IN RESPONSE TO A FRIEND'S COMMENT ABOUT THE SAD INDIFFERENCE OF THE PRESENT-DAY YOUTH TO THE MEMORY OF THE HEROES OF THE FREEDOM STRUGGLE ... 1

Right you are and it is here that we must work to change the order of things. The British and before that the Muslims destroyed our civilisation and culture. We must never forget the injury they caused us. But now we are free to act, to serve and to propagate the idea that eternal India stands for and we must contribute our mite towards that end of resurrecting the mission of our motherland. Upon the survival of India depends the survival of the human race for it is here, and here alone, that the highest ideas about life and existence, about man and and his mission were discovered ages ago when civilisation elsewhere was in slumber. No wonder India has been called, and fittingly so, the 'cradle of human civilisation'. From here have rushed out life-giving ideas of spirituality and light, peace and harmony, cooperation and coexistence, reflection and renunciation, the likes of which the world has never seen before or after. It is this eternal India with her message of the freedom from phenomenal tyranny that lay at the base of our political freedom movement and not mere arrival at earthly sovereignty for enjoyment of this transitory life.

However, it behoves us to remember that freedom won is not freedom kept. For that we have to arm ourselves in sacrifice and service for the nation. And what better way to do it than to begin at home by serving our aged and ailing parents, our invalid and infirm kith and kin by being with them physically, psychologically and, why, even spiritually for such proximity is what they seek in their heart of hearts and not mere medicines and food served routinely at the prescribed hours like automatons without emotion or involvement. These elderly ones are in the evening of their lives and seek our company more than anything else but are denied it as we remain busy with our own selfish ends of life and its pleasures, our so-called necessities of survival in a world where existence is supposedly becoming increasingly difficult as not to allow us occasion to visit the room of the patients even once a day to put a comforting hand on their head. We are busy indeed!

The defence of India is of paramount importance and we must get over the Gandhian legacy of debilitating passivity in the world of realpolitik if we are not to suffer at the hands of China again whose 'String of Pearls' policy is but barely indicative of its geopolitical intentions in the Indian Ocean. Emperor Ashok had once done untold damage to the cause of Indian defence through his unrealistic approach to international relations when he gave in to the high idealism of non-violence as a matter of State policy and, so, ushered in two millenia of security catastrophe for India from which we are still recovering. Swami Vivekananda came to set the balance straight but in came Gandhi with his Jain background of extreme non-violence inherited from his maternal side to upset the balance. The result was that our movement of manhood manifest in the violent revolution of the day was squashed as millions of mild Indians supported the Mahatma in his fanatical adherence to his unrealistic doctrine of non-violence as the only legitimate means available to Indians to combat and uproot British imperialism from India. That India got partitioned on independence meant that Gandhi's shortsightedness throughout his ministration of the freedom movement had made its mark finally and the blame, merely shifted to the British or Jinnah, as pious petitioners of Gandhi's cause are wont to doing, will not hold ground. Gandhi has to take the share of his responsibility, for political Mahatmas ought not to make such disastrous mistakes in reading the opposition that leads to the destruction of millions and the dissection of the nation, deliberately ignoring the call to militancy by so-called adversaries that could have avoided the eventual scenario and saved the motherland. What the British did was the fulfilment of their policy of 'Divide and Rule' right from the inception of their colonial occupation of India. And what Jinnah did to effect Partition is in the very fabric of the faith he was born into, the fanaticism that has ravaged the world for 1400 years, that which has caused the loss of 80 million Hindu lives over a period of 1000 years of brutal Islamic occupation of India.

A point to note ought to be this, that we gained our independence not merely from the British but also from the Muslims who controlled political life in Hindu India. The British, in a way, helped the Hindu cause by subjugating the Muslim rulers so that when the British were gone from India, the Hindus gained their liberation from the Islamic yoke that had awaited them for a thousand years, years of terrible oppression, despite the mischievous misrepresentation of Indian history by left liberals and Muslim scholars who keep propagating the myth of India having been a syncretic culture when all of that syncretism meant the destruction of universities (Nalanda, the most significant one), the burning of their libraries, the desecration and destruction of temples, forced conversions, exaction of Jizya, murder, loot and imposition of the barbaric Sharia, with only Kathak, Khayal, Urdu, Indo-Islamic architecture, the failed Din-i-Ilahi and Indian Sufism to tell the grand tale of syncretism. Not insignificant, perhaps, this amalgamation of cultures but small consolation for the tens of millions of Hindus including the Sikh Gurus Arjan Dev and Tegh Bahadur who lost their lives in this barbarous assault of an inferior religious culture on a civilisation infinitely superior.

... To be continued