Modi, conversion is a slap in the face of India

It is a shameless mess of anger, bigotry and coercion which threatens our multi-religious nation.

POLITICS   |   4-minute read |   15-12-2014

Rajeev Dhavan

Conversion, reconversion, counter-conversion and victimisation of Hindu converts to any other faith. What a shameless mess of anger, bigotry, threats and coercion.

On December 8, 2014, there was a havan in Agra, by offshoots of the RSS and the Bajrang Dal, who "reconverted" 200 Muslims into the Hindu fold. Muslims were promised Aadhar cards, IDs and registration as BPL (Below Poverty Line). Amidst chants and priestly ceremonies, vermilion was put on Muslim foreheads as they washed the feet of Hindu idols. Most Muslims said they were lured, and asserted that they were Muslims. Farhan, a poor Muslim put it well: “If 40 saffron-scarved persons stand on your head, you do what they want.”

The Hindutva juggernaut is on the roll. The plan is to have 600 conversion sammelans. After Balarampur and Agra will come Ghazipur and Aligarh on Christmas day. The rest will follow. This unrelenting Hindutva crusade in the name of Hinduism is shamelessly subversive by a religion which does not proselyte.

Legislation

The BJP suggested the remedy lay in passing an anti-conversion legislation. Such anti-conversion legislation has been used in the past to terrorise non-Hindus. Before independence it existed in princely states in Rajgarh (1936), Bihar (1942) Sarguja and Udaipur. After independence, the first round of legislation was in Orissa (1967) and Madhya Pradesh (1968). The Orissa legislation was struck down and its MP counterpart upheld by their respective high courts.

In the Stanislaus case (1977), the Supreme Court upheld the acts without examining them. Its logic was that Article 25 of the Constitution specifically guaranteed the right to “propagate” one’s faith, but not to convert. This clumsy judgment was welcomed by Hindu fundamentalists. Unfortunately in the Satya Narayan case (2003), justice Khare and Sinha showed extreme indiscipline, to affirm Stanislaus without a notice to the other side. After Stanislaus, the legislation was passed in Arunachal Pradesh (1978), Chhattisgarh (2202), Himachal Pradesh (2006) and Rajasthan (2008).

When Rajasthan wanted to make its law stricter, governor Pratibha Patil killed the Bill by reserving it for presidential assent. Gujarat’s anti-conversation laws were passed in 2003; with a later proactive amendment by Narendra Modi that conversions between Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs were not conversion because they were part of the same Hindu faith. Governor Sharma ordered reconsideration and Modi withdrew under pressure.

All these statutes decry conversion by force, misrepresentation or inducement. Fair enough. India’s Penal Code (IPC) treats such conversions as cheating and punishes those who promote enmity and outrage religious feelings (Sections 153A, 295A of the IPC). By this test, the RSS and Bajrang Dal initiative in Agra and 600 planned sammelans are illegal as disturbing communal harmony. Anti-conversion acts are not that simple.

Models

The simple model is to introduce criminal consequences, including making them cognisable (investigation by police) and non-bailable. The second model may be called the surveillance model, followed in MP, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. Here, prior intimation of a conversion has to be given to the magistrate who can inquire into any “complaint or information”. Significantly, Parliament has refused to pass the Indian Conversion (Regulation and Registration) Bill, 1954 and the Backward Communities (Religion Protection) Bill 1960. A 1978 bill lapsed. The response of the Modi government on December 12, 2014 to the recent conversions in Agra is to suggest an anti-conversion Bill. Such statutes are designed to harass Christians, Muslims and other minorities through surveillance and punishment.

Technically, conversion by Hindus will also come under the proposed bill. But we all know there is a huge difference of application. Such laws are inflicted on minorities and reticent in their use on Hindus. Modi’s strategy is brilliant in its deceit. First, his rank and file create Agra and then his government suggest this odious solution as a panacea. Create a crisis and propose a solution which Parliament has resisted for 64 years. Freedom of religion by threats and criminalisation is not acceptable.

Tolerance

Hindutva adherents must recognise that Hindus left the faith because of some aspects of Hinduism which can be considered offensive. Buddhism posed a threat to Hindus over centuries because of the caste system and Buddhism’s innate attractiveness. It took the Shankaracharya to simplify the Hindu faith to some extent even as lapses continue. Even if conversions took place in the Muslim era (1206 -1857) and the Christian era (1700-1947) to curry favour with the rulers, after many generations today’s Muslims and Christians remain steadfast in their faith.

