Is being Indian not enough?

rediffnews.com
Saturday Nov 10, 2009

Tarun Vijay

I thought being an Indian is enough till I saw people being killed and ousted for not being Maharashtrian and contributing 'appropriately' for the cause of Maratha culture.

But how do I convert to their version of a good citizenship so that my existence in Mumbai and Nashik is not under threat?

First it's difficult to explain to which state I really belong. My father hailed from Punjab and my mother came from Rajasthan. They settled down in a city, which was, then under UP, but has now become the capital of a newly created hill state.

I was born and brought up there, so by birth I can be a UPwallah Bhaiya though now I shall be called a Garhwali. My brother married a UP girl; my sister was married in a Haryana village. One niece married a Tam-Bram -- I hope you understand Tamil Brahmin. The other married a Telugu boy and my nephew fell in love with a Bengali girl.

That's my family. I worked as a tribal activist in Maharashtra and Gujarat and learnt Marathi with my friends, all of whom were pucca Maharashtrians.

I loved Marathi food, read and spoke Marathi and being in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh almost all of us colleagues had a great reverence for Maharashtra. RSS founder Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar was a Maharashtrian. So was Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a Maharashtrian and, of course, the great Shivaji, who elevated the sense of being an Indian like our other heroes such as Guru Govind Singh and Raja Raja Chola.

I never felt that being a Maratha was an overwhelming identity for a warrior like Shivaji till I saw a huge billboard of Shivaji's picture in Nagpur on the way to the airport.

It said -- salutations to the 'Great Kurmi Mahapurush of Maharashtra'. I saw it twice to ensure that the eulogy was written for the hero whom I thought was a great Indian icon. Yes, Shivaji was Kurmi and the Kurmi Mahasangh was celebrating their caste hero. I was perplexed, if Shivaji is a Kurmi hero, how could I feel proud of him because I am not a Kurmi?

In fact long back I had removed the caste tag from my name under the influence of some old pracharaks of the Sangh, who held an archaic belief that caste identities are of no significance in our society and we must assert our identity as Hindus only.

I think they were wrong because after having spent so many decades in Delhi I have found that caste is the only identity that matters in today's vibrant, dynamic and futuristic India.

I married a girl who hails from Garhwal, a Bisht, and it was certainly an inter-caste marriage with everyone's consent. Till then we had held the belief that being an Indian is enough, that caste and provincial marks belong to a bygone era. To be modern and forward looking means to show your acumen and win a place of honour through merit.

Enough?

Not exactly. You have to prove that you have done enough for upholding the cause of the state where you are trying your luck. Most states have this provision. The law of Bhumiputra -- or the son of the soil principle -- is applied everywhere. Beginning from Jammu and Kashmir where no Indian can buy land or get admission in a professional college unless s/he has a state residentship certificate. Thanks to the constitutional provision of Article 370, J&K is bestowed another special privilege, a separate red flag with a plough. It is hoisted along side the national tricolour.

If any woman of the state marries an Indian who is not a citizen of J&K, she loses her state subject status and their children lose the right to admission in any state run/ aided college. It's a punishment for being an Indian rather than being just a Kashmiri.

Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee was a Bengali, he was also the youngest-ever vice-chancellor of Calcutta University. But he chose to agitate for removing the ominous provisions of two flags, two constitutions and two heads of state for Kashmir. He died mysteriously in Sheikh Abdullah's jail in Srinagar and not even a magisterial enquiry was conducted.

And with that ended the unification efforts.

If you try to enter a northeastern state like Nagaland or Arunachal Pradesh, you will be required to obtain an Inner line Permit, started by the British to strengthen the isolation of NEFA (North Eastern Frontier Agency) areas. We continue with that and one has to state before a prescribed authority for how many days one is visiting the state, the purpose, where will he stay. Then there has to be a guarantor who is required to sign that within the stipulated period the person applying for permission to enter the state will go back.

This much for the national integration through government routes. But nothing of this applies to Bangladeshi infiltrators or jihadis. They are welcomed and given ration cards and enlisted as Indian citizens. The last time when I was in Nagaland, the then home minister said the state had approximately 75,000 illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators, who had entered the state without inner line permits obviously.

Being an infiltrator doesn't bother anyone, but North Indians in Mumbai, mostly Hindus, have to be targeted for vote bank politics.

In India, to be an Indian alone is a deficiency factor. You have to be a Jat, Gujjar, SC or ST or Yadav, or Muslim to live with political support and get state protection and aid.

The less your Indian-ness is pronounced, and more micro-identities are projected the chances to move forward and benefit brighten up.

So like the Haj subsidy, Andhra's Christian chief minister has announced subsidies for Christians going to Israel for pilgrimage. He hasn't uttered a word about Kailas Manasarovar pilgrims who go to Tibet for pilgrimage.

