GANDHI and NEHRU - Betrayers, nay, destroyers of Bharatvarsh

V. Sundaram (January 2010 onwards) http://ennapadampanchajanya.blogspot.com/2010/03/gandhi-and-nehru-betrayers-nay.html Part 1 About 2 weeks ago, my friend Smt Radha Rajan, a brilliant political analyst, consummate scholar and fearless editor from Chennai, sent me a copy of her book titled Eclipse of the Hindu Nation, Gandhi and his Freedom Struggle. She is also one of the authors of the book NGOs, Activists and Foreign Funds: Anti-Nation Industry published a few years ago. In my view, the most important and seminal book on Indias Freedom Movement that has been published after our independence is the recent book of Smt Radha Rajan titled Eclipse of the Hindu Nation, Gandhi and his Freedom Struggle. Smt Radha Rajans book is full of original grand thoughts which have stemmed from her buoyant and valiant heart. I would say that it pulsates with Living Truth. Dr Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) defined Living Truth thus: Living Truth is that alone which has its origin in thinking. Just as a tree bears year after year the same fruit and yet fruit which is each year new, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually born again and again in thought. In the decaying if not dying India of today -- a helpless India in the vicious grip of American imperialism, rising Chinese hegemony, Europe-directed Christian evangelism, Saudi-funded terrorist Islam, debilitating Nehruvian Secularism and the American epidemic of consumerism -there is an imperative national and paramount need for the creation of a Hindu Nation rooted in our ancient Sanatana Dharma to protect the Hindus of India in their own homeland. In my view the publication of Smt Radha Rajans book marks a definitive moment of destiny in the evolution of a full-fledged Hindu Nation in the not-very-distant future. After reading this book, the democratic battle cry of all the Hindus of India should be: Hindus of India unite; we have nothing to lose but our Nehru-congress-designed anti-hindu secular chains. Smt Radha Rajans book is seething with radical views animated by radiant ideals. Here I cannot help quoting the bracing words of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860): It is thought, and thought only, that divides right from wrong; it is thought and thought only that elevates or degrades human deeds and desires. Next we may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves, and those who think through others. The latter are the rule, and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word. It is from them only that the world learns wisdom. For only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others. Smt Radha Rajans book is a powerhouse radiating new shafts of light and wisdom on Indias Freedom Movement dispelling completely the vacuous illusions about the Congress myth of the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent role played by Mahatma Gandhi in that movement. Her mind seems to be a power station, a storage warehouse of beaming and bubbling ideas, a library, an amphitheatre, a museum, a hall of archives, a seat of exemplary fearless justice and above all a seat of just government. When I started reading this book, right from the first page, I was overwhelmed by a new beam of light --nay, a flame of fire-- entering the smithy of my anguished soul making me realize that I had been fed for more than 45 years on carefully designed, organized and orchestrated political fraud and falsehood relating to the history of Indias freedom movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Brutal public facts that are not frankly and boldly faced have a habit of stabbing us in the back. One of the most sublime things in the world is honest plain truth. General, abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it each one of us would be blind, because it is the eye of reason. Smt Radha Rajan has demystified Mahatma Gandhi and the history of Indias freedom movement from 1893 to 1947, in a forthright and forceful manner. She has magnificently succeeded in writing this extraordinary, original and courageous book rooted in

concrete terrestrial Truth about Mahatma Gandhi and his various movements from time to time. Her working principle as a scholar, political and social scientist, historian and historiographer seems to be this: I will not let go or leave manifest Truths unstated merely because I cannot answer all questions about them. During the last 10 days I have been under the continuous spell of this original and captivating book by Smt Radha Rajan. I have been carrying it with me all over the place and I can say with some confidence that I can quote verbatim without looking at the text many of the breath-taking passages from this book. I can assert that I have felt the same way as the great English poet William Butler Yeats (1865 1939) felt in September 1912 about the manuscript of the English translation of the Gitanjali and other Bengali poems of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). W. B Yeats in his introduction to the first published English translation of Gitanjali wrote as follows: I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in Railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants and I often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes. A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has passed through the Centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and the noble. In the same manner as the poems of Tagore (I am referring to the primordial fire of his poetry!), Smt Radha Rajan has written an incendiary and explosive book on Indias freedom movement bringing out stern, grim and scorching truths about the so-called leading events in Indias struggle for freedom in general and the never steady and ever unstable and unpredictable leadership of Mahatma Gandhi in particular. I have been struck by the profundity and loftiness of national spirit and patriotism pervading this book. I have not been excited or exalted so much by the diversity of testimony as by the many-sidedness of Truth, brought out with assiduous care through carefully marshalled documentary evidence, gleaming and glowing through this glorious book. The most outstanding feature of this book is that every word and every sentence of Smt Radha Rajan is fully backed and sustained by unassailable documentary evidence available in the COLLECTED WORKS OF MAHATMA GANDHI in more than 100 Volumes brought out by the Government of India. When these Works were being edited by an independent, outstanding and courageous scholar like Dr Swaminathan, the successive Prime Ministers from the days of Nehru to the days of Narasimha Rao had no idea of what was being incorporated into these volumes. Otherwise, they would have used their political clout to ensure that only the politically convenient or politically comfortable portions from the total corpus of Gandhis writings were incorporated into these Volumes. This would have resulted in the murder and burial of concrete Truth about the so called Saintly ways of Mahatma Gandhi and the mercenary ways of the Indian National Congress from time to time from 1919 till the attainment of our Independence in 1947. The presentation of Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth about Mahatma Gandhi and the Indias Freedom Struggle by Smt Radha Rajan can stand the strictest and most impartial judicial scrutiny by any court of law in the world. I am not surprised that she has derived her Himalayan inspiration and energy for writing this powerful book from the following words of Shri Aurobindo: Respect of persons must always give place to truth and conscience; and the demand that we should be silent because of the age or past services of our opponents, is politically immoral and unsound. Open attack, unsparing criticism, the severest satire, the most wounding irony, are all methods perfectly justifiable and indispensable in politics. We have strong things to say; let us say them strongly; we have stern things to do; let us do them sternly. We can see from every page of Smt Radha Rajans book that she has stronger things to say and she has stated them with candour and courage of conviction in the strongest language possible.

