Courage at other’s cost is no courage

Shuddhi was as much a protest against the caste-bound socio-religious paralysis of the Hindu society as it was to facilitate the homecoming of those who had left the fold, in case they wished to. It was a constructive criticismof the aberration that had been imposed on the Hindu social order by the high castes by making merit entirely birth-based. This turned the Hindu religious community into a semi-closed order from which people were free to escape but not free to return. And the oppressiveness of the caste system provided ample motivation for the lower castes to escape en masse. Out of this there arose a situation that exposed the inner contradictions and non-viability of the caste system in a situation of free choice.

Such a situation leaves us with two options. The first is to dismantle the caste system and to replace it with the Varna Ashram Vyvastha as laid down in the Vedas. Birth-based human merit has no place in the Vedas. The Vedic worldview is a dynamic spiritual vision that militates against burying people alive in the graves of caste degradation. This was what the founders of the Arya Samaj advocated. The other option is to put down the rebellion against the caste system in the form of conversion to othertheoretically more egalitarian faiths. This is done in two ways by the custodians of the caste system: a) by creating an anti-conversion dogma, ruling out thereby freedom of choice leading to conversions or b) by the use of force either against those who convert or those who encourage conversion or against both. It was a return to the Varna Vyvastha that the Arya Samaj advocated.

Globalisation, among other things, is the unconditional acceptance of a new global order based on free choice. Perpetuation of any birth-based handicap or advantage is utterly incompatible with its ethos. The custodians of casteism, if they are serious about their business, must fight globalisation with all their might as their foremost caste enemy. Most of them are in league with this pernicious process, conspiratorially crafted to rob the rest of the world for the greater affluence of the richer nations. The hijack drama is a milestone also in the globalisation of terrorism.

While I am unhappy that the hijackers of the IndianAirlines plane got away with some of their demands, I cannot fault the government on the way this crisis has been handled. On the contrary, I endorse the government’s concern that innocent lives be not lost through tactical dogmatism and ideological inflexibility. The courage to be inflexible at the cost of other people’s lives is embarrassingly cheap.

The hijack crisis provided a glorious opportunity for the RSS leaders to prove their newly acquired Hindu virility. They could have offered themselves as substitute hostages, procured the release of the innocent passengers, and then advocated total inflexibility. It does no credit either to the Hindu community or to their macho image to have hid themselves in safety until the crisis was defused and to emerge soon thereafter to strike up comic-strip-like postures of courage that costs them nothing.