‘Hindutva’ needs edification from South
[TamilNet, Monday, 25 August 2014, 09:00 GMT]
The New Delhi Establishment has to be made to realise that it has touched a wrong nerve on the national question of Eezham Tamils, in the name of its ‘national interests’. If the BJP’s stand is going to be the ‘majority State’ formula in India and in upholding genocidal Sri Lanka, the boundaries of both created by the British whom the BJP condemns otherwise, it is time for the peoples of India to prove who is the real majority and who has the real people’s power– whether the power-centric mobilisation harping on ‘Hindutva’ or others. If the Tamils, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Lingayats (Veera Saivas), Dalits, Tribals and peoples of Northeast States join together, the picture would be totally different.
It should be carefully understood that the present ‘Hindutva’ set up in New Delhi is one that doesn’t even spare the name of Vivekananada in its international imperialistic exercises. The present National Security Advisor at New Delhi was running Vevekananda International Foundation for ten years.
This ‘Hindutva’ of corporate-militarist-imperialist perspective is now deployed with its theoretical justifications of so-called ‘national interest’ in joining hands with the genocidal Sinhala-Buddhist State and in continuing the genocide of Eezham Tamils in the immediate neighbourhood, disregarding all obvious logic of geopolitics and norms of humanity.
While it is said that local bias and paranoia of sectarian but influential individuals in the south of India long contributed to the policy in New Delhi including ‘Hindutva’, the edification of the current brand of ‘Hindutva’ should never be approached as anti-Brahmin.
The cock and bull stories of Rama and Ravana said by the Harvard-educated, ‘Hindutva’ stalwart Subramanian Swamy at a venue such as a ‘defence conference’ in Colombo would tell the current quality of ‘Hindutva’. One should have seen the way Colombo’s genocidal military commanders were amusing at his talk.
But the lingering counter-products of the anti-Brahmin outbursts of the Dravidian movement during the last century also have to be scrutinised with a balanced sense of today’s needs in mobilising the masses against a power group that has hijacked religion for the monopoly of one sixth of humanity and for genocidal imperialism.
It was a Brahmin-born doyen of modern Kannada literature, Professor U. R. Ananthamurthy, who passed away on Friday, had said in April that he would not live in India if Modi were to be elected as Prime Minister. His famous novel Samskara is available in Tamil, for global Tamils to get an idea on the realm of social forces outside of Tamil Nadu that could be mobilised in the edification of ‘Hindutva’.
When the north of India lost bearing in religion, it was a Kerala-born Sankara, Tamil-Nadu-born Ramanuja and Karnataka-born Madhva, who rejuvenated the philosophical foundations of today’s ‘Vedic Hinduism’.
More than that, it was the Bhakthi movement of Tamils that started in the 5th century CE that liberated religion for every walk of people. A Nanthanaar of the Pa’raiyar community became a saint to be worshiped by the Brahmins.
Whether it is the Lingayat Saivism that has rejected Brahmanism and is followed by the majority of the people in Karnataka and by considerable number of people in Andhra, Telengana and Maharashtra; the Puri Jagannath tradition of Odisha; the Chaithanya school of Bengal; the Radha Swamy sect of Gujarat or the Meera tradition in the north – they all are based on Bhakthi of the common folk and were historically inspired by Tamil Saivism and Vaishnavism.
If the BJP and its allies the Shiv Sena and the RSS are now going to come out with a ‘Hindutva’ for majoritarianism in religion, which doesn’t actually exist; if this ‘Hindutva’ is going to be deployed for socio-political-cultural-linguistic monopoly and for corporate-militarist-imperialist purposes, and if this could go to the extent of not shunning genocide, then it is high time the South, especially Tamil Nadu should step in, leading the edification of it, or if edification is not possible doing away with it.
Tamils have a long history of going through all the major religions of the world and also rebelling against religions whenever it was necessary. The century-old experience of the Dravidian movement in the matter of religion should now be used in a positive way, incorporating all sections of Tamils and reaching out the rest of India.
If the stateless and military-less Tamils, collectively penalised by imperialist aspirations, could have a foreign policy in struggling against genocide and imperialism, it begins from a social foreign policy of Tamils inside and outside of India.
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