Hindu Tolerance

With unconditional respect to Durga Prasad Dash, I must say that his basic premise is wrong. “Are the non-aggressive, tolerant attitude of Hindus…” He starts.  Wrong, Sir. You are assuming that Hindus were non-aggressive and tolerant. 

Hindus were no less aggressive than any others.  We don’t need to go to the pre-Christian Ashoka who killed thousands of people in order to expand his kingdom and would have conquered China or Burma if the logistical situations hadn’t been as bad as they were.  I guess the Ashoka pillars in Kandahar didn’t appear there by a peaceful miracle.  No Sir, the Hindu kings were as belligerent as any others.  Kingship is all about conquests.  Even Lord Krishna would agree.  I’m sure, Durga Sir, you’re familiar with the vile things he did in order to win the Kurukshetra War.  I’m also sure you know about the wars and battles fought by our kings and princes throughout our history even before the Muslim invaders and the Christian colonisers came in. 

Durga Sir, those were the days of conquests.  I’m sure you know that England was conquered by the French in 1066.  In the same century the Muslims conquered North India.  Today in England, most of the landed nobility and the aristocracy are of foreign extraction though they may not admit it very openly.  We don’t have to go so far back in history, in fact, to understand conquests and annihilations.  Look at America.  Whose country was it before the Europeans invaded it as recently as the Taj Mahal was being built in our own Agra?

Conquest was the hobby of the ambitious in those days, Durga Sir.  They had no internet and its entertainments like blogging or Facebook.  Not even a democracy like we now have in which we can vote for somebody and get somebody else as our leader.  As Tennyson’s Ulysses says, it’s of no “profit” for an ambitious person to sit “idle” in the palace with “an aged wife” and a “savage” people. So they went around conquering.  Our very own Bharatiya kings did it too.  But our guys didn’t venture out too far.  Instead they killed those in the nearest kingdoms.  Like the Marathas making their killing in Gujarat or the Cholas in the Southeast Asia.

No, Sir. We were not at all tolerant.  Maybe we were incapable of venturing out beyond Kabul as Ranjit Singh managed to do.  But we always knew how to suppress people.  Our caste system, our Sati system and our devadasi system are enough to prove our intolerance, our cruelty which is more heartless than the conquests of the aliens.  The aliens subjugated the ‘others’.  We subjugated our own people.

The worst tragedy is that we continue to do the same thing even today.  Durga Sir, you put the Kashmiri Pandits in the same brackets with Sadhvi Pragya and Col Purohit.  My innards threw up when I saw this topic in Indipsire and I never imagined you had put it up.  I voted for it just to see who the blogger was who dared to insinuate so much.  I apologise to you, Durga Sir, for being so blunt.  I know no other way.  My emotions are deeper than those of the gau rakshak, the anti-Romeo squad as well as other new gen thugs in India.

Durga Sir, when you claimed that the Hindus in India are “victims of apathy, conspiracy and forced displacement in their homeland,” I was appalled.  What are you saying, Sir?  This country belongs to you.  It always did.  The Hindus were and still are the majority here.  Who displaced whom?  Teesta Setalvad says in her autobiography that nearly two lakh Muslims were displaced from Gujarat in 2002 when our beloved PM was the CM there.  Check the history of independent India, Durga Sir, and you will see how many people of which category were displaced from where.  A lot of Dalits have been displaced too.  Will you accept them in your fold, Sir?

I was shocked by the hashtag you gave: #hindusvictimised.  My god!  It has always been a country of the Hindus, hasn’t it, Sir?  80%.  And what have they made of the country?  Who are they blaming now?  The paltry 20%?  How silly, Sir? 

Okay, Sir.  Now you have a leader who can be another medieval conqueror.  Is such a conquest that you really want?  He did that in his own state.  Look at the condition of that state now.

I’m sorry, Durga Sir, if I hurt you.  I think you are intelligent enough to understand me.  If you don’t understand, you are welcome to shoot me.  I’ll stand before you bare-chested.