THREE ENDURING HOAXES have disfigured the Hindu psyche and distorted public discourse for more than a century.
One, the Congress alone gave India its independence. This myth has its roots in the Gandhian cultish belief that British colonial rule was a force for the good of India.
Two, India’s diversity and pluralism was the consequence of tolerant Islamic rule.
Three, the RSS is a fascist organisation which is out to usher in a “Hindu Nazi” government in India.
Among the three, the last hoax has been – and remains – the most durable. In fact, the sustained demonisation of the RSS counts as one of the most successful slander campaigns in world history. It is comparable to the demonisation of the so-called Pagans in a Christianised Roman Empire, which eventually led to their annihilation.
It all begins with verbal slander which, when sustained long enough, becomes a received truth and leads to genocide. The roots of this slander lie in sacred scripture. And so, slander sanctified by scripture is transformed in practice as a religious duty. This is exactly how large parts of the earth were Christianised. Here’s a handy formula to understand this phenomenon: a non-Christian country that allows one missionary on its soil paves the way for a civil war and commits civilisational suicide, generations later. The Islamic method is cruder and openly violent but as dogged as Christianity – among other things, the Daawa (invitation to convert to Islam) activity continues to receive fabulous donations within the Muslim community.
As we observed in the previous episode, the Christian slander machinery is perhaps the most sophisticated and the most effective. Its other great success is the manner in which it effortlessly sanitises history.
Let’s take a random example to understand the levels at which this works.
Kélsos or Celsus was a Pagan philosopher who lived in the second Century CE. His treatise, The True Word, is the earliest known comprehensive criticism of Christianity. He was one of the first to realise the long-term civilisational threat posed by what we today call as Christian missionaries. He openly called them as charlatans who took advantage of the simple beliefs of the so-called Pagans to convert them. He also exposed the so-called miracles of Christian missionaries as “masquerades for scandalous trickery, less impressive than the stunts of jugglers who performed in the marketplace.” Sounds familiar with the elaborate charades of “healing” done in our own time in India? Remember, the Church across the world, has perfected this technique for more than a millennium.
Slander and demonisation are also the primary tools by which dictatorships and tyrannies are established. Slandering non-Communists as exploiters and enemies of the proletariat is how Lenin achieved his Communist dictatorship. Demonising the Jews is how Hitler got his Nazi tyranny.
OVER THE LAST CENTURY, THE RSS has been the chosen subject for such targeted and determined slander. Yet, for all the mala fide equations with fascism and Nazism, not one RSS-slanderer has been able to show even a single strand of evidence linking the RSS with the Nazis. George Orwell gives us perhaps the best analysis of how this ideological deception works.
"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different." (Emphasis added)
Orwell might have as well been describing Indian secularism in practice when he wrote this. These words also perfectly capture the whole essence of the calumny against the RSS. Remember that the traducers of the Sangh call themselves as democrats, secularists, and liberals, which is why they are opposed to the RSS. For more than seven decades, these mudslingers acquired an aura of omniscience by self-identifying with such intellectual-sounding labels. Politics and not knowledge and honesty, were their calling cards.
In his blistering and brilliant Freedom of Expression, the legendary Sita Ram Goel nails them:
"The concept of Secularism as known to the modern West is dreaded, derided and denounced in the strongest terms by the foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam. Both of these doctrines prescribe Theocracy… It is, therefore, intriguing that the most fanatical and fundamentalist adherents of Christianity and Islam in India - Christian missionaries and Muslim mullahs - cry themselves hoarse in defence of Indian Secularism, the same way as the votaries of Communist totalitarianism coming out vociferously in defence of Democracy." (Emphasis added)
Which raises some obvious questions, which we shall examine in the next instalment of this series.
To be continued
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