Smt Radha Rajan seems to have mastered The Art of Words. The dictionary is full of words but it is how words are used that makes the big difference. Her words have both the explosive power of a nuclear bomb and the soothing effect of oil on troubled waters. Indeed they seem to have the inherent power to start a war or to keep the peace or to state the Truth as she has discovered it as a Political Scientist in the manner and measure required. In this context, the words of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) are very relevant. Language is called the Garment of Thought: However, it should rather be, Garment, the Body of Thought. NO ENGLISH NEWSPAPER IN INDIA --- all of them being Islam-embracing, Christianitycoveting and Hindu-hating --- has taken note of this revolutionary book by Smt Radha Rajan. The Anti-Hindu mafia of mass media in India, politically and financially sustained by the Sonia Congress and other equally anti-Hindu political parties, seem to be under a cosmic delusion to the effect that when they close their eyes, the whole of India closes its eyes and when they weep or laugh, the whole of India weeps and laughs with them! The disgustingly criminal attempt made by the mass media and the anti-Hindu political parties to keep the whole country in an area of pseudo-secular anti-Hindu spiritual and cultural darkness about the stark Truths relating to Mahatma Gandhi brought out so splendidly by Radha Rajan in her book has to be politically, socially, culturally, religiously and spiritually countered by all the Nationalist Hindus of India. That is why I propose to review this revolutionary book in 10 parts. I am going to do in 10 parts, in order to deliberately bring out the Dashavatar dimensions of the stern, grim and scorching TRUTH about Gandhi and his role in Indias Freedom Struggle, brought out by Smt Radha Rajan into the public arena, in a bold and courageous manner. Let me begin the 1st part of the review with the introduction to this book. It takes off from the first paragraph of the book. To quote the words of Smt Radha Rajan: This book is concerned with the systemic and well-organized political disempowerment of Indias Hindu community. A nations polity reflects its peoples notion of NATION AND NATIONHOOD (emphasis and capital letters - mine). Nowhere in the world and never in history can there be found a country whose ruling elite has not emerged from its native and / or majority populace, nor has there ever been a power-elite which rejected the ethos of its majority populace, except perhaps in South Africa, the Americas and India. The native populace of South Africa managed to seize control of its polity after a long, bloody and painful struggle to end Apartheid White Rule and the nations of South America are struggling for native assertion via the ballot box. But North America, invaded and occupied by Europeans after decimating the Native American populace, is unlikely to witness any meaningful change in its power equations in the foreseeable future. Its polity is likely to retain its White Christian edge, a fact increasingly challenged by its African-American populace. The situation is similar in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Contemporary India is thus the only country in the world whose polity is actively hostile to native (Hindu) interests; the only country whose sense of nationhood is still repressed by state power. Smt Radha Rajan is absolutely right because the Hindus of India are treated with indivisible contempt by the Sonia Congress party and all other anti-Hindu pseudo-secular political parties. Followers of Monotheistic Islam and Christianity have a powerful political sense as both these religions are essentially political and imperial in their objectives and goals -- conquest of territory, physical subjugation (and if possible decimation) of non-Muslim and non-Christian populace with wanton destruction of their historical and cultural icons and subordination of their political will towards furtherance of imperial objectives and goals -- which they pursue relentlessly till the whole world comes under their hegemony. According to Smt Radha Rajan, this objective is deemed legitimate not only by the Indian Muslims and Indian Christians but also by the anti-Hindu Indian secularists who regard Christian Violence and intimidation in the North-East and Jihad by the Muslims in different parts of India as compatible with their quest for creating a NON-HINDU INDIA. All of them consider Hindu Nationalism a serious threat to the established polity dominated by Nehruvian Secularism (read, Minorityism), Anti-Hindu Southern Dravidianism and all shades of Communism.

Smt. Radha Rajan says in her introduction that historically, the sense of nation and nationhood among Hindus since the dawn of history has been cultural and civilizational. The culture and its unique value system, derived from an extraordinary concept of dharma, touched every aspect of individual and collective life. Politics, a means to protect and preserve dharma, was subordinate to dharma. Until Hindus faced successive Islamic and Christian conquests, they had no idea or sense of civilizational, adversarial political-cultural purposes. Yet the fact is that confronted with the hostility of Islam and Christianity, a heightened Hindu Nationalism manifested itself over the last 1200 years as organized resistance and individual acts of extreme courage to protect Hindus and the Hindu way of life. In this context, to illustrate her point, Smt Radha Rajan cites the examples of revolutionaries like Rana Pratap Singh, Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, Chhatrapati Shivaji, Guru Gobind Singh, the Gorakshana Samitis, Shri Aurobindo, Veer Savarkar, Madanlal Dhingra who followed each other into the 20th century. Smt Radha Rajan states an axiomatic political truth when she says that a nations polity derives from and reflects the racial or religious ethos of its majority populace. Indias Constitutionally-enshrined Secularism is a KILLER VIRUS whose offspring, Freedom of Religion, allows both Indian Islam and Indian Christianity the liberty to function in a Hindu land while keeping their political core intact, indeed actively nurtured by its democratic Constitution. I fully endorse Smt Radha Rajan's finding that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and later Jawaharlal Nehru successfully stifled the march of Hindu Nationalism. Nehru viewed a politically vibrant Hindu Nationalism as an inherent threat to his political pre-eminence and invoked the might of State patronage to promote an academic discourse and an authorised history that deliberately manipulated history in order to relegate Hindu civilization to the margins of national consciousness. Treacherous Marxist historians like R.S. Sharma, D.N. Jha and Romila Thapar belong to this category of shameless historians who came forward to sell their souls for a mess of state potage. These historians perpetuated the Colonial fiction that India was always pluralist, never Hindu, the implication being that Hindus cannot claim this land as their special Janmabhumi. In other words they cannot legitimately take steps to protect their territory, their way of life or cultural sensibilities. Indian political discourse has been so intolerant towards Hindu nationalism that even most of the eminent Hindu political leaders started mouthing soulless inanities like Hindu Nationalism is only cultural nationalism. This has so far only meant denial of territorial content to and political intent in Hindu Nationalism. Smt Radha Rajan states with conviction and clarity that her present work is an attempt to balance Indias distorted pseudo-secular anti-Hindu public discourse by outlining the contours and content of Hindu nationalism. The anti-Hindu polity today constitutes the greatest threat to Hindus and the Hindu Nation. Gandhis leadership of the Indian National Congress (INC) and the freedom movement sounded the death knell for Hindu Nationalism. On the eve of Indian independence Gandhi and Nehru conspired together and handpicked all Congress members to the Constituent Assembly in such a calculated manner only to ensure that the Hindus of the Nation were presented with a Constitution that did not reflect Bharatvarshs timeless civilizational ethos or heritage nor represent the interests of the nations majority Hindu populace. Thus the so called truncated independence on August 15th 1947 only marked the beginning of an active anti-Hindu polity that continues to hold sway even today. To quote the clinching words of Smt Radha Rajan: This book signals the beginning of the collective effort of political-minded Self-respecting Nationalist Hindus to set down the coffins of Gandhi and Nehru from the unwilling shoulders of the Hindu Nation. Part II, 3 March 2010 History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, tragedies and misfortunes of mankind.- Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) History is the first distinct product of mans spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what can be called THOUGHT. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)

