Rise like Rama

Tarun Vijay


Rama annihilated the unrepentant wrongdoers and brought cheers to his people. Hence there is Dussehra. What use celebrating it if India is not made invincible and strong enough to punish enemies?

To live with your head high, victory over evil is essential. It makes you moored in the faith that sustains earth. That an Indian satellite found water on the moon made every one of us feel great and Dussehra became more delightful. Success for a good cause. Achievement for noble purposes. But have you ever given a thought why should our people making giant leaps in any field, whether it is science and technology or a Kargil success, make us proud?

What’s the thread that binds us together in sukh, dukh, fall or ascent? The only thread is the feeling of belonging to one greater family of India, the civilizational fabric of Hindustan that was described vividly by Swami Vivekananda when he declared in Chicago on September 11, 1893. He spoke about the universal message of the Hindu civilization and became known as the cyclonic Hindu monk of India. He was accepted as a leader who changed the image of India abroad in a positive way. And mark his words, “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.”

The only place on this planet where thousands of years old civilizational values are still practised in their oldest form is India and undoubtedly that civilization is Hindu which has given this world the values of pluralism, respect for nature and an unbelievable space of freedom for thought. The civilization that is iconized in the virtues of Rama and Krishna, Dussehra and Diwali and Vedas and Upanishads and Bhagavadgita. The flow that makes us celebrate Puja, Navaratra and Bijoya. These are not just meaningless rituals of an illiterate society believing in multiplicity of gods and goddesses and worshipping divinity carved in stones. It’s the most fabulous and living civilization that world can see in the form of highest universal values expressed through the Vedic sages since millenniums. Those who do not read and have no knowledge must not sit on judgment on such a flow of greatest scholarship humanity has ever witnessed which kept the greatest minds of the west mesmerized in awe. Dussehra is not just a symbol of the victory of good over evil, it’s also a symbol of the invincible character and the prowess of the Hindu civilization that has survived the hardest assaults of the Arabs, Turks, Portuguese and British who attacked our nation and destroyed the centres of Hindu faith. But as the Constitution declares, Satyameva Jayate, the truth of this civilization’s inherent goodness, was never weakened or fatigued.

Ironically the very Hindu civilization is facing the greatest threat since its inception from within by those who are seeking power through avoiding the responsibility to protect Hindus and appeasing forces that represent the same assaulters of the yore who had destroyed Hampi and Thanjavur and Kashi. The very word Hinduness, the very appeal to assert the right of the Hindu civilization’s survival, raises eyebrows in the secular power sector and invites a state-supported condemnation. Does that attitude help a healthy social fabric? Is the distrust in the state apparatus to safeguard the all-encompassing Hindu civilizational power stations a positive feature for the nation that is still a Hindu majority and that has its principal identity as a land of the Hindu civilization? Why should anything that depicts a Hindu assertion be taken as anti-non-Hindus?

On the contrary the strengthening of the Hindu core values alone guarantees the survival of the various streams of faith and a weakened Hindu society would result in the de-pluralization of the Indian social fabric as we can see in our neighbourhood.

The state apparatus feels quite comfortable to talk to Hurriyat or the NSCN people who demand secession from our motherland and hence are anti-national. The Muslim League, which divided the nation, gets a berth in the cabinet but have you ever heard, the leaders of the assertive Hindu organizations being invited for a Presidential banquet or an at-home by the Prime Minister on the Diwali eve? Why this kind of an ideological apartheid against those who live and die for national integrity and protect the principal civilizational moors of the land? Why should it be necessary to think the way the state apparatus approves in a democracy and under a Constitution that upholds the values of pluralism? Then what will be the difference between a Stalinist attitude and a pluralistic democracy? Hindu assertions, without any acrimonious feelings for anyone, were never so much looked down and projected as unacceptable, even in the times of the Mughals, as they are being treated now under a hateful secular dispensation, that too in a nation that celebrates Dussehra as a national festival. Is that the right way to honour the spirit of Rama?

Hindus are refugees in their own nation, their number is dwindling and enormous amount of foreign money is allowed to reduce them through deceit and scandalous methods. The worshipped animal cow, which is essentially beneficial for agriculture is slaughtered and exported to Muslim countries and their highest revered temples either stand desecrated from the valley of Sage Kashyap to the land of Sarayu and Ganga or kept under government control disallowing them to run them as per scriptural instructions and with freedom. Why? Who gains by demoralizing the Hindus? What will happen if Hindus become a minority in India? If the only Muslim majority state in India can happily celebrate the dance of democracy by exiling all the Hindus from the valley and making it impossible for any justifiable distribution of the government grants and schemes in non-Muslim pockets of the state, then what will be the state of affairs when India becomes a non-Hindu-majority nation? Dussehra or Vijaya Dashami in times of looming threat from Pakistan and China, and internally from the Maoists, must mean more than burning the effigy of Ravana. The reason behind Dussehra is not a compromising attitude but a steel resolve to protect dharma and bring happiness to people. Can those who shiver in fear of the assaulters and live in their dread showing no intention defang them claim a ticket to Dussehra?

It’s important that such inconvenient questions be asked at Dussehra time and a grand festival of our civilization’s victorious character is not reduced merely into a fun and frolic carnival. Dussehra means victory for the Indian values and nobility of the human soul. That’s the success of dharma. The only point of universal convergence is the belief that goodness alone wins in the end, come what may. Rama, the victorious, shall always remain invincible because he epitomizes the maryada, the noble virtues and the righteousness. There is a Ravana, the evil, in every age and space on this planet and everywhere the faith that keeps society alive is the belief in the victory of goodness, in positive values. Hence Iqbal, the poet who would envision Pakistan at one stage, had called Rama the Imam-e- Hind, supreme icon of India and wrote "kuchh baat hai ki hasti mit-ti nahin hamaari (there is something extraordinary that we have survived the vicissitudes of history while all other civilizations vanished)." That extraordinary element is the belief in the victory of righteousness, the message that is ingrained in the logo of India’s Supreme Court (taken from the Mahabharata): Yato dharmah tato jayah (victory follows wherever there is dharma i.e. righteousness). That’s the character of the India’s soul. Hence the celebration of goodness winning over the evil has continued unabated since time immemorial.

This Dussehra, ask yourself, have you ever thought it prudent to teach your children about the grand heritage of your nation and ancestral knowledge that surpasses the lines of religion and ways of worship? Should it make us feel hesitant to say the truth that everyone in India, irrespective of the religious fault lines, belongs to the civilizational flow that’s epitomized in the legacy of Rama and Dussehra and a victory of good over evil? Shouldn't we be rising like Rama to deserve a Dussehra?