Can You Take It Ramachandra Guha?

Had Lal Bahadur Shastri lived on for another 5 years, Indira Gandhi would have never become the prime minister of India. Sanjay Gandhi would have been a failed entrepreneur and Rajiv Gandhi a retired airline pilot. Rahul Gandhi would have been a middle-level manager in a private sector company and India would have been a much better place. Had Lal Bahadur Shastri lived on for another 5 years… – Ramachandra Guha.

Lots of people are angry with him… so he must be doing something right. I haven’t read the book but from the interview he appears to have balanced views and is quite straight forward. I actually agree with him on almost everything.. guess i did not have my glass of cow milk today

Guha is a very intelligent,articulate,excellent writer. He has the potential to be a Scholar,Social Historian Chronicler& Analyst and a Thinker, but he chooses not to. He is happy being a shallow,superficial, pseudo scholar and belong to the “defined” mores of “intellectual” of India which means; you must be leftist,anti-establishment,anti-Hindu,anti-Sangh Parivar, Psuedo secular, in brief, an “apologist”. I didn’t like his India after Gandhi, it was too shallow & selective. I am eagerly waiting to read this new book. His columns and articles are nice to read. There are a few things to be said about what he said in this interview;

1. If Muslims have done poorly in all aspects despite 65 years of “pampering” by the “secularists”, who is responsible?

2. Hindu rage & Internet Hindu phenomenon needs to be studied,understood, and analysed more deeply. It is not irrational and illogical,there is a reason and rationale behind it.It cannot, and should not be dismissed as fanaticism.

3. Bitchy remarks about team Anna are unfair and unbecoming of a “scholar” like Guha.

Superb job by Madhu, who did incisive questioning. Guha should debate with Arun Shourie and Subramaniam Swamy, or even Govindacharya to become better and more enlightened.

Good interview for the most part.

Guha does try to appear fair but I’m appalled at his lack of understanding why Hindus though 85% of the population would feel besieged. The reason for the rage is exactly the so called secular folks like him (who’d like to believe they are somehow fair to all communities and liberal minded as in ‘live and let live’). Let me explain it to him as Mr. Guha says he doesn’t get it – Its simply because they are not represented in the mainstream adequately IN SPITE of being 85%.

Day in and day out historians like Romila Thapar (who is still feted despite the thrashing she got from Dr. Swamy on AIT, still peddles the same old wares under ‘Aryan migration theory’ even as historians worldwide have dropped the racist AIT as it doesn’t hold up to DNA studies) and most English news media, which is so blatantly anti Hindu (due to their Church funding perhaps) hold the view of history that the best thing that happened in our history is the muslim invasion and ‘thank God’ for the British who ‘liberated’ the unwashed masses of India. They cannot see anything good in our civilization before the islamic invasion (insinuating that the invasion was a good thing!). They are rooted in a thinking that anything ancient is by definition outdated and superstitious (evident when he quips ‘islam wants to take us to 7th century, Hindutva wants to take us to the much older vedic age’).

Most Hindus just put up with the glib talk of such ‘intellectuals’, their pretentious vocabulary, and ‘steeple hand gestures’ because they never had a voice to express it. Now they use the internet Why is it that the media houses which always want to hold candle sticks for the oppressed ever talk of historical injustices of Hindus and pretend as if it never happened? Of course, I would never hold the current gen of muslims responsible (they were mostly forcibly converted by the invaders, so they are victims too) for it but to forget history and whitewash it and peddle distorted histories ‘to keep communal harmony’ and not to ‘offend muslim sentiments’ is not any different from vote bank and appeasement politics of Congress (no wonder these historians are perceived to be cong stooges).

The real challenge today is that even the muslim youth are misled by this fear mongering (propagated by Congress and ably supported by ‘elite’ historians like Guha and Thapar) that Hindutva is somehow equivalent to Islamic fundamentalism in a different color and Hindutva is aimed at making the equivalent of Pakistan but of Hindu flavor. On the face of it he might appear correct but the here is the key difference which is never debated – How is Hinduism different from Islam? To his credit Guha did say ‘Hinduism is decentralized and constantly renews itself’ but what he failed to mention is that in Hinduism text is subservient and belief is voluntary, not imposed, so even a Hindu country which retains and cherishes its historical richness will still be more free than a islamic or even a Western secular country, as India has been all along (here is the complete definition – an essentially decentralized faith where experience is central, skepticism integral, belief voluntary and text subservient)

Wasn’t India a Hindu country before the arrival of the muslim invaders and the British? Why did they come? These historians make it sound like the Muslim Invaders came to teach us how to make chicken tikka and the British came to build our railways. Having credulously swallowed the British version of Indian history, these historians no wonder are clueless why so many Hindus don’t agree with them. In fact historians (if they really are historians and not propagandists) such as Guha would do well to learn from such feedback instead of painting them all as irrational, rabid and bigoted just so that he could appear as the victim of uncalled-for hatred and criticism. Of course, he would like to think they are not the ‘real hindus’ but I’m.

Mr. Guha may want to find some equivalency between Babar and Rama by some warped thinking but why should he expect anyone to agree with him?

Sadly its another opportunity lost for him to learn since to learn you have to question your long held beliefs but its tough to introspect and drop them when its also the source of his social standing and livelihood.

“History is to a civilization as memory is to a man” . Think if you lost your memory (like in Ghajini), no idea who your friends or family are or what you did in your life until today, how disoriented will you be? Think now if someone plants a false memory that you caused a lot of harm to others but you cannot remember it but you were saved by X. That’s how I see Hindus today – confused by years of distorted histories, diffident to assert their identity, unfounded self-flagellation, value shifts which makes them glorify anything white and European/American/foreign and see them as ‘cool’ (even today Max Mueller is well known and respected than someone like Dharampal despite there being no correlation to their respective scholarships). But slowly today some Hindus are starting to see through the inconsistencies in the stories they are told about their past. They are now trying to unravel the truth from inaccurate popular narratives, wanton propaganda and ignorant prejudicial writings of Risley, Mueller, Caldwell, et al. Why should Indian historians still peddle British justifications for colonizing India as ‘history’?

My only request to Mr. Guha, other historians and social scientists is this – Don’t try to create false equivalences when none exists just to appear ‘fair’.