UP Polls: Has The “Hindoo” Worm Finally Turned?

The results of the UP polls left the usual pundits shell-shocked. I would even venture to say that the observers in the BJP’s central office in the capital’s leafy Ashoka Road would also have been very surprised, albeit most pleasantly. The secularist storm troopers (SS), of course, are hardened psychological warriors and putting up a brave front when their ship is going down comes naturally to them. From their early youth, they are taught the skills of mental bluster, sang froid and intellectual calisthenics.

When they are out-manoeuvred and outsmarted, they can always draw on the helplines extended by their handlers in various parts of the globe. Make no mistake, the resources at the command of the latter are humongous. Be that as it may, the lessons from UP go well beyond electoral politics and voting issues. I would suggest that phrases like “tectonic shift” etc that are being bandied around by the salon circles in the capital and other major cities apply not only to the events at the hustings but to developments in the Indian mind and psyche.

I would say that people professing the Indic faiths have somehow decided to take a concerted stance in their political choice. I realise that this stand of mine will lead to howls of protest from the usual suspects, but I feel our group can withstand these outbursts. For centuries, the segment of the Indian population that followed Hinduism-Buddhism-Sikhism-Jainism (and even animism) were separated and divided by deep fissures and fault lines. It was impossible for this majority to behave as a consolidated decision-making group when they confronted invaders from West and Central Asia, to start with, and then the colonisers from Europe, with Pax Britannica turning out to be the only player in the long run.

During the national elections in 2014, the Indic population showed the first determined step to exercise their collective choice against the aggressive and continuous appeasement of minorities by successive Congress regimes and their allies. In some states, the BJP and its partners also benefited from specific fallouts of bad governance by the UPA lot, an issue that had little to do with faiths and creeds.

In the latest exercise too, the lamentable law and order situation and the horrendous graft, corruption and chicanery of the ruling coterie in India’s largest state clearly played a major role for all voters. And there are indications that Muslim women too decided that the mullah and the local patriarchs should not be allowed to continue negating their basic human rights.

However, let us not make any mistakes here. The landslide win could not have come about without a massive consolidation of the votes of the followers of the Indic faiths. Caste, sub-caste and economic class were subsumed under a common preferential umbrella. The non-BJP players were perceived as those who had carried out repeated onslaughts against their most valued symbols of identity that they had zealously but silently guarded and nurtured for tens of centuries.

The Lutyens Delhi coterie and its counterparts in the other metros across the country have had a field day from 1947 onwards. Together with the SS gang and the jholawallahs, they delighted in heaping calumny and insults on the most venerated symbols of Indic culture and faith.

On every major issue you can think of, whether it is Vande Mataram, the Somnath temple, Aurangzeb’s and Tughlak’s genocides or the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus, the gang of three would disseminate their rants in the MSM or in academia and other places. Textbooks in schools and colleges in our country were specifically used to brainwash at least four or five generations of young Indians.

This resulted in a macabre spectacle—a national elite that denied a country’s basic civilisational roots. The gameplan was simple and the message was clear—India’s basic genes and DNA would be transformed and mutated through diabolic techniques fine-tuned in laboratories and test-centres.

Ultimately, the virus would be transmitted from the chosen few in urban India to the vast majority in the country’s rural heartlands. The entire plan nearly succeeded. For many decades, we saw a desi version of the Stockholm syndrome running amok in Indian universities, among the intelligentsia and the politicians. We have repeatedly witnessed the nauseating spectacle of the Romila Thapars in a state of denial about the destruction of the Somnath temple, and the Amartya Sens fixated on a lone Muslim riot victim, when the whole of Dacca (where Sen stayed) and East Bengal was seeing a mass massacre of the Hindus.

In the last few years, UP, under the successive regimes of Mayawati and the Yadav family, has seen concerted and disturbing attempts by vocal and aggressive minority elements to rubbish the sentiments of the majority people.

Though the situation is not nearly as perilous as in Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal, where 4-5 districts have almost become no-go zones for the Indian state machinery, UP saw some examples of Hindu exoduses from pockets where Muslims are in a majority.

Desperate attempts were made by the MSM and the SS lot to whitewash these events. However, a simple motor trip along the national highways in western UP will show our couch potato journalists that large swathes of land have been bought over by Muslims with funds from undisclosed sources. Indeed, UP, Kerala, West Bengal, parts of Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra are seeing a replication of the Sudetenland phenomenon in pre-war Czechoslovakia.

This was when Nazi Germany financed the minority Sudeten Germans in the western border areas of Czechoslovakia to consolidate and strengthen their land holdings and economic clout.

Whereas the Sudeten Germans had Henlein and his murderous goons, UP and India have the Azam Khans and their sidekicks like Digvijay Singh. As I have said repeatedly, the ISI and the Daesh read the same history books as we do.

To return to UP, the blatant and discriminatory redistribution of assets and benefits in favour of the Muslims led to a slow build-up of resentment and, eventually, to the tectonic shift we saw in the last few days.

The JNU and Jadavpur jholawallahs have not really grasped their Marx and Engels—a silent accumulation of resentment against indiscriminate favouritism by a country’s rulers inevitably leads to a massive groundswell of protest. Happily, in our Republic, we still have elections where people can let off steam and bring about change, that can even be drastic.

The SS brigade should also try and remember some truisms from their Anglo-Saxon masters.

John Dryden warned us a few centuries ago that we should be careful about “the fury of a patient man”. More appropriately, there was Francis Quarles who wrote: “Beware of him that is slow to anger; for when it is long coming, it is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept. Abused patience turns to fury.”

However, I would return to our own sages. Sri Aurobindo, as early as in 1905, had said: “We have to create strength where it did not exist before; we have to change our natures, and become new men with new hearts, to be born again…We need a nucleus of men in whom the shakti is developed to its utmost extent, in whom it fills every corner of the personality and overflows to fertilise the earth. These, having the fire of Bhawani in their hearts and brains, will go forth and carry the flame to every nook and cranny of our land.”

Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in his convocation address in Bombay University in 1937 had warned in prophetic terms that the new Indian youth must not “in any case permit the destruction of the vital elements of their own civilisation”, even though they “have drunk deep at the springs of western knowledge” and absorbed “for their benefit and for the national good, the best elements in western culture and thought”.

Are we as a nation, therefore, on the cusp of a change? Has the “Hindoo” worm finally turned? Or, to use a slightly different and politically milder analogy, has the Indian pachyderm finally become assertive? This writer would venture to answer in the affirmative.