The Swami and his friends

It was one of those forlorn evenings, when I wanted to flee my own thoughts. As I flipped through the paper, I saw an advertisement inviting people for a talk by Swami Dayanand Saraswathi of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam. Now that he should share his name with the founder of Arya Samaj who lived in the 19th century intrigued me. It was already half past the scheduled time for the talk, but I decided to take the plunge. The venue was barely a ten-minute ride from my place. A half kilometer long line of flashy cars dotted the stretch on either side. I entered into an over seated auditorium. Content to have found my place in the margins of the occasion, I heard the Swami speak of ‘everything being a sham’. He bellowed that all textbook knowledge was a sham and those history books written by Professors of Jawaharlal Nehru University with its secular content was a sham. That attack on my alma mater, didn’t go down well with me, after all those ceaseless conviction laden torch light processions on those frigid winter nights, against saffronisation of history textbooks on campus. A quick scan over the multitude revealed the class and age group of the subjects seated. Nonchalant women and men clad in silk saris and starched shirts and trousers were seated, nodding robustly, half comprehending and half gaping at the ceiling.

The Swami spoke of the ‘Hindu religion under threat from secularists and from ‘imported religions’ and claimed that this was a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ with a ‘national culture that was essentially Hindu’ and that it ‘stretched from Kashmir to Kanyakumari’. With one stroke, he painted a homogenous colour on the whole nation dismissing with unabashed scorn, it’s multiple identities and cultures. His was a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ that envisaged a second class citizenship to my gender, my primary identity that determined my life’s experiences. By enforcing a singular religious identity, he abrogaged my consciously discarded and embraced identities. He assumed a right to speak on my behalf without my rendering him the power to do so.

The disconcerting aspect besides that man’s harangue was the callousness of the men and women seated there. They were cheerleaders standing on the fringes, passively participating in his ‘othering’ project. After an evening of skewed sermon with fudged facts, that would have coloured their otherwise dormant, contented yet cynical consciousness, they would all retreat in their flashy cars to their cozy homes. The homes that would never be burnt down or attacked in a communal ravage. And the Swami’s Mercedes, would carry him to his abode and perhaps to another sermon, in another place, in another country. That another country from where the Indian diaspora, while basking in the multiculturalism of their host country, generously funds the communal agenda of these organisations from a secure distance. Possibly, this middle class audience would not get down on to the streets to butcher a man or rape a woman belonging to the ‘other’ community during a communal riot. But certainly, they would go on to vote to power, the party that thrives on majoritarianism. And most certainly, by expressing solidarity with the idea, they’ve consciously and unconsciously lent credence to the subtle yet vicious propaganda of hatred. With this class providing the financial and ‘moral’ credence, the unemployed class living in the social periphery are turned into discontented pawns, strained to provide the ‘man power’ to man the logistics of hatred during a bloody riot. And we will be left to witness our ghettos inhabited by humans go up in flames, while the Swami and his friends are away in his ashram that is a two hour drive from New York.As I ride back silently, I struggle hard to battle the sense of trepidation that had engulfed my almost quarter of a century of existence.