[nukkad] Cry, My Beloved India (by Francois Gautier)

[Gireesh Dixit - PCS <>]

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If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. - Mark Twain
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Hi Guys,
This is the mail specially for Samridhi &  Dinesh
who don't know any thing about Hinduisum and
behaving like 10 year child.

Gireesh 

Title: Cry, My Beloved India
Author: Francois Gautier
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 7, 2003

But history shows us that the worst enemies of Hindus are Hindus themselves
- not Muslims, Christians, Pakistanis or Americans, as several Hindu
organisations such as the RSS or the VHP claim. Islam could not break the
back of Hindu India in spite of ten centuries of intermittent rape and
pillage of its civilisation during which the invading hordes plundered and
pillaged towns and razed thousands of temples to the ground. Nor could the
British - who, in three centuries of rule via Macaulayism, started massive
conversion drives and made insidious attempts to break India's social
system particularly at the village level - subdue the Hindu spirit. Nor
even globalisation which India has so far resisted fairly well, contrary to
many Third World countries which got swept away in no time.

No, the greatest enemy of India is the passivity of the 850 million Hindus,
one billion worldwide, inheritors of the most ancient civilisation on this
planet, holders of the last candle of true spirituality in the world. We
can forgive the writers, intellectuals, academics (all of them Hindus), who
continuously keep belittling India's Hindu and ancient culture and way of
life at home and abroad. After all, most of them sincerely believe that
Marxism is the only answer to India's social injustices. It is thus in the
name of Marxism that generations of Nehruvian intellectuals have trampled
on Hindu culture, which they feel has been responsible for casteism and
social inequity.

The irony of it all is that these Marxist intellectuals have always been a
tiny minority of India, and that the overwhelming silent Hindu majority
allows itself to be run down, to be despised, to be throttled, all in the
name of secularism and democracy, which should be rather called cowardice.
The Gujarat riots, however horrible, signalled for the first time that
Hindus were not going to take things lying down; they were sending a strong
warning to their enemies. And the Indian English language media and the
foreign press, who got the poll predictions all wrong, should do some
serious introspection instead of ranting about "Nazism and Hindu
fanaticism". They ought to realise that Gujaratis are just ordinary Hindus
fed-up with their way of life being made fun of, of their community being
burnt, of their Parliament and temples being attacked.

Many people here are also full of complacency and delude themselves. The
other day I was giving a lecture at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi and
an elderly gentleman in front cautioned me against being too pessimistic.
"After all," he said, "the world knows about India and the good things
Indians do." Do they? This is a grand illusion: From France to the US, from
Saudi Arabia to Malaysia, India is not taken seriously politically, to the
point that in its fight against terrorism, the US uses Pakistan, which -
whatever its plus points - actually sponsors Islamic terrorism. They ignore
India which - whatever its minus points - is a democracy, and which has
suffered heavily at the hands of jihadis in the last ten centuries.
Does anybody in the world have a care about Kashmir, where there has been
an ethnic cleansing without parallel in the world - 300,000 Kashmiri
Pandits, refugees in their own country? Name one government in the world
which has sympathised with the plight of Pandits. If India is to become the
spiritual leader of the world, as many of India's modern prophets such as
Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have
prophesied, then India has to emerge industrially, politically, even
militarily, in the eyes of the world.

Sri Aurobindo came to announce the "supramentalisation" of the earth - man
after man - but he and the
Mother found that the brightest of their disciples could not follow them
past a certain point and that the bulk of their ashram did not understand
what they were trying to do. And they both had to leave. People think that
bowing in front of Mother and Sri Aurobindo's photographs, doing some
departmental work and daily reading of a few lines of Sri Aurobindo's
extraordinary epic, Savitri, is equal to doing sadhana. But is that not a
delusion? At some point we have to cast a frank look at ourselves, at the
state of our ashrams when our Masters are gone, and at India and the world.
Are we in the way we should be? Are we how the Mother and Sri Aurobindo,
Vivekananda, wanted us to be?

Sometimes, in her intimate conversations with Satprem (the Agenda of the
Mother, Mira Aditi Centre), the Mother would despair at the lack of
receptivity in her disciples and of this earth. Why did she go? Did we, her
own disciples, fail her, as every disciple has failed his or her master
throughout the ages and made of their spiritual teachings the rigid and
intolerant religions that we witness today?

India's curse is the age-old Hindu passivity, this lack of civic sense, of
commitment to others, which Christians and Muslims possess to a certain
degree. Last week, I participated in a workshop in Konark. The purpose was
noble: Make Konark a living temple where puja and aarti are performed
again, so as to attract more tourists and give back to Konark its ancient
vibrancy. But as soon as I entered the conference hall, two groups began
shouting at each other and nearly came to blows. One wanted the conference
to be opened to everybody, the other incommunicado. When some kind of order
was restored, speaker after speaker gave, in true Indian tradition,
rhetorical speeches praising the "glorious past of Konark". Nothing came of
the meeting.

The same phenomenon can be observed amongst the different Indian
organisations in the US: No unity, no building of a powerful lobby on the
lines of the Jewish one, so that the upward, law-abiding, rich and
brilliant Hindu community of the US can make the voice of India heard.
Instead we witness only squabbling: Who will be the president, the vice
president, who will give the vote of thanks, who will be photographed with
the US President. How very, utterly sad.

This is also why India's oldest political party, the Congress, is incapable
of finding a worthy leader amongst its own members, many of whom are
intelligent and sincere. And by choosing Ms Sonia Gandhi, they are
repeating the same old story of India's ancient princes and maharajas
betraying each other and bowing down to a foreign ruler. Who betrayed the
mighty empire of Vijaynagar, the last great Hindu kingdom, to the Muslims?
Who betrayed India to the British? Who is betraying India today? Answer the
question yourselves.

Cry, O My beloved India. Look at what thy children are doing to thee.
	


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