English Enclave

Presidential Address of Dr. B. S. Moonje

(Hindu Mahasabha Session, Patna – April, 1927)

I shudder to think what shall happen to Bengal, say 50 years hence, if this course of rapid decline of the Hindus in Bengal is not checked. I am afraid Bengal is fairly on the way to become another Kashmere of India in this respect. I feel from what I have seen and read of the daily happenings in East Bengal particularly that Bengalees alone and unaided by Hindus outside Bengal are absolutely incapable of resisting he inroads of Islam into the preserves of Hinduism there. Let Bengal clearly understand that it may exercise some pressure on the Govt. through the cult of the Bomb and the Pistol, but it will not be able to maintain and the pressure until it develops the Lathi cult and proves its capacity of putting down the mischievously aggressive mass Hooliganism.

“The Afghan, before he was allowed to be captured by and absorbed in Islam, was fighting for the preservation and maintenance of Hindu religion and culture with the same tenacity and fearlessness of death as he was fighting for their destruction only three or four centuries later on, after Islam was forced on him through sheer compulsion in a moment of helplessness of defeat suffered in wars with his Moslem invaders of Central Asia. But how did the Hindu India of the time re-act to this forcible shearing of its most powerful wings? Does History record any evidence of any pang felt in the then entirely Hindu Hindusthan, when such a big and enviable slice as Afghanistan was cut out of it? Did the Hindu Hindusthan of those days make any concerted move to avert the calamity then overtaking Afghanistan?  As for Kashmere and Malabar, History tells the same sorry tale being repeated over there much in the same fashion as in Afghanistan.

“Yet after the Moghul Empire was subverted and the Sikhs in the Punjab and the Marathas in the rest of India had re-established the Hindu Empire, did the Hindus who were as permanent in India then as the Moslems were in their days before they had been conquered, move a finger to recoup the loss in their number sustained through Moslem aggression? Other parts of India also show marks of Moslem aggression narrating equally eloquent tales of Moslem efficiency and hunger of man power on one hand and of Hindu spinelessness supineness and indifference on the other.

“Thus every Moslem man or woman is a proselytizing agent of Islam. The success so far gained by them is a memorable monument to their faith and tenacity of purpose as it is to our irreligion, indifference and inefficiency. By their serious perseverance they have for themselves, by now, built up out of the very Hindus a community of no less than 7 crores, that is, just one fourth of the entire Hindu population of India.  The indifference and the present sociology and orthodoxy of the Hindus together with proverbial mildness and docility of temper, and their indulgence in sentimentalism of various kinds of their own creations – such as the excess of Bhakti Sampradaya and of Ahimsa and non-violence – have been the chief contributors to their monumental success of Islam in India. Their daily work of proselytisation and of building up of their community brick by brick, was so long going on unmolested and without any noise, that the hope was manufactured in them and they had come to believe as a matter of course that a time will soon come when the 7 crores of the untouchables which the Hindus regard as the refuse of their community shall have been devoured, digested and assimilated in the Islamic society. They were thus building up castles in their mind that if they can once reach the Hindus at par by assimilation of the untouchables, their aggressiveness in which they feel supreme confidence will stand them in good stead to give such a push to the mild Hindu as to send him down headlong along the inclined plane of extinction. Thus they were dreaming of absorbing the whole of Hindu India into themselves so that the whole of Hindusthan may ultimately belong to them and be changed into Muslimsthan as the whole of Afghanistan now belongs to the Moslems.

“Now let us further analyse the Hindu mentality. It is hopelessly perplexing. The Hindu seems to be obsessed with the desire for Swaraj. It is a very noble and manly ambition, but has he ever indulged in a little introspection and examined his own inner self with a view to satisfy himself if he is really fit for Swaraj? In the quite loneliness of his room, when he is all to himself alone, if he were to ask himself a question “if I cannot guarantee safety and immunity from molestation to my women folk and temples from those of my Moslem brethren who are only armed with Lathies, how can I aspire to wrest Swaraj from and maintain it against the cupidity of those armed with machine guns,” what answer can he give? While trying to invent or discover an answer let him picture to himself in the loneliness of his room the daily occurrences of Hindoo’s running way for life when attacked by Muslim ruffians, leaving behind their women-folk to be dealt with by them as they may please.

“Every Moslem, man or woman is, as I have said above, a proselytizing agent of his religion and considers it one of the sacred duties of his life as a Muslim to decay in his or her life time a few Hindus, men or women, boys or girls, preferably the latter, and bring them into the Islamic fold. To the Muslim the whole world is his home and its things are meant to minister to his health and strength. Whatever he touches he purifies. The Hindu on the other hand is ever haunted with the fear of being polluted at every step. Here it may be the touch of one whom he is pleased to dub as untouchable: there perhaps the shadow of an outsider has fallen on his dishes; perhaps the water that he is drinking water that he is drinking or the food he is eating has had a touch of a Shudra. He must take a Prayaschitta, that is, undergo purification.

“Communalism though inherently present more or less in any Credal Religion, has in the case of Islam in India been unfortunately fed and aggravated by the impolitic and unstatesmanlike utterances of many of the Hindu Leaders of the Congress.

“The Moslems fully utilized the Khilafat movement for internal organization of socio-religious character and the whole Moslem community of India was taught to look beyond the frontiers of India for inspiration to Moslem Nationalism and for objects commanding their transcendental Love and sacrifice.  This led to the revival of a surging wave of Pan-Islamism involving in its vortex each and every Moslem from the highest to the lowest rank of the society and conjuring up before them a vista of common brotherhood of Islamic nations from Turkey in the West to East Bengal in the East, including in it the Moslemised portions of India on its North Western Frontier such as Sind, Baluchistan, N. W. Frontier Province and the Punjab, under the hegemony of any one of the independent Islamic Nations developing the modern system of warfare in the West.

“Unity based on the principle of bargaining can never be stable, particularly when it has to be purchased by making concessions…The moment they say that Swaraj cannot be attained without Hindu-Moslem unity, that unity becomes a marketable article and all the laws of economics concerning Demand and Supply immediately come into operation on it.

“I have no value, not the least, for that Swaraj where the Hindoo declines daily both in numbers and influence. I can only imagine that Swaraj where the Hindu in his forefathers’ land of Hindusthan shall be prospering and supreme, capable of radiating peace and love and brotherhood all around. How can he attain it, living as he does at the present moment, under the dual domination of the British Machine-gun and the Moslem Lathi? Shuddhi and Sangathan are the means prescribed by the Hindu Sabha Movement and both reason and commonsense dictate that success in this enterprise shall be the harbinger of stable and permanent Hindu-Moslem Unity and the Swaraj that shall be covetable.

“I feel that I should repeat my conviction that if the Hindus leave the Moslems severely alone for sometime to come to do as they please even in association with the Government and cease talking any further of the Hindu Moslem Unity, the Moslems themselves will see the folly of their own insistence on separatist communalism and may eventually come to feel that it shall be to their real interest as also to that of India as a whole if they veer round and merge themselves in the Indian Nationalism for the common good of India which commotes their Communal prosperity also”.

(Hindu Mahasabha Archives)

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