Definitely in politics a pan Indian outlook and belonging to a majority is a Ghate ka sauda -- a matter of loss.

Therefore, I find that to live a secured and politically correct life in India, it is better to have a provincial identity than just be an Indian.

Kindly get me a proselytiser who can certifiably convert me to be a Maratha or a Maharashtrian. At least I will belong to someone who would consider me his own. My broader Rashtra is lost in a shrunk Maharashtra.

Medieval trap

The Times of India
Saturday Nov 05, 2009

Tarun Vijay

When the nation is facing grave threats from the Maoists and the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Islamist mad-heads, and discussing how to counter the Chinese arrogance, suddenly mullahs living in a frozen Arabian time zone have cried that they won't sing "Vande Mataram".

Are they concerned about the people? People whose lives they think they govern through some fatwas and scriptural instructions? Do they realize that hardly any educated Muslim with his head firmly positioned where it should be, listens to them leave aside "obeying" their dictates? Still they make some noises to get media attention and register their political presence.

What was the compulsive necessity for making such an announcement while the home minister was there to have a plateful of appeasement biryani in hope of garnering their votes for a 21st-century government?

One explanation that has come to us through Deoband observers is frighteningly pregnant with serious consequences to our already strained social fabric. The Congress wants to create another monster out of Muslim fanatics to further erode Mayawati's vote bank and simultaneously distract public attention from its failure on the Maoist front and keep the public debate away from the price rise. These are the issues it couldn't handle; hence, the distraction was immediately needed. And the way fanatics helped the British before India was vivisected, the maulvis have obliged the party in power. It's advisable not to get trapped in this political lunacy, but then the media will be taking it up in a big way for certain unexplained reasons and there will be obvious reactions and diatribes from both sides to keep the issue alive.

Public memory shouldn't be too thin. Remember how Bhindranwale was created, the statements about his "saintliness", the permission to his brigands to roam free through Delhi's roads brandishing AK-47s on top of buses. And then only too recently, Raj Thackeray was propped up to counter Shiv Sena-BJP's growth in the Maratha land.

They forget that a Bhindranwale and a Raj results in self-defeat, a defeat for the national unity and collective goals of economic prosperity. The Deoband mullahs have never helped their community in making economic, social and educational progress. At any moment of a social crisis among Muslims, they have delayed any decision or taken a retrograde stand. The "shining" examples of their fossilized mentality were too visible during the Shah Bano case, Gudiya's tragic story and equal right to Muslim women. They kept a studied silence when five lakh Hindus were driven out of their homes in the Kashmir valley, after announcements were blared out on the dreadful night of January 11,1989, asking Pandits to get out and leave behind their women. Jammu & Kashmir is the only Muslim-majority state in India and if Deoband is "concerned" about Islam's peaceful, and humanitarian face, why should it not try to influence the terror groups operating in the name of their religion and in turn, as the maulvis say, bringing bad name to their great message of universal brotherhood?

But never will one find them engaging the "bad elements" and issuing a fatwa against their "anti-Islamic" action. All they would do is to irritate Hindus and punch the patriotic people belonging to all denominations with untimely and out of context pronouncements like the one they made while the "man with a mission" Chidambaram was in their midst.

They know very well that "Vande Mataram" is a song celestial for a patriotic Indian no matter to which stream of faith he belongs. It's a song that inspired Bhagat Singh and Ashfakullah alike and is more popular with an electrifying affect than any other song. An A R Rahman refashioned it and offered a beautiful rendering of it with Bharat Bala making its universal appeal more thrilling. Millions of Indians, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and all denominations sing it with pride and confidence. It was the song which united India against the British repression that had caused the death of millions in Bengal creating an unnatural famine .The original song appears in the famous novel of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay named "Anand Math" which describes a revolution against the foreign yoke led by ochre-robed monks. The deity is Mother India, the song is in praise of the Mother and it's accepted as a national song by the Constitution. No organization can be given an option to denounce or reject the icons representing the national ethos and the spirit of the freedom struggle. If they don't belong to us, they don't have a right to enjoy the fruits of a pluralist society, democracy and a Constitution that gives them more than their ilk offers to any non-Muslim anywhere. Instead of making an Indian identity stronger and helping their community to join the national mainstream endeavouring for a happy and progressive life, they are, at a time when an average Indian is more concerned about dal roti and security, more concerned about a song that was opposed in the same manner by Pakistan seekers pre-1947.

Then to which country these Deobandis and Jamiat's big-mouths belong? What's their problem?
It's not the song they are opposing. The message is loud and clear that they don't want to forge a sense of unity with the national life. They want to create a divide on the lines of a Muslim Indian and an Indian Muslim for political leverage. P Chidambaram is certainly not a scholar of Islamic theology that they invited him for a religious discourse. The home minister was there on a political mission. The home minister of India must have made them sing an Indian song rather than emboldening them to oppose it.

