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What do the Taliban and Union Shipping Minister TR Balu have in common? The Taliban once thumbed its nose at an outraged global community by turning the world heritage Bamiyan Buddhas to rubble. But savage iconoclasm is not the sole preserve of puritanical fanatics who bend thought and history to their totalising Word.
The Bamiyan syndrome afflicts self-professed participants in democracy as well. Both types of idol-breakers choose soft targets. In the Diamond Sutra, the famed Sakyamuni said: "Lifetimes ago when my body was cut into pieces by (the) King (of) Kalinga, I was not caught in the idea of a separate self. If I ... had been caught up in any such idea, I would have felt anger and ill-will against the king." Hinduism, from which Buddhism sprang, is the original reservoir of this spiritual largesse. Small wonder its adherents have been sitting-duck objects of scorn and malicious attack in India. The reason is revealing:
Their attackers appear pathologically in denial about the fact Hinduism is India's civilisational core. Without this many-splendoured way of life, the nation's hoary traditions would be a conceptual impossibility and a material cipher. Yet, the Hindu's demonisation and victimisation have been the bricks with which India's so-called pluralist edifice is built. Anyone claiming to be "secular" must perforce be "ashamed" to be Hindu-this institutionalised "sharm se kaho hum Hindu hain" bromide was regurgitated by DMK luminary Balu at a recent Christian function. And why not? Normative "secularism" in India means respecting the sensitivities of all social groups-barring Hindus. It is also an implicit command: Hindus are to submit their intrinsic tolerance to forced elasticity. They must 'prove' they are not "communal" by swallowing every insult, even from members of their flock who wear self-flagellation and spiritual cretinism as a badge of honour. Mr Balu apologised for being "born Hindu". Atheism is his defence for dismantling his community's altar, and for metaphorically erasing the deeply religious Mahatma's image graven in the national psyche.
Apologising for India's resilient
pre-Islamic heritage can be traced back beyond the Dravida brand of militant
repudiation of faith per se-though one would have expected Mr Balu to reject
all faiths and not, tellingly, single out Hinduism. Gandhi first realised
Nehruvian nation-building would turn out a "moral disaster" if its assertion
of freedom involved spiritual parricide, based on the driving myth of all
revolutionary adolescents: That a socio-political order could be born full-grown.
The Mahatma knew free India had to draw inspiration from its organic links
with the humanist breadth and constitutive plurality of the Hindu way of
life. Yet Nehru's Marxist/agnostic paradigm rejected the civilisational
impulses that had fathered Bhartiyata. His intellectual heirs, their political
variety notwithstanding, would lend feigned shame over Hindu origins to
political encashment. The strategy was two- pronged: Demean the Hindu and
appease the non-Hindu, via crafty indigenisation of colonial divide-and-rule.
Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee has alluded to this 'Partition' mentality, when
rightly decrying the Congress's endorsement of religion-based quotas. What
doubtless came as a shock to Hindu-baiters is their victim's belated awakening,
his rebellion against forced emasculation, his insistence that Indian nationalism
is a hollow shell without cultural self-esteem. Organisations such as the
VHP did a yeoman's service by countering Hindu self-denigration, saying:
"Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain". That Hindu pride needed this radical reassertion
at all constitutes India's real shame. Hindus have nothing to be ashamed
of- save the undeserved Hindu birth of kin such as Mr Balu.
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