The Left, instead of falling into the Hindutva game-plan of tit for tat must concentrate on organising all sections of Kerala population against the anti-national plan of the “Sanatan Hindu rashtra” where Casteism, racism, inequality and Manu Code will thrive.
Image: PTI
The RSS-dominated BJP rulers of India have finally woken up against violence! You are grossly mistaken if you believe that they are seeking forgiveness for large scale killing/raping/maiming/robbing people of the minorities specially Muslims and Christians in 1992-3 (nation-wide carnage of Muslims before and after demolition of a mosque at Ayodhya), 1998 (wide-spread violence against Christians in Gujarat), 2002 (carnage of Muslims in Gujarat) and Kandhmal, Orissa violence of 2007-8 (cleansing of Christians in the area). The RSS/BJP rulers have not expressed any intention of discarding or checking the present spate of violence against minorities in the name of cow, love-jihad, ghar wapsi (forcible conversion of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism) and allegiance to Hindutva.
There has been no respite in violence against Dalits too. In fact, in last three years incident of violence against Dalits has escalated by around 300%. Casteist, criminal and patriarchal elements are having free run in inflicting violence against women. The same is the fate of peasantry, working class, students and intellectuals. Never in the history of India’s independence,these classes were subjected to such brutal denigration and repression in the name of Bharat Mata.
But it is only Kerala only where violence is running amok perpetrated by the CPM government of the State against RSS/BJP cadres which has been labelled as ‘red terror’.
The rulers marching under the banner of Hindutva have declared war against Kerala government by launching a strident Jan Raksha Yatra. It is not that only the left, CPM-run government of the state that is under attack. The whole of the Kerala society, its ethos and culture is under attack. The national leadership of RSS/BJP has descended on Kerala to fight the Left, to be specific, the CPM for ‘perpetrating violence’. The UP chief minister Mahant Yogi Adityanathwho has many criminal cases pending against him in UP courts is at the forefront, the commander of this Hindutva juggernaut. According to Adityanath the Left has turned the state into a factory of “jihadi terrorism” which should be matter of serious concern for India as a whole. To quote him, “In the guise of secularism, CPM has turned Kerala into hub of jihadi terror. It must be rejected for which we have come here to create public consciousness”.
No proofs are of course offered in support of these serious allegations against Kerala and its people. Even the home ministry of India which is under the charge of Adityanath’s Hindutva co-traveller, Rajnath Singh and other national intelligence agencies like NIA, CBI and IB under him have not prepared any such dossier. If this was so CPM government would have been dismissed long ago by the Modi government. But this denigration of the state and government of Kerala publicly continues. In any other country the person/s making such wild allegations would have been hauled up by courts and deposited within the safe custody of jails.
Despite this smoke-screen created by the rhetoric, the Hindutva leadership has been unable to hide its real design. None less than Adityanath, the newly surcharged Hindutva icon has spilled the beans. He declared that in Kerala “the red will turn saffron soon”. This would be done by converting Kerala into a “Sanatan Hindu Rashtra”. The Left would be cleansed as Adi Shankaracharya did in the 8th century by cleansing opponents. According to Adityanath “When the country’s religion and culture was threatened by foreign invaders, Shankaracharya launched the movement for the protection of the Hindu religion. Today, time has come to replicate the Shankaracharya movement and Hindu culture must be protected and preserved in Kerala”.
By foreign invaders Adityanath must have meant Buddhism and Jainism (as that period there were no Muslim or Christian ‘invader’) and what Shankaracharya army did to these religions has been chronicled by the two prominent saints of Hinduism.
According to Dayanand Sarswati, founder of Arya Samaj “For ten years he (Adi Shankaracharya) toured all over the country, refuted Jainism and advocated the Vedic religion. All the broken images that are now-a- days dug out of the earth were broken in the time of Shankar, whilst those that are found whole here and there under the ground had been buried by the Jainis for fear of their being broken (by those who had renounced Jainism).”[i]
Swami Vivekananda while describing cleansing of Buddhism from India wrote: “The temple of Jaganath is an old Buddhistic temple. We took this and others over and re-Hinduised them. We shall have to do many things like that yet.”.[ii]
It is surprising that Hindutva bandwagon does not organise anti-beef yatra in Kerala where beef is part and parcel of a secular diet. It does not launch any movement for banning cow-slaughter in the State. It only exposes its own hypocrisy. The issue of Islamic jehad and Left having a foreign ideology are being used as the RSS feels that after Gujarat it is Kerala which could be the laboratory of Hindutva because has substantial presence of minorities.