Recent conversions from Hinduism are symbolised by Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism. If Hinduism were to introspect, one would find an apparatus of cruel absurdities in an otherwise creditable faith. What we now have is a political Hinduism backed by arrogance, ignorance and threats. When Gujarat burned, Modi was complicit. Today, he is the prime minister of India. What is expected from him is a severe condemnation of the events in Agra, the one planned in Aligarh and the 600 to follow. Is Modi himself truly a Hindu? I think in name only. The RSS "short pants" brigade was modelled on Nazi lines. Modi needs the RSS and others for political victory, even if at times limits of decency have been crossed.

India is the greatest multicultural, multi-religious nation in the world, with traditions of tolerance and co-existence. Mr Modi — don’t let your electoral supporters spoil this.

Source: dailyo

Sanskrit deserves more than slogans

Vaishna Roy

December 15, 2014    Updated: December 15, 2014 01:31 IST

Illustration: Satwik Gade

Making Sanskrit compulsory does not give us even a glimpse into the immensity of the language’s grammar or its soaring poetry and philosophy

Philologist William Jones famously described it as “more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” Layered and complex, Sanskrit is one of our richest legacies. With its perfect grammar, its capacity for poetry, its synonyms and metaphors, it’s a linguist’s and philologist’s delight. Wanting to return to Sanskrit some of its status is not just commendable but crucial, but as always we are not interested in the big picture. We don’t want solutions that need hard work or academic rigour, just trite and superficial truisms. The idea to make Sanskrit mandatory in schools or to declare the Bhagavad Gita the “national scripture” is along the same lines. It’s important to at least get the premise right before we declare that Sanskrit is “the language of our country. Everything was written in Sanskrit thousands of years ago ...” as Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Ashok Singhal declared at last month’s World Hindu Congress, when he said ominously that many things would soon be made compulsory in India.

First of all, consider that Sanskrit was never the language of our masses. It’s always been the medium of instruction, the classical and liturgical language in which grammar, science, religion and philosophy were written. The word Sanskrit comes from sanskrita or refined. The everyday language of people was Prakrit from prakriti for natural or common. In fact, several scholars consider that Sanskrit originated not so much as a disparate language but as a superior and polished version of speech (samskrita vak or polished speech). It coexisted with local dialects and these vocabularies intermingled extensively — Hindi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Telugu, Malayalam all sharing etymological roots.

Language of liturgy

Also, Sanskrit was actually divisive and sowed some of the first seeds of segregation in Indian society. Because it was complex and highly evolved, its knowledge began to mark speakers as belonging to the wealthy and educated classes. From there it was a short step to Sanskrit being taught only to upper castes and then only to Brahmins and priests. If Sanskrit got marginalised, it was not so much because foreign languages wiped it out, but because it chose to confine itself to a narrower and narrower space until it was soon exclusively the language of liturgy alone, learnt only by priests, who grew into an esoteric cabal.

The Bhakti movement was born as a reaction to the priestly class’s appropriation of language and religion. Poet-saints such as Kabir and Tulsidas dumped not just the ritualism and caste system of extant Hinduism, but also Sanskrit, its language. An extraordinary body of prose and poetry in the vernacular mushroomed in this era — Kabir wrote his dohe in Braj Bhasha, Tulsidas in Braj and Awadhi, Tukaram and Namdev in Marathi, Nanak in Gurmukhi. In fact, even the much earlier Mauryan era edicts of Ashoka are in Prakrit.

Sanskrit in school

Studying in a Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) school, we had Sanskrit till Class 8. A bit of an ear for linguistics and you recognised half the words because Sanskrit shares cognates with almost every Indo-European language. Then you learnt by rote the declensions of various common shabdas. You spouted these, did some basic translation and verb matching, and were pretty much guaranteed at least 90 per cent in exams. If Sanskrit is made mandatory, that’s what students will largely experience. Nothing traumatic or difficult but nothing very meaningful either. The point I am making is this: what we were taught did not give us even a glimpse into the immensity of the language’s grammar or its soaring poetry and philosophy.

