Back in 1998 I was working around Howrah in an MNC. As a person from UP, I used to wonder if I needed a VISA to be there. I had not felt so out of place in the hinterlands of United States. On my train rides north of Howrah, I saw abandoned factories and their skeletons, reminder of the good days gone by. In the factory I worked, workers on an average got 72 days of vacation yearly. They would go on strikes at the drop of a hat. A simple visit to the bank was a painful reminder of how dysfunctional a state was West Bengal.
I took a train ride to a place called Falacata up north. When I reached there, what I found was a small place, no more than a tehsil. A visit to the market place in the evening was quite an eye opener. It was a small place. Three shops at the most, this was not a place of significance. It catered to the tea gardens nearby. The looks of this place told me that most people there were struggling to make ends meet and did not know or cared for places outside of West Bengal if not Falacata itself.
I saw a three story building which proudly displayed a banner on the topmost part. Someone painted this banner at that height, a testament to the effort it must’ve required. It was written in Hindi so I understood it. Translated into English, it said: “Free Black Activist Mumia Abu Jamal”. It was quite a shocker. I doubt if too many people there knew who this guy was. Since I had spent some time close to Philadelphia in the US, I had heard of this guy. Abu Jamal had shot and killed a police officer Daniel Faulkner. Subsequently, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Abu Jamal became quite a cause celebre in the US attracting liberals from all walks of life. But the guy despite of their best efforts, never got out.
Had I not stayed close to Philadelphia, I would not have known about this guy. People in the Midwest of US have not heard of this guy. But somehow, in a Podunk town of Falacata, there was someone who went to considerable effort to put up that banner. Now remember, there is plenty in WB to fight, causes to protest, injustices to stand up to, employment and healthcare to demand and yet Mumia Abu Jamal took precedence over all those issues.
That’s the nature of Indian communist. Their activism is NEVER about things that matter but about symbols, perceived enemies, exerting power from behind the scenes (without any responsibility) and of course freebies. In many ways they are like Muslims who rate their neighborhood, city, state and nation well below Ummah. For an Indian communist, Marx, Lenin and Mao are more important than any national issue or hero. If the man on the street wants a temple in Ayodhya, they suggest a hospital. When Ram Chandra Bhartiya wants name of Aurangzeb Road changed to a national hero, they mock them while naming streets in Kolakata, Tripura as Lenin Sarani or Marx Sarani.
People of India finally caught a break in 2014, when they elected Narendra Modi as PM. He is democratically challenging every status quo and bringing about meaningful changes. He is taking away power form irrelevant activists who lead one kind of life and espouse entirely the opposite. The Indian communist is afraid of Modi. The Indian communist is afraid of the no-longer-afraid voter. Hopefully, we are seeing beginning of the end of a failed murderous ideology and its murderous grip on states like West Bengal and Kerala.
Any system that pits one human being against another is evil. It is against all laws of this world or the other. My co-blogger is a Tamil Brahmin while I belong to one of the non-descript kind of castes. Both of us abhor the system. We are nation first kind of Hindus.
We have written on the topic often and from different point of view. The most recent violence at Bhima-Koregaon is very upsetting and is forcing us to write again on the topic. Interacting with other on twitter using our handle @NetHindu1 we see that discussion on this sensitive issue tends to bring out the worst in all of us. Dalits are playing the victim card (and rightly so). Brahmins are bragging about their ability, reach and influence despite of smaller numbers. Other upper caste members are complaining about reservation. It is downright ugly. Fissures are turning into chasms. We as Hindus are playing right into the hands of Leftists, urban naxals and jihadis who are very effectively using morons like Jignesh Mewani. All you have to do is to read the twitter page of this jihadi Shehla Rashid and see what I mean.
Hindus have always fallen prey to the divide and rule ploy that is the only piece of history that matters here. Who collaborated with whom in what war is old news and often does not take into account local and selfish factors of that time is not doing us any good except these “I am smarter than you and know more history than you” arguments. Clearly, we irrespective of our castes are not learning anything from history.
I am of the opinion that if you pit two people who are identical in every aspect, they will still try to find a way to exert their superiority over the other. I have seen that in India and I have seen here in the US. An ocean away, people still make Polish or Italian or Irish jokes even though they are multiple generations away from the old country. One-upmanship is a human phenomenon. Hindus are made it more structured and killed for it.
The choice in front of as Hindus is: are we going to rise above casteism and take back our country from Naxals and Jihadis or stay beholden to either our pride or victimhood, stay divided and lose the war to the “Bharat tere tukde honge” jihadi gang. Pakistanis are probably rubbing their hands in glee at this windfall due to our stupidity.
