We deeply value and appreciate your wishes and prayers for the World Sikh News. However, we would like to express our views over what you call myopic approach in referring to Hindustan as Hindu India. The expression Hindu India sounds odd because it disturbs and shakes our psyche out of its smug conditioning to a make-believe world of secular values. The reality of communal India is too frightening for the minorities to be faced boldly and courageously. Minorities in Hindustan had hoped that the majority community would honor its commitment to the principle of secularism, but the rise and dominance of intolerant ‘Brahminvad’ has shattered all such hopes.
The important point is not whether an individual here or there is sympathetic or rational or secular but whether the collective behavior of the community is secular or communal, Every society, howsoever fascist, fanatical or totalitarian it may be in its collective behavior, has also some sprinkling of excellent human beings who have the courage of conviction and can rise above the popular clamour and speak out the truth. The individuals that you have referred to belong to this category. They have demonstrated that they can transcend the narrow communal mania and we respect and salute each one of them and record our gratitude to them. But when such excellent individuals are reduced to helpless spectators and are powerless before the diabolic forces prowling all around them, then, their predicament is as pitiable as that of the victims. They cease to represent the community they belong to, and are not considered part of that madness which debases secular India into Hindu India.
The character of a country is reflected in the policies of its government and the collective responses of the majority community. It is the ruthless massacre of Muslims, humiliating harassment of Christian missionaries and _ indiscriminate genocide of Sikhs, inspired and aided by the ruling circles that has earned the epithet of “Hindu” for India. Your chagrin at the repeated use of the phrase Hindu India is understandable, but truth has to be faced, howsoever, bitter it may be. Time has come for the minorities of India to face the truth. They must steer clear of the intellectual cliches and pious platitudes that have been woven around them through artful jugglery of idealistic formulations.
The dehumanization, you think, has been brought about by the Congress (I) and the holocausts and massacres are authored by Congress (1). Yet it is the Congress (I) that gets an unprecedented mandate to continue those very policies. Millions endorse and applaud its actions as excel lent individuals like Basus, NTRS, Kotharis, etc., etc., helplessly watch the ghastly spectacle. We could blame the Congress (I) if the electorate had rejected Rajiv and his party for perpetrating the most heinous crimes against the minorities. In the situation obtaining now in India minorities cannot blindly subscribe to the myth of secular India. So long excellent Hindus do not succeed in creating a climate in which minorities can also feel the glow of freedom and practice their religion, India would continue to be correctly described as Hindu India.
Editors
Article extracted from this publication >> April 19, 1985
