Pakistani human rights activist Rahat Austin on Monday shared that homes of Hindus belonging to Bheel community were attacked and looted by Islamists in Sindh, Pakistan. The Bheel community in Pakistan is highly marginalised and socio-economically backward.He informed that one Muhammad Aslam along with a few others from the neighbourhood, tortured the impoverished Hindus living in that area and forced them to leave their houses.

These persecuted Hindus who are now scared to return to their respective homes have submitted a request for protection to the Session Judge and the SSP police Badin, Pakistan. The video shared by Rahat Austin shows these troubled Hindus raising slogans against the continuous atrocities meted out to them.

These unfortunate incidents are very common in Pakistan. In October, Islamists had burnt down houses of some Hindus in Sindh in order to exert pressure on them to convert to Islam. Rahat Austin had claimed that by carrying out such atrocities, these Islamists continuously try and create pressure on these marginalised Hindus to either take up Islam or have them work as slaves.

A month prior to the above incident, wereportedhow 171 Hindu men, women and children belonging to the Bheel community were forcefully converted to Islam inside a madarsa in Pakistans Sindh province. Rahat had informed that the poor and vulnerable community has been subject to mass conversion under various allurements.

According to reports, incessant atrocities have forced many Hindus in Pakistan to take up Islam in hope that at least then they would get social recognition and money and would be able to live with dignity in the Islamic state of Pakistan.

The rest is here:

Persecution of religious minorities continue in Pakistan as Islamists attack homes of Hindus in Sindh, forcing them to leave - OpIndia

The Karnataka High Court has dismissed pleas that sought the strict implementation of Section 7 of the Karnataka Hindu Religious Institutions and Charitable Endowments Act, which maintains that only Hindus can be employed in the management of Hindu Temples, LiveLaw has reported. The petitions were dismissed without providing any relief.

One petition questioned the printing of the name of one A B Ibrahim, working as Deputy Commissioner with the HRCE department in Mangaluru, on the invitation card of Mahalingeswara Temples annual festival. The other was filed by Bharata Punarutthana Trust objecting to the appointment of Mohamad Deshav Alikhan as Superintendent in the office of the Commissioner under the Act.

What heavens are going to fall if respondent 4 being the Deputy Commissioner, for overlooking the arrangements will enter the temple. Hindu religion was never so narrow. Hindu religion as professed never consisted of people who are so narrow minded, the bench comprising of Chief Justice Abhay Oka and Justice S Vishwajith Shetty observed orally as per the report.

The bench cited Constitutional philosophy, which appears to be a variant of the more popular term Constitutional morality, to question the maintainability of such petitions. After the Constitution has come into force, we will never entertain such petitions in the court. There is something known as the Constitution, there is something known as Constitutional philosophy. We will not entertain a petition which will take us 100 years back.

Section 7 of the said Act says, The Commissioner and every Deputy Commissioner or Assistant Commissioner and every other Officer or servant, appointed to carry out the purposes of this Act by whomsoever appointed, shall be a person professing Hindu Religion, and shall cease to hold office as such when he ceases to profess that religion.

The bench stated, On plain reading of section 7, there is no general prohibition on appointing an officer or servant to work in the offices of commissioner, deputy commissioner or assistant commissioner. The restriction imposed by section 7 is that Commissioner, Dy Commissioner, Asst Commissioner and every officer or servant appointed to carry out purposes of the said act of 1997, shall be a person professing Hindu religion. The test for applicability is that the officer or servant is appointed to carry out the purpose of the Act.

The bench noted before concluding, Judicial notice will have to be taken of the fact that government officers, police officers, irrespective of their religious faith and beliefs effectively assist all religions in celebrating their respective religious festivals. In fact that is part of the Constitutional philosophy and concept of Secularism.

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Hindu religion was never so narrow: Karnataka HC dismisses pleas seeking strict implementation of section of Act that requires Temple officials to be...

Except for this COVID year, there is a lot of excitement around Christmas celebration.

Its celebrated all over the world, not just by Christians but by non-Christians as a cultural festival, providing a significant commercial opportunity.

But the central message of Christmas is the Incarnation, God becoming man.

As John wrote in his gospel: In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was GodThe Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory.

However, the concept of incarnation is not unique to Christianity.

Hinduism, which is a religion as old as mankind, believes in incarnation known as avatar. It means god taking a physical form in the world in a human or animal form (by the way, avatar is now an accepted term in English dictionaries).

The Hindu scripture, Gita, declares that whenever there is decline of good and the up rise of evil, Krishna incarnates himself in the world to destroy the evil and to re-establish the good, in order to save the righteous and to destroy the sinner.

