When The Saints Get
Lynched In
Louis Armstrong
sang the famous song, ‘When the saints go marching’ in the famous ballad to
express his feeling of divinity and admiration for the Christian saints. If he
were asked to sing the same song for saints belonging to Hinduism wearing
saffron he would have to change a few words to fit in with what is happening to
saints in India today. One would have to replace marching with lynching and it
would tell another story to the world that is hidden and not allowed to come
out for many centuries.
Saints getting
lynched is not news in India or for that matter anywhere in the rest of the world.
It can be provided the saints make a change and stop wearing saffron. Saffron
has been labelled as a color of a terror with the word ‘saffron terror’. Earlier
an association was made of it with that of child lifters and sexual violence, two
of the most heinous crimes. Isn’t it worth asking who and which institution
linked the two and why?
One wonders why no
other color has come close to being associated with crimes in India. Maybe the
creators of the word ‘saffron terror’ can explain why their masters told them
to invent it. Has anyone ever wondered why in their nightmares, so many
sexually abused children across the world, see a smiling saint in white robe?
Today, saint
wearing saffron dare not walk through many streets of India. Saints wearing other
colors have no such problem. So strong is our secularism. No saffron saints can
wear their robes, hold their holy books and preach about decadent idol worship without
fear in the remote corner of India like the saints of other religions can march.
And if confronted, their story of victimhood assures them a safe hearing to
media of the world and front page headlines. The entire intolerant majority in
India falls in line in no time.
When was the last
time we saw our saints wearing saffron walk in say Kashmir, in Nagaland or other
northeastern states without fear? The list grows by leaps and bounds with more parts
of West Bengal, Kerala and now Maharashtra being drawn into the orbit. Our beloved
‘Chacha’, who called himself a Hindu by mistake, even forbade saints wearing
saffron from visiting States in North East on the advice of Verrier Elvin, a White
anthropologist, otherwise called a missionary. The order is seen as a golden
yardstick. So effective was his presence that Hindus got wiped out from there.
Any obituaries anyone? Brownie points for India’s seculars for winning an
award.
His daughter,
Indira, went a step further and ordered firing on the saints who protested
against cow slaughter. That was not enough so she inserted the word ‘secular’
in our Constitution during the period of ‘Emergency’.
Our leaders dread
being shown as anti secular and not Hindus. I am sure there are agencies who
rank them on a scale to see how secularism is doing in India. A lesser number
of converts in a year, missionaries not allowed to go in a certain area draws
up the index in no time.
So, with the
politician firing bullets, the fourth pillar writing against him, the
intellectuals vilifying him, what chance does the saint in the saffron have to
survive. He has no Pope to speak up for him, no court to listen to his agonies,
no leader in UN to stand up for him. He stands alone, a solitary figure of
fortitude and loneliness, one who never asks for help and charts a lonely path.
He travels and lives wherever he finds shelter, eats what he finds and has no possessions.
Unlike his counterparts of other religions, he walks alone standing up for his
religion that is persecuted but never playing victimhood and not bothered about
his life.
The saint in
saffron was the protagonist of the book ‘Anandamath’ by Bankim Chandra that
gave the nation the song ‘Bande Mataram’. It awakened a nation that slept from
despair. Why did the British ban the book whose protagonist and theme was only
a song that linked our freedom, our nation with the saints in the saffron? Was an
awakening imminent?
I believe the key
to India’s resurgence lies in the unknown saint in the saffron who faces
persecution like in Palghar. The saint who was killed in Palghar is the same one
whose ancestors were exterminated, who was stopped from traveling by ‘Chacha’,
who was fired upon by successive governments. The invaders of the past could
destroy India’s temples, her universities, her education, her legacy but they
could not destroy the wondering saint in saffron who once roamed in every
village, who can still be found in every corner of India wandering alone. He doesn’t
convert, he doesn’t spread of a message of hatred against anyone. He remains the
only institution of the past whom invaders, colonialism, missionaries and their
wealth could not destroy. It is he who kept alive the legacy of the ‘Kumbh Mela’
and all religious festivals. It is he who carries even the smallest memory that
belongs to our destroyed past, the betrayals and the sadness that we are left behind
with as a legacy. The passage of time has not destroyed his spirit, no atrocity
has destroyed his purpose and all pogroms and violence against him has not made
him extinct.
The re-awakening
of the India will not come from any material advancement, by making new highways
or from bright glimmering malls but will come from the spiritual awakening that
the spirit of the unknown saint represents.
A hundred years
ago, a defeated nation was roused by the words of an unknown Hindu saint in saffron.
He had sat shivering at a train station almost ready to be sent to jail. With
not a penny with him, he carried the message of a glorious past of his religion
and a philosophy. His words roused a nation chained in slavery whose people had
begun to believe they were savages. As someone had remarked after listening to
him, ‘we realize how foolish it is to send our saints to preach there’.
Can we step back
and ask what if a Shankaracharya, a Vivekananda were to appear amongst us today
and want to take a journey across India? How far will they be able to go without
being lynched?
Once a reader of
my book ‘The Infidel Next Door’ had felt frustrated and asked me why does its protagonist,
a Hindu priest walks alone surrounded by enemies? Why doesn’t he ever run away?
Why is it that despite no one coming for his help he fights a lone battle? When
I told him every Hindu saint down the ages has done the same, he said he will
look at them differently from now on.
Lala Lajpat Rai
once said, ‘every blow of lathi on my body will become a nail in the coffin of the
British empire’. His martyrdom produced a Bhagat Singh, a Raj Guru, a Sukhdev and
many others who changed the course of history. How many more blows will we take
on our bodies, on the soul of our nation before we wake up and know we are the
next on the list?
I want to say in anguish
that we need a Bhagat Singh, a Raj Guru, a Vivekananda who can force us to face
the reality that our ‘Matri Bhumi’ needs protection. Only then our saints in
saffron can march without getting lynched across the length and breadth of our beloved
motherland.
Rajat Mitra
Psychologist,
Speaker and Author of The Infidel Next Door
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