How Narendra Modi’s Kashi movement will help India unshackle itself from Left-liberal wokism

Nehru’s India missed the opportunity at Somnath in the 1950s. Not Modi’s India, which is very much alive to its history. The most ancient and timeless city of the world is all set to guide new India

In 1993, in an interview with Dileep Padgaonkar, Sir VS Naipaul refused to see the Ram temple movement in Ayodhya merely as a reaction to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the Congress’ dilly-dallying with Muslim fanatics in the name of secularism which, according to sociologist TN Madan, “is the dream of a minority which wants to shape the majority in its own image” and which “stigmatises the majority as primordially oriented”.

Naipaul, instead, saw the Ram temple movement as “a new, historical awakening”. He said, “Today, it seems to me that Indians are becoming alive to their history… (the invaders) were conquering, they were subjugating. And they were in a country where people never understood this… Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s restoration of the Kashi Vishwanath temple on 13 December 2021 too should be seen in this broader civilisational perspective and framework. A city, which Mark Twain thought was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend”, is in the ruins. Facing one cataclysmic attack after another from Muslim invaders like Mohammed Ghori and Aurangzeb Alamgir, the city of Kashi found itself perennially in the ruins. So much so that the ruins became the city and the city, ruins.

After Kashi witnessed its last Islamist vandalism of repute from Aurangzeb, Ahilyabai Holkar, the enlightened Maratha queen of Indore, came forward to rebuild the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab decided to get the temple’s crown covered with gold. Yet, the city continued to find “amnesiac solace amid agonising filth and disorder”, to use a Naipaulian phrase from An Area of Darkness.

In 1928, Mahatma Gandhi was “deeply pained” to see how the approach to one of the holiest sites in Hinduism was through a narrow and filthy lane, swarming with flies and the gutters overflowing. Almost a century later, Narendra Modi wouldn’t have felt any different when he decided to contest the 2014 Lok Sabha election from this ancient, timeless city. But unlike others, he chose to act. And in a couple of years, he managed to recast this ancient city into a new, modern-day avatar.

A process that began with the Ayodhya movement in the 1980s, seems to have now taken a more definite character in Kashi. (Sadly, the Indic civilisation missed an opportunity to awaken itself in the 1950s when the then president, Rajendra Prasad, pushed for the grand renovation of the Somnath temple, but India was then in the deep grip of Nehruvianism and the spell of Left-liberalism not yet broken.) While the movement in the 1980s and early 1990s had rough, violent edges, it seems to have smoothened a lot now, though there’s still a long way to go before Indians can become fully alive to their history.

Indian history, after all, is still the history of foreign invaders. The history of India jumps from one invasion to another, and if there are no real invasions, a few have been invented — the so-called Aryan invasion theory is a case in point. When our eminent historians failed to find a single piece of evidence supporting their hypothesis, they quietly changed the term “Aryan invasion” into “Aryan migration”!

By pursuing the “maybe, perhaps, probably mostly… therefore” methodology — a term used by Arun Shourie in his book Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud to explain the process of first making a big historical claim with a “maybe” and in the end use the same “maybe” claim to reach the “therefore” phase of an argument — our historians inherently get the end result they desire.

The most blatant form of historical distortion and negationism, however, is seen in the medieval era where a Muslim ruler who is never shy of wearing his religion on his sleeve and whose main motivation has ostensibly been to wage a jihad against the infidels of Hindustan, is humanised, secularised and sanitised beyond recognition. What Will Durant saw as “probably the bloodiest story in history” has been projected by our historians as the flowering of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

And when it was difficult to completely sanitise the acts of some of the rulers like Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb, then a secular reason for such assaults had to be invented. So, Mahmud didn’t attack Somnath for religious reasons — if legends were to be believed, the temple was ravaged 17 times between 1000 AD and 1025 AD — he did so for immense wealth parked at the temple.

If this were not enough, Romila Thapar, in her book Somnatha: The Many Voices of a History, brings in the reference of an early Arabic Goddess, Manat, saying Somnath might be a bastardisation of the Arabic “su-manat”. Manat was one of the goddesses Prophet Muhammad once said could be worshiped, but then retracted, claiming that the assertion was influenced by Satan. These lines came to be known as the “Satanic Verses” and were subsequently deleted from the Quran.

