HINDUTAVA AND RADICAL ISLAM: WHERE THE TWAIN DO MEET

• Every set of scriptures has in it enough to justify extreme, even violent reaction. The tectonic shift in the Hindu mind, that has been going on for 200 years, is being underestimated.
• In the great work, Gita Rahasya, that he wrote in the Mandalay prison, the Lokmanya invokes Sri Samartha, "Meet boldness with boldness; Large heartedness towards those who are grasping? Forgiveness towards those who are cruel? ‘Even Prahlada, that highest of devotees of the Blessed Lord,’ the Lokmanya recalls, has said, ‘Therefore, my friend, wise men have everywhere mentioned exceptions to the principle of forgiveness’.
• The mistake is to assume that the sterner stance is something that has been fomented by this individual or that in the case of Hindutva, by say, Veer Savarkar or by one organisation, say the RSS or the VHP. That is just a comforting mistake the inference is that once that individual is calumnised, once that organisation is neutralised, ‘the problem will be over. Large numbers do not gravitate to this interpretation rather than that merely because an individual or an organisation has advanced it. They gravitate to the harsher rendering because events convince them that it alone will save them.
• Instigating factors:-
The more aggressively the other religions proselytise – look at the fervour with which today the Tablighi Jamaat goes about conversion; look at the organised way in which the missionaries ‘harvest’ our souls;
The more they use money to increase the harvest whether it is Saudi money or that of Rome and the American churches;
The more any of them uses violence to enlarge its sway.
From within India, three factors in particular will make the acquiring of that Islamic body all the more certain.
The more biased ‘secularist’ discourse is.
The more political parties use non Hindus, Muslims for instance as vote banks and the more that non Hindu group comes to act as one –‘strategic voting’. The more the state of India bends to these exclusivist, aggressive traditions.
• M.F. Husain. He is a kindly man, his depictions of Hindus goddesses have been in the news; he has painted them in less than skimpy attire. How come he has never felt inspired to paint women revered in Islam, or in his own family, in the same style as the one that propelled his inspiration in regard to Hindu goddesses?
• When Muslims start behaving like a vote bank you can be certain that someone will get the idea that Hindus too should be welded into a vote bank, and eventually they will get welded into one.
ARUN SHOURIE
28/12/2007