What does being a Hindu mean today?

A small part of being Hindu, I am sure, is the belief that everyone gets to choose their own personal god. That’s one of the reasons why there’s 33 crore of them in this land. But religion has little to do with being a Hindu these days. Not the spiritual kind, anyway — no, being a Hindu these days is about belonging. And that idea too, I’m on board with.

Everyone needs a home. We’re born onto this planet whether we like it or not — half blind, squalling amnesiacs. No one knows where we’re coming from or where we’re going, or even if those questions are meaningless. For the time that we are here, we need to be with other people, and have food, water and shelter, among other assorted necessities. All of those things come from wherever you belong. This is only important because if you don’t have any of the above, life becomes worse than difficult — it becomes a question of survival.

As a Hindu, I belong to this land; I was born here, and have lived here my entire life. By a happy coincidence, the family I was born to follows the "correct" religious teachings for these times. At least, that is what the majority of people tell me, and that is how I was brought up. I am a Hindu: I acknowledge everyone’s gods, and bow to all of them. I wouldn’t have it any other way. That is both my religion and my freedom from it.

Many people don’t see it quite like that. That's okay, though. Tolerance — benign neglect, almost — is also part of being a Hindu. There’s just too many of us in this land for it to be otherwise. Personally speaking, it does not matter what another person believes, or enjoys believing, unless they are violent or similarly deranged. All beliefs are individual paths; all lead to the ultimate truth.

Some generalisations can be made. The rest is politics. Religion, then, becomes something that keeps you going, rather than something to fight over. A fellow believer cannot be reduced to "another lathi"; they’re another living being, another fragment of the same ultimate truth.

As ideas, the books and stories that make up the Hindu culture are pretty resilient. Consider the fact that Islamic empires ruled north India for several centuries, and did their best to stamp out the existing belief systems. It didn’t work out. The British did the same, only more systematically. We’re still here.

That being said, there’s also a darker side to being Hindu.

Today, it means not being Muslim. To a lesser degree, it also means not belonging to any other religion; but I don’t think many would disagree that at the end of January 2017, being a Hindu is — politically at least — quite definitely about not being Muslim.

This was foreseen

It was foreseen by the British when they formally "returned India to its people" in August 1947. It was the result of something they had practiced all over the world. It was an act of deliberate, irrational malice, designed to cause "racial tensions among the natives".

Put in less diplomatic terms, it was done so that India would be so busy with riots and murders and gangrapes — "religious strife" — that she would never be a threat. After all, the British had rather guilty consciences at that moment of magnanimity; and guilt leads quite naturally to fear.

Consider also the context: at the time, Europe had, for the second time, almost drowned the world in war and murder. The "white races" were exhausted. The "great colonial powers" — murderous regimes that had enslaved most of the globe — were dying, and their "colonies" were being "returned to the natives". There was a distinct chance that "not-Europe and the western hemisphere" would emerge as the next global superpowers.

Enter India; or rather, British India

British India was far larger than India is today. It was roughly Dinanath Batra’s "Akhand Bharat". That is a significant part of the globe. More importantly, the land itself is extraordinarily resource rich, blessed with a double monsoon, and has both the population and wealth to rival any other slice of the world you care to mention.

It was part of the reason the British arrived here in the first place. A United India — or a reborn Indian empire — would have been an automatic global superpower, one with thoroughly justified reasons to view the British as an enemy. And a peaceful industrialisation — exactly what allowed Europe to take over the world — was all that stood in the way.

That’s not what happened. Instead, the people of this land were condemned to suffer decades of hatred, suspicion, fear and bloodshed, all beginning with an epic genocide to really drive that lesson home.

Partition

If the reader will forgive my language, it was a bastard of an idea to begin with. Consider just one small aspect of it — the creation of East and West Pakistan. Common sense alone should have pointed out how thoroughly asinine an idea it was to begin with. A single country made up of Muslims in "East" and "West" Pakistan — with all of mostly-Hindu India in between?

Not foolish, not silly, not ill advised. Deliberately, perhaps criminally idiotic. The eventual birth of Bangladesh was almost a certainty from the very beginning. So was the vicious hatred that such a birth would cause between the Indians and the Pakistanis.

Partition was not the first time that the British had done such a thing to a people. They had done it in Bengal in the name of administration in 1905, during their almost two-centuries-long occupation of India. That mini-partition contributed to the stark religious divide that created "East Pakistan" 70-odd years later.

The Partition of India was, in some ways, their most masterful attempt at infecting a people with the disease of sectarian hatred; but again, it was a technique they had perfected over centuries of bloody exploitation practiced across the world.

Here is a list of the 11 most populous countries in the Middle East: Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, the UAE, Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Between them, these countries account for about 95 per cent of the population of that part of the world.

Consider the following facts: almost every single country on that list was freed from European — if not British — rule around the end of the Second World War. Almost all have international borders that were drawn by the European powers at the end of the Great Enslavement. And almost all of them are currently fighting wars that are either civil, sectarian, or in the case of Israel and Palestine, religious.

Are you a Hindu?

I still am, because there’s another word from our past, one that might have been the original. Sindhu-sthan-i. A person who lives in the land containing the Indus.

Also read: What do Manusmriti and Dharmashastra have to say about homosexuality?