‘A Republic of South India’ may still be possible, and blame for this rests with Left-‘liberal’-missionary ecosystem

When senior journalist Manu Joseph wrote the article, ‘A Republic of South India is not entirely unthinkable’, on 1 May 2023, he accidentally hit the raw nerve. Accidentally, because though he was right about the threats of centrifugal forces being at play down south, he didn’t know the exact nature of the sinister design and also the players behind that. He, therefore, got the prescription and the treatment wrong.

Joseph, quite erroneously, just like most of his Western counterparts, puts the entire blame on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his style of governance for setting in motion India’s centrifugal forces. The blame, instead, lies with sustained and concerted attempts being made by the ‘breaking-India’ forces, led by missionaries, to incapacitate India’s civilisational unity. South India, especially Tamil Nadu, is in the throes of competitive harvesting of souls from evangelists of different hues, with covering fire being provided by the Western, Left-liberal media and intelligentsia.

The missionary forces are particularly targeting India’s troubled peripheries. This explains why Punjab has seen a spike in conversion cases. And Tamil Nadu, as per a study conducted a few years ago by the Centre for Policy Studies, a Chennai-based think tank, has been the most favourable state in India for the growth of Christianity. The population of Hindus, which constituted 90.47 percent of the state’s population in 1951, has come down to 87.58 percent by 2011. And if credible Tamil Nadu watchers are to be believed, the Hindu number is even lesser as neo-converts are now encouraged not to officially register their new faith. It’s a win-win strategy: One, the neo-converts can still claim the government’s welfare benefits; two, this allows the missionaries to remain under the radar; and three, the Hindu community, anyway prone to being indifferent to their larger religio-cultural SOS calls, can be hoodwinked to remain in its comfort zone.

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Tamil Nadu’s demographic change hasn’t been confined to the areas near Kanyakumari, which in the past 100 years have seen the Christian population rise from 30.7 percent in 1921 to almost 50 percent today. (In fact, if George Ponnaiah, a controversial Roman Catholic priest from the region, is to be believed, the Christian numbers in Kanyakumari “have crossed 62 percent. Soon we would be 70 percent”.) Other areas such as Coimbatore, Thanjavur, Tiruchirappalli, Dindigul, Coimbatore and Nilgiris, Sivaganga, Ramanathapuram, Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi, too, have witnessed a substantial rise in Muslim population.

However, more than the missionary activities down South, especially in Tamil Nadu, it is the deeply entrenched anti-Hindu ecosystem — a byproduct of the Left-‘liberal’-missionary nexus — which is threatening to create a divide that has not been there civilisationally. Originally a colonial-missionary construct, post-Independence, the Dravidian movement warriors — again in collusion with evangelistic forces — have perfected this language of divide.

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So, when Periyar, in 1953, broke the idols of Lord Ganesh, and his ideological successor, former Tamil Nadu CM M Karunanidhi, called Bhagwan Ram a “drunkard” in 2007, the two were merely aping the colonial-missionary narrative to target Hinduism to forward their politico-ideological objectives. Without denying the excesses of the caste system, the fact remains that most campaigns against Brahminism were organised and orchestrated by those inimical to Hinduism per se: A Brahmin was targeted because he was seen as a symbol of civilisational Bharat. The missionaries attacked him because he was regarded as the biggest hurdle in winning “India for the Christ” — a fact attested by Abbe JA Dubois in Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies. The British saw him as a rallying point of Indian nationalism rising against colonial rule. Worse, post-Independence, the Left-Dravidian forces have joined hands to villanise him, for he seems to epitomise everything that they detest.

One can unravel the true nature of anti-Brahminism in Tamil Nadu — which VS Naipaul categorically classifies in his book, India: A Million Mutinies, as a movement of the middle castes, and not all non-Brahmin castes — from the fact that it offered no protection to lower castes. In fact, some of the most brutal attacks on the Scheduled Castes took place post-1967 during the DMK regime. In 1969, for instance, 40 Harijans were burnt alive by Thevars, a powerful middle caste.

South India has a long history — and a deep conspiracy — to decimate Hinduism, of course in the name of Brahminism. There has also been a serious and incessant endeavour to assimilate Hinduism in South India into Christian history and theology. Even an apocryphal saga that places St Thomas in India in 53 AD has been invented to suggest Christian influence on Tamil culture and spirituality. It has been said that the Tamil classics, such as the great Thirukkural, were composed under Christian influence — but got debased later under ‘Aryan’ manipulations and interventions.

Even the Hindu fine arts were not left alone. Here’s a cautionary tale for the liberal Hindu. As the book Snakes in the Ganga, written by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan, shows, the rich and the powerful should choose institutions wisely (especially the Western ones) for charity, for they might actually be paying for writing the obituaries of their own people, culture and civilisation; likewise, the gurus of the fine art too need to choose their shishyas astutely. For there are artists who learnt ancient Indian dances under traditional Hindu gurus to later actively work to de-Hinduise, or rather Christianise, them. Rani David, a well-known Bharatanatyam dancer, is a classic case in study. Even more glaring is the saga of Leela Samson, who learnt Bharatanatyam from Kalakshetra. Rukmini Arundale had set up this revered institution to not just rescue the ancient dance form from the colonial-evangelistic interventions, but also acknowledge its innate Hinduness. As fate would have it, Samson became the head of Kalakshetra in 2005, and suddenly she became uncomfortable about the spiritual roots of Bharatanatyam. A year later, she stopped her students from participating in an Art of Living event in Chennai. The reason: “This function is concerned with Hindu religion,” she said matter-of-factly.

If the actual conversion of Hindus on a large scale weren’t bad enough, this de-Hinduisation, or rather Christianisation, of the South Indian mind through selective tempering of their religious, cultural and artistic ethos is creating an enemy within. It has created a section of people who may physically be Hindu but think and act like the adversaries of India’s civilisational and constitutional unity. They act as Trojan Horses without even knowing it.

It is in this backdrop that a republic of south India is very much possible — and the blame for this rests primarily with the thriving Left-‘liberal’-missionary ecosystem. If at all, the Modi government at the Centre can be accused of not doing enough to challenge these forces that have been bent on challenging India’s unity and decimating Hinduism down South. Maybe for the government, the liberation of Hindu temples from immoral state control can be a good starting point. And, it’s a low-hanging fruit too.

(This is the concluding article of the two-part series)

Read part one - Why entertaining the idea of a ‘republic of south India’ is mischievous, dangerous and outright ahistorical

The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.

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