We Indians love symbolic gestures, and that’s what “making Sanskrit mandatory” is about. It’s another bronze statue, another slogan — the ‘Don’t Horn’ on the back of a truck — that won’t achieve anything real. Students will mug up shabdas for exams and still learn German in private. But, in that narrow sense, Sanskrit is already available from institutes such as Samskrita Bharati, which conduct classes and award diplomas for anyone who cares to look.

We don’t need that sort of shallow familiarity because without social currency, a language cannot survive anyway. It’s more important to preserve Sanskrit academically rather than colloquially.

The same groups that are so quick to ban texts at universities would do well to do something proactive instead, such as demand the inclusion of translated Sanskrit poetry and drama into syllabi. I have friends with fancy degrees in Comparative Literature or Philosophy who would be hard-pressed to identify Bhavabhuti but can spout “Odysseus.” We have Indian publishers who produce handcrafted, collector’s editions of Sophocles’ works — why not something similar for “Mricchakatika”?

In fact, if knowledge and learning were not as Eurocentric as it is today, any self-respecting university would intuitively include Sanskrit texts, as they do Greek, in the canon of world literature. Not only is Panini’s “Patanjali” the world’s earliest work in linguistics and phonetics (and the foundation for most modern linguistics), there is no grammar as detailed or logical. We need Indologists pushing for these quiet, back-end but ultimately significant changes.

A practical approach

Real renewal happens not in shrill sloganeering but here — in funding top-notch translations, textbooks and libraries; in sponsoring research chairs that produce more Sanskritists in India than abroad; in high-paid professorships that encourage the study of Indology rather than English Literature. How about pushing for short courses at prestigious universities worldwide where students can earn extra credits?

Most important, it means divorcing the religious from the linguistic, so that Sanskrit is deconstructed and studied for its intrinsic value rather than as ritual.

We must stop pretending that a perfect Indian culture, preserved in amber, is waiting to be resuscitated intact, with dhoti-clad denizens chattering away in Sanskrit and milking cows. That’s as much a chimera as Gandhiji’s vision of charkha-spinning villagers breeding silkworms. If we want Sanskrit appreciated, let’s get practical for a change.

vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in .

Source: The Hindu

Fifth column: Stop Hindutva now

Why is the Prime Minister not publicly rebuking them for dragging Hindutva 
into his mandate in the ugliest way?

Written by Tavleen Singh | Posted: December 14, 2014 1:33 am | Updated: December 14, 2014 1:39 am
   
Why is the Prime Minister allowing the RSS to steal his mandate? I ask this question wherever I go these days and frankly I have no answer.

When Leftist political pundits harangue me with charges that it was the RSS that helped Narendra Modi become prime minister, I tell them that they do not know what they are talking about. Leftists are usually allergic to dust, heat, poverty and the real India and so rarely travel during election campaigns. This made them miss the fact that last summer’s general election was not about Hindutva. Anywhere. It was about change and development. Without Modi, the BJP could not have won half the seats they did. Besides, if the RSS could help it win elections, what went wrong the last two times?

Yet there exists today the bizarre situation in which our strongest prime minister in decades is allowing Hindu fanatics in the Lok Sabha and Hindu fanatical organisations outside to blacken his image. The MPs who have been most offensive wear saffron robes signifying asceticism and renunciation. So what they are doing in Parliament instead of in some Himalayan cave is a valid question. But since they have found their way into the Lok Sabha, why is the Prime Minister not publicly rebuking them for dragging Hindutva into his mandate in the ugliest way? We barely recovered from that Sadhvi calling all Muslims ‘bastards’ when her brother in saffron pronounced that Nathuram Godse was a patriot. Both these MPs expressed regret when their remarks caused a public furore, but it is not possible to ever apologise for such things.

If we need proof that these fanatics have RSS approval, it is evident in the zeal with which the BJP’s ‘alma mater’ is trying to convert Muslims and Christians ‘back’ to Hinduism. The Sanatana Dharma does not permit proselytisation. But try telling that to those loonies rampaging about the derelict, desperately poor shanties of Uttar Pradesh trying to bring Muslims and Christians ‘home’.

Of course these fanatics harmed the people they are trying to reconvert, but much more than this is the harm they have done Modi and his government. Just as he was beginning to bask in the luminous glow of international approval and domestic election victories, he is now in danger of losing all his support. His votes did not come for Hindutva reasons. I say this with certainty. During the election campaign, wherever I went, I asked if Hindutva and the Ram temple were issues any more. And not even in the dusty halls of Banaras Hindu University did I meet anyone who believed these were issues in the 2014 election.

