Dr. Subramanya Swami calls on the Hindus to unite

Adherence to Hinduism is also being sought to be diluted in the name of modernity and this dilution is made a norm of secularism. Religion, it is advocated, is personal. To be a good Hindu today is conceptually being reduced to just praying, piety, visiting temples, and celebrating religious festivals. The concept of a collective Hindu mindset is being ridiculed as chauvinist and retrograde, even fundamentalist.

However pious a Hindu becomes, however prosperous Hindu temples become from doting devotees’ offerings, when the nation is in danger it is this collective mindset of the people that matters, and not the piety of the individual in that collective.

Hindu society today lacking a cohesive corporate identity, is thus in the process of becoming fragmented, and hence increasingly in disarray. This fission process is on simultaneously with the reality of millions of Hindus who go to temples regularly or walk to Sabarimalai or participate in Kumbh Mela.

This is not what I mean when I speak of Hindu unity to this august gathering, he said. I am instead referring to the Hindu consciousness which encompasses the willingness and determination to collectively defend the faith from the erosion that is being induced by the disconnect with our glorious past. What Swami Vivekananda, Bankim Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, and Subramania Bharati had achieved by raising Hindu consciousness to that end, has now been depleted and dissipated over the last six decades. Even the patriotic and anguished writings of Dr. Ambedkar, and his oration in the Constituent Assembly for a strong united country have been vulgarized to advocate Hindu society’s disintegration. In his scholarly paper presented in a 1916 Columbia University seminar [and published in Indian Antiquary, vol. XLI, May 1917 p.81-95] Dr. Ambedkar stated: “It is the unity of culture that is the basis of homogeneity. Taking this for granted, I venture to say that there is no country that can rival the Indian Peninsula with respect to the unity of it’s culture. It has not only a geographic unity, but it has over and above all a deeper and much more fundamental unity—the indubitable cultural unity that covers the land from end to end”. Ambedkar wrote several such brilliant books, but alas, Nehru and his cohorts so thoroughly frustrated him that in the end bitterness drove him to Buddhism. Thus, if this degeneration and disconnect are not rectified and repaired by a resolve to unite Hindustanis [Hindus and those others who proudly identify with India’s Hindu past], the Hindu civilization may go into a tail spin and ultimately fade away like other civilizations have for much the same reason.