Date: June 17th 2008

From: scnjat@gmail.com Date: Monday, June 16, 2008

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Worth mulling over. Gives a short discourse on Hindu philosophy & Indian civilisation, and argues about Sonia Gandhi's behavior in 1971 war and the emergency and her reluctance to take Indian citizenship (facts every true Indian should know).
Sudhir

http://commentisfree.wordpress.com/

Infidelity and Sonia Gandhi (Part 1)

16 06 2008

I (mukukv@aol.com) came across an interesting piece written by Gurumurthy sometime ago when Sonia Gandhi was seeking candidature for the Prime Ministerial position.

In this enlightening piece, Gurumurthy goes on to discuss the philosophy that strengthened India and guided its freedom movement and contrasts it with the concept of the nation-states of the west.

He also recounts numerous instances from the Indian political history to support his arguments thereby questioning the legal and moral grounds on which Sonia, a foreigner, can assume the highest office in our country.

Since it was a lengthy article, i have pruned a half of it, proofread it and have posted it here. The second half will follow sometime in future. Here is how it goes:

Dear brothers and sisters,

It is certainly not a matter of pride to have Sonia as the Prime Minister. You cannot be electing a person as a Prime Minister and not feel proud about having elected her. When someone wants to lead this country, it must be a matter of pride for the people of the country to have that person leading the country. It is not one of those ‘also ran’ positions where you can say it is ok for her to be the Prime Minister. You do not even appoint a clerk in your office with so little thought. Imagine the depths to which this issue has descended. “What is wrong if she is the Prime Minister”, is an argument which comes not only from the ordinary, but also from the educated Indian. This comes from the Chidambarams and from the Rajdeeep sardesais of this country; this comes from editorial writers sitting in Madras. So let us analyze this issue in all its deeper implications for a country like India, which as Radha Rajan said, has an unbroken continuity.

India is a civilization pretending to be a nation. Something like this is inconceivable by the intellectuals we are turning out of our universities today. This civilization is now facing the might of the nation-state, which has evolved in the west. The nation-state mechanism in the west is basically aggressive, violent, conquering, invasive, dominating, and imperialistic. This is a concept, which, the Indian mind, cannot internalize, cannot understand, and cannot exhibit in its attitude. India is basically a civilization, which is committed to fostering our civilization. That is why it grew far beyond its boundaries, without a single soldier moving out of this country to propagate it.

You can find temples and can still hear the sound of the recitation of Vedas in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in Thailand even today. It is unbelievable that Vedic sounds are still heard in tribal areas of South-East Asia. No Hindu king went there. No one imposed his culture, his tradition or literature on them. Hinduism grew because of its worth and its philosophical reach. This is a civilization which is non-conflicting, which cannot understand why people confront and kill each other. It cannot really understand why someone has to fight over whether his God is superior to my God; and decide the outcome through a boxing match/ jihad/crusade. For a civilization of this kind, to be aggressive is alien, violence is alien, and domination is alien. But the worldly affairs of today are organized broadly on these bases. These have become the fundamental rules of existence today. Organized violence is the basis of the nation-state in the west.

The nation-state in the west was forged by clans, by dictators, by oligarchies, and by powerful men. They thought that their power was signified by their armies; and this power can be seen in the destruction through out present-day Europe. You can see desolate monuments, the ruins of cities and societies in all parts of Europe. A nation-state, which philosophically grew out of this kind of attitude to other civilizations, to other nations, to other people, and other societies, is now recognized as the paradigmatic framework of all political existence. This, for people like us, is a difficult phenomenon to understand and to deal with. In no religious-political literature of this world can one find the equivalent of something like “let noble thoughts come to us from all sides”. All political, social and religious philosophies of the west and of the Abrahamic faiths rest on the premise that “What I say or think is noble”. This is the essence of all the western philosophies.

Contrast this to our civilization where you open your hearts and mind to others, and say athithi is God personified. You belong to a civilization which has internalized this value. We therefore find it very difficult to reconcile it with the modern idea of the nation-state, which is based on violence, exclusivity and intolerance. We have problem which we, as intellectuals, must understand and deal with eventually. Why do we have a difficulty in dealing with the issue of foreigners and their holding high offices in our country? Britain would never enact a constitution in which they have to mention that only a British-born can be the Prime Minister or the Chief Justice. The French and the Germans see no necessity to do a similar thing because it is generally accepted in their political, social and cultural traditions that only a white Christian will hold the highest office in their countries. But the USA will have to make such a stipulation in its Constitution. It is because Am
erica is basically an immigration society. It is a nation state brought about by a boarding and lodging mentality. Safe guards, which are needed for a nation that is forged from a melting pot identity drawn from different countries of the world, have to be made to ensure a modicum of loyalty to the American State. The forefathers of the white, Christian American in the USA today, had systematically and ruthlessly wiped out the nation, the society, the civilization, which existed 500 years ago. A 110 million people were wiped out in a planned genocide lasting three centuries! The entire Mayan civilization was wiped out in this campaign of hatred and intolerance. The Americans brought something new in the place of what had been destroyed. We are a far more evolved society. This society, this country, this nation, this civilization is not run, not controlled, or administered by the police, President or the Prime Minister.

