Swami Vivekananda’s call for National Renaissance – Keynote address of Dr Subramanian Swamy at Chicago

Keynote address on the occasion of: 150th birthday Celebration at Chicago by Dr. Subramanian Swamy, Ph.D. (Harvard), Former Cabinet Minister for Commerce, Law and Justice, Govt. of India September 28, 2013

1. THE IDENTITY OF AN INDIA AS HINDUSTAN

In Chapter 7 Sloka 5 in the Gita, Bhagvan Krishna says that besides eight material elements , the noble souls collectively empower him to control the world. Swami Vivekananda is one such soul that Lord Krishna must have had in mind. As RSS senior adhikari K. Suryanarayana Rao pointed out in his booklet, Swami Ramakrishna, the guru of Swami Vivekananda had prophesied that indeed Vivekananda as Narendranath, a shishya of the guru, would one day through his intellectual and spiritual powers shake the foundations of the world. Swami Vivekananda indeed did so by his discourses and speeches. He spoke vigorously on the need for a new Hindustan. He wanted the cultural unity of India to be acknowledged openly by all Indians. Swamiji wanted a renaissance in the Hindu outlook based on Vedanta scriptures, and from it outlined the architecture of Hindu identity.

In his “Paper on Hinduism” read at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago on 19th Sept 1983, Swami Vivekananda emphasized the common points agreed by all the Indian-born religions (or Indic religions):

“From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu’s religion.”

Swami Vivekananda defined Hindutva, upon returning from Chicago in 1896, in an address in Lahore as follows:

“Mark me, then and then alone you are a Hindu when the very name Hindu sends through you a galvanic shock of strength. Then and then alone you are a Hindu when every man and woman who bears the name Hindu, from any country, speaking our language or any other language, becomes at once the nearest and dearest to you. Then and then alone you are a Hindu when the distress of anyone bearing the name Hindu comes to your heart and makes you fell as if your own son or daughter were in distress”
[Collected Works, vol 3, page 379].

Swamiji listed seven common points of Hindu and other Indic [India born] religions:

1.         Religion is received through revelation, the Vedas. By Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different sages in different bodies.
2.         Creation is without beginning or end. Creation and creator can be likened to two lines without beginning and without end.
3.         We are a spirit living in a body. We are not the body.
4.         The present is determined by our past actions and the future by the present.  There must have been causes before the present birth to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions. Also the natural habits of a new-born soul must have come from past lives.
5.         The soul in its very essence is free, unbounded, holy, pure and perfect. But the soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death.
6.         Worship Him, the God Almighty, through love, love for the love’s sake without pre-conditions or expectation.
7.          The whole object is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God. We can have the experience of God in this life.

And Deendayal Upadhyaya, an outstanding original thinker and President of the Jana Sangh, in hisIntegral Humanism following Swami Vivekananda, outlined how to modernize the concepts of Hindutva as follows:

“We have to discard the status quo mentality and usher in a new era. Indeed our efforts at reconstruction need not be clouded by prejudice or disregard for all that is inherited from our past. On the other hand, there is no need to cling to past institutions and traditions which have outlived their utility”. This is the essence of renaissance.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar who emerged later in 1916 as a young scholar just after Swamji attained Samadhi, expressed much the same view in his forgotten writings on Indian history. Presenting a research paper as long ago as in l916, titled “Castes in India; Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development” at an Anthropology Department seminar at the prestigious Columbia University in New York, Dr.Ambedkar stated:

“I venture to say that there is no country that can rival the Indian Peninsula with respect to the unity of its culture. It has not only a geographical unity, but it has over and above all a deeper and much more fundamental unity – the indubitable cultural unity that cover the land from end to end”(Indian Antiquary. vol.XVL May, 1917. p.94).

 

Hindu culture is at the root of the Indian civilization. After 1000 years of aggression against Hindus, causing deprivation and subjugation, nevertheless the core Hindu spirit remained undiminished, despite the consequential poverty and destitution having dented the mindset of the average Hindu.

Thus, Swami Vivekananda uplifted the Hindu mind which was since 1857 in a gloom to again throw of the shackles of the mind. Hindu renaissance thus began in inclusive best after Swamiji’s speech in Chacago in 1893.

