Without knowing what for, I received an invitation from the stalwart Hindu organization Sanātana Sansthā for attending the Sanātana Rāṣṭra Śankhanāda Mahotsava (“Conch-sound Festival of the Eternal Nation”) in Ponda, Goa, 17-19 May 2025. To my sincere surprise, it turned out that I was to be among the awardees for services rendered to the cause of Sanātana Dharma. After receiving our awards, we were each allotted 3 minutes for a little speech.

Enough for me to sum up 3 illustrations of why even a skeptic of the notion “Hindu state (Rāṣṭra)”, like myself, has to acknowledge that India can’t help being a Hindu state. Eventhough chosen by the Secularist coterie of first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, the 3 chief national symbols are Hindu par excellence.

The flag highlights the 24-spoked Wheel of Dharma. Nehru thereby intended to glorify Aśoka, who via a bloody coup d’état had become Maurya emperor and proved a statist despot perfectly prefiguring Nehru’s own Socialism. This choice was meant as a slap in the face of the Hindus, as Nehru had swallowed the flawed Orientalist thesis (based on the Christian liking for remorse-and-conversion narratives) that Aśoka, after his massacre in Kaliṅgā, had turned his back on Hinduism in favour of Buddhism. In reality, the long-standing Buddhist Aśoka had stayed true to his chosen Buddhist path all through his coup d’état and Kaliṅgā slaughter, and merely continued his Hindu ancestors’ use of the Dharma Cakra as symbol of the federative state led by a Cakravarti or “wheel-turner”. Yes, dear Hindus, Aśoka was a ruthless ruler, but he was your ruthless ruler. And his Cakra was your own Cakra.

As for the number 24, it refers to the oldest Hindu worldview, the Sāṅkhya or “enumeration (of the world’s constituents/tattvas)”, a Dualism of the indivisible conscious Subject (Puruṣa, the wheel’s axis) and Nature (Prakrti, the wheel’s circumference) consisting of 24 essences. Of this lineage, the Buddha was a pupil, and Buddhism an offshoot. Hindu-basher Nehru had, in spite of himself and oddly thanks to his illiteracy about Hindu history, elevated a quintessentially Hindu symbol into India’s logo.

A similar story counts for the anthem. Written by Rabindranath Tagore (Ravidranāth Ṭhākur) in 1911, it glorifies the “Commander of the People’s Mind” (Jana Gaņa Mana Adhināyak) and the “Dispenser of India’s Destiny” (Bhārata Bhāgya Vidhātā). Who is this? Not the ruler in 1911, King George V, nor Nehru nor any other worldly ruler: the song’s later stanzas identify someone else. The 3rd stanza calls him the Eternal Charioteer,– Krṣņa. The 4th stanza see “him” as a goddess: the Combative Mother who protects us through the darkest night,– Durgā. Congress had first opted for the song Vande Mātaram (“Hail Mother [Durgā]”), invoked by the martial monks of the Abbey of Bliss (Ānanda Maṭh, title of Bankimchandra Chatterji’s historical novel) but then dropped the idea under Muslim pressure: no “idolatry” for a Pagan goddess! But here she is again, inescapable. India’s anthem designates the Hindu pantheon as the guide of India’s destiny.

Finally, the country’s name: Bhārat. It does not just feel more indigenous than “India”, a Persian and thence Greco-Roman exonym ultimately based on a secular native word (Sindhū, “river”, the name of the river roughly demarcating the Indo-Aryan from the Iranian world). It also — and Secularists with their entrenched superficiality forget this — has a specific meaning. It is a derivative of the personal name Bharata, and thus comes to mean “descendant of Bharata”. The Bharata meant here was not Rāma’s brother, nor the choreographer who codified the dance-form Bhārat Nāṭyam, but an earlier Bharata whose glory had inspired their parents to name their newborn sons after him. Who was this?

He was the king of the small Paurava state along the Sarasvatī river in northern Haryāṇā, and described as descendant of Manu Vaivasvata’s daughter Ilā, of Lunar dynasty’s founder Purūravas, and of Yayāti’s favourite son Pūru. He himself was the son of Duṣyanta and father of Bhumanyu. He was to become the forefather of all the princes known as Bhāratas, some of whom got embroiled in a fratricidal war of succession narrated in the Mahābhārata epic.

In political importance king Bharata was rather insignificant; even his more ambitious close descendants, like king Sudās of “Battle of the Ten Kings” fame, would never militarily conquer more than the Subcontinent’s northwest. Yet Bharata has a unique achievement to his credit that makes him worthy of getting a whole Subcontinent named after him.

King Bharata was the founder of the Vedic tradition. His court priest Bharadvāja composed the first Vedic hymns. They were to contain the background lyrics to the practice of fire sacrifice, and include poetic expressions of the extant philosophical lore. This included an outline of India’s oldest worldview, Sāṅkhya, and the germ ideas of what was to become the crowning glory of Hindu philosophy, Vedānta.

The meaning of his name is not what made him famous, but happens to be very significant too. Scholars explain it as the passive participle of a verbal root *bhr- (~ English: to bear), “carry through, maintain”, said of the fire. So it had become an epithet and ultimately a synonym of “fire”. Bharata neatly embodied the message of verse 1.1.1 of the Rg-Veda: Aum agnim ile, “Aum, I worship the fire”. The name’s usual folk-etymology also happens to be a felicitous one: bha-rata, “light-oriented”. If that reading can act as a guideline for an enlightened lifestyle, all the better.

The Vedic tradition became the overarching framework for all the religious practices which the expanding Vedic priesthood encountered and integrated, and which together became Hinduism. This included the worship of God statues (mūrtipūjā) in temples dotting the entire Subcontinent’s landscape. In its very last hymn, the Rg-Veda invites all tribes to gather around the sacred fire and cherish a common vision.

Ultimately, through the eager adoption of the Vedic tradition by rulers in India’s south and east, king Bharata became the true “Father of the Nation” of all the Bhāratīya people. (No, Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t. He saw himself as the son of an ancient nation; only vainglorious Nehru crowned him the father of a “Nation in the Making”.) King Bharata sums up India’s cultural identity: Bhārata effectively means “Vedaland”.

When in August 2023 the Government called Droupadi Murmu “president of Bhārat”, if effectively made her “president of Vedaland”. Of this Vedasthān, she happens to be a perfect embodiment. She is a member of the Santal tribe (of which the distinct language has been elevated to the status of a national language), itself a member of the Austro-Asiatic-speaking community that immigrated into India from Indochina a few thousand years ago. It integrated to various degrees into the expanding Vedic civilization, as exemplified by the name her parents chose for her: she was named after princess Draupadī, one of the heroines of the Mahābhārata, a descendent-in-law of king Bharata.

The Nehruvians, like the Liberal elites in the Anglosphere and the EU, and like the Communist Party that controls the heirs of Chinese civilization, see their nation as a blank slate on which they can write any novel designs they have on their nation, unmindful of its own heritage, both age-old and more recently acquired. Well, India’s national symbols, chosen by an earlier generation of their own ideological lineage, tell a different story. They make the Cakravartin’s Dharma, mother Durgā and Veda-founder Bharata come alive again.