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 The cartoon in the Birla Group's Hindi daily ‘Hindustan’, depicting Congress President Sonia Gandhi as the Madonna and Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh as Baby Jesus in her lap is a deliberate act of provocation toward the Christian community and is an unforgivable sacrilege. Editorial insensitivity can be understood only because this was an egregious insult and a gratuitous pre-planned assault. The Christian community cannot expect an apology or amends from its publishers or owners. This is just the first salvo fired by the discarded Hindutva in the prospective campaign of violence against minorities, with Christians being chosen to be the major target. The contemptuous rejection of communalist fascism by the electorate could not be left without revenge. For the electorate’s daring free exercise of its franchise, it will be made to pay in blood. Minorities, dubbed as "foreigners" in the broadsides and bilges of the faux Hindus, cannot be allowed to upset the apple cart of the theocratic terrorism known as Hindutva, which signifies the abominable horrors of the Hindu Rashtra. A kicked-out and wounded Hindutva, like a Hydra, will prove its "viability" by resorting to mega-violence in the days ahead. This is its time-tested method to avenge the defeat and return to be at the helm. It cannot stomach the loss of lucre and power ensuing from its defeat. Nor can it accept with democratic temperance its replacement by the Congress, which it never imagined could arise from the ashes and wrestle it to ground. They believed Congress had been effectively abolished, along with the legacy of Gandhi and Nehru that had animated and sustained the composite national ethos pre and post-1947. In the view of the Hindu Rashtra, Congress’ only business in its own medieval mind is to wrest power and contaminate the populace with a poisonous creed. Without which, it feels, it would fade out and die. In this complex web, Sonia occupies a special place for Hindutva’s anathema and ire. That a mere woman of the Nehru family with the surname of Gandhi succeeded in resuscitating a long moribund Congress and restored it in Parliament as the largest party, is too nettlesome a fact for the self-proclaimed and universally notorious militancy of Hindutva. And then, as if this was not enough to rub salt in the saffron wound, she happens to have been born a Christian in Italy in 1947, the year India won independence. She, as Congress President and as parliamentary leader of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), embodies an ominously potent threat to Hindutva and its bandwagon. They are afraid she might write the finis to the inhuman project of Hindu Rashtra. The Congress under her may prove to be their nemesis. Therefore, she will continue to be attacked by the vulgar buglers of Hindutva. Having "forced" her to relinquish the Premiership, the Sangh brigade feels emboldened to carry on as if it is still ruling the country. Unless it is rid of this miasma swiftly and severely by UPA, it may plunge the nation in a bloody chaos making governance impossible, and the day-to-day life of the citizenry miserable. It does not suffer from any qualms, for it has no respect for the Constitutional order, nor has it any sensitivity to the mandate of people in favour of the Congress, nor softness for democracy.
That the saffronites have now suddenly started fearing colonialism as something bad which Sonia might bring back (of which country is she the queen?), is really amusing. The Sanghs, in all their cooked up synonyms since the 1920s, have been the most ardent collaborators of colonialism, and the potential fifth column of foreign powers. They supported the British in the 1940s most openly when India was fighting its last ditch battle for freedom. They embraced fascism and Nazism and thus became the zealous supporters and surrogates of Mussolini and Hitler when the world was being trashed and traumatized by these murderous juggernauts. Thus, they declared their animus against independence for the colonies and dominions of the predatory imperialist powers. Votaries of slavery and exploitation, racist repression and resource despoliation, the saffronites have historically always aided and abetted foreign supremacists. For them suddenly to be worried about colonialism is nothing less than piffle and gas. They, who sold out the profit-making PSUs to the privateers of Capital, who became the willing touts of worldwide imperialist terror, who helped the Western neo-colonialists in every way to subjugate and enslave various nations far and near, who stood by the side of warmongers and war criminals, thus bringing upon India universal disgrace and abomination, who are now clamouring against the colonialism which Sonia might induct, is a stretch too much for even Orwell! The defeated, now visibly demented, in their desperation, are likely to opt for the anti-human, antisocial career of desperados. Their deviant theology has conditioned them for nothing else. In the future, to cover up their sleazy record as traitors and robbers, assassins and arsonists, they would deafeningly proclaim their antipathy to colonialism. But, patriotism and freedom are the last things in their calculus worthy of fealty or commitment. It is on these that they will make the loudest noises. Cowards and quislings cannot become patriots overnight however loud they howl. It is called keening. They are crying over loss of power. Upstarts and gamblers, they never dreamed defeat as a possibility in a democratic dispensation. They had hijacked for good, they believed, the chariot of democracy. That it could change its riders never occurred to them, for they had no