A Short Review of Anand Ranganathan's "Hindus in Hindu Rashtra − Eighth-Class Citizens and victims of State-Sanctioned Apartheid"

 

A Short Review of Anand Ranganathan's "Hindus in Hindu Rashtra − Eighth-Class Citizens and victims of State-Sanctioned Apartheid"

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

I rarely buy books on Amazon:  I doubt if I have ever bought more than two or three (and the first one, and the one that I remember, was Devdutt Pattanaik's book "Jaya"!). But when I saw this book in my cousin's house and glanced through it, I knew that I just had to buy it. To my surprise (the price on Amazon I think must go on changing), this 135 page hard- cover version, priced at 399/- was available at 119/- + delivery 70/- = 189/-, and so I ordered two copies, which I received today morning.

After the Voice of India corpus of books and most of the books by Arun Shourie and Koenraad Elst, and the two parts of Rajiv Malhotra's "Breaking India" series, this book (with due apologies to other writers who may also have made significant contributions whom I may have inadvertently missed out on mentioning here), this present book by Anand Ranganathan is one more absolutely must-read book. the title of the book itself says it all, but, in addition, we appropriately have other comparable stalwarts like Meenakshi Jain, J Sai Deepak (who also writes the brilliant foreword to the book) and Vikram Sampath (who also writes the brilliant  afterword to the book) along with eminent SC lawyer Vishnu Jain, giving their full support and endorsement to this book on the front cover, back cover and the Advance praise section:

Vikram Sampath: "If, even after reading this scholarly and evocative work−a small masterpiece in its own right−the Hindus and the governments of this country do not wake up to take control and address these issues, the fate of the community will sadly be akin to that of lambs being quitly led to their own slaughter".

J. Sai Deepak: "Powerfully demonstrates that Hindus were and continue to be eighth-class citizens regardless of who holds the reins of power; hope it awakens, re-awakens, hearts and minds. A must-read".

Meenakshi Jain: "This book is a ruthless exposure of monumental follies. What Ranganathan describes, chapter after chapter, is discrimination unparalleled in world history, in that it is directed against the  majority community……..Awareness is a necessary first step to course correction and one hopes this crisp and powerful book does exactly that".

Vishnu Jain: "A searing commentary, a manifesto of sorts for the modern Indic age. One hopes it is not reduced to just a cry in the wilderness".  

This book does not require my endorsement: Anand Ranganathan has millions of fans, as do the above masterminds giving their strong endorsement of this book. But I want to place my respects on record, and I urge everyone to buy this book or to read it from wherever they can, and to propagate its contents. The big advantage of this book is, that it is "crisp and powerful", only 135 pages including everything! I myself am never able to keep my writings crisp, however much I want and try to do so, so I am all the more aware of the importance of crispness in writing. After all, in my opinion, the greatest book on politics ever written is "Animal Farm" by George Orwell, and just see the size of that book!

The book contains eight chapters:

1. State Control of Hindu Temples

2. Injustice Towards Kashmiri Hindus

3. The Waqf Act, 1995

4. The RTE Act

5. Legislations that Appease Non-Hindus but Target Hindus

6. Judiciary that Almost Exclusively Tries to Reform Hinduism

8. Places of Worship Act, 1991

I will not go into detail about these chapters. Let it suffice to say that they are all brilliant, and absolutely must-read and cannot be summarized by me here.

Ultimately, the book is more than likely to still remain "just a cry in the wilderness", since a wilderness is precisely what India has become today, under treacherous pseudo-Hindutva rule − even more than it was under "secular" rule. It is not enough if the book is read, understood and supported by millions of Hindus: ultimately the people who those millions of Hindus vote for and bring to power will be the ones who will be in a position to do something more concrete than just becoming aware of the true situation (though this awareness itself is no mean thing, and is a necessary first step towards further concrete action). And there is no real hope that anyone, least of all the pseudo-Hindutva Parivar, will ever have even the slightest desire to do anything really concrete for Hindus.

In this context, something not mentioned in the otherwise brilliant chapter on The Waqf Act, 1995, is a fact that was being discussed on the internet a few months ago, see the tweet below:

The chapter somehow does not mention this fact (I don't know why, since the writer as well as his endorsers make it clear that they are under no illusions about the character of the present regime), although it does indirectly make a tongue-in-cheek reference to the BJP as follows: "the hard Congress went away in 2014 and was replaced by the soft Congress" (p.40). While this omission does not detract from the brilliance, the importance and the must-read character of the chapter and the book, it should make us realize that, although it is true that "hope springs eternal in the human breast", it can only be a hopeless hope so far as the Hindu breast is concerned: Hindus and Hinduism have no hope in India.

 

Post-script Added 23-9-2023:

I want to incorporate into this article a question asked in a comment to my article, and my reply to it:

Question: How does BJP benefit from the Waqf act? That too in 1995! Why would Ram Ratan move that amendment? This is what I don't get, can you elaborate this, Sir?

Reply: Please buy and read this book. Read the chapter on the Waqf Act 1995 in full and in detail. Understand the full horror of the act.

Hindus should learn to look at facts with open eyes, instead of modestly averting their eyes from unpleasant facts and asking foolish escapist questions. When one sees a man getting drunk and beating up his wife everyday, does one ask "How does he benefit from this act?". When the BJP gives over 70000 crores of public funds looted from Hindu temples to minority-only schemes, you cannot escape the fact by asking "How does the BJP benefit from looting funds from Hindu temples and giving them to the minorities?"

The only psychology we need to examine (if we want to spend our time examining psychology) is why Hindus have this suicide mentality which makes them defend and whitewash those who make a joke out of their existence, like the daily-beaten wife who defends her husband against anyone who tries to save her. Why the BJP does or does not do something - whether out of sheer villainy, out of extraordinary stupidity, or out of gross mercenary miscalculation - is not important.