VIGIL Public Opinion Forum - THE 'TOLERANT' HINDU AS THE 'VILLAGE IDIOT'

• VIGIL Public Opinion Forum - THE 'TOLERANT' HINDU AS THE 'VILLAGE IDIOT'

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  • The Hindus of post independent India find themselves in a position similar to that of the village idiot. We have an acquired image, an image given to us and enforced by the Indian political and intellectual class to sustain the myth of communal harmony and to sustain the modern face of this country – composite-cultural, multi-national, pluralist, secular democracy.
  • If these images, a combination of falsehoods and partial truths have to be sustained then the Hindu has to continue to remain the village idiot with an identity which is not self-realised but cleverly imposed. The Hindu must forever and all times be unflinchingly committed to ‘tolerance’ and ‘ahimsa’ – the two qualities guaranteed to keep Hindus in inaction, in self-destructive pacifism, in smug masochism which delights in its tolerance of abuse and which begs for more.
  • India is held up by the likes Sonia Gandhi, Syed Shahabuddin and Romilla Thapar as the perfect example of a ‘pluralist democracy’, of communal harmony where Hindus live peaceably with the world’s second largest population of Muslims. Now this is a self-serving and palpably false image because communal harmony is maintained as long as the Hindus do not react to Muslim intractability and Christian and Muslim stubborn refusal to respect Hindu sensibilities. Communal harmony rests on Hindu inaction, on the Hindu remaining the village idiot.
  • The intellectual Hindu with the capacity to resist abuse but whose will to resist has been neutralised by western education, is happy with the ‘tolerant’ epithet because ‘tolerance’ does not compel him to accept responsibility for resistance.
  • Gandhi ji told us that generosity and tolerance to be whole must now be embellished with ‘ahimsa’. So no matter how we are abused and humiliated, we must never give up on ‘ahimsa’. ‘Ahimsa’ is not for the weak, Gandhi ji told us kindly, to make us all feel even more virtuous, it is for the strong. Yeah, right. But of what use is strength if it cannot deter abuse or if it refuses to punish the abuser? And the Hindu village idiot never asked Gandhi ji if ‘ahimsa’ is a practical quality when good lived with evil, when an inclusive civilization was forced to co-exist with exclusive religions. And the idiot also never asked Gandhi ji why his inspiration Sri Rama did not practice the kind of ‘ahimsa’ Gandhi ji was preaching to us and why Sri Rama had to take to arms and wage a bloody war against Ravana.
  • The Hindu idiot also did not dare to question Gandhi ji if perhaps Gandhi ji was not imposing what was undeniably an admirable quality in an individual totally erroneously on an entire people, on an entire community! ‘Ahimsa’ is not a collective virtue, not when we live amidst humans who have no faith in it.
  • Radha Rajan
  • 21st June, 2004.

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