The Kerala political establishment is fervently doing what it can and more to save the skin of infamous terrorists and local Muslim women are fighting home-grown Talibans to stay dignified. Common folk in Kerala in particular and India in general have become apparently insensitive, if not repellent, to the current political imbroglio. Ordinary people, the salt of the earth, seem to have lost their certitude. Just talking to some who were once avid newspaper readers would suggest they are skipping their daily political readings for unknown reasons, causing one to wonder whether they have become desensitised by other factors – alcohol or drugs or both. Some detest even talking anything about it. No wonder our so-called Indian democracy is pitching downwards like a dart.

If there is anything more despicable to talk about than politics nowadays it would certainly be religion, so much so that one is obliged to say no more than a cursory “my goodness” to the atrocities practised by professional religionists (among others, jihadis belong to this category). Those people who shy away have never figured in the ultimate reckoning, arguably because they are those who need god and spirituality, but prefer to buy it in a shop. They come to know god only through other people who sell god and spirituality, lock, stock and barrel. They think they can find god or all-in-one spirituality in somebody else’s pocket, or book for that matter.

Democracy is akin to spirituality or true religion. True participation in democracy is like genuine participation in religion. You are obliged to participate in both directly. You can’t buy them in a religious or political party office. One principle valid for both is the owning of individual responsibility. No use closing our eyes to shit and pretending the shit will go away by itself. Fear of consequences has drawn us all back into our shells. But, like the proverbial sin, that which we fear is already lurking at our doorway.

It is because we Indians have buried our heads too deep in the sand that we don’t realise we are on the verge of losing our head, literally, as the top of our political map and figuratively as the peak of our unique civilisation – the principles and ideals that have bestowed us our bharatiyata, the civilisation our Hindu ancestors worked hard to achieve through millennia of yagna and tapas.

This is probably what some people call Hindutva, and for which they are scornfully derided. Anyway it is this Indian beingness and essence that make a lot of Muslims and Christians living in India genuinely Indian Christians and Indian Muslims. Aping the Saudi Arabian version of Islam or carrying around the yellow flag of Vatican or mocking Hindu heritage doesn’t make anybody an Indian Muslim or Indian Christian. They may carry an Indian passport when they go abroad to beg or get debriefed. Well, that’s another matter.

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s, or rather the grey eminence Sonia Gandhi’s leadership is any indication, India will be dismembered again soon and trigger the erasure of the Indian civilisation from human memory. Kashmir will be handed over to jihadis on a platter because Sonia Gandhi hasn’t the stomach to fight terrorists. You can’t expect an ordinary housewife with two kids out in the open, who lost a husband and mother-in-law to terrorists, to take up the glove and go after terrorists like cowboy George W. Bush did.

On top of that she is a Catholic Christian with allegiance to Vatican and Rome and even when good faith and in-law patriotism are granted, is vulnerable to orchestrations of foreign powers opposed to the Indian civilisation and all out to get it. The problem is not with her, but with all of us who allow her to do all this and get away with it. The fault lies strictly with the Indian voters who allowed this to happen and dream in their silliest moments that Manmohan Singh is our prime minister.

News reports sympathetic to the jihadis are emanating from seemingly respectable pseudo-secularist journalists like Karan Thapar and national newspapers like Hindustan Times who hypnotically suggest to the Indian public: why not call back the army from Kashmir, why not give away Kashmir to the jihadis, what do we lose? Anyway, it is already off-limits for the non-Kashmiri Indian by federal law and for the Hindu Kashmiri by jihadi dictate. We can only be tourists at risk now and by giving it up we can be better, no-risk tourists tomorrow!

All arguments for compromise on Kashmir are not only faulty, but are cunning innuendos designed to promote the disintegration of all inherited values that make us India and Indians. We know for sure there are many Muslims in Kashmir who don’t want to have anything to do with the jihadis who root for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Thousands of relatives of these Kashmiri Muslims are living in all parts of India going about their daily business. What is Pakistan but the nation of jihadis who denounced their Hindutva to become mere servants and pawns of foreign powers like the UK and the US?

For all that the Pakistani jihadis have done for their masters – the Americans, the British and the Saudis – they got what they had in store all the while. One might say they have even earned commensurate with their services. According to the Wall Street Journal, even the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI now thinks the jihadis are bigger threats to Pakistan than the Indian army. Jihadis fighting jihadis? Working for asuras hasn’t done anybody any good since the history of time.

Creating a jihadi Kashmir will be the birth of another failed state and monster of anarchy dancing on another dead limb of Indian civilisation. Letting go of Kashmir will be betraying the millions of peaceable Indian Muslims who want to have no truck with jihadis or foreign powers. Compromising on Kashmir also means bowing down to the same foreign powers who are the real masters of Pakistan. And in the process, we Indians are also put on the line, at the mercy of the unscrupulous American state and its global band of modern highway robbers.

As I write, the Indian parliament is wasting much time and public money debating a disastrous nuclear deal with these thieves. Our parliamentarians are discussing not any strategic security or crucial energy issue, but the terms and conditions on which the western merchants queuing up outside our borders can sell their outdated nuclear ware for billions of dollars inside India.

Behind almost every nuclear reactor in the West there are untold stories of deception and subterfuge in terms of lethal nuclear waste. Kept under tight wraps, these stories have been seeping out slowly, but at regular intervals. A hundred percent safe or sustainable waste disposal facility doesn’t exist anywhere. Why do we need obsolete technology when we could easily develop an innovation with all that money? Do we have to condemn innumerable future generations of Indians to certain contamination?

Mauled, looted and then brainwashed to be servile, the story of modern India is a tragic-comedy entirely scripted by the Anglo-American geo-political persuasion. The freedom from colonial powers came at the expense of a huge price – the truncation of India – caused mainly by the Cold War considerations of bigger actors like the UK and USA, than any real effect of Muslim League’s theological pyrotechnics or M.K. Gandhi’s non-virility.

When Pakistan has become a dreadful tragedy and a burden for its monster minders, the slapstick comedy of India is being turned around to the same fate, though in a different way, once again being scripted by the Western establishment. There is no doubt the Obama administration would love to see Kashmir given to the jihadis as a reward for leaving American interests alone.

Kashmir was born from the faux pas of partition, the foundation of which was the idea that the Islamic faith is a nation. It was an ideology that many of its own followers could not stomach for various reasons, and opted out of the ‘land of the pure’ to remain behind in a logically Hindu India. If somebody surmised at the time that the all-pervading spirituality cannot be a nation, they kept it to themselves or didn’t say it loud enough or just wasn’t heeded. However, this served the purpose of the enemies of our unique civilisation.

By electing the UPA we have committed a crime against the nation and wronged our heritage. If the opposition is not strong enough, it is because our collective will is not strong enough. If the majority are voting for Sonia Gandhi it is because she promises a greasy freewheeling in the corridors of corruption. Those who voted for the UPA could very well have jumped off the nearest cliff.

The author is a professional translator and author of Maya, a novel on Kerala’s turbulent past