Socialism was touted as the supreme solution to all our economic ills. But it turned out to be worse than the disease, relegating the country to the fiscal ICU. Again, the malaise of casteism was aggravated by the strong medicine or rather wrong medicine, called Mandal, which has now rendered the society so caste-ridden that there are as many castes as there are people who all seem to believe that they must become ‘ backward ‘ in order to move forward.
Manu himself contemplated only four groups, that too only based on vocation, but Mandal ‘ s multiplier effect has yielded over four thousand. It is now time to assess the effect of the cure-all drug called secularism on the body politik and what does one behold? Lika a surgery gone awry, it has only slit open our stomachs, and no one has any clue as to how to stitch it up! And if it does get sewed up, one can be sure that the scissors would have been be left inside, cutting away at will!
The dictionary simply describes secularism as the ‘ belief that laws, education,etc should be based on facts, science, etc rather than religion ‘. But the secular Congress changed the law (Shah Bano case) to accommodate a religion and then had the temerity to describe its capitulation as secularism.
And the minority religion that benefitted by this generosity of the Congress secularism, having earlier reacted indignantly to the judiciary ‘ s assault on ‘ their constitution ‘ , and then ensuring that ‘ our constitution ‘ fell in line with theirs, is now lecturing to the country at large on the majesty of law and the superiority of the Supreme Court.
But you see, the Hindus have obeyed the rule of law, and even those ‘ militant ‘ elements who promised to defy the verdict had been made to obey, not by a secular government but by a ‘ communal ‘ regime. And this obedience is also being taunted as a climbdown by the secular brigade, which all along has been parotting that abiding by law is no concession.
And the dead horse is not just left there peacefully either, but flogged incessantly even after, adding insult to injury. The secular Sonia, the leading practitioner of the wonder drug secularism, now says by sending a government emissary to accept the Shila dhan, the BJP government has exposed itself and its communal agenda. What agenda or rather, whose agenda was the Congress promoting when it amended the Constitution in the past? Does the Vajpayee regime ‘ s act of sending an official bear any comparison to what the Congress did in the Shah Bano matter?
Did the Congress engage the nation in any debate or consultation before pushing through an amendment of such enormous import on the ‘ secular fabric ‘ of the nation? Instead it used its brute majority to appease a section of the minority. That divisive scissor is still there in our stomachs cutting away at our insides! But poor old Vajpayee is being pilloried for messing up his treatment of common cold! Doctor Sonia, heal thyself!
How would the prescription purveyed by a doctor of this calibre turn out to be? The secular treatment by itself is dubious. Its practitioner ‘ s past has been abominable. For us to expect the country to be healed by this deadly combination is indeed optimism at its comic best! If anything, the current version of secular medicine is yet another remedy that is doomed to fail.
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