What is wrong
with the word ‘Hindutva’?
During the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s national executive meeting, Amit
Shah put some light on the
approaching Assembly elections. The
battle lines between the nationalist and anti-national forces, according to
him, had already been drawn. Other
senior leaders — Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad — spoke
along the same line. Prime Minister too Narendra Modi touched on the same
subject stressing that the party’s basic
policy should be “development, development and development”. The BJP targeted the Congress, portraying it as
“anti-national”. They condemned Rahul
Gandhi for supporting those who had
shouted “anti-national slogans” on
the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus.
BJP sought to
balance its development slogan with a return to its time-tested Hindutva line.
Whenever BJP talks about Hindutva they invite criticisms from many quarters,
even from quite many Hindus themselves, as if the word ‘Hindutva’ is some bad
word. When Muslim countries talk about Islam or Catholic countries talk about
Christianity, nobody opposes them. But in India, someone has to just utter the
word ‘Hinduism’ and we find so many persons opposing the idea. Strange!
Just because a
party supports majority Hindus that doesn’t mean they are against the minority.
Has minority people belonging to different religions have ever been degraded as
secondary citizen in India? Never! If you go through the history of India there
was no unity among the Hindus living in different parts of India ruled by
Chieftains or Kings and everyone wanted to widen their control by waging a war
and established their hegemony. If we would have unity, we would have allowed
neither the Moghuls nor the British to rule India. If you take China into
consideration they did not allow any foreign rulers in their country because of
their unity.
The Congress of
today is in no way equivalent to the Congress which got freedom to India where
leaders sacrificed their lives. The Congress
went down to the dusts through nepotism, sycophancy, incompetence and most
heinous corruption - and it took about 60 years for them to reach their dust
level. BJP should learn from this failure of Congress and not make moves which
will lead them to dust level also.
