If one were to assign a persona to any nation, say Britain, one would think of a prim and proper gentlemen with stiff upper lip and upright lady with long skirts and her tea parties. Similarly, if one were to think of a persona to be assigned to Australia, it would be a tall, sporty man (or woman) with a near-brash openness. If one were to think of an American, one would conjure a picture of an adventurous man, with noticeable openness of mind, frankness of opinion and ruthless business acumen. Similarly an Italian would be Artistic and Romantic, a French man would be idealist and haughty. Thus we assign a character to a nation, in our minds. If India was to be imagined as a person, who would that person be? Some may say, an Engineer with traditional moorings, correct to an extent. But what if we were to extend that persona to a frame of timeless boundaries, from ancient worlds to the modern world.

It would be difficult for the modern intellectuals to define for they are divided in camps and the hunger for international appeal have dimmed the vision of most. I therefore, go back to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore in April 1903. That was a time when so-called Hindu imagery was not yet maligned by communal politics of the later-day Politics. When our today is much-maligned by the devious mind-games of modern thinkers who equate a Hindu Swastika with Nazi Emblem (latter was from the history of fanatic Christianity) and project Bharatvarsha as a term of Hindu supremacy, it is best to go back to the past. While lamenting about ‘our lack of faith, our lack of conduct, our imitativeness’  of our education-excited youth, the ever optimist Gurudev imagines a perfect Indian persona surviving across the ages, and I quote below the part where he describes the persona which defines the character of our ancient land:

“Him that in total indifference we are not even looking at, whom we are not even trying to understand and know, and sitting by the window of the English School, even glimpse of whose unadorned appearance is making our earlobes red with embarrassment and we are turning away our face in shame, it is he that represents the true eternal Bharatvarsha…. Clad in loincloth he is waiting alone and silently, seated on his grass mat in the dusty boundless riverside fields radiating fiery Sun. He is dreadfully strong, he frightfully painstaking, and he observes fasting as a vow. Within his thin skeletal frame he still keeps aflame the deathless, sorrowless, reassuring oblation fire of the ancient hermitage…All that we now consider as the only reality in the Bharatvarsha, as the single Great Truth, that which is flippant, which is restless, which is only a mass of foam surging from the Western Ocean, in the event of a storm arising all these would vanish into thin air. Only the eyes of the unassailably strong ascetic would be found shining in the storm and the tawny locks of his matter hair flowing in the wind. When in the roar of storm the fine speeches in English with impeccable accents would not be audible any longer, only the clanking of the iron bangle with the iron rod held firmly in the right hand of the ascetic would reverberate above the sound of the thundering clouds all around.

I have never come across a better personification of what could be defined as Ancient Indian ethos in a long time. Now, more than a century later, when we look back, we realize how the ascetics or Sadhus have been thrown into dark corners of our national conscience where they exist in shadows as if they have turned into shadows themselves, unrecognizable from the dark unfamiliarity of their surroundings. When we read about the horrendous lynching of Sadhus in Palghar, Maharashtra, on Camera, and consider the secular silence with which it was buried until such time that it came out in public and forced an acknowledgement, one is filled with disgust towards the conscience-keepers of the nation. When we compare it with the case of alleged lynching of a person caught in an act of thievery, who died days later in Police custody, and the national and internal outrage which continued for months; we feel sad, both for the victims of a madness in a Christo-Communist territory and for the slow decay of the Idea of Bharatvarsha described by Gurudev above.

Three days after the chilling and ghastly murder of Hindu saints Maharaj Kalpavrukshagiri and Maharaj Sushil Giri in the presence of local Police, almost like facilitated by them, and two days before the State Home Minister, sitting a hundred Kilometers away from the site of the Crime, Palghar, patted his back stating there was no Muslim involved in the crime, National Newspapers and digital media were forced to pick the news, painting it the way state government seemingly wanted. No one had ever complained about the involvement of Muslims in the incident. The Home Minister from NCP who was found sitting over the release of curfew passes for Picnic to supposedly ‘untraceable’ Wadhawan brothers’ and over conspiratorial collection of a mob of thousands at Bandra in Mumbai at the behest of a person known to the Minister, misses the whole point here.

