Nimitha > Recent Status Updates

Marx was, in starure and approach, the heir of classical economists and philosophers. But the society whose prophet and architect he hoped to become was a very different one from theirs.

Genuinely conservative conservative governments were inclined to distrust all intellectuals and ideologists, even reactionary ones, for, once the principle of thinking rather than obeying was accepted, the end was in sight.

Pious and illiterate peoples would live content in the poverty to which God had called them under the rulers which Providence had given them, simple, moral, orderly and immune from the subversive effects of reason.

For the monarchies and aristocracies, and indeed for all who rested on top of the social pyramid, it(religion) provided social stability.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
~ Carl Marx

By 1848, educated Europe was almost ripe for the shock of Charles Darwin.

'Sire', the great mathematician Laplace is reported to have told Nepolean, when asked where God fitted into his celestial mechanics, 'I have no need of such a hypothesis'.

Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament.

He (Nepolean) had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty, and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.

The results of American revolutions, broadly speaking, were countries carrying on much as before , only minus the political control of the British, Spaniards, and Portuguese. The result of the French revolution was that the age of Balzac replaced the age of Mme Dubarry.

"Everything is a puppet show. If a new puppet dances better to a given tune than the current one, and shows more colour, dazzle, devotion and cunning, it enters the stage wearing a mask of strength or astuteness. It becomes the leader. The puppet that played the leader earlier is flung aside(remember L.K. Advani). "

The qualifications for an utsava murti are the ability to put up a show and the canniness to give an emotional colour to things that spin out of control, and create a commotion, and thus take attention away from the problem."

The author has hit the bullseye here!

"PM Modi,who won a majority for the BJP, is projected as a strong leader. But he's only an utsava murti, a replica of the temple deity taken out during a procession. The real deity sits in Nagpur, inside the RSS shrine. The utsava murti dazzles everyone across the length and breadth of the country. It's hailed everywhere. (TBC)

"Starting with the Adivasis, and including the Brahmins, the multitude of castes forming the humane majority of Hindu society must act now(against fanaticism)"
The problem with this "humane" Hindu society is that its division along caste lines is too deep to fight against any common enemy. RSS, in this case is spawned out of the same social structure that holds this hindu society. Author is too optimistic imo.

"Golwalkar rules out allowing swayamsevaks any discretion. Choices, he says, don't exist for them. This is distressing because the RSS pulls young children into its organisational fold. It doesn't make humans out of them; instead it creates inhuman robots called swayamsevaks."

Not sure about RSS casting a spell on even the liberal Hindu communities in India. As Ambedkar had said Hinduism basically promotes graded inequality. As long as someone else is the lowest in the social order(as are Muslims now in India), Hindus will gladly forget their sufferings. That's why majority of RSS's foot soldiers are from the long-suffering lower caste Hindus.

"The main reason for the RSS's hatred of Islam and Christianity is that they refuse to dissolve into the chaturvarna order"

A bit of simplification here I think. Muslims and Christians of Indian subcontinent don't completely distance themselves from caste system (Eg, uppercaste Christians -Knanaya and Syrian- of Kerala).

Fascism everywhere seeks enemies and makes wild claims of racial purity. RSS is no exception.