History can only be understood by seeing it as the theatre of diverse groups of idealists respectively urging ideals incompatible for conjoint realization. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) -----------------------What amazes me most is the fact that Smt Radha Rajan is both a historiographer and an original historian. What is historiography? Historiography is the study of the history and methodology of the discipline of history. As such, it uses semiotics to consider how knowledge of the past is obtained and transmitted. Formally, historiography examines the writing of history, the use of historical methods, drawing upon authorship, sources, interpretation, style, bias etc. Further, historiography also denotes a body of historical work. Scholars discuss historiography topically, i.e. the historiography of Catholicism, the historiography of early Islam, the historiography of China, etc., and the approaches and genres include oral history and social history. Smt Radha Rajans book is a landmark work both in the field of Historiography of Indias Freedom Movement and History of Indias Freedom Movement. That is why perhaps the Statesupported and State-sustained (by means of flood-flow of Government advertisements on a massive scale!) criminal mafia of mass media in India--both print and electronichave deliberately chosen to black out this revolutionary Hindu Nationalistic book from public view. The truths enshrined in this book have the explosive and convulsive power of billions and billions of atom bombs and are going to explode sooner than later in the not very distant future. Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris define historiography as "the study of the way history has been and is written the history of historical writing... When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events Having closely surveyed and read this work of Smt Radha Rajan, I can say that she has unconsciously though indubitably followed the road map for proper history writing drawn up by great historians like Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), R.G Collingwood (1889-1943), E.H Carr (1892-1982) and Michael Oakeshot (1901-1990). I would like to offer some quotations from the corpus of their great historical writings to illustrate my point regarding Smt Radha Rajan. Fernand Braudel was the foremost French historian of the postwar era, and a leader of the Annales School. His reputation stems in part from his writings, but even more from his success in making the Annales School the most important engine of historical research in France and much of the world after 1950. Braudel has been considered one of the greatest of those modern historians who have emphasized the role of large scale socio-economic factors in the making and telling of history. He can also be considered as one of the precursors of World Systems Theory. As the dominant leader of the Annales School of historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, he exerted enormous influence on historical writing in France and other countries. According to Braudel, History offers a gleam but no illumination; facts but no illumination, because Historians tend to focus exclusively on events, individual actions and short-term developments and assume that each can be perceived discretely. History is thus reduced to histoire evenementielle or the history of events, particularly political events. Renouncing the drama and breathless rush of histoire evenementielle is no easy matter, but we must do so if we are to achieve a better understanding of the world. In Braudels view, the short term is not the centre of history; historians have only taken it to be such. Rather, history does not have a Centre. Like other Structuralists, Braudel believes that meaning in history is relational rather than substantial: the meaning of objects, events and individual actions lies not in the things themselves, but in the relationships we construct between them. Apprehending structures, Braudel believes, requires broadening and deepening our gaze across and through time. That is, historians must not only consider the relations of co-existing elements (for example, cultural, geographic, economic and political developments) but also those over different periods of time (for instance, long-term and short-term developments). When we change our gaze, we can no longer maintain the fiction that time is homogeneous: time does not flow at one even rate, but goes at a thousand

different paces, swift or slow, which bear almost no relation to the day-to-day rhythm of a chronicle or traditional history. Plotting out the various paces of time is impossible, but Braudel detects three broad groupings in historical time: Geographical Time (la longue duree the long-term periods that span at least one century), Social Time and Individual Time (histoire evenementielle or the history of events). Braudels vision of history requires the study of a broad range of historical evidence over la longue duree, the long-term period. According to him the study of the past makes greater self-understanding possible. To quote his brilliant words in this context: Live in London for a year and you will not learn much about England but you will learn a lot about France: you see because you have distanced yourself. Past and present illuminate one another reciprocally. So history is as much about the present as it is about the past. I have quoted these words of Braudel only to bring out the fact that Smt Radha Rajan also views the history of Indias freedom movement and the stranglehold that Mahatma Gandhi had on it from 1919 to 1948 in the same manner as Braudel. According to her this book is as much concerned about the present (eg. 2010) as it is about the past!(1890 to 1947) According to R.G Collingwood the structure of history raised by any historian rests on Res gestae. Res gestae are actions done by reasonable agents in pursuit of ends determined by their reason. And for Collingwood the key to gaining knowledge of Res gestae is re-enactment. In this re-enactment, let me quote the oft quoted famous words of Collingwood regarding the right approach of a great historian: The historian must be able to think over again for himself the thought whose expression he is trying to interpret. If for any reason he is such a kind of man that he cannot do this, he had better leave the problem alone. The important point here is that the historian of a certain thought must think for himself that very same thought, not another like it. According to Collingwood historians do not look at evidence and simply describe what they see: they read it. Documents are not in themselves evidence. Evidence consists of what they say. For example, any archaeologist looking at a triangular piece of clay discovered in an archaeological dig can view it superficially as a triangular piece of clay. But he could also read it as a loom weight. The important thing here is that the historian assumes that the piece of clay is an expression of thought or language. Indeed Collingwood argues that every action has the character of language and that every action is an expression of thought. Based on this kind of approach Collingwood sums it all up as follows: The starting point of any genuinely historical argument is strictly speaking, not this person, or this printed book, or this set of footprints, says so-and-so, but I knowing the language, read this person, or this book, or these footprints, as saying so-and-so. That is why it could be insisted that in respect of his evidence the historian is autonomous or dependent on his own authority: for his evidence is always an experience of his own, an act which he has performed by his own powers and is conscious of having performed by his own powers: the aesthetic act of reading a certain text in a language he knows and assigning to it a certain sense. (Ref: The Principles of History, pg 4344). In my view Smt Radha Rajan has subjected THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MAHATMA GANDHI brought out by the Government of India to the same kind of minute, searching and incisive questioning and analysis--- not only viewing but also seeing it through and whole---as indicated by Collingwood in the paragraph above. She has functioned as an independent, objective, fearless and autonomous historian of Indias freedom movement. For Smt Radha Rajan the study of history of Indias freedom movement is not a luxury but a fundamental duty that every Indian Citizen must discharge. If I can interpret her mind, she seems to tell us: The development of self-knowledge ought to be the fundamental aim of humanity. Through selfknowledge I realize that my life is given shape by particular presuppositions and that it is imperative that I help others to achieve the same realization. In this context the questions raised by R.G Collingwood become relevant: Why should we think of History as merely a trade or profession, a craft or calling? And what is the good of doing

