Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
January 21, 2019
On no issue has the RSS been able so far to mount a campaign resulting in successful protection of Hindu causes.
from 1952 to 1997, the BJS/BJP cannot boast of a single policy decision which the Indian state has made under its influence. The fact that the party was in the opposition most of the time is no excuse: in most democracies, skilful opposition politicians can occasionally make deals with the ruling parties or enter their own themes on to the national agenda by creating public opinion.
Organisations generally reach a stage when the organisation itself becomes more important than the idea it was supposed to promote. The vehicle becomes more important than the goal. The RSS too has reached that stage.
politics; Savarkar is often quoted as having commented that “the epitaph of an RSS man will be: he was born, went to shâkhâ, and died
A clear national vision would have told the RSS that the Babri mosque had no business to stand on the Râma Janmabhûmi and its demolition was a rightful aspiration of the Hindu nation. But the RSS never developed this conviction.
One of the arguments used to minimize the seriousness of the Hindu-Muslim conflict is that Hindus and Indian Muslims have a common ancestry. This is a Sangh favourite though its weakness has been exposed long ago.
while the Hindus love these affinities which bind the Hindu to a Hindu…—the Moslems hate the very mention of them and are trying to eradicate the very memory of it all.
for Muslims, pre-Islamic period is a period of darkness (jâhilîya). Prophet Mohammed is himself reported to have said that his mother and beloved uncle were sent to Hell because they were non-Muslims.
the deliberate effort to lure people away from their ancestral religion is perhaps nowhere as serious in magnitude as in India, partly because the country puts no substantial hurdles in the way of internal and foreign missionaries, as opposed to most of its neighbours.
If any comparison can be made, it is with the well-funded US-based Protestant mission in Latin America, against which the Pope protested during his visit to Guatemala, pleading that the people there had been Catholics “for centuries
the Pope is not cancelling the Catholic mission project among Hindus.
the power of the Churches in India is totally out of proportion to the numbers of Indians they represent. The Catholic Church by itself is among the biggest owners of real estate, publishing-houses, print media and educational establishments; the situation of the Baptists and other Protestant Churches is, in relative figures, similar.
(for example, the celebration by a Jewish sect of a Last Supper rite decades before Christ’s birth should indicate that the Last Supper was but a dramatization of an existing practice, not its origin).
Ram Swarup attacks the principle of “proxy religions”, meaning religions in which contact with the Divine is established through privileged intermediaries, the Prophet or God’s Only-Begotten Son, as opposed to religions of direct experience.
Ishwar Sharan in his Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple. He points out that even Christian historians in the West have become sceptical of this story, and that they favour the account of Christianity being brought to India by Syrian refugees from the Persian empire in AD 345.
He was killed be ruhme, Syriac for “with a spear”. Centuries later, these consonants (Syriac usually writes no vowels) were reinterpreted as rendering brahma, “(by) a Brahmin”. No location for the execution is given, but the sixteenth-century Portuguse colonizers decided that it was on the Mylapore beach outside Madras, where a Jain and a Shaiva temple were demolished to make way for the San Thome cathedral in commemoration of the apostle’s martyrdom.
So what? The European landscape is studded with churches containing false relics of false saints to whom false martyrdom is attributed.
the Pagan viewpoint, these elements of continuity were and are small consolation. The decisive change in Europe was that the sacred fires on the altars to Vesta, Zeus, Lug or Wodan were extinguished, their hymns forgotten, their worship suspended. Like Latin, Pagan mythology became a dead language.
from a Hindu angle, focusing on the methods of conversion misses the point.
in spite of his family’s refusal to hand over copies of their despatches to the homefront bulletin Tidings to the police investigators, a few were traced elsewhere and turned out to monitor the harvest in souls gradually being reaped as a result of the missionary’s investment in material gifts and social service.139 That service was not purely altruistic, it was meant as a bargaining chip in order to get the natives to accept the missionary’s message.
Yet, if Christianity were the true religion, the exclusive road to Salvation, this tricking of materially deprived people into the faith by means of material incentives would be a very small matter. Against this background, the fuss over the methods used becomes petty and sterile:
Turn India into a Christian state if you want, as long as you keep it united and independent. Formulated this radically, it will of course be rejected by RSS men, but it is none the less the logical implication of Shukla’s position.
The pope should withdraw all foreign missionaries from our soil. Indian Christian missionaries are competent to do their job.
The British, who had a policy of transforming the border regions into a protective cordon of the empire, ‘discovered’ the Nagas in about 1830 but prohibited the entry in this area to anyone without official or military capacity, which curiously did not exclude the Christian missionaries!… One might say that it was the administrators, and in their wake the ethnographers and missionaries who, by a need of rational classification and order, invented the Naga tribes and consequently Naga nationalism.
This is the RSS mind typically at work: reducing an ideological confrontation between religions to a purely political confrontation between nations.
the Portuguese intentions in India were exactly the same as those of the Spanish in America.154 The 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing was commemorated with a lot of soul-searching in essays and symposia, films and novels, and formal apologies to the Natives including one by the Pope during his visit to the Dominican Republic.
Human Resources Minister Arjun Singh proposed to organize Maoist-style “people’s committees” to enforce the ban on the RSS. Two Bills were introduced in the Lok Sabha in 1993, the Constitution (80th Amendment) Bill and the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, which would have excluded parties which mix religion and politics from contesting elections,
the Muslim occupation of the larger part of India was as much and as certainly a colonization as British paramountcy has been.
Islamic conquerors turned India into an exploitation colony and in some parts also into a settlement colony. The steepest inequality between colonizing ruling class and colonized underclass prevailed. True, there were concessions for some collaborating enclaves (Jain financiers, Rajput vassal princes), but that too formed an exact parallel with British colonial policy, which depended on the Sikhs, the Muslim League, Indian civil servants and other collaborator enclaves of the native society.
Make war on them until idolatry does not exist any longer and religion belongs to Allah alone.
Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or victorious, on him we shall bestow a vast reward.”228 The reference to the chance of being “slain” shows that no allegorical war is meant, but a physical confrontation with winners and losers, martyrs and killers.
This goes against the common apologetic claim that if Mohammed’s Islam was sometimes characterized by violence, it was due to the violent nature of Arab society, which was then gradually tempered by Islam.
Pagan Arabia accepted Jews and Christians but rejected their God for itself; Muslim Arabia accepted their God but rejected His people.
Hindu scriptures do prescribe strict rules of chivalry,
second battle of Tarain in 1292:
Talikota,
23 January 1565,
K.S. Lal has collected some figures. The army of Mahmud Ghaznavi (c. AD 1000), which sacked the Somnath temple before being thrown back with heavy losses, employed 30,000 camels only for carrying the water supplies. Mohammed Ghori, the actual conqueror of North India (AD 1192), had 120,000 cavalry. Controlling the conquered territory required even larger armies: Alauddin Khilji had 475,000 horsemen under his command, Mohammed Tughlaq had 900,000. The Bahmani sultanate in the Dekhan recruited many thousands of soldiers from the Muslim countries per year; when this inflow was reduced because the
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an inscription, dated AD 1345, in which the Reddi dynasty of Andhra describes how after the elimination of the Kshatriya defenders, the duty of defending cows and Brahmins fell on the Shudras, “born of the feet of Vishnu”; the first independent Reddi king, Vema, “restored all the agraharas of Brahmanas, which had been taken away by the wicked Mleccha kings
Epigraphica Indica, vol.III
