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        Ram Swarup, as a fearless intellectual, did not feel powerless in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful network of social authorities, the communist mafia of mass media, the government and business corporations, etc which were competing with one another in crowding out the possibilities for achieving any decent change in post-independent India.

        He openly came out against the disgraceful public performance of Nehruvian intellectuals marked by strategic pre-meditated trimming, careful silence, patriotic bluff and bluster and above all a self-dramatising and retrospective apostasy.

        In his approach to public affairs, Ram Swarup often found exhilaration in danger and relished nothing better than a controversy. His was the spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation. He was firmly of the view that the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life was to be found in dissent against the status quo in India immediately after 1947 when the struggle on behalf of the under-represented and disadvantaged groups seemed so unfairly weighted against them.

        As a young intellectual, he had the integrity and moral courage to proclaim that standards of truth about human misery and oppression should be upheld by fearless intellectuals regardless of their party affiliation, regional background and primeval loyalties.

        Edward W Said, an internationally known literary critic, beautifully describes the predicament of a committed and ardent intellectual in this context: Witnessing a sorry state of affairs when one is not in power is by no means a monotonous, monochromatic activity. It involves what Foucault once called ' a relentless erudition ', scouring alternative sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories. It involves a sense of the dramatic and of the insurgent, making a great deal of one's opportunities to speak, catching the audience's attention, being better at wit and debate than one's opponents. And there is something fundamentally unsettling about intellectuals who have neither offices to protect nor territory to consolidate and guard, self-irony is therefore more frequent than pomposity, directness more than hemming or hawing. But there is no dodging the inescapable reality that such representations by intellectuals will neither make them friends in high places nor win them official honours. It is a lonely condition, yes, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things are.

        Ram Swarup, through his life and writings as a fearless fighter for great public causes, gave a cubic content to the above words of Edward Said. All his life he stood upright and talked back to authority. He was disgusted by the unquestioning subservience to authority in the India of his time and viewed it as the greatest of threats to an active, and moral, intellectual life. He often told his friends that the hardest aspect of being an intellectual is to represent what you profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or method.

        When he and Sita Ram Goel were fighting together against the menace of communism in India after 1949, Ram Swarup viewed Gandhism as an alternative to communism. In a pamphlet written after the assassination of Gandhiji ' Mahatma Gandhi and his Assassin ' (1948), he expressed the view that martyrdom was only befitting a man of Gandhiji's elemental greatness.

        After waging a relentless intellectual battle against communism and serfdom, Ram Swarup turned to religious and philosophical issues after 1957. Apart from contributing a large number of seminal articles on Hinduism, Islam and Christianity from several points of view to important newspapers like The Times of India, The Indian Express, The Observer and Hindustan Times, he also wrote a series of important books on comparative religion and philosophy. Some of his main works are: Buddhism vis-a-vis Hinduism (1958), The Hindu View of Education (1971), The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods (1980), Hinduism vis-a-vis Christianity and Islam (1982), Christianity, An Imperialist Ideology (1983), Understanding Islam Through Hadis (1983), Hindu-Sikh Relationship (1985), Ramakrishna Mission in Search of a New Identity (1986), Cultural Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces (1987), Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992), Woman in Islam (1994), On Hinduism: Reviews and Reflections (published posthumously in 1999), and Meditations: Gods, Religions (published posthumously in 2000).

        Ram Swarup was an unassuming, quiet and reflective type of person. He never sought a job; he never got married and he never did any business for commercial profit. After a life of strenuous and unremitting intellectual labour, Ram Swarup passed away peacefully during an afternoon nap on 26 December 1998 leaving to the world a splendid example of lonely and disinterested pursuit of truth and light.

        When Ram Swarup's Hindu View of Christianity and Islam was published in 1992, Syed Sahabuddin, a Janata Dal Member of Parliament wrote a letter on 20 August 1993 to his co-religionist, the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs (Late) P M Syeed, asking the government of India to have the book examined from the point of view of banning it under the law of the land. Syed Sahabuddin's vile attempt to get Ram Swarup's book Hindu View of Christianity and Islam banned by government of India in 1993 failed totally.

        An instantaneous reaction from Arun Shourie fully exposed the unfounded prejudice of Syed Sahabuddin in the whole affair and a statement made by a group of intellectuals, under the leadership of K S Lal against Syed Sahabuddin's proposal to impose a ban on that book also had the desired impact.

        In their statement on that occasion these intellectuals declared as follows: We strongly condemn all recent attempts in India and abroad to prevent free enquiry into the history and the doctrines of various religions. In particular we condemn the attempt by Syed Sahabuddin to make the Indian authorities impose a ban on the book Hindu View of Christianity and Islam by Ram Swarup published by Voice of India, New Delhi in 1992.

        This book is one of the first serious comparative studies of religion written from the Hindu viewpoint; banning it would be a direct attack on the right of Hindu society to develop an intellectual response to ideological challenges.

        Ram Swarup was a crusader for ' Sanathana Dharma ', Hindu culture, Hindu civilisation, Hindu society, Hinduism as a whole and above all for things, issues and ideals Hindu in character. He wrote in his Hindu View of Christianity and Islam: If religious tolerance is a value, Christianity as well as Islam lacks it badly. Wherever they have gone, they have carried fire and sword and oppressed and destroyed as far as it lay in their power. They demolished and occupied the temples and shrines of others. Any tolerance shown was an exception, intolerance was the rule. Ram Swarup clearly concluded that the destructive record of Islam and Christianity through the ages has been outdone only by communism. Likewise, he rejected the philosophy of ' Sarva Dharma Sambhava ' of Mahatma Gandhi on the ground that the tolerant polytheistic Hinduism can never be equated with brutal monotheistic religions like Islam and Christianity.

        Under the 'Islam-embracing, Christianity-coveting, Hindu-hating, caste-Quota-loving' UPA government in New Delhi, Hinduism has become a dirty word and Hindus are being made to disown their identities. Smaller identities and narrower loyalties, once an integral part of a larger Hindu milieu, are being mischievously thrown to the forefront by planned anti-social and anti-national policies. Castes and creeds are becoming more prominent at the highest levels of governance. Such dangerous forces have acquired their own momentum, power, justification and vested interests. Their game is obvious; it is to confuse the nation's counsel, to weaken its will, to create a soft society so that its parts can be picked up one by one and the nation dismembered and destroyed to the total pseudo-secular satisfaction of all tall leaders in New Delhi!

        Renascent Hinduism will have to contend with these forces. It will have to overcome the forces of self-denigration, self-alienation and even self-destruction.

        I would like to pay my tribute to Ram Swarup in his own words in which he gives a clear and clairvoyant message to all of us: Those who are against India are even more opposed to Hinduism, a name for India at its deepest and most cultural and spiritual; Hinduism embodies India's civilisational dimension and gives it cohesion, integrity, continuity and unity. They know that before they can subvert India, they must subvert Hinduism, that the country's Balkanisation is not possible without prior fragmentation of the Hindu society. Hence, the tenacious attack on Hinduism, their need to unleash caste politics. The game-plan allows the talents of corporate caste giants like V P Singhs, Chandrasekars, Lalu and Mulayam Singh Yadavs, full scope. It allows the Naxalites, the Marxists, Macaulayites to make their full contribution; it allows Pakistan, petro-dollars, evangelists, liberation theologians and several other unnamed agencies to play a crucial role not always hidden.

        Are we going to be wise enough, brave enough and united enough to imbibe the letter and spirit of this message and act upon it immediately? This is the question of questions today.