So, the obvious question is: If the concept of incarnation is not unique to Christianity, what are the differences between the incarnation of Jesus and all other incarnations?

Let me suggest a few.

Apart from a couple of significant differences, one is the purpose behind the incarnation. Lord Krishna, explaining the purpose of his incarnation is believed to have said: I incarnate myself in every age to save the righteous and to destroy the sinner.

On the other hand, the Bible gives the purpose of the incarnation of Jesus in this way: For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Jesus himself said: For the Son of Man came to seek and save what was lost. And, in another place, he said: For I have not come to call (save) the righteous, but sinners.

Behind these two opposite purposes there are two distinct and opposite theological concepts.

Hinduism and other religions divide mankind between good and evil. Their thesis is: God helps the good and gives them salvation because they are good. By being good, they have earned their salvation.

On the other hand, according to them, God destroys the evil sinner because by being evil that is what they deserve.

Its interesting that in Hinduism, the evil are always they and the righteous is always I or we, and there is no sense of personal sinfulness or the concept of inherent sin nature.

Whereas according to Christian theology, no one is good enough to meet Gods standard and so no one can save himself by being good.

There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who does good, not even one. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (Romans 3:10, 12, 23).

In the Old Testament, prophet Isaiah wrote: The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He was appalled that there was no one to intervene. So his own arm worked salvation for him and his own righteousness sustained him, (Isaiah 59:15-16).

Sinful mankind was not able to save itself, so God took it upon Himself to save them and sent His Son to save the sinful world.

The Bible describes God as having compassion on sinners. He is not pleased with their destruction. He wants them to turn to Him and be saved.

The different and opposite purposes of incarnation bring out two opposite concepts of God.

In one, God is the God who judges and destroys the sinner. In the other, God is the God who saves, provides salvation through His love for the sinner.

Of course, the God of the Bible will judge too one day, but He does not delight in it.

Another major difference between the Hindu avatars and the incarnation of Christ is expressed in the plural versus singular of the word avatar, many versus one, and how often it has to take place.

In the same text quoted from Gita, Krishna told his disciple Arjuna: Whenever there is decline of good and up rise of evil, I incarnate myself from age to age, meaning as often as needed incarnation takes place.

The Hindu scriptures list 10 major avatars, but theoretically whenever indicates that there is no limit. It surmises that from time to time evil raises its head again and again which makes another avatar necessary and there is no end in sight.

There is a duality of good and evil, both coexistent and eternal, and hence there is no permanent victory of good over evil.

On the other hand, Jesus was able to accomplish his work once for all and once forever. He does not need to incarnate himself repeatedly.

As the author of the book of Hebrews says: But this priest, after he had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, sat down at the right hand of God, (Hebrews 10:12).

The Bible has a clear answer to the question, what if Jesus had not incarnated?

There would not be any personal encounter with God unless at His whim and pleasure a blackout off and on and a period of permanent triumph of evil over good.

The birth of Christ brought the lustre of hope to this dark world. As someone has aptly said: Sins darkness retreats when Christs light is revealed.

Narayan Mitra is a volunteer Chaplain at Thompson Rivers University.

KTW welcomes submissions to its Faith page. Columns should be between 600 and 800 words in length and can be emailed to editor@kamloopsthisweek.com. Please include a very short bio and a photo.

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Faith: What if Jesus had not incarnated? - Kamloops This Week

By Leah MarieAnn Klett, Christian Post Reporter Follow | Tuesday, December 15, 2020 Supporters of hardline Vishwa Hindu Parishad Hindu group hold tridents in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, India. | REUTERS

Hindu extremists in India brutally tortured a pastor, belting his head and threatening to sacrifice him to their god because he distributed Bible tracts.

Morning Star News reports that recently Shelton Vishwanathan, a house church pastor, was handing out Gospel tracts in Tiryani village, in Bihar states Sheohar District when six Hindu radicals approached him and ordered him to stop.

Though the pastor complied, one Hindu seized the keys from his scooter, took away his phone and signaled the others to attack him.

They punched my back and told me that they would offer me as a sacrifice to their deity as a punishment for distributing gospel tracts, he recalled. They struck severe blows on my head, so that I soon fainted.

When he regained consciousness, he found himself locked in a dark room.

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I shouted for help, cried loud hoping someone would hear my cries and come to help me, but nobody could hear me, Pastor Vishwanathan said. I was lying down on the floor without food or water for the next few days. They did not give me anything to eat or drink.

One week later, an elderly woman who lives nearby heard his cries and knocked on the door, he said.

She told me that the door was bolted from outside and that she would open it for me on the condition that I would not tell anyone that she opened it, he said. She was very scared that if the assailants found out that she opened the door, she would also land in trouble.