that. For Collingwood the question is not shall I be an Historian or not? but How good an Historian shall I be? My answer to Collingwood would be that Smt Radha Rajan is an outstanding Historian of Indias Freedom Movement in all its phases, dimensions and aspects. Let me now come to E.H Carr. In his most popular work What is History? Carr has stated that facts are not ascertained like sense impressions and do not Speak for themselves. Nor are they entirely the creation of historians. For Carr, facts exist apart from the historian, but they only become historical facts when they are judged historically significant by selection and interpretation. To quote the words of E.H Carr in this context: The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Julius Caesars crossing of that petty stream Rubicon is a fact of history, whereas the crossings of the Rubicon by millions of other people interest no body at all. Smt Radha Rajan has selected, interpreted and presented facts regarding Indias Freedom Movement with a rare kind of acumen and prescience in the light of her analysis, her interests and experiences. She has proven Carr right that her history is an unending dialogue between the past and the present. I can see that Smt Radha Rajan has been unconsciously influenced by the history-writing and historiography of Michael Oakeshott. According to Oakeshott, history as it is commonly viewed incorporates two distinct ideas. First, it can refer to the the notional ground total of all that humanity has experienced or a passage of somehow related occurrences distinguished in this grand total by being specified in terms of a place and a time and a substantive identity. Here, history refers to what actually happened there and then and is made by the participants in historical occurrences irrespective of whether we know anything about them. Second, history may refer to an historians inquiry into or attempt to understand historical occurrences. Great historians, Oakeshott contends, are the creators rather than the discoverers of the past which they describe. They aim not to revive a dead past, for that would be a piece of obscene necromancy, but to transform historical evidence or survivals into an account in which they understand men and events more profoundly than when they were understood when they lived and happened. History is thus an activity which accounts for the nature and existence of historical survivals and the historian contributes to a coherent account of the present world. This does not mean, however, that historians are free to write what they please, because their work must accommodate historical evidence. The truth of their accounts will depend not on their correspondence with the past as it really was but on their coherence and comprehensiveness. Oakeshott writes: Coherence is the sole criterion of Truth: it requires neither modification nor supplement, and is operative always and everywhere because there is no external means by which Truth can be established. The work of Smt Radha Rajan is distinguished by the qualities of both coherence and comprehensiveness in the sense in which Michael Oakeshott has defined them. In short, for a true historian, the past is a certain way of reading the present. In his famous essay The Activity of being a Historian, Oakeshott identifies 4 attitudes that can be taken towards the past: Contemplative, Scientific, Practical and Historical. In my view, Smt Radha Rajan takes the most practical attitude in narrating the history of Indias Freedom Movement based on the irrefutable documentary evidence available in more than 100 Volumes of THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MAHATMA GANDHI brought out by the Government of India. Oakeshott has clearly explained what the most practical attitude is. Let us hear the words of Oakeshott in this context: Whenever the past is merely that which preceded the present, that from which the present has grown, wherever the significance of the past lies in the fact that it has been influential in deciding the present and future fortunes of man, wherever the present is sought in the past, and wherever the past is regarded as merely a refuge from the present-the past involved is a practical and not a historical past. This kind of practical attitude has been displayed by Smt Radha Rajan on every page of her explosive book --- seen, for instance, in searching for the origins of events like the Swadeshi

Movement in Bengal in 1905, Surat Session of the Indian National Congress(INC) in 1907, Khilafat Movement in 1920-21 and passing fearless and objective value judgments on each of them and pointing to future events. As a formidable practical historian, Smt Radha Rajan has admirably succeeded in picking out emblematic actions and utterances of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders from the vast storehouse that is the living past of Indias Freedom Movement: Occurrences, artifacts and utterances have been transformed by her into living historical tales. As for Oakeshott, so also for Smt Radha Rajan there is a close relationship between the practical attitude to the past and her ideology (any sort of pre-meditated political concept or abstraction). What Oakeshott has written in his famous essay The Activity Of Being An Historian, is wholly applicable to the brilliant value judgments and findings of Smt Radha Rajan: The categories of Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Justice and Injustice etc relate to the organization of the world --- Past or Present --- in respect of relationship to ourselves. Another observation of Oakeshott which is wholly applicable to the work of Smt Radha Rajan is that for a genuine historian the past is feminine; he loves it as a mistress of whom he never tires and whom he never expects to talk sense. The appeal of Smt Radha Rajans history to us all in the last analysis is poetic. As the great historian G.M Trevelyan has stated, the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That is what Smt Radha Rajan has done through her creative imagination with assiduous care in her book. In the light of all this, the root questions to be asked are as follows: Ought history to be merely the accumulation of facts about the past? Or ought it also to be the interpretation of facts about the past? Or one step further, ought it to be not merely the accumulation and interpretation of facts, but also the exposition of these facts and opinions in their full emotional and intellectual value to a wide public by the difficult art of literature? I can say with certainty (after having read the book many times!) Smt Radha Rajan has achieved great success on all these fronts in her exceptional book Eclipse of the Hindu Nation, Gandhi and his Freedom Struggle. All of us are wrong in our assumption that in writing, the creative process is the exclusive property of poets and novelists. I would like to suggest that the thought applied by a distinguished historian like Smt Radha Rajan to her subject matter is not less creative than the imagination applied by a novelist to the art of his novel. That is why the great English historian George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), the late Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and the great champion of literary as opposed to scientific history stated thus in his famous essay on the muse: I would always stress writing for the general reader as opposed to writing for fellow scholars because I know that when you write for the public you have to be clear and you have to be interesting. I have no patience with the idea that only imaginative writing is literature. Bad novels are not literature. Even polemical pamphlets, if they are good enough can become literature. In this context Trevelyan cited the pamphlets of John Milton (1608-1674), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Edmund Burke (17291797). Smt Radha Rajans book is a work of literature. It is a gold mine for her fellow scholars and at the same time it is also a great read for the general public because she has made her narrative history of Indias Freedom Movement both clear and interesting. Finally Trevelyan concluded that the best historian was he who combined knowledge of the evidence with the the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers. No one can deny that Smt Radha Rajan possesses all these qualifications. The last two human qualities mentioned by Trevelyan are no different from those necessary to a great novelist. They are a necessary part of a historians equipment because they are what enable him to understand the evidence he has accumulated. Imagination stretches the available facts --extrapolates them, so to speak, thus often supplying an otherwise missing answer to the Why of what happened. Sympathy is essential to the understanding of motive. Without sympathy and imagination, the historian can supply figures from a land revenue tax roll for ever --- or count

