Svayambodha and Shatrubodha aims to build a foundational framework to help Hindus discover who they are and who they are not.
The Hindu consciousness is built upon the wisdom to differentiate between dharma and adharma. As long as this viveka is alive, Hindu society thrives. A loss of this discriminating power leads to decay and degeneration. In the last few hundred years, especially in the post-independence era, this core Hindu aptitude to survive and thrive has been lost. As a result, the very fabric of Hindu society developed ruptures, leading to socio-political and civilizational decline. Great saints, thinkers, and leaders like Swami Vivekananda, Shri Aurobindo, Lokmanya Tilak, Veer Savarkar, Ram Swarup, and Sita Ram Goel started and continued the revival of the Hindu intellect. This book is a small attempt to take that intellectual Hindu renaissance forward by rekindling the viveka that is necessary to differentiate between dharma and adharma. The Svayambodha-Shatrubodha framework does this by making Hindus aware of their civilizational core on one hand and by sensitizing them about the civilizational threats that Sanatana Dharma and Hindu society face today.
Pankaj Saxena is a leading Hindu thinker and author. His writing explains the beauty of Sanatana Dharma and Hindu culture, contrasting the dharmic worldview with the Judeo-Christian paradigm. He has observed and documented the Hindu renaissance movement for more than two decades. Having a deep interest in Hindu arts, aesthetics, and, particularly, Hindu temple architecture, he has visited and documented more than fourteen hundred ancient Hindu temples in Bharata. He has been writing in various magazines and journals for the past several years. He is the co-founder of Brhat, an organization dedicated to the revival of Indian knowledge system and linking India's policy with Hindu culture. This is his first book in a series of books on Shatrubodha.
On that extremely hot day of June 2014, while I was on my way to an ancient temple site, I saw an ocean of Muslims in skullcaps, protesting in a huge march. One slogan, tearing through all the noise, reached me very clearly: 'Israel murdabad! The Muslims of Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, were protesting in thousands against Israel's attacks on Gaza in response to Hamas's (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya [Islamic Resistance Movement]) abduction and massacre of three Israeli teenagers. The sides were clear. Muslims versus the rest. Not one placard sympathized with the three innocent Jewish teenagers who were murdered brutally by Palestinian Islamists. The Muslims of Vidisha were supporting the Muslims of Palestine with no ethical or moral judgement involved. Very few of them would even know exactly where Palestine was. The criterion to choose sides was clear-Islam, the necessary and sufficient condition. Hamas was a Muslim organization. Palestine was a Muslim state. And the protestors in Vidisha were Muslims. Muslims of India were taking out a massive rally in a state with a heavy Hindu majority to support their 'Muslim brothers' in Palestine. Along with Israel, they were also protesting against the Indian state for not supporting Palestine enough.
Kalicharan, the 23-year-old driver who was taking me to the site, was also silently observing. He was a proud Hindu, and the spectacle of the Muslim strength for a transnational Islamic cause held his attention deeply. Breaking long silence, he asked a deep question, the essence of which was: 'Why is it so that Muslims unite across national and geographical boundaries but fail to unite with the land they live in? And why are Hindus not like that?'
To answer Kalicharan's question simply: Muslims unite worldwide with their co-religionists, because for them, religion is more important than country, geography, civilization, or even ethics and morality. But this answer is not fundamental, for it asks other more fundamental questions like: Why do Muslims consider religion (Islam) as their primary and overarching identity, subsuming all other identities like State, race, ethnicity, language, humanity, etc.? And why do Hindus and other pagan, polytheistic, and native religionists all over the world identify more with land and other concrete markers, like language, race, ethnicity, food, etc., unlike Muslims?
Before we attempt to answer these questions, it would be pertinent to ask whether Muslims are alone in this or if there are other communities that unite over an abstract idea. The answer is yes. In another event, almost a decade later, rivalling the one quoted above, the Chhattisgarh Christians (minuscule in number) called for and achieved a state-wide bandh protesting the 'killing of their brothers and sisters in Manipur' during the Meitei-Kuki riots in Manipur in late 2023.
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