Everywhere I went, people said that they were drawn to Modi because of his talk of ‘vikas’ and ‘parivartan’. At his first rally in Uttar Pradesh I walked some distance with ordinary residents of Kanpur and when they saw BJP workers ride by angrily shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ from speeding motorcycles, they expressed strong disapproval. So why has the Prime Minister remained silent when the worst kind of Hinduism has been unleashed by the RSS and when the ‘love jihad’ proved that it would lose him votes in future?

For his government, the worst consequence is that the RSS has succeeded in changing the subject. So six months on, when we should have been talking about reforms in governance and the economy, we are talking about cow urine remedies and religious tensions. By now his ministers should have put before us a list of proposed reforms for sectors ranging from energy and the railways to policing and healthcare. That these are desperately needed is obvious from the horrible healthcare tragedies in Chhattisgarh and Punjab and from the recent rape in an Uber taxi.

Where economic reforms are concerned, there has so far been only talk. Not only has Modi’s government continued policies that brought the economy to its knees, it has not even rid us of laws (land acquisition, companies law) that have made doing business in India even more difficult than it already was. And if our roads, railways and ports continue to be as bad as they were in the 19th century, we can be certain that India will remain very poor for another 50 years.

It was the hope that Modi meant what he said when he promised ‘parivartan’ that won him a full mandate. For his own sake, he needs to remember this quickly or he will find that the RSS will take it away from him to revive its own fortunes. Incidentally, if it is so keen to play a bigger role in India’s future, why does it not take charge of doing some ‘Swachh Bharat’ activity in temples and holy cities like Varanasi and Hardwar? Why does it not take charge of cleaning our sacred rivers?

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh

Source: The Indian Express

English, ticklish

Jatin Gandhi

Illustration by Satwik Gade.                                                                 The Hindu

English is the passport to upward mobility in the modern, aspirational India, but many political leaders seem to be out of touch with this new reality. This disconnect has led to friction in the nation in transition.

During the anti-colonial movement, Mahatma Gandhi’s anti-English stance offered a means of fighting colonialism and the English. In the 1960s and the later decades, the resurgent rural elite stood at loggerheads with the urban elite as cities grew at the expense of the villages and development overlooked the vast countryside. The English-speaking elite became the villains of this lopsided development. The heavily Sanskritised version of Hindi that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Sangh, propagate offers a counter-elitism rather than an anti-elitism. It breeds exclusivist tendencies of a different hue found in the Jan Sangh’s slogan of “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan.” The attempts to impose Sanskrit or Hindi each time a Bharatiya Janata Party-led government comes to power are not merely a coincidence.

“In the mid-1960s, an attempt to impose Hindi was made and Tamil Nadu went up in flames. We ought to have learnt our lessons,” cautions Mridula Mukherjee, Professor of Modern Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. “National integration in a democracy has to be a voluntary process. There should no attempt at coercion.”

Read full article: The Hindu

******************************************************************************


Hindi is still a thorn in Tamil Nadu's flesh

Sruthisagar Yamunan

 The 1965 anti-Hindi agitation.

When the Centre wanted government departments to use Hindi in social media, protests erupted immediately in the State. The then Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said the decision was against the spirit of the Official Languages Act, 1963.

Perhaps, one of the major reasons the Congress was shunted out of power in the State in 1967 was imposition of Hindi. The State government brought in paramilitary forces and clamped down on the anti-Hindi agitators, and the party never again came to power.

Back in 1937, when the Madras Presidency government led by C. Rajagopalachari insisted on compulsory learning of Hindi in the State, the Dravidian movement, then in the form of the Justice Party, got a major campaign agenda. For three years till the policy was revoked in 1940, the agitations were sustained in almost every part of the Presidency, in the process making its leader, E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar), the tallest leader of the Dravidian movement.

In 1965, when the 15-year timeframe to make Hindi the only official language was about to expire, Tamil Nadu again led the agitations. By this time, with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) gaining ground, imposition of Hindi was part of the narrative of the Aryan-Dravidian divide — the northern Aryans attempting to invade the cultural space of the southern Dravidians. It took an assurance from the then Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, that English would continue as the second official language as long as non-Hindi-speaking people wanted it, to quell the protests.