them by computer as they do nowadays --- but he will never know or be able to portray the people who paid the land revenue taxes. Smt Radha Rajan has combined the qualities of sympathy and imagination in the writing of her landmark book. Narrative history is neither as simple nor as straightforward as it might seem. It requires arrangement, composition, planning just like a painting --- like Raja Ravi Varmas famous painting of Goddess Saraswati or Goddess Lakshmi. Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) did not paint those figures with the light falling on them just so, without much trial and error and innumerable preliminary sketches. It is the same with writing history. Although the finished result may look to the reader natural and inevitable, as if the author had only to follow the sequence of events, it is not that easy. Sometimes, to catch attention, the crucial events and the causative circumstance have to be reversed in order --- the event first and the cause afterwards. Smt Radha Rajan is as painstaking as a writer as Raja Ravi Varma was as a painter. Her clear goals as a writer seem to be clarity, interest and aesthetic pleasure. On the first of these, I would like to quote, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), a great historian (excepting on India!) and writer on many subjects and themes: How little the all important part of making meaning of any writing pellucid is studied now! How hardly any popular writer, except myself, thinks of it. In Chapter I titled A Hindu Nation but Not a Hindu State, Smt Radha Rajan refers extensively to Kautilyas Arthashastra, the Hindu Science of Statecraft. According to Kautilya, rashtra implies both territory with well-defined borders and its inhabitants. I agree with her when she says that though Hindus comprise 83% of Indias population, yet when colonial rule ended on August 15 1947, despite being a Nation of Hindus, we failed to establish a Hindu Rajya(Hindu polity) enjoined and empowered to protect Sanatana Dharma and the dharmi, that is the Hindu dharma and the Hindu people. Smt Radha Rajan has correctly diagnosed that the following factors have been responsible for our failure to establish a Hindu Rajya: Both the British Raj and the Indian National Congress (INC) always discredited and/or ruthlessly put down all expressions of Hindu resistance and rebellion. Gandhi and his doctrines of passive resistance and non-violence came to occupy the public space vacated by Hindu nationalists and fiery proponents of Hindu Rajya like Tilak, Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar all of whom were towering Hindu thinkers and votaries of armed resistance. Gandhi de-legitimized Hindu anger and all expressions of Hindu anger. Nehru inherited the mantle of leadership from Gandhi and was actively hostile to everything Hindu. No important leader of the Freedom Struggle (with the striking exception of Veer Savarkar) explicitly articulated or delineated the concept of Hindu Rajya as the ultimate objective of the Freedom Movement. After the advent of Gandhi in 1915 and the ascent of Nehru in 1929, with the notable exception of Veer Savarkar, there was no sense of conscious Hindu political objectives to the Freedom Movement in general and to the Indian National Congress (INC) in particular. Very unfortunately there was no collective and conscious realization of the nature of a Hindu Rashtra and the objectives of Hindu Rajya and hence there was no intention or determination to achieve them. Aurobindo withdrew from the arena of politics in 1910. Tilak was sent to prison in Burma soon thereafter and after his return lived only for a few more years till his death in 1920. Veer Savarkar was jailed for 25 years from 1911. Thus the Hindu Society failed to throw up an outstanding leader (other than these 3 stalwarts) during the critically important period from 1890 to 1947. Sri Aurobindo and Bal Gangadhar Tilak had no clear conception or understanding of what is a Hindu Rashtra. Nor did they declare from any public platform that the goal of Purna Swaraj is the establishment of a Hindu State. Only Veer Savarkar was clear and categorical in his

view that the establishment of a Hindu State and Hindu Nation ought to be the aim of Purna Swaraj Smt Radha Rajan has argued with facts and tested documentary evidence that Mahatma Gandhi was adroitly pumped into the leadership vacuum deliberately created in India by the British Government in 1914. The British Colonial Government managed to politically smuggle M.K Gandhi out of South Africa and to plant him in India with effect from January 1915. In this pre-planned political operation, the British Government had cleverly and carefully utilised the services of a known Empire loyalist like Gopal Krishna Gokhale from 1909 onwards. The point to be noted here is that Gopal Krishna Gokhale died on 19 February 1915, within one month of MK Gandhis arrival in Bombay. Thus the British planned political field for MK Gandhi became totally open and clear in February 1915! It was Gopal Krishna Gokhale who visited South Africa twice and acted as a political ambassador between the Colonial Government of India, Government of Britain and Mr M.K Gandhi. It was Gokhale who convinced Gandhi that his services were more urgently required in India than in South Africa. It was the paramount political aim of the British Government, both in India and in Britain, to see that a mild and wobbly character like M.K Gandhi stepped into the leadership vacuum created by the forced exit of fiery and uncompromising Hindu Nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar. According to Smt Radha Rajan, in this murky design the British Government succeeded magnificently. I would put the planned injection of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi into the body politic of India in these words: The British Government wanted the strategic presence of M.K Gandhi in India in January 1915, particularly having regard to the several extremist movements for Indias freedom like the Gaddar Movement that were erupting in India and abroad during that time. Thus was ushered in the diabolic colonial intervention which irretrievably twisted the twig of events against Hindu Nationalism in the subsequent history of Indias Freedom Movement. I am putting it in this manner because I am always seduced by the sound of words and the interaction of their sound and sense. Smt Radha Rajan has rightly concluded with cold and biting sarcasm: Gandhis untested Mahatmahood gave him a ready constituency in 1920 but he declared that neither he nor the Indian National Congress (INC) represented Hindu interests! The swansong of the Congress party --- and of course, Sonia Congress Party --- continues to be the same even today. I shall be reverting to this contraband political operation of the Colonial British Government in India in the later parts of my review of this book. To quote the brilliant words of Smt Radha Rajan: The British Government in India used state power to brutalize and break the spirit of Hindu Nationalists to discourage all thoughts of armed resistance and political independence. Post-independence Indian Polity also continued with use of state power to quell Hindu Nationalism because Hindu Nationalism threatened to dismantle the shaky edifice of the bogus but highly remunerative secular polity which sustains politics of minorityism and their votaries. Let me now go back in time to the establishment of the Indian National Congress (INC) in December 1885. The most brilliant finding of Smt Radha Rajan is that the Indian National Congress (INC) was planned, organized, manufactured and launched according to their own imperialistic design, in the manner and measure required, by the colonial British Government in 1885. This task was entrusted to Allan Octavian Hume I.C.S. He founded the Indian National Congress (INC) in December 1885. The First Session of the Indian National Congress (INC) was held in Bombay in December 1885. Wyomesh Chandra Banerjee was the President of this Session. Salem Lion Vijayaraghavachariar (1852-1944), one of the greatest captains in our struggle for freedom and G. Subramania Iyer (1855-1916) attended this session from Madras Presidency. The picture of the First Session of the Congress in Bombay in December 1885 is given below.

