Skip to main content

Holy Wars


When Babur was conquering more territory in India, one of his formidable opponents was the Rajput king Rana Sangha of Mewar.  The news of the defeat of one of his battalions by Rana Sangha was accompanied by a soothsayer’s prediction of disaster and the desertion of the Indian mercenaries.  Babur’s soldiers were thoroughly demoralised.  A new strategy was required.  Thus came in religion.  “This is not just a war for territory,” declared the divinely inspired Babur.  “This is a jihad against infidels.”  With no other weapon than a few words, Babur converted a greedy and violent war into a holy jihad.  “Cowardice became apostasy while death assumed the welcome guise of martyrdom,” writes John Keay in his book, India: A History.  Keay goes on to quote from Babur-nama (Babur’s personal memoir-cum-diary), “The plan was perfect, it worked admirably...”  His soldiers took an oath on the Quran to fight till they fell.  What’s more, Babur enacted certain religious rituals too: abjuring alcohol, he ostentatiously dashed decanters and goblets to pieces, and emptied the wine-skins.  Babur-the-Conqueror became Babur-the-Crusader. 

Making use of religion for political purposes is a very ancient trick.  It is unfortunate that the trickery continues to be in use even today when the world has marched ahead of religion using science, reason and technology.  What happened in Chennai two days back is yet another instance of the return of obsolete tricks.  Some political activists belonging to various parties attacked a TV channel and forced it to cancel a programme which debated whether the mangal sutra worn by married women in India is a boon or a bane.  Even after the channel decided to call off the telecast of the debate, the attacks continued even to the extent of hurling a bomb though no one was hurt.  It’s not only “some fringe elements” that are involved but also the state’s BJP which extended its support to the attack. 

A few weeks back, Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan was forced to take an oath that he would not write any more merely because one of his novels questioned the male chauvinism that underscores the Hindu patriarchal system (as it does all patriarchal systems). 

Stifling debates and literature is the beginning of the disastrous decline of any society.  But some political parties in India led by the ruling BJP do not see it that way.  They belong to the era of Babur and his successors who believed that an empire of conquest could be sustained only by more conquests. 

Why does the past keep pulling the Party backwards even though the people of the country voted for the progressive “development” it had promised in its election manifesto?  Does India really need Holy Wars?  What triggers such notions as manifested by the Party and its “fringe elements” ever since Mr Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of the country?  These are a few of the questions that can be contemplated on in the Party’s next Chintan Baitak.


Comments

  1. Very true, people have used religion as a way to manipulate people's mind and the result is todays civilization. I just hope people should open their mind and use their own brain rather than being manupulated by others. Religion is so misused term.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The most terrifying tragedy is that we have a PM who supports such venality.

      Delete
  2. 'Writer' Perumal is dead and a blogger is killed brutally in Bangladesh. The world has not moved on after Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen faced similar issues decade ago.

    Politics always exploits weakness is society. Hope and wish this crack does not propagate.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've just bought a copy of Perumal's controversial novel. Want to see what's the limit of our religious leaders' comprehension and imagination.

      Delete
    2. I have read that and I do not find anything worth to kill the writer. I am sure who wanted to kill him have NOT read it. You know, it did not make news when it was published in Tamil couple of years ago but it created issues for the author after it was translated into English. These 'English reading Hindus' are taking away freedom of speech from the writers. They do not know what they are opposing. This is not democracy, at least for writers.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af