It should not surprise anybody that RSS basically represents hegemonic Brahamanism of North India that historically looked down upon, if not hated the Keralite Hindu and treated them as if belonging to inferior race.
MS Golwalkar, the RSS Supremo was invited to address the students of the School of Social Science of Gujarat University on December 17, 1960. In this address, while underlying his firm belief in the Race Theory, he touched upon the issue of cross-breeding of human beings in the Indian Hindu society in history. He said:
“Today experiments in cross-breeding are made only on animals. But the courage to make such experiments on human beings is not shown even by the so-called modern scientist of today. If some human cross-breeding is seen today it is the result not of scientific experiments but of carnal lust. Now let us see the experiments our ancestors made in this sphere. In an effort to better the human species through cross-breeding the Namboodri Brahamanas of the North were settled in Kerala and a rule was laid down that the eldest son of a Namboodri family could marry only the daughter of Vaishya, Kashtriya or Shudra communities of Kerala. Another still more courageous rule was that the first off-spring of a married woman of any class must be fathered by a Namboodri Brahman and then she could beget children by her husband. Today this experiment will be called adultery but it was not so, as it was limited to the first child.”[iii]
This statement of Golwalkar is worrying at several levels. Firstly, it proves that Golwalkar believed that India had a superior Race or breed and also an inferior Race which needed to be improved through cross-breeding. An equally worrying aspect was his belief that Brahmans of the North (India) and specially Namboodri Brahamans, belonged to a superior Race. Due to this quality, Namboodri Brahamanas were sent from the North to Kerala to improve the breed of inferior Hindus there. Interestingly, this was being argued by a person who claimed to uphold the unity of Hindus world over. Thirdly, Golwalkar as a male chauvinist believed that a Namboodri Brahman male belonging to a superior Race from the North only could improve the inferior human Race from South. For him the wombs of Kerala’s Hindu women enjoyed no sanctity and were simply breeding organs, destined for ‘improving the breed through intercourse with Namboodri Brahamanas who in no way were related to them.’ Golwalkar was thus conferring legitimation on a regressive and medieval practice, prevalent amongst the male dominated high Caste Hindu society in the past, that forced gendered violence on newly-wedded women of other Castes by compelling them to spend the first night of their marriage with ‘superior’ caste males.
It is surprising that despite holding and propagating such ideas that denigrate Hindu women of Kerala and hold them in contempt, the RSS has been able to create pockets of influence within Kerala society. And present itself as saviour of the Hindus of Kerala.
There is no doubt that some parts of Kerala are in the grip of bitter and condemnable political violence. This is sad for a State which is known for its high literacy, deep sense of culture, finest gender ratio and all-inclusiveness. Hindutva leaders present the violence as one-sided; saying only their cadres are being targeted. This is not true. According to police records accessed by journalist Sneha Mary Koshy of NDTV, “172 political murders have occurred since 2000. Of these, the RSS and the BJP have together lost 65 party workers, while 85 of the CPI (M)’s workers have been killed. 11 activists each of the Congress and the IUML have also been killed in this period.”[iv] The data on killings clearly shows that insince the year 2000 that BJP/RSS sole victimhood is not supported by facts. But one unfortunate aspect of these killings is that almost all victims hailed from poor families.
In fact, it was not long ago that Golwalkar, the most prominent ideologue of the RSS who has been described as ‘guru of hate’ in an essay titled ‘Internal Threats’ identified three sections of the Indians as ‘Internal Threats’ who needed to be neutralized. Muslims, Christians and Communists were declared to be ‘Internal Threats’ number one, two and three respectively.[v] Muslims and Christians have been perennial targets of Hindutva storm troopers for being ‘outsiders’ and it is the turn of the Communists now. This guru wrote: “Socialism is not a product of this soil. It is not in our blood and tradition. It has absolutely nothing to do with the traditions and ideal of thousands of years of our national life.”[vi]
This semi-literate (a status worst then being illiterate) guru thus denigrated hundreds of great martyrs of India namely Bhagat Singh, Chandershekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Ashfaqullah Khan who sacrificed their lives raising the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and dream of building a Socialist India. Golwalkar while describing Socialism as alien ideology insults even swami Vivekananda who declared “I am a socialist not because I think it is a perfect system, but half a loaf is better than no bread” and described Socialism “as the vanguard of the social revolution that is to follow”.’
The political violence in parts of Kerala is not an aberration but part of Hindutva strategy of hegemony over those parts of India where the ‘other’ kind of Hindu resides. The Left, instead of falling into the Hindutva game-plan of tit for tat must concentrate on organising all sections of Kerala population against the anti-national plan of the “Sanatan Hindu rashtra” where Casteism, racism, inequality and Manu Code will thrive.