It wasn’t till the 2030s that the history books came to see the election of 2009 as the historical prelude to the Second Republic, the first leapt hurdle to the run-up to the Reconstitution of 2017 when a great assembly of sadhus and shankaracharyas long promised by the Intermediate Lauhpurush (the one with the moustache) rewrote the Constitution that corrupted the First Republic. With hindsight, the foundational image of the era was the photograph of the Latest Lauhpurush (the bearded one, for the sake of clarity) in saffron, holding up the hand of a now obscure provincial leader as if he were assimilating the old style politician into the New Order. That handclasp came to symbolize the sea-change that occurred in Indian politics at the turn of the century, when the Parivar, from being the political untouchable of the 20th century, became the patriotic touchstone of the 21st.
But the Latest Lauhpurush, who, in a lesser age, would have been the at the head of our political resurgence, had to settle, in this time of Titans, for being the right-hand man of its Leader, the colossus who came to be known as the True Inheritor. It is appropriate that the True Inheritor is missing from the aforementioned photograph (a massive painted version of which now hangs in Parliament’s vestibule) because till the campaign of 2009 no one could have predicted his meteoric ascent to the Hindu helm.
But such is the transformational power of the true Leader that he not only changes the course of history, he comes to be seen as inevitable. The True Inheritor, or the True Bearer of the Name as he is sometimes called, is the necessary link between the First and the Second Republics, necessary because there is no other way of making the two regimes continuous, so chasm-like is the ideological gulf that separates them. Without him, the nationalist resurgence that led to the Reconstitution would have been seen as an ideological rupture with the past, and the idea of rupture is anathema to a properly Hindu historiography which strives always to establish cultural continuity, to chronicle assimilation. Ruptures, revolutions, epistemological breaks — these violent ideas belonged to the linear, Semitic view of the past that so misled the self-hating historians of the First Republic.
Thanks to the True Inheritor’s genealogical connection with the First Family of proto-Independence — that twilit, liminal time between 1947 and 2017 when Bharat was neither bound nor free — we can write the modern history of India as a continuous story. His grandmother in her Pakistan-partitioning avatar can be seen as the bridge between the perversity of Kangress pluralism and the virility of Parivar patriotism. His father, a pioneer of planned parenthood for Abrahamic Hindus, is even easier to assimilate into the narrative of the Hindu renaissance. There were hold-outs within the Parivar who continued to hold the Emergency against him but any balanced history of the modern Hindu people will see the True Inheritor’s father as a friendly ancestor.
Apart from this biological connection with the First Family of the False Dawn, the Inheritor also had the priceless advantage of being nominally related to the Pitr of post-colonial India. In the ideal world that man’s name would be scrubbed from the annals of Bharatvarsha, but given Hindu tolerance, our genius for creative assimilation and the power of the man’s brand, claiming him as a progenitor was easier than purging him. Also, it allowed the New History to suggest a metaphorical passing of the flame from M. Gandhi to Mrs Gandhi to the Inheritor, excising, en passant that Arch-Appeaser, that Pseudo-Socialist, that Angst-Ridden Angrez (who luckily went by another surname) from the political history of Hindusthan.
It ought to be clarified here that the history sketched out above isn’t a drab chronicle of actual occurrence: it is something of a work in progress, at once history and prophesy. Not all the landmark events referred to have actually happened. The Second Republic is yet to be and the great Reconstitution is some years distant, eight to be precise. With the blessings of the Great Golwalkar, the results of the 2009 elections will lay the foundation for that golden age. For this we need the Nativists for the Defence of Aryavarta to vanquish the Unpatriotic Party of Appeasement. But even if this doesn’t pan out, we can still work to ensure that this sketch of the future becomes the history of Bharat.
The Latest Lauhpurush will sweep the western regions of Bharatvarsha while the triumph of the True Inheritor and the Matriarch in Pilibhit and Aonla is certain so our history of the Second Republic can commence immediately with these constituencies treated as its early territories, rather the like the 13 colonies that initially constituted the United States. Much, of course, remains to be done, such as the annexation of the Mayan Empire, the taming of Bolshevik Bengal, the reassimilation of the godless Dravida country and the cleansing of eclectic Kerala, but that should not dishearten us because much can be immediately achieved.
The True Inheritor’s greatly raised profile is in itself a triumph because he epitomizes the Hindutvavadi Hero in his bloodlines. He combines in himself three faiths, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism and Hinduism, which have many rightful complaints against the faith that the True Inheritor cannot currently name for legal reasons. He plans, however, to carry on the good work done by the Matriarch in compiling a handbook of Hindu first names by issuing a Guide to Permissible Muslim Names. Scary Muslim monikers like Karimullah and Amanullah will be proscribed partly because they sound sinister and partly because names that suggest that the descendants of Babur could be benign or peaceful are clearly forms of false advertising if not misleading marketing.
In this way, step by incremental step, shall this corruptly pluralist republic be purged and the Hindu nation consolidated. By the end of this historic process we shall have achieved the Second Republic. Under its aegis no pseudo-secular historian will dream of using a title as vague as India After Gandhi without specifying the first name of the homonymous pygmy who came Before.