According to Smt Radha Rajan, the INC has been touted by motivated historians as the ultimate vehicle of Indian Nationalism. The Indian National Congress (INC) was set up by A. O. Hume to make Indians willing and/or unwitting collaborators of the Raj. At any rate that ideology of Indian Nationalism always excluded the Hindus of India, their hopes, urges and aspirations! Before I conclude the second part of the review, I would again like to comment upon Smt Radha Rajans exceptional versatility as a historian and a historiographer. She makes us understand through her evocative and pointed writing that history is philosophy, teaching by example and also by warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology. She seems to tell us that history is nothing but the unrolled scroll of prophesy. As a historian Smt Radha Rajan is exact, sincere and impartial. She is free from fear, resentment or affection. She is faithful to the TRUTH, which is the Mother of History, the Preserver of Great Actions, the Enemy of Oblivion, the Witness of the Past, the Divine Director of the Future. The best tribute I can pay to her work is in the words of the great English Historian John Robert Seeley (1834-1895): History is not, as it was once regarded, merely a liberal pursuit in which men found wholesome food for the imagination and sympathies; but now it is a department of serious scientific investigations. We study it in the hope of giving new precision, definiteness and solidity to the principles of political science. As a dedicated scholar and historian, Smt Radha Rajan has done just that for educating us all about the imperative and paramount national need for the creation of a HINDU NATION with reference to the timeless principles of Hindu Statecraft and political science outlined by Kautilya in his famous Arthashastra Part III, 10-3-2010 In the second part of my review of Smt Radha Rajans book, I had referred to the deliberate British subterfuge behind the founding of the Indian National Congress (INC) in December 1885. Though Shri Aurobindo may not have openly articulated the British subterfuge relating to the establishment of the INC, yet he was fully aware of its serious deficiencies. Smt Radha Rajan considers 1893 as an important year in the evolution of our struggle for national freedom. She does so not because Mahatma Gandhi went to South Africa for the first time in his life in the year 1893 but because it was in 1893 that Shri Aurobindo started writing his series of 9 biting articles about the Indian National Congress (INC), titled New Lamps for Old, in Indu Prakash, a Marathi-English Daily published from Bombay. Shri Aurobindo was a young lad of 21 years at that time and the INC was barely 8 years old! In the last part of the series written on March 6, 1894 Shri Aurobindo uses the English language in an incendiary manner to describe what he thought of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) to which Sir Allan Octavian Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress (INC) belonged. Let me quote the biting words of Shri Aurobindo on the Indian Civil Service: And when one knows the stuff of which the Indian Civil Service (ICS) is made, one ceases to wonder at it. A shallow school-boy stepping from a cramming establishment to the command of high and difficult affairs can hardly be expected to give us anything magnificent or princely. Still less can it be expected when the sons of small tradesmen are suddenly promoted from the counter to govern great provinces. Not that I have any fastidious prejudice against small tradesmen. I simply mean that the best education men of that class can have in England does not adequately qualify a raw youth to rule over millions of his fellow human beings. It has to be borne in mind that Shri Aurobindo himself had also qualified for the final selection in the ICS in 1891 but he chose not to join it by deliberately absenting himself from the riding examination. One year earlier, from August 28, 1893 onwards, Shri Aurobindo started writing a series of impassioned articles under the title New Lamps for the Old pouring vitriol on the Congress for its Moderate policy. He was as forthright and lethal in his estimate of the Indian National Congress (INC) as he was about the ICS: I am quite aware that in doing this, my motive and my prudence may be called into question. I am not ignorant that I am able to censure a body which to many of my countrymen seems the mightiest outcome of our national life and if I were not fully

confident that this idea of ours is a snare and a delusion, likely to have the most pernicious effects, I should simply have suppressed my own doubts and remained silent. . I say, of the Congress, then, this --- that its aims are mistaken, that the spirit in which it proceeds towards their accomplishment is not a spirit of sincerity and whole-heartedness, and that the methods it has chosen are not the right methods, and the leaders in whom it trusts, not the right sort of men to be leaders; - in brief, that we are at present the blind led, if not by the blind, at any rate by the one-eyed. Shri Aurobindo came to the right conclusion: Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism. The Congress of that time was quite intolerant of criticism by Shri Aurobindo and reacted in such a peculiar manner that it pressurized the editors of Indu Prakash to discontinue the series of fiery articles by Shri Aurobindo. Following the lead given by Shri Aurobindo, the economic rape and plunder of India by the British Government came to be documented by many public men of the time. Dadabhai Navroji (1825-1917) wrote his famous book titled Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901. The public anger against the Colonial Government soon became a war cry. To quote the words of Smt Radha Rajan in this context: Yet Dadabhai Navroji, like Gandhi later in Hind Swaraj, blamed the British only partially, indeed, half-heartedly. Navroji understood that the predatory Raj was responsible for Indias gross impoverishment and economic deprivation, yet he defined this rapaciousness as Un-British! Excepting leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Shri Aurobindo and Veer Savarkar, all the rest of the National leaders from 1885 till 1905 seem to have been great admirers and supporters of the Colonial British (different from Un-British) Raj in India. It is not therefore surprising that Gandhi too picked up this theme with alacrity in his famous letter dated October 30, 1909 to Lord Ampthill in this manner: It is my deliberate opinion that India is going down not under the English heel but under that of modern civilization. The true remedy lies, in my humble opinion, in England discarding modern civilization which is ensouled by this spirit of selfishness and materialism is vain and purposeless and is a negation of the spirit of Christianity. I would be dealing with the strategic political significance of this letter to Lord Ampthill in the coming parts of the review. Shri Aurobindo was not taken in by the patently pro-British views of Gandhi in his Hind Swaraj and other writings. Shri Aurobindo did not share the view of Gandhi that the devilish evils of colonial administration could be attributed to modern Western civilization which ignored the Christian roots and went on the path of loot and plunder, exploiting most of Asia, Africa and America. In an explosive article titled Lessons at Jamalpur, published in Bande Mataram (Shri Aurobindo was its editor) on September 01, 1906, Shri Aurobindo saw clearly the roots of Christianity and exposed them: Under the stimulus of an intolerable wrong, Bengal in the fervour of the Swadeshi Movement parted company with the old ideals and began to seek for its own strength. It has found it in the people. But the awakening of this strength immediately brought the whole Swadeshi Movement into collision with the British interests and the true nature of the Englishman, when his interests are threatened, revealed itself. The Swadeshi Movement threatened British trade and immediately an unholy alliance was formed between the magistracy, the non-officials and the pious Missionaries of Christ, to crush the new movement by every form of persecution and harassment. The Swaraj and Swadeshi Movement masterminded by Shri Aurobindo, Bhupendranath Dutta, Barin Ghosh and Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, among other Bengal luminaries, was very much like the go-samrakshan (cow-protection) Movement of the 19th Century, because it was a spontaneous eruption of Hindu society, except that it made economic and broader cultural issues central to its concerns and was a spontaneous and determined reaction to the Partition of Bengal brought about by the arch-Colonial dictator Lord Curzon (1859-1925), the Viceroy of India.

