I have been asked to speak on nation and nationhood from the civilizational perspective. In this age of globalization there are some people who believe that ideas of nation and nationalism are irrelevant. That is a very shallow, superficial view of things.

If being a nation implies a sense of belonging, then nations are deeply rooted in the human psyche. They have a role and function to perform. All attempts by some ideologies, religions to do away with nations and nationalism have failed. Communism failed to obliterate national boundaries. Islam has also so far failed to create a pan Islamic State, even regionally. Indonesia is different from Iran and Bangladesh is different from Pakistan.

Nations will remain because they are necessary for human existence and if because of some cataclysmic change nations cease to be, then that will create a void in the human mind, in human consciousness.

India is an ancient nation. There is a section among the educated Indians, which believes that India became a nation only because of the British. Nations in the West are a very recent development in its political history. But, the concept of nation in India is as ancient as the Vedas themselves. You will find references to 'nation' in the Rg Veda and later on more profusely in the Atharvana Veda and then repeatedly in classical Indian literature.

Even modern thinkers in India, at the time of the freedom struggle, reminded us that nation in India is at least as old as the Vedas. It is not necessary, that the concept of nation or 'Rashtra' as we understand it, has to be identical with the Western understanding of nations. These are two very different concepts. These concepts evolve as part of a culture or a civilization.

I was asked to speak on the concept of nation and nationhood from the civilzational perspective. I would like to call it a cultural perspective.

In India the concept of nation is essentially a cultural concept. According to the Vedas, which mention the concept of 'rashtra', it was our rishis, who in their wisdom, created the rashtras through intense tapasya. It was a cultural expression of a spiritual vision. And what is this spiritual vision?

It was that, the ultimate Truth is One, and this manifests itself diversely, in many ways. And in the 'rashtras' which our rishis created for us, the people were bound to each other in their shared sense of belonging to their land and in a shared way of life which was rooted in a commonly accepted value system and a common understanding of the ultimate Truth. So pluralism or diversity, which is a natural expression of Creation itself, is the defining characteristic of the Bharatiya civilization and is rooted in our spiritual and cultural vision.

And again, the Atharvana Veda describes the Indian nation thus: like a cow nurturing all her offspring with life-giving milk; hundreds of thousands of them this country has been feeding and nourishing - people of different languages and of different religious orientation. This pluralism is inherent in our cultural vision, in our national concept, as Radha Rajanji said earlier. This vision, this Truth is Sanatana Dharma. This pluralistic vision, which accepts all faiths as different paths leading to the same ultimate reality, is integral to Sanatana Dharma and Sanatana Dharma only. No nation, or religion needs to labour to teach Indians about the virtues of a pluralistic way of life.

Now let us return to the concept of nation.

The most fundamental aspect of this concept of nation is the emotional relationship between the people and the motherland. This emotional bond is very crucial and the Government and all parties concerned must keep this in mind when dealing with Kashmir.

What is the attitude of the people of this nation to the motherland?

From Vedic times we have looked upon our nation not just as a piece of land in which we happened to be born, but as mother herself. Mother and Motherland are held in high reverence in our value system. So this attachment to our nation, to every inch of her territory, is one of worshipful devotion, as that of a child to its mother. This emotional bond of mother and child is one of the defining characteristics of our nationhood. This has been very beautifully described from the Vedic to modern times.

The boundaries of this nation have also been delineated. North of the seas, south of the Himalayas, this land is called Bharata and the children, Bharatiya. This then is the outline of our national boundaries. Beginning with the Himalayas and stretching deep into the South, until the three mighty oceans, the people of this nation know that this land was created by the Gods and so there is sanctity attached to it. There is the element of spiritual content to it. The king of the mountains called Himalayas, resides in the north, says Kalidasa. Our people have worshipped the Himalayas because, not only is it the abode of Shiva and all the seers and rishis who have sanctified this nation, but also because they believe these mountains are indeed the tangled, wildly blowing hair of Shiva Himself.

All these descriptions have gone deep into the national psyche. And when we think of our motherland, what comes immediately to our minds is the towering, majestic, life-giving Himalaya, the three oceans protectively holding the southern borders within them, and densely and profusely dotting every nook and corner of this nation, the thousands of sacred centers of pilgrimage, the Shakti peetas, the Jyothirlingas, the 108 Tirupathis - all this together constitute this nation, our motherland. And so this nation is 'punya bhoomi' - holy land. This country is therefore not just a piece of land. This is the land we worship, we adore.

