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Jan 02 2015 : The Economic Times (Bangalore)Hindustan's 80% MinorityAbheek
BarmanFOLK THEOREM There's no surprise in Indian politics' latest lurch
towards communalismIn the 2001 census returns, people who called themselves
`Hindus' were a little more than 80% of the population of India.Yet, since May
when the BJP came to power, the only thing its parent, the RSS, wants is to
convert Muslims, Christians, Jews -and anyone else in the 20% -to Hinduism.
So now, we have mass conversion campaigns, turning Indian politics into a
pressure cooker of communal rhetoric. Parliament is paralysed.Reforms are
stalled. Those who imagined that Narendra Modi would push development, not
sectarianism, are pulling their hair out.
Spare your scalp. This chronicle was foretold more than 85 years ago when the
bizarre theories that fuel the RSS and its allies took shape.Many assumptions
based on prejudice and a warped telling of history underlie this.
One is about how Muslim `invaders' came to India and converted Hindus to Islam
at the point of the sword.If true, this would imply parts of the subcontinent
ruled by the sultanates and the Mughal empire, based largely out of Delhi,
would have the maximum number of converts to Islam.
In an influential paper published in 1985, the American historian Richard M
Eaton showed that exactly the opposite was true. Looking at data from 1200 to
pre-Partition India, he found that the areas of the subcontinent that had the
maximum number of Muslims were places beyond the pale of Delhi's `Islamic'
administration; and where Delhi had maximum control, the number of Muslims was
the least.
The most Islamised places were Balochistan, the northwest areas, western
Punjab, greater Bengal, and coastal areas on the western peninsula from Gujarat
to Kerala. The heart of Sultanate and Mughal administration, from Rajasthan in
the west to Gangetic Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, were the least
Islamised areas.
Currency Converter
The northwest, western Punjab and greater Bengal were never `Hinduised' in any
meaningful way . They took easily to Islam when, in the west, Iranian and
Turkic folks brought farm innovations like the Persian wheel to convert the
kinetic energy of water for other uses, vastly boosting yields and incomes. In
the east, as the course of the Ganga shifted from western to eastern Bengal,
fertility improved, and local Sufi saints guided folks to better methods of
cultivation and incomes. Indeed, even today , farm productivity in Bangladesh
is better than in West Bengal.
But the biggest integrator with Islam was commerce. The landlocked west and
parts of east Bengal got connected with land trade routes that stretched from
China to Europe.
Many of these traders spoke Arabic or Persian, and we imbibed much from them.
The peninsular region absorbed Islam through maritime trade across the Arabian
Sea and the Indian Ocean. You didn't need a sword to convert. The plough and
profits were enough. So, how did plough and profit yield to toxic Hindutva?
Sometime in the 1920s, an upper caste, English-educa ted Maharashtrian decided
that Hin dus had had enough of `foreign' rule.
His solution: get rid of the Muslims, Christians and all non-Hindus and expand
` Aryan' supremacy globally .
He had tried to kill a Briton in En gland, was captured, spent time in jail and
wrote the Bible of the RSS.
He argued that long ago, every race in the world was inferior to Hindus, who
were originally Aryan super men from a land of seven rivers and invented
everything worth knowing, presumably with the exception of in stant coffee and
Google.
This knowledge they exported to the West, and forgot all about it. So, they
were unprepared when the West turned everything back on us.
Turning Full Circle
Now, it was payback time. Kick all infidels out or turn them into Hindus, if
necessary , at the point of a trishul.This book, published in 1923, was
Hindutva. Its author was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, or as the RSS calls him,
`Veer' -brave -Savarkar. One of the few people who took him seriously was a
Greek-French woman called Maximiani Portas, or Savitri Devi, as she called
herself.She exported Savarkar's ideas to Bengal and to Adolf Hitler, no less.
But Savarkar couldn't live up to his lofty ideals or his `Veer' epithet. He
crawled before his captors to get out of jail and never took part in the
Independence movement.
To get out of the slammer, he wrote, “If the government in their manifold
beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the staunchest
advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government....
My conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled
young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide....
The Mighty alone can afford to be merciful and, therefore, where else can the
prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the government.“
Savarkar, the fountainhead of Hindu supremacism, bartered his beliefs for
personal freedom. Today , his followers indulge in doublespeak about
development and demagoguery .
