REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS ... 1

REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS ... 1

I did not sufficiently respond to his call in those early years when clouds covered consciousness. Now in the fullness of the vesper hour shall I fail him yet again? No. 

In those days of youthful innocence I hardly could fathom the civilisational danger Hindus faced as ignorant I was of Islam and its ways. When an erudite Tamil brāhman uncle, well versed in Sanskrit, used to read to me passages from the 'Organiser', the journal of the RSS, I could hardly appreciate their import in the context of the prospective insecurity of the Hindus in their homeland. Frequenting the Ramakrishna Mission and being thus exposed to their literature and listening to the speeches and discourses of the monks, I never could imagine how far fact was from the fiction that I was being fed by people compromised to utopian ideas of interfaith harmony. Reading Vivekananda not quite thoroughly convinced me further that Islam was theologically upholding the sagun nirākār aspect of Brahman. Youth is life's phase of idealism and I was carried away as well by the youthful idealism of a perfect monastic order working the world to a perfect order of humanity where all religions were phases of THE RELIGION, as Swamiji put it, and my duty as devotee was but to grease the wheels of this vast machinery and lend my force to turning the Wheel of Dharma (Dharmachakra). Swamiji has said that since the advent of Sri Ramakrishna has been the onset of Satya Yug, and this got into my head in a curiously ignorant way which betrayed my lack of knowledge of the real world of things. But the ball had been set rolling. Often did that Sanskritised soul, that uncle who knew Sanskrit and was an ardent Hindutvavādi, try to convince me of the fundamental differences of attitude of Hindus and Muslims, and how the Hindus were being persecuted in different parts of the subcontinent by the Muslims and how Hindus were being craftily converted by the Christian missionaries, but they all fell on deaf ears, ears deadened to warning bells by the chimes of the harmony of religions preached by Ramakrishna-Vivekananda and carried forward unto us directly by the Ramakrishna Mission. This was in the 1980s.

The father of a student of mine, an alumnus of Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission School who had stood second in the then Higher Secondary Examination, had in 1990/91 warned me about the demographic change that was occurring in Assam and how from Assam to West Bengal the entire belt would in the decades ahead become progressively Islamised, how infiltration from Bangladesh was upsetting and would upset severely West Bengal's demographic balance, how RSS had Swamiji as its ideological mentor et al. But again I was impervious to understanding historical and existent realities in my pursuit of the Absolute Brahman. After all Thakur has said that all religions are valid paths to God and he has tested the same to be true. So, where was the problem? Naive that I was, duped that I was, stubborn that I was and ignorant that I was, I held the flag of harmony high as India slid into progressive Islamic anarchy.

Thakur disliked newspapers and had on one occasion asked for Ganga water to be sprinkled at a devotee's place where he would take his seat because a newspaper was earlier kept there. Swamiji had made the Ramakrishna Mission strictly apolitical. And I was temperamentally apolitical, as also in those days immersed in spiritual practice which prompted me to more or less give up reading the daily newspaper from 1983 onwards. I was thus cut off from the outside world and lived in my inner world of the spirit and of the intellect, being immersed in spiritual contemplation and in my books.

Kashmir happened in 1990, Ayodhya in 1992, Gujarat in 2002, and so much more happened, but I was immune to these momentous events for I was busy serving the Ramakrishna Mission with all my soul. And there was the luminous figure of Thakur beckoning me on towards what I had misread as the prospective utopia. 

Not all mature early in every sense and certainly I did not. Having been a self-taught soul in every sense of the term, I could not gather my civilisational bearings right, although I did proceed fairly far for a lay person along the spiritual path, thanks to the Ramakrishna monks and to the unbounded grace of Thakur-Ma-Swamiji and later my Gurudev post-initiation. Earlier I had to as well adjust my soul to the jolt of Ramakrishna Mission declaring itself a non-Hindu organisation consequent on Communist oppression of its academic institutions. The case had been won in the Calcutta High Court and lost in the Supreme Court of India but all the while it was painful to find my identity as a devotee of the Mission in light of the fact that I was born a Brāhmo and had converted to the Hindu fold out of conviction in 1983. When the Mission declared itself non-Hindu, I had emphatically rejected the status and with redoubled vigour declared myself a Hindu.

Politics and religion. People say they ought to be kept separate and yet these very ones speak of 'unity in diversity'. This has become the catch-word of surface secular people who scarce know anything in depth of religion and its dharmic (ethical) role in politics. Our Constitution is based on dharma without which it would lose its philosophical or moral validity. It is not a mere codification of dead laws but is a vibrant treatise of principles that ought to govern our polity in keeping with our civilisational ethos. This element of dharma as opposed to exclusive Abrahamic religion is vital for our politics and sadly here we have been led astray by all and sundry either preaching that they are unduly apolitical or that politics is dirty business for dirtier souls than us, us whose prime duty is to serve the afflicted and the distressed, taking care to stay aloof from the sources of such distress and affliction as it would then entail being associated with and, perhaps, embroiled in politics. And, yet, we must as devotees and monks take the fullest protection of the state whenever threatened by ulterior political elements, maintaining all the while that we are after all apolitical. Complex reading? Let me explain then.

While the Hindu of late seeks to separate religion from politics, the Muslim never does so. Politics and religion for him are intimately wedded since the inception of Islam whose primary motivation is political domination of the world in the name of Allah (the one and only true God), that is, to create Dar-ul-lslam (land of Islam) out of Dar-ul-Harb (land of war). The Muslim is fed with mother's milk this close connection of his religion with politics and has no confusion about it. Our Sanatan Dharma also makes no distinction between dharma and politics as such, considering the latter Rajdharma, but in modern times, especially since Independence, there has been this consistent propaganda that religion and politics must be kept separate where it concerns the Hindus while there is a studied silence over Islamic jihad which of course in the eyes of our enlightened secular and pseudosecular intellectuals and gentlemen, as the case may be, is deemed an inner struggle for spiritual excellence when hard facts prove otherwise as we all know. Jihad is out and out a war against non-Muslims with the express purpose of conversion, killing and seizing power to establish the Islamic state wherever possible till the world has been totally won over and non-Muslims utterly subjugated.

End of Part 1

To be serialised and continued...

Written by Sugata Bose