The woman took him out of the room and later gave him food and water, saving his life.

Had she not helped, I would not be alive today, he said. I fully believe that it was God who sent her to help me.

After returning to his home in Sheohar, the pastor learned his family had searched for him throughout the district and eventually fled to his wifes hometown in Nepal.

With help from other Christians, eventually, he was able to make contact and pay for his family to return home nearly a month after the attack.

I am overjoyed to see the Lords hand in every situation over the past two months, said Vishwanathan. My family who thought I must have been lost and died have returned to see me alive. We give thanks and praises to the Lord.

This is not the first time the pastor has been attacked for his faith. In June 2019, eight Hindu extremists in Sheohar District pushed him off his scooter, breaking his hand and foot as they beat him.

Though the legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom India urged the pastor to file charges against the attackers, he refused.

I had come under attack several times for leading a home church and sharing the gospel in villages but survived only because of Gods grace. Even in the past, the police warned me that there is a threat to my life. As the Navratri [Hindu festival] celebrations were in full swing, if I was found again the assailants might have really offered me as a sacrifice to the deity, he explained.

Violence against Christians in Bihar state, in Indias northeast bordering Nepal and Bangladesh, has increased over the last few years. Christianity is practiced by less than 0.5% of the population, while Hindus make up 82.7% of the population.

A recent report from United Christian Forum in India, a Christian organization that advocates on behalf of Christians in India, found that attacks on Christians and their places of worship in the state escalated in both number and severity in the early months of 2020.

In August, it was reported that three Christians in Bihar state were brutally beaten by Hindu extremists angered by the believers acceptance of what they called a foreign faith" and foreign God.

Earlier, a pastor in the state was severely beaten alongside members of his congregation after he was accused of carrying out forceful conversions.

Thomas Schirrmacher, the newly-appointed head of the World Evangelical Alliance, which represents over 600 million evangelical Christians worldwide, told The Christian Post that Indias religious minorities have faced increasing persecution since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP party rose to power in 2014.

Elections are won by the Prime Minister with this topic: India is for the Hindus, and suddenly Muslims and Christians find themselves in a country that clearly wants to get rid of them, he said. They promote the idea that an Indian by nature is a Hindu. So if he is not a Hindu, he has been stolen and must be reconverted.

This idea was not on the market 10 years ago, and has led to an increase in discrimination and killings of Indian Christians and other minorities, he said.

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Hindus beat pastor in India, threaten to sacrifice him to false god over Bible tracts - The Christian Post

Bajrang Dal's threat to Hindus

The extreme right-wing group Bajrang Dal's threat to Hindus who may wish to attend church on Christmas Day in Assam's Barak Valley is a self-destructive diktat emanating from hard Hindutva. It's a clear threat not just to communal harmony but also an assault on Hinduism, which is an open religion that for millennium has been known to respect variety, plurality and diversity and for its acceptance of all other faiths. The likes of the Bajrang Dal do not justice to the beliefs of its own faith that has been able to assert itself globally without threatening any other faith. Regardless of such threats materializing to pose a danger to ordinary people who have been accustomed to celebrating the special days of all faiths, the truth is they serve only to tear the fabric of harmony prevailing in most parts of India. Fringe elements tend to be pockets of religious bigotry and communalism, but their voluble presence presents an image that brings about an avoidable perception across the world that India is a hotbed of Hindu communalism. All governments need to rein in on such divisive forces or at least reassure people that they will not come to any harm if they follow the simple but eloquent practice of enjoying all festivals, whether it be Diwali, Eid or Christmas.

Chandan Kumar Nath,

Sorbhog.

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Letters to the Editor - Sentinelassam - The Sentinel Assam

Decades ago, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the great Hindutva revolutionary, opined that should Hindus come to unite, then Congress leaders will be forced to wear their Janeu over their coats. That is, the Congress leaders will be forced to display their Hindu credentials overtly in order to retain their Hindu voters. Veer Savarkar said that for Congress but it largely holds true for every other non-Islamic political party as well, such as the Samajwadi Party and others.

Samajwadi Party supremo Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday declared that Shri Ram belongs to his party and he and his party men are Ram Bhakts. He also said that he will be visiting Ayodhya soon with his family. I had also arranged lights on the banks of river Saryu and sound system at the Bhajan Sthal for the worship of Lord Rama, he added.

Amusingly enough, it is a total departure from what the Samajwadi Party was preaching in its heydays. One wonders how Mulayam Singh Yadav must be feeling at this moment. At the height of his power, as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, he felt emboldened enough to order firing upon Karsevaks during the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement resulting in the death of innumerable Ram Bhakts.

