BHARATA BHARATI

“The Right Wing Liberal is the new face of India that looks towards the future as an improvement on the past, unlike his fellow traveller who turns to the past as the medium of its message. It is in discovery that growth lies; rediscovery is often just another word for selective ignorance.” – Ravi Shankar Etteth

History’s stepchildren are born out of unexpected couplings in the times of cultural conflict. Such a war is on today, changing India’s obsolete mindsets as old skeletons are exhumed and existing ghouls fight the exorcism of change. Scholars like Dinanath Batra, whose knowledge is vast but attitude antediluvian, have become educational celebrities. India’s Leftist thinkers oppose Hindu cultural influence on education. Both are opposite faces of the same Janus—the implacable belief in the rightness of their thought. One brands all Hindu thought as revisionist and undemocratic, while the other, like cultural Nazis, declares war on Valentine’s Day and perceives mini skirts as enemies of Indian tradition.

In India’s genealogy of conviction, there are Macaulayputras, Nehruputras, Patelputras and the ideologically illegitimate Stalinputras and Maoputras. The secular liberal and conservative nationalist are both defined by a thesaurus of clichés. The first believe that India, being a Hindu majority nation, should be generously inclusive at the cost of its majority faith-holders. The second declares that India is primarily a Hindu nation that wears the Upanishads on its sleeve. After the bend in the Ganges that was the watershed victory at Varanasi, a third Bharat-putra has entered the stage—the Right Wing Liberal (RWL), who sublimates contradictions by being both a global nationalist and a free market Indian. He or she is urbane with an Indian sensibility, and believes India can conquer the world not by rejecting Shakespeare but with Rabindranath Tagore in Priyanka Chopra’s body. The RWL realises that by limiting the Indian experience to a few centuries of post-Victorian British rule, the bhoomiputra is defeating the idea of original India—of powerful empires like Chandragupta Maurya and Asoka’s which were far greater in size than what are mapped today. He is an evolved nationalist who doesn’t pander to language chauvinism, understanding the importance of English as not just a global linguistic currency but also the linkage between various Indian states. He questions why Indian education has gone into graphic details of British loot and racism but glosses over the horrors of Ghori, Ghazni and Babur; why students are taught that Shah Jahan was a mooning emperor who built the romantic Taj Mahal, but not the cruel zealot who destroyed temples in Varanasi. The benefits of missionary education have been extolled, but the horrific torture of the Portuguese Inquisition is largely absent from Indian schoolbooks.

The RWL understands the future differently. He is bewildered why bhoomiputras want sex education banned in schools. He understands why GM crops are bad for the farmer and why FDI has to be controlled in mom and pop sectors. Meanwhile, the secular intellectual has always believed in the sanctity of balance. If the Gita has to be taught in schools, so should the Koran and Bible, laments he. Meanwhile, the Batraputras believe in the purity of partisanship—that only the Gita and the Gita alone should be taught, and English is a colonial epidemic that mutated and grew. The Right Wing Liberal understands both the irrationality of balance and pitfalls of blind partisanship. He also realises that just teaching the Gita to young minds is not enough—curriculums should explain ‘why’ it should be taught.

Because unlike other holy books, the Gita is singularly Indian. It is by India, of India, for India. It is a philosophy—not just a manual—that talks about the moral struggle of the individual and how it affects society. India is strong, powerful and the proud repository of the knowledge of Ved Vyas, Aryabhata, Charak, Kalidas, Ramanujam and Jagdish Chandra Bose. Its visionary gurus are Shankaracharya, Ramana Maharshi  and Sri Narayana Guru. The RWL is the new face of India that looks towards the future as an improvement on the past, unlike his fellow traveller who turns to the past as the medium of its message. It is in discovery that growth lies; rediscovery is often just another word for selective ignorance. India’s next moment of angst will be the Right Wing Liberal’s graduation day.  – The New Indian Express, 10 August 2014

» Ravi Shankar is an author, cartoonist and columnist for The New Indian Express. Contact him at ravi@newindianexpress.com

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