Earlier, Ram Mohan Roy who propounded the concept of Brahmo Samaj, tried to import the Christian methodology of revival such as congregational worship, and eschewing individualizing and personalizing the divinity. Swamiji advocated the individual’s commitment to serve the downtrodden as the real form of worship, and held the “Truth alone is my God”. Nor did he agree to Swami Dayanand Sarasvati’s creation of a one dimensional deity, the fire, as the only way to worship.

Swami Vivekananda thus focused his spiritual energy on liberation of the individual from the shackles of the mind instilled by foreign rule and occupation of the nation which he called Bharat Mata. In that sense Swamiji was the fore runner of the national freedom fighters, opening the path for Sri Aurobindo and later Mahatma Gandhi to shape the Indian identity.
          
The question “Who are we?” is the first step in this search for that identity. It is an attempt to seek the foundation stone for a new Hindu Renaissance, which is necessary for discarding dysfunctional trappings of the past. We are today on the verge of an Indian cultural revolution that draws its sustenance and roots from our glorious past centuries of achievements, and of valour while in bondage.

Swamiji said: “If a Hindu is not spiritual, I do not call him a Hindu. National union in India must be a gathering up of its scattered spiritual forces. A nation of India must be a union of those whose hearts beats to the same spiritual tune.”[Quoted I K. Suryanarayana Rao : Swami Vivekananda : India Condensed].

We shall therefore define India as “Hindustan, a nation of Hindus and those others who proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus”. India is therefore a spiritual country and not secular in the West European sense.

In this definition of identity of India as Hindustan, Parsis,  Muslims and Christians who accept the historical and scientific truth that their ancestors were Hindus, are an integral part of the identity of Hindustani [see my Virat Hindu Identity (2013), Harnanand Publications, New Delhi]

The late Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington penned an influential book titled:       Who We Are? to define the American’s identity as a “White Anglo-Saxon Christian who speaks English” even if a very large proportion of Americans are of African, Mexican, Phillipines and Indian origin. For this Huntington focused on two ingredients of identity: Salience and Substance.

            Salience is the willing commitment of every citizen to place enlightened national interests, security and integrity above any personal interests and aspiration and thus be ready to make sacrifices, if necessary, for the same.

Substance is the existence and recognition of commonality of a citizen with other citizens of the nation, an emotional bonding that is not possible with citizens of other nations.  

Fortunately, we Indians do not have to contrive an identity as Huntington had to for a multi-ethnic USA. The territory in which Hindus have lived has been known for ages as Hindustan, i.e., a specific area of a collective of persons who are bonded together by common culture, history, ethos, aspirations.

As recent researches on DNA of the Indian people shows, Indians are ethnically one people.  The Indian nation-nation is a modern Republic today, whose roots are also in the long unbroken civilisational history.

It has been scientifically established in the research of Ramana Gutala and Denise Carvalhosilva (published in the renowned Human Genes journal, Sept.2006, VI. 120 p.543-51), titled “A Shared Y-Chronoosomal Heritage between Muslims and Hindus”, that Hindus and Muslims have the same DNA structure. Parsis, Indian Jews, and Christians do not deny Hindu ancestry.

The whole world has known our vast territory and millions of the inhabitants for centuries as ‘India and Indians’ or ‘Hind and Hindi’ or as the Chinese know us even today both as nation and people as ‘Yindu’. The root word in all these terms is ‘Hindu’, which word for the Persians, Arabs and Europeans meant a people living beyond the Sindhu river, and for the Chinese a people living beyond the Himalayas and bounded by the Indu Sagar [Indian Ocean].

The theology and epistemology of Hindu religion, or Hinduism is codified in the four Vedas and in the Vedanta scriptures, and the values contained therein are the basis for the Substance of being an Indian.

India’s glorious past in aptly summarized in the writings of Dr.Ambedkar, and his oration in the Constituent Assembly for a strong united country. Ambedkar wrote in this vein several such brilliant books, but alas, Nehru and his cohorts so thoroughly frustrated him and electorally humiliated him that in the end bitterness drove him to his sad end. We must honour him now as a great Rajrishi and co-opt his writings as a mandatory part of the patriotic Indians’ literature.

Jonah Blank, an American journalist curious about the “paradoxical” durability and the solidSubstance of Indianness, took a journey in 1991-92 from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka on the route taken by Lord Rama. He then wrote a book about titled: Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God—Retracing the Ramayana Through India [Houghton Mifflin, Boston USA]. He writes: “India’s land may be ruled by aliens from time to time, but never her mind, never her soul…..In the end, it is always India that does the digesting”[p.217].

