THE FATE OF THE HINDUS ... 1

THE FATE OF THE HINDUS ... 1

The worst sinners are those who convert innocent Hindu children to Islam and Christianity, and Hindu brides and bridegrooms to the same in marriage. This is subversion of natural culture and detrimental to the prospects of the Hindu race.

India is the home of Hinduism and ours is a non-proselytising dharma tradition much like modern science which convinces by reason and efficacy rather than by imposition and subsequent indoctrination of faith. If this grand spiritual culture is decimated by clever or coercive conversion to fanatical faiths, it will be humanity's loss, not just India's. If Hinduism goes from India and she is rendered an Islamic State as in her dismembered parts she has become, what shall remain of India?

But this is just what has been going on in India for the last thirteen centuries. Every since the fall of Sindh in 712 CE when Sindhunaresh (King of Sindh) Raja Dahir fell to the Arab General Muhammad Bin Qasim, India's fate has been progressively sealed.

India is such a vast country with such a range of linguistic diversity, geographical differences, climatic and cultural divergences, social and civic variations that it would have been impossible for her ever to have had a unifying identity but for the grand Sanatan Dharma that permeated her being from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean and gave her that solidarity of national cultural consciousness. It is this spirit of the Vedas and even of those rebel movements like Jainism and Buddhism that gave India a singular spiritual culture and marked her out as the civiliser of nations.

In ancient times Indian spirituality spread out into the wider world through trade relations and later through Buddhist peaceful proselytising across Asia. Even Europe, namely, Greece had come into contact with the thought of brahmanical India. Buddhism civilised Asia and set the stamp of Indian spirituality everywhere whose indelible impressions we can still see in Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bhutan, Java, Sumatra and elsewhere. Hindu influence is still markedly seen in Nepal, Mauritius, Bali, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Afghanistan was once upon a time called Gandhar and was a part of Hindu India. Pakistan and Bangladesh were torn off from India just the other day. This was India and Indian influence in the past. Now where are we? Reduced in terrain by Partition and tormented by separatist movements within, we are fighting daily a war of attrition for sheer survival as a race whose crowning glory is our ancient spiritual culture.

Long ago Swamiji had written a piece, 'Shall India die?' In it he had indicated that the demise of India would mean the spiritual death of the world, a terrible decline in its morality and a generally regressive order of human civilisation. Swamiji's fears were not unfounded. Wherever Islam has badly displaced Hinduism as is best evidenced in recent times in Pakistan and Bangladesh, barbarism has been the order of the day. Minorities are persecuted -- which has historically been the case with Islam -- and theocratic norms and laws have driven the soul out of an erstwhile vibrant civilisation. Hindus 🕉 are a decimated lot in these two Islam-dominated states and live like second class citizens, much like the Islamic scriptural 'dhimmis'. This has led to large scale exodus of Hindus from these two countries and forced conversions to Islam. The lot of Hindus there is pitiable and only refuge in Hindu-majority India seems a safe option for them.

But how did this all happen? How could India lose her influence over so many countries of Asia and finally her own independence and subsequently territory post-Partition? It is a long story that needs retelling.

Indian civilisation is ancient and had lost a lot of energy by the time its influence started waning in Asia in spiritual-cultural terms. Younger and more energetic races started emerging, joining this inter-racial race and, barbaric as they were, they violently took the lead through armed conquests while India brooded on domestic divisive issues. Being geographically large and varied and with a myriad complexities of social divisions afflicting it, India became a world unto herself, a self-contained continent of peoples that lost interest in the wider world that surrounded her. Her colonies abroad lost links with her gradually eventhough they remained Hindu or Buddhist in bearing. India became isolated from the rest of the civilised world by an act of self-seclusion, for she was a land of plenty that did not need foreign help for self-sustenance nor did her domestic divisions allow her scope to look beyond. In this self-imposed banishment from the world 🌎 India sought her singular identity, not realising that if she did not conquer cultures spiritually, barbaric hordes would conquer her politically and corrode and kill her culture. That is exactly what happened and has been happening ever since. India has been converted one-third to Islam and those limbs on her flanks cut off by the perfidious act of Partition. The remaining polity, a full two-thirds of the subcontinent are being slowly converted till Hindus 🕉 are rendered a defenceless minority in their very homeland.  This has happened in the Middle East in the past and is the awaited fate of India.

Written by Sugata Bose