About the Book
Book: Hindus in Hindu Rashtra
Author: by ANAND RANGANATHAN
Publisher: BluOne Ink
Price Rs 399
Anand Ranganathan’s book, Hindus in Hindu Rashtra, offers a scathing analysis of the plight of Hindus in modern India, drawing parallels to historical persecution and raising crucial questions about religious dynamics in the country.
Sufferance is the badge of our tribe,” Shylock, the Jewish money lender, says in the Shakespearean play “The Merchant of Venice,” Had Shylock been around now, he would certainly have added Hindus too as the victims of hatred and cruelty perpetrated by the Abrahamic religions. History, as well as modern times, substantiate what Shakespeare made Shylock say in this path-breaking play.
In October 2023, the dreaded Hamas organisation let loose one of the most barbaric attacks ever reported in history on the innocent Jewish residents of the Gaza Strip, kidnapping more than 300 of them and subjecting them to vicious torture. The Hamas terrorists were celebrating in style as their colleagues recounted how they raped young girls in front of their parents and tore them apart, a la Nirbhaya incident that shook India in 2012.
It was only when Israel retaliated (like any other nation would) in a bid to release their brethren from the torturing cells of Hamas, that liberals, secularists and pseudo-intellectuals came out extending their open-hearted support to Hamas. The Israeli Defence Force was portrayed as the aggressor while the Hamas terrorists were seen as angels in the eyes of these paid intellectuals.
The history of the Jewish people is packed with stories of persecution faced by them and their struggles for survival. No other community, other than Hindus, has faced the kind of cruelty to which the Jewish were subjected by their tormentors. To lambast Israel and eulogise the Arabs as well as Palestinians became the measure of one’s intellectual dexterity.
This is what the Hindus in India face now. Though 80 per cent of the Indian population are Hindus, they face the same kind of torment and cruelty at the hands of the minorities. In the land of the Sanatana Dharma, the aggressors claim ownership of more than 70 per cent of the land. A cleric was heard claiming the other day that Antilia, the 27-storey personal residence of Mukesh Ambani in Bombay and valued at $4.6 billion, has been constructed on Waqf land. It is for Mukesh Ambani to give clarification to this claim, while the day is not far off when the same people are likely to come forward claiming that Rashtrapati Bhavan as well as 7 Lok Kalyan Marg belong to them.
Forget about these things. The Hindus have become eighth-class citizens and victims of State-sanctioned apartheid in their own country, according to Dr Anand Ranganathan, scientist, author and political critic who works in the Communist citadel Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU for short). Dr Ranganathan speaks and writes with conviction and articulation. True to his profession as a genetic engineer and biotechnologist, Dr Ranganathan has found out the basic reasons behind the plight of the Hindus in the country, and he has made it unambiguously clear with his latest book Hindus in Hindu Rashtra, published by BluOne Ink. The book of 128 pages is a power-packed punch from this frail professor, which the rivals would not be able to counter.
The author has made his intention clear from the word go. “To those who claim we are now living in a totalitarian Hindu Rashtra, one must ask: What kind of a Hindu Rashtra is this where a billion-strong Hindus have been, through our parliament, courts, education system and our Constitution, reduced to not just second-class but rather, eighth-class citizens? What kind of a Hindu Rashtra is this where Durga Puja and Garba celebrations are stoned with impunity, where a sitting Prime Minister claims minorities have the first right to resources?” Even as I write about the book, TV channels scroll news headlines about Ganapati statue immersions in Karnataka and Maharashtra being stoned by a group of people.
The Marxist-Mullah-Congress axis held State-wide protest rallies in Kerala to express solidarity with the terrorists and extremists of Hamas and Hezbollah. A TV channel and newspaper owned by Jamaat-e-Islami laments 24x7 that there is no freedom of expression and religion in India since 2014. The channel beams anti-India news round the clock, forcing the viewers to complain to the ministries of home and information and broadcasting about the hidden agenda behind the channel and the newspaper. The Supreme Court comes to the help of the channel by blasting the Centre for its high-handedness. This is the kind of privilege enjoyed by the minority communities in India, only in India. A Hindu cannot be blamed for feeling compelled to convert to Islam, but what prevents most of the Sanatanis from doing so is the severe pain it may cause in the process.
Dr Ranganathan, I feel, is lenient in his words. He explains through eight chapters the state of abyss the Hindus find themselves in. The powers that be, whether it is the Congress, BJP, or the motley crowd of the Third Front, do not have any answer for the questions posed by him in the opening chapter, “State Control of Hindu Temples”. In Kerala, from where I hail, the most coveted post for which politicians who fail to make it to the assembly or parliament vie with each other is for the post of the chairman of the Devaswom Boards (Travancore, Kochi, and Malabar). Even rationalists and atheists in the CPI(M), CPI, and RSP turn believers to occupy the chairmanship and to swindle the hundis (treasure boxes in which the devotees make offerings to the presiding deities).
"The Hindus have no right to question the injustice meted out to them in the form of adding pig fat to laddus, a divine offering to God. If you dare to question the act, the Lordships would come down on you like an avalanche with the claim that ‘Secularism is in danger’." The term secularism has become the most nauseating one in India, as a jurist was heard asking the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh to keep quiet over the affair with the Tirupati laddu. To those who do not care about the ground realities facing the Hindus, we have to ask, “What happened to the Veda Patasalas and Gurukulas, which were the landmarks along the banks of Krishna, Godavari, Kaveri, Ganga, Yamuna, and Brahmaputra?" It is an unpardonable sin in the Hindu country to ask the questions posed by the likes of Anand Ranganathan, R Vaidyanathan, Rajiv Malhotra, Sandeep Balakrishna and of course Arun Shourie.
India may be the only country in the world that keeps its citizens from the real history (the XI volumes of the History and Culture of the Indian People edited by that wonderful historian Prof R C Majumdar). It is a “crime” in this country to pinpoint the directives given by the one and only Prophet that the idolaters only are unclean (Surah 9, ayat 5) and the disbelievers are an open enemy to you (Surah 4:101) (Quotes from The Calcutta Quran Petition authored by Sita Ram Goel). If the Hindus fail to take note of the observations by Anand Ranganathan, they are doomed to be Pappus and village idiots. In this era of religious hegemony, scholars like Ranganathan, Vaidyanathan, and Rajiv Malhotra are beacons of hope. Please do not miss out on what they speak and write.