Now, fortunes have turned around so greatly that Mulayams own son has to go around saying that he and his party members are Ram Bhakts. To be clear, Mulayam Singh Yadav had said tha he had regrets but defended his order that led to the death of the Ram Bhakts. And his defense was atrocious. He had said, I regret giving orders to shoot kar sevaks at Ayodhya. My decision to order firing at kar sevaks was to save Muslim minorities. This decision was needed to keep the faith of Muslims in this country intact.

Last year in February, Republic TV had revealed in a sting that the Karsevaks were denied proper funeral rites and were buried instead of being cremated as per Hindu rituals. The official government figure was 16 but the actual number was in the hundreds. It was one of the worst cases of human rights violations in Independent India. And now, Mulayam Singh Yadavs son claims that he and his party members are Ram Bhakts too.

Samajwadi Party under Mulayam Singh Yadav left no stones unturned to mock Shri Ram and his devotees. In fact, the slogan of the SP-BSP alliance for the UP Assembly Elections in 1993, a year after the demolition of the disputed structure at Ram Janmabhoomi, was Mile Mulayam Kanshi Ram, Hawa Ho Gaye Jai Shri Ram. Such conduct had earned Mulayam Singh Yadav the sobriquet Mullah Mulayam.

Akhilesh Yadav, during his tenure as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, carried on with the party legacy of antagonising Ram Bhakts. In 2013, he banned the 84-kosi Parikramah after Azam Khan issued a strong statement following a meeting between VHP leaders and the father-son duo of Mulayam and Akhilesh. The VHP was quite visibly upset.

That now Mulayams son Akhilesh has turned around and declared himself a Ram Bhakt only goes on to show the tectonic shift Indian politics has undergone. The rise of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah has ensured that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to continue to rule politically while disrespecting Hindu sentiments. The Congress party was the first to undergo such a transformation. Now, it appears regional parties are following suit.

Excerpt from:

It is 2020 and Mullah Mulayams son Akhilesh has turned Ram Bhakt: Read Samajwadi Partys history of insulting Hindu sentiments - OpIndia

In Delhi, the RSS launched Ekta Abhiyan in the same year as an outreach to non-Sikh Hindus to counter the deep psychological divide the Congress was creating. Various programmes were launched, including seminar and cultural events, highlighting the sacrifices and contributions of Sikh gurus to nation-building and protection of Dharma.

Traumatic 1984

The year proved to be the most testing and traumatic in the history of India and for the Sikhs. An emboldened Bhindranwale had taken over Sri Harmandir Sahib. Indira Gandhi who had nurtured him and turned mostly a blind eye to Khalistani terrorists periodically massacring Punjabis both non-Sikh Hindus and Hindus, now decided to send the army into Harmandir Sahib or the Golden Temple. Operation Blue Star became a humiliating trauma to the Sikhs an eternal wound.

The year 1984 also saw parallel activities by the RSS.

In 1984, the Punjab Kalyan Forum organised a conference Punjab Today. General J S Aruora, the liberator of Bangladesh, openly declared in the conference that Khalistan was futile fantasy. Dr Mann Singh, another prominent Sikh and a retired principal of Amritsar medical college, denounced the separation between Sikhs and Hindus and stated categorically that the Sikhs were a part of the Hindu community and their duty was to protect India.

These initiatives posed a challenge to the core Khalistan-separatist ideology and terrorists and the divisive manoeuvring of Nehruvian dynast politics. The RSS also launched Punjab Peedit Sahayata Samiti which worked in terrorism-hit rural Punjab.

It distributed relief measures to the families of terror victims. They helped them with their livelihoods and sponsored the education of the children of the affected families. In the cities of Amritsar, Ferozepur, Batala etc, swayamsevaks donated 109 bottles of blood to 300 people wounded by Pakistan-sponsored Khalistan terrorists. They also provided the hospitals taking care of terror victims Rs 70,000 worth life-saving medicines.

All these steps naturally made RSS the target.

After Operation Blue Star, the RSS got involved in a series of activities to alleviate the pain experienced by the nation on account of the action on the Golden Temple.

Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal of the RSS while expressing its deep anguish at the sad course of events making the Army action inevitable in Punjab to flush out the terrorists from the Golden Temple Complex identified with clinical precision, "the low-level political rivalry indulged in by the ruling Congress (l) and the Akali Dal and factional fighting within both the parties" for the spiralling down of the situation into murderous events.

Expressing great distress to all our countrymen, more so to the devout Sikhs the RSS exhorted all our countrymen in general and Swayamsevaks in particular to come forward to restore the pristine glory of our Darbar Sahib through all possible means including Kar Seva''.