I am amazed at this concept which I have now internalized for the last twenty-years. It was only after twenty-five years of completing my university education that my real education began. And the understanding I have about our society is that it is an enormously harmonious society which knows how to live with others. We have seven and a half lakh villages and fifty thousand police stations only. American society can’t live like this. Their insecurity is so internalized in the system of relationship between the State and the society and there is nothing called society. It is in inter-personal relationships, that they depend on the police and the law for security and protection.

So we do not understand the rules that govern the idea of the nation-state dichotomy in the west and at the global level and contrast it with the idea of the nation-state that all of us in this country are experiencing. What is the nation in India? The greatest of the great sociologists have been confounded by this country. In this context I have often asked myself what is it about this nation that a Thanjavurian in Los Angeles continues to feel anxious about the level of water in the Mettur Dam. He owns no land there, as he has disposed them off. Still, he continues to follow the level of water in the Mettur dam from Los Angeles. The obvious reason is that he is still linked to the Cauvery and to his village subconsciously. He is linked to cultivation there, in his thoughts and in his ideas. It is these ideas that bond a person with the land, that make this nation what it is. At the highest level of existence, there have been nations without territories and nations without g
overnments. On a more mundane level and from recent history, one singular example is the Jews. For two thousand years, they were butchered and persecuted and displaced from a hundred and seven countries. They were strewn and scattered around the world as refugees. They were hated everywhere uniformly. They migrated to seek asylum in a hundred and eight countries and were abused and treated with scant respect in 107 of them. It was only in India that they were treated with courtesy, respect and compassion. The Jews published a book in 1965. This book was printed in America and distributed all over the world except in India. In this book, the author mentions that the Jews had to beg for survival in hundred and eight countries. In 107 of those countries, they were butchered, maimed, raped or rubbished. It was only in India, where they were received and treated like their own.

There was no constitution in India at that time. There was no article 29,30,25,26 calling for protection of the minorities. Do we mean to say that it is the constitution, which protects the minorities here? Our constitution, that arguably protects the minorities, is a product of this civilization. It has evolved from our working, our method, our language, and our life. And when we wish to discuss the issue of foreigners holding high offices in this country, we are told, to look at the Constitution and at times even frowned upon that we are communal, that we are promoting hatred.

A majority in India have been increasingly losing confidence with the governance in the last 50 years. Looking at it deeply, ours in a country in which the majority (whether you like it or not there is a majority because there is a minority as well) have been abused, hounded out in public discourses on issues which are important to Hindus, have had their symbols discredited, and their points of respect derided. For fifty years, we have been forced to assume an excruciatingly defensive position in the country’s public life. This situation has assumed such tragic proportions that a senior Hindu institution like ‘The Ramakrishna Mission’ requested the courts to declare them a non-Hindu institution. This was the kind of pressure thrust on the Hindus. If eighty-five percent people in a country are under pressure, the country can’t be at ease. We, the qualified intellectuals, have been looking at the situation for all these years. But what did we do about it? Nothing. This inaction
is the direct consequence of the enormous implication, the destructive implication of the Macaulay mix in our education.

This civilization was so noble that it was hardly a competitor to the nation-states of the west. The western states could easily conquer the Indian geography, but not the nation. The nation in India has always been free. The State in India may have been conquered and may have passed into the hands of alien invaders. But it never really mattered. The state in India never symbolized the nation in India. The State was never the protector of the nation. The State was a residual mechanism that was vested with only a residuary power. But in western societies, the State, the king, the administration, the building, the army, and the police symbolize everything. They symbolize the State and society. Therefore if you take over the capital, the country is gone, and the civilization is gone.

In this country, as Swami Vivekananda says, temple after temple rose again after being demolished because the spirit of the people was not broken. Rulers of alien religions tried to levy tax for visiting Hindu temples. Some people paid the tax and went to the temples. Those that couldn’t afford the tax gave in. Though it was a submissive approach, it can be compared to the pliant and the submissive grass that lives to see another day in the midst of a tempest that threatens to fell trees. This is how we learnt to counter a barbarian attitude, a barbarian civilization, a barbarian army, and barbarian rulers. That is why this nation is a very difficult nation to define. One can easily define what is French – “One who detests all things English is French”. You can also define what is British and what Australian is because they are all shades of the same culture. There is no difference among them in their overall attitude towards other civilizations. There is no demarcation betwe
en them with respect to their own civilization. They are only distinguished by their approach and attitude to power and how they demarcate that power.

