When cliché are dismantled

By K.N. Pandita

When long cherished and trumpeted cliché are dismantled, one should care to fumble for the reality. Most of the cliché are time-serving motivation; only a few are universal and that too for limited time.

In a recent utterance former British Prime Minster Tony Blaire said that Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence cannot hold water in our days. It never did, to be precise. 

To Indian Gandhiites, this is shocking sacrilege. Even in more objective and critical circles among Indian intellectuals, the sustainability of the axiom of non-violence tenuous. When Jinnah announced Direct Action in Bengal, Congress leadership got knee-jerks. With his own hands, Gandhi struck off his more than a century long jargon.

Gandhi was afraid of unarmed Indians getting killed in an armed clash with the colonialists. A believer in Bhagwad Gita, he trivialized Krishna’s words: “I am the killer and I am the killed”. No motivation can be more powerful and realistic.

Gandhiite Congressmen marginalized Neta Ji, the first Indian after Shiva ji Maharaj to embrace arms and fighting as the religion of the free and the valiant. Gandhi, more than Gautam, made his nation hostage to impotency.

Nehru, his blue-eyed disciple, was blind to the spirit of a soldier. Remember how he chided the General who had proposed expansion of Indian armed forces years before the Chinese incursion. Also remember how he went with a beggar’s scrip to Washington for arms when Indian troops were mauled by the PLA.   Encapsulated in the culture of scribing, he thought, and unfortunately naively believed that pen was mightier than the sword.

When Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minster of Pakistan showed him a clenched fist, he cavalierly extended his hand of friendship. Today, sixty-five years after that event, Kashmir is gone; two sub-Himalayan Indian States have been semi-Islamized; organizations like IM, SIMI and Al Umma etc. are spanning their fangs in Southern States; Indian secularism is hiding its head in shame; minority dominated districts and regions are emerging almost with autonomous contours; sops, privileges, incentives, quotas, special packages are offered on platter to minority groups for carrying on their anti-India activities overtly or covertly. And then, a bagful of charges are brought against nationalists and Saffronites to paint them as communalists. To pseudo-secularists, right-wing politics appears more dangerous than religious radicalism.

And the sponsors of minority privileges, who are also majority-bashers, are no other than the members of the majority. Such is the reach and influence of the muscle power.

When Hazratbal shrine (Srinagar) was occupied by Islamic terrorists, all of their conditions were accepted silently and they were provided safe passage back to their places of origin in Pakistan without hurting a finger nail. But when the Khalistanis occupied the Golden Temple, guns and tanks rolled in to carry out the blitzkrieg. Why were guns and tanks muzzled in Hazratbal case? The state power whips its muscle selectively. That is the shameful profile of Indian secularism.

Pakistani armed legions make deep inroads inside Indian Territory, capture Indian jawans, behead them, and take the heads back to show to their handlers. Pakistan inflicts jab after jab on India’s face and India just registers the count. India adds Gorshikov; the world’s largest nuclear powered powerful warship to its naval force yet Sri Lankan tiny naval boats chases away the Indian fishermen in the Straits of Lanka from their own fishing fields. India can do nothing because “ahimsa parmo dharma”.

At Simla, Indians succumbed to Pakistani premier’s harangues, and released 93 thousand soldiers taken prisoners in the war. On his return to Karachi, the Paki told the BBC,” I got everything from the bastards and gave them nothing in return.” Long live “non-violence” and long live the charade that we do not compromise our territorial integrity.

In good old days, when the Sultans of Delhi visited the Paradise on Earth (Kashmir) and had their fill with goshtabas and yakhni, they pontificated that Kashmir was the secular crown on India’s head. The crown has melted in the thin air. Kashmir has been cleansed of its entire Hindu minority community in 1991 when NC-Congress coalition government was in power. With the eruption of armed insurgency, this government resigned and went into hibernation to re-emerge from its debris five years later. Not a single enquiry has been ordered into the event that rent to shreds India’s secularism as well as democracy.

On the other hand, no minister or chief minister in India has been subjected to a chain of enquiry commissions as Narendra Modi has been from 2004 to present day. One, who installed one of these enquiries against him in his capacity of Railway Minster, is undergoing five-year jail term for siphoning off thousands of crores of rupees in a fodder scam. How prophetic are the words of Churchill that”they (Indian leaders) are men of straw”.

How are we to get rid of this can of worms? Our youth are made imbecile under the indoctrination of the muck called non-violence. On the contrary, recall Chairman Mao’s slogan that “Power flows from the barrel of the gun.” China was liberated years after we won freedom. Today, this nation, once called the opium eaters, but now arch believer in “the power of the gun” rules over world economy. And we, the apostle of non-violence, have 33 per cent of our population below poverty line and also the richest Corporate Houses in the world.

Today, more than seventy per cent of our armed troops and paramilitaries are deployed to curb armed insurgency in the country be it the Eastern, Central or Northern parts of the country. Kashmiris, Khalistanis, Maoists, Naxalites, Bodos, Nagas, Assamese, all are up in arms. There are numerous un-armed but anti-establishment movements in the country. Is the Indian State dealing with them through the panacea of “non violence”? Where will this all lead us to? Why does not the mantra of non-violence make any headway anywhere? This charade has to be given up. It sustained Nehruvian gibberish for many decades but should now meet its natural and ignominious death.

If India is to survive and rise as a great, powerful and an assertive nation of 120 crore people, then each Indian man and woman has to become a soldier, live as a soldier and die as a soldier in defence of the motherland. All the junk of the past has to be given a deep burial, and new and young India has to rise.

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