[Sri Aurobindo
wrote the following note to Amal Kiran in September 1949, but how relevant it
is to the present situation in Kashmir in 2017! I draw the attention of the
reader to four points which I frame in my own words for the sake of brevity:
(1) Not all Muslims are fanatics, so look for their support in a secular state.
(2) Do not trust Pakistan. (3) Do not suggest a coalition “between the loyalists and the rebels in
Kashmir”, for the rebels will only subvert the administration. (4) Do not give
up Kashmir because of military weakness, for it will only encourage Pakistan to
establish Muslim rule in North India.]
A Hindu Counterpoint
Current Issues & Comments on Articles in Major English Newspapers of India
Sunday 21 May 2017
Sunday 2 April 2017
“Yes, bring on Bharatiyata" by Pratap Bhanu Mehta on the Indian Express website on March 29, 2017
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/mohan-bhagwat-rss-workshop-at-delhi-university-yes-bring-on-bharatiyata-4590003/
Quote from the above article followed by my comment:
“Indigenisation
would require confronting the self as much as confronting the other. The
insidious claim in the call to indigenisation is this: What counts as Indian?
Who gets to set these terms? What about western ideas? What about Islam? Will
we recognise, as Aurobindo did, “However much we may deplore some of the characteristics
of that intervening period which were dominated by the western standpoint or
move away from that standpoint back to our own characteristic way of seeing
existence, we cannot get rid of a certain element of inevitable change it has
produced upon us, any more than a man can go back in life to what he was some
years ago?” Will we recognise as Aurobindo did, that Islam nourished India and
was nourished by it? Or will the choice of indigenous be determined by
Golwalkar who said non-Hindu peoples must “stay in the country wholly
subordinated to the Hindu nation”? A genuine indigenisation would require
embracing all of India; not parts of it. So, bring on the indigenisation that
embraces all, the Western and the Islamic, the Aghoris and the Tantriks, the Marxists
and the Liberals, as Indian.”
The quote from Sri Aurobindo is from his
book The Renaissance of India (CWSA,
Vol. 20, p 51). The context of it is whether India can or should go back to its
culture as it was before the Mahomedan and British conquest. Sri Aurobindo says
that we cannot go back to our great past, but we “can go forward to a large
repossession of ourselves in which we shall make a better, more living, more
real, more self-possessed use of the intervening experience”. This can hardly
mean that Islam has “nourished India”! It could as well mean that the problems
of building a nation have multiplied instead of diminishing with the coming of
Islam into India. If Islam had really “nourished India”, then there would have
been no problems at all in unifying the Indian nation.
Saturday 4 March 2017
The Wrong Notion that Sri Aurobindo Rejected Hinduism – Raman Reddy
(With
specific reference to The Clasp of
Civilisations (2015) by Richard
Hartz, published by Nalanda International,
and Nationalism,
Religion, and Beyond (2005), a
compilation of Sri Aurobindo’s writings on Politics, Society and Culture, edited
by Peter
Heehs.)
I was rather disappointed
after reading The Clasp of Civilisations
by Richard Hartz because I expected from him a better understanding of Hinduism
than most Western scholars.[1]
The book starts off well with a sense of universality in spiritual matters
which justifies the title, but gets caught halfway through with the usual
antipathy towards Hinduism that is so common among secular scholars of India. The
chapter on Vivekananda’s famous address in the Parliament of Religions held in
Chicago in September 1893 is indeed well-written and the circumstances of the historic
event depicted in a most interesting manner with an undercurrent of humour. But
the chapter on Hinduism titled “Untold
Potentialities: Jawaharlal Nehru, Sri Aurobindo and the Idea of India”, in
which Nehru is elevated into a spiritual figure and Sri Aurobindo converted
into a secular icon, shows the fundamental flaws of Richard’s scholarship. One immediately gets the impression of
encountering one more Hinduphobic armchair scholar, who meticulously builds his
arguments on the works of other Hinduphobic scholars who also have never
empathised with Indian culture. Ironically, Richard Hartz has studied the Vedas
and is an expert in Sanskrit, but this only shows that mere scholarship does
not open the gates of spiritual comprehension. After all, Peter Heehs, his
colleague, did the same, wasting forty years of research on Sri Aurobindo and producing
such a hostile biography that the disciples of Sri Aurobindo had to go to the
Court to take him to task. But let us come back to Richard Hartz who could have
easily come to his own conclusions instead of following the path of Peter Heehs
with regard to Hinduism, or what is in fact the path of leftist secular
scholars of India and abroad which Peter Heehs himself follows faithfully for
the sake of his academic career. After all, for him academic success is more
important than stating the fundamental truth of Hinduism!
Monday 5 December 2016
Demonetization: Detailed Drama of How Modi Checkmated Pakistan’s Devastating Assault – by Desh Kapoor
All the chairpersons and MDs of India’s top banks were meeting at Reserve Bank of
India’s headquarters on the 15th floor of the Mint Street office in a
special session that started at 7 pm. In Delhi, on the other hand, the
top Cabinet ministers of the Modi government were meeting over an agenda
regarding MoUs between India and Japan.
None of the top bank chiefs or the ministers of the
government were aware of what was to happen.
The Cabinet meeting ended at 7.30 pm and the PM went to
meet the President to inform him about the plan. The ministers were
instructed to remain in the meeting hall. The bankers on the other hand,
were discussing the situation from the Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) in the economy.
Just before 8 PM, the TV sets were switched on to listen to
the PM, with the understanding that the meeting would continue after the PM
address. Of course, the announcement from the PM was going to be
earth-shattering for most bankers who had to rush back to their offices to
handle the situation arising from the ban of Rs 500 and Rs 1000!
Tuesday 22 November 2016
Indian Pseudo-secularism – by Rajiv Malhotra
Given the mistranslation of dharma as religion, the Western idea of no religion in the public square has been
interpreted by many Indians as no dharma in the public square. Secularized
Indians have failed to appreciate that a dharma-nirapeksha society – or a
society lacking dharma (as secularism has often been translated) – would be
dangerously ambivalent toward ethical conduct. Nirad Chaudhuri warned against
India’s adopting secularism of even the highest European type, because without
dharma’s moral and spiritual qualities, society would become immoral and
culturally debased. Being irreligious still allows for ethical behaviour, but
being un-dharmic equates with things like corruption and abuse. The result of
importing secularism into a dharmic society has thus been disastrous in many
ways. (extract from the book Being Different)
Saturday 12 November 2016
The Case for Secular Hinduism – Raman Reddy
The desperate attempts to declare Hinduism
as a religion and not “a way of life”, as the Supreme Court had observed twenty
years back in 1995, has obvious political motives. It is basically to prevent
Hindus to unite under one banner and weaken the BJP’s hold on the electoral
politics of India. But the impression given by those who raise the bogey of
Hinduism is that it is the biggest threat to the nation since the Partition of
India. I have often asked myself what exactly are the dangers of Hinduism to
the nation, and in this regard a clear presentation of this perceived threat is
long overdue. Secular scholars do make a lot of noise about unimportant issues
such as beef-eating and the compulsory singing of Vande Mataram, but when it
comes to going beyond these trifles and getting into the nitty-gritty of their
accusation, they simply vanish from the public domain. But before I speculate
further on the underlying reason for feeling threatened by such a harmless
religion as Hinduism, let me repeat an old argument in its favour.
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