--------------

Writer A. Marx says politically, the Tamil language issue has ceased to be an electoral issue, though it continues to be an emotive issue.

In 1965, the DMK was the only face of the anti-Hindi agitations, giving it the full benefit of the anti-Congress mood. In 2014, all Tamil parties have a common policy on the language issue, giving no one a clear advantage.

Mr. Marx says the anti-Hindi mood is actually more vigorous in the North than in the South at the moment. “It is people speaking non-Hindi languages in the North who have come down heavily on the BJP this time,” he says.

While the Dravidian parties opposed Hindi, he says, they had a logical language policy nevertheless with the constant emphasis on learning English, ensuring that Tamils were not left behind in the development story.

Read full article: The Hindu

******************************************************************************

Blogger's Comment:

Hindi will never become official language in the five Southern States of India. We have our own distinct mother tongues, Telugu (A.P., Telangana), Tamil (Tamilnadu), Kannada (Karnataka) and Malayalam (Kerala) (first language), English (second language) mouth piece to the world. Hindi will have third language status as we have now, no further change in the status quo.

Our history, culture, literature are tied to our mother tongues and we are identified by it as Telugus/Andhras, Tamils, Kanarese and Malayalis. BJP Hindutva activists RSS, VHP. Bajrang Dal may campaign as much as they can for Hindi/Sanskrit and their efforts will be futile in the Sourthen India.

Explained: QUESTION OF CONVERSION

Written by Utkarsh Anand | New Delhi | Posted: December 13, 2014 2:11 am | Updated: December 13, 2014 8:25 am   

Amid chaos in Parliament over alleged forced religious conversions in Agra, Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday called for central and state anti-conversion laws.

What does the Constitution say on freedom of religion?

Articles 25-30 guarantee citizens freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion. They also guarantee freedom to manage religious affairs, monetarily contribute to promotion of any religion, and to set up and administer educational institutions.

Was there a law on conversion before Independence?

The British did not enact any law. But many princely states did. Examples: Raigarh State Conversion Act, 1936, Patna Freedom of Religion Act, 1942, Sarguja State Apostasy Act, 1945, Udaipur State Anti-Conversion Act, 1946. Specific laws against conversion to Christianity were enacted in Bikaner, Jodhpur, Kalahandi and Kota.

What happened after Independence?

In 1954, Parliament took up for consideration the Indian Conversion (Regulation and Registration) Bill. Six years later, another law, the Backward Communities (Religious Protection) Bill, 1960, was proposed to stop conversion. Both were dropped for want of support. However, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh passed anti-conversion laws in 1967, 1968 and 1978 respectively. Later, similar laws were passed by the state assemblies of Chhattisgarh (2000), Tamil Nadu (2002), Gujarat (2003), Himachal Pradesh (2006), and Rajasthan (2008). The laws were intended to stop conversions by force or inducement, or fraudulently. Some of the laws made it mandatory to seek prior permission from local authorities before conversion.

What offences do forced conversions attract?

These laws made forced conversion a cognisable offence under sections 295 A and 298 of the Indian Penal Code, which pertain to malicious and deliberate intention to hurt the religious sentiments of others. They attract a prison term of up to three years and fine. The punishment, in some cases, is harsher if the offence is committed against a minor, a woman or an SC or ST person.

What legal challenge have these laws faced?

The first major case in which the Supreme Court ruled on the freedom of religion and on conversions related to petitions challenging the conversion laws of Orissa and MP in 1967-68. In 1977, a constitution bench headed by then Chief Justice of India A N Ray upheld the validity of the laws, saying freedom to propagate one’s religion, as stipulated under Article 25 (1), did not grant a fundamental right to convert another person. The bench ruled that a purposive conversion would impinge on the “freedom of conscience” guaranteed to all citizens.

What are the other significant judgments on conversion?

In the Sarla Mudgal case (1995), the Supreme Court held that conversion to Islam was not valid if done only in order to be able to practise polygamy. It was held to be an act of bigamy prohibited u/s 17 of Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and punishable under Section 494 IPC. The second marriage would be void, the SC observed. This position was reaffirmed by the judgment in the Lilly Thomas case (2000), which clarified that prosecution for bigamy was not a violation of the freedom of religion under Article 25.

