Election-Time "Hindus" are the biggest Hypocrites in the World
Shrikant G. Talageri
I received one of the usual messages from Swarajya magazine, asking for subscriptions. But this time, the message accompanying the request seems to me to contain a veiled attack on Anand Ranganathan. The following is the message: the title is "Evening Check-In, 02 November 2023, How Anand Ranganathan became agitator-in-chief". The message goes on as follows:
"Dear Reader,
Anand Ranganathan has 10 lakh followers on Twitter alone. On YouTube and in TV News channels lakhs more watch him every day.
Amidst the cacophony of meaningless yelling and 'engagement' farming on social media Ranganathan's presence stands out - he's used the very same playbooks used by social media influencers and TV speakers to make for himself a space that stands for a more meaningful agenda and philosophy.
His cleverly scripted 30 second interventions and sarcasm loaded tweets are a perfect recipe for instant virality. But he doesn't do it for a political party or a promotion. He does it because it is the right thing to do - because he could make the world a little bit better for himself and others.
But can his modus operandi always work? Idealism is one thing and running a political party or government can be another - you see, the polemicist has the luxury of being aggressive and honest all the time but if you have to run complex things you have to be willing to compromise.
The latest Swarajya print issue explores this angle while telling you in detail about how Anand Ranganathan became the social media agitator-in-chief. The cover story is anchored by Swati Goel Sharma.
Get your own print issue now - become a print subscriber for just Rs 2400 (or go digital for Rs 999/year). Click to subscribe!"
Let me state at the very outset that I was not able to read the actual article about "how Anand Ranganathan became the social media agitator-in-chief" since obviously I have no intentions of paying my hard-earned money to buy or subscribe to a political party propaganda mouthpiece. But, unless the gist of the article is exactly opposite to what this above message (which calls him a "polemicist") as well as the very title of the article show it to be, the article is clearly a veiled attempt to pull him down several pegs and present him in an unfavourable light.
Let me just deal with the insolent statement contained in the above message: "Idealism is one thing and running a political party or government can be another - you see, the polemicist has the luxury of being aggressive and honest all the time but if you have to run complex things you have to be willing to compromise."
As another "polemicist", let me point out a glaring truth: these hypocrites advocating that people (meaning the BJP) "running a political party or government" do not have the "luxury of being aggressive and honest all the time" (thankfully they admit that we "polemicists" are "honest") because they "have to run complex things" and "have to be willing to compromise" never applied the same principle to the Congress during all these decades when they painted the Congress as anti-Hindu and the BJP as pro-Hindu and when the BJP came to power on the back of these tactics:
1.They have consistently been attacking the Congress, whose leaders have been having to "run complex things" for decades by being similarly "willing to compromise". But strangely, there was never really any question of the Congress "compromising", since it never claimed to represent Hindu interests − unlike the BJP which always did, and still does in the opinion of its diehard supporters. So any "compromises" they have made were nothing as compared to the compromises being made by the BJP in its declared ideology. You cannot condemn the smaller compromisers who never made any promises while condoning the bigger ones who always did. [Correction: you can do just that, and much more than that, if you are an unprincipled BJP supporter].
2. Not only did the Congress never claim to represent Hindu interests, but their anti-Hindu acts − going not by the accusations of "polemicists" but by the claims of their own [BJP] party propaganda machinery, their "compromises" were never as great or lethal as those of the BJP. Recently, the BJP advertised the fact − is it a fact, though? Anything the BJP says is always suspect − that in 67 years of pre-Modi (mainly Congress) rule, Muslims continued to constitute only 4.5% among government servants, but in 9 years of Modi/BJP rule, their numbers rose to 10.5%. What will the numbers be after one or two more stints of BJP rule, I wonder.
Anand Ranganathan wrote the cold truth in his recent book "Hindus in Hindu Rashtra", and reiterated the same in his many interviews after the publication of that book. The BJP supporters cannot counter the facts and the truth, so the only recourse is to slander and defame. In this "Hindu Rashtra", "polemicists" like Anand Ranganathan (and Nupur Sharma before him) have to pay heavily for their words. But as Anand Ranganathan said at the end of a recent interview, he is not courageous, he (like all other "polemicists") is a coward: but in spite of knowing (as he specifically stated) that he has to face the twin threats of the sar-tan-se-juda gang and the powerful government, he prefers to indulge in a cowardice which is infinitely more courageous than the "courage" of the powerfully entrenched government-backed forces, the real polemicists, who call him names.
And while Anand Ranganathan is being defamed and slandered and called a "polemicist", people like the "stand-up comedian" Munawar Faruqui, known for his insulting jokes about Sita and other Hindu divinities to the applause of leftist and anti-Hindu audiences, is minting money, and is currently the top star on the notorious show "Bigg Boss", and almost certain to be the winner!
But, let me indulge in a little bit more of honest "polemics": I have much greater respect even for Munawar Faruqui, who is at least honest in saying what he thinks, than I have for these hypocrites who do not seem to know the meaning of the words "truth", "honesty" and "principles". I have more respect for the Breaking India Forces than I have for the BJP and its propagandists.
