Article 113

The Last Defense of Hinduism Is Reason, Not Ritual

Hindu gurus, swamis, and priests are theologically programmed. Their armor is ritual, their weapons are mantras, and their shield is tradition. But when confronted with the relentless advance of the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—they are disarmed before the battle even begins. For the rivalry between India and the Semitic world is not a rivalry of theology at all. It is not a contest of metaphysical speculation, of whose scripture shines brighter or whose deity is more transcendent. It is a civilizational conflict, an existential clash between two worlds that have defined humanity for millennia: the Indic and the Semitic.

The Indic world, with its multiplicity of gods, philosophies, and ways of life, built a civilization of openness and debate, of speculation and synthesis. The Semitic world, by contrast, constructed its civilization on exclusive monotheism, prophetic authority, and an iron insistence on one book, one truth, one god. These two civilizational types cannot meet as equals in dialogue; they collide as rivals in power. The Hindu priest who chants the Rig Veda at dawn is not thereby armed against the missionary who arrives at noon with the Bible, nor against the jihadist who comes at night with the sword. Reciting the Upanishads may soothe the soul, but it does not prevent the conversion of one’s neighbor or the burning of one’s temple.

This is the truth that India has refused to confront for centuries. The tragedy of Hinduism has been to mistake theological debate for civilizational struggle. When Muslims marched through the passes, Hindu kings relied on astrologers. When Christian missionaries landed with colonial ships, Hindu swamis answered them with sermons on karma and rebirth. Both responses were irrelevant to the actual stakes. The Abrahamic faiths were never interested in debate, only in conquest—of land, of souls, of minds. They did not come to argue; they came to rule.

That is why it is not the priest but the secular intellectual who must defend Hinduism. It is not the one reciting Sanskrit hymns but the one wielding reason, history, and nationalism who can meet the challenge. For the defense of a civilization requires clarity of purpose, not ritual repetition. It requires a relentless pursuit of truth, not in the metaphysical sense, but in the historical and political sense. Hinduism must learn, and fast, that quoting the Rig Veda is no substitute for militant nationalism.

Take the example of Buddhism in India. The monks built monasteries, preserved scriptures, and cultivated meditation. But when the Turkic and Afghan invaders came, monasteries were burned, monks were massacred, and the Dharma was extinguished from the land of its birth. Why? Because the monks believed their intellectual and spiritual superiority would shield them. They did not realize they were in a civilizational conflict where the opponent respected only submission or death. Debate was irrelevant. Reason was irrelevant. Only power mattered. Hinduism survived where Buddhism perished not because priests were more effective, but because fragments of Hindu society retained some martial resistance. Yet even there, the story is one of defeat after defeat, until the colonial period when Hindus became subjects of an alien Christian empire.

India has tried every possible defense except the right one. Ritual failed against Islam. Syncretism failed against Christianity. And “tolerance” has failed against both. Today, the intellectual heirs of Gandhi preach non-violence and pluralism, while Christians continue to expand conversion networks and Muslims continue to enforce communal solidarity. The Hindu temple priest may continue to chant the Gayatri mantra, but it does not prevent a Dalit villager from accepting baptism for a bag of rice, nor does it deter a Muslim mob from lynching a Hindu shopkeeper.

The modern Hindu must understand: this is not a war of gods but a war of civilizations. The Indic world does not need more rituals; it needs more reason. It does not need more gurus; it needs more intellectuals who can dissect Semitic theologies and expose their authoritarian core. It does not need more “holy men” urging renunciation; it needs more nationalists insisting on survival. Civilization is not defended by priests; it is defended by citizens who know that existence is political before it is spiritual.

If Hinduism is to endure, it must abandon the delusion that metaphysics can save it. The Vedas and Upanishads are treasures, but they are not weapons. They can inspire, but they cannot defend. The task of defense falls to secular intellectuals, to those who recognize that the challenge is civilizational, not theological. India must embrace militant nationalism—not the empty sloganeering of parties, but the deeper nationalism of civilizational self-consciousness. Hindu survival depends on the recognition that the real choice is not between gods, but between civilizations: whether Indic civilization will live or be annihilated.

History is merciless in exposing illusions. The Hindu illusion has always been that wisdom alone confers safety. From the early medieval period onward, India was repeatedly given chances to learn that knowledge does not protect a civilization when the enemy comes armed with faith fused to power. Yet time and again, Hindu leaders—royal and religious alike—mistook spiritual resources for material defenses. The price was centuries of humiliation.

When Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh in 712, the Brahmins of Multan were still reciting the Rig Veda and presiding over ritual sacrifice. They did not understand that the Qur’an in the saddle of an Arab horse was not a competing scripture but a declaration of civilizational supremacy. The priests saw religion where they should have seen strategy. The mosques rose on temple foundations not because Allah out-argued Vishnu, but because armies enforced theology through violence. Hindu civilization never absorbed the lesson that Semitic religion was less about belief than about sovereignty.

The pattern continued. When Mahmud of Ghazni sacked Somnath in 1026, carting away gold and smashing idols, the guardians of the temple did not prepare fortifications or train militias. They trusted ritual purity to protect a shrine against men who saw idol-smashing as divine command. In Hindu imagination, Somnath was a cosmic center; in Ghazni’s worldview, it was a pile of stone. He proved, brutally, which worldview carried weight in history.

Centuries later, during the Mughal conquest, the same misreading persisted. Akbar’s policy of tolerance is remembered as proof that coexistence was possible, but Akbar was an anomaly, not the rule. His successors reimposed the Islamic civilizational imperative, and Hindu leaders were still debating karma and dharma while facing waves of forced conversions and temple demolitions. When Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of Kashi Vishwanath, Brahmins quoted the Upanishads about the immortality of the soul. But what use was metaphysics when the sanctum itself was reduced to rubble?

Under British rule, the dynamic shifted but the stakes remained civilizational. Missionaries arrived armed with printing presses, schools, and a theology of universal salvation. Hindu priests again believed they could counter with ritual and myth. They quoted shlokas about rebirth to rebut doctrines of heaven and hell. But the Christian missionary was not there for debate. He was there to baptize villagers, to educate elites into contempt for their own traditions, to tie the colony to the Bible as much as to the Crown. He succeeded far beyond what Muslim rulers had managed. Large sections of Hindu society were hollowed out, psychologically colonized, made ashamed of their gods.

The crucial fact is this: in every one of these confrontations, priests failed. They did not fail because they lacked sincerity, but because the civilizational struggle was not theological, and theological actors were irrelevant. The battlefield was not the spirit but society. The enemy did not care whether the Upanishads were profound; he cared whether India submitted. And priests, however profound, had nothing to say about sovereignty, power, or survival.

Contrast this with the rare moments when secular intellectuals and militant nationalists took charge. The Marathas under Shivaji recognized that a temple survives only when the state survives. They did not defend Hinduism by quoting the Vedas but by building forts, training armies, and constructing a civilizational nationalism that gave Hindu identity political teeth. Likewise, the Sikh resistance in Punjab was forged not in the monastery but on the battlefield. Guru Gobind Singh understood that scripture without sovereignty was suicide; hence the Khalsa was born, blending spiritual identity with militant solidarity. That is what kept Sikhism alive where Buddhism vanished.

Even in modern India, it has never been priests who defended Hindu civilization. It was intellectuals and nationalists who fought the decisive battles. Swami Vivekananda is often celebrated as a religious figure, but what electrified his audience in Chicago in 1893 was not his metaphysics but his defiance. He refused to accept the civilizational inferiority of Hinduism before an imperial West. Likewise, Savarkar, Nehru, and Ambedkar—all in their own ways secular intellectuals—recognized that the fate of Hindu civilization depended not on mantras but on modernity, not on metaphysics but on politics. Ambedkar did not protect Dalits from Christian missionaries by chanting hymns; he fought by rewriting laws, by drafting a constitution, by wielding reason against dogma.

This is the difference Hindus must learn to internalize. A civilization is not preserved by chanting; it is preserved by struggle. Abrahamic faiths did not conquer through persuasion. They conquered through the fusion of theology and power—Islam through jihad, Christianity through mission and empire, Judaism through survival strategies of cohesion and political leverage. If Hinduism is to endure, it must fuse its own intellectual resources with militant nationalism. Otherwise, it will repeat the fate of Buddhism—sublime, sophisticated, and extinct.

The lesson of history is pitiless. A civilization unwilling to defend itself in the terms that matter to its enemies will not survive. The Muslims did not care for Sanskrit logic. The Christians did not care for Advaita Vedānta. Both cared for obedience, for submission, for expansion. To meet such adversaries, Hinduism requires not priests but strategists, not gurus but generals, not ritualists but rationalists who understand power.