In the Vilayat Raj case (1983). the court said that if both parties were Hindu at the time of marriage, provisions of the Hindu Marriage Act can apply even after one of them or both converted to Islam.

In the Chandra Sekaran case (1963), the court had observed that a person does not cease to be a Hindu merely because he declares that he has no faith in his religion, or if he stops practising his religion.

When was the last attempt made at a central legislation?

In 1978, an All India Freedom of Religion Bill was introduced in Lok Sabha. However, it was never discussed, and was dropped after the government fell in July 1979.

Source: The Indian Express

Satyarthi loses Nobel acceptance speech page

By: Press Trust of India | Oslo | Posted: December 10, 2014 10:22 pm

Kailash Satyarthi, winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize along with Pakistani teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, lost a page of his speech and wondered whether this had happened before to any other Nobel laureate.

“Solutions are not found only in the deliberations in conferences and prescriptions from a distance…Friends what is missing now of course is my (speech) paper,” he said to peels of laughter in the Oslo City Hall where he received the the coveted prize.

“But, no problem, I will continue without that,” the 60-year-old said, quickly regaining composure.

Minutes later a Norwegian official came on stage with the missing page of his lecture and Satyarthi once again had the audience in splits saying, “Thank You so much! I don’t know whether it has happened to some Nobel Laureate before or not.”

“But many things are happening today and the best thing that happened is that a young and courageous Pakistani girl has met an Indian father and the Indian father met the Pakistani daughter,” he said.

Delivering the speech, Satyarthi said, “Friends, the Nobel Committee generously invited me to deliver a ‘lecture’.

Respectfully, I am unable to do that. I represent here the sound of silence. The cry of innocence. And, the face of invisibility. I have come here to share the voices and dreams of our children, our children, because they are all our children.”

He started off his speech by reciting a mantra from the Vedas.

Satyarthi also invoked other religions to impress upon the importance of child rights, saying “all the great religions tell us to care for children.”

“Jesus said ‘Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to them.’ The Holy Quran says: “Kill not your children because of poverty,” he said.

In his concluding remarks, Satyarthi said “I call upon you in this room, and all across the world. I call for a march from exploitation to education, from poverty to shared prosperity, a march from slavery to liberty, and a march from violence to peace. Let us march from darkness to light. Let us march from mortality to divinity.”

“Let us march!” he signed off.

Satyarthi’s NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) prides itself on liberating over 80,000 children from bonded labour in factories and workshops across India.

Malala, who was nominated in the peace prize category last year also, became the youngest ever Nobel laureate.

Source: The Indian Express

Sushmaji, our Constitution is our National Book

A country once divided upon religious lines, cannot afford to exalt into statecraft, any holy text, majority or minority, into an identity marker of nationhood.

POLITICS  |   5-minute read |   09-12-2014

Sanjay Hegde @sanjayuvacha

Minister of external affairs Sushma Swaraj has called for officially notifying the Bhagavad Gita, as India’s “Rashtriya Granth”; a phrase which loosely translates as “National book/scripture”. At the very outset, there are a few conceptual problems. Reducing the Gita to a mere book, albeit with national status is problematic to say the least. It is even more problematic  to treat it as national  scripture, and imply that scriptures of other religions are anti-national or at any rate non-national.

Secondly, designating anything as the national definitive is to condemn the object to ritual meaninglessness and perpetuate a neglectful protection. Our national game is hockey, our national calendar is the Saka Calendar, our national animal is the Royal Bengal Tiger, our national aquatic animal is the river dolphin and our national river is the Ganga. The national appellation has neither guaranteed their existence nor any continued engagement by this country.

Semantics aside, the Gita is a book by which nearly 80 per cent of India is expected to swear by. Its eternal philosophy of performance of duty irrespective of reward is an ideal which if nationally emulated would build a strong country of ever dutiful citizens. Why should then anyone object to a national status being conferred on it?

I object, because we do have a national book, it is called the Constitution of India. It was fashioned out of the debris of an empire, the aspirations of a new democratic nation and the hopes of a post-colonial world. In 1947, as we got rid of the empire, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on March 6, 1947, warned his fellow British parliamentarians: “ In handing over the government of India to these so-called political classes we are handing over to men of straw, of whom, in a few years, no trace will remain.”