That year, for the sanghs Guru Puja programmes in most places, the prominent Sikhs even if they had differences with the RSS were invited. Kushwant Singh, the wel- known RSS baiter, was invited to preside over the Guru Puja at Chennai, where Singh to his credit declared that none could doubt the patriotic fervour of the RSS . In Delhi, the veteran Sikh scholar Padma Sri Dr Attar Singh presided over the Guru Puja of the RSS. He said:

Link:

Punjab Of The 1980s: Nehruvian Laboratory Versus Healing Hindutva - Swarajya

Sukhbir Badal addressing a press conference at Chandigarh after core committee meeting

CHANDIGARH, PunjabThe Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) today stated that BJP-led centre government is repeating Congress blunders of divide and rule by dividing Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab and asked its former ally to shun this exercise. Akali Dal also repeatedly placed national unity above everything in the resolution passed during its core committee meeting held on Thursday.

Do not repeat Congress blunders of divide and rule. Do nothing that weakens national unity or disturbs the peace and communal harmony for which Punjabis, especially the SAD, have made supreme sacrifices, says a Resolution of the Core Committee of the party.

The resolutionexpressed deep concern and anxiety over ominous signs of a deep conspiracy to divide Hindus and Sikhs and farmers and traders.

This is an anti-national conspiracy and the SAD will fight against it with all the resources at its disposal. Farmers agitation is a peoples movement which is a totally peaceful, democratic and secular movement. This was visible in the all-round support to the Bharat Bandh lent by every section of society, said the party.

The party urged the Government of India not to take any reckless or repressive steps that might deepen festering emotional wounds in the farmers minds and weaken the sacred cause of peace and communal harmony in India.

The meeting was presided over by SAD president Sukhbir Badal. Giving details of the meeting to the media, Harcharan Bains, Principal Advisor to Badal said that the SAD will observe the centenary of the party as Sangharsh Samarpan Divas for Sarbat da Bhala, with a focus on Kisan interests and justice for them.

He said, The SADwill fully safeguard peace and communal harmony in Punjab and the rest of the country at all costs and will exposeand defeatevery conspiracy against these ideals. The party is convinced that no progress in the countryis possible without Peace, communal harmony and national unity, said Bains, adding thatunfortunatelysome people are not happy over this prevailing peace and harmony.

Asking the government not to be stubborn or stand on prestige against the annadata of the country, the SAD resolution asked If the government is willing to change every clause of the old Acts, then why is it standing on prestige to revoke them After all, if you are conceding all demands of the farmers, why not put it all in the new Act and end the debate once and for all?

The party said, The deep-rooted conspiracy is being hatched to paint the movement of the patriotic farmers in communal and separatist colours. The movement is not only peaceful and democratic but also totally secular and nationalist and patriotic. The sons of a large number of the agitators are right now defending the borders of the country against China and Pakistan. They come from families that have shed blood in the defense of the country in all the wars including 1948, 1965, 1971, the Kargil war, and now in Galwan in Ladakh. Only a few days ago, the young son of the farmers from Taran Taran sacrificed his life fighting the Pakistani attempts at the intrusion on the LoC in Kashmir.

The party which remained in alliance with the saffron party for 28 years without any gap, alleged that the Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh is playing a traitorous role to weaken the movement in secret alliance with the Government of India. He kept holding secret meetings with those in power at the center and his only input has been to try and cause divisions. Strangely, the CM of a predominantly agricultural state has no word of advice for the center as Captain telling the farmers only to be responsible, it said.

Continued here:

BJP repeating Congress blunders of dividing Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab: Akali Dal - Sikh24 News & Updates

India is still in the middle of a pandemic, every day we read of more deaths, people who were attacked by the virus are going to live with neurotic disorders/kidney/ heart/liver maladies, the bottomless trough of deprivation into which the sudden lockdown drove millions of migrant workers has neither been recognised nor dealt with, lakhs of farmers agitate for access to minimum subsistence, and India is in the middle of economic decline. Yet huge sums of money are going to be spent on the spatial remaking of history, from temples to Parliament.

The scale and the costs of the project of spatial reordering are enormous. The mind boggles. Emerald green, verdant lawns, impressive broad avenues, the sweep of architectural magnificence that extends from the national museum to Janpath via the archives, and above all our beloved and majestic Parliament will either be demolished or replaced. A major part of our history is going to be demolished and replaced.

The new structures and spaces will bear no history and embody no collective memory. They will not speak to us of battles lost by the colonial power and won by the freedom struggle, of citizens demonstrations and protest movements against government policies, of political fasts, of celebrations, of family picnics and memories of romantic meetings on the lawns of the Central Vista. They will symbolise only the overweening desire for personal glory of a ruling class that wants us to forget our democratic past, howsoever flawed the past might have been.