He self-presumes the cause of the outrage and self-settles it by releasing the list of alleged murderers. It is not about communal nature of the crime which bothers people. It is the state apathy which bothers people. It is the absolutely stony silence of the Minister for more than two days on the horrendous, inhuman crime in his state until it went public through the citizen sources, and created such a furor that it became impossible for both media and minister to continue to ignore it. The minister counted on overall Hindu ignorance and apathy as he tried to keep the whole thing under the carpet till such time it became impossible to hide. The Minister comes from NCP which is led by Sharad Pawar who was at helm during heinous 1993 Mumbai Bomb Blasts which left 250 dead and 700 injured, and who on discovering that all the 12 explosions happened in Hindu-dominated areas, invented a Thirteenth Blast in a Muslim-Dominated area, Masjid Bunde to create a secular fiction.

                Confident of Hindu apathy to this whole incident, based on a century of British conditioning where Sadhus were often persecuted under the Thuggery Act and later almost half century of Indian-born Anglicized leadership, which initially restricted, later had a free run under Nehru family’s leadership at Hindu hatred, the media followed the same path. Less-read, but evidently well-funded media channels like The Scroll, The Wire and even more frontline media houses like The Hindu, The New Indian Express tried hard much like the Minister to call the victims from ‘Thieves’ to ‘Kidney Racket’ to ‘Nomadic Tribes (Charging others to maliciously trying to project the Sadhus as Hindus), in a shameless effort to secularize the crime. Some like The Wire even charged the outraged people for trying to communalize the crime by claiming the Hindu Sadhus to be Hindus. The way the British wiped the Sadhus History from Public conscience makes it easier for anyone to project the Sadhus as Non-Hindu or Non-Hindu Tribals or Thieves or merely ‘Two men’.

It ignores the fact that the Dashnami Sadhus, the sect from which these unfortunate victims came, are said to be Shaivite disciples of Adi Shankaracharya who is credited with the resurgence of Hinduism after it was pushed back by rising forces of Buddhism. From the time, when Harsha, a Buddhist King was known to be an ardent follower of Shiva and Hindus would move in and out of Buddhism from Hinduism, Buddhism acquired a stringent and strongly fanatical anti-Hindu shade when Shankara arrived as a defender of Hindu faith. A child prodigy, who mastered all the Vedas and Hindu Shastras at the age of Six in Keledi, Kerala, Shakara renounced the family life at the age of Eight and traveled north to Kashi after studying under GovindaPada in Omkareshwar, on the banks of Narmada. Shankara met Hindu thinker Kumarilla at Allahabad and then travelled to Mahishmati where his famous debate with Mandan Mishra and his wife Saraswati or Ubhay Bharti happened for 18 days. Defeating Mandan as his fame rose, Shankara set about establishing Mathas or Monastries. First Matha came up in Sringeri in Karnataka headed by Hastamalaka or Trotak Acharya. The guiding Veda of Yajurveda, then came Govardhan Math in East with Rigveda as its book, in North came Joshi Math in Kedarnath, and Sharada Math in Dwarka Gujarat.

As time went, Sringeri Matha got the lands granted to it from Harihara in 1346 and became a self-administered and autonomous religious territory. The Mathas consolidated and pursued Hinduism with full-time students of Hindu Dharma much on the lines of Buddhist Viharas. In face of brutal Islamic invasion and often Sufis being a part of the Islamic armies; Sadhus too became militarized, structured and organized to defend the faith, regimented into Akhadas. The earliest Dashnami Akhada came up in 1202 as Juna akhada, and later seven more Akhadas came up. The name Dashnami came from the ten names (Giri, Puri, Bharati, Van, Aranya, Parvat, Teerth, Ashram, Saraswati and Sagar), one of which is meant to be the part of the new names Sadhus acquire after they renounce the worldly life for the sake of Dharma. The Sadhus were split between Astradhari (Carrying Arms) and Shastradhari (Carrying scriptures). Astradharis became known for their martial strength and grew into a major part of all the political battles in India. When Mathura was attacked, Sanyasis and Bairagis were ruthlessly being slaughtered by the Islamic forces; the dreaded Naga Sadhus with a force of Four Thousand descended on the city and 2000 lost their life in the battle to defended the holy land of the faithful Hindus. Similar stories of their valor is known about the first attack of Aurangzeb on the temples of Varanasi.

