The Hindu phenomenon

Girilal Jain, a doyen of Indian journalists and editor of The Times of India from 1978 to 1988, was a passionate crusader of the Hindu cause. His posthumous work puts into historical perspective the growing Hindu self-awareness and self-assertion. The author believes that a fundamental shift took place in the power balance between Hindus and Muslims as a result of the consolidation of the British Raj and the disarming of the populace which began in 1818 and was completed in 1858. This shift, he contends, was not reversed by the pro-Muslim change in the official attitude, starting from the 1870s, and by the policy of divide and rule, though it led to the partition of the country in 1947. It is from the establishment of the British rule that the author traces the rise of Hindus. The socio-economic-political order that Jawaharlal Nehru fashioned is today as much in the throes of death as its progenitor, the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist order. Secularism and socialism have been major planks of these orders. In the face of the dramatic global events of the last few years, both have lost much of their old glitter and, therefore, the capacity to dazzle and mislead. By the same token, re-Hinduization of the country’s political domain has begun. Superficially, it may be a sheer `accident’ that the battle between aroused Hindus and the imitation Indian state, neutral to the restoration of the country’s ancient civilization has been joined on the question of the Ramjanambhoomi temple in the city of Ayodhya.;