The irony of history is that most ruling classes, intoxicated by power, forget that this phase will pass. Shelleys evocative poem Ozymandias, which most of us learnt by heart in school, tells a story of the pathetic remains of a statue of a former king. Upon the pedestal of the statue was carved: My name is Ozymandias King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Years down the line nothing remains of the boastful king. Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away. But people in power seldom think, so hallucinogenic is absolute power. All they want to do is to imprint history with their names. For this, they write a new history for a new country in new spatial forms. They want to obliterate other histories that might tell a different story of men and women who secured and exercised power.

What we remember

Can there be a new history that replaces an old one? History is not a leather shoe that has grown old and needs to be replaced. History is a vibrant battlefield of ideas and memories that persist into the indefinite future. Some memories overlap and some clash. We remember all, for history is plural. When we remember our post-independence history, what is it that we remember? At the midnight hour which heralded the advent of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru gave his tryst with destinys speech in the central hall of the Constituent Assembly, now Parliament. The address delivered in his usual elegant style and incomparable language is one of the most famous speeches in the world. His words exuded a sense of excitement and hope as he welcomed Indias independence for which generations had aspired and fought for.

Also read: When the Supreme Courts Vista of the Law is Clouded By Great Expectations

But Nehru was also painfully aware that independence had come to us bathed in blood. Partition was the price that India had to pay for freedom. The dark underbelly of independence was the violence that erupted even before the tricolour replaced the flag of the Empire. And Pandit Nehru was there, in the killing fields of Punjab and Delhi, persuading people to desist from violence, assuring Muslims of their safety, and appealing to Muslims who had left for Pakistan to come back. The deadly spiral of violence eluded the grasp of the interim Prime Minister of independent India, but he was there among his own people.

On the night of August 25 in a small town of Sheikhupura near Lahore which had a population of 10,000 Muslims and ten 10,000 Sikhs and Hindus, a massive battle exploded between communities. Twenty-four hours later several thousand people, mainly Sikh and Hindu, had been murdered in a frenzy of stabbing, shooting, beating and burning. Parts of the town were on fire. No attempt was made to quell the violence. A journalist wrote that Sikhs were afraid to go to the hospital and preferred to shelter in the Gurudwara without basic facilities.

The sight was appalling, hands and feet of men and women had been cut off and their forearms were reduced to black putrescent fly-covered stumps. Babies and children had been cut and slashed. When Nehru visited a few days later he found himself sick with horror at the sight; the stink of blood and burnt flesh was inescapable. He wrote to Mountbatten in deep depression, I suppose I am not directly responsible for what is taking place in the PunjabBut in any event I cannot and do not wish to shed responsibility for my people. If I cannot discharge the responsibility effectively then I begin to doubt whether I have any business to be where I am.

Jawaharlal Nehru addresses the midnight session of the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on August 15, 1947. Photo: Wikimedia commons

This was Nehru, a man who was alive to the needs of his people, who celebrated with them but also mourned with them. Above all he mourned for himself as a leader who could not control the designs of a malevolent fate that was tearing at the seams of a newly independent Republic. How can we forget this man who never failed to recognise his own flaws; a man who refused to tom-tom his achievements? Only a Nehru could have said to a political cartoonist, Shankar, dont spare me. Today political cartoonists are jailed for simple tongue-in-cheek comments. History tells us that there are a few leaders who simply cannot be marginalised either historically or spatially. Nor can they be appropriated. Nehru is one of them.

An obsession with the ancient

We have to learn from history, otherwise we will fall into the same traps as our forebears. Consider the focus on ancient India by the ruling dispensation. It has been stressed repeatedly that new structures of power will form the link between ancient and contemporary India. The thesis of the glories of ancient India holds proponents of the Hindu right in thrall. They do not recognise that they subscribe to a version of Indian history that has been manufactured by the colonialist.

British colonialism was unlike any other form of rule previously experienced by Indians. Pre-modern rulers taxed non-believers, even converted individuals to the religion of the group that was in power, but they seldom tried to regulate the personal lives of their subjects the way modern states seek to do. British colonialism, as a proto-modern state, set out to control not only the political and economic destiny of Indians, but also the way they thought about themselves, the way in which they interpreted their history and the present, and how they conceived of the future. They had a host of intellectuals to aid them in this task.