Aurobindo said this nation was Adi Shakti Herself; and Vivekananda said for the next 50 years even if all other Gods disappeared, it would suffice us to worship only this land of ours.

And our nation is worthy of worship. And it is this sentiment which is so well expressed in Bankim Chandra's Vande Mataram which inspired so many of our fathers and forefathers to lay down their lives. Let us therefore not say dismissively that the concept of nation is merely emotive. But for these emotions, our country would not have become free. But for this intense emotion of devotion to our nation, our motherland, thousands of people would not have laid down their lives. Without emotions there would have been no Subhash Chandra Bose, no Kattabomman.

Emotive issues and emotions are the real things that spur people to act. Let us not underestimate the importance of these emotions. Nationalism is an emotional concept. Without emotion there is no nation.

As a concept, I grant that there is a great difference between the western concept of nation and that of ours. For us, nation is an organic, living being. It is not an artificially created, man-made mechanism.

In the western concept every human arrangement is mechanical and even human endeavor is machinery. As Toynbee himself said, the West is machinery oriented. Everything is reduced in terms of mechanism. In our understanding though, nation is not a mechanism and the State is not a machinery. For us, everything is a part of this vibrant, living, and sacred Creation.

So when we think of nation we don't consider it to be an artificially contrived thing. The nation has a soul, a living soul. Each nation has a mission to fulfill, a role to play. And as long as the nation is true to its mission, as long as it fulfills it, it lives. The moment it forgets its nature and its role and mission, it dies. And therefore our approach to nation is different from the generally accepted understanding of the modern educated elite of the West and the westernised among us. Today you speak of newspaper as an industry, knowledge as an industry.

For Indians, for the Bharatiya, Knowledge is not an industry; for us, all knowledge is sacred, it is Saraswati, goddess of wisdom herself. There is a civilizational, cultural difference between the West and us, in the manner in which we relate to ideas.

My question is whether we should give up our natural, indigenous and native genius and ways of thinking and action and approach, and borrow the western approach. And then we cease to be ourselves. There is no use for the civilization, the culture, the nation of Bharat to remain if it becomes a carbon copy of any one of the western countries. If we are to remain what we are and if we are to contribute significantly and uniquely to the sum total of human experiences, it is only possible by remaining what we are. Gandhiji had the great genius to understand that India's future lay not in the imitation of the West but in evolving our own models and arrangements.

Our concept of nation as a cultural manifestation of a spiritual vision has to be nurtured and sustained. Only then will India remain India, true to herself and to the role she has been created to fulfill.

There are two components of a nation, which are critical if she has to fulfill her destiny - one, the composition of her population and two, her boundaries. Unless the population is a loyal and a contended population, no nation can be safe.

I attribute the problem in Kashmir to be the composition of its population. It seems as though the population there is not loyal to India. And the loyal section of the population has been reduced to an insignificant, insecure minority. Now this can happen anywhere. This has happened in the North -east. This is also happening in other pockets of this nation.

So any nation, which wants to preserve itself has to see that the loyal population remains within its borders and that they remain in the majority. And this has not been the case in Kashmir for at least a few centuries now.

And then there is the question of boundaries.

Every nation lives within well-defined boundaries. Boundaries have to be well-defined and fiercely protected. Boundaries are always in danger. The great thinker Chanakya said that you must always consider your neighbour to be a potential enemy as he is easily the closest threat to your territories. You must therefore always consider your neighbour to be a potential enemy even while making every effort at friendship and keeping the friendship alive. Hasn't that been India's experience over the last 800 years and isn't it true even today?

Whether it is in the north or in the east our neighbours are our enemies and therefore we find it difficult to protect our frontiers. Frontiers shrink. And they shrink not only by foreign conquest but by demographic aggression also. Look at what is happening in Bengal today. And what is happening in the border districts of several of our states. Demographic aggression is reducing our area within our own state. This is happening in Kashmir too.

Samuel Huntington has drawn pointed attention to two things in his book "The Clash Of Civilizations and The Remaking of World Order". Heavy influx of Muslims from Pakistan is fomenting unrest and disturbing the peace in India and also to the fact that it is this kind of demographic aggression, which has fomented separatism in the state of Kashmir. He has also drawn attention to the spiraling growth of world Muslim population and the political consequences of this rapidly growing population in several regions of the world.

