Are Hindus More Sinned Against Than Sinning

8/14/2019 Are Hindus More Sinned Against Than Sinning

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The current strife in context!

As is their wont the secular exponents found in the recent Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka grist to their anti-Hindu

mill. The violence in Orissa followed the brutal murder of a reveredHindu pontiff Swami Lakshmananda Saraswathi who happened to bethe state vice president of the Viswa Hindu Parishat. He wasmurdered along with four other inmates of his Ashram including a

woman devotee.

In the zeitgeist of Indian secular ethos Hindus are expendable.Swamijis and office bearers of Hindu organizations like the BajrangDal, the RSS and the VHP are even more equal - in being expendable!The Hindus should shrug off violence against them so that exponentsof the Indian brand of secular ism can praise the resilience of Indiansecularism and syncretism .

This was the norm till the Bombay train blasts of July 11, 2006 in which two hundred and thirteen people were killed and more than700 injured.

Pics by Ritesh Uttamchandani, reproduced from:http://mumbaitrainblasts.wordpress.com/

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The city reportedly went about its business the next day in cynicaldisregard for the dead, and the secular exponents were all praise forBombayites resilience in the face of grave danger. The first lead in asecular newspaper the next day was that the serial bomb blasts werethe handiwork of Hindu organizations!

The refrain of - the resilience of Indian secularism - continued tillDelhi was bombed in 2008. The bombings of Jaipur, Bengaluru and

Ahmedabad were explained away as an expression of Muslim angeragainst the BJP as these states were ruled by the party. The secular alibis for the mass murders included social alienation, exclusion frommain stream society, poverty, poor representation in government jobsand anger against Ayodhya and Gujarat riots that followed the savage

burning of fifty nine Karsevaks in February 2002.

With its eyes firmly locked on secular vote banks, the congress government didits bit to fuel disinformation by constituting the Justice Rajinder Sacharcommittee to prepare a report, ostensibly on the social, economic andeducational status of the Muslim community in India. The other members of thecommittee include Mr. Sayyid Hamid, Dr. T.K. Ooman, Mr. M.A. Basith, Dr. Akhtar Majeed, Dr. Abu Saleh Shariff and Dr. Rakesh Basant with Dr. Syed ZafarMahmood, a civil servant, appointed by the prime minister as Officer on SpecialDuty (OSD) to assist the commission.

The committees job was all the more easier as it was given the theories; it wasonly expected to go out and find facts to fit into them! Lo and presto , it did it andhow? Try as you might, you can not accuse the committee of objectivity or doinganything right either by commission or omission. The committees report, to borrow from information technology jargon, was doomed to be GIGO (garbagein, garbage out) right from inception. The committee set out with faulty assumptions, faulty data collection, faulty analysis and of course ended up inarriving at faulty conclusions.

The following may be summed up as the reports errors of commission andomission. The report did not take into account the bulk of educated employedMuslims that migrated to Pakistan when the country was partitioned. It did nottake into account the numbers of Muslims engaged in trades and otherprofessions. It excluded the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes fromcorresponding Hindu figures thus annulling any equity in its comparisons. Last but not least it excluded educated / well off Muslims from comparisons.

The committee ignored the fact that the country did provide fair and equitableopportunities to all and those Muslims who availed of them did prosper - infilmdom, in industry, in government / university jobs or in politics. If you go by the findings of the report, Asghar Ali Enginner, A. G. Noorani, Azim Premji, SyedShabuddin, the Khan trio and other Muslim celebrities of Bollywood and a host of other Muslims in high places (Sayyid Hamid, T.K. Ooman, M.A. Basith, Akhtar

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Majeed, Abu Saleh Shariff and Syed Zafar Mahmood included) - all need reservations in government jobs!The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) has concluded that thefindings of the Sachar committee were manipulated .

For a detailed analysis of the issue see The Sachar report: A flawed number game by Nitish Sengupta (The Asian Age, 16.10.2008).

When it was found that highly educated and well-paid professionalstoo took part in the terror attacks the groundswell of public opinionforced the secular exponents to change their refrain but only just.Forced on the back foot they had to a do balancing act by finding

villains in the majority religion to appease their minority vote banks.Therefore the bogey of the Bajrang Dal was raised with a pliant mediaorchestrating it as the root cause of anarchy.

Returning to the main story, the strife between the Kandhas a ScheduledTribe (ST) and the Panas a Scheduled Caste (SC) is not new. Under the Indianconstitution, the STs can enjoy reservation benefits even after conversion toChristianity, whereas the SCs lose them if they convert. It is this legal loopholethat is a godsend for the proselytizers. The statistics speak for themselves: theChristian population of Kandhamal district in 1961 was 2%, 6% in 1971 and 27%in 2001.

The proselytizers were only trying to extend their successes from the northeastern states: for example, in the last century they were able to convert 100% of the Nagas (in Nagaland) and 80% of the Mizos (in Mizoram).