The Sadhus are to follow strict rules, for instance to wear only one cloth on the upper half and one to cover the lower, having only one meal a day, beg alms only from Seven Families and sleep without food if unable to get any alm from the seven houses, sleep on the ground, not to salute and not to abuse, never to bow before anyone except a Sanyasi of higher order, and to wear nothing but Saffron.  If we look at the vows these Sadhus are supposed to follow, which flow from the Sanatana spiritual principles, it is clear the amount of intellectual chicanery of such pathetic level which must have gone into the creation of claim projecting these Sadhus of Palghar as Non-Hindus.

Owing to the strength, discipline and impossible levels of courage, by 17^th Century, Sadhus became an important part of Military strength. The first recorded history of their straight-forward involvement in a battle is in the Battle of Prayagraj where they suddenly appeared under the leadership of Naga Sadhu Rajendra Giri in support of the Awadh Kingdom and routed the Afghan warriors. They were also one time in Mughal services and were appointed Faujdar of Saharanpur and Tarikh-i-Ahmadshah mentions that, “The Afghans and Gurjars and Saiyyids of Barha who had never obeyed any Faujdar were now totally ruined.” The Naga Sadhu army of Awadh was later led by brothers Anup Giri and Umrao Giri. The Sadhus continued to play an important part in the political discourse, like meditating between the Mughals and the King of Benaras Balwant Singh, negotiating between Marathas and Bundelas. When the combined Mughal forces came to fight the British at Benaras, the 6000 Nagas by Anup Giri and Umrao Giri joined them with the Forces of Awadh and as historians write, presented the most-feared troop in the Mughal army. The internal conflict among the Mughals came into play the moment they stepped into the battlefield and Nagas with some support of Ruhelas were the only found battling the British in the battlefield. Once the Mughals lost, we read something about the Sadhus working with Marathas and Rajputs in Ajmer. But British came down heavy one them, it seems, more so after the Sanyasi movement in Bengal and possibly under the pressure of the Missionaries. The last we know of their political involvement was the presence of around a hundred Naga Sadhus in Nagpur Convention of the Congress in 1920.

Slowly post-independence, the irrelevance increased under an intellectual system which looked down at anything remotely Hindu. The obsolescence was almost compete when the old guard of Congress with deep roots in Hinduism like KM Munshi, GB Pant, Radhakrishnan, Sardar Patel and Dr. Rajendra Prasad faded away. No wonder we find mild murmurs of protest on social media on Palghar Sadhu Lynching. What is amazing that those who engineered widespread protests on similar lynching of ordinary people or even broken Church windows, cannot cobble a proper condemnation of this sad incident involving cold-blooded killing of Hindu saints. An attempt to elicit a response from Congress leadership has turned into another affair of Congress versus media. The obstinate refusal to acknowledge the crime under their watch and a cold-blooded murder where under lockout more than hundred people collected to kill Hindu saints in present of Police is confounding.

The fact that the community Home Minister of Maharashtra presumed people to be blaming for the murder is not involved, could be a comfort to him and only him. It still is a serious slap on the face of constantly failing administration and the silence of leadership is both annoying and saddening. Palghar Lynching is not only a story of human loss and inhuman savagery; it is a knife which digs deeper into the soul of India than any other story of Mob Lynching. The religion of the killers is inconsequential here. They could very well be Naxal Atheists here. It is the impact of it which matters.

The Dashnamis Sadhus are the students of ancient Hindu culture, defender of faith and represent courage and valor of Hindu priesthood in the face of fanaticism, religious or otherwise. Their killing and the subsequent silence of those known to have a definite anti-Hindu slant therefore takes a larger proportion. It is the conspiracy of silence which is worrisome. When famous lady mathematician and thinker Hypatia was lynched on the streets of Alexandria by Christian fanatics, it was more than a loss of Human life; it meant the loss of Human light which sunk Europe deep into the dark ages for extender to many centuries. This could well be such an event. Our apathy could well send us into dark ages for centuries and the renaissance of Bharatavarsha, which Gurudev Tagore dreamt of, might turn into an elusive dream with no ascetic left to welcome it with the clanking of iron bangle on the iron rod.

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