Politics of paranoia-India will always remain the land of Gandhi,not of Godse
JPR:
Get a load of this.
Holy mama this is quite an indictment on VHP, doesn't look good at all for the Parivar gang. I had no idea these dimwits sat out the 'freedom struggle' against the damn British only now to emerge as the 'real patriots', how amusingly quaint!!
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The politics of paranoia
(Amulya Ganguli-Hindustan Times)
There is nothing sudden, spontaneous or unplanned about the Sangh Parivar's anti-Christian agitation. Instead, it represents the classical fascist practice of demonising a community by creating a fear psychosis, a paranoia, about its malefic objectives among the majority population. With remarkable coordination between the different Parivar outfits and outside support from fellow travellers in the academic and journalistic world, a propaganda barrage is unleashed comprising half truths, plain lies and crude insinuations to paint a fearful picture of the horrendous deeds committed by Christians and their priests in the past, and their secret subversive plans for the future.
These range not only from their clandestine efforts "to win India for Christ" within a certain period of time, but also undermine the country's sovereignty through militant uprisings of the faithful in the north-east. And all these nefarious plans, hatched in India and abroad, are presented against the background of a helpless motherland, which has suffered for centuries because of the cowardice, lack of foresight and even sheer treachery of the Parivar's political adversaries. But no longer. Now India has stood up, under the inspiring leadership of the saffron camp, and all the heinous machinations of the alien faith will henceforth be crushed. Such is the propaganda ploy.
An associated feature of the current anti-Christian agitation is that Muslims have been given a reprieve. They can, for the moment, sleep in peace although their anti-national role, in the eyes of the Parivar, is no less reprehensible. Their demonisation, too, was undertaken not long ago with equal fervour by the saffron propagandists, mixing their past crimes of invasion and partition of the country with their future plans for subversion through reckless breeding with their four wives and infiltration from neighbouring countries. But since a battle on two fronts is bothersome, Muslims ? Internal Enemy No 1, according to Golwalkar - have been given a respite for the time being while the Parivar concentrates on Internal Enemy No 2, the Christians.
The chargesheet, however, against Christians and Muslims are the same - their "alien" faith automatically making them unpatriotic; their past misdemeanours, including conversion of "innocent" tribals and others through material allurements, and the denigration of Hinduism and destruction of temples, making them targets of the Parivar's righteous wrath; and finally their malafide intention of turning the majority into a minority through conversion and population explosion making their every act, and indeed their very presence in the country, suspect.
"To make a struggle intelligible to the broad masses," wrote Hitler, "it must always be carried on against two things, against a person and against a cause. Against whom did England fight? Against the German Emperor as a person, and against militarism as a cause. Against whom did the Jews fight with their Marxist power? Against the bourgeoisie as a person, and against capitalism as a cause. Against whom, therefore, must our movement fight? Against the Jew as a person, and against Marxism as a cause."
For success in this fight, however, the adversary has to be painted in the blackest of colours. "The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end," wrote the Fuehrer, "satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people...The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland with the ultimate idea of bastardising the white race which they hate."
As Alan Bullock writes in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny: "In all the pages which Hitler devotes to the Jews in Mein Kampf he does not bring forward a single fact to support his wild assertions...to read these pages is to enter the world of the insane, a world peopled by hideous and distorted shadows. The Jew is no longer a human being, he has become a mythical figure, a grimacing, leering devil invested with infernal powers, the incarnation of evil..."
Unlike Hitler, who had only the Jews as his hate objects, the ultra-right in India has the advantage of having three - Muslims, Christians and communists. They are Golwalkar's Internal Enemies Nos 1, 2 and 3. The advantage is that the attacks on them can be spread out to avoid tedium. Muslims, of course, were the first target, but after the campaign against them reached its peak with the Babri Masjid demolition, the Parivar may have realised the need to step back a little, to survey the battlefield, as it were, before the next onslaught.
The respite may have been deemed necessary because the maximum political mileage had presumably been extracted from the tirades against the No.1 enemy and may have even begun to lose its effectiveness. After all, how long can one go on castigating the children of Babar for their sins of the past? So now the children of the Pope have been targeted, which must have taken them by no little surprise because, in all the 70-odd years of the Sangh Parivar's functioning, the Christians have never come under such virulent attack earlier. The reason may not be unrelated to the reluctance of the Sangh Parivar, which stayed scrupulously aloof from the freedom struggle, not to tangle with the British in any way during the pre-1947 period. Later, in the wake of the ban on the RSS after Gandhi's assassination, the Parivar retreated to its designated place in Indian society ? the outer periphery. When the degeneration of the Congress, the Left and the others enabled the Parivar to emerge from the shadows, its first job, naturally, was to go for Muslims. And now, logically, the focus has shifted to Internal Enemy No. 2.
The hounding of "internal enemies" is in keeping with the fascist precept of preserving the "purity" of the motherland and of the majority community from the contaminating influence of "outsiders." Whether it was Nazis targeting Jews or neo-Nazis and white supremacists now venting their spleen on "coloured" immigrants, the basic "patriotic" objective is the same. The Sangh Parivar's Hindu Rashtra is modelled, therefore, on Golwalkar's ideal of an India ? or Bharat ? where "non-Hindu people...must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion...or may stay wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen's rights."
The similarity of this prescription with Point 4 of the Nazi party programme, as mentioned in Saul Friedlander?s Nazi Germany and the Jews, is obvious: "Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State. Only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Accordingly no Jew may be a member of the nation."
For all their strenuous efforts, however, it is unlikely that India will ever be Hitler's Germany. The innate tolerance of Hinduism and the sound roots of democracy will never allow sectarianism to flourish. Indeed, there is bound to be a backlash against the current campaigns waged against the minorities, as more and more people become aware of their dangerous political objective, though couched in the language of religion. India will always remain the land of Gandhi, not of Godse.
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