Nageswara Rao Ji: You Are Wrong

 

Nageswara Rao Ji: You Are Wrong

Shrikant G. Talageri 

 

M Nageswara Rao has put up the following tweet just a short while ago, and someone already sent it to me for my reaction:

https://x.com/MNageswarRaoIPS/status/1988157976910463384

“THE POWER OF BELIEF

Part 1: The Individual Experiment

 He was a man already sentenced to die; his fate sealed, the electric chair waiting. But then, an unusual proposal came. A scientist approached him with an alternative: instead of a violent execution, he could take part in a psychological experiment that promised a peaceful death. The method sounded simple, almost harmless. A small incision on the wrist. A bowl placed beneath the arm. And the quiet sound of liquid dripping. Desperate to avoid the terror of the chair, the prisoner agreed. He was strapped to a stretcher. His eyes were covered so he could not see. A shallow cut was made, just enough to feel pain, but the real trick was hidden. The bowl beneath him wasn’t collecting blood. Nearby, a concealed bottle slowly released fluid drop by drop, mimicking the sound of his life draining away. The prisoner believed the illusion completely. As the drip continued, his skin grew pale. His breathing became shallow. His heart raced in panic. He felt himself dying because his mind accepted that death was happening. And when the dripping stopped, his body surrendered. No massive blood loss. No internal failure. No poison. He died purely from belief.

Part 2: The Collective Haemorrhage – Modern Hindus

This experiment revealed something unsettling and extraordinary: the mind can shape reality; not just for individuals, but collectively for communities and societies. A single person can die from imagined bleeding; an entire community can collapse from imagined defeat. When a society or people believes it is doomed, it begins to unravel even before the real blows land. Not because survival is impossible, but because collective belief in failure makes it so. Today, this defeatist mentality is gripping modern Hindus and Hindu society. A slow, invisible mental haemorrhaging is underway through the relentless de-Hinduisation process; a drip-by-drip erosion of cultural confidence, historical pride, and civilizational identity. Temples are reduced to tourist sites, scriptures to museum pieces, and Sanskrit to a “dead language.” The youth are taught shame instead of reverence for their history, religion, culture and civilisation; apology instead of assertion. And the sinister role of the #PseudoHindutva Sangh Parivar in this process is no mean. What began as a movement to awaken Hindu consciousness has, in many quarters, devolved into ritualistic rhetoric and political opportunism, draining the very vitality it claims to protect. Instead of bold reclamation, there is bureaucratic control. Instead of intellectual revival, there is sloganised stagnation. The drip continues: one compromised narrative, one diluted tradition, one silenced voice at a time. Fear alone can weaken the body, a family, or a people. Hope alone can restore it. Belief can kill but it can also heal, build, rise, and overcome. In life, many people, communities, and societies lose long before they fail because they convince themselves they can’t succeed. The battlefield is lost in the mind before the first shot is fired; the civilization surrenders in its stories before its temples fall. As the saying goes: “He who believes he is defeated is defeated already. He who believes he can win has already begun.” Hindu society must stop the drip. Reclaim the narrative. Restore the belief. Or bleed out — slowly, silently, and entirely by volition.”

1:42 P.M.

Nageswara ji; you are wrong.

Of course, in the last line, you hit the nail on the head: “Reclaim the narrative. Restore the belief. Or bleed out – slowly, silently, and entirely by volition”.

And there are many pieces of pure truth (repeated hitting of the nail on the head) in what you write: “A slow invisible mental haemorrhaging is underway through the relentless de-Hinduization process: a drip-by-drip erosion of cultural confidence, historical pride and civilizational identity. Temples are reduced to tourist sites, scriptures to museum pieces, and Sanskrit to a “dead language”. The youth are taught….apology instead of assertion. And the sinister role of the #Pseudo-Hindutva Sangh Parivar in this process is no mean. What began as a movement to awaken Hindu consciousness has in many quarters devolved into ritualistic rhetoric and political opportunism, draining the very vitality it claims to protect. Instead of bold reclamation, there is bureaucratic control. Instead of bold reclamation, there is bureaucratic control. instead of intellectual revival, there is sloganised stagnation. The drip continues: one compromised narrative, one silenced voice at a time. Fear alone can weaken the body, a family or a people. Hope alone can restore it. Belief can kill but it can also heal, build, rise and overcome. In life, many people and communities, and societies lose long before they fail because they convince themselves they can’t succeed. The battlefield is lost in the mind before the first shot is fired; the civilization surrenders in its stories before its temples fall. As the saying goes: “He who believes he is defeated is defeated already. He who believes he can win has already begun””.

