INDIA'S STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

A WIDE CANVAS

INDIA'S STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

In a sense, every country may be said to be struggling for existence today: the US, the only superpower, is battling Islamic fundamentalism, though it would not admit it openly; the Middle East and  Africa are in conflict, besides the economic distress faced by the latter; the countries of the former Soviet Union in Eastern Europe are facing ethnic, religious and political conflicts; Western European nations have forged a magnificent political and economic union, forgetting centuries of strife, and two grave world wars, but they too are facing problems of Islamic fundamentalism. China is dominating Asia and no one is sure what it thinks- which is a source of stress for other nations. Southeast Asian nations suffer from ethnic and religious conflicts. 

Map showing current conflicts in the world, mainly political-military. 
By Futuretrillionaire CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons via wikimedia commons.




The Indian subcontinent has to be viewed in this context. The three nations- India, Pakistan and Bangladesh hold the largest Muslim population in the world. India is sandwiched between them, one exporting terrorism, and the other illegal immigrants.
Yet, there are people in India who close their eyes, and deny both!

Europe is not expansionist and does not pose a threat to any nation, except when it may join the US in its adventures; but even then, not all nations will support the US. The US is certainly expansionist- it may not seek colonies in the geographical sense, but it surely seeks spheres of influence  in the political and economic sense. Islam is expansionist- whether it is of the Saudi-Wahhabi, or Iranian-Shia, or Turkish or others like Islamic State type.. China is expansionist- it already holds large chunks of Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. It is building a large number of dams across the Himalayan rivers and will choke the water supply to India in the decades to come. Christianity is also expansionist, seeking to convert Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs. Most western nations have separated church and state and become genuinely secular, but they tend to blindly support Christian organisations in India in their conversion efforts.

The peculiar nature of Indian plight is this: while every other nation or power or religion has carried the conflict away from its homeland, all of them have converged on India! We face all enemies on our own soil, simultaneously!

After the collapse of the USSR in 1989, the cold war, which was basically ideological ,officially ended. Samuel Huntington, an American political theorist then proposed that conflicts in the post- cold war world would be based on civilisation and culture, and not political ideology. At one level, this has turned out to be broadly correct (even if one can disagree on details): the conflicts today are between Islam and Christianity; between factions of Islam itself; between China and others; between expansionist Christians and others.

Samuel P.Huntington, who proposed  'Clash of Civilizations' after the ideological cold war. He identified Hinduism as a major civilization. But our own pseudo-'sickular' pundits have other ideas!
Photo By Copyright World Economic Forum
(www.weforum.org swiss-image ch/Photo by Photo by Peter Lauth [CC BY-SA 3.0 Creative commons via Wikimedia Commons]

At one level, there certainly is conflict today in the world between Christians and Muslims, and between Muslims and other non-Muslims, and India faces problems from both Christians and Muslims.


But at another level, the conflict of ideology has not really ended. Outwardly communism has lost power; but its ideological followers have captured power in the Academies, media and press in the West. In the American universities today, no one is allowed to criticise Islam while no holds are barred on other religions. In the name of multiculturalism, they are not willing to speak about Western or American culture. 

The situation has become so serious (or ridiculous) that they are not even prepared to  admit that the founders of the American republic and its Constitution were imbued with some noble, spiritual sentiments, though they could not be identified with any Christian denominational theology. Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, which provided the inspiration for the great constitution of the US clearly said:

Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?

 Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia.
Quoted by Daniel J.Boorstin in 'The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson'.1948

The Declaration of Independence, drafted principally by Jefferson, was approved and adopted by the general  congress on 4 July,1776 and its second sentence stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In the first sentence, it said that "the laws of Nature and  of Nature's God entitle them" to these..

Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams seated and Thomas Jefferson standing. Drafting of the Declaration of Independence, July, 1776.

The original draft, in the handwriting of Jefferson, additions and alterations made by Franklin and Adams.

Under the influence of multiculturalism, moral relativism, and sheer leftism masquerading as 'liberalism', it is precisely these values which American academies are unwilling to own up boldly! What to talk of India , whose Constitution is a flat political statement, mostly borrowed, in keeping with the Macaulay spirit of blind imitation, without a single ray of original inspiration!

All our national leaders before Gandhi were inspired by an ideal of India as a civilisation or a divine power, not a mere geographical piece.  Gandhi too embodied it briefly in his first and only book 'Hind Swaraj' in 1908, when he declared: "My Swaraj is to keep intact the genius of our civilisation". But he soon forgot it and plunged for a  normal western type of political arrangement. The Nehru dispensation has almost completely erased the record of the work and words of those old leaders, like Tilak and Sri Aurobindo, from public memory. And our leftist elements , disguising themselves as liberal,, whose imitated inspiration always comes from abroad ( now, from Harvard, Chicago, etc,after the fall of Moscow) would call them all Hindu fundamentalists!