Cry for "India"! A sage one's bitter laments.

[Sukla Sen]

<<Those who are as old as me, or older, will remember seeing Bharat Milaap and Ram Rajya, two movies released one after the other in 1942-43, when I was seven. I cried my heart out while watching Bharat Milaap and felt disappointed when Ram Rajya didn't live up to my sky-rocketed expectations.

Today I cry with hot unshed tears for where my Hindu India has got to. Our government can even launch raids against Harsh Mander! Oh, my God! This man whose crimes included insisting, as a Covid patient, that he should experience a crowded general ward when his IAS career and high-level contacts would have opened the door to any room in any hospital of his choice. And the greater crime of trudging to the huts of mourning relatives of those murdered by hate to say to them, with eyes more than his lips, that he felt for them.

It seems that nothing, no plea, no warning, will stop the advancing steamroller of India's ethnonationalists. The Chief Minister of India's most populous state, leading a population larger than the numbers living in all of Bangladesh or Russia or Japan, publicly accuses his state's Muslims of stealing the rations of their Hindu neighbours, and gets away with it.

This slander, audible to anyone who can click on a smartphone or a computer, may violate the law of the land, the Constitution, and the oath the Chief Minister took, but who cares? Many. Except for those who can do something.

Even more ominous to me, however, is Mr Mohan Bhagwat's repeated assertion that "Indian" and "Hindu" are interchangeable terms. According to this Hindustan Times report, Mr. Bhagwat said that "Hindus and Muslims of India share the same ancestry as he reasserted that every Indian citizen is a Hindu." Mr. Bhagwat saying "Hindu equals Indian" may sound nice and generous to some, but precision is helpful not only in law but also in everyday life. It is not lawful for Christians and Muslims to take advantage of a tax provision like that for a Hindu Undivided Family (HUF). Nor can Dalits with a Christian or Muslim background claim access to benefits enacted for Hindu Dalits. The constitutional provision for such benefits contains a clarification in a footnote that "Hindu" also means "Sikh" or "Buddhist", underlining, in effect, that Hindu does not mean Christian or Muslim. If Hindu equals Indian, what is the meaning of "Hindu" in the phrase "Hindu Mahasabha" or "Hindu Rashtra" or in the hundreds of legal and non-legal forms in which the word occurs, not only in India but wherever Hindus live in the world?

Mr. Bhagwat should know that doublespeak cannot invite trust, if that is what he seeks from India's non-Hindus. Surely he knows of the insistence with which Sikhs say "We are not Hindus." Again, when, shortly before his death in 1956, Babasaheb Dr. Ambedkar and tens of thousands of his followers publicly renounced Hinduism and embraced Buddhism, did they cease being Indian?>>

(Excerpted from: <https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/opinion-yes-hinduism-is-indeed-under-threat-2545545>.)