Just to further illustrate the main point, of blog published above ⬆️ yesterday, readers should please go back to it and re-read the short list of a few inconvenient and downright “mocking” questions that anti-Hindu brigades pose to us .
Many of you after reading the above blog the first time might have wanted to offer very many of your own thoughtful and sincere opinions/views/ reflections on the subject … but I daresay that none of you would’ve even thought about attempting to give any kind of direct, specific answers to those awkward questions ?
But please do not worry, dear reader, if you think that I am right. You are not all that different from many Hindus in our country. Your reaction would be so typical indeed of the collective Hindu mind!
We Hindus simply skirt issues even when it stares us in the face because the Hindu mind has been psychologically conditioned over many centuries to adopt Avoidance as a reflexive defence-mechanism whenever faced with challenges thrown at it by alien ideologies .
Historically, the Hindu religious establishment has never been used to engaging with schools of thought, belief-systems or theological doctrines other than the Vedic ones of Vedic-variants.. .
Hinduism does not have a strong historical record of resisting or overcoming alien faiths, alien ideologies that have entered India through military conquest or global trade-routes. India prides itself instead on its so-called “pluralistic” or eclectic outlook to life. It often bends over backwards in seeking to assimilate alien thought into its very own . Hinduism is philosophically attuned to absorbing not rejecting alien ideas and idealism.
The great Adi Sankara vanquished Buddhism in large parts of India. But then Buddhism was only a deviant Vedic faith, not an alien faith. He was able to fight it tooth and nail when it became almost the principal pan-India religion. He rejuvenated Sanatana Dharma and restored it.
Ramanujacharya and Madhvacharya in their lifetimes only rivalled other Vedantic schools of thought in India. They never really had to deal with the rise of Islamic religion in India or with any other foreign faith-systems.
Throughout the medieval history of India, we do not come across a single great Hindu religious leader who took it upon himself to take on the challenge of engaging headlong with neither intolerant Islam nor evangelical Christianity and resolving to defeat them both.
Today, we won’t be able to recall the name of even one Adi Sankara-like Acharya who had the vast popular appeal and the awesome intellectual horsepower to have been able to fight Islam or Christianity in India — on our turf and on our own terms— in the same way in which which they otherwise went about fighting internally amongst themselves as rival Vedic schools .
In other words, Hindu religious leaders were great “pahalwans” in their own backyard … but when it came to taking on big, muscular religious bullies from other neighbouring gangs, they couldn’t really rise to the challenge.
In pre-Independence India , Hinduism was unable to overcome the onslaught of Islam and Christian religious proselytism. The Hindu Acharyas were simply unable to assert themselves against the power of the new politics of the Republic of India viz a Secular Democracy .
The Hindu Acharyas found themselves all relegated to the backwaters of religious life under the new dispensation and ethos of the nation. They became venerable pariahs in their own country … anachronisms within the larger body politic of India who meant nothing to anybody but their own sectarian followers. Why? Because it was found that it was just impossible to marry the country’s new Constitutional ideals and aspirations with those of its ancient religious, even civilisational past which the Acharyas continued to cling to, espouse and hold dear. There was a deep religion-politics disconnect which developed between what I call “ State and Civilisational Continuity” which neither party foresaw would be bad for both parties in the future.
Today, the Hindu religious establishment in independent India has thus become even more effete and ineffective than it ever was before in history. It has no intellectual firepower or moral artillery-force to take on ideologically, much less politically, the non-Vedic, anti-Vedic and pseudo-Sanatana hordes who are now gnawing away at the vitals of Hindu society, both from within and abroad.
There is no such thing as real credible Leadership to be found today in Hinduism … not in the same sense that we know Adi Sankara or Ramanujacharya had exercised it in history . Which is why we as Hindus today have had to look around desperately for leadership and rely upon political parties to double-up for our sakes and for our causes, and deign to act as quasi-religious leaders and patrons too.
Most Hindus today in fact are so confused about the State of the Hindu Union that they just can’t figure out where politics ends and where religion really begins …
That to my mind is, very broadly speaking, the fundamental Hindu predicament which I was trying to highlight in my essay posted yesterday.
Non-Hindus and anti-Hindus have got us Vedic Hindus pinned against the ropes, to use a boxing-ring metaphor, and they indeed have so successfully been able to keep us all, at all times since we gained Independence, feeling so very defensive and craven about ourselves and our religious faith.
Sudarshan Madabushi