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Bookmark A Hindu, communalist too! By M.V. Kamath India?s only communalist: In commemoration of Sita Ram Goel; Edited by Koenraad Elst; Voice of India, New Delhi; pp 353; Rs 300.00 Sita Ram Goel, a prolific writer, historical novelist and uncompromising analyst of communism, Islam and Christianity passed away at his residence in Delhi on December 3, 2003. A writer equally at home in Hindi and in English and distinguished for his scrupulous attention to facts and sources, in his time was known for his sharp and clean enunciation of his views on the growth and spread of India?s minority religions. He often courted the label of ?Hindu communalist? and the title of this book is a tongue-in-the-check response to it. Those who knew Goel were aware that he was what his son described him to be: ?Ardent atheist turned born-again Hindu? who ?committed the better part of his 82 years on earth to restoring Hindu dignity?. Like most people of his generation Goel developed a keen interest in communism during his college days?he had an M.A. in History in 1944 from the University of Delhi?but turned against that miserable ideology in 1949 when he came to understand the plight of people living in communist Russia. Subsequently he became a strong defender of Hinduism, particularly after the eighties when there was a mass conversion of Scheduled Caste people to Islam at Meenakshipuram in south India. What kind of man was he who aroused as much enthusiasm as he did visceral hatred? Koenraad Elst, himself an ardent supporter of Hinduism invited eighteen contributors to write on Goel and what he stood for. Some of the contributions are understandably testimonial or biographical but others deal with the ideological controversies that Goel initiated and thrived on. Thus Vishal Agarwal takes on Romila Thapar, tearing her to pieces on the subject of the so-called ?Aryan? invasion of India. Baljit Rai has much to say about Sufi jehad, making the point that the ?so-called Sufi saints? were in reality ?the civil arm of the Islamic polity with not a single objective and ideal different from that of the armed wing?. Navaratna S. Rajaram inaugurates a scholarly discussion of the alleged ?Aryan invasion?. Gautam Sen takes on western critics of Indian culture and civilization with commendable zest dismissing the arrogance shown by some American scholars as originating ?in the mind-set of a slave-owning culture?. As Sen puts it: ?The long-standing Anglo-Saxon critique of Hindu society and independent India has roots in the visceral British hatred of the educated Indian elites of late nineteenth century Bengal whom they themselves had originally sponsored.? Then there is Saradindu Mukherji?s highly controversial article challenging Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen?s observation that Akbar, the Mughal Emperor was a trendsetter for a democratic polity in India. Mukherji notes, ?If Prof (Amartya) Sen cared to be objective, he could not have maintained his outlandish hypothesis that humane policies and ideas of freedom had come as a gift of the Mughal invaders.? Accusing Prof Amartya Sen of inventing facts of history, Mukherji cites instance after instance of Akbar?s ?unsecular as well as unchivalrous treatment of non-Muslim captives?, noting in passing that while attacking Chitor, Akbar called himself a ghazi and ?the mayhem that he cause was typical jehadi style?. Thirty thousand poor peasants were killed in the fort of Chitor, a fact that many secular writers deliberately ignore. One of the longest contributions to this book is from Shrikant Talageri, according to whom ?today, India needs true karmayogis like Sita Ram Goel in every field of Indian culture and every socio-economic field.? Would it be communalism to say, as Talageri says: ?If Hindu society and civilization are to be saved from annihilation, there is only one solution: Hindu consciousness must be aroused, a Hindu perspective and world view must be cultivated.? And, no doubt Talageri reflects the views of Goel himself when he writes: ?It is also necessary to alert Hindus to the inner weaknesses which make Hindu society susceptible to the dangers of secularism.? What Goel did?and this has been well recorded by Virendra Parekh, was to spend a life time to defend the idea of India, a national vision as it existed through millenia, in such books as Hindu Society Under Siege and Defence of Hindu Society. That Goel also took great trouble to expose the atrocities committed by Muslim rulers in his monumental work The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India no doubt is responsible for his being frequently damned as a communalist, though Goel never went beyond what medieval Muslim historians themselves had written about their times. Parekh quotes Goel as saying: ?A society which has no self-confidence, which suffers from self-pity, which indulges in breast beating at the behest of every Hindu-baiter, and which stands in daily need of certificates of good conduct from its sworn enemies, has not a ghost of a chance in a world which is becoming deadlier with the passing of every day.? Secularists would wince on reading this work. Truth hurts. And yet it is remarkable that Goel never was much involved in conventional religion, never went to temples or performed devotional rituals and could possibly be described as an atheist. David Frawley described Goel as ?modern India?s greatest intellectual kshatriya, ?one of India?s most important thinkers in the post-independence era?. But ask the average Indian intellectual whether he has ever heard of Goel and that reply probably would be ?Goel what??. Sad. It is this which gives relevance to this well-argued work. It needs to be read by the Hindu intelligentsia and especially by those who claim to be true secularists. They may still learn something of their country?s past?and lost glory.

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