The population therefore must be loyal to the nation and loyal to the ethos of the nation. Allurement with money and religious conversions are the two things that create a disloyal population. And both factors are operating rampantly in our country. Wherever religious conversion takes place, disloyalty to the national ethos is also instilled in the population. That is why Swami Vivekananda said that when one Hindu is converted it is not one Hindu less but one enemy more. Conversion is not merely a religious issue. It is a national issue as well.

In Kashmir both these factors have operated against us and continue to operate against us. The problem of Kashmir is not of recent origin. In 1900 Swami Vivekanada went on a pilgrimage to Kashmir. He went to the Khir Bhavani temple. It was in ruins. It had been reduced to that state by vandals. Swamiji offered worship there and was terribly saddened at heart when he saw the desecration. Then he uttered these words " had I been alive at that time I would have resisted it. I would not have allowed this attack on the temple to take place" And then, the story goes, as Swamiji was coming out of the temple, he allegedly heard the voice of the Divine Mother - "who protects me, who protects whom. I protect you or you protect me". Then Swamiji felt that his emotion that he would never have allowed the temple to be attacked was a delusion rooted in ignorance. This mystic, philosophical sentiment overtook the natural emotions of anger and sorrow at the destruction of Hindu temples in Kashmir.

The outrage was replaced by helpless resignation, which Swamiji cloaked in philosophical garb.

This is the problem with Hindus even today.

Their naturally philosophical and fatalistic approach to life incapacitates them from confronting a problem head-on.

We tend to philosophise every adversity so that we are never spurred into action - to fight it, to overcome it.

We are afraid of confrontation, of violence, of war, of any situation, which destabilizes our comfortable inaction.

This is the attitude, which has kept the Kashmir problem burning for more than a decade now.

Our people are unwilling to act decisively to bring the conflict to an end.

It is the same philosophical universalism, which afflicts our thinking again on the question of Ayodhya. Rather than confronting history head-on and acknowledging the violent assault on Hindus and their religion by wave upon wave of Muslim invaders, and acknowledging the intense anger and humiliation, which the mosques in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura are evoking, and acting upon it, we become philosophical and broad-minded and palliate our inaction by rationalizing, with statements like, "past mistakes cannot be rectified by new mistakes", "do our Gods really demand temples, particularly if it means confrontation and violence", and so on..

When Toynbee came to India to deliver the Abdul Kalam Azad lecture, Humayun Kabir presided over the lecture. In the course of the lecture, Toynbee said, "I am surprised you have not pulled down the structures in Mathura and Kashi." He said Aurangazeb had pulled down the temples in these major temple towns not merely to construct mosques for worship but to raise structures in the very place where the temples stood, to humiliate and insult the Hindus, and to break their spirit as they looked upon those monstrosities day in and day out. He cited the example of the Orthodox church of Poland, which had been built by the Russians after they invaded Poland, in the very place where they had destroyed a Roman Catholic Church. When Poland became free, the Polish people pulled down the Orthodox Church and re-built the Catholic Church. Toynbee said the Polish people did the right thing by destroying a structure, even if it was a place of worship, which was raised as a symbol of enemy power, and as a symbol of humiliation of a defeated people. And in the same breath, he wondered how the Hindus of India had allowed these insulting structures to remain.

Thankfully, Toynbee was no mystic and did not whitewash the historical wound with philosophical palliatives. But the Hindu intellectual, the westernized among the Hindus turn mystics at the time of public discussions on Ayodhya and advocate status quo, which is in reality, continuing inaction on the part of Hindus. Today, the prime minister of this country publicly declares that the building of the temple in Ayodhya at the very place on which the insulting mosque had stood, is a national sentiment. It is not enough to declare that it is a national sentiment.

National sentiment must be protected; national self-respect demands it. But then with our typical weakness for romantic mysticism, we are afraid to say this. I am inclined to believe that the question of Kashmir, like the questions of Ayodhya or the cause for the Partition in 1947, Islamic fundamentalism, jihad and religious conversions, continue to plague the Indian polity and continue to keep historical wounds open and unhealed, because the Hindu intellectuals of this country, who are in governance and politics and other positions of power and influence, suffer from the psychological malaise of being unable to face these problems as problems, as it was pointed out by Radha Rajan-ji a while ago.