And so the contemporary Hindu must make a hard choice: either continue to recite verses while the world changes, or accept that survival requires militant nationalism, the intellectual dismantling of Semitic theologies, and the building of a secular defense of Indic civilization. It is not an easy choice, but it is the only choice. Because history, unlike scripture, offers no second life, no rebirth. It offers only survival or extinction.

If the first millennium of India’s encounter with the Semitic world proved the futility of ritual as defense, the twentieth century exposed the same lesson in modern form. By the dawn of the colonial era’s end, Hindu priests had been reduced to marginal actors in their own society. They presided over ceremonies, but they did not shape history. The future of Hindu civilization was being decided not in temples but in assemblies, in jails, in universities, in newspapers, and ultimately in the Constituent Assembly that wrote India’s Constitution.

Look closely: the men and women who defined modern India were not temple priests. Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, Savarkar—all came armed not with mantras but with ideologies, visions of power, and strategies of survival. Gandhi’s genius, whatever one makes of it, was political theater, not theological debate. His spinning wheel was not a mantra but a weapon of civilizational assertion against the machine of British imperialism. Nehru’s vision of India as a secular democracy was not an Upanishadic recitation but a modernist wager that Hindu civilization could survive by adopting the very tools of its conquerors—science, rationalism, centralized statehood. Patel stitched the country together with realpolitik, not ritual. Ambedkar rewrote Hindu society with law, not liturgy. And Savarkar, often vilified but seldom refuted, insisted that Hindu survival demanded militant nationalism, a civilizational consciousness that refused to be lulled by metaphysical comfort.

Each of these men had their blind spots, but each understood one thing the priesthood did not: that survival is civilizational, not spiritual. The cow may be sacred, but it is not sovereignty. The temple may be holy, but it is not the state. The Veda may be eternal, but it cannot legislate. A civilization without political power is a corpse waiting to be burned.

Partition was not an accident; it was the political arithmetic of civilizational failure. It happened because Hindus were prepared to debate metaphysics while others prepared to seize territory and enforce belonging. The bargain of nonviolence, of moral appeal, of spiritual surrender that Gandhi personified was noble — but nobility is not a strategy for survival when your adversary treats politics as theology. The night India fractured, it was not priests who negotiated borders; it was politicians and soldiers who counted trains and corpses. The lesson is brutal but necessary: moral purity does not substitute for political power. If Hinduism is to survive in the modern world, it must treat politics as a battlefield of ideas and interests — and it must win there.

After independence, the new threats took subtler, more bureaucratic forms. Missionary agencies, flush with Western funding, turned charity into conversion. They set up hospitals, schools, and NGOs in the poorest districts and offered shelter, education, and hope in exchange for renunciation. The conversion was not always a theatric mass-baptism; often it was a quiet, incremental attrition of identity, a shifting of loyalty from village to mission, from temple to church. A ritual cannot compete with the refrigerator, the scholarship, the hospital bed. Priests could shout about dharma from the temple steps, but that did not feed hungry bellies or supply modern education. The secular intellectual must therefore understand how material inducements function as instruments of civilizational replacement — and how to counter them with institutions that restore pride, dignity, and opportunity within the Indic fold.

Then there is jihad in its modern form: transnational ideology fused to grievance, amplified by social media and financed through networks that cross borders. Jihadist movements do not merely recruit fighters; they build narratives of humiliation and promise of belonging. They mobilize diaspora funds, they radicalize alienated youths, and they wage terror as both tactic and theater. Confronting such movements requires more than theological disputation. It needs intelligence, community resilience, legal clarity, and political will — things priests do not provide. The defense of Hindu civilization against Islamist expansion is therefore a multi-dimensional task: policing and intelligence; community development and education; counter-radicalization through reasoned public debate; and a legal framework that isolates violent ideologues without criminalizing an entire faith.

Meanwhile, a different but no less insidious front emerges from Western universities and media. Academic fashion exports moral doctrines that treat imperialism as eternal guilt and indigenous civilizations as irredeemable oppressors. The language of “postcolonial critique,” “structural oppression,” and “woke universalism” is weaponized against Hindu civilization: temples become symbols of caste cruelty, ancient texts become proof of backwardness, and any assertion of civilizational pride is branded as fascism. This intellectual warfare is less visible than bullets but no less effective: it shapes donors, influences foreign policy, and legitimizes missionary and Islamist narratives. The priest with his shloka has no answer to a ranked syllabus at Oxford or a New York Times editorial. The answer must come from scholars who can out-argue, from journalists who can out-report, and from cultural producers who can out-narrate the Indic story on global platforms.

