A Hindu View on Gun Control

While shootings in the US generate more hysteria from the Hindu “right wing” on Twitter, it is interesting to note that this alleged Hindu “right wing” crowd don’t ever dare question India’s gun control over countless atrocities against Hindus by their Muslim brothers. It is also interesting to note how they selectively ignore countries such as Switzerland with very high gun ownership rates and very little gun crime, perhaps because it pokes holes into their shoddy theories.

They didn’t find it pertinent to ask how 26/11 could have happened if gun control worked. They never ask how well gun control worked out for Hindu Kashmiris or the Bodos.

The truth is that these are no Hindus or right wingers but armchair liberals living in the safety of America or some other place without any existential threats. In their opinion, the Hindu masses are nincompoops and should be abandoned to their fate if they are attacked by bloodlust mobs who see them as infidels. In other words, Hindus have no right to self defense.

But what do Hindu texts and tradition say about the right to bear arms?

Acharya Medhatithi (9^th century CE) answers this question in his Manubhashya when he points out that a Kshatriya is to live by bearing weapons, but common people are also permitted to bear arms for self protection. In support of this, he points out that the king’s arms cannot reach all men, and that there are some wicked men who attack the most valiant of the king’s officers, but are afraid of persons bearing arms.

The Hindu tradition from the earliest times has been that the right to self defense cannot be outsourced to the government and this has always been the practice of Hindu kings. Indeed this is how Hindus survived centuries of Muslim tyranny. Common people being armed always played a crucial role in resisting the tyranny of Muslims using their weapons.

Let us look at history:

These comprised mainly of two options – to fight with determination as far as possible, but, if resistance proved of no avail, to flee and settle down elsewhere. Medieval Indian society, both urban and agrarian, was to some extent an armed society. In cities and towns the elite carried swords like walking sticks. In villages few men were without at least a spear or bow and arrows, and they were skilled in the use of these arms. In 1632, Peter Mundy actually saw in the present day Kanpur district, “labourers with their guns, swords and bucklers lying by them while they ploughed the ground”.⁷⁰ Similarly, Manucci described how in Akbar’s days the villagers of the Mathura region defended themselves against Mughal revenue-collecting officers: “The women stood behind their husbands with spears and arrows, when the husband had shot off his matchlock, his wife handed him the lance, while she reloaded the matchlock.”⁷¹ The countryside was studded with little forts, some surrounded by nothing more than mud walls, but which nevertheless provided centres of the general tradition of rebellion and agrarian unrest. Armed peasants provided contingents to Baheliyas, Bhadauriyas, Bachgotis, Mandahars and Tomars in the earlier period, to Jats, Marathas and Sikhs in the later.

http://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/tlmr/ch7.htm

So how did weapons control & disarmament of Hindus begin?

It began with Muslim tyrants such as Aurangzeb who issued the following order:

In March 1695, all the Hindus, with the exception of the Rajputs, were forbidden to travel in palkis, or ride on elephants or thorough-bred horses, or to carry arms. (Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, ii, 395; Maasir-i-Alamgiri, 370 and News Letter, 11 December 1694).

http://www.aurangzeb.info/2008/06/exhibit-no_7371.html

Imagine the fate of our ancestors if Hindu rulers had practiced bow control, matchlock control, or sword control. The result would have been en masse foreskin control of the unarmed population by Muslims.

Now we move forward a few centuries, the British were now the rulers of India and the 1857 rebellion breaks out which shakes British control. How was this rebellion made possible?

The answer to this question is also the existence of an armed populace. Tatya Tope did not do Satyagraha but fired guns against the British tyrants. Unfortunately, the rebellion failed and the British had learned their lesson. Thus began a systematic disarmament campaign of Hindus along with suppression of Hindu martial arts. In 1878, Lord Lytton helped pass the “Indian Arms Act” which made it illegal for any Indian to possess arms unless he was considered a loyal subject of the empire. Europeans in India were of course exempted from this act.

Even the ahimsa monger Gandhi had recognized this great crime of the British tyrants & commented:

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.

— Mahatma Gandhi (An Autobiography OR The story of my experiments with truth, by M.K. Gandhi, p.238)

In fact, before India’s independence from the British, one of the items on the Congress party platform was lifting the arms control imposed by the British. But the brown sahibs who replaced the Gora sahibs thought the average Hindu was an idiot who cannot be allowed to defend himself, the same view held by fake Hindu “right wing” today.

To conclude, these fake Hindus & “right wingers” have more in common with Aurangzeb and the British than with the traditions of our ancestors. If they had been living under Aurangzeb they would have no doubt supported his efforts to disarm Hindus.

These people have no shame or conscience because they know they never have to face the guns of the terrorists as the common people did on 26/11 or Hindu Kashmiris during their ethnic cleansing by Muslims or more recently the Bodos at the hands of illegal Muslims. Many live in the safety of the West or in affluent non-Muslim majority areas in India while demanding that everyday Hindus be made defenseless.

People such as these are more dangerous to the survival of Hindu civilization than any Kasab & every right thinking Hindu should emphatically reject gun control.