 He concludes: “But somehow a nebulous sense of ‘Indianness’ does exist, and it binds together Gujaratis, Orissans, to Nagas who might seem to have nothing at all in common. Perhaps it is this elusive, undefinable [yet very real] link that has allowed the sub-continent’s multitude of races to live in some rough semblance of harmony for four thousand years”[p.218]. Despite Blank’s unthinking adherence to Indian ancient and medieval history as written out by British colonialists, the reality of his direct experiences from his travels in India makes him come to the opposite conclusion to the British colonialists viz., India has always existed because of the “Indian-ness” of the people.

Moreover, the world knew of Indians in these millenniums not as nomads but as a highly civilized people who produced exotic goods they had never seen before and were hospitable to visitors of all religious persuasion from abroad. Many travelers such as Fa Hsien, Yuan Chuang, Marco Polo, Vasco d’Gama, and Mark Twain wrote glowingly then about the tolerant behaviourial quality of the Hindus, which quality can be summarized as the defining characteristic of the ancient Indian people.

Justice Bharucha, a Parsi, who later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India, wrote in his Babri Masjid judgment of 1993 [Reported in (1994) 6 SCC 378] that “…Hinduism is a tolerant faith. It is that tolerance that has enabled [emphasis added] Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism to find shelter and support upon this land.”

Throughout this history Hindustan was a Republic in content and a monarchy in form [a possible but weak exception being Asoka’s reign]. In this ancient Republican concept, the king did not make policy or proclaim the law. The intellectually accomplished elite in the society, known as Brahmins, framed the laws and state policy and the King implemented it. Chanakya [circa 1500 B.C.], one such Brahmin, propounded the concept of ‘Chakravartin’ to explain how a highly decentralized Indian polity nevertheless united when the nation would face danger. Such unity, which Huntington called Salience we saw many times in existence, more recently for example, in 1857, in the Freedom Movement, 1962 Chinese conflict, 1977 in the post-Emergency elections.

Brahmins, contrary to the current practice in India, were not necessarily by birth. They could be born in any family but had to become accomplished in knowledge, learning including in the art of warfare but only for teaching others and advising the monarch.

Not only according Lord Krishna in Gita [Sloka 13, Chapter IV] but even modern research of scholars such as M.N. Srinivas and M.V. Nadkarni, it was this guna which defined the Brahmin. Vedas were to be learnt and researched by Brahmins, and the values in particular which are the pillars of Sanatana Dharma, were to be inculcated by all. 

Vedic values hence form our innate nature, the Substance, while India is our territorial body, while our republican soul , the Salience, is in today’s Hindustan. Hindu panth [religion] is however a theology of faith rooted in the Vedas. Even if an Indian has a different faith from a Hindu, he or she can still be possessed of Vedic values.

Since India was 100 percent Hindu a millennium ago, the only way any significant group could have a different faith in today’s India is if there was religious conversion from Hindu faith, hence today those are whose ancestors were Hindus.

Conversion of faith does not have to imply conversion to another culture or language or nature. In Iran, the converted Muslims have continued with Persian, the language of the Zoroastrians, as their own. Hence in India too the Sanskrit language can remain to be sacred for a non-Hindu in India.

Thus, we can say that Hindustan is a country not only of Hindus but also of those others who accept that their ancestors were Hindus. Acceptance with pride this reality is to accept the Vedic legacy of values even if like the Jains and others, they do not accept the Vedas. A republican nation of Hindustan is therefore of Hindus and of those of other faiths who have assimilated Vedic values in them. This formulation of salience and substance settles the question of identity of the Hindustani or Indian. An Indian is a Hindu rooted in Vedic values or is one who proudly admits that his ancestors were Hindus and thus imbibed with Vedic values.

This is what Swami Vivekananda meant by Vedanta philosophy, and which is the only way that Hindustan can become a modern Rashtra, thereby, as Parmacharya had wanted, achieving Independence after having recovered our  Freedom in 1947.