The idea that India is spiritual and child-like compared to the modern materialist West was first put forth by German Romantics in the 18th century. The 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fredrik Hegel inherited from the German Romantics an attraction for the Orient. But he set out to demolish their assumptions. Accepting that chronologically, philosophy religion and art took root in the Orient that is in Persia, China, Egypt and India, he suggested that India has remained stationary and fixed. Stagnant was not the word he used, but this was the implication of his argument.

Also read: The Invisible Ghosts Who Walk Will Haunt India for Years to Come

After explorers, missionaries, traders and commercial companies conquered India, and as the exotic became the known, he suggested, it was clear that India had nothing to offer the world. Indias tradition is a matter of the past; it never reached the level of philosophy and science. That is genuinely and uniquely European achievement, which culminated in 19th century Germany, with presumably Hegel as its most distinguished spokesman.

Hegels opinion on Indian philosophy was shaped by two factors, his response to the Indologists he drew upon, and his profound ignorance about the great debates that accompanied the consolidation of the four sacred texts that constitute the Vedas. Philosophies, such as Carvaka, Samkhya, Buddhism and Jainism repudiated the moral authority of the Vedas. The Bhakti movement challenged Brahmanical authority. And Buddhist philosophers such as Nagarjuna in the second century C.E., gave to the world a sophisticated and rational philosophy.

A portrait of Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger.

But European Indologists/Orientalists isolated an abstract, metaphysical, and an upper-caste Hinduism from the welter of lived practices, and from struggles around caste discrimination. Purely on the basis of texts of ancient India, Hegel concluded that though India was the birthplace of philosophy, once philosophy left its shores and migrated to Greece, torpor followed. India has no philosophy. Hegel knew well that philosophy is the soul of any society; deny a country philosophy and you deny it history. For him the history of India is nothing but the pre-history of Europe. The necessary fate of Asiatic Empires is to be subjected to Europeans.

Though Hegel continued to be fascinated with Indian society till the end of his life, he was contemptuously dismissive of the India of his day. His thesis on the decline that followed ancient India legitimised the colonial project. India had to be saved from its own propensity towards collapse. It also motivated the attempts of Indian intellectuals and nationalists to return to a once glorious past. The culture of ancient India was the touchstone against which nationalists measured and evaluated their own country. The shadows of German Romantics and of Hegel who acclaimed a Golden Age of Hinduism and consequent regression, hover over us till today.

In retrospect, it is surprising that Indian intellectuals joined the Orientalist acclaim of a rich and sophisticated Vedic tradition without acknowledging its adverse impact upon society: the consolidation of Brahmanical superiority. Nor did they recognise the great debates in philosophy or the struggles against power. The textual tradition provided an anchor for the recovery of the collective self in the freedom struggle, but the self was deeply fractured.

Blunting the critical edges

The philosopher J.N. Mohanty tells us that the Vedas that developed around two thousand years B.C.E cover an entire range of subjects, but above all they represent an exemplary spirit of enquiry into the one being or ekam sat that underlies the diversity of empirical phenomenon, and into the origin of all things. The lesson in wisdom was challenged both by supporters and opponents of the philosophy. Within the school of Vedanta endless debates took place on the nature of the self. Outside the school critical traditions challenged the dominant themes of the Vedas.

Towards the end of the Upanisadic period was born Gautama the founder of Buddhism (560 BCE). The emergence of Buddhism was politically significant because the philosophy mounted a strong challenge to the superiority of the Brahmanical class, to ritualism, and to the caste system that had banished its own people to the margins of society. Indian intellectuals proceeded to appropriate Buddhism. Vivekananda in his famous address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago suggested that Buddhism had completed the highly metaphysical task of the Vedanta. In a short period of time the Buddha came to be seen as the eighth avatar of Hinduism. The critical edge of Buddhism that provides an alternative to the high tradition had been blunted, somewhat alarmingly.

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The marginalisation of critical and rational philosophical schools both by the Indologists and the nationalists gives us cause for considerable thought. If a rational, materialistic, empiricist and sceptical philosophical school such as Carvaka had been given prominence in the forging of a Hindu tradition, perhaps India would have escaped being slotted into the spiritual versus materialist dichotomy. We have to accept that the stereotyping of Indian society as exotic and other-worldly based on the obsession with ancient India has not helped us forge an equitable future. India with all its material inequities, communalism, patriarchy and casteism has been slotted into a spiritual pigeonhole.

Till today Indian society fails to accept the enormity of material inequities, fascinated as it is with the metaphysical spirit. In short, the privileging of a highly metaphysical tradition as the public philosophy of India leads us away from social oppressions and power. It cannot help us to pinpoint power equations, or remedy inequities. It leads to the skewed political priorities of todays politics. Instead of securing to the Indian people their basic rights of freedom of expression and freedom from deprivation, the ruling class would rather concentrate on manufactured spaces that symbolise raw power. This is their conceit. It is bound to disappear. The new Lutyens Delhi ought to read Ozymandias.

