Opinion Lessons from the Ayatollah
When I finished listening to Irans grand Ayatollah express his worldview last week,I felt a profound,immeasurable sense of relief...
When I finished listening to Irans grand Ayatollah express his worldview last week,I felt a profound,immeasurable sense of relief that there is no likelihood ever of some Shankaracharya ruling India. The minuscule possibility of our holy men gaining importance outside their temples died with the Bharatiya Janata Partys hopes of ruling India in the foreseeable future. All that the BJP has been able to do anyway is tear down the odd mosque or set up the odd sena in the name of poor old Ram. Praise be to the heathen gods who oversee our beloved Bharat Mata that there is not a single religious leader who could pull in the crowds the Ayatollah Khamenei did.
As someone who has watched with wonder and admiration the brave protests in the streets of Irans cities,I felt that I needed to listen carefully to what the Ayatollah had to say. So I sat glued to my television for all of the two hours that he droned on and on about Irans spirituality and the arrogant Western powers who he identified as the enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the end of his speech I concluded that whatever Indias problems,and they are huge,we are very lucky not to have any of our supposed holy men guiding our political destiny. What bad luck for Iran to have such an extraordinary political movement squashed by someone who claims to speak for Allah. Its hard to believe that Allah would approve of a totalitarian theocracy but who dares question those who speak in his name? Who would dare ask Ayatollah Khamenei what building a nuclear bomb has to do with spirituality or God.
While the BJP licks its wounds and gets accustomed to its humiliating defeat,it would do well to stop squabbling over petty posts and instead analyse what is happening in Iran. It might wake them up to the reality that the party of Hindutva is dead,dead,dead until it severs its links with the RSS. It is this cultural organisation that brought into politics all those sadhus and sadhvis whose only contribution to Indian politics was venom and bigotry. Whenever religious people enter the political arena,they have to find an enemy and,in my humble opinion,it was this very bad habit that became the primary reason for the BJPs defeat.
The more that the BJPs leaders vented their venom against Muslims,the better they made the pseudo-secular Congress look. And,every time Shri L.K. Advani trotted off to that annual mega-shakha in Nagpur,it made your average Indian voter think twice. Not just because he disqualified himself as a future Prime Minister by doing this but because there are very few young Indians who understand the purpose of the RSS. If it is trying to save Hindu culture,it is doing a very bad job.
There is a great deal about ancient,Hindu India that we should try and understand and preserve. It saddens me every time I go to a Southeast Asian country and see the immense influence of Indian civilisation that continues to exist there and that is almost totally lost here. We need to understand why it has been lost here if we are not to end up as a country whose only culture comes from Bollywood. We need to understand why our cities still do not have major bookshops that sell books in Indian languages. If there are millions of Indians reading Hindi newspapers every day,why are they not buying books? Why do small towns in India not have any bookshops at all? Why does nobody sell books in our villages?
Could it be because our education system remains colonised? When the BJP had its brief moment of ruling India,it could have concentrated on decolonising Indian education. It could have,at the very least,made sure that modern Indian writers were translated into Indian languages so that they could be taught in Indian schools. It did nothing because its big leaders were bred in the nurseries of the RSS on a false sense of patriotism and a false sense of insecurity about the Hindu religion. The RSS thinkers of recent times have spent their time trying to Islamise Hinduism. Why? For what?
Luckily these questions no longer matter. If the BJP is dead,dead,dead,the RSS is in even worse shape because it is dying a slow painful death unnoticed and un-mourned. Hopefully the BJP will learn from its mistakes and reincarnate itself before the next election as a proper political party with a political agenda that offers us real solutions to our real problems. If all it offers us next time around is reinvented Hindutva then it will remain dead,dead,dead forever.
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