However, Vedic values relevant today have to be inculcated in our people from values and norms that emerge out of a renaissance,  that is, shorn of the accumulated but unacceptable baggage of the past as also by co-opting new scientific discoveries, perceptions and by synergizing with modernity.Its implementation of course requires political action with public consent. This thus is the goal of this address: to chart a road map for India that is Hindustan to become a Rashtra based on Vedic values.

I was inspired in preparing this address by the comment of the greatest sage and sanyasi of the 20th century, namely Chandrashekharendra Sarasvati, the Shankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt at Kanchipuram, TN, who is reverentially referred to as the Parmacharya.

That great sage had counseled the Indian leadership on August 15, 1947 that “having become free, we must translate that freedom into independence”. It is the content of that independence that should have concerned all thinkers since then, but did not. The then Establishment and political dispensation disregarded Parmacharya’s advice, ignorantly perhaps thinking that freedom and independence were synonymous words. These words are however not synonyms, and moreover, without independence we cannot retain freedom either for long. That is the danger today of failing to follow the wise counsel of the Parmacharya.

Freedom is a physical attribute of a citizen’s rights, such as the right to a livelihood, the freedom of travel etc., while Independence of a nation rests on the quality of the citizen’s values such as his or her attitude to duties, morality, inter-personal relations, social commitment, and nationalism. This requires knowledge of the correct history of Hindustan. Vedic values embody all these aspects.

I shall now make the presentation of such an Agenda in three parts: First, I will highlight the structural parameters of Hindu theology which circumscribe any Vedic values Renaissance Agenda;Second, I will discuss the Five Point Agenda to adopt as a road map for political action today; Third, I will raise some issues for consideration in the implementation of this Agenda.

 VEDANTIC VALUES: THE STRUCTURAL PARAMETERS
          
Structurally, there is no scope for a theology based on Vedantic values to be fundamentalist. For fundamentalism, by definition, requires an unquestioning commitment to the scripture in its pristine original version. For Hindus, there is no one scripture to revert to for theological purity since there are many scriptures which raise a plethora of beliefs and sustain faith, debates, and profound speculations on basic questions[e.g., Upanishads], such as on advaita, dvaita, astika and nastika.

Questioning, debating and synthesizing are an integral part of Vedic values. Nor does Sanatana Dharma have just one prophet to revere, or prohibits anyone from holding any other view of religious experience. But most of all, Vedic values are committed to the search for truth [including knowing what is truth] for which incessant debate is permitted, while fundamentalists are committed to a Book and brook no debate.

We Hindus even tolerate and passively suffer the most lewd and blasphemous interpretation of the Vedic tradition as recently witnessed in the paintings of M.F. Hussain or the writings of Wendy Doniger. This democratic temperament induced by Vedic values is why Vedanta can never lead to fundamentalism.

This is because Vedic philosophy is not a theology founded on the revelation of a single prophet or constituted by a single scripture that which all adherents have to blindly believe in. It is instead accumulated wisdom of sages. Hence, the synergy between the Vedic values and a national renaissance.

There is in Vedanta  no ‘Church’ to belong to, or to obey  dictums or fatwas, or to believe in a ‘Pope’ who is held to be infallible, or to regard a ‘Bible’ or Koran as the sole Holy Book to specify a mandatory code of what to believe in and what not to.  Nor is there the likes of a Hadith or a Sura in Vedanta to goad the faithful into submission to God to commit, as His direction, violence against unbelievers termed as Kafirs and Dhimmis.

Vedas also formally acknowledges that that there are many paths to reach God and hence treats other religions with respect on the principle of Sarva Pantha Sama Bhava even if these paths are not considered equally efficacious for reaching the Divine.  That is why in Hindu civilisational history, there has never been burning of religious books of others, destructing places of these other religions, crucifying of prophets of other religions, holding of inquisitions, or even disrespecting other schools of thought. Jews and Zoroastrians suffering persecution in their own countries and elsewhere, found safe refuge only in Hindu India and were assisted by Hindus to practice their religion freely. No other religion has this compassionate track record or proud legacy.

 Hindu acharyas instead have always believed in shashtrathas[debate] to convert others to their point of view. Hence, even when Buddha challenged the ritualistic practices of Hindus, or Mahavira and Nanak gave fresh perspectives on Hindu concepts, there was never any persecution of these Prophets. Indeed these Prophets were considered Hindu avataras and their teachings challenged in debates and then synthesized into Hindu theology itself.

