K.N. Pandita
During six weeks-long election campaign, word “change” was the refrain first with AAP during Delhi Assembly election and then with BJP in parliamentary election. Ordinary people orchestrated the slogan of their leaders. But many did not bother to go into the content and substance of the change they asked for. To many it didn’t go beyond marginal economic relief, while for others it meant fringe improvement in quality of life.
Many BJP leaders at second and lower rungs also remained content with this somewhat superfluous interpretation of change. But visionaries, in and outside the party, dismayed by the prospect of country pushed to disastrous drift, looked far beyond shallow meaning of change and tried to bring to mind millennia old civilization of India.
Struggle for independence from foreign rule was spearheaded by patriotic fervour across the length and breadth of the country in 20th century. But at the end of the day, power passed into wrong hands. Nehru was a great patriot and nationalist, and intriguingly, a virtual disaster as Foreign and Prime Minister. His patriotism and enviable popularity with the Indian masses became a cover for his imbecile statesmanship. A half-baked socialist, a pseudo-democrat and a wobbled secularist, he took upon himself the task of undermining the historic cosmopolitanism of Hindu civilization of India from whose roots he tried to extricate his person and submit to implanted culture of foreign origin.
Nehruvian cult was a disaster that befell a nation steeped in traditions of tolerance. His intolerance of “sanskriti” is proverbial just because brought up in cultural vacuum he struggled all his life with unresolved civilizational and ideological contradictions and complexities. His self-manufactured code of morality was fragile and inconsistent.
Three generations of Nehru-Gandhi dynastic rule has virtually culminated in an oligarchy of sycophants and flatterers, looters, burglars and thieves. Under dynastic hegemony institutes of higher learning were denuded of all manifestations of Hindu nationalist civilization; some of these, like JNU, emerged as cesspools of communal and leftist grime. No institute has done as much damage to Hindu nationalist civilization as the one under reference. History was distorted, Hindu nation’s civilizational fund was berated and historic Indian wisdom was dishonoured. Sanskrit language, the vehicle of traditional Indian philosophical lore was underrated.
In particular, the Muslim community of India, one integral to historic Indian civilization, was perpetually alienated from the mainstream by instilling in its leadership the feigned threat of annihilation by the majority community. They were covertly and overtly sensitized to behaving as non-Indians and outsiders who had to fight the locals at all costs for their survival. Instead of treating them as integral part of India nation, Nehruvian ideologues projected them as victimised community in the precise spirit of colonial catchphrase of divide and rule.
Ordinary Indians wondered what type of freedom we had won from the British. The rulers, who had replaced the colonizers, were far removed from the very essence of Indian national civilization. They feigned as Ghandhiites but behind that mask they wore the diseased master-servant mentality. Charlatans ruled the roost and swindlers manned the government.
The ruling clique in Lutyens Delhi reduced the Government of India to a private limited company, controlled by one who was not an Indian by blood, birth, culture or by sanskara. Under the controls of the private limited company, the elected President and Prime Minister of India were reduced to the status of “encaged parrots” babbling the rhetoric of their master. They rejoiced at voluntarily disowning personality, conscience and conviction. Throughout their tenure they fought a bitter battle with their own conscience
This is the scenario which nationalist ideologues assayed to change. But since we have democratic system in place, change could be brought about only through democratic dispensation. The cue to change was given by Narendra Modi in the course of his hurricane-like election campaign. For certain what he brought about is revival not change.
It was almost after a millennium that a son of the soil raised his voice loud and forceful to speak for the flattened nation. The historic struggle which this great patriot unleashed was far more difficult and complex than the struggle led by our freedom fighters. This was a struggle for saving Indian’s fund of national civilization by snatching it away from the clutches of inheritors of colonial mentality.
What will the change bring in its trail is a question that is speculated in political circles. In the first place, it has uprooted lock, stock and barrel the miserable Leftist line that was the main source of disaster for our country in post-independence period. Marxism-Leninism, the model for Nehruite apes, was dead and buried in its place of origin; in fact the Soviet State has been wiped out from the physical and political map of the world. China, once the bi-polar power of socialism has made U-turn and is now ruling the world economy as a reformed and reoriented nation. Our Indian Left refused to learn a lesson from these cataclysmic changes of world history till the electorate sent them packing home.
Secondly, the communal discourse so fondly pursued by the Congress regimes has come to its ignoble finale. The Muslims of India have voted for a change, for Modi, and they got it. This opens new vision upon them and from the day Modi took over the government in Delhi, Muslims of India are breathing the air of mental, psychological and social freedom. Their joy knows no bounds that they will not be treated as pariah and aliens but as integral part of Indian polity. To be an integral part of the polity guarantees their economic and cultural development. The change is eloquent.
Thirdly, the change expressly indicates the end of dynastic rule that held the nation at ransom for six decades and half. Today every Indian feels that he is India. Gradually, the hitherto subdued aspects of Hindu nationalist civilization will unfold and embrace all aspects of our civilizational fund. This will bring the historic India to life. The Hindu civilization standing at the core of healthy, vibrant and cosmopolitan cultural construct of Indonesia is a proof what it stands for in modern world.
Lastly, and more importantly, the revival of Hindu nationalist civilization is a message to the entire world that religions are not for antagonism and deep division but for reconciliation, assimilation and incorporation. Modern world rent asunder by religious, ideological and civilizational divide will look up to India’s revivalist movement as the real harbinger of a new era (yuga) of human dignity.
(The writer is the former Director of the Centre of Central Asian Studies, Kashmir University, India
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