A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

In a delicious irony, while purportedly protecting the land from alien faiths, the self-anointed protectors have come under the influence of foreigners in their interpretation and practice of the Hindu tradition, aping the antediluvian diktats—which disregard scepticism and deny openness—of the same traditions from which they aim to defend Hinduism. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed, those who fight with monsters should be careful lest they become monsters.10 How else does one explain a so-called Hindu faction, however fringe, which beats up defenceless young couples, yet subscribes to the same broad Hindu tradition that worships Krishna, famed for his relationship with Radha, with whom he was never married? How does one reconcile a self-styled Hindu faction which attacks women for drinking alcohol, when Hindu festivals are celebrated by men and women alike with the consumption of a drink made from the cannabis plant, and when the potent datura is offered in prayer to Shiva? These groups seem to have internalised the anti-blasphemy attitudes of medieval Turks and the prudery of Victorian England.