These are civilizations whose age is marked in decades or centuries or millenniums. They have no concept called the ‘Yuga’. Our civilization spans beyond decades and millenniums. We need an aerial view so to say, to understand this nation. We can catch a glimpse of it in our freedom struggle. What triggered India to fight for freedom and what was the core of the philosophy of the Indian freedom movement? Maharishi Aurobindo once said that “Sanathana Dharma” is nationalism in India. He went to deliver a talk in Uttarapara in Bengal. He had a prepared text with him and when he wanted to read from this text, his inner voice instructed him to ignore the text and speak extempore. That was his last speech because he exiled to Pondicherry then after. In the speech, he had mentioned that the nation will disintegrate when Sanathana declines. Vande Mataram, the single slogan that motivated thousands to go to jail, had its base in Sanathana dharma.

What this country responds to, what this country accepts, what this country reveres is Vande Mataram, Rama Rajya and Sanathana Dharma. Swami Vivekananda talked about spiritual nationalism. It is these ideas, these abstract ideas that provided a concrete shape to this country and guided the freedom movement. People left their homes, never bothering to return. People gave up their lucrative businesses; rich people destroyed or forwent their property. Young people did not bother about their career. They did not give up so much for a democracy to be installed in this country, not to elect someone as Prime Minister and President. They never had who will rule this country after independence in mind. All they wanted was this country to be free, from the domination of foreigners, foreign ideas, alien civilization, and destructive nation-states. India fought for freedom in the real sense of the term. It is this philosophy that shaped the Indian freedom movement. It is an irony that th
e greatest destruction of the Indian mind was brought about by the intellectual and academic systems of free India.

India was such a civilization and she posed a major challenge to both Macaulay and Marx. In their own words, “The Indian civilization has its ideas rooted till the lowest levels of our social and political structures. It could, therefore, be destroyed only by distortive and destructive ideas. Nothing else could make any kind of an impact on the Indian civilization. Invading armies cannot achieve it, foreign rule cannot end it, coercive and violent religious conversions certainly can not harm it”.

The fact that the Indian State passed into the hands of successive invaders for 900 years meant that there was no protection for the Hindus of this nation. In fact, I remember one of my friends, an IAS officer, who resigned from his job and went to an Australian University. He was telling me that the Hindus were the only people in the whole world who were denied protection to life and property for 900 years. He also added that a single amendment to Article 21 in the constitution of India, which guarantees protection to life and property, should now be done in a manner to make it available only to Hindus in India. If this happens, there will be no other people in India in the next 200 years. But this thought will not even occur to us. This is the thought on which the entire concept of nation-state in the west and in the Middle East was based, the concept of “Only I can live, you have no right to live”. And to protect and defend their right is, to say in today’s India, protecti
ng the minority right. The extent to which the thinking of Indian intellectuals has been convoluted by the English invasion is appalling! We have to straighten them out, and only English speaking Indians can do it.

So, the Indian mind, the Indian philosophy, and the non-conflicting approach of the Indian civilization have to confront the exclusive, conflicting and aggressive nature of the other civilizations and the institutions born out of those civilizations. We must understand the attitude of the makers of our constitution in this background to understand why they did not think of stipulating the clause that only Indian-born people can hold high offices in India. The thought of anybody foreign to this soil would one day target these high offices would have never occurred to them. It was a time when we had just won freedom from foreigners. So, they would have thought it to be superfluous to stipulate such a condition in our constitution. It does not make any sense if the argument today centres on the absence of this clause in our constitution and allows someone alien to India to hold high offices in this country.

Today, people who support Sonia’s candidature concede the fact that foreigners can become Prime Ministers and Presidents in India if they hold a valid citizenship certificate. They also go on making odious comparisons with great people in support of their arguments to make Sonia the Prime Minister. People, who have not studied her closely, cite Sister Nivedita (Margaret) as an example. Nivedita rebelled against the British in India. She also helped in smuggling arms into India to fight the British. The Ramakrishna Mission, which kept away from politics, requested her to leave them. Swami Vivekananda called her ‘Nivedita’ because she had surrendered herself to this country. Where does Sonia stand in comparison with her?

Sonia came to India in 1968, marrying a very good looking husband in Rajiv, who was the son of the Prime Minister of India. It is in our tradition that when a woman is married, she becomes one in the husband’s family and an ideal part of that family’s tradition. But supporters of Sonia must not ignore the fact that she did not apply for Indian citizenship when she married Rajiv and came to India, something that any Indian wife would have done. She filled in an application in 1968 seeking for permission to stay in India as a foreigner for five years. She preferred to remain a foreigner despite marrying an Indian. She was issued a certificate in 1968 to reside in India as a foreigner for five years. In 1973, after her first five year period of stay expired, she sought extension to stay in India for another five years. Can we expect someone, who didn’t want to seek permanent Indian citizenship to live and die for us when she represents our nation?

