prasad1
Active member
A new form of Hinduism is emerging around the world: one that is tired of being seen as passive and tolerant, like a suffering docile wife. It wants to be aggressive, violent. So it prefers Durga and Kali to the demure Gauri; Shiva as Rudra and Virabhadra and Bhairava rather than as the guileless Bholenath or the august Dakshinamurthy; and the Krishna of the Mahabharat to the affectionate Bhagavata Krishna. It visualises Ram without Sita. It wants its Ganesh to lose that pot belly and sport a six-pack ab. All this while insisting, with violence if necessary, on the values of vegetarianism and seva and ‘giving up the ego’, which is the principle of ‘sanatana dharma’ — not just a religion but a way of life.
This new form of Hinduism is what we call Hindutva. We can call it a sampradaya, a movement within the vast ocean of Hinduism that has many such movements, traditions, forces and counterforces. Hindutva sampradaya, like all sampradayas in history, insists it is the true voice of Hinduism. Like all sampradayas, it rejects all alternative readings of Hinduism.
And so, when you direct them to an article, ‘The Hindu View on Food and Drink’ by S. Ganesh and Hari Ravikumar on IndiaFacts.com, which draws attention to the fact that while Vedic scriptures do value the cow, they have no problem with the consumption of bulls and oxen and barren cows, members of the Hindutva brigade will question the credentials of the authors and their Hinduness, invariably in language that is hyperbolic, rhetorical and violent. There is no room for discussion or nuance here. The only language is force and bullying. Where is this coming from?
It comes from institutionalised paranoia: a belief that innocent Hindi-speaking rural Bharat needs rescuing from an evil English-speaking India that favours Nehru, from the liberals who equate Hinduism only with casteism, and from Euro-American scholars who insist Shiva is a ‘phallic’ god. And, to be fair, there is a modicum of truth in their argument.
In his book Rearming Hinduism, Vamsee Juluri expresses outrage at the way Hinduism is being projected in the U.S. That outrage and anguish is genuine, and can be felt in the NRI community that has increasingly become more and more vocal, even aggressive. When ‘liberals’ deny this outrage and anguish, it seems to consolidate the paranoia of the Hindutva sampradaya. When the liberal press dismisses the book by Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples — What Happened to Them, as right-wing propaganda, and gleefully declares that the Hindu memory of Muslim kings destroying thousands of Hindu temple is just not true on the basis of Richard Eaton’s Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India, you start wondering if the scientific and historical method is simply designed to mock all things that a traditional Hindu simply assumes to be true. When the banning of radical literature does not meet with the same outrage as the banning of Wendy Doniger’s Hindus: An Alternative History, a section of the population starts feeling that they are alone, isolated and rejected, by the people who claim to be fair and just and liberal.
How do you strike back at those who simply invalidate your memories and beliefs by constantly quoting science and facts? You simply create your own narrative and dismiss theirs. And this is what is happening in the beef-eating discourse. It is a symbolic attack on the ‘educated Indian’ who did not stand up for Hinduism in the international arena. And the Muslims, sadly, are the tragic collateral damage.
In the 1980s, we saw how the then Congress government tried to appease the Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case by diluting even a Supreme Court judgment that gave maintenance rights to divorced Muslim women, but did not bother to appease the Hindutva sampradaya in the Roop Kanwar sati case when the court declared sati a crime and not a religious act. In these cases, women were simply symbols in a fight where religious orthodoxy was demanding its place in a secular nation state. Now, it is the turn of the cow to be that symbol.
When the secular nation state tilts in favour of one religion and seems to be persecuting another, there is bound to be a backlash. And that is what we are facing now: a karma-phala (karmic fruit) of karmic-bija (karmic seed) sown by the Congress on the one hand, when it unashamedly appeased Muslim religious orthodoxy, and the liberals on the other, who endorsed their secular and rational and atheistic credentials by repeatedly projecting Hinduism as only a violent and oppressive force. Let us ponder on our contribution to the rising tide of ahimsa terrorism, while the still starving ‘rescued’ cow wades through garbage in Indian towns and villages, eating plastic.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/holy-cow-unholy-violence/article7727157.ece?homepage=true
This new form of Hinduism is what we call Hindutva. We can call it a sampradaya, a movement within the vast ocean of Hinduism that has many such movements, traditions, forces and counterforces. Hindutva sampradaya, like all sampradayas in history, insists it is the true voice of Hinduism. Like all sampradayas, it rejects all alternative readings of Hinduism.
And so, when you direct them to an article, ‘The Hindu View on Food and Drink’ by S. Ganesh and Hari Ravikumar on IndiaFacts.com, which draws attention to the fact that while Vedic scriptures do value the cow, they have no problem with the consumption of bulls and oxen and barren cows, members of the Hindutva brigade will question the credentials of the authors and their Hinduness, invariably in language that is hyperbolic, rhetorical and violent. There is no room for discussion or nuance here. The only language is force and bullying. Where is this coming from?
It comes from institutionalised paranoia: a belief that innocent Hindi-speaking rural Bharat needs rescuing from an evil English-speaking India that favours Nehru, from the liberals who equate Hinduism only with casteism, and from Euro-American scholars who insist Shiva is a ‘phallic’ god. And, to be fair, there is a modicum of truth in their argument.
In his book Rearming Hinduism, Vamsee Juluri expresses outrage at the way Hinduism is being projected in the U.S. That outrage and anguish is genuine, and can be felt in the NRI community that has increasingly become more and more vocal, even aggressive. When ‘liberals’ deny this outrage and anguish, it seems to consolidate the paranoia of the Hindutva sampradaya. When the liberal press dismisses the book by Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples — What Happened to Them, as right-wing propaganda, and gleefully declares that the Hindu memory of Muslim kings destroying thousands of Hindu temple is just not true on the basis of Richard Eaton’s Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India, you start wondering if the scientific and historical method is simply designed to mock all things that a traditional Hindu simply assumes to be true. When the banning of radical literature does not meet with the same outrage as the banning of Wendy Doniger’s Hindus: An Alternative History, a section of the population starts feeling that they are alone, isolated and rejected, by the people who claim to be fair and just and liberal.
How do you strike back at those who simply invalidate your memories and beliefs by constantly quoting science and facts? You simply create your own narrative and dismiss theirs. And this is what is happening in the beef-eating discourse. It is a symbolic attack on the ‘educated Indian’ who did not stand up for Hinduism in the international arena. And the Muslims, sadly, are the tragic collateral damage.
In the 1980s, we saw how the then Congress government tried to appease the Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case by diluting even a Supreme Court judgment that gave maintenance rights to divorced Muslim women, but did not bother to appease the Hindutva sampradaya in the Roop Kanwar sati case when the court declared sati a crime and not a religious act. In these cases, women were simply symbols in a fight where religious orthodoxy was demanding its place in a secular nation state. Now, it is the turn of the cow to be that symbol.
When the secular nation state tilts in favour of one religion and seems to be persecuting another, there is bound to be a backlash. And that is what we are facing now: a karma-phala (karmic fruit) of karmic-bija (karmic seed) sown by the Congress on the one hand, when it unashamedly appeased Muslim religious orthodoxy, and the liberals on the other, who endorsed their secular and rational and atheistic credentials by repeatedly projecting Hinduism as only a violent and oppressive force. Let us ponder on our contribution to the rising tide of ahimsa terrorism, while the still starving ‘rescued’ cow wades through garbage in Indian towns and villages, eating plastic.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/holy-cow-unholy-violence/article7727157.ece?homepage=true
