Rahul Writes

(Pseudo Seculars)

Secular Ways of Defeating Hindus

India is a secular state; though its definition of secularism seems to be meaning a systematic negligence and destruction of the religion which majority of Indians officially practice.

It works in favor of politicians if the electorates of our nation remain divided; be it on the basis of religion, caste, region, race, language, or any other invented factor. When divided, the communities are mentally segregated, each looking at others as people different from themselves. Winning elections in such conditions is easy ' all they have to do is to shell out some sops and appease the popular demands of an adequate number of such segregated groups. This leads to the creation of what we call 'vote-banks'. No wonder why each typical political party in India aspires to have some vote-banks.

Congress party (INC) has traditionally tried hard to make vote banks out of almost all non-Hindu communities. Reasons were many, including some historical ones. On the other hand, the main opposition party BJP tried to aim for being representative of the Hindus ' but mostly failed. It failed because Hindus are too diverse in their customs, philosophies and thinking ' and are just too broad minded to vote en masse. On the other hand, religions with smaller bases have fewer difficulties to overcome to come on a single line. During the last general elections, the Catholic Church had asked the Christians to vote for secular parties (read: vote-for-Congress and not-to-vote for BJP), while Muslims have this concept of their mullahs giving them dictates which party to vote for; this time they got a fatwa telling them to vote for the party and leaders which work in favor of Muslims, irrespective of their religion. Some times back there was a Muslim convention where they even awarded and thanked those ministers in the UPA government who have worked to benefit the Muslims. If we talk of Neo-Buddhists, they even exist today because of efforts from some political parties like BSP and RPI.

The non-Hindu religions, particularly the Muslims and so-called Dalit-Christians have been demanding religion-based reservations for them in education and in employment. While various forms of reservations do exist, like there are minority institutions which are funded by tax-payers money, or there are some other ways to include them in the quota system, a plain 'religious quota' is still too far away to be implemented. Therefore, the states governments in India have 'minority' departments which carry out lots of efforts for the welfare of minorities (minorities are defined as non-Hindus).

The advertisement with this post is one of the most naïve ones in this context. Govt. of Maharastra is trying to include more non-Hindus in their Police departments. (They have found a justification for their pseudo secularism in the Affirmative Action of the USA, forgetting that India has never discriminated like the racist Whites groups did in the US, and hence a comparison is misplaced.) Since they can't hire plainly on the basis of religion, they are giving training for non-Hindu candidates so that they can out-compete the Hindu candidates and hence get the jobs. Guess who pays for such trainings? Of course the tax payers ' the 'majority' of it would also come from Hindus. So in a way, Hindus are 'paying' to non-Hindus to out-compete themselves! Is not this a great achievement of our secular politics?

Religion as eligibility criteria for such schemes can't be called secular. Most of us would say that the government should train just the economically poor students for such entrance exams, irrespective of their castes or religions. But our righteous requests would go in vain. Politics in India doesn't work this way. Congress party doesn't work this way. They want us divided and down.

But there is still a hope. The only point where this secular divide would stop is when Hindus would become as minority in numbers, as illiterate, as closed-minded, or in one word as 'vote-bank like', as the other communal vote banks are. Or may be there would be a third world war before that and we won't survive to see a free India anymore. In death and ruins, our nation would become free of secular divides. The only other hope is for these self-defined secular politicians to get defeated.

Equality can't be achieved with pseudo secularism.

(Rahul)