The new akhand danger to India

Even though sheltered quite naturally by geographical forces, India faced two key challenges across its centuries-old history: the multiple Islamic invasions, in particular of those who stayed on to impose taxes such as jizya; and European colonialism, who gave names and concepts such as caste and religion to Indians' understanding of India. Nothing in this life is a gain-gain or a loss-loss: we gain some, we lose some, but it's not a net zero either. We evolve: not into better or worse, but something different. India has evolved: keeping many things, notably its stunning diversity of lifestyles and beliefs, thus enabling experience of an extraordinary amount of freedom for many an individual; losing many things, in particular its groundedness, its contentedness, becoming "ferociously ambitious" as the West teaches it to, and to which new India aspires to. It is this aspiration, where individual colludes with national and religious, that gives rise to the most dangerous challenge for India: the uniformization of India, presently under way since the BJP came into power, is probably the biggest ever attack on the Hindu fabric of India, as I see it. This time again, if the BJP succeeds, there will be gain and there will be loss: India will gain as a nation-state, much stronger, muscular, ambitious, and even leading its people to greater material prosperity; India will, however, lose its freedom that I talked about earlier, and will transform from being the conscience of the world into just another ambitious upstart. This is easily the biggest assault on India's Hindu identity and ethos: when Modi tries to bring a uniform civil code, he takes away India's biggest principle by which even today millions of Indians abide, if not always then sometimes: dharma. When codified law replaces dharma, we undo the very same ancients' work that the BJP is proud to call their own: to avoid this very codification, India chose, by favouring oral transmission of knowledge, to suffer from lack of knowledge transmission and lack of material development, as opposed to, say, ancient China, which saw value early in codification and, thus, law, thus a societal structure less interrupted by craziness. When every Indian is forced to bank, to have an identity card, to come inside a system which they are happy without, we destroy millions of lifestyles, free choices, traditions, and the very feeling of freedom. For, it must be always remembered, freedom comes first from the feeling of freedom, not merely the infrastructure provided: a man left to roam wherever he pleases but having a suspicion that he is being watched does not give the recipe to a free man, whereas a man even in a prison may feel free when he is so mentally developed as to let his fancy fly unhindered when and where he pleases. Freedom is in the mind: it is not enabled by laws. The best example is France, the so-called self-proclaimed land of liberty, and in reality anything but. But when law takes the upper hand, when dharma is banished, the Western distinction between the sacred and the profane, the society and the individual, comes into play: then, schizophrenia comes into play. Already, in times of globalisation and fed by Western, leftist education, not many Indians have the ability to think things from their perspective: the BJP-provided antidote now is much the same thing, but hued saffron. Hued in the old RSS vision of an akhand Bharat. But, is Shankaracharya's akhandness the same as the RSS's akhandness?

I don't think Adi Shankaracharya, when he established the four dhaams in four corners of Indian subcontinent, ever envisioned it as akhand, or used the word, though if he did so, even then that akhand would be very different. The akhandness of India does not come from some geographical realm under one umbrella, nor from some one religious cult holding sway: it comes from the typical character of an Indian. In that way, every land (not every nation-state) is akhand: however, many lands of this world lost this aspect quite early, when they stopped, for example, their animistic practices and were converted on a mass scale to Abrahamic religions. A concept born in one land, that of the Abrahamic religions, thus suddenly was mass-exported quite early in many lands' history, and most of them succumbed to it completely: thus was born a schizophrenia, for the native character often clashed with these imported values. With industrialisation, and people's license to turn their schizophrenia (greed) into profit, things became more unhinged. In India's case, though, it held onto its Hindu identity: simply because it was, and even today is, too difficult to define what or who a Hindu is. How do you define one, at all? How do you break water? Today, though, the water is being frozen: it is being given a shape, an identity. It is done in the name of glorifying it, so that there is an akhand Hindu raashtra, but what it does is only make the water breakable, to finish the last populous land of this world where that original akhandness was surviving. Nationalism is any day an extremely dangerous evil, but when coupled with what is the Western concept of religion, it launches people into a dizzying velocity of feeling self-important and threatened from everywhere: do you expect such a person to develop in an all-round manner?

When Shashi Tharoor wrote in a book about those great Hindu mathematicians and what India did first, it is easy to forgive him: he is but a completely Western-dyed man and he thinks himself too wise. But when the BJP starts to claim ancient airplanes and we did it first, we begin to wonder, does their Indianness, or Hinduness, stop at the sacred thread itself? What's the difference between Tharoor/Congress and the BJP, except that the latter is even more dangerous since it appears to many as the one which will protect dharma? What is first, or biggest, or highest ... such superlatives come from a Western idea of timeline, of history, a history that is organically born from codification, from writing systems. If Indians were so interested in the first and the biggest, they would have written things, not orally transmitted them across centuries. If someone from Italy or Jamaica were to invent something first, does the knowledge become less fascinating, less useful, or less enlightening? Knowledge is gained through thirst: that thirst is a love of knowledge, is an utter fascination with seeking truth; that thirst is not of someone who rushes to get a patent or plant a flag on a mountain. The one who lagged behind to seek himself in the mountain air and seek mountain air in himself is a richer person: though without "proofs" for those who cannot see beyond the flag. We do not love the Ramayana for its BC or AD dates: it is the West's role to call it "mythology". Why should we call it? Do not we meet Ram or Krishna or their aspects in our own lives: what "myth" is there about it? Let those others who see merit in anchoring things on an imaginary time do their own thing; can we not devise our own methods using our own loves and realities?

It is easy to write. So my dharma is now to fight: for dharma. I shudder at the thought that once India falls, which it may soon if no one fights for dharma, the world will enter the Kali Yuga very, very fast indeed.