This is why the program I sketched earlier — education, media, law, alliances, ideological critique, and a renewed national character — is not abstract policy; it is survival doctrine. But doctrine becomes effective only when translated into institutions. Here are the practical moves a militant rationalist civilizational project must make now.

First, education must be reclaimed. Rewrite curricula at all levels so children learn their civilizational history candidly — its glories and its crimes — but above all its continuity and achievements. Establish scholarship centers that produce research in defense of Indic contributions to mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, political thought, and philosophy. Fund university chairs explicitly dedicated to comparative civilizational studies where Indic perspectives are not footnotes but protagonists. Create technical institutes in tribal districts that render missionary inducements irrelevant by marrying dignity to opportunity.

Second, create a media ecosystem that projects Indic confidence. Produce films, documentaries, podcasts, and long-form journalism that narrate Indian history on our terms. Build international English-language outlets to reach diasporas and global opinion-makers. Train a new generation of editors, anchors, and columnists who understand civilizational narrative-building. If other civilizations could normalize themselves through story and spectacle, so must we — only we will bring reason, not myth, to the task.

Third, pursue legal and policy reforms that remove asymmetries. Churches and missionary outfits that run schools must be subject to the same civil audits and curricular standards as Hindu institutions. Predatory conversion via material inducement must be curbed by law that protects choice without criminalizing faith. Temples held under archaic government trusts must be liberated and managed by communities that can restore them as centers of cultural life and social service. These are technical, bureaucratic, legal fights, but they matter more than sermons.

Fourth, construct alliances that reflect civilizational affinities. The “United Dharmic Alliance” is not fantasy but strategy: cultural, economic, and diplomatic networks across South and Southeast Asia, parts of East Asia, and sympathetic partners in Eurasia can blunt the global reach of Abrahamic blocs. These alliances will trade, protect minority rights for Indic adherents abroad, support cultural exchange, and present a united front on international stages against missionary overreach and Islamist political pressure. Diplomacy is a weapon if wielded; let India wield it not as a shy postcolonial nation but as a civilizational center with allies.

Fifth, wage intellectual counteroffensives. Support think tanks that publish systematic critiques of monotheistic universalism, fund translations of Indic texts into global languages with rigorous commentary, and sponsor debates in international fora where Indic scholars contest the monopoly of western narratives. Train lawyers and public intellectuals to use history and evidence to dismantle dishonest critiques and to expose hypocrisy where Western moralism serves as cover for geopolitical meddling.

Finally, cultivate a national character that is assertive and charitable at once. Militant nationalism must be disciplined, principled, and civic: it defends citizens, secures borders, protects cultural heritage, and insists on legal equality. It is not vengeance disguised as piety. It is not theocracy. It is civilizational self-respect fused with liberal instruments where needed. The goal is not to purge all difference but to ensure that difference is not a pathway to erasure.

This program is demanding because the enemies of civilizational confidence are not weak. They have centuries of institutional practice: missionary funding mechanisms, Islamist transnational networks, and Western educational prestige. Our response must be patient but relentless, strategic not merely sentimental. It must accept uncomfortable truths — that ritual cannot substitute for policy, that piety cannot substitute for institutions, that metaphysics cannot substitute for strategy.The priest will always have a place; the temple will always be a human necessity. But temples cannot substitute for statecraft, and mantras cannot substitute for law. If Hinduism is to remain more than a museum relic admired by foreigners, it must be defended by thought and by institutions. The age of apologetics is over. The age of defense — rational, disciplined, and unapologetically militant in spirit — must begin. The choice is stark: civilization, or extinction. Choose accordingly.

Defense, however necessary, is never enough. A civilization that is content merely to survive—beaten, scarred, and apologizing for itself—is already halfway to extinction. Hinduism must not remain the cornered victim of history, constantly explaining itself to hostile audiences, constantly surrendering the initiative. A civilization survives not only by enduring but by exposing the illusions of its enemies and dismantling their claim to superiority. Hinduism must stop parrying blows and start striking.

The Abrahamic faiths survive on a myth of universality. Each insists that its god is the only god, its book the only revelation, its prophet the only voice of truth. This is not spirituality but monopoly. It is not enlightenment but a civilizational strategy disguised as divine will. Judaism protected itself by declaring one people chosen. Christianity globalized chosenness through the myth of universal sin and one savior. Islam radicalized universality by declaring Muhammad the final prophet and the Qur’an the final word. Each in its own way erased alternatives, exterminated plurality, and declared monopoly as truth.

