Marx is dead, I’m not too well, and God, by god, is alive and kicking! Heaven help us, for the heavens have fallen upon our humble heads. Refugee commissars of an aborted Soviet Eden, hoping against hope to share the fruits of the October Revolution with the world’s only twice-born nation, we have been ground to dust by rabble roused by a saffron-clad half-naked fakir.
Father Marx, your dialectic has crumbled before the spiritual materialism of a humble sadhu. This son of a poor Haryana farmer is guilty of one of India’s million mutinies. Born Ram Kishen, paralyzed at the age of two-plus, he was admitted to the gurukul of one Swami Baldev at the age of four, and decided then itself to be a swami. It’s not fair; how could Hindus permit a poor little fat brat to breach the caste hierarchy?
At least we know why no one trusts Brahmins – they always break the rules. This Ram Kishen (he now calls himself Swami Ramdev and bewitches those bovine Hindus by rolling his one good eye), was taught the holy scriptures, including Patanjali’s sacred asthanga yoga. Daily he preaches the Hindu way of a healthy life before incredulous multitudes in colloquial Hindi and a smattering of English. Great Commissar, you can see that under the guise of ayurveda, this lowly yogi is peddling a potent cocktail of Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan, which we have had such a hard time squashing from the time of Bharatendu Harishchandra.
Dear Karl, we realized that if we did not respond with our own Molotovs, we would never again see a Red Star in the east. Our desi commissar Brinda Karat picked up the gauntlet by dispatching medicines from the guru’s pharmacy to the Union Health Minister. Unfortunately, he proved a duplicitous bourgeois, possibly an admirer of the one-eyed Baba. So while our family-owned television channel showed large pieces of animal and human material found in the samples, Doordarshan quoted contradictory findings from two separate laboratories, and the Minister said he did not know where our samples came from. What cheek, when we are supporting this Government to keep the brotherhood of saffron at bay.
We need Engles to intercede with the Angels. The Minister passed the buck to the Chief Minister of Uttaranchal, a wily Brahmin even by the standards of that cunning caste. He flushed our hopes down the cold waters of the Gangotri, which is partial of this Ramdev, because he once lived in its caves. I tell you, nepotism is built into the landscape of India!
The situation is hopeless. For fifteen years we earned public odium for supporting that Bihari cowherd; we remained loyal even after he lost support of both nar and Narayan. He repaid us by ridiculing the dictatorship of the proletariat and its bhakralok vanguard, and prostrating himself before that sweaty sanyasi. Even before the saffron party could feel the pulse of the people (remember their wimpish response to the arrest of Kanchi Acharya?), the Yadav cowboy started shouting about “indigenous causes” and “foreign multinationals.” Doesn’t he know the Communist Party is one of the great multinational corporations? And we are doing so well in India – our real estate rivals the evangelical churches. But the cowboy hit us bad, telling those idiotic television reporters that so long as herbal medicines added life to one’s years (it should be years to one’s life, but you can see how naughty he is), it hardly mattered if they contained the bones of “manav ya danav” (human beings or devils). Where does that leave us? Comrades preaching vegetarianism are a blot on the gulag archipelago.
Worse, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh also jumped into the fray, saying the Baba is being victimized at the behest of multinational drug companies, to hurt the “swadeshi” concept of medicine, particularly the idea of yoga as a counter to the culture of imbibing pills for every ailment. Now swadeshi is simply Hindu (it can hardly mean Mecca or Rome), and yoga goes back to the Vedas, so you can see where Mulayam Singh is heading. It is said the yogi is his caste fellow; this could explain the behaviour of the Yadav twins.
It beats me that Hindu upper castes genuflect before this bairagi. They are the ones who guzzle the colas that Ramdev says are fit only to clean toilets. I must admit colas make economical cleaners, and Andhra farmers have proved they are cheap and effective pesticides. Actually, Ramdev has been smart to link us with cola multinationals – they have a bad product and a high public profile – and are easy to target. In fact, I think we made a mistake when we decided to pick a quarrel with Ramdev for the sake of a handful of retrenched workers in Haridwar, because the swami is a smart cookie and the dismissed workers are fools – they took us for a ride and we came off worst.
Look at the guts of a yogi who says he is willing to teach Comrade Karat pranayam, the Hindu science of breathing for a sound mind and body, and adds in the same breath that he is not a pushover like the Kanchi Shankaracharya. If only we had known this before; if only we could have foreseen that the storm that did not rise when the Shankaracharya was incarcerated would not abate when a smooth-talking fakir was at the receiving end. You will wonder Great Commissar, why the tsunami of public anger broke out for the latter, while God alone wept for the former. Since the dharma of both men is the same, I think the answer lies in their karmic responses to life’s challenges – one is contemplative, the other combative.
But our real problem is that this deceptive swami is a mayavi, like his dark kinsman, Krishna. He spins his web around society gently, with yogic aerobics and loads of sweet talk, which he claims can cure all serious and even “incurable” diseases. His gullible admirers rush to buy his medicines on their own; he accuses us of links with foreign drug companies, and we are speechless. Worse, in this era of intensified capitalism which is somehow called liberalization, his programme boosts the TRPs of his host television channels and earns them fabulous revenues. The secular media is bourgeois, and ditches us for this reason. As for the Government media, it is a fact that all these good-for-nothing politicians line up at the ashram after dark for special life-enhancing medicaments. Haven’t you noticed that the lifespan of a politician far exceeds the national average?
Sadly, the Ramdev episode has given a new lease of life to the hitherto dormant Hindu atma; Hindus will no longer be content to live as dhimmis in their own country. We chose the wrong target and attacked with the wrong weapon. With hindsight, it appears that a protective Hindu sentiment enveloped the yogi when that idiotic group, SIMI, told him to close shop because some Muslims were deriving medical benefits from the Hindu asanas. It did not help that a reputed Muslim classical singer derided the Astha channel, which Hindus revere, but was silent about Q TV. By the time our desi commissar jumped into the fray, the scales were already tilted against us.
The Pioneer, 10 January 2006