Probably in response, in the very first address of the chairman of Constituent Assembly, Dr Sachidanand Sinha ended with a reiteration of the founding fathers’ faith in the immortality of the destiny of this country, best summed up by the Urdu poet Iqbal in these lines:

Yunan-o-Misr-o-Roma sab mit gaye jahan se,

Baqi abhi talak hai nam-o-nishan hamara.

Kuch bat hai ke hasti mit-ti nahin hamari,

Sadion raha hai dushman daur-e-zaman hamara

It loosely translated into: "Greece, Egypt, and Rome, have all disappeared from the surface of the Earth; but the name and fame of India, our country, has survived the ravages of time and the cataclysms of ages. Surely, surely, there is an eternal element in us which had frustrated all attempts at our obliteration, in spite of the fact that the heavens themselves had rolled and revolved for centuries, and centuries, in a spirit of hostility and enmity towards us.”

With the horrors of partition still continuing, the attendant transfer of nearly ten million humans, the violence and riots that cost us hundreds of thousands of lives, capped by  the assassination of the Mahatma, India seemed well on the way of making Churchill’s direst predictions come true. In that atmosphere of fear and promise, a constituent Assembly came together, with people drawn from every province, representing every interest and finally fashioned a document that has bound the nation together, as a modern, democratic unit. We adopted the Constitution on November 26, 1949, gave it to ourselves from January 26, 1950. Ever thereafter, we have as a nation, lived by its guiding light in all matters of state.

Our Rashtriya Granth was conceived in hope, carried though grave deliberation and delivered to an expectant nation as a child to be nurtured through a hostile world of decaying imperialism and cold-war conflict. We did not give ourselves this Constitution to merely keep it on ceremonial display. Time and again we resorted to it, to elect rulers, to throw them out, to keep a check on dictatorial tendencies, to fashion for ourselves a minimum charter of fundamental rights and to define the mechanics of operation of each organ of government. From the post-Emergency era to the Supreme Court, Election Commission under TN Seshan and JM Lyngdoh and the CAG in the times of Bofors and 2G scandals, every authority that attempted systemic reforms, found its raison d'être and its powers, in the relevant provisions of the Constitution. Justice VR Krishna Iyer, in Sunil Batra’s case put it best, when he said: “The Indian human has a constant companion - the court armed with the Constitution.”

It must be conceded that our Constitution is the one national book for India; that all citizens can identify with. It does not represent only a dominant section, and thus impliedly exclude the rest.

The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind had strongly opposed the demand for a separate Pakistan. Despite its opposition, Partition happened. Post Independence and Partition, the Jamiat propounded a theological basis for its nationalistic philosophy. Its thesis is that Muslims and non-Muslims have entered upon a mutual contract in India since independence, to establish a secular state. The Constitution of India represents this contract. This is known in Urdu as a Mu'ahadah. This mu'ahadah is similar to a previous similar contract signed between the Muslims and the Jews in Medina in the times of the Holy Prophet. Accordingly as the Muslim community's elected representatives supported and swore allegiance to this modern day Mu'ahadah, so it is the duty of Indian Muslims is to keep loyalty to the Constitution.

No contract is one sided, no loyalty can endure neglect and repudiation. It behoves all children of mother India, in matters of nation and state to adhere only to the constitution. Religious texts are for matters of worship, an individual’s communion with his particular God. A granth is a guru for the seeker of God. In matters temporal, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", is not a mere biblical injunction, but states the sound political doctrine of separation of church and state.

A country once divided upon religious lines, cannot afford to exalt into statecraft, any holy text, majority or minority, into an identity marker of nationhood. To stand together, this country does not need a religious text as a “rashtriya granth”. We have the Constitution of India as our enduring creed of citizenship, a charter for nationhood, all enveloping, all encompassing.

Source: dailyo

Everyone loves a good slut-shaming, including women

In India, a woman's body is never her own. We love stereotyping.

LIFE  |  Below The Belt  |   5-minute read |   06-12-2014

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu @sreemoyeekundu

I don’t remember much about my gym. Considering I work out for approximately every six months, every few years. Except, this one, glaring incident. There used to be this bombshell of a woman. Late 40s. 

"Kya, rap-chick figure, bidu!"