Nuclear technology, particularly nuclear military power, is an indicator of a country's standing in the hierarchy of power in international politics. It is also an indicator of a nation's indigenous scientific, technological and engineering capability besides being an indicator (albeit indirectly) of a nation's economic health. And that is why, the P5 nations, which are the only internationally acknowledged nuclear powers, have been strenuously resisting attempts by any other country from acquiring nuclear military capability.

Threats of sanctions, isolation and international opprobrium had put our nuclear weaponization programme on hold for over 25 years. But Pokhran II was not only a major step taken in the interest of India's national security needs, it was also a measure of national assertion in the face of strong and vehement, adverse international opinion. I see Ayodhya similarly as an issue, which will symbolize national self-assertion.

We will have to build the temple in the same spirit in which we conducted the nuclear tests two years ago. This will have to be done with supreme self-confidence and with a vision of this nation, which can withstand international scrutiny and maybe even condemnation. You rebuild the temple of national sentiment and national honour, and both inside India and outside, I am sure, you will be respected. Does the Hindu mind have the courage to do it and the honesty to say this?

The Kashmir problem will also be solved only when there is a similar will and vision. I don't say that there should be no compromise at all or that we will not negotiate at all. But whatever we talk, whatever we negotiate must be from a position of strength. Then and only then can problems be resolved. There should be a give and take no doubt but never from a sense of helplessness or weakness masquerading as philosophy or broad-mindedness.

If the Kashmir problem is not solved in the best interests of India, if there is any fatalistic compromise in Kashmir, let me assure you, you are only letting open the legendary Pandora's Box. You are not going to solve the problem.

In 1947 Pandit Nehru said that we gave in to Partition to rid ourselves of the headache that Jinnah and Islamic nationalism posed to this country. But history and fifty years of the bitter experience of living with Pakistan has only shown us that to rid ourselves of the headache, we cut off our head, but the ache persists. Similarly Kashmir and the interests of Kashmiri Hindus maybe bartered away in the name of compromise, but we are still not going to be dealing with the root of the problem. The problem will continue to plague this country.

I will conclude with one reference - to the recently concluded All India History Congress in Calcutta. Prof. Amartya Sen and a historian from Bangaldesh also spoke. Amartya Sen pooh poohed the faith of the Hindus of this country who want the temple to be built in Ayodhya because they believe that it is the birthplace of Srirama. They are mixing history with mythology, he pronounced condescendingly. There is no mythology without the element of history to it and no history without some mythology.

And it is not surprising at all that the good professor chose to speak only of the faith of the Hindus thus. The devout among all faiths hold similar beliefs very sacred - whether it is the shroud of Turin, the tooth of the Buddha or the hair of the Prophet. I made this reference to Prof. Amartya Sen because it is his kind of intellectualism, which has consistently scorned and trivialized the emotional and religious bond that Hindus have towards this nation.

The professor from Bangladesh spoke about our freedom movement, particularly with reference to the mindset of Gandhiji and Jinnah. He said Jinnah could achieve the impossible - the creation of Pakistan despite the fact that it was Gandhiji who alone stood between him and his goal. At a time when the Muslims of the country were frustrated, Jinnah united a desperate people with supreme self-confidence in himself and his cause; and without paying any price, without any personal sacrifice, he achieved Pakistan. Without going to jail once. Without the tapasya of satyagraha. All the sacrifices and suffering, which characterized Gandhiji's and the Congress' ceaseless struggle for freedom and for keeping the nation together at the decisive moment, came to naught and Jinnah prevailed over the Mahatma and he was handed Pakistan on a platter. Why? Because, not only did we not deal with Jinnah's demand for partition appropriately, we also did not have the vision and the will to deal with Jinnah appropriately. And typically, because we did not know how to deal with him at that time, we failed to withstand the crisis with tenacity and made the terribly short-sighted and easier choice of Partition. We did this thinking that the problem would thus conveniently disappear. So Jinnah's success at that crucial moment should be seen alongside Gandhiji's failure at that moment. Until that time there was supreme self-confidence in the nation, in all of us at having got rid of the British finally. There was tremendous optimism about rebuilding the nation in tune with the aspirations of all our people. But then everything was lost and the country was partitioned.

Kashmir is a by-product of the inept handling of the demand for Partition in 1947. If we attempt to solve the Kashmir problem by any kind of short-sighted compromise, by partition, I can assure you all, there will be a hundred Kashmirs hanging over our head. That is not the way to solve your problem. The problem of Jammu and Kashmir is not only a civilisational problem, it is also a problem of our national safety and security. And we will have to face the challenge that the rest of the world poses to our country through their pressure tactics to resolve the problem quickly. But the world also respects those who have self-respect, who are bold and who know what they want. Like Patel.

