By Anand Patwardhan
Their founding fathers came from the most conservative Brahmin castes, with enormous faith in the culture that empowered them.
They opposed the mainstream secular freedom struggle and started to mobilise along religious lines from the early 20th century.
They openly admired Hitler and said that it would “profit” India to copy the Nazi approach to minorities.
They stated that their top three enemies were a) Muslims, b) Christians and c) Communists.
Arguing that Hindus and Muslims were irreconcilable, they propagated the two-nation theory, exactly as did their mirror opposite, the Muslim League.
They along with the Muslim League supported the British even during the 1942 Quit India movement.
They, along with the Muslim League, instigated unparalleled bloodshed during Partition.
At the dawn of Independence in 1947, they rejected the tricolour national flag and flew only their saffron flag.
In 1948, they murdered Mahatma Gandhi and distributed sweets afterwards.
In 1950 they wrote bitterly against the Indian Constitution, preferring the Manusmruti instead.
In 1951 they opposed Law Minister Dr Ambedkar’s Hindu Code Bill that granted Hindu women the same rights as Hindu men. Dr Ambedkar resigned in disgust, so the work of drafting a Uniform Civil Code, which was his next stated goal, was never fulfilled.
In 1956 they opposed all those who along with Dr Ambedkar, walked out of caste-ridden Hinduism to embrace non-casteist Buddhism.
Despite continuing heinous atrocities against Dalits, they continue to oppose any questioning of “holy” scriptures that enshrine the caste system. They continue to pretend to the world that their religion is the most tolerant one on the planet.
In Kashmir, they bitterly opposed Article 370 granting autonomy to the region, which in great measure, fuelled militancy to grow in response.
In 1987, they glorified sati in Rajasthan to make electoral gains.
They bitterly opposed the Reservation policy for Dalits and Other Backward Classes until they finally realised the electoral damage of their stand.
In 1992, they demolished the Babri Mosque and destroyed the fragile unity between Hindus and Muslims.
They targeted and murdered Christians working for the educational and medical needs of Adivasis.
In 1998 they promoted the atom bomb and even wanted to build a temple to it. They also began weaponising the bomb and started a nuclear arms race with Pakistan that has brought the subcontinent to the brink of nuclear holocaust.
After engineering countless communal riots throughout the post-Independence era, they started a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
They carried out a witch-hunt of whistleblowers like Teesta Setalvad and her team just because they challenged the post-riot impunity of their justice system.
Other communal riots in Muzaffarnagar and many other places followed as when required by the exigencies of elections.
They carried out terror attacks and bomb blasts in Goa, Thane, Malegaon, Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid and many others places and attempted to pin the blame on Muslims, until their game was exposed by a brave police officer, Hemant Karkare.
From 2013 on, they murdered three well-known rationalists and many unknown ones, as well as threatened scores of others.
Today, they and their mushrooming affiliates are giving arms training to vigilante groups across the countryside to attack minorities in the name of a beef ban and love jihad.
Their rapidly growing youth wings are terrorising campuses across India, opposing all other student bodies be they secular, democratic, Gandhian, Left, Dalit or any combination of these. They violently oppose or defame all rival groups and individuals whose thinking challenges their hegemony, from Professor Sandeep Pande of the Benares Hindu University, to Sheetal Sathe of the Kabir Kala Manch, from the students of Film and Television Institute of India to those of the Ambedkar-Periyar group in Chennai and the Ambedkar Students Association in Hyderabad.
Their ideology now combines a medieval cultural mindset with a free market economic model that surrenders sovereignty and natural resources to foreign multinationals, modern avatars of the East India Company.
And they called Rohit Vemula, their latest victim from a section of society they oppressed for thousands of years, an “anti-national”.
This story was first appeared on scroll.in
