A Secular Agenda; by Arun Shourie.

Shourie was the reason Indian Express was read avidly by the intelligentsia, the youth and anyone who cared, until he left - which is when the Express dwindled. There is a new version and some attractive writers which might mean it is worth looking at again. Meanwhile Shourie continued his fearless reporting and incisive analysis of facts, prima facie and those behind, and this has been in form of books he published from time to time.

From the time British almost lost an independence war in India in 1857, they woke up to the necessity of breaking of the spirit of the nation by any and every means possible, and the surest way of doing it is they realised was to discredit anything good while harping on all that was or could be called bad, and the war of propaganda was on thenceforth. All ancient traditions, all ancient knowledge and those that protected it and kept it alive were to be discredited as bad, or worse. From discrediting Vedas and interpreting them in the stupidest, falsest way possible, to inventing the Aryan invasion myth and Aryan versus original Dravidians myth, to heaping all sorts of discredit on Brahmans, to spreading lies about Vivekananda and other great personalities of India - of which there has never been any shortage - to finally separating the nation by actively encouraging and in fact fabricating separate identities not only where the separations had ceased to exist but even where they did not even exist as separate, ever, they did their best - or worst, in this case - possible.

To some extent, it worked, especially with the population that had only India as the identity. Embarrassment, if not outright shame, about a purely Indian identity, were the gifts of the colonial rulers' manufacture that stayed deep in psyche with those that had lost any real acquaintance with their roots, and they have been forever apologetic and hungry for approval of anything, anyone "foreign". All this is perpetrated and encouraged forever in perpetuity by the schools opened by missionaries that were forever publicised as the best possible education, however deficient they have proved in producing pupils of intellectual superiority of either scientific or most other necessary sorts for any nation, except that of being excellent colonial subjects. This estranged embarrassment about roots of India is what passes for secular in the nation that inherited and kept the name of India, while other pieces that separated went the way of fundamentalist or military rule and worse. And thus the perpetually losing status of India in the hidden war being propagated against her by either physical weapons of terrorists that can come and go freely from either side of the border or simply in the propaganda war that is hidden in plain sight for all to see.

If any other nation would do this sort of conjuring trickery to aid and abate those bent on destroying it for reasons of fear of what the world might say - or even worse, for personal or political gains for a small clicque, as often has been going on, the nation doing this would be a laughing stock of the world. That India does not see herself as such is perhaps a stubborn blindness to facts or a convenient closing of eyes for small, temporary, immediate goals of winning an election or so by the few that have ruled it for long. Laughingstock it is, and that is why major achievements of the nation even in areas of major importance only invoke further ire or ridicule in various parts of the world, mainly Europe and US, whose approval India craves while a second focus of this craving is towards nations that would never give it anyway, on grounds of "faith".

Hence the ridicule reminding India of "starving poor" when India launches a completely indigenous missile or manages to acquire nuclear capability totally on its own in spite of disapproval of world powers, and hence the much punishing of sanctions against India even as nations that cheat on aid and abet terrorists are given further aid on escalating scales.


Hence the abuse heaped on poor hapless call centre workers who painstakingly learn accents and idioms to get along with the customers and stay up nights to help out clients clear around the world, for a pittance compared to what their counterparts would be paid locally to another worker in the client's neighbourhood and have the prices of services go up there to levels they would rather not pay.

Of course, it is easy to abuse someone on phone while it is impossible to do so when one sees clothes or cheap gadgets or other products in shops across US made in some east Asian nation - usually China - but it is also the perception of China as a formidable nation with a nuclear arsenal and unambiguous intentions of domination of territory in and around its borders, while India is seen as poor, starving, and pretentious.

The starving was way back in the soon after independence era, when the nation had accepted responsibility for all the debts of India after partition, while Gandhi had forced the governrment to part with the unfairly demanded share to the part that separated (and accepted no part of debts). It has been more than a few decades that India achieved self sufficiency in terms of food - and indeed has many other achievements to her credit.


What India does not have is a habit of - or even one instance of - retaliatory strikes, US fashion (or even the overtaking of another nation or two or more, China fashion) when terrorism is perpetrated on the innocent citizens, year after year, in the name of some facade of a reason or other that provides a convenient excuse for those that would whip the indigenous of India into submission or oblivion, but are in fact nothing but this effort to wipe out the very nation and its essence and turn it into another robot land of human weapons.

On the contrary, Indian politicians often have pretended infiltrators were not from another country at all, to create vote banks in regions where a local awakening of population might just not go with the one party rule that has been norm for most of the time, no matter if the infiltration is pointed to wresting the land away from the very nation by changing its demographics and more, and the fact that this is not a fear or guess but an openly declared, indeed printed (and circulated for purposes of funds too) policy in some nations near and far is conveniently ignored.

After all it is cheaper to browbeat someone Indian with a name-calling - one can accuse anyone pointing out these and other disturbing facts as non secular, communal, right wing (no matter if the person is ascetic and poor in lifestyle compared to Gandhi) and a new one, sword wielding. One wonders when a young idiot who makes such accusations is unaware of any facts about his or her own nation if this idiot would respect weapons more modern than swords, and that is the reason that the bombing perpetrators who manage to kill hundreds of people in India every now and then (- every couple of months, on ignored levels since they are poor or middle class, and sometime even the spectacular levels such as the Taj attack to attract attention by targeting US, UK and Israel citizens apart from Indians) are not indicted even in supposedly innocent conversation this way, because by definition communal can be an accusation only made against someone who cannot have loyalties anywhere else other than India. No wonder India is seen as ridiculous, the nuclear and other intellectual achievements as pretension of an ex-slave nation with not even an ability to defend its citizens on its own streets.

Shourie gives a great deal of facts and discusses the various actions and various facets of various issues involved around the issue of secularism, whether the Kashmir issue and who is responsible for what, or the Assam bomb that is ticking, and more.