Author: George Augustine
Publication: Vijayvaani.com
Date: May 27, 2018
URL:      http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4687

Delhi Archbishop Anil Couto’s letter to Catholics dated May 8, 2019, to “pray for democracy” and exhorting his flock to “defeat Hindu forces” is a battle cry that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party should take to heart very closely. Archbishop Couto is a representative of the most undemocratic organisation in the world and the agent of an alien nation state, the Vatican, which has imperial designs in its operational manifesto. The Christian call for battle bodes ill for India’s democracy and for its majority Hindus.

The strategy of communal divide

For the ruling elite in any nation, democracy or not, keeping the majority in the grip of unrefined, primeval sentiments always pays well. If a sizeable group of people has grown beyond the basic earthly needs, showing carrots stop working and more is asked for. The easiest way is to create quarrels among themselves or with others. Divide people and it pays!

The ‘divide and rule’ tactic the British imperialists experimented with by promoting political divisions between Hindus and Muslims in India is a case study in itself. The British adopted it as a legitimate strategy to govern India and when it was time to leave, divided the country into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India as a parting shot, leaving behind the misery of millions who perished in the tragic consequences without shedding a tear. It ensured that the sub-continent could never remain in peace in the background of the then Cold War and the shadow of a collective Imperial West headed by the USA.

Wherever there is a  livid, non-healing laceration among humankind, like India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland (where a tall wall keeps the peace), and so on, orchestrated divisions are the sores that fester. Where there is no religious divide, comes sectarianism like Sunni-Shia and Protestant-Catholic. Ethnic divisions also play a role like Kurds who want Kurdistan for themselves.

Global phenomenon

Communal or religious divides are nurtured in almost every country, and this accounts for most of the human conflicts taking place around the globe. Where communal divides were not possible (as in Palestine before 1948), the Imperial West imported Jews into the new Israel and made sure they were created.

Not many people know that the co-founder of geo-political strategy, H.J. Mackinder, had envisaged the Jewish settlers in Palestine around half a century before the imperialists implemented it. Mackinder would nod satisfactorily in his grave with the goings-on at the present-day White House, with Trump upping the ante for Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a spot Mackinder thought was the “navel” on the world map and very important to occupy to control the world.

So, communal divides are necessary all around, for the local leaders as well as for imperialists of all hues whose mortal eyes focus steadfastly on the planet’s resources and for the ultimate control of the world.

Religious divide in India

Distinguished from other countries, India is unique for its high population of Hindus, which phenomenon one cannot come across anywhere else (barring Nepal). There is some kind of contention among scholars and the intelligentsia about the status of Hindus as a religious group, for such is the variety of spiritual endeavour among them – ranging from brainy philosophies and staunch atheists up to the Semitic kind of no-evidence believers who faithfully enact blood sacrifices on a regular basis.

I prefer to call all the Hindus just pagans or heathens or infidels, because that is precisely what their self-proclaimed spiritual enemies such as the Christians and Muslims call them and who have been trying for more than 1500 years to annihilate them, prompted by their respective scriptural injunctions to get rid of them from the face of the earth, instigating their headless footmen by blessing this heinous act as a major religious duty. These scriptures are still deemed “holy” by faithful Christians and Muslims.

In the shadow of these primeval scriptural injunctions, the communal divide in India looks substantial, particularly when religious ideologies divide the human species on the basis of belief systems. Though the Hindus (pagans) amount to nearly 80 per cent of the country’s population, they are outnumbered by Muslims and Christians the world over. The dwindling population of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh in recent times as well as the massacre of scores of Hindus in Myanmar by Rohingya Muslim terrorists in August 2017 (all Hindu countries some centuries ago) in their bid to change their pagan status, indicates that the dynamic scriptural forces of the Semitic religions still form a paramount factor in India as well.

Two hundred years of British education in India have made sure that the prejudice against the pagans and the “divide and rule” policy continued to flourish in India. The electoral divides between Hindu and Muslim were carefully nurtured by the Indian polity, since it fetched easy dividends for the ruling party. Add to it another kind of divide they deftly engineered within the Hindus, the so-called low castes and high castes, and the ruling Congress party continued to rule India for 60 years.

This political and social situation was aided and abetted by external forces, mostly through missionary enterprise, which controlled the health care and social welfare organisations, and sometimes funded by imperial spying agencies as in the North East of India. The control of the media and an education system that glorified the Semitic worldview demeaning the pagans and their worldview also reinforced this power structure, and most educated Hindus themselves were seemingly embarrassed to be pagans at all, so much so that many of these Hindus themselves joined their rivals and engaged heartily in periodic journalistic blitzkriegs around the world that regularly put to shame their own Hindu culture and civilisation before a Semitically inclined world audience.

Rise of Hindu nationalism

A radical change in the political and social scene in India took place with the rise of Narendra Damodardas Modi to power under the banner of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a party which came into being in 1980. Modi became successful only because he could unify people across communal lines. In Gujarat where Modi ruled for three terms as Chief Minister, a substantial number of Muslims regularly voted for his party despite the bloody riots that heralded his reign, which found them at the wrong end of the stick. The bloody riots followed the Godhra massacre where a criminal crowd killed more than 50 pagans, most of them women and kids. But the point to note is that Modi’s Gujarat has never seen a single Hindu-Muslim riot in more than one and half decades, a record none of the previous governments in Gujarat ever managed.

Until the rise of Narendra Modi, Hindu culture was looked down upon, derided and made fun of (like the Hindu rate of economic growth) by the Western imperial establishment with whom the erstwhile ruling elite in India colluded in and joined in the ridicule. The rise of Modi saw the rise of Hindu nationalism like never before. Young men and women, among them many Muslims and Christians, began to come out in public with pride in their eyes and fire in their hearts chanting “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”.

Many of these people from the minority religions identified with their ancestral culture, which was still the culture of the majority. The opposition had no answer to this unexpected pride of young people in the old pagan glory and they were shell shocked. The opposition began to lose one election after the next, so that BJP now rules in over 20 states. However, the opposition is finding new bearings, starting to play new tricks at their old game of divide and divide. Their combined strength is still short of beating the BJP in most places in India, but they are garnering strength from external sources.

One of the mainstays of the opposition has always been the clergymen of Islam and Christianity who colluded with them against the majority pagans whenever they got an opportunity. The existence of nearly a billion Hindus in India today might look like a miracle for religious researchers who can rarely find old pagans anywhere else, but for the professional practitioners of Islam and Christianity, the rise of Hindu nationalism heralds not only a road block for their conversion enterprise, but also the thwarting of their religious mandate as commissioned by their scriptures. On top of it, they also have to answer their minders in places such as Saudi Arabia and the Vatican.

Vatican’s challenge

Delhi Archbishop Anil Couto’s battle cry should be taken as Vatican throwing down the gauntlet, considering the hierarchical discipline of its officials. Hindus have taken the challenge calmly in their characteristic fashion, but this should be taken as a serious warning from the international Christian establishment.

The fate of“pagan” India will be decided in the 2019 elections. Much will depend on how far Modi can hold together the unity that he had been steadily forging across religious and caste barriers and how much more he can inculcate a pride in the Hindu nation among ordinary countrymen regardless of their personal faiths. The motley crowd that have become the opposition is very dangerous indeed considering the media machinery at their disposal, backed by most of the big names in the West and the enormous funds at their disposal from external sources.