If the home minister knows anything unlawful about the RSS or the BJP, who has stopped him from taking the sternest action?
But to blame nationalist forces without any proof is a sin against the very idea of India, says BJP MP Tarun Vijay.
Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde's job was to ensure that he brought back Lashkar-e-Tayiba founder Mohammad Saeed to India and send him to the gallows like 26/11 accused Ajmal Kasab. Instead, he secured a congratulatory notefrom Saeed. What a singular achievement!
Saeed, India's most wanted criminal terrorist, said 'See, what we have been saying is now repeated by India's Vazire-Dakhla (home minister). Thanks Shindesaab.
Should this make the Congress pleased and defend India's most indefensible minister?
Can Shinde's statement that delighted Pakistani butchers be a good beginning for Rahul Gandhi's political ascendancy?
At a time when the nation is seething about the Pakistani savagery that brutally mutilated two of our soldiers along the Line of Control, Shinde successfully turned the debate inwards, hitting his fellow citizens and giving Pakistan huge relief.
The government could have used the people's patriotic anger to make its hands stronger. It would have been a great beginning for Rahul Gandhi to announce that the Congress would strive to end terrorism and Pakistan's mischief.
Everyone would have been forced to support the Congress and Rahul, hail their commitment; the youth would have been enthused.
Instead, the Congress ended up serving Pakistan and its worst, hated, uncivil, ugly, faces of extremism.
Terrorism is an instrument of cowards, who act like thieves to attack innocent, common people to mark their bloody presence.
There is a difference between terrorism in contemporary times and our nation's freedom fighters who fought for a just cause and happily embraced the gallows for the motherland.
A soldier too kills the enemy, but he is a martyr if he falls to the bullets of his foes. A terrorist is a traitor, a small-time murderer, a criminal.
Hindus have never approved of these methods and if ever anyone bearing a Hindu name committed such acts, he became less of a Hindu.
If the home minister knows anything unlawful about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, who has stopped him from taking the sternest action?
Whoever breaks the country's laws and violates the Constitution has to be punished, and that exactly has been the demands of the patriots belonging to these two organisations.
Take harsh measures, ensure that the law reigns supreme, stop infiltration from across the border, eliminate terror hideouts within the country and enact special laws, establish fast track courts, to try the extremists.
But to show a nauseating secular balance with the Islamic terrorists, blaming nationalist forces, without any proof is a sin against the very idea of India.
The word terrorism has been tied to peace-loving Hindus who are the world's biggest victims of terror attacks. Their temples were burnt, looted and destroyed, their women dishonoured, and millions of them were converted under the shadow of swords, yet they remained peaceful and accommodating.
In spite of seeing their motherland vivisected on communal lines, they chose a secular Constitution and ensured special privileges to non-Hindus, something that is not found in our immediate neighbourhood but also in the so-called most advanced Western nations.
Hindus have faced the most uncivilised and barbaric attacks from across the Khyber Pass since the last millennium and fought valiantly to preserve their culture, language, rituals, and way of life that dates back at least ten thousand years of recorded history.
Their ethos and social values is what makes India an adorable place of freedom, justice, democracy and pluralism.
You may speak against the government, against Hindu gods, their temple worship, have concerted and foreign-funded campaigns to convert their poor and illiterate, publish books about any subject, deride the army, blast India and praise Pakistan.
Be an atheist or declare yourself a god. Be a hardcore Wahabbi or go worship at dargahs, offer red scarves, pray to have your wishes fulfilled at the dargahs of Muslim Sufis, something that will attract the harshest punishment from the mullahs of the Middle East.
Yet your rights will be protected. In spite of many fallacies and weaknesses, we have survived beautifully. Religious bigotry has never guided our mainstream public life -- otherwise the majority Hindus of this nation would never have accepted a Christian as their real master, a Muslim as the chairman of the Upper House of Parliament, a Christian as the deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha and another Muslim as the Rajya Sabha secretary general, another Muslim as the Intelligence Bureau chief and another as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The Hindus have never complained.
America will not come close to this in another two hundred years.
If this is happening here, it is only because the Hindus, who always shunned extremism of any kind, are in a majority.
The greatest guarantee to pluralism, liberal attitudes, universal application of law, equal rights to all, special and many times more than equal privileges to the non-Hindu minorities enshrined in the Constitution are the contribution of the nation's Hindu ethos and population.
The moment we see Hindus turning into a feeble majority or closer to a minority, none would be able to stop us becoming another unashamed violator of human rights of the weak like it has happened in Jammu and Kashmir and more so in Bangladesh or Pakistan.
This is the truth accepted by all right-thinking Muslims, Parsis, Jews and others.
Mr Shinde forgot he inherits this legacy.
Has he ever read Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk who revived the glory of the Hindus and gave us the phrase -- 'Say proudly, you are a Hindu' (Garv Se Kaho Tum Hindu Ho). Can he really quote what Swami Vivekananda said about the danger of conversions from Hindus to another religion? He said, 'And then every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy more.'
Mr Shinde would have never read this.
He just shares a government that celebrated Vivekananda's birth anniversary without knowing who the monk was.
It is ironical that a leader whose party cadres killed 3,000 Sikhs in a most barbaric manner in the capital, blames organisations that have set the benchmarks for nationalism, patriotism and love for the motherland.
It is the RSS that shaped and gave India's first-ever genuinely non-Congress prime minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose tenure is appreciated universally.
It is the RSS that brought to the fore a statesman like Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and made him the president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, who was inducted into the first Cabinet of independent India under Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, that too at Mahatma Gandhi's insistence.
Whatever your differences with the RSS's ideology might be, does that mean the State apparatus should be used to eliminate different voices -- that too through falsehood and deceit?
Will India be a better place minus the saffron?
All that shines as India's spiritual contribution to the world, so aptly represented by Vivekananda, Dayanand Saraswati, Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo and savants like Ramana Maharishi, that quintessentially forms the bedrock of India's civilisation and cultural heritage.
Is that being preserved and nurtured by the likes of Sushilkumar Shinde or has the RSS emerged as the singular most significant force to stand by that, protect and preserve Indian languages, heritage, values and the multi-faceted Hindu-ness that spreads from Dwarka to Tawang and Leh to Port Blair?
Is the Hinduness of this nation a burden, a liability, a threat to the nation?
Or is it the nation's life force and her sole unifying factor?
Should that be insulted, humiliated and attacked or preserved and respected?
A government that does not feel shy to shake hands with the Muslim League and invite it to join the central Cabinet, which never was touched even by Nehru or Indira Gandhi, practices hateful apartheid against Hindu organisations. Why?
Even Indira Gandhi, who once banned the RSS, was never hateful to Hindus as such. She was a devout, practicing, Hindu and a proud inheritor of her Hindu legacy. But this Congress has left that trait and followed an alien attitude, which reflects the mindset of a persecutor, towards anything Hindu.
Be it the Ram Sethu or Sanskrit, or respecting cultural icons and seers, the irritating rudeness is too evident in the government's behaviour.
Is it good for national life and a welcome beginning for a new leader?
Tarun Vijay, MP, is a national spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party.