That is why the Indian Constitution defines Hindus to include Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs, and in the theological framework Hinduism accepted by these other religions even if the concepts of Vedic theology was challenged or even rejected . Religious intolerance and sustained persecution however later came to India with Islam and Christianity and through their instrumentalities.

Vedic philosophy thus founded on a vast rainbow spectrum of scriptures and a monumental accumulated wisdom of many sages that is contained in the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas etc., all of which intellectually hold that the Ultimate Truth is manifested in manifold ways.

Hence, the essentiality of Vedic values, or alternatively the core quality of being a Hindu, which we may call as our Hindu-ness [i.e., Hindutva], is that structurally there is no danger in the advocacy ever degenerating into fundamentalism. In fact, so liberal, sophisticated, and focused on inward evolution is Vedanta, that in a series of Supreme Court judgments, various Constitutional Benches have not held Hindutva as a communal outlook, as we discover from an useful review of these judgments by Bal Apte MP [in Supreme Court on Hindutva, India First Foundation, 2005].

All the apex court judgments since 1951 on the subject have rejected the notion that Hindutva is either an antonym of secularism or held that per se an appeal to voters by a candidate to poll for him on the ground that he believes in Hindutva, will constitute an offence under the electoral law of the country than bans appeal to religion in elections.

Hence, we can rest here our case for defence of Vedic values as an ideology incapable of becoming fundamentalist, and proceed now with the larger issues of Vedic values for nation building and national renaissance.  This is often described as Hindu-ness or Hindutva.

Hindu-ness of outlook on life had been termed Hindutva by Swami Vivekananda. Hindutva’s political perspective has been developed by Veer Savarkar.  Deendayal Upadhaya briefly dealt with the concept of Hindutva when he wrote about chiti in his seminal work: Integral Humanism.

The focus of all three profound thinkers was the multi-dimensional development of the Hindus as an individuals harmonizing material pursuits with spiritual advancement, and on how to aggregate individualistic Hindus into an united community or a vibrant collective on the concept of Hindutva.

            Because of the individual-centric distinctiveness of Vedanta, it is possible to see millions of Hindus, for example, come to Kumbh Mela on their own, without a direction in the nature of a fatwa, or invitation,  peacefully and without any imposition, perform their pujas and then depart. It is purely voluntary and disciplined even as the state does not provide any organization or subsidy for travel expenses. This is individualism par excellence inculcated by Vedic values.

With this kind of widespread voluntary commitment of Hindus, seen not only in Kumbh Mela, but in other pilgrimage occasions such as in Sabarimalai, Vaishno Devi, etc., and the reality of our tolerant civilisational history, can we feel secure that we Hindus can and will unite when it becomes necessary to defend against sinister, sophisticated,  and violent threats that the religion faces today?

 We cannot be sure, because the Kumbh Mela spirit not only represents the innate strength of Vedic values, but also the main weakness of Hindus as a society.  That is, those who assemble at Kumbh Mela do it as an act of individual piety.  Hindus do not go to Kumbh Mela to be with other Hindus in a religious congregation, but because they believe that their individual salvation lies in going there.

Patriotic Hindus should understand this structural limitation in the theology that individualism, mistakenly taken nowadays as apathy, and find ways to rectify it for the national good. Collectively, Hindus today lack the necessary modern mindset that can pro-actively bond the community in an inclusive virile wholesome unity, which unity is necessary today for meeting  the threats that the Hindu religion faces from terrorism, conversions, religious minority appeasement, and distortions in the history textbooks [ for a discussion of the nature of this siege see my Hindus Under Siege: The Way Out(Haranand, New Delhi, 2005)].

This limitation must not only be overcome but we must try rectify it, not on an ad hoc basis, but on a durable foundation that is sustainable, because Hinduism is being targeted today as never before by terrorism, religious conversion,  minority appeasement, debasement in history textbooks, and distortions in the mass media.

It is worthy of notice that, recognizing this limitation,  Hindu spiritual leaders in the past have from time to time come forward to rectify it, whenever the need arose e.g., as the Sringeri Shankaracharya did by founding the Vijayanagaram dynasty or Swami Ramdas did with Shivaji and the Mahratta campaign. In the Ramjanmabhoomi Mandir campaign, and the Rama Setu Raksha Abhiyan, the VHP had demonstrated that this individualism is not apathy and that this limitation can be overcome by mass action, by mobilizing most of the sants and acharyas of the Hindu faith. 

