Today marks Martyr’s Day in India. On this day, January 30, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi, father of a free India, visiting New Delhi to address an evening Hindu prayer meeting, was gunned down by nationalist Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who fired three bullets into his chest, killing him. Godse believed Gandhi was overly conciliatory to Muslims.
Falling to the ground, Gandhi reputedly moved his hand to his forehead in the Hindu sign of forgiveness, his final words, “He Ram, He Ram” (“Oh God, Oh God”).
This happened a mere five months after India had won independence from British rule.
Committed to the Tolstoy principle of non-violence, Gandhi would be appalled at the changes sweeping across today’s India in the wake of a Hindu fundamentalism of tsunami proportions not adverse to employing violence against those perceived as threatening its interests, augmented by a Modi government keen to buttress its hegemony by supporting religious bias.
A few days ago, January 22, saw the dedication of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, said to be Ram’s birthplace. Ram is the seventh avatar of the god, Vishnu, and regarded as deity.
Modi had promised the temple in his initial run for prime minister and was present to inaugurate the temple: “Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” said Modi.
Built on a 70-acre site previously occupied by the four century old Babri Mosque, torn down in 1992 by a frenzied Hindu mob, thousands died in the sectarian violence that followed. None of the perpetrators were sentenced.
Not that any of this mattered to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi, entrenched in power since 2014. The Ram Temple symbolizes the supremacy of both the BJP and a Hindu culture that discourages pluralism.
In contrast, India’s founding fathers, recognizing the myriad religious diversity of India—Muslims, Buddhists Christians, and Jains—eschewed pandering to any faction.
Ironically, India seems to be following in the steps of Pakistan, deliberately created as a Muslim state.
Chillingly, there’s the legacy of Hindu nationalist M. S. Golwalkar, advocating that “minorities in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”
Modi deemed Golwalkar one of his primary influences in his 2008 book, Jyotipunj (Beams of Light).
Today’s Hindu dominated India, 80% of its population, increasingly imposes Golwalkar’s dictum of a monolithic culture impervious to those it views as interlopers, deserving of restriction and possibly extinction.
In the first eight months of 2023, 525 attacks on Christians occurred. In the state of Manipur, 642 churches were torched by Hindu arsonists “receiving support from people in power,” said the United Christian Forum (UCF).
Notorious was the killing of Australian missionary Graham Stuart Staines in 1999, along with his two sons, Philip (aged 10) and Timothy (aged 6), burnt to death by a Hindu Nationalist group named Bajrang Dal. Stains, a medical doctor, had come to India several years earlier to treat lepers and minister to the poor. He was accused of “forced conversions,” a common rumored charge among Hindu nationalists.
As is, Christians comprise a mere 2.3 % of India’s teeming population.
Indian Muslims, comprising the third largest Muslim population in the world, have likewise been continuously assaulted, often accused of cattle rustling.
2020 saw the Delhi riots, killing 53 people, 40 of them Muslim. In its aftermath, Modi denied his government discriminates against Muslims, despite the BJP’s legislating the Citizen’s Act, restricting citizen eligibility of undocumented immigrants, largely Muslim, and prohibiting proselytizing by Muslims and Christians.
An investigation of the Delhi riots by the independent Delhi Minorities Commission found the violence “planned and targeted” and several police actively participating in attacking Muslims. A subsequent video confirmed several policemen beating five seriously injured Muslim men lying on the street and forcing them to sing the Indian national anthem to prove their patriotism.
I won’t go into persecution of the Sikh population, increasingly viewed as disloyal citizenry, seeking establishment of an independent state. Canadian and American intelligence agencies have uncovered assassination plots, one of them succeeding in Canada, against Sikh diaspora leadership.
Meanwhile, President Biden went all out for the state visit of Prime Minister Midi, hosting a vegetarian dinner on June 21, 2023, despite protestors among Democrats and the urgings of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that he confront Modi on the matter of human rights in India. The President would later say he did so in private conversation with Modi, but if so, any details were excluded from his public closing summation.
India, which held so much promise for an enlightened democracy upon its emergence as a free nation, has altered its raison d’être over the last decade, increasingly disenfranchising its minorities and critics.
I have wondered how my friends are faring in Kerala, where the apostle Thomas ministered to the natives 2000 years ago. Its Christian community is India’s largest . Unfortunately, the Catholic leadership has cozied up to the BJP in return for its support of a good price for Kerala rubber. I find it a dubious Faustian exchange, prioritizing profit over the welfare of Christians elsewhere in the nation.
I think back to my privileged visit years ago to Gandhi’s simple bed, cup, and walking stick. I had read about him at age ten, which began my lifetime devotion to this great man, advocate of non-violence, charity to the poor, abolishing caste, proponent of women’s emancipation and, of course, India’s freedom. His impact on Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement is fully acknowledged.
It’s Martyr’s Day as I said at the outset. Is it conceivable Gandhi’s leading India’s into the promise land of sovereignty has transpired into a new tyranny of oppression, imposed not by a foreign entity, but by an Indian government weaponizing nationalism for its own ends?
Sadly, Modi and the BJP enjoy widespread favorability in today’s India, assuring long term oppression of India’s religious and political minorities, usurping the enlightened legacy of Gandhi and Nehru with their targeted bigotry.
–rj
Brimmings: up from the well 