Hindu intellectuals must attack this monopoly with relentless scorn. Why should the desert god of a tribal people be universal, while the gods of India, worshiped by hundreds of millions over millennia, are dismissed as “idols”? Why should the death of one Jew in Roman Judea be called the hinge of history, while the lives and teachings of Krishna, Buddha, or Mahāvīra are treated as “myth”? Why should books written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic be called revelation, while the Sanskrit Vedas, older by centuries, are dismissed as primitive chants? These are not polite questions to raise in debate halls. They are polemical strikes that expose the fraudulence of Abrahamic propaganda.

What Hindu priests cannot say, secular intellectuals must. Priests protect ritual, but rituals are irrelevant to this war. Intellectuals must say bluntly: Abrahamic faiths are not universal but provincial, not eternal but historical, not divine but political. They are the fossilized obsessions of desert tribes who universalized their local quarrels. The desert became the cosmos, the tribal law became divine command, the tribal prophet became the voice of eternity. It was clever, but it was also a fraud.

And Hinduism must also stop apologizing for what Abrahamics mock. Polytheism is not weakness but strength. Many gods means many truths, many ways, many freedoms. A world of plurality is a world without monopoly. Hindu intellectuals must learn to say: the poverty is not in having many gods, but in having only one. Likewise, caste is not the unique sin of Hinduism but the universal fact of all societies. Hierarchy has existed everywhere; slavery was codified in the Bible and the Qur’an. Caste has been oppressive, yes, but it was also flexible and reformable, unlike the rigid categories of Semitic law. If Hinduism stops apologizing and begins counterattacking, the Abrahamic moral monopoly collapses.

This counteroffensive requires a new type of Hindu: militant, rational, unapologetic. Militant not in blind violence, but in relentless determination to defend and expand civilizational space. Rational not in sterile academic terms, but in wielding evidence, history, and logic as weapons. Unapologetic not in arrogance, but in refusing to kneel before the false universals of others. The task is to create an army of secular intellectuals who dismantle Abrahamic propaganda with the same confidence that priests chant mantras.

For too long, Hindus have accepted the role of explaining themselves, of tolerating insults, of being the “pluralist” foil to Semitic absolutism. That age must end. The new task is not to ask for tolerance but to demand recognition of Hindu civilization as a civilizational equal, to strip Abrahamic faiths of their pretensions, to show that their universalism is nothing more than parochial conquest dressed in divine language.

This is why I insist: defense is survival, but offense is freedom. Hinduism must not only endure; it must reverse a millennium of humiliation. It must dismantle the smug confidence of Abrahamic monopoly and expose it for what it is: provincial arrogance masquerading as cosmic truth. It must say, without hesitation, that Semitic monotheism is not progress but regression, not enlightenment but tyranny, not universality but parochialism. It must refuse to kneel before Jerusalem, Rome, or Mecca.

The priests will never do this. They are not trained for ideological war. They may chant, but they cannot counter. They may inspire devotion, but they cannot dismantle propaganda. Civilization cannot be defended with incense sticks. It must be defended with reason, with clarity, with unapologetic scorn. That is the task of secular intellectuals, and it must begin now.

The time for lamentation is over. A thousand years of humiliation should have taught the lesson: civilizations are not defended by prayers. They are defended by power, by clarity, by militant reason. The Abrahamic world has its machinery—missionaries, jihadists, global media, international institutions, and centuries of accumulated propaganda. Hinduism has only one weapon left: its intellect fused to nationalism. To survive, it must deploy this weapon without apology.

The first front is education. Hindu children cannot be raised on textbooks that portray their civilization as superstition while glorifying their conquerors as reformers. Colonial historians wrote to humiliate, and postcolonial Marxists wrote to demoralize. Both succeeded in producing generations of Hindus ashamed of their own traditions. The cure is not ritual but curriculum. Rewrite history truthfully: expose the destruction of temples, the violence of conquests, the strategies of missionaries. Teach Hindu contributions to philosophy, mathematics, science, literature. Train students to see Hindu civilization as a world-historical force, not as a provincial curiosity. Education is where civilizations are saved or lost.

The second front is media. In the modern world, perception is power. Hollywood, Western publishing, and global news outlets normalize Abrahamic dominance while caricaturing Hinduism as exotic ritual or violent nationalism. Within India, media houses amplify missionary rhetoric and Islamist victimhood while mocking Hindu aspirations. Priests cannot fight this war; they do not control cameras or presses. But intellectuals, filmmakers, writers, and journalists can. Hindus must build media institutions that project their civilization with pride, not apology. They must narrate history on their own terms, tell their own stories, and challenge the propaganda networks that have humiliated them for centuries. Without media power, every truth will be drowned by lies.

