I am really surprised at the vulgarity that’s flowing in the country and astonished that it has caught Himachal too. Whether be the BJP or the Congress, Himachalis have brought the parties to power alternatively on local merit rather than on national narrative. Ram Mandir or ultra Hinduism has never been an issue here. Probably, because the Hinduism we know of today was never a part of the Himachali culture.

Being the aboriginals, the Hinduism of Himachal was ingrained in the Naga Cult — in much of Himachal, if not all and parts of Uttarakhand — rather than the Vaishnav cult, which was introduced much later into Himachal and some parts of Uttarakhand by the migrating Brahmins.

So much so has been this influence that some of the Naga deity temples are now portrayed as Shiva temples. In Jaunsar/Kiran areas of Uttarakhand, there are temples devoted to Kauravas, which are now being pushed as Shiva temples. We have enough of our local deities to take care of rather than get embroiled in the Sadhvi, Yogi, brand of Hindutva.

What surprises me is that I find some Himachali students (read: official bearers of a certain Hindu wing student offshoot) preaching Hindutva on social media when they have no bloody clue of the history of their local culture and roots. I am sure, they even don’t know the difference between Hindutva and Hinduism. They use the terms interchangeably. For them, Hindusim is Hindutva and Hindutva is Hinduism. They know only one kind of ism — the RSS kind of ism, which is far far away from what our history has had, which was made rich by different cults varying from Viashnav, Shiva, Shakti, Tantrik, Naga, Buddhist, Jain etc.

They don’t understand that India was never a land of believers, but has been a land of seekers. And it is this “seeking” that the Bhakt brigade is trying to strangle. The current narrative is being pushed to believe. Believe in Modi, Yogi and the curses of a pseudo Sadhvi.

Seeking, thinking, academia, intellectualism, reasoning is being killed bit by bit and anyone who dares to question the flow, should be shunned to Pakistan. The biggest threat to Hinduism today is from Hindutva itself and its propagators. For them, it’s a vague idea, without understanding the either of them. For them ‘dharmayudh’ is literal translation into ‘religious warfare’ rather than the literary sense of “the war for righteousness.”

History is being and will be rewritten. Our cultural and cult and religious history will never be so rich again. It will have only one colour — Saffron.