My dear friend, Cho, once told me that what she says is divorced from what she does. There have been numerous instances which remind us of Sonia’s infidelity. Let’s delve deeper into once such instance. When Sonia applied for a five year extension of her stay in 1973, the political climate was such that a war with Pakistan over East Pakistan was imminent. A struggle for Bangladesh independence was also round the corner. When all commercial pilots were asked to forgo their leaves and come back to service during the Bangladesh war, she urged Rajiv Gandhi to avail long leave on special permission. Sonia doubted India’s chances of survival when the seventh American fleet was moving towards India. They left India and spent their time in Rome throughout the war period and returned only after peace was restored. India had won the war because of Indira Gandhi’s vision, and the congress party acquired an invincible status in the eyes of the opposition parties.

Compare the contrasting attitudes of Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi. After the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, Vajpayee, who was the opposition leader at that time, stood up in Parliament and congratulated Indira Gandhi for her courage and compared her with goddess “Durga”. At that important moment, he never thought that acknowledging the achievement of his political adversary will cost him votes. He lost on votes in the election that followed. Still, Vajpayee stood tall in his praise for Indira Gandhi. Compare him with Sonia Gandhi, who did not give the credit due to the soldiers of the Kargil war when they successfully evacuated the infiltrators.

It is not everyday that a nation comes together to feel proud. Such opportunities do not come very often and that is why these incidents are studied, reread and recapitulated in history. Sonia even played politics with the self-esteem of this country by choosing the wrong moment to demand an explanation from the NDA government in raising issues related to corruption in defence deals. Even her praise for our armed forces came late when she realised that the people of this country were not taking her criticism of our armed forces very well. That she was a foreigner and had no business asking for explanations came through very clearly. Every educated Indian knew there were problems, including corruption, associated with some sections of the army and it was these problems that resulted in the Kargil invasion. But Sonia chose the wrong occasion to escalate the issue to expose a smaller number of people and ended up defaming the entire army in the process. The army represents the c
ore of Indian nationalism. There are moles everywhere and the Indian army is no exception to it. But the occasion demanded the nation to rise above everything and pat the army for its heroism, its courage and its sacrifice. But then, one can expect such broad-mindedness and consideration only from a nationalist. A person like Sonia Gandhi, who is after votes, who is after power, who is after a citizenship certificate to rule this country, cannot think like one.

So, we have to read between the lines and look at what is preset under the person’s skin. In 1973, Sonia sought for a five-year extension to stay in India. When Indira Gandhi was defeated in the 1977 elections after the Emergency period, Sonia Gandhi understood the mood of the nation and went into the Italian embassy refusing to come back. She had ideas of going back to Italy and Sanjay Gandhi pleaded with her to give up the thought and return back home. And we expect this woman to live and die for India. To live in India is very different from living for India. And to live in India in such glory, with such protection, with such resources, is very different from dying for India. No one will die for something which one does not own or feel a part of.

Swami Vivekananda once went to Colombo after his American visit. When everybody was waiting with garlands to receive him, they were shocked to see Vivekananda rolling on the sand, embracing his mother. He was one of the towering intellectuals of the world who could leave a hostile audience spellbound for hours. He was the same person who was a rationalist to start with; one who questioned the existence of God to Ramakrishna. He was found rolling on the sand; in the lap of his mother, embracing her. This is nationalism.

Nationalism does not come by merely dressing traditionally. The sari is as much a fancy dress today like any other haute couture. But some Indians are very happy when they see Sonia wearing a sari. Cho once told me something that he may not put down in his writing. But I take this opportunity to share this with the audience. He said “If Sonia Gandhi had been black, or had she been a person of African origin, this problem would never have arisen”. The educated Indian would then not support her candidature. The problem is with the educated Indian, for he reveres the White and has a fascination for the white skin. That is why he is pushing forward her candidature, questioning anyone and everyone who feels otherwise.

The million dollar question is how to remove this inherent bias from the Indian mind and how to remove this fascination for the white skin and for the English language. Let us assume that I become the Prime Minister one day and explain how I will go about eliminating this bias. I will then bring in 50,000 shoe-shiners from different parts of the world and make them work in Indian bus stands, railway stations and airports. I will also ask the government to pay on someone’s behalf, who gets his shoes shined by the white men. So, the idea that the white man can also be a shoe-shiner will come to us. It may be a petty idea, it may seem funny, but there is a deep implication in this idea with respect to our civilization. Let us assume that a lorry driver from a foreign country comes to India on a vacation. When he approaches the Air India counter, the attendant will courteously ask him to wait while she serves the waiting customers. This is the way we treat the white man in our co
untry, with deference. As a result, there is a definite racial bias in favour of Sonia, which we must understand.

Source: Gurumurthy’s website.