Among people, mostly from minority, insecurity is palpable. Markets are silent, streets are empty, people don’t even speak and share the suffering among themselves. Bilal Ansari, hardly 22, running a clothing shop close to Shahi Jama Masjid, had gone to his shop in the morning. A few hours later, family got a call that Bilal was wounded and was in a Hospital. His brother ran to the emergency ward. Bilal was there, still breathing as his brother held his hand. The only words that he could whisper were “I was shot by police.” His brother asked,” How shall we resume our lives?” Someone added, “Musalmano ko kaun nyay dilwayega?”

History repeats itself. MS Golwalkar, the chief of RSS, had said, “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the entire Semitic Race, that is Jews. It was a good lesson for Hindusthan to learn and profit by”.

The brutality with which the attempt was made to wipe out the entire Jewish race in Hitler’s Germany in the name of purity of the Aryan race had highly impressed the RSS leaders. Invoking their Hindutva creed, RSS always tried to make people believe that they were acting under the avenging hands of god. On the contrary, since the days of struggle for independence, the entire national movement, from the beginning, was fully committed to secularism. Its leaders believed in composite culture. In the midst of partition of India and horrors of communal holocaust, it enshrined secularism in our Constitution that emerged as a non-racist, anti imperialist force.

We inherited from our past the rich and robust tradition of unity in diversity which remains as a challenge to forces of right, represented by Hindutva. They used religion as a strong intoxicant, and used it in moments of crisis as a veiled weapon, to fan up the antagonism among masses. It was also used in Germany by the Nazi party in the name of Purity of the Aryan Race, a key architect of the holocaust, to annihilate the Jews, without any sense of guilt.

With the same absence of guilt, in last one decade, efforts are made to reduce our all initiatives to evolve economically, politically and culturally to a motiveless struggle. They are trying to negate the ongoing central contradiction between the democratic and imperialist forces. Only truth they want to establish is victory of autocracy.

World history is littered with innumerable memories of brutal dictators who inflicted untold miseries and cruelties on the very people they were supposed to represent. They built monuments to self-glory and often considered themselves as someone ordained by god. And what they have left behind is a repressive past with painful memories for their people. Hitler is the most notorious example and Modi has been drawing from Hitler.

The Nazi movement was hostile to Germany’s traditional churches. The minister of church affairs in Hitler’s government, said that Positive Christianity did not believe in Apostle’s creed, or faith in Christ or son of god, Christ. Positive Christianity was represented by Nazi party. Fuhrer is the herald of new revelation, no believer in Old Testament, Hebrew Bible, nor in Christ as son of god.

The Nazis’ Positive Christianity was a variety of Clerical fascism. Hitler believed that he understood the religion of war better than the highest priests, that were the generals.

Marx had written that religion is the opium of the masses. Also it is the sigh of the oppressed. Both express the wretchedness of our populace. They need to forget the present, which is awfully painful. Future appears to be bleak and past is lost in the gloom. It is this anguish that is used by those in power, or to be in power, despite the fact that people are suffering because of their policies. They are the cause and also the effect.

It is significant that as the managing committee of Sambhal’s Shahi Jama Masjid was consulted for the survey, the court’s order seeking a survey report by November 26 was passed ex-parte, that was without hearing both parties.

It is also significant that Shahi Jama Masjid of Sambhal is a “protected monument”, under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act, 1904. It also comes under the Places of Worship Act that says that religious character of any place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947, must be maintained. About the act itself, the then home minister S B Chavan had said that “the enactment of this Bill will go a long way in helping restoring communal amity and goodwill.”

Times have taken a turn towards a future that country had never imagined. Lenin has been proved providential. Capitalism is in transition, finance capital is here to rule the roost. (IPA Service)