The eminent historian also quotes a couple of traditions to say that the image of Manat was “secreted away to Kathiawad for safekeeping in a land where idol worship was considered normal”. So, when Mahmud attacked Somnath, he wasn’t actually desecrating a Hindu temple; he was targeting a place that provided sanctuary to a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess!

However, no one is more fervently defended, sanitised, humanised and even secularised than Aurangzeb, the man who last demolished the Kashi Vishwanath temple, one of the most famous Hindu temples dedicated to Lord Shiva. The latest liberal, secularist torchbearer seems to be Audrey Truschke, an associate professor at Rutgers University, who in her 2017 book on Aurangzeb argues that “Hindu hater, murderer and religious zealot are just a handful of the modern caricatures” of the Mughal emperor.

In an apparent attempt to bring out Aurangzeb’s “untold side”, Truschke emphasises how “detractors trumpet that Aurangzeb destroyed certain temples without acknowledging that he also issued many orders protecting Hindu temples and granted stipends to Brahmins. They denounce that he restricted the celebration of Holi without mentioning that he also clamped down on Muharram and Eid festivities”.

Sadly, for her, Mughal court chroniclers never intended to be politically correct. They gleefully mentioned Aurangzeb’s acts of violence and destruction. For, it never occurred to them that they were doing anything wrong; they were just being pious Muslims. Even Truschke’s argument that Aurangzeb was secular because he employed a large number of Hindus in his bureaucracy, is as ludicrous as calling British pro-Indians just because 98 percent of the titles it gave — Rai Sahib, Rai Bahadur, et al — were conferred on Indians! This was more of a practical policy. Aurangzeb wanted to extend his empire to all corners of the subcontinent and nothing gave him more kick than the idea of a Hindu taking on another Hindu. For, whoever loses it’s the victory of Islam!

If one reads Truschke with her fellow historians, the picture becomes complete. For instance, professor KN Panikkar believes that the destruction of the Kashi Vishwanath temple “had political motives”, as he talks about “a nexus between the Sufi rebels and the pandits of the temple”. According to him, it was primarily to “smash this nexus that Aurangzeb ordered action against the temple”.

Satish Chandra makes him appear a good man, with a high moral compass and sense of austerity, and who in a way was “a victim of circumstances”. In his NCERT Class XI book, which has now been nixed, he writes: “In the 11th year of his reign (1669), Aurangzeb took a number of measures which have been puritanical but many of which were really of economic and social character and against superstitious beliefs… many other regulations of a similar nature, some of a moral character and some to instil a sense of austerity, were issued.” He also says that temples were targeted because he believed they acted as “centres of spreading subversive ideas”, and that the “destruction of these temples had a political motivation”.

So, the process is plain and simple: Deny any coercion, violence, killings in the medieval era, sanitise them as much as you can, and where you can’t do in the face of hard evidence, blame it on circumstances and the victims themselves!

There is another oft-used Marxist modus operandi: If you can’t win against your ideological opponents, pretend they don’t exist. And if you can’t wish them away, resort to name-calling. The likes of Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup were the victims of the first set of Marxist warfare; Vikram Sampath is the latest victim of the second methodology as he finds himself face-to-face with the Left-liberal academic cabal with almost a dozen articles suddenly appearing from nowhere to malign his academic credentials!

If the Ram temple movement in Ayodhya marked the beginning of “a new, historical awakening” in India, PM Modi’s Shiva temple movement in Kashi symbolises the crystallising of that awakening. Like caste Hindus, Kashi and its famous Vishwanath temple have been a victim of the obsolete politico-intellectual order where secular fundamentalism and Islamist secularism seem to be a normal phenomenon; where victims and victors are often one and the same; where desecrated temples are forced to share space with mosques; and, where one finds great comfort being in filth and disorder.

Prime Minister Modi inaugurating the renovated Kashi Vishwanath Mandir complex and corridor marks a new civilisational journey for the country. It will help India unshackle itself from Left-liberal wokism. Nehru’s India missed the opportunity at Somnath in the 1950s. Not Modi’s India, which is very much alive to its history. The most ancient and timeless city of the world is all set to guide new India.

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