respect for democracy, let alone its quirky jolts. Fascists to the core in their conduct, they were seen by the voters as aliens in their orientation and origins, unconcerned with the well-being of Indians, toadies of imperialist marauders and their local agents. It was not ideology at the grassroots level, but the diurnal misery and pile of privations that clinched the issue for the millions of voters who determined: "The architects of their deprivation and destitution will be booted out.” Their lies about India shining, when it was in the deadly grip of all-devouring darkness, were too crude a joke to be suffered with equanimity. They were feeling good with millions starving, and thousands committing suicide! Such liars, deaf and blind to people’s plight, were dangerous criminals deserving of incarceration or gallows, lest they should damage the nation even more deeply by their corrupt and criminal behaviour. Those who chopped the nation and slaughtered the citizens were calling themselves patriots! Have they no shame, no conscience? How are they different from the beasts? For having seen through the game of Hindutva deception and distraction, of the bloody orgies engineered to secure votes, of the farrago of lies and pits of corruption, and for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the theo-terrorist gangsterism touted as Hindutva, minorities will have to be taught a lesson, so adumbrated the junta of reprobates collectively known as Sang(h) [stone] Family. Not that others will be spared. Their turn will come later. The first order of business is dealing with the "foreigners", namely Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Dalits, Adivasis and, weirdly enough, Communists, who encompass all those capable of dissent and independent thinking which are verboten in the culture of crime propagated by the Hindu Taliban and Vedic Al Qaeda. Dalits and Adivasis will have to live on the sufferance of the upper caste patricians, or they will also be administered the "foreigner" medicine. Violence is essential to fascism, like war to capitalism. The Sang(h) and its cohort cannot rest in peace with a Congress revived and resurgent, even though their class composition and class interests are generally the same. But a Congress under Sonia sweeping them out of power even from their bastion, Uttar Pradesh, is too chilling an experience, and too numbing a portent of their ugly future; that is, no future at all. It is this prospect of oblivion that is driving the Hinduist honchos and henchmen crazy. It is this nightmare that bedevils their sleep and keeps their eyes alternately bleary or glazed. Had they been Hindus even minimally, they would have deemed their debacle to be a condign punishment for their sins, and thus would have come to terms with their fall from power. But from day one in the caves and boot camps of Hindutva, they had abjured and anathematised Hinduism. They renounced Hinduism long ago, since their mentors, steeped in fascism and foreign cults of mayhem and mendacity, taught them that it had bred effeminacy and non-belligerence. That is why they appropriated savagery as vigour, adopted violence as a cleansing virtue, and inculcated inhumanity as a substitute for purity. Therefore, they had to invent the bravery (in their forbears), absent from history. This faux bravery was aggressively on show in Gujarat 2002. But none of it was availed of to make them free from ingrained cowardice or inferiority. It is this persistent sense of deficiency that the Hindu manqué will seek to overcome, with dubious success, not only in the immediate future by disrupting the UPA's functioning, but also as a long-term project. Why? Because it has no other agenda, no other issues, except implementing its messianic monstrosity of Hindutva, a monotheistic variant of Semitic religions, in utter disregard of India's age-old, multiform, eclectic, and variegated designs of philosophy and faith. People and their problems may be condemned and forsaken. That is why "saving Hindu dharma" by demolishing the mosques, by destroying and damaging the churches, and thus exterminating the "foreigners", will remain its perpetual priority. Governance, development, entitlement, empowerment of the people through education, enhancing their longevity through sanitary living conditions, jobs, affordable housing, infrastructure, and corruption-free polity and bureaucracy – all these are, in the eyes of the saffronazis concepts that are foreign in origin, hence undeserving of attention since they detract from and are a drag on the Hindutva imperative which issues the challenge to live in past glory and that this world is maya. A rejuvenated Congress, assertive and expansive, with Sonia Gandhi at the helm, is the last thing the BJP needed to demoralize and drag it down. Foreign, dynastic, Christian, ignorant of Indian culture, these buzz words are meant to create the fog of feverish fanaticism, to camouflage the sordid aims and sinister agenda of the Hindu Taliban. Demagoguery, lethally the most effective weapon in its arsenal, should not be allowed to have a field day. The Congress, organizationally and administratively, will have to deal with the enemies of the nation resolutely. No crime can earn absolution by being dressed up as "political" or "religious". Since the people have taught the BJP a lesson, the BJP sees it fit to reply with an equally pertinent lesson, reflective of Gujarat 2002. However, the BJP will never learn one. And that, luckily for India, will prove to be bliss. Rahul Gandhi called the BJP a "sad joke". He was wrong. The BJP worked very hard, very blindly and very bloodily, to earn its laurels as a brutal joke.
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