MARCHING TOWARDS DARKNESS

MARCHING TOWARDS DARKNESS

Today in India the political power is forcing the people to remain attached to their religious identities. And this is true for all religious communities, be it Hindu, Muslim, Sikh , Christian or anything else. By doing so the political power is trying to keep people fixed in their religious world . The idea behind it is to mobelize majority religious community to support the present political regime. Indian Prime Minister creates occasions to use them to publicly show his religious affiliations and by this he painstakingly tries to draw majority Hindu community to which he himself belongs to towards him. His these  endeavors are highly publicized and they are given maximum possible media coverage, often live media coverage. His image once cultivated in Gujrat after those heinous communal pogroms of the year 2000 as Hindu Hriday Samrat is capitalized to encash votes of the majority community of Hindus and this has been strengthened on many occasions like those of Navratri, Vijayadashami, Kedarnath Yatras. On other occasions this religious identity exercise is accomplished by arranging communal riots at every important festivals, and by implementing communal  legislations like those of Love Jihad, cow protection etc. Other agencies to strengthen religious identities are exercises done by campaigns of Ghar Wapsi and others. Even education system is now being used to highlight religious identity.

In nut shell we can conclude that all possible means are being used by political masters to strengthen religious identities of the people of India with the objective of pulling religious majority group to the folders of the ruling dispensation.

      There is no doubt that this political exercise has ensured the victories of the political party of our Prime Minister but such victories are coming with very high cost. One obvious causality is politics itself which under the influence of communal tactics has been losing it's democratic ethos and practices.

      Secondly the other very obvious consequence is the growth of acrimonious strains in the social structure of the Indian Society which has been existing for centuries with mutual cooperation and coherence despite all sorts of bickerings.

      But more dangerous consequences are still to be unfolded. India is a multi religious country with people of all major religions of the world. Hindus and Sikhs  belong to India and  third largest Muslim poplulation resides in India. Jains and Buddhists also originally belong to India. No political power of whatever majority and authority will ever come in a position to eliminate all religions except Hindus from India . This is a  fact which can't be obscured by any means of propaganda. Then what options left to the present  political masters to achieve their cherished goal of the Hindu Rashtra. Then only two prong policies are left to be pursued and which are actually in practice in India today. First is to captivate people into the cells of their own religions by creating hardest possible cultural barriers and legal walls. Self identification with ones own religion and hatred for others are the most effective cultural barriers. And secondly creating supermacy complex among majority religious community by patronizing them and willfully demonizing other religious communities by branding them anti nationals, by denouncing their practices and by prohibiting the observation and exercise of their practices and by playing  conscious discrimination against the other religious communities. Thus unequal religious communities are being created where minority communities see themselves as inferior people of the same country. 

       This mechanism will generate major flaws among majority community people. Captivated into their own cells they are being  forced into the fundamentalist world where modernity and scientific world is viewed with great suspicion. Anti Islam and anti West are the cornerstones of such fundamentalist ideology and people are being bereft of knowledge and understanding of the rest of the communities of India and of the world. 

       Besides being  culturally deprived such people will also be materially deprived. Majority religious community in India  is not a homogeneous community. It has so many historically cultural and regional  devides within itself . No amount of cultural isolation can mitigate these historical and regional divides as they are part of their religious identities. Thus isolated Indian religious majority will be a weak and fragmented unit , divided  into so many smaller sub units which may be occasionally  competitive and combative among themselves. Cultural isolation will not allow them to find some exit. This will lead to extinction of some of them and in some cases will lead them to continuous infighting , ideologically, culturally and even physically.

        Such religiously segregated and compartmentalized communities will be so religion based identity conscious that it is easy to dupe them easily. Their education , health, employment, environment , wealth related aspirations and other material aspirations can easily be bargained for their commitment to their religious identity. 

         Thus the religious and cultural isolation of India's rigious majority community   will ultimately pauparize India's riligious majority community and will thus make it vulnerable to exploitation, violence, ignorance,infighting , leading the country of many millennial years civilization into era of many decades or probably centuries of darkness.