Cry, o! my beloved India – Francois Gautier

Indians often rave about how India is shining and sparkling. Yet,nobody seems to note that today, in India at least, we live in a world of the politically correct where truth is often a casualty and untruths take on scintillating forms. If one looks a little closely at what’s happening, we will find India has never been in such great danger of losing its identity, of forfeiting what makes it special – indeed, unique – amongst all the nations in the world.

Indians are getting divided and subdivided: Instead of feeling Indians first, they feel they are Muslims first, or Dalits first or Christians first. This is a very dangerous trend because it spells the death of the minimum unified nationalistic pride, which alone takes a country forward.

Indians today take pride in melting abroad, or adopting a ‘secular’ creed, which basically makes them soulless and identity-less, however brilliantly they may ape the West. There is also increasing Christianisation taking place in India – virtually half of the coastal villages of Tamil Nadu have converted to Christianity after the tsunami, to give just one example. Conversion to Islam, too, is going on at an alarming rate: Madarsas, which teach children that there is only one God, Allah, are sprouting all over the country, from Kerala to UP.

Marxism poses another kind of threat: The Congress-led UPA Government has placed its
Communist fellow travellers in major academic posts, universities, and curriculum committees. It will take a decade to dislodge them and correct the untruths they have introduced into the textbooks. Then, Americanisation in the name of globalisation is going on at full tilt. It can stifle the soul of the country with the connivance of advertisers, the Government and greedy entrepreneurs.

While all this is happening, the one person who can make a difference, who can put a stop to all this, the "Eminence Grise" of India, Ms Sonia Gandhi, maintains her Sphinx-like silence. Surely, she might be sincere in her desire to cleanse Indian politics and introduce rationality to the Congress party. However, her actions speak louder than words, and India has entered the worst phase of divisiveness under her dispensation-by-proxy.

Despite widespread disquiet with caste-based reservation, Ms Gandhi’s Congress party is pushing for quotas for Muslims. The Congress leaders have always cynically exploited Muslims as vote-banks while doing nothing for their uplift. But under Ms Gandhi, minority appeasement has turned into an article of faith. She may go to Tirupati but it’s only because she lives in a country of 850 million Hindus; she probably won’t mind too much if India turned into a land of converts to Christianity. As a Westerner and a Catholic, she has no idea about the spirituality behind Hinduism, and probably sees the West as the ultimate sign of civilisation.

Is Ms Sonia Gandhi at all concerned about the fact that poor tribals in large pockets in the North-East are being converted to Christianity? Where missionaries tell them that it is sinful to enter a temple, where women are asked not to wear bindis and children taught to look down on their culture as animist or heathen? Is it surprising that there is an increasing loss of communal harmony in the North-East?

Regardless of the shocks of invasions that India went through historically, there has always been syncretism among Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim communities. The ordinary Muslim in Jammu & Kashmir or the Christian in Kerala, even if he thought that his or her God was the only true one, had understanding and respect for the age-old Indian culture. Reverence for
women, respecting others’ festivals and customs, harmony with one’s neighbours were the hallmarks. Today, thanks to the pernicious policy of caste and religion-based reservation, Christians, Muslims and Dalits are taking things for granted.

What makes India special is its spirituality. The knowledge that there is life after death, the understanding of the various subtle plans above the mind, the ancient wisdom on reincarnation, dharma, karma, jnana, maya and, above all, the acceptance of God as an ethical and moral absolute, and that he manifests himself at different times under different names, is the greatest contribution of Hinduism to humanity.

This is the knowledge that humanity needs in the 21st century if it does not want to continue hurtling towards catastrophe as it is doing now. The world’s two major so-called monotheistic religions, whose adherents still believe that only their God is true, and that the rest must be converted through guile and financial baits, is a medieval attitude to religion.

Some suggest that all this is because Indians have a slavish mindset. That may not be true. Still, the question must be asked: How is it possible that a nation of a billion people, with some of the best brains on this planet, allows itself to be governed by patently divisive and dangerous policies that the current UPA dispensation led by Ms Sonia Gandhi is following? What can be done to prevent the dismantling of all that is good and true about India?

Cry, o my beloved India! See what thy children are doing to thee…

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