Their Arabian-night fever must be brought to an end with the firmness of a united Indian patriotism symbolized in our Constitution and the ever victorious tricolor.

Tarun Vijay at the Taj, Mumbai addressing Rotarians

Director, Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation Shri Tarun Vijay was invited as the chief guest by Rotary Club of Bombay(the oldest and highly reputed club of Mumbai) to speak to its members on India's Global Vision at The Taj, Mumbai on 3rd November 2009. It was a full house with a number of luminaries and top industrialists present to listen to him. Tarun Vijay spoke about the glorious Hindu heritage that has its footprints all over the globe from China to Cambodia and from Brazil to Korea. He presented the Indian vision in terms of scholarship, and character and opined that the protecting Indian values of family , pluralism, safeguarding nature and following the legacy of Ram, Guru Govind Singh and Shivaji to annihilate the unrepentant wicked is the Dharma of every Indian in the present circumstances when we are facing a bloody

Jihad and the 'harvesting'of the proselytizers. He gave examples of Indian seers going in various far off regions of the world and establishing their mark on the basis of their compassion, wisdom and scholarship like Kumarjiva, who became China's 'Rajguru', and the rishis who established Kamboj desh(Cambodia) and helped build Ang Kor Wat. He also gave vivid description of Hindu culture's influence in Thailand, where the King is known as Rama the ninth and their international airport is named Suvarnabhumi with a marvelous sculpture of Saagar Manthan(churning of the ocean) inside it.Go global, earn great heights in achievements,but never forget to fulfill your duty towards your motherland and Dharma. Strengthening Hindu civilizational values is necessary to protect pluralism, diversity and democracy . He quoted Prof. Rajendra Singh, the fourth Sarsanghchalak of the RSS as saying that India's progress and influence on the world must be measured by its Vidya and Character. He said that the present Sarsanghchalak Shri Mohan Bhagwat is the youngest chief of the global Hindu consolidation who has put the principles of Sewa ie service to humanity and nature conservation before the Swayamsewaks while remaining firm on the need to rekindle interest in Hindu civilisation.

Shri Tarun Vijay said that the barbaric savages attacking us, like they did here, at Taj, where we are sitting today, on 26/11 two years before have to be finally annihilated if we are the true inheritors of Ram and Krishna who never pardoned the wicked. He exhorted young Rotarians to be true to their heritage and strengthen the spirit of patriotism with Vande Mataram on their lips, that devotion to motherland alone can save the nation and defeat the anti-national elements. Indian global vision can only be defined in terms of freedom to choose , appreciation for a different view point, helping world find solution to issues like global warming and climate change in a nuclear free atmosphere,where no nation can dictate terms to the other on the basis of brute force are parts of the Indian global vision.

The speech was followed by a brief Q&A session.

Introduction to the pictures - Shri Tarun Vijay answering a question from the dias। From L to R-Shri Nanik Rupani, chief of the programmes, Shri Vijay, Shri Narendra Damani, President of the Rotary Club, Shri Naveen Shah, Secretary and Smt। Tarjani Merchant. famous banker .Report by Anil Karnik.

Why should our President receive the queen’s baton?

The Times of India
Saturday October 28, 2009

Tarun Vijay

President Pratibha Patil is in London to receive a baton from Queen Elizabeth II on October 29. She has already received a tasteless joke from the duke of Windsor about Patels . And then the President is all ready to get the dubious distinction of the first-ever head of state of a Commonwealth country to receive the baton from the Queen Elizabeth. It’s a ‘baton’ that’s customarily given to the host country of the Commonwealth Games. The Commonwealth has 53 member states including Nauru, .. etc and none of them ever thought it prudent to be so obsessed with the colonial hangover that their head of the state would go and be a durbari in the former coloniser’s palace.

And our sportsmen like Kapil Dev gave a statement expressing a feel of pride for having found their names in the invite list to be in the queue and get introduced to a lady who hardly knows about their land except that her predecessors once ruled them with a barbarity that is reminiscent of the dark ages (her knowledge about us won’t be better than that of the duke of fatigue and follies who slipped over the Patels) and she never expressed any regret or remorse over what the British did to us.

Any surprises on the Indian spinelessness?

We are a nation that produced a large number of rai bahadurs and sirs and rao sahebs while ‘crazy deewane’ were becoming Bhagat Singhs and Rajgurus and Sukhdevs. There were a large section of our Indians who thought it prudent to keep a silence on Jalianwala Bagh, honour the butcher Dyer even after the gruesome incident. It’s another matter that we had those Casablancas too who preferred gallows to knighthood.