If you are absolutely right in all this, and in fact you are hitting the nail on the head, why am I saying “Nageswara ji; you are wrong”?

Because, although you are basically and in general right when you say: “A single person can die from imagined bleeding; an entire community can collapse from imagined defeat. When a society or people believes it is doomed, it begins to unravel even before the real blows land. Not because survival is impossible, but because collective belief in failure makes it so”, you are wrong in this particular context.

Look around you with open eyes. You will see that most people (those who love Hinduism and want to see it not only survive but succeed and win through, as well as those who hate Hinduism and want to see it destroyed) actually believe Hindus are winning through. There is no “collective belief in failure”; or, if there is, there is to a very much greater extent a “collective belief in ultimate victory under BJP/Modi”.

And this is far more dangerous. Blind “belief” in anything is dangerous. What is required is not “belief” in ultimate victory but “awareness and consciousness” of the actual facts and situation and an “unswerving determination to fight it out and win through”: the desire to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat, and not to complacently believe that we are winning (“everything is in good hands”) and can take it easy. What is required is not “faith and belief in victory” which manifests itself as “faith and belief in individuals, parties and organizations”, but “faith and belief in principles, and in the truth, over faith and belief in individuals, parties and organizations”. We must fight not because Hinduism is winning through: it is not! We must fight because Hinduism is indeed being set on the path of defeat by the BJP and Modi,        

Nageswara ji, I am a very great fan and admirer of yours, and I can understand the mental turmoil which is gripping you. The same turmoil is gripping me and all true Hindus who care for the future of Hindus, Hinduism and Indian culture and civilization.

You write: “The youth are taught shame instead of reverence for their history, religion, culture and civilization”. Except in specific cases (the RSS chief asking RSS swayamsevaks to eat beef in order to win the hearts of beef-eating “dalits”! Or politicians playing reservation politics) this is not fully correct. True, this government is accelerating the process of westernization (in the name of modernization and development) to the extent where an increasing (and increasing in geometric progression) percentage of the youth are becoming purely westernized and adopting a mercenary and indifferent attitude towards Indian heritage, but at the same time increasing number of youths are also becoming more proud of their history, religion, culture and civilization. Both the trends have always been there in India (even, I remember, in my youth in the sixties and seventies) but they covered only the well-informed or educated (or consciously traditionalistic vs. consciously rebellious) sections among the populace, and there was a huge mass of youths who were so uninformed about everything that they had no particular opinions. Now, with the massive onslaught of information technology and addictive social media platforms, and with open clashes between nationalism (unfortunately often just jingoistic-nationalism or vyakti-bhakti instead of true informed nationalism) and wokism, both the opposite sides are increasing in number, and the number of uninformed youths are increasingly joining one or the other side. It is difficult to say who will win this battle of perceptions.

It is heartening in this situation that there are people like you who will fight for Hinduism and for the Truth through thick and thin. If you are doing it in the belief that Hinduism will ultimately triumph, or in the belief that believing that Hinduism will ultimately triumph will lead to actual victory, all my best wishes are with you. But, as you yourself put it in your above tweet, “Belief can kill but it can also heal”. Unfortunately, the majority of “Hindus who think as Hindus” have a belief which “can kill” rather than a belief which “can heal”: they have belief in the power of bhakti (bhakti  towards individuals and parties, and not towards truth and principles).

I myself believe that Hinduism will be defeated and that nothing can save India. I have realized that there is nothing that I can really do about it, but that does not and will not stop me from trying till my last breath. But neither will I let it spoil my health. I console myself with the following selfish realization (which I expressed out of pique in a recent article, but then suddenly realized that it was actually true!):

“I know positively now that India, in a hundred years, will be an Islamic state with a sizable Christian minority and a slightly smaller Hindu minority (consisting of different caste groups fighting it out amongst themselves). But unless all my above articles are completely wiped out from all records and memory with Orwellian “1984”-like efficiency, the OIT will still prevail. Who knows: maybe Islamic India will be proud of being the Original Homeland of the IE languages (most of Indo-European Europe also having become Islamic by then)? After all, Pakistan does claim a history of 5000 years from the Harappan Civilization onwards: and the “Aryan” question is purely one of Language, not of Religion, Philosophy, Cosmology or Race!”