Harsimran kaur ON  Oct03, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW,HINDUS IN HINDU RASHTRA BY ANAND RANGANATHAN–NON-FICTION

Rating: 3.5/5

A soliloquy has started of ‘Hindu Rashtra’. Who actually coined this term?

• Is it a sclerosis of an ideological framework that is prescriptive of religious liberties?
• Or, the right-wing politics peremptorily creating more holes in the flute releasing a cantata of minority distress?
• Religious palaver? It has notoriously filled the bellies with discursive ‘Muslim Invasion’ and the protuberant ‘religious conversions’.

All this unceremoniously bulges to create a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. Many in our country are happy with this development but some especially the minorities have been put at the ripper’s edge. But, our esteemed author, Anand Ranganathan, is perturbed and looks mortified by the plight of the Hindus in a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. So, all this brings up two important points:

• First, India has gradually become a ‘Hindu Rashtra’.
• Second, Hindus now need to be gratified more in their own Rashtra from the scurrilous disgorgement by the Judiciary, Government and the hoi polloi.

I will like to put it discreetly:

“Hindus are under a cannonade of capitulating shots losing the cadence of certitude making them cack-handed, and now living with a chimera of belongingness.”

It was hard to put up with this fact justified by the author in his book, ‘Hindus in Hindu Rashtra’. The mind then sharpens—why is there a need to disinter past ignominies or arguments to further sow the seeds of insecurities? This holds true for both ‘Hindus’ who are a majority and also for the minorities that make an equal effort to the civilization inflow.

Anand Ranganathan has his own sentient mindset that is seethed with facts and figures in his latest book, ‘Hindus in Hindu Rashtra’. Rip roaring and rumpus, the book excavates the denials ‘Hindus’ live within their own country. The book did come as a surprise but going by the author’s comprehension, I feel it’s ‘precocity and not perseverance’ Hindus need to exhibit to defy the auld lang syne ‘Muslim appeasement’, cut open their incessant wounds frequently plastered with ‘lour’ extravaganzas of ‘sacrificial appurtenances’ and the likes of ‘create your own heaven’ on the evangelical Shepard’s pie.

So, what makes Hindus so fragile and rudderless that it gets necessary to be really bothered by the exuberance of a different set of mind?

It’s the comparison binding to a prevalent mind to find discomfiture in validations insidiously pouncing to make ‘Hindus’ a scrofula of solecist displeasure.  

Temples are an eloquent fabrication of a ‘belief’ of a common Hindu. They definitely need to be managed well by a committee so that unscrupulous elements don’t serrate the financial influx to any unfamiliar territory. The Government, in fact, is mulish to entertain any alternative. The author shows his annoyance to such feather brained impulses. Why don’t we take the example of SGPC (Shriomani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee) that is responsible for the management of Sikh Gurudwaras, taking care of clothes, sacred articrafts, weapons and write-ups of Sikh Gurus. If this kind of arrangement can nip the parochial in the bud, why not?

This is just one of the grievances the author is sqwakish about. I see a hint of antagonism towards the Muslim youth that took to militancy in the pulchritude state of Kashmir in the year 1989; ‘the putrescent exodus of Kashmiri Hindus’—an estrangement from their roots ad infinitum. Certain emotions are inevitable; a community will have its own distressing period. Also, the refutation to the apocalypse is palpable but the more we become judgmental without a solution, such thought process only gives rise to polemics.

If every flower in the passerine loses its fragrance, it will eventually absorb dust to justify its code of morality!

In fact, I sometimes too feel obligated as a minority community if my discretions to address a hard-boiled issue doesn’t turn into a whataboutery. It happens often! The book too has instances of similar precedencies. It makes my heart bleed though, that an attempt to foresee a change requires a deleterious scourge on ‘Aurangzeb’s prodigal temple adventures’ and the ‘Legislative profligacy’ to satirize. We can bring about a change without being sententious. If the Sikh Guru, ‘Guru Tegh Bahadur” would have gnarled discontentment, he would not have been able to sacrifice his life for ‘Hindu Brahmins’ who were being halberd to convert into ‘Muslim religiosity’. I think it’s all about churning out the incorrigible fragments that falter in their pejorative arpeggio rather than add exothermic impressions to it. Result—a disoriented minority and a vacillating majority!

Consider the current imbroglio over Gyanvapi Mosque; a lot has been said and vivified—a mosque over the ruins of a Temple! And what are we doing today? Demolish the mosque to build a temple. Atleast that is the intention; so we are trying to say that for Hindus to prosper in a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ let’s open a cesspool of refutations. Doesn’t it all seem like a reprobate of past perfidies by Muslim invaders? We cannot correct historical wrongs but can be benevolent enough not to repeat the same mistake again. In riposte, the book simmers a hot stew on archeological interventions to make history look a vivid spectacle of mistakes. For us, it was always the incorrigible entrenchment of circumstances.

The grievances are many but again I question if ‘Hindu Rashtra’ is an ineluctable need to disinter the so called ‘wrongs’, rabble-rouse to correct it and thereby be inconspicuous to the seed of intolerance feeding on isolated fundamentals? All this gives rise to beliefs vs. judgments skirmish. A pride for some could be an ambiguous lethargy of minds to jog over the incomprehensible. The author censoriously pulls the curtains off the Judiciary and Legislature that give compelling verdicts on religious paranoia. For instance, Bigamy is prohibited in Hinduism but the Muslim Code of Law permits it. The solution is a universal law, and here I emphatically agree; a law where the security and dignity of women is not compromised. A common law in it’s essentially is a cul de sac for any differences arising in granting verdicts.

TAKE AWAY

India is gradually moving towards a ‘Hindu Rashtra’; the pitter-patter has evolved into a pitched battle of ideologies, and political demagoguery issuing a comeuppance to the undesirable. The secular set-up and democratic lineage cannot be left out. We can’t afford to lose the belongingness that has mattered over decades. A ricochet of displeasure towards any community comes forward as a rendition of strict moral codes; a roguish intention to discredit the act of evolvement.