17. S. C. Gupta

I refer to the pamphlet �TIME FOR STOCK TAKING - A SWAYAMSEVAK SPEAKS.� which you have sent for my comments. The following pages contain my comments on Dr. Shreerang Godbole�s two documents, points by point, in the same order as the points in the pamphlet.
 

First Document

There is a Hindu resurgence but not to the extent it should be.

It is also true that in spite of Hindu resurgence, the Hindu organisations are becoming softer towards Islam and Muslims. There is no corresponding change in the Muslim attitude towards Hindus or Hinduism. These Hindu organisations sometimes take a seemingly harder attitude towards Islam but the next moment they melt and behave as M.K. Gandhi behaved towards Muslims and Islam. Such varying attitudes on the part of Hindu organisations are indeed confusing to the Hindu masses in general. It seems to me that if such a thing continues repeatedly a few more times, the Hindu masses will consider the hard attitudes of Hindu organisations as mere gimmicks having no steadfastness and teeth at all. This will be also entirely harmful to the Hindu Renaissance we expect in India.

1. Jesus, Mohammed and Allah cannot be included in the Hindu divine hierarchy until they cease to be exclusive. There is no animosity among the Hindu Divinities (33 crores). But the Christian �God�, Islam�s �Allah and Allah�s last prophet Mohammed, do not admit any other as equal to them. They are jealous. The Ule ma in the Madrasas of India preach this day in and day out. Christians consider Hindus as �Pagans� and Muslims consider them as �Kafirs�. So there cannot be a meeting point like including Jesus, the Christian God or Mohammad and his Allah in the Hindu divine order until there is a radical change in the attitudes of Christians and Muslims towards Hindus. Christians have shown a bit of change but Islam and Muslims have done nothing of the kind.

2. All religions do not lead to God and Divinity. Those Hindus who think that they should not criticize other religions are wrong. There must be a thorough debate and criticism of all religions. Everything (even the most minor beliefs of all religions) must be open to question and doubt and the adherents of those religions must reply to objections. If they keep silent about objections and questions raised about their beliefs - it will not at all be satisfactory. At present, they are politically a bit down, but we know from Pakistan and Bangladesh what happens when they attain majority. There are no spiritual practices in Islam (at least not in the Quran, the Hadith and the Sunnah).

3. If Islam is taken out of Muslims, they will probably be better men and women. Islam has made them fanatic. The whole of Islam needs a thorough reinterpretation for co-existence with other communities. There should be a radical reinterpretation of Islam giving it more inner orientation.

At present, in the thousands of Madrasas of India, the Mullahs (specially of Deoband and Bareilly) keep on dinning the students� ears and minds with the same attitude towards Hindus and Hinduism. If they could, they would still like to impose Jizia on Hindus and start treating them as they treat Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

I hope everyone knows how Hindus are treated in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. They cannot worship in their own individual way even privately, what to say of publicly. Hindu girls above 10 have to wear burqa.

In fact, it is Islam which should be thoroughly criticised - each line of the Quran, each part of the Sunnah and the Hadith - even to the extent of calling names in order to make fun of them. Muslims should learn to keep their beliefs (whatever they are) intact even if their religion is being made fun of, as Hindus have been doing for thousands of years. This way, if really there is something solid in Islam, all the fun which is heaped on it will not be able to shake it -just as the basic structure of Hinduism has not been shaken at all even by a thousand years attack by Islam and almost 500 years attack by Christianity.

Translations of the Quran, the Sunnah and the Hadith must be made available in all Indian languages along with thorough commentaries, so that people come to know what is their real import. The interpretation of these texts should not be left only in the hands of Mullahs and the Ulema but scholars of any hue should study them and freely discuss them. Sri Ram Swarup has written a small study, Understanding Islam through Hadis, which is banned in India. Bigger and more books of this kind should be written in all Indian languages. Unless Islam is thoroughly exposed, people will continue to have a sense of the mystic in Islam, which there in none.

This is the only of way of taking Islam out of Muslims. It is Islam which is the main culprit.

