A Secular Protocol

By Tarun Vijay



Patience is the key that defines facilitating others’ survival more than your own. Earth, mother we call her, symbolises that element of life. She le ts the barbarian exploit her boons and the bliss , and waits for a millennium to show she is angry.


Indian society, which believes in the values of the civilisational flow so painstakingly preserved and handed over to us, is being subjected the same kind of test of patience by the forces that represent the colors of Roman and Arab ancestry.


Like history can’t be understood through secondary or tertiary sources, original references have to be consulted, watershed incidents in a nation’s life have to be analysed through original events. Hence after Meenakshipuram, the forced exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, Godhra and Kandhmal murders, its now the turn of Bodo Hindus in Assam to face Muslim attacks.


So far 40 Hindus have been reported killed and 76,000 people have left their villages out of fear and taken refuge in 32 state government camps in Udalguri and Darrang. Twelve villages have been burnt. In Jhakuapara village the gaon budhaa (village head) was burnt alive along with his mother and sister. It all began after local Hindus resisted the forcible occupation of their lands by Muslims. The area has suddenly seen Bodo Hindus reduced to a minority and a spurt in the activities of the All Assam Minority Students Union (AMSU), SIMI, All Assam Muslim Chatra Parishad and Muslim Students Association (MUSA). Now, having burnt Hindu villages and forced them to flee, Muslims are occupying the villages vacated by Hindus.


The Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF - Badruddin Ajmal’s Muslim Political Party) MLA Rasul Haq Bahadur and AAMSU president Abdul Aziz have been demanding a separate autonomous area for the Muslims in lower Assam. The recent violence is considered as a ‘warming up’ exercise’ to chase away Hindus from their traditional hamlets.


Saw any report or interviews of the victims or front page ’shame’ editorials condemning the roasting alive of Hindus, or making them refugees in their own land? Got any call from Vatican or admonishment from Paris? Sorry, the victims happened to be Hindus so we can devote our space and time on matters more earthly like ICL cricket and red alerts in the stock exchange.
Hate sells. The more you add poison to it, the more you get elevated on the scales of leadership and fame. They say terrorism is the main issue. But do you think any one wants to fight it? All that appears on the list are a few ghastly pictures of the terror-struck common people, a few ‘good’ slogans, emotional lines of poetry and the election plank is ready. Greed, intolerance, revenge and bigotry of the secular kind have taken centrestage to constitutionalise a hate regime that thrives on disrobing India of her unique characteristics. Anything that defines that uniqueness is under assault and like a colonial dispensation; this has become a business of profit and comfort. Grants, awards and fellowships are reserved for those who yield and say yes to the secular protocol that defines India as a non-Hindu entity, using terms like ’shackled in the old’, ‘outdated’, ‘obscurantist Brahmanism’ and ‘weird ritualism which makes the practitioner rigid, backward looking’ and ‘pot-bellied, unintelligent creature with a tuft’.


The sultans of this secular protocol define an assertive Hindu as anti-women, anti-minority (read Muslims and Christians), Hindi chauvinist, having a fossilized vision that tries to revive a dead language like Sanskrit, worshipper of snakes, rats, cow, phallus, trees, who uses cow urine, cow dung for various purposes including medicine. They light fire and throw some herbs to please gods, who are elephant-shaped, and use peacocks, oxen and owls as their vehicles. They have to be civilized. And to do that they get grants from the ministry of culture.