Perhaps we have been asleep all this time. I certainly patriotic NRI, or an Indian heritage citizen living in a foreign land, we have all inherently denied it. What I am referring to is a truism that aligns one's mind, spirit and body with what India, what Bharat, represents, and specifically the magnificence of Hinduism and its political, cultural and trenchant character, and its individualistic cousin-Hindutva.
I certainly had been asleep before 2014 and that is a significant year indeed. It is the year Prime Minister Narendra Modi ascended to the premiership of the largest democracy in the world, the bastion of one of the oldest and respected faiths known to human existence. I was hitherto in the same state of mind that many Indians were in before that time, a disconsolate sense of abandonment from what it means to be a true Hindu, a true Indian, a true lover of the Mother Earth that shapes every Hindu from when they are born, to when they pass, and are reborn again. I was also a victim of the deft colonial gaze that has swept through the rubric of every generation since Robert Clive effectively birthed the British Empire-no matter how much I tried to deny it, it was there as it was within every Indian. To deny its nomadic eye is to be a fool.
You see, before Narendra Modi gave the BJP and the RSS the wings which they needed to fly, many Hindus and Indians were trapped in a kind of punishing cycle of self-psychosis and flagellation. Since India was 'free' after partition, Indians the world over have grappled with what it means to embrace the identity of a new nation, the eminent religion, and way of life that was always its undercurrent. We have been taught to be ashamed of the idea of a strident Hindu polity and philosophy, to accept all those years of imperialism and plunder at the hands of the British and Europeans, and the hundreds of years of barbaric bloodshed meted out by the power-hungry invaders who were Mughals, Arabs and Islamic.
One would think an emergent nation would embrace its history, its culture, its Hindu and Indic foundation. Instead, the opposite has happened. A faulty Nehruvian idealisation, and meek, obeisant nature, has ensured that the Hindu, the Indian, has accepted second place. This acceptance has come about through a humbling which is entirely of the Hindu's own doing.
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