among all revolutionaries and spent a decade in Anadaman’s Cellular Jail in the most inhuman conditions. In spite of that, the British could not break his morale or his will to fight the British Raj. Within the walls of the gigantic Cellular Jail, Savarkar continued his work of eradicating untouchability and illiteracy among the prisoners to unify them.
One must read his famous book, ‘My Life Sentence’ (“Mazi Janmthep”) to know what he endured and what he achieved even in this adversity. As Savarkar’s written words, including his poems were like live-wire to ignite fire of independence in the hearts of Bharatiyas, he was denied paper, pen-pencil in the Andaman prison. Savarkar triumphed over this inconvenience by writing his poems on the prison walls by thorns and making the prisoners memorize them whenever someone was to be released.
This is how his inspiring work was transported to the underground resistance in Bharat for nationwide circulation. In this captivity, his greatest creation – 10,000 stanzas ‘Kamala- Mahakavya’ – the lengthiest poem ever written in the world – was born.
For creating a mass movement for freedom struggle, Savarkar established “Hindu Mahasabha” which became one of the leading political forces at the time.
Savarkar’s intellectualism was based solely on Science and Technology, rather than on ritualistic religious notions. Needless to say, his views, at times, were contrarian to age-old Hindu dogmas. He initiated and propagated the concept of ‘Hindutva’ as the primary identity of ‘Bharatbhoomi’, giving rise to ‘Hindu Nationalism’. He defined it, fundamentally in terms of the nation’s consciousness, its cultural soul and eternal heritage – but not in religious terms.
He gave self-esteem, national identity, and unflinching courage to ‘Bharitiya nationalists’. Not many people know that Savarkar has been a political guiding light in the life of Hon. PM Modi all along, like many generations before him. Savarkar left this mortal world on February 26, 1966 by refusing to have any food in his last days, in the best traditions of yogic Hindu philosophy.
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