Pratibha Patil and Kapil Devs have joined the ranks of those who have no sense of history, leave aside a sense of pride in the sacrifices of revolutionaries who fought the British. We are the world’s greatest living democracy, much larger and with a better civilisational background and track record of humanity than the British. Why should a head of a democracy present herself before a queen, a symbol of a decaying, old tradition, which has lost all relevance to the contemporary values of civil society? Shouldn’t they be raising questions that why the lady occupying Buckingham Palace must remain the head of the Commonwealth? The most logical and contextually correct thing would be to have a head of a democratic sovereign as its chief and not a titular icon of a royalty that stinks with the blood of our revolutionaries and whose wealth is built on the loot of India?

Pratibha Patil hasn’t found time to visit Hussainiwala , the memorial to Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. Or the Jalianwala Bagh. London seems to be more inviting to her. What a shame that India should send a large contingent of sportsmen along with her.

The first question that has to raised before the lethargic neo-rai sahebs is the logic of still clinging to the Commonwealth comity? What great achievement we envisage by spending more than $1.6 billion on organizing the Commonwealth Games, which were originally conceptualized to keep the British colonial legacy alive and still require the queen to distribute largesse and announce the beginning of the games as its head. Since its inception in the new garb in1952, there has not been anyone else except the queen to head the games and it’s incumbent upon the members, all former subjects of the empire, all who had been slaves of the queen, to go to London and receive the ‘baton’ from Her Majesty so that the games are launched formally.

Here are some gems of information taken from the official website of the games.

The Queen's Baton Relay

The Relay traditionally begins at Buckingham Palace in London as a part of the city's Commonwealth Day festivities. Her Majesty the Queen entrusts the baton to the first relay runner. At the Opening Ceremony of the Games, the final relay runner hands the baton back to her Majesty the Queen .

History

The Relay was introduced at the 1958 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, Wales. Through the 1994 Games, the Relay only went through England and the host nation.

The history of The Games

In 1911, the 'Festival of Empire’ was held in London to celebrate the coronation of King George V. As part of the festival, an Inter-Empire Championships was held in which teams from Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom competed in events such as boxing, wrestling, swimming and athletics.

From 1930 to 1950 the Games were known as the British Empire Games, then the British Empire and Commonwealth Games until 1962. From 1966 to 1974 they took on the title of British Commonwealth Games and from 1978 onwards they have been known as simply the Commonwealth Games. The Commonwealth Youth Games are also known as Friendly Games in the English speaking provinces of the Commonwealth.

In the baton relay, after the president receives the baton from the Queen, the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) chairman Suresh Kalamdi, and Olympic gold medallist and ace shooter Abhinav Bindra will then start the Queen’s Baton Relay,

The Queen's Baton relay is one of the oldest traditions of Commonwealth Games since it was first done in the 1958 Games in Wales



Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, 1994

The Baton was fashioned from sterling silver and was engraved with traditional symbols of the creative artists' families and cultures, including a wolf, a raven and an eagle with a frog in its mouth.

Kuala Lumpur, 1998

Malaysia placed their own flavour on the Games, with the Queen’s Baton being carried into the stadium on an elephant. The baton was presented to Prince Edward by Malaysia’s first ever Commonwealth medal winner Koh Eng Tong, a gold medallist in weightlifting in 1950.

Manchester, 2002

The baton has special significance as it marks the Golden Jubilee of Her Majesty The Queen and was designed to symbolise the uniqueness of the individual and the common rhythm of humanity.

Opening ceremony traditions

• From 1930 through 1950, the parade of nations was led by a single flag bearer carrying the Union Flag, symbolising Britain's leading role in the British Empire.

• Since 1958, there has been a relay of athletes carrying a baton from Buckingham Palace to the Opening Ceremony. This baton has within it the Queen's Message of Greeting to the athletes.

• All other nations march in English alphabetical order.

• The military is more active in the Opening Ceremony than in the Olympic Games. This is to honour the British Military traditions of the Old Empire.

So we have a queen and her representatives to be honoured who hardly get a serious glance in their own country except when a scandal brings them to the front page of a tabloid, we have to follow the English, and run with a baton which has symbols we do not know why-“a wolf, a raven and an eagle with a frog in its mouth.” And then we have to honour the “British Military traditions of the Old Empire.” Because they killed our patriots? Someone must file an application under RTI to know how many millions have been allocated just to finalise the theme and the tamasha to start a function that would be a joke to the sacred memories of our freedom fighters.

Why can’t we spend half the money we are spending on the Commonwealth Games for training and building better and permanent facilities to identify indigenous sports talent and prepare them for the next Olympics? Why can’t we have a commonwealth of the proud, patriotic sovereign countries which would make sure that they do everything in line with the honour and pride of their language, customs, traditions and salute their patriots taking the baton from a freedom fighter who had fought the savagery of the British empire rather than go to London and bow before the British queen?