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Thursday, June 09, 2022

The Great Hindu Civilization: Pavan K. Varma's Looking Glass World

 

Pavan K. Varma’s The Great Hindu Civilization – Achievement Neglect Bias and the Way Forward must be read in the context of the rapid degeneration of India from a Constitutional secular democracy to an autocratic state where the only democratic feature is periodic elections; all other Constitutional provisions that made India the largest democracy in the world are being allowed to erode rapidly by the ruling Hindutva establishment.

The advocates of Hindutva, the political ideology of Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claim with fervour that following Narendra Modi’s electoral victories in 2014 and 2019, the Indian nation has been reawakened from a deep slumber, and has entered a phase of true Hindu renaissance.

And that it is time now for the Hinduism to reclaim its rightful place at the top that it has traditionally and legitimately occupied; to obliterate the influences of the ‘Islamic marauders,’ and the British colonial rulers. These ‘aliens’ subjugated the Hindu mind and emasculated the Hindu civilization for a millennium. What drives these bhakts up the wall is that even in the first five to six decades of an independent India, the Nehruvian ideology of secularism continued to dominate academic and public discourse, leading to further marginalization of the Indian civilization’s Hindu ethos.

For these bhakts, there is no distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva – they are the same, or at best two sides of the same coin. Violence is their preferred mode of discourse. The hatred fomented by the bhakts has driven India to the edge of the precipice, periodically culminating in violence against the religious and caste minorities. The state is complicit in these diabolical shenanigans, as it allows the Hindutva forces to slowly but in a determined manner, take control of all the apparatus of statehood that was created to ensure democratic rights to the people.

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