Hinduism and India in the Cesspool: Dissection Before Resurrection

I was born a Hindu. I chose to become a secular humanist. I stand with logic, with experiment, with the stubborn fact. I believe in free minds and free markets. I see no contradiction. Every truth must be tested; every idol must be broken. Marx turned Hegel upside down; I would turn Marx inside out.

Russell said it best: “The whole of Marx’s theory of economic development may perfectly well be true if his metaphysic is false, and false if his metaphysic is true, and, but for the influence of Hegel, it would never have occurred to him that a matter so purely empirical could depend upon abstract metaphysics.” He was right. Ideas rot when they stop touching the ground.

China and Vietnam understood. They kept the dialectic on paper and the market in practice. They built factories, not philosophies. India built slogans. In 1947 we stood equal to China. Today China rules the marketplace; India still debates its horoscope. We are a republic of quarrels and excuses—caste against caste, region against region, god against god. Corruption is not our problem; it is our bloodstream.

I left that chaos. Poverty pushed me out; curiosity kept me out. I built a life in America, a family of another color, another faith, another sanity. Here I can say what I think. There, thought itself is a crime.

I refuse to call August 15th Independence Day. It was a transfer of power from white clerks to brown clerks. We traded the ruler’s skin, not the ruler’s soul. Bureaucracy survived. Servility survived. The English left behind their desks, their files, their fear of decision. We kept them all.

Gandhi became our national saint because we mistook moral theatre for political courage. He preached weakness as virtue and called it peace. He wanted to be the Great Soul even if the nation starved. Fasting is not policy; purity is not government. He thought the world would change because he willed it to be kind. It did not.

Jinnah was his mirror. A lonely widower with an iron will, dressed in London tailoring, speaking a language his followers barely understood. He divided a continent with rhetoric and resentment. A million died for the vanity of two men who mistook their egos for destiny.

And the British—the pale, weary empire that drank itself through its last century—left the scene like thieves at dawn. They looted, lectured, and left. They called it civilization. We called it fate.

That is the inheritance. Moral exhibitionism on one side, cynical manipulation on the other, and servility binding them together. India learned to bow and boast in the same breath.

Yet decay is not destiny. Every civilization must dissect itself before it can be reborn. We must cut superstition from thought, obedience from education, sentiment from politics. Reason must become a public virtue, not a private hobby. Evidence must outrank revelation. Enterprise must be honor, not sin.

I write because silence is rot. I write because someone must. I write because I am Indian enough to care and free enough to speak. I will not flatter the dead. I will not worship failure. I will not forgive mediocrity.

This is not hatred; it is hygiene. A nation cannot heal without burning its infections. Truth is fire. Let it spread.This is Reason in Revolt.

— Panini