By Francois Gautier
After Bal Thackeray’s death, which was covered extensively, the Media conveniently forgot how much it bashed the Thakeray family. Laughter, derision, mockery, horror, you found it all in the press. In fact, some of the Media made a common practice of bashing-up all Thackerays’ father, son and nephew. Most people, specially outside Maharashtra, gave credence to what they read for want of first-hand and balanced information When a country is colonized, say by the British. The first thing the British do, principally via the education system they impose, is to make you lose your indigenous identity and become like the English. There is that famous quotation of Macaulay where he expresses admiration for the Indians and then proceeds to say how he will break them.
Macaulay was extremely successful, for today it is the British education system that is in place, which Nehru has adopted blindly, without caring to adapt it to the Indian psyche. It produces such brilliant western clones, who know more about Shakespeare than Kalidasa, more about the Greek thinkers than the great Sankhya philosophical system, and are good for export – the greatest brain drain in the world, that feeds the American and British think-tanks and leadership system.
Not only that, but upper class Indians, particularly the maharajas went overboard: they became more British than the British, imitating them in all: their accent, their customs, their cars, their likes, their books, their thinking… Did you know for instance that most maharajas, whatever their reputation abroad, were traitors to their culture and people and collaborated with the Moghols and later the British? Without doubt the Scindias were the greatest of them all. Mahadaji Shinde installed Shah Alam II as the puppet ruler on the Mughal throne and became known as Naib Wakil-i-Mutlaq. Later, another Scindia Maharaja wanted to impress his British masters and marched out with his army and fired on the Rani of Jhansi’s army, which led to her defeat.
Only Maharana Pratap fought the Moghols and actually defeated Akbar in Haldighati. Pratap was a simple man, lived with his soldiers, cared about farmers and encouraged arts. Today, his descendant, Shriji Arvind Singh Mewar of Udaipur, preserves that tradition. He considers himself as a custodian –and not a as maharaja – of he House of Mewar, the world’s oldest-serving dynasty, and strives to preserve the beautiful cultural and architectural inheritance of Udaipur through grants, museums, foundations, charities…
Many Indian journalists are also direct descendants of Macaulay’s disciples: they tends to denigrate whoever is proud to be an Indian – in fact, journalists and leftist intellectuals, still in the name of these British values, which they hide under the name of democracy, would like India to be entirely westernized and lose its Indian – pardon me Hindu psyche – as the Hindus are still the majority of their country and their culture and spiritual ethos remain the only indigenous values in the face of what has been often brutally imported in India in the last 15 centuries, be it British thought, Islam, Christianity, or today rampant & blind westernization.
Thus, the Thackerays will never find grace in the eyes of this Media and these Indian intellectuals who swear by Macaulay, They will be called radical, saffron, fanatic, their sayings will be distorted and made to look fanatical in the eyes of the readers. For the Media would rather have a Maharashtra which loses its unique identity, a legacy of the great Shivaji Maharaj, who alone, with a few trusted men, stood against the greatest empire in India – and defeated it – and becomes a so called melting pot, which means in reality that it would become swamped by Bangladeshi or Bihari Muslims, and lead to the clashes we saw in Assam. It’s a pity, that the Thakerays are disunited, the curse of Hindus throughout the ages.
This concept of ‘become a melting pot, accept whatever people and influences come to you’, sounds alluring, but can have dramatic consequences. In Sri Lanka, for instance, a tiny vulnerable island, on the maritime path to the Far East, the Sinhalese, because of their early Buddhist leanings, accepted and soaked all their invaders’ values and ethnical traits through intermarriage: the Arabs, the Africans, the British, the Dutch… As a result Sinhalese lost a sense of identity and became an extremely violent people. The Tamils in the North of Sri Lanka, because of their Hindu faith and caste rules, did not intermarry with the invaders and thus kept their culture and identity till today. That because of the constant Sinhalese oppression and pogroms on the Tamils since 1947, the LTTE became more violent even than the Sinhalese, is another story.
So Maharastrians, be proud, stand by your values, let not those so-called secularists discourage you. Bal Thackeray showed you the way. Let no his sacrifice be in vain: It’s great & noble to be a Hindu: you are the descendants of a 5000 year old civilisation. When your enemies want to belittle you, tell them that Hindus have always believed in universality: that God manifests Himself or Herself from time to time under different names, using different Scriptures. This is why all persecuted religious minorities have always found refuge in India, Ask the Parsis and Jews of Mumbai ! This is why a Hindu respects all other religions and can go to a church or even a mosque. But it has not been a two way traffic: other religions such Islam or Christianity do not give the same respect to Hindus and have persecuted them or try to convert them by guile or economical inducement.