4. If Muslims are told of their common ancestry with the Hindus, it does not seem to help. The teachings of Mullahs and Islam insist again and again that the period of a person or a community before conversion to Islam, was a period of jahiliya (ignorance). So after becoming Muslims, they have left their past of ignorance and now they have the new enlightenment and the exalted status of superior beings. They consign all their non-Muslim ancestors to eternal hell fire. They do not want to have any relationship with them except seeing them as Kafirs.

5. As pointed out in the pamphlet itself, it is the Muslims who used Congress and not the other way round. If BJP also treats Muslims as the Congress and specially Gandhi did, it will be a greater disaster than it has been so far. Muslims can be treated as human beings all right but there should not be appeasement of any kind in the name of Islam.

It is true that the aggressive doctrines of Islam are partially kept in abeyance at the moment in India (because of a mild Hindu resurgence) but as soon as Muslims gain an upper hand the medieval Muslim history will be repeated with greater vigour - even a nuclear holocaust is not ruled out. India and Hindus must be prepared for this.

6. Among the Sufis exceptionally few can be counted as having peaceful intentions. Even they did not speak against the atrocities which were committed by Muslim sultans on Hindus.

The majority of Sufis were fanatic Muslim jihadists. They secretly and more often openly sided with the armies of Islam in destroying Hindus and their places of worship. Musa Ashikan was disciple of a Hindu Yogi in Ayodhya around 1528. The Yogi resided near the Ram Janma Bhumi at that time. Musa Ashikan used to come to receive instruction from the Hindu Yogi there. He used to feel the grandeur and power of Ram Janma Bhumi and had a secret desire to get it converted into a mosque. That he did, as soon as Babar and Mir Baqi came near Ayodhya - he incited them to destroy the Ram Janma Bhumi and got a mosque constructed at its place.

7. That Muslim leaders are responsible for the ghetto mentality of Muslims is partly true. But the fact is that the responsibility for this lies entirely in the teachings of the Quran, the Sunnah and the Hadith, i.e. the Muslim theology. Muslims are not supposed to mix with Kafirs, by making friends with them or by living in their neighbourhood. They should prepare all kinds of ambush for the Kafirs and kill them at the first opportunity. They should wait for the time when such an opportunity arises.

8. This is what Syed Shahabuddin has said in one of his letters to a newspaper and is plainly meaningless in the light of the teachings of the Quran and the practice of Islam through these 1000 years. Countless Hindu temples all over India have been destroyed and mosques erected in their places.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has repeatedly asked the, Muslims to hand over three sites (Ayodhya, Kashi Vishwa Nath and the Krishna Janma Bhumi) to the Hindus as a goodwill gesture. Shri L.K. Advani has confined the demand to only the one at Ayodhya. Knowing full well what the reality is, Muslims have not shown any gesture of the kind. The recent proposal in the Parliament to declare December 6, 1992 as a black day, in which the Muslim members joined wholeheartedly, is an illustration of their attitude.

No concessions should be made to Muslims now or in future. The prevalent ethos running the society in India must be and will be Hindu - which means that religion is a personal affair between the almighty and the individual. There should be no organized religion. Local Hindu organisations do celebrate Hindu festivals in small or big groups but that is a cultural matter and not religious.
 

Second Document

All the religions which have arisen in the Middle East, specially Islam, Christianity, Judaism etc. are monotheistic, prophet-based religions and are exclusivistic. Each of them divides humanity in two groups - one, the believers, and the other, the non-believers. The latter must be destroyed by the one chosen people. Israel has disowned such exclusivistic parts in Judaism comparatively recently. I think Jews are becoming more and more tolerant and so I think Judaism can now be excluded from the exclusivist theologies. But Christianity and Islam cannot be excluded because there is essentially no change in their attitude towards the so-called �Pagans� and �Kafirs�. Marxism, Nazism and Fascism, though not religions in the older sense are as condemnable. At present (till there is some perceptible change observed), the Sarva Panth Samãdar March must include only the panths which have arisen on the Indian soil, i.e. Sikhism, Hindusim in all its varieties, Buddhism, Jainism and Indian Tribalism.

There is no sign as yet on the part of Muslims that they are prepared to be assimilated and that they want to live and coexist harmoniously with others in India, and even elsewhere in the world at large.
 

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