Such involvement of sanyasis is required even more urgently today, and thus the mobilization of the sants and sadhus for social action has become crucial for our spiritual consolidation.  In fact, Swami Vivekananda had aptly put it when he stated that: “National union of India must be a gathering up of its scattered spiritual forces. A Nation in India must be a union of those whose hearts beat to the same spiritual tune….The common ground that we have is our sacred traditions, our religion. That is the only common ground… upon that we shall have to build”.

The recent efforts in this direction of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati of the Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in forming the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha that includes all the Shankaracharyas, Mahamandaleshwars, Akharas, and others as members, for the first time as a body corporate, is highly necessary and noteworthy.

            Let us recall here that well before the birth of Christianity and Islam, Hindu religion had been intellectually dethroned by Hinayana Buddhism.  But Adi Sankaracharya rethroned Hinduism through his famous shastrathas [religious debate] and caused a renaissance in Buddhism itself, which later came to be known as Mahayana Buddhism, conceptually in complete harmony with, if not indistinguishable from Hindu theology. It is Mahayana Buddhism that spread to China, Cambodia and Vietnam.

In Tamil Nadu, the Azhwars and Nayanmars, also through shastrathas, repositioned Hinduism after dethroning Jainism and Buddhism.  Since then the Hindu dharmacharyas have always been looked up to whenever Hindu society faced a threat or crisis, for guidance to meet these dangers.
          
Moreover, the facts of our history have to be well understood so that we are not condemned to re-live it. Militant Islam and later crusading Christianity had come to India, and aggressively had challenged Hinduism.  Because Hindus had then very civilized Vedic rules of warfare such as fighting only on open barren fields, and between sunrise and sunset, besides forgiving the loser and sending him back with due honour, therefore these Muslim and Christian invaders despite being much smaller in numbers, seized power in sequence by the changing the rules of combat, and established their own state in India that lasted several centuries.

This change of rules is what Prithviraj Chauhan had not realized while repeatedly defeating Mohammed Ghori and then forgiving him. But Chhatrapati Shivaji had fully understood the perfidy of these aggressors, and accordingly improvised new tactics while dealing with the likes of Aurangzeb and Afzal Khan. The difference [in outcomes achieved] between Chauhan and Shivaji thus speaks for itself.

 Today the terrorists and religious missionaries are doing precisely that again of playing by new and even more clandestine and deceptive rules. We Hindus have to accordingly devise our strategy for dealing with them, and will be successful only after understanding the rules by which these enemy forces will scheme against us.

In 1947, temporal power and freedom were defacto restored to the Hindu majority. But the Indian state formally adopted secularism, which concept however was never properly defined or debated. For example, it left vague what a modern Indian’s connection was with the nation’s Hindu past and legacy. What Nehru grafted on the nation was a vague concept of secularism which operationally meant that anything European in mores and manners was good and anything Hindu was obscurantist.

In the name of secularism, it was taboo for a public servant even to break a coconut or light an oil lamp to inaugurate an official function on the ground that religious symbols must not invade public life! This orthodox concept of secularism has debilitated the civilisational independence of the nation since 1947 when we recovered our freedom.

Secular orthodoxy promoted by Jawarharlal Nehru and his Leftist advisers led the government to take over supervision of temples, legislate on Hindu personal laws, and regulate religious festivals, but kept aloof from the Muslim and Christian religious affairs. In fact, data from Karnataka show that during 1997-2002, over 25,000 temples under state government administration had appropriated Rs 391.40 crores in revenue from devotee offerings, but only Rs.84.00 crores of that was spent on the temples for its upkeep.

As a consequence of this meager expenditure, over 8000 temples went into disuse. Madrasas and Haj travel however received Rs. 180.60 crores from these temple funds! Churches got Rs.44.00 crores, thus diverting a total of 78.58% of Hindu temple donations to Muslim, Christian and other non-Hindu activities!! Is this not incredible in a nation of 83% Hindu even in the name of secularism? The secularism principle was thus foisted on the Hindu masses without making him understand why they had to abide by such legislation, but not Muslims and Christians.

As a result of the Nehruvian secularist’s chicanery, the renaissance that had begun in the late nineteenth century to redefine the national identity [in cont

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