Debating Saffronisation, Science, and Astrology

Not Neo-Colonialism As Much As Anti-Hinduism

Indians may have achieved political independence, but they are yet to attain cultural independence, and the uproar in parliament in Delhi on August 16, 2001 over the alleged saffronisation of education was merely one of the side-shows orchestrated and organised by those inimical to Hindu heritage, culture, and ways of life. The British began dismantling traditional Indian schools and learning in 1858 with a view to manufacture clerks to take care of British business, and a citizenry that would become intellectual and spiritual wards of the West. The Nehruvian-Stalinists (to use the apt label coined by Rajiv Sreenivasan, Rediff columnist) have been seeing to it that the British agenda is continued, so hateful are they of "Brahminism" (a label they have used to demonise Hinduism, which itself is an "amorphous" term that, unlike Christianity or Islam or Judaism, does not refer to a brand of "monotheistic religion" but instead is a more encompassing, pluralistic, open philosophy and way of life).

It is indeed tragic that the first prime minister of India supported and encouraged the project of dismantling and destruction of Hindu culture that the British started. "Modernisation and secularisation" was Nehru’s mantra, selectively uttered and used, by his academic and political henchmen to attack Hinduism and to protect the "minorities". The word "communal" was used to label Muslim separatists before independence. Those Muslims wanted a separate country for themselves. But after independence, things changed, and terminologies changed overnight. Indeed, in the Indian version of the Brave New World and "new-speak," left became right, and right became wrong. Non-Marxist, Hindu Indians became communal. Muslims became secular and progressive. Hindus were labeled chauvinistic and fundamentalist, and among those labeled Hindu chauvinist and radicals were Aurobindo, Tilak, and Gokhale!

Against the vision of these Hindu nationalists (in the very positive sense of the term), the wheelers and dealers in post-colonial India foisted upon the hapless Indian public their version of Macaulay-ism. They abused power to distort the nationalist version of Indian history and made it a political issue. With the support of Nehru, the leftists took over and established their hegemony over academic institutions like the ICHR, ICSSR, and NCERT. A combination of these Left/Marxist "intellectuals" and their Muslim collaborators made sure that what was produced by the "mainstream" historians, political scientists, sociologists, and cultural analysts was, in many cases, ugly revisionism masquerading as scholarship.

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