What can we do? All of us need to realize our collective responsibility. Dalit leadership needs to be taken into confidence and reassured by upper caste leaders. They need to realize that joining hands with Jihadis will result into mass forced conversions as seen in Pakistan. Our political leadership needs to crackdown one the naxal-jihadi nexus, go after their funding and pre-emptively keep them out of potential hotspots i.e. better than our current Home Ministry is doing.
After reading these people on twitter, sometimes I feel that I don’t know as much as them. But I do know that we have a serious problem. A solution, more practical than finger pointing needs to be found. Our future depends on it.
An article we had written on collective responsibility can be read at.
Back in 2013, Sanjay Singh in an article absolutely worth reading again said:
More than anyone else, Togadia himself should be acutely aware of his own and the VHP’s near complete irrelevance in Gujarat today. This has been reflected during the last two assembly elections that Narendra Modi won. The VHP’s cadre base has shrunk and Togadia is struggling hard to stay afloat in the state.
Even today, PM Modi gets accused by the far right Hindus as betraying their causes. The fact is that Modi is an India first kind of Hindu which means he puts nation first and his faith second. Of course this does not mean he shies away from a proud public display of his faith. Thanks to him, Yoga is an international phenomenon with Saudi Arabia embracing the practice. This is just one of the example.
His India first attitude gets displayed by his passion of keeping peace at all cost which is essential for prosperity. This approach has earned him a different variety of invectives but clearly he could care less. After the post Godhra massacre riots (his inexperience let him down). But after that, as we all know, there was NO incidence during his tenure as CM or after him. He went after the troublemakers hard despite of their affiliations. VHP was sidelined and Jihadis were dealt with decisively. This is a man who places a lot of dividend in peace because it IS important for prosperity. As a CM, he was second to none.
Now as we all can see UP CM Adityanath is probably the second most popular person in BJP. A mahant of the Gorakhnath mutt, he is completely unapologetic about his faith and the way he practices it. If you rise above the media din and smear campaign launched against him by these so called conservatives, you will see that underneath the saffron robe is a pragmatic man who is fair (as Muslims in Gorakhpur will tell you) and is inspired greatly by Narendra Modi. A report in Economic Times says the following:
Adityanath aims to model the investor summit on Vibrant Gujarat, the popular biennial investor summit started by Modi in 2003. Adityanath had a morning meeting with ten of the country's prominent bankers, including State Bank of India chairman Rajnish Kumar, Central Bank of India chairman Rajeev Rishi and Dena Bank chairman Ashwani Kumar among others, inviting them to open regional offices in the state.
Adityanath spoke of planned reforms and investments in infrastructure, civil aviation, food processing, tourism, film making and the dairy industry. He said the state government is bringing reforms in labour laws and scrapping as many as 1,200 obsolete rules.
It is therefore no surprise that the UP CM puts great importance on law and order. The following was said in an NDTV report:
According to data released by the UP Police, between March 20 and September 18, there have been 431 encounters, in which 17 criminals were killed; two policemen died and 88 were injured; so far, 1,106 criminals have been caught.
In a sort of a prequel to the debacle at BhimaKoregaon, proactive action at Saharanpur and the eventual arrest of Chandrashekhar Azad of Bhimsena controlled what could have been a disaster.
On one hand the Yogi is creating tourism hotspots in UP and on the other inspecting homeless shelters for adequate protection against the cold. Just like Modi, this is a one man army.
Now Yogi inherited possible the worst state in the entire union unlike Devendra Fadnavis who got this plum job as CM of arguably the most prosperous and economically robust state. All he has to do is maintain.
However the coolest first couple of any of the states in India have tried their best to be a Not-Modi-Not-Yogi CM. Destroying Hindu run budget schools by implementing RTE, aiding the “Be Santa” campaign (clearly ashamed of their Hindu roots), absolute Muslim appeasement. Of course the worst is the latest debacle in BhimKoregaon where urban naxals and jihadis ran amok under the garb of dalits to open up really old wounds with the ultimate aim of dividing Hindus along caste lines for the benefit of Congress. All Fadnavis had to do was to be proactive like Yogi Adityanath and all this could have been avoided. Instead he and his wife are more in news because of their love for dogs and picking up fights with RW twitteratis.
Fadnavis needs to emulate Modi and Yogi in proactive governance and maintain a strong law and order in a state that is so much easier to govern than UP. He needs to govern his state like Modi and Yogi – with firm hand and respecting everyone. The algorithm for good governance is there. All he and others have to do is to conform to it with sincerity without abandoning your faith.
The following are the references used:
//economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/62214138.cms?
utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
http://shankhnaad.net/nation/public-sphere
/item/506-the-anti-hindu-stature-of-maharashtra-cm-devendra-fadnavis