Neera Chandhokeis former professor of political science, Delhi University.

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A New Central Vista, and the Political Conceit of the Ruling Classes - The Wire

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At the foundation stone-layingceremonyfor the countrys new Parliament building, PrimeMinister NarendraModi declared that in a vibrant democracy like India, there was room for differences, but not disconnect. This is a welcome acknowledgement of the Argumentative Indian who loves debate, who is curious about the world around them and is open to ideas, no matter where they may come from. This is because India is a truly crossroads culture, its present determined by a long history of engagement with other races and cultures.

This engagement may well have taken place through invasions, migrations, trade or evangelical missions,but these have led to a remarkably diverse and plural society blessed with an innate cosmopolitanism. There is no homogeneity among its people, neither of race nor religion, neither of language nor traditions. It is the shared historical experience, a mutual enrichment of cultures and an affinity born out of a deep attachment to the idea of Indiathat underlieits nationalism. In its most positive and dynamic articulations, this nationalism has been accommodative, not exclusionary. It is infused with a sense of common humanity.

This is the connect that hopefullyPMModiwasreferringto because without this awareness of common humanity, how is a connect possible when we disagree with each other, as we must sometimes? Those who seek identity through exclusion narrow their own space; those who seek uniformity end up in a barren aridity that dries up precisely what is sought to be preserved. For history shows that cultures flourish through mutual enrichment, ideas advance through debate, and what is more dangerous is not questions to which there are no answers, but answers which may not be questioned.

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Political democracy has taken root in the Indian soil because the values it seeks to nurture are aligned with Indias own striving as an independent nation, a nation that has found its voice after centuries of whispered yearnings. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the genius of the Indian Constitution. It recognised that unity in a diverse country like India cannot be achieved through suppression of its myriad identities, but in these being transcended and celebrated in a shared sense of common citizenship.

It is only when that citizenship deviates from its basis in individual and inalienable rights that the assertions of narrower caste or community-based identities begin to be seen as the only way to prevent injustice and discrimination. Once this is acquiesced to in one case, how do youillegitimiseit in another? If one particular caste or community insists on a veto over whatever offends its sensitivities as a group, how do you deny this to another group? And there are so many different groups in India. Is this not a recipe for a million mutinies?

There is an expectation that a broader Hindu unity can be built on a Hindu-Muslim binary. But that ignores the fact that a Hindu is also deeply attached to his other identities, for example, as part of a language group, a membership of a caste group, a particular religious sect of the Hindu faith, perhaps a more modern professional group and perhaps as part of a vested economic or business group the list is endless. There is little likelihood ofone-nation one-languagebeing achieved in India. Even a hint that this might be the intent of a government in power triggers dangerous political reactions. To justify the grand Ram temple in Ayodhya, some of its champions argue that if the Christians can have their Vatican, the Muslims their Mecca, why should the Hindus not have their Ayodhya? Is that not limiting the very notion of Hinduism as a faith with no boundaries?

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PMModispoke of the Indian tradition oftalking and listening toeach other as part of our ability to connectas Indians. But this assumes a willingness to appreciate what the other is saying, otherwise this would be a dialogue of the deaf. We hear but we do not listen. And as soon as we begin to attach labels to our interlocutors, we are absolved of the need to listen to what they may be saying. If the protesting farmers are infiltrated by Khalistanis, Maoists andLeft-wing provocateurs, does the government need to listen? If some elements among our Muslim community are suspected of harbouring pro-Pakistan sympathies, should they be allowed to speak? If some writers and social activists are urban Naxals, should they not be prevented from speaking; better still, should they not be incarcerated?

There are any number of labels to choose from to prevent the talking and the listening. Labels preclude connecting. IfPMModireally wishes to celebrate India as a democracy, then he should stop this labelling exercise forthwith. The Minister of Commerce should not see hiddenLeftist hands behind the farmers agitation and thusbelittleit. This disconnects rather than opens the way for understanding what is driving their protests, braving the cold weather andpolice action.

India is too diverse a country to allow a monochromatic frame to be imposed on it. It is a landscape with multiple colours and shades in between. The way forward is to allow this profusion of colours to become even more varied, and more vibrant. Every label used to exclude this or that colour diminishes the whole. Labels prevent sharing and celebrating our diversity. They do not allow us to connect with each other. Let us forswear a government by label.

The author is former Foreign Secretary and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research. Views are personal.

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If Modi really sees India as a democracy, then he must stop the labelling exercise - ThePrint