Patel dealt with Hyderabad, Kashmir was left to be dealt with by Nehru. We are living with the consequences. It is difficult not to compare the two men, their vision and their will. So much depends on the character of the person or persons who tackle such problems. And even towering leaders cannot do anything by themselves unless the people of the nation back them. Nation means the people. People's will has to be built up. And this cannot be done by weakly surrendering to any and every pressure tactic and act of terrorism. I don't wish to prolong my talk. I conclude.

Panel Discussion:

Shri B.S.Raghavan

There has been a distinction made between reason, rationality and emotion.

I am for emotion. When I joined the Administrative Service, my first collector told me, " In administration, Mr. Raghavan, you can never be successful if you bring in emotion." But in my forty-five years of public service I have come to realize, you cannot achieve without emotion.

I think constructive emotion, properly channelized emotion is the very breath of any kind of achievement by humanity. Many of us are ashamed to admit that emotions play a very large part in all that we do because we think that that is what is required of anglo-saxon wisdom with which all of us have been educated and even bastardized, if I may be pardoned for saying so.

But how did Churchill win the war? "By toil, tears, blood and sweat." This is the first point that I wished to make.

I have a question sir, for you. You referred to Jinnah and made the observation that by just being determined on achieving his separate nation, Jinnah achieved it. Maybe there is a lesson in this for us, as we deal with the problem in Kashmir. Jinnah was steadfast.

Had our leaders also held on tenaciously to their demand for a united India, had they not given in so quickly, had they been steadfast, perhaps we could have saved this country from partition. We blinked first and paid for it. You also said that the loyal section of the population had been reduced to an insignificant minority and also that our nation lies within well-delineated boundaries and that our nationhood must be protected.

My question is, if we have living in our midst, what is admittedly a large section of disloyal population, how are we going to draw them into the fold, what would be the ways by which we can do so?

It can't be done by institutions, resolutions, or politics. How are we going to reconcile with the fact that there is a disloyal population?

Answer.

Once the people know for sure that the rulers are aware of their needs and aspirations, and that they are determined to govern accordingly, then there is the very real possibility that even the mindset of this disloyal section of the population can change But on the contrary, if the people feel that the rulers are not fulfilling their aspirations, then how can the rulers expect loyalty from the people?

I also referred to Patel and Nehru. It is my considered opinion, that had Patel been entrusted with the responsibility of integrating Kashmir into the Indian Union, I am quite sure, one of the first things that he would have done would have been to effect some steps to bring about demographic rationalization in the state by getting people from the rest of India to settle down in the valley - ex-servicemen, Sikhs, and those interested in trade and business in the state. Then the whole complexion of the state - physical and psychological - would have changed. There was nothing that stopped us from doing so.

But unfortunately, our first prime minister was so enamoured of world opinion, that he failed to understand what was in the country's best interests given the ground realty of the conditions that prevailed. Mind you, notwithstanding the fact that the country at that time was being torn apart by the trauma of partition. And the root cause of partition was the demographic composition of the territories that were carved out as West and East Pakistan. Nehru for reasons well known now, failed to acknowledge this fact and act upon it.

Prof. V.Suryanarayan.

Not in terms of specific questions but in terms of a few responses to what Shri Parameswaran told us this morning.

In his monumental book on the study of history, Prof. Arnold Toynbee when dealing with the rise and fall of civilizations mentions about twenty-two civilizations which had originated, risen, decayed and had fallen, but mentions two civilizations which have continued for several thousands of years now - the Indian and Chinese civilizations. And I fully subscribe to what Parameswaran mentioned of countries which have a civilizational heritage like India and China and which respond to crisis situations in a very different way from that of States which have a very short history of just a few centuries, while some have been formed only after the Second World War.

My submission is that the civilizational heritage need not necessarily conform to the territorial boundaries of a State.

Let us take the Dhaksheswar temple in Dhaka, which is a part of our civilizational heritage but which is not within the Indian State. We also know of the Indian religious and cultural influences, which spread to the countries of South East Asia. And we also have astounding monuments in parts of the world, which are incomparable, like the 7th century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Borobudur in Java, Indonesia. We have Hindus in Nepal, we have Hindus elsewhere.

