Dear Editor,
Never have I seen such a vicious, angry and acrimonious denunciation of any world leader in any of our media outlets as that of Mr. Christopher Ram’s frenzied vilification of India’s Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi using the pandemic as a pretext for his invectives. Will it be remembered as a letter highlighting the pandemic travails of the country or as a letter of extreme scurrility seeking to anathemize a world leader? (SN May 3, 2021)
Mr. Ram ostensibly invokes our relationship with India as the reason for his fulminations which he calls “speaking up.” The same rationale of long-standing relationship should have led him to condemn the United States where in the early days of the pandemic large numbers of COVID-19 victims were buried in unmarked mass graves. He said nothing about President Donald Trump even the media in the US were calling him out on his “anti-science” stance on the virus and its spread.
If our relationship is the reason for “speaking up” I have seen nothing from Mr. Ram about China whom the world has to thank for the virus, and which has virtually decimated democracy in Hong Kong, or about the camps in that country imprisoning the Uighur Muslim population. After all, Mr. Ram is bleeding for the welfare of Muslims in India so one would expect him to have the same concern for the Uighur Muslims. As a matter of fact, I have not seen any Muslim leader or country that has challenged China on the treatment of the Uighurs.
So, why the Indian leadership, Mr. Ram? Well, it has always been easy to trample on India with no consequence such as revocation of visa. For many people around the globe India, and obviously for Mr. Ram as well, is seen as a soft target.
The leadership in any country takes credit when things go well and must equally take the responsibility in any crisis. The Mr. Narendra Modi that I know will have no hesitation in accepting any censure, as he has always gracefully done, for he is an ardent devotee of the Bhagavad Gita principle of balance in praise and blame. So, I can agree with Mr. Ram in “placing the blame where it belongs: at the feet of Narendra Modi.”
Many things can be said about the government mishandling the situation, mismanagement of resources, failure to anticipate severity of the spread and so on. And all these would probably be justified. But Mr. Ram went after Modi and for things not related in any way to the present pandemic, regurgitating a great deal of worn-out, over-used factual inaccuracies and labels which have been levelled at him since he burst into political prominence.
The world knows that India has a robust parliamentary system and one of the most adversarial media anywhere in the world. Mass protests, a clear mark of an open and free society, in India are frequent and dynamic as seen by the current months-long farmers protest in New Delhi. In stark contrast to despotism, Mr. Ram himself tells us that Narendra Modi has conceded his party’s defeat in West Bengal and we have since learned that the BJP has congratulated the leader of the victorious party who herself lost in her constituency to a BJP candidate. Mr. Ram, like Anthony would say of ambition, “Despotism is made of sterner stuff.”
One remembers that it was Mr. Ram, among others, who accus-ed President Ali when he was Minister of Housing of all kinds of transgressions, and the Granger administration immediately launched its investigations which after five years come up with nothing with which to prosecute President Ali. Charges and accusations without evidence become innuendos.
One wonders whether Mr. Ram has a philosophical problem with the idea of a theocratic state or he is concerned with only India becoming theocratic? One wonders also whether the idea of a Christian theocratic state or an Islamic theocratic state is an acceptable one, but not a Hindu theocratic state. If Mr. Ram has a philosophical problem with theocracies, then he has been strangely silent on the dozens of Islamic Republics from north Africa to Malaysia, including the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and until recently the Islamic Republic of Bangladesh, as he has been silent on the Vatican theocratic state. However, leaving aside all these considerations, I will now appeal to Mr. Ram to list all those actions that Mr. Modi has undertaken as alleged in converting India into a “Hindu State.”
Mr. Ram next accuses Mr. Modi of stripping “Indian Muslims of their citizenship rights,” by the Citizenship Amend-ment Act passed into law in 2019. As I understand it the CAA provides the pathway to citizenship to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who flee and have fled religious persecution in the Islamic Republics of Afghanistan and Pakistan and until recently Bangladesh. The act recognises a long history of the persecution of religious minorities, especially Hindus, in the region.
I have never heard of Mr. Ram raising any objection to the well-documented persecution of Hindus in any of these countries. Every Indian government till now has as well been silent on the issue. Even the powerful Indira Gandhi could not bring herself to use the “H” when she condemned the murders of Hindus in Bangladesh, both by Bengali Muslims and the occupying Pakistan Army during the Bangladesh liberation struggle, so well reported and documented in a series of telegrams sent to Kissinger and Nixon by the US Consul in Dacca, Archer Blood.
Now comes a leader at last who has declared enough is enough. India will henceforth open its arms to all religious minorities who flee religious oppression, hatred and bigotry which everyone knows is as common place as chapati in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Not a word in the Act has been said about Indian Muslim citizens. Still, I will again plead with Mr. Ram to tell us how the CAA intends to strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship rights. How has the CAA since 2019 stripped a single Indian Muslim of his or her citizenship rights?
I had cause to respond to an incorrigible interlocutor recently by stating that the world has so long been accustomed to see Hindus on their backs and knees, that the slightest gesture to get on their feet drives all kinds of irrational fears in the hearts of many.
As far as Indian secular values are concerned it is my unbounded faith that the more Hindu India is the more secure will be these values. If by some stroke of history, not entirely inconceivable, India were to become a Muslim dominant state, there is no doubt it will herald the end of secularism. Maybe Mr. Ram would prefer to see India as an Islamic theocracy.
Yours faithfully,
Swami Aksharananda
