Unity of Dharma and Conflict of Religions

In the struggle for Dharma’s survival, “the only weapon we have is the truth”, according to Sita Ram Goel. This much we can take as firm ground for our action. It is a thing really worth working for. The question is merely whether it will prove strong enough for victory. Is it not possible that a future excavator will find that some of us were onto something, but that it proved a dead end, snowed under before it could find a hearing among those capable of giving it any effect?

Our mentors, the late philosopher Ram Swarup (1920-98) and the historian-publisher Sita Ram Goel (1921-2003), had comparatively little influence during their lifetimes. For starters, in their mid-twenties they were members of the Changers Club, founded by Ram Swarup. Though the name alluded to Karl Marx’ maxim that the philosophers should not discuss but change the world, it was just another talking-shop. While it produced some good ideas, it never got its chance to realize them, and hardly even to publicize them.

Its first booklet, Ram Swarup’s Indictment (1947), was about the now-forgotten topic of the mismanaged Quit India movement, and its most memorable line is a general observation in the foreword’s opening-line by the late but then-young philosopher Daya Krishna: “The bane of Indian politics is hero-worship.” In those days it applied to Quit India leader Mahatma Gandhi, later to a Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar or a PM Narendra Modi. According to a maxim with a long tradition among clergymen but loosely ascribed to its quoter Eleonore Roosevelt, “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”. It’s what Goel in his later life remarked on RSS-BJP folk: they are enamoured of an Atal Behari Vajpayee as an entertaining orator but don’t pay attention to the distinctly Secularist (or to personalize it: “Nehruvian”) flavour of his ideas, pooh-poohing Hindu Dharma.

In the 1950s, Ram Swarup’s and SR Goel’s anti-Communist think-tank Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia (SDFA, Kolkata) received some praise from opinion. leaders in Taiwan and the West but could not impact India’s foreign policy. The only Indian political party that sympathized with it was not the Hindu-Nationalist Jan Sangh (which saw it as a CIA outfit at cross-purposes with its own anti-American gut feelings) but Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s Swatantra Party, which was still dealing with its own organizational birth pangs. It unsuccessfully put Goel up as a candidate in Khajuraho constituency for the 1957 elections because it saw in him the only man capable of standing up to PM Jawaharlal Nehru. By the time this party became a major political player, in the 1962 elections, the SDFA had folded, with Ram Swarup retiring to a more reflective lifestyle and Goel starting to devote his energies to managing a commercial book business.