According to Francois Gautier, In Tripura, there were no Christians at the timeof independence. There are 1, 20,000 today, a 90 per cent increase since 1991.The figures are even more striking in Arunachal Pradesh, where there wereonly 1,710 Christians in 1961, but 1.2 million today, as well as 780 churches! In Andhra Pradesh, churches are coming up every day in far-flung villages and there was even an attempt to set up one near Tirupati.

There were clashes between the converted Kandhas and the unconverted Panaseven as far back as 1992, when the VHP did not exist in Orissa and the BajrangDal was yet to be borne.

Swami Laksmananda a Vedic scholar has been running schools and colleges, forthe unconverted Panas. However both the converted Kandhas and theunconverted Panas were thronging to his satsangs and discourses in greatnumbers. This is the fly in the proselytizers ointment. They wanted to do away with him and according to a recent report of the regions inspector general of police a religious group - recruited the Maoists to do the hatchet job. Is itdifficult to imagine who the unnamed religious group was? Indias secular media

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blotted out these facts but went to town with the violence that followed the brutalkillings, painting it as the handiwork of Hindu organizations.

For a detailed analysis of the issue see Kandhamal and Bengaluru by S.Gurumurthy (The New Indian Express, 11.09.2008).

The happenings in Mangalore Karnataka were again true to form: a neo-convertpastor in Andhra Pradesh wanted to be lauded for being more loyal than theKing. His pamphlet, the product of a prostituted, putrefied and suppurating mindportrayed Hindu gods and goddesses in the most obnoxious manner possibleaccusing them of incest, debauchery and worse.

A Kannada translation of this rag entitled Satya Darshini was published by the Newlife Church and disseminated in Karnataka. Here are a few excerpts from it:

Urvashi - the daughter of Lord Vishnu - is a prostitute. Vashistha is the son of this prostitute. He in turn married his own Mother. Such a degraded person isthe Guru of the Hindu God Rama. (p. 48).

When Krishna himself is wallowing in darkness of hell, how can he enlightenothers? Since Krishna himself is a shady character, there is a need for us toliberate his misled followers. (p. 50).

It was Brahma himself who kidnapped Sita. (p. 39)

Since Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva were themselves victims of lust, it is a sin toconsider them as Gods. (p. 39)

When the Trinity of Hinduism (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) are consumed bylust and anger, how can they liberate others? The projection of them as Gods isnothing but a joke. (p. 39)

God, please liberate the sinful people of India who are worshipping FalseGods. (p. 39)

This was the background for the Bajrang Dal activists protests in Mangalore.They were protesting mainly against Newlife prayer houses but as they could notdistinguish one denomination from the other, it appears, they protested against acatholic church too.

For a detailed analysis of the issue see What made Hindus angry in Karnataka by Francois Gautier (The New Indian Express, 06.10.2008).

More sinned against than sinning?

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While the print and electronic media aired exaggerated reports of these incidentsthe violence unleashed by the Christian groups against the police during theirdemonstrations were airbrushed.

The Archbishop of Bangalore chose to berate the Chief Minister of the state in the

full glare of media cameras, when the CM sought to meet with him andcommiserate with him for the violent protests. The secular exponents did notutter a word of reproof against such a blatant insult meted out to thedemocratically elected leader of a state.

Consider the secular exponents quiescence vis--vis Muslim protests against thecartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper and the furore against grantingpolitical asylum to Taleema Nasreen.

Consider also the secular exponents quiescence when Christian groups protestedagainst the screening of the movie Da Vinci Code eventually forcing somesecular state governments to ban it, even though it was freely exhibited in many Christian nations including Italy, next door to the Vatican.

For the record, this article does not support either the Danish cartoonist or the Bangladeshi writer or the American novelist inasmuch as they hurt thereligious sentiments of Muslims or Christians.

The quintessence of Indian secularism as it is in vogue appears to be not inseparating the state and religion as the word originally connoted but in opposing Hinduism , its philosophy and social mores. On the other hand a pilgrimage to Azamgarh to commiserate with the families of those arrested for acts of war onthe Indian nation and seeking a ban of the Bajrang Dal was seen as an avowal of their secular credentials by some!

The mantra of Indian secular exponents who would rather wear secularism ontheir sleeve is to oppose any opposition of Hindu organisations - which for themcome under the collective moniker of the Sangh Parivar . Therefore if Hinduorganisations protest against aggressive efforts to proselytize, then the secular exponents must rush to the defence of the proselytizers. Indian secular exponents dotingly refer to members of the Sangh Parivar as goons . For them,there are no goons in other religions and that is a fact. Every time there is areference to religious fundamentalism in other religions the spectre of Hindufundamentalism had to be invoked, in the name of balance!

Tags: Bajrang Dal ; Managalore; Hindu-Christian violence; Kandhamal, NewlifeChurch; Proselytization; Secularism;

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Are Hindus More Sinned Against Than Sinning