The third front is law and politics. Indian secularism has been designed as Hindu self-denial. Muslim personal law remains intact. Christian schools receive subsidies. Hindu temples are seized and managed by the state. No priest will dismantle this asymmetry. Only a rationalist movement can. Temples must be liberated. Legal equality must be enforced—one civil code for all. Predatory conversions through material inducement must be outlawed, not as repression of faith but as defense of choice. The Indian state must stop using “secularism” as a whip to punish Hindu assertion while appeasing Abrahamic aggression. Civilizational survival requires a state that protects, not undermines, its majority.

The fourth front is alliances. Hinduism cannot stand alone. It must see itself as the core of a civilizational bloc that spans Asia. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and even rationalist philosophies of East Asia share with Hinduism the instinct for plurality. A United Dharmic Alliance could include India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan, Mongolia, and segments of Indonesia, alongside sympathetic powers like Russia and Buddhist regions of China. This alliance would dwarf the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in population and rival Christian networks in influence. It would project to the world a civilizational pole rooted not in monopoly but in plurality. Without alliances, Hinduism will remain a cornered giant. With them, it can become global again.

The fifth front is ideological critique. Every Abrahamic claim must be dismantled publicly and mercilessly. Missionary universalism must be exposed as cultural imperialism. Jihadist theology must be shown as tyranny disguised as revelation. Western academic attacks on Hinduism as “casteist” must be countered with the history of slavery, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, and genocide committed under Abrahamic banners. Hindu intellectuals must not debate as if on equal terms; they must attack as if dismantling a fraud. The monopoly of one god, one book, one prophet must be revealed as provincial arrogance masquerading as truth. The world must hear it said: the poverty is not in worshiping many gods, but in being confined to only one.

The sixth front is national character. A civilization survives not by accident but by confidence. For too long Hindus have tolerated humiliation, excused aggression, and mistaken weakness for tolerance. The new Hinduism must be unapologetic. Militant nationalism must be embraced not as hatred of others but as love of survival. Just as Jews reclaimed sovereignty through Zionism after centuries of exile, Hindus must reclaim their civilizational self through Hindutva—not the caricature of thuggery painted by enemies, but the deeper idea of Hindu unity, pride, and sovereignty. The nation must stand as the guardian of civilization, ensuring that temples are not demolished, that children are not converted by bribes, that identity is not eroded by shame.

This is the survival program: education, media, law, alliances, ideological critique, and nationalism. Priests cannot deliver it. Gurus cannot articulate it. Swamis cannot enforce it. Only secular intellectuals can. And unless Hindus embrace this role, their civilization will go the way of Buddhism in India—remembered in books, admired abroad, dead at home.

The stakes could not be higher. The Abrahamic world commands armies of believers: two billion Muslims ready to die for Mecca, two billion Christians ready to convert the globe for Christ, a Jewish state defended by the wealth and power of the West. Hinduism commands a billion adherents but no missionary zeal, no global bloc, no coherent defense. Its only strength is its reason and its nationalism. If it refuses to wield them, it will be buried by history.

The Rig Veda may still be recited, but only militant nationalism will ensure it is recited in freedom, not in exile. The Upanishads may still be quoted, but only reason will ensure they are quoted in universities, not in forgotten ruins. The choice is stark: chant while the world erases you, or rise as a civilization that defends itself with intellect, with nationalism, with unapologetic power.

If not now, when? If not reason, what? If not nationalism, who? The future of Hindu civilization hangs on the answer.

Notes

1. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), 459–72.
2. Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib (Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1912), vol. 3, 225–31.
3. Romila Thapar, Somnath: The Many Voices of a History (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004), 32–56.
4. Richard Eaton, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 283–92.
5. Qur’an 9:29; Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 53, Hadith 386 (command to fight non-Muslims until they pay tribute).
6. Bible, Matthew 28:19–20 (“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…”).
7. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (Bombay: 1936), 62–71.
8. V.D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (Nagpur: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, 1923), 47–65.
9. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1907), 6–12.
10. Arun Shourie, Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: ASA, 1994), 21–34.
11. Arun Shourie, Harvesting Our Souls: Missionaries, Their Design, Their Claims (New Delhi: ASA, 1999), 49–65.
12. Christophe Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 77–91.
13. A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 103–10.