According to Smt Radha Rajan, the Swaraj and Swadeshi Movement which came to be known even at that time as Boycott, aimed at total political independence from the British and not merely Self-Governance, Home-Rule, or Dominion Status, which would keep the Indian people in perpetual serfdom within the British Empire. Their Swaraj was Self-Governance as obtained not in the colonies of the Raj but in the Raj itself. Shri Aurobindo demanded Self-Rule, not like that of Canada, but like that of the United Kingdom. As articulated by Tilak and Shri Aurobindo, Swaraj and Swadeshi meant total and complete independence and therefore entailed the total boycott of all British goods, Government schools and the judiciary. I fully endorse the brilliant finding of Smt Radha Rajan to this effect: Boycott or Swaraj and Swadeshi was only passive resistance or Satyagraha, which post-independence Indian polity, for the sake of vested interests, continues to propagate as a Gandhian principle and virtue. When Shri Aurobindo was at the height of his powers as a fiery, patriotic political journalist, he wrote a series of outstanding articles on Passive Resistance under the general title New Thought in his own Journal, Bande Mataram from April 11, 1907 to April 23, 1907. Smt Radha Rajan says that Gandhis exposition on Satyagraha or Passive Resistance seems vacuous by comparison with Shri Aurobindos writings on Passive Resistance. I fully endorse her view that Gandhi could add very little to Shri Aurobindos discourse on Passive Resistance. Smt Radha Rajan has written, In typical Gandhi vein he does not give credit where it is due in his HIND SWARAJ, considered by Gandhians to be his seminal work. It is clear from Smt Radha Rajans book that Passive Resistance was the self-chosen lifeboat of Gandhi's political life in South Africa and India from 1893 to 1947. It is therefore necessary to refer to Gandhis doctrine of Passive Resistance in some detail. Here I would like to digress a little and deal with Gandhis paranoid doctrine of Passive Resistance in his own words. I have taken the quotations from a book titled HINDU DHARMA, by Gandhi published by Orient Paperbacks in 1978. I am presenting the front cover of this book, below. I am analyzing these quotations to show the twisted and warped, tortuous and treacherous heart and mind of Gandhi. Gandhis quotations given below are drawn from the above book have all been put in CAPITAL LETTERS. A. You will find in history cases of injustice done by Muslims. But their religion is a noble one and the Muslims are a noble people. I, therefore, advice every Hindu to place his full trust in his Muslim brethren [Hindu Dharma by Gandhi, Orient Paperbacks, Pg 54, 55] We can see that Gandhi is a confused man. After admitting that we can see in history cases of injustice by the Muslims, he concludes that Islam is a NOBLE RELIGION and foolishly expects Hindus to repose their FULL TRUST in the Muslims! Let me give an example to explain the lofty and mysterious workings of Gandhis mind. If a Muslim rape-warrior called Rahmatullah with a known criminal past marked by abduction/ kidnapping/rape of Hindu minor girls and women, comes to a Hindu house with the evil intent of raping the female members of that Hindu family, the Hindu householder must place his full trust in the Muslim rapist, treat Rahmatullah as his Islamic Brother and invite him into his house and treat that known Muslim rapist in a very cultured and humane manner, extending to him the full Hindu hospitality under the ancient Vedic injunction of atithi devo bhava. After suggesting this course of action to the Hindu householder, Gandhi continues to remain in self-created doubt and confusion. Here I have to revert to Gandhi again to carry this story forward! B. To quote Gandhi: but suppose that Muslims betray Hindus despite the latters generous behaviour? This view of Gandhi can be analyzed in detail as follows. Should the Hindu householder resist the rape of his family members by the Muslim bully? Well if the Hindu householder does indeed dare to resist the rape of his family members, then, what do you think would be the just and balanced judicial verdict of a Bar-at-Law like Gandhi? C. To quote Gandhi: We have made no sincere efforts to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity.

Of course, Gandhi does not think that the Hindu will resist, because, Gandhi in his Macaulayinduced utter ignorance of a thousand-year old Hindu track record of successful armed resistance to Islamic rape and rapine, believed that Hindus are cowards. So Gandhi goes on to ask, D. To quote Gandhi: WILL, HINDUS, IN THAT CASE REMAIN COWARDS? The operative word here is the word remain since for Gandhi it is an article of faith spiritually derived from his Inner Voice that Hindus are cast in the same cowardly mould as himself. So if our Hindu householder does not resist the rape of his family members by Rahmatullah, Gandhi would self-righteously exclaim with grave solemnity, Aha! I knew very well, all along, that you are a Hindu coward!!! Now let me go on to the most interesting part of the Islamic rape story. Now it can be asked, what should the Hindu householder do after the Muslim brother Rahmatullah has completed his Islamic obligation of rape of Hindu kafir woman? In order to answer this question, I have to refer to the truly Islamic words in letter and spirit of our saintly Gandhi once again: E. to quote Gandhi: I do not mean that Hindus should help because of their own weakness, but that it has become our duty to help the Muslims as neighbours since their case is just and the means they are employing are also just. So, when the Muslim brother rape-warrior Rahmatullah comes calling next time, to satiate his Islamic lust and carnal desire for Hindu women, Gandhi expects our Passive Resistor Hindu householder to perform the dominated, oppressed and suppressed kafirs DUTY TO HELP THE MUSLIM, by handing over his Hindu daughters to Rahmatullah, since the Islamic domination of Hindu Kaffirs is JUST and the Islamic MEANS of rape and loot of Hindus ARE ALSO JUST. Gandhi then seems to ask his next and final question: what would happen if the Hindu householder in question and all the other Hindus do not do their duty as slaves of the Muslims? This will be crystal clear from the clinching and inimitable words of Gandhi. F. to quote Gandhi: If they do not do this duty, they will strengthen the bonds of slavery and lose forever the opportunity of winning the friendship of Muslims. Doing it, they will shake off slavery and win over Muslims. Gandhi earnestly believed that every Hindu is fettered by BONDS OF SLAVERY. So the Hindu slave must meekly submit to the will --- every wish and whim of the violent, oppressive and rapist Muslims like Rahmatullah --- by handing over his daughters and wife to Rahmatullah in order to WIN OVER THE MUSLIMS. Gandhi mistakenly thought that only craven submission to the Muslims will lead to Hindu emancipation and manumission (liberation from slavery). Gandhiji behaved like a supreme dictator in enforcing his conflicting, vague and esoteric views on different aspects of life on his unsuspecting followers. I would even say that he thought himself to be a Swayambhu Linga in respect of all matters political, economic, scientific, scriptural, religious, spiritual, social and cultural. This is the reasonable inference I can draw from the great work of Smt Radha Rajan. Gandhijis dictatorial approach even in the intellectual and spiritual world of ideas seems to have been based on this authoritarian working philosophy: What I know on all matters of the mind heart and soul, perhaps one or two in the rest of the Universe (not even excluding Lord Shiva of Somnath or Lord Natraj of Chidambaram!) might know! But what I do not know (such a rare occasion arising on one occasion out of a thousand billion occasions!) noone would in the Rest of the Universe (including Lord Shiva or Goddess Parvati in Mount Kailas!) has a natural right to know. So much for Gandhis grandiloquent conceptions and notions of the Cosmic impact of the Non-Violent Doctrine of Passive Resistance upon mankind, with all its lethal practical day-today implications for the gullible and trusting Hindus of India! Consequently, only the Hindus of India were the victims of Gandhis ideological wickedness and ideological obduracy.

