Author: Sita Ram Goel
Translator(s): Yashpal Sharma
Publisher: Voice of India
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 107
ISBN/UPC (if available): 818599059X
Description
The ideology of Secularism had taken shape during the European Enlightenment (18-19 centuries). Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who had never used the term in his pre-independence writing or speeches, simply picked up a prestigious word from the Western political parlance and made it mean the opposite of what it meant in the West.
more than obvious in due course. In pre-indepenpendence India, the Muslim minority had exercised a veto on who was to be hailed as nationalist and who was to be denounced as Hindu communalist. Now the same minority reacquired the same veto on who was to be applauded as secularist and who was to be hounded out as communalist. In short, the term secularism in the post-independence period ahs been and remains no more than a euphemism for Hindu-baiting.
The world India’s instead of Indian has been sued in the title of this book because there is nothing Indian about Nehruvian Secularism. In fact, the term secularism in its original Western sense had remained unknown to Indian political parlance because Indians had never envisaged or experienced a theocratic dispensation before the advent of Islam and its state apparatus in this country. Even today, traditional Indian scholars do not understand what Theocracy means, and how Secularism in the Western sense stands opposed to it. And this secularism has not been defined as Nehruvian because it is shared in common by all political parties including the Bharatiya Janata party.
Herculean efforts have been made and are being made by the apologists of Christianity and Islam in modern times, to salvage the central figures and fundamental doctrines of these creeds from the blood-soaked histories they have enacted for many years in many parts of the word. The apologists have been trying to prove that the inhuman atrocities with which these histories are brimful, have nothing to do with their sacred scriptures and can be explained more satisfactorily in terms of the human infirmities of persons or peoples who committed the atrocities. In post-independence India, this Christian and Islamic Apologetics has achieved remarkable success, so much so that while these creeds pass as advocates of human brotherhood, social justice, human rights, freedom, equality, peace, and progress, their doctrines and doing s have been projected to Hinduism and Hindu history by motley crowd of secularists spawned by Socialism, Communism, Gandhism, Nehruism, Ambedkarism, etc. Shri Sharma has nailed the lies by quoting chapter and verse from the sacred scriptures of Christianity and Islam.
Political developments in India in recent years indicate that a National Vision is emerging in the Hindu intelligentia at large. The pace of this emergence is slow because old slogans continue to dominate the media and the academia. It will take some time for these slogans to get exhausted. The world at large is realizing the danger which Islamic terrorism poses to peace and progress, and we too will have to face the truth.
Contents
Foreword
What is Dharma?
Secularism: Perversion of Meaning
Challenge of Islam and Hindu Response
Appendix 1: The Emerging National Vision
Appendix 2: Plea for Study of Islamic Polity in India’s Universities
Appendix 3: Scriptural Sanctions for the Behaviour Pattern of the followers of Biblical or Prophetic Monotheism