Girilal Jain

Girilal Jain (1924 - 1993) was a senior Indian journalist who was editor of The Times of India from 1978-1988. He is often described as one of the most passionate crusader for the Hindu cause.

Quotes

• Hindus accept no divisions between the believer and unbeliever. Every path leads to Him (God or Reality); there can be as many paths to Him as the number of human. Indeed, the prophetic tradition is alien to Hinduism. Narrowness of the spirit, peculiar to Semitic faiths, has been alien to India.
  • (source: The Hindu Phenomenon - By Girilal Jain p 5 -135 - South Asia Books - 1998 ISBN 8174760105)

• "The Semitic spirit is intolerant and insistent on the pursuit of a particular course, whereas the Indian spirits is a broadminded and tolerant one. To say therefore that Ram and Rahim are the same is, in my opinion, a form of escapism or make-believe.... There is no concept, for example, in Hinduism of kafir. You cannot be a kafir in Hinduism. You do not cease to be a Hindu whatever you do, unless you choose to get converted to another religion. You can be a Buddhist and a Hindu at the same time, not only in a social sense but also in religious terms."
  • (source: Girilal Jain on Hindu Rashtra - bharatvani.org) [1]

• Hindu tolerance, it seems, is another name for Hindu cowardice.
  • quoted in Goel, S.R. Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990) Preface, 2nd edition, p. xvii

• A number of Indians have tried to define secularism as sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions). I cannot say whether they have been naive or clever in doing so. But the fact remains that secularism cannot admit of such an interpretation. In fact, orthodox Muslims are quite justified in regarding it as irreligious. Moreover, dharma cannot be defined as religion which is a Semitic concept and applies only to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Hinduism is not a religion in that sense; nor are Jainism and Buddhism, or for that matter, Taoism and Confucianism.
  • Girilal Jain, "Limits of the Hindu Rashtra", in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

• As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism in its proper European and historical context.
  • Girilal Jain, "This is Hindu India", in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

• As a group, the secularists, especially the Leftists, have not summoned the courage to insist that in order to ensure the survival of the secular India state, Muslims should accept one common civil code, and that Article 370 of the Constitution, which concedes special rights to Jammu and Kashmir mainly because it is a Muslim-majority state, should be scrapped... Even so I find it extraordinary that those who call themselves modernizers and secularists-the two terms are interchangeable-should shirk the logic of their philosophy of life.
  • Girilal Jain, App. 1, Limits of the Hindu Rashtra, in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

• While a proper discussion of this question must wait, I would wish to add in conclusion that V.P. Singh and Mulayam Singh have rendered a yeoman's service to the cause of Hindu Rashtra, the former by splitting the secularist forces in the political realm, and the latter by showing Hindus how contemptuous and brutal the Indian state can be in its treatment of them.
  • Girilal Jain, App. 1, Limits of the Hindu Rashtra, in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

On Peoples

On Mahatma Gandhi

• "I could find no explanation worthy of the Mahatma for his decision to accept leadership of the khilafat movement. The decision, it seemed to me, revealed the great man's proverbial Achilles' heel."
  • page 52, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

• "But, he was a bhakt not of Ram in his totality, that is of Ram the warrior also, but of Ram as Purushottam Purusha, that is, of Ram who set the ideal for ethical life."
  • Page 152, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

On Muhammad Ali Jinnah

• "Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the greatest benefactor of hindus in modern times, if he was not a hindu in disguise."
  • page 56, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

On narrowmindedness of rulers of Independent India

• "It speaks for the spirit animating the rulers of independent India that even the roads named after Curzon and Hastings in New Delhi have been renamed."
  • page 38, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

On Hinduism

• "Many Hindu intellectuals are just not able to comprehend the fact that there is no human aspiration or experience which lies outside the range of Hinduism; it provides for even demon-Gods. In contrast, all religions are in the nature of sects, though they cannot be so defined because of their insistence on their separateness and, indeed, hostility to Hinduism"
  • Page 5, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

On relation of Hinduism with Jainism and Buddhism

• "In view of deliberate attempts in recent decades to project Buddhism and Jainism as separate religions, distinct from Hinduism, it would be in order to deal with them in passing. the attempts have clearly been motivated by the design to separate their followers from the parent body called Hinduism just as Sikhs have been to an extent. Though not to the same extent as in the case of Sikhs, the attempts have succeeded in as much as neo-Buddhists and at least some Jains have come to regard themselves as non-Hindus.

• In reality, however, Buddhisms and Jainism have been no more than movements within the larger body of Hinduism, not significantly different from Lingayats, Saktas or Bhaktas of more recent times."
  • page 24-25, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

On Hindutva

• "It is sheer dishonesty or naivete to suggest, as is being widely suggested these days, that Hinduism can admit of theocracy. That is a Muslim privilege which no one else can appropriate."
  • Page 105, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

• "Such is the grip of the misrepresentation of Hindutva in anti-Muslim terms that (even) its proponents, including some leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party, themselves, speak of it defensively".
  • Page 106, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

• "The BJP is not a communal party; it cannot be, for the simple reason that Hindus have never been, and are not, a community in the accepted sense of the term. They represent an ancient civilization not known either to draw a boundary between the faithful and the faithless, the blessed and the damned, or to engage in heresy hunting and its counterpart, persecution of other faiths. Hindus are, in western terms, pagans."
  • Page 149, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

• "Unlike Islamic fundamentalists, the BJP does not claim to possess a blueprint. It shall have to struggle to evolve an Indian approach to modern problems."
  • Page 105, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

On Marxism

• "Western thinkers had merged liberalism and Marxism to produce the theory of democratic socialism and in the process emasculated both."
  • Page 152, The Hindu Phenomenon, ISBN 81-86112-32-4.

About Jain

• He dared you with Olympian majesty and ... tossed out his formulations with a merciless disregard for sentiment...
  • M.J. Akbar, This tongue had bones, 1993. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.218

• Journalists can reach the level of bureau chief or assistant editor but can never become chief editors. Editors who developed sympathies for Hindu cause, like Girilal Jain, were squeezed out his job as editor of Times Of India. This is just a very-very small glimpse of the vice-like grip these groups have over these two institutions of democracy.
  • Ratan Sharda - RSS 360 °_ Demystifying Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bloomsbury India (2018)

• The now fashionable expression "clash of civilizations" was already in use in India well before Samuel Huntington gave it currency in the West. Girilal Jain, for one, already used it in his analysis of the Ayodhya crisis in 1988-92.
  • "Some recollections from my acquaintance with Sita Ram Goel", ch.6 of K. Elst, ed.: India's Only Communalist, In Commemoration of Sita Ram Goel, also see Elst, K. India's Only Communalist: an Introduction to the Work of Sita Ram Goel, in Sharma, A. (2001). Hinduism and secularism: After Ayodhya. Basingstoke: Palgrave.