The Muslims of India were doubly fortunate. They had the wisdom and practical commonsense to completely reject the debilitating political ideology of Gandhi dressed in seemingly Hindu religious clothes! Islamic Maulana Nehru saw to it that the Muslims remaining in India were given special Minority rights under the Indian constitution so as to continuously pamper them and raise them to the level of super citizens, reminiscent of the times of Aurangzebs Islamic rule. The Muslims of India have also been given the special privilege of their being governed by the Muslim Personal Law instead of the Common Civil Code uniformly applicable to all the non-Muslim citizens of India. Those Muslims who were fortunate to go to Pakistan got their indivisible freedom not only to live in Dar-ul-Islam but also to drive out all the Hindus from there to India after looting their wealth and cornering all their landed property with the full official support of the Government of Pakistan. In driving out the Hindus from Pakistan to India --- almost all of them from West Pakistan and more than 90% of them from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to India --- the Muslims of Pakistan got the full political and military support of the Islamic Government of Pakistan, on the one hand and the full political support of the anti-Hindu pseudo-secular Government of India on the other. These brutal and patently anti-Hindu facts have been clearly brought out in a graphic manner by Smt Radha Rajan in her book. The first partition of Bengal effected by Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, was deliberately crafted on communal lines in order to create two continuously warring factions, viz, Muslim majority East Bengal and Hindu majority West Bengal. Shri Aurobindo saw this danger very clearly when he wrote: The Partition of Bengal was no mere administrative proposal but a blow straight at the heart of the nation. That it is something for other than this (administrative purpose), that the danger involved far more urgent and appalling, is what I shall try to point out in this article. Unfortunately, to do this is impossible without treading on Lord Curzons corns; and indeed one of the tenderest of all the crop. We have recently been permitted to know that our great Viceroy particularly objects to the imputation fo motives to his government and not unnaturally; for Lord Curzon is a vain man loving praise and sensitive to dislike and censure; more than that he is a statesman of unusual genius who is following subtle and daring policy on which immense issues hang and it is naturally disturbing him to find that there are wits in India as subtle as his own and which can perceive something at least of the goal at which he is aiming. The British Government in India met with a fierce and violent backlash from Bengal Hindus; Muslims in general and Bengali Muslims in particular were delighted with the move. This period saw Bankim Chandra Chatterjis Bande Mataram acquiring high Hindu Nationalist overtones which inspired some of the most brilliant writings of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Shri Aurobindo along with widespread, nation-wide Hindu armed resistance to the partition. Completely shaken up and shocked by the combined Hindu-Muslim uproar against the Partition of Bengal, the British Government under Lord Minto, the Viceroy convened a meeting of Muslim Leaders in Shimla in October 1906. Lord Minto took this decision to strengthen, if not Muslim support for the Raj, at least their non-cooperation with the Indian National Congress (INC), by widening the rift between the Hindus and Muslims. A delegation of Muslim leaders waited upon Lord Minto on that fateful day in October 1906 and it was led by Aga Khan. In a planned act of civil sabotage, Lord Minto and his henchmen had carefully stage-managed the visit of the Aga Khan delegation to Simla. In their Memorandum to Lord Minto they stated: The position accorded to the Mohammedan community in any kind of representation, direct or indirect, and in all other ways affecting their status and influence, should be commensurate not merely with their numerical strength, but also with their political importance and the value of the contribution which they make to the defense of the Empire and with due regard to the position they occupied in India a little more than a hundred years ago. So as to reach this goal, we

Muslims should be given the right to select our representatives through separate communal electorates. Lord Minto became an embodiment of diabolic courtesy, consideration and high culture when he told the Aga Khan delegation at Simla in 1906: In any system of representation, whether it affects a Municipality, a District Board or a Legislative Council, in which it is proposed to introduce or increase the electoral organization, the Mohammedan community should be represented as a community, and its position should be estimated not merely on numerical strength but in respect to its political importance and the service it has rendered to the Empire. I am entirely in accord with you. I am as firmly convinced as I believe you to be, that any electoral representation in India would be doomed to mischievous failure which aimed at granting a personal enfranchisement, regardless of the beliefs and traditions of the communities composing the population of this continent. The most disastrous consequence of this act of national communal sabotage was that the British Government made it clear to all the Muslims that the key to corner the maximum benefit lay in their staying united as a community as Muslims apart from the Hindus --- in short, only by remaining different, in every sense of the word, from the Hindus. The seeds of Pakistan and Muslim separatism were thus sown by Lord Minto in October, 1906. Lady Minto was able to see that this was a far-sighted decision from the British point of view. She recorded thus in her diary: Very very big thing had happened today; a work of statesmanship that will affect India and Indian history for many long years. It is nothing less than pulling back 62 Millions of people from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition. Two months after the October 1906 Shimla conclave, in December 1906, the Muslim League was setup as a counterfoil to what was perceived as a Hindu Indian National Congress (INC). Its mandate was to fulfill the incomplete agenda of 1857 war; the Partition of Bengal was seen as the first step towards the return of Muslim Rule over Hindustan; with hindsight, it was also the precursor to the vivisection of India on August 15, 1947. Smt Radha Rajan sums it all most brilliantly in these words: It seems logical to deduce that just as the British created the Indian National Congress (INC) to wean away important Hindus from opposition to British Rule and particularly armed resistance, they sponsored the Muslim League to counter the Swaraj and Swadeshi Movement. Aga Khan confirmed this truth much later after 1947 in his 'Memoirs' in which he wrote: Lord Minto's acceptance of our demands was the foundation of all future constitutional proposals made for India by successive British Governments and its final, inevitable consequence was the partition of India and the emergence of Pakistan. I cannot resist the temptation of giving another quotation from the book of Smt Radha Rajan. Let us hear her: The British Government conceived the Muslim League as a thorn in the flesh of the Hindus. State power made an ascendant Islam possible by undermining Indias Hindu community. A striking feature of the evolving Hindu polity at this time was that while the Raj exploited the gullibility of the English-educated Hindu political leadership of the Indian National Congress (INC) and planted British officials within the party besides getting one of them to create it in the first place, the Muslim League steadfastedly resisted White-penetration while playing ball with the Regime, wringing as many concessions and benefits for the Muslim community as Government was prepared to concede in separate but parallel attempts to check the rising tide of Hindu Nationalism. The same Hindu strategic weakness was seen on August 15, 1947 when the Congress government under Nehru allowed the British Queen appointed White Lord Mountbatten to continue as the Governor-General of India while in Pakistan, M.A Jinnah made it clear to Lord Mountbatten that his services were no longer required. This kind of slavish colonial mindset and fascination for the white skin continues even today with a Vatican appointed White woman Antonia Maino Gandhi of the Italian Civil Service (instead of the Indian Civil Service of British

India!!!) heading the Indian National Congress and acting as the de-facto Viceroy of the Pope in Rome for the evangelization of India. Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 AD 117) was a senator and historian of the Roman Empire. I am recalling him only to say that what he adjudged to be chief objective of history is wholly applicable to the splendid work of Smt Radha Rajan on Indias Freedom Struggle and the diabolic role played by Mahatma Gandhi, with unchallenged authority, in the eclipse of the Hindu Nation. These are the famous words of Tacitus: This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions. (To be continued)