So I was wondering sir, instead of confining the Hindu civilization just to India, we should accept the border term that Hinduism is an Asian religion and it is with this insight that we should define our cultural and even political relationship with the peoples and States of this region. I have been pleading for this paradigm shift for the past seven or eight years but without much success.

The second point I wish to make is with reference to the repeated criticism with regard to Indian history in that we never had dynastic history similar to what the Greeks and the Chinese had. And Prof. K.V.Raman and I have always disputed this accusation by pointing to Kalhana's 'Rajatarangini', which is a monumental work on the history of Kashmir.

The third point arises out of Shri C.V.Narasimhan delineating the contours of the seminar.

About not looking at this problem as a Hindu-Muslim problem. To give one specific instance, take the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. I would like to add to what Shri Narasimhan has already said by pointing out that we should not make the mistake of looking at the Christian and Muslim world as a homogenous entity.

Each country responds to crisis situations according to national interests. An Islamic State like Malaysia supported India whereas the secular State of Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world, but with a secular Constitution, supported Pakistan. Two Muslim countries responding in entirely different ways to the same event. The same is true of Kashmir too.

We have President Wahid of Indonesia, a great Islamic scholar, belonging to the Nadat-ul-ulema, the Islamic reformist movement, who at the time of our Prime Minister Shri Vajpayee's State visit to Indonesia, mentioned that Islam should not be viewed as a State-sponsored religion but should be viewed as a matter of individual belief. I know Radha disagrees with me on this issue basically but I would like to plead with you that if we should understand international relations better, we should not look at these religions as a monolith, not even within one country.

When we look at Islam we should pay attention to how it acculturised itself with the nations and societies into which it entered. So Kashmiri Islam is basically Sufi Islam which acculturised itself to local customs.

I wish to expand on this by citing the conflict of 1965. The Pakistani incursion into Indian territory was first reported to our security forces by Muslim shepherds. The alienation of the local populace did not happen until well into the '80s.

So all that I will plead for is that when we are looking at the Kashmir problem and the people of Kashmir, let us keep all these points in mind. I will stop here for now. I may have more things to say later.

Answer.

Civilizations need not be contiguous with nations. Within a civilization, there can be many nations. These are not co-terminus. As for chronological recording of history, Kalhana's 'Rajatarangini' only attests to the fact that we are as capable of any other country at documenting political history. But our view was that history or Ithihasa has a function to perform. It is not merely a chronological arrangement of the ascension of monarchs and the numerous wars that they waged.

History is meant to convey to successive generations the purpose of life and about the purusharthas, which define our life - 'dharma, artha, kama and moksha'. And this is conveyed through the narration of stories, events, and incidents. So history from our civilizational point of view is a record of the cumulative wisdom of our forefathers and it is from ithihasa we derive our inspiration and our exemplars for any given situation in individual, community or national life.

I agree with you that the Islamic or Christian religious world should not be viewed as a homogenous community all over the world. They differ from nation to nation, region to region; and that is why I started off by saying that Iran is not like Indonesia and how Pakistan is not like Bangladesh. These differences are there, I admit.

Muslims do behave differently. But the teachings of Islam are intolerant, they not only encourage but exhort upon the faithful, religious conversion, by force if need be. If you want to go to heaven not only must you forcibly convert or kill the infidel but you must also destroy their places of worship.

Unfortunately, Hindu intellectuals never read the Koran. Christians themselves have written and spoken about their plan of action for Asia in the third millennium. We don't read that too. We insist on saying that all religions say the same things. They don't. We continue to believe that adherents of Islam and Christianity are just like us. They are not. And it is in this self-deception that we commit our greatest folly. And history will attest to the fact that we have paid a very heavy price for failing to understand and acknowledge the true nature of these religions.

At least now let us be objective enough to understand Islam from the Koran directly. As Arun Shourie keeps saying, let us go to the origin, to the original sources themselves. Let us not indulge in wishful thinking. As long as practices prevail over precepts, Islam does not pose a major problem; but the truth is, the fanatics or the fundamentalists always prevail over the moderates.

Which is why in Islam, Jinnah prevailed over Azad, whereas among the Hindus, Gandhiji prevailed over Savarkar. This is the difference in the respective mindsets.

Ultimately, when the chips are down, the Muslim will swear only by the Koran whereas the Hindu will swear by his conscience.

All materials on this website are © 2000-2010

Printer Friendly Format

Search this website

top