"Full item. Kya mast honth. Perfect breasts. Sexy abs. The whole health club fida over the shape of her ankles. Paisa wasool. Baby doll", the trainers sniggered amongst themselves. Taking bets on who she would beckon. Kiska number, pehle.

"Madam... c’mon some more abs… or chest. Pehle chest karte hain," they would raise their hands, as she breezed past them. Her hips swinging.

Dance Basanti.

"You must be really killing it in training," I remarked one morning, from the next treadmill, mustering up some courage. She was in a tight spandex shorts. Her arms chiseled. A tattoo just over her navel. An angel, with just one wing.

I tried to stop myself from staring.

"Issh…. who dresses like this? We are all family people. Obscene. Must be a Punjabi, husband must be home, screwing his maid… or drunk from last night… the men I’ve heard drink regularly. Party, party, party," I heard someone whisper.

"I’m 46. Thanks, I’ve always looked after myself. I have two boys. My husband is a shippie. Come home, someday. I’m in CR Park, too. Our body is our biggest source of strength," she smiled, plugging back her earphones.

"She always comes in the morning, so that she can fall all over these trainers. "Madam. Madam." As if we don’t exist. Slut! Must be then calling them home, in the afternoons, paying them. It’s a big racket in Delhi. Society people. Horny housewives, hubby in merchant navy, apparently…" another allegation, arose.

"I like your shorts. You should have been a model… an actress…" I passed her a hand towel.

"You’re good for my ego," she patted my back.

"Stay away from her. All dirty women."

Last month, it was her older son’s birthday, she was telling one of the trainers. Wanted to wear a fully backless gown. Was showing him the picture on her WhatsApp. He showed us, later. "Badi aayi Sunny Leone," a pot-bellied lady cackled, as soon as she had walked away.

"But, aunty…" I tried defending her.

The woman, sans a name.

The next week she left.

"She surely has implants… always dhakdhak… God she was one horny woman. I spoke to the manager, we, we hardly get any attention once she entered… and did you notice how she always monopolised the treadmill, cross-trainer… carried her own music… bloody angrez," another angry woman hissed.

Let’s get this straight; men are not the only enemy. And neither is any particular religion. Those, believe it or not, are the easiest to blame. So, incase you’ve been smarting after the Gauahar Khan tamacha or were violated when India’s top sportswoman, Sania Mirza, had drawn flack from Muslim religious groups for her skimpy tennis skirts, with a Muslim scholar even issuing a ruling that declared that women’s tennis attire was not suited to Islam. Or feel nauseous each time a minister, maharaj or maulawi claims that tight jeans cause rape. Take the case of right wing Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, for instance, which recently demanded that a dress code for girls be introduced in schools and colleges while banning the use of cell phones; they must also wear "dupatta," it added.

It’s easy to stereotype women, I guess. I mean how many times have you questioned a woman's character only because she was skimpily clad. Labelling her a tramp, in your own head. The kind of woman who sleeps around. With younger men. Gym trainers. Gigolos. On the side.

Or is single. Beyond a certain age. A divorce, perhaps. What if she’s queer, you ask? Pointing to someone you claim you may have seen in the newspapers today. Gay parade, Delhi? A woman who exposes too much. Is also a muffat aurat. Maybe, a feminist, you allege. Gets laid by the boss. A corporate honcho who slept her way to the top.

A woman’s body is never quite her own? Our womb our destiny in some way. Our every body part crucified for mass consumption. Objectified in umpteen films, popular ads, item numbers, porn videos, posters, ramps...? Never safe, never sacred. Always in need of a certain degree of social sanction...? Always crying out for protection. In other words, put a label, on me and tuck me away in cold storage.

The way millions of Indian mothers forewarn their desi girls to wear "dhang ke kapde," while leaving for college. A call centre. A café.

"Aise behude kapde mein nikli toh tange tod dunga…samjhe? Tumhara dupatta kahan hain? Achcha pala hai tune beti ko…" screams a father. An uncle. An older brother. A parched patriarch, of some sort. Speaking in a misogynistic mother tongue.

The one you tie rakhi to. Every year. The same man who later ties a mangal sutra around your neck. As you look towards the moon, and wait.

"Mein moti toh nahin lag rahi hoon iss mein, na?" you pause, pouting, sucking in your stomach. In a mall trial room, somewhere. Guarded by male vanity. Built on centuries of fragile feminine self-confidence. Body images. Size zