Why have Hindus suffered for a thousand years? Why don’t Hindus unitedly fight against their aggressors?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Question Why have Hindus been suffering for more than a thousand years? Why can’t Hindus be united in fighting against the aggressors who have been plundering them for so long? Answer.
Yes, it is true that what we call as Hindu culture which is actually Vedic culture has been targeted and plundered by foreigners for quite a long time. Now the reason for this is that people within the Vedic fold stopped following the Vedic teachings properly and because they stopped following the Vedic teachings so they lost the empowerment that comes by connection with God. So when we work on God’s behalf then we have God’s power with us.
But over the centuries because of the influence of Kali Yuga, people’s minds got perverted, diluted, contaminated and because of that they lost their connection with God and the Vedic culture became exploitative. So the Brahmins became prestige hungry, the Kshatriyas became power hungry and they stopped caring for the people in general and that happened. When they stopped caring for people in general then the result of that was that they started losing the hold on people and people started rebelling so Buddhism, Jainism came up and Buddhism, Jainism these very strongly opposed violence.
So many aspects were there. The opposition to non-violence was there. Exaltation of non-violence was such that when Islamic raiders came to invade India many of the kings who were influenced unduly influenced by these religions, Buddhism and Jainism they did not feel the impetus to defend themselves and even many of the Hindus they were following rituals without understanding their purposes so when the Muslims would attack they would use the Hindus blind faith against them so the Muslims would attack with say having cows in front of their armies and they would be shooting arrows from behind the cows and the Hindus would be afraid of hurting the cows so they would not counter back and they would be defeated and plundered that way.
So Krishna demonstrated in the Mahabharata that with the cunning one should be cunning so the Kauravas were cunning and Krishna did not hesitate to use deception Shatho Shatkyam with those who were deceptive so if in the Indian culture people would not have a simplistic understanding of Vedic culture means just blind adherence to rituals and rationalization of Vedic teachings for one’s own purposes of power and prestige if people did not get into that kind of misunderstanding then Vedic culture would have stayed strong against whoever had exalted it so there is power when we connect with God but when there is only the external appearance of connection with God but there is no inner connection with God then that power is no longer there and then we become overpowered by endemic forces. So at one level it has happened because of the influence of Kali Yuga but at an individual level just because there is Kali Yuga doesn’t mean that we don’t have free will. All of us have free will and if we act according to scripture properly then we can still access the power of God and we can minimize the harmful effects of this dark age of Kali Now why can’t Hindus become united to face the onslaughts? Yes they can in many ways.
Actually what we call as Hindu today, the word Hindu doesn’t come in any of these scriptures the word Hindu is given by foreigners the Arabian invaders who came to India they called those people who were living on one side of the Sindhu river as Sindhus and their name became Hindu afterwards but still the point is there are a large number of people who self-identify as Hindus now if Hindus are to be united there has to be a basis for that and the basis should be the Vedic scriptures so we understand what the Vedic teachings are and then we harmonize based on that but what has happened today is that there are many organizations who want unification without any philosophical foundation to that unification so in fact they try to downplay the philosophy and they suggest we want to be united at the cultural level yes we can be united at the cultural level to some extent but ultimately the culture is ever changing and unification at the cultural level is not sustainable and especially if the cultural unity is brought out by downplaying scriptural fidelity, faithfulness to scripture then that sort of cultural unity becomes entirely material it doesn’t become spiritual so at that level the Hindu unity is not much different from the fanatical Muslim unity or the hyper-evangelical Christian unity hyper-evangelical means those who want to share who want to evangelize preach Christianity to others and hyper-evangelical means excessively excessively overbearing in their outreach, in their teaching so the point is at a material level unity is not really possible it may be there for some time as long as people’s interests are being taken care of I scratch your back, you scratch my back but those interests can never be sustained because the material level itself is not sustainable that’s why if you want sustainable unity it has to be based on harmony with the teaching of the scriptures so the Krishna consciousness movement is sharing the scriptural message and it is presenting it so that intelligent people can understand it so people understand the scriptural message and harmonize with it then there will not just be unity between people but there is unity between humanity and divinity unity between man and god and when there is unity between man and god that is what happens at the end of the Bhagavad Gita what Arjuna tells Krishna is I will do what you say and then he gets the power of Krishna and he is able to do extraordinary things in the battle of Kurukshetra so we may not have to fight a physical war but we do have to take up intellectual arms to counter the various conceptions that are there in society today and for countering that we do need empowerment by god and that comes when we follow god so now this doesn’t mean that everybody has to follow one idea only the Vedic culture is multilevel and different people can follow different things as long as it is in the broad Vedic agreement it is the agreement with the broad mission of the Vedic scriptures and there is a understanding of their gradual progression this is a large subject about what the Vedic teachings actually are and I have talked about this briefly in my book Deity Worship as well as in several other questions but the point is that if we seek unity just based on external factors oh there is a threat to us so we should become united that unity will not be sustainable and that unity will not be transformational that unity may be required circumstantially and when it is required it should definitely be done and in the history it has been done several times when Muslims were invading and conquering and desecrating the Vedic culture all over India so at that time the Advaitins they all came together the Advaitins the Ramayujites the Sri Vaishnavas and the Madhavites they all came together to help establish the Vijayanagara empire so Vidyaranya and others they all came together in a united way so there are examples of that being done at a cultural level and even today it can be done at a cultural level where we understand that there are certain general principles of Vedic culture which many of the organizations agree upon and we can work to protect them so in many ways it’s gone is networking say on cow protection is networking on eco-friendly community development that sort of networking is happening and it can also be expanded so that those people who have similar cultural interests can unite but overall we have to understand that along with cultural unity there has to be intellectual harmony based on scriptural fidelity and then there will be divine empowerment that will lead to sustainable and transformational re-spiritualization of society that will be what will actually benefit people that will make people internally happy and help others to become happy otherwise it will just be one culture fighting against another culture throughout history cultures have been fighting and it will just be material Hindu culture fighting against Christian culture or Muslim culture if we want to have a spiritual element in it then we have to connect with God by following scriptures which he has given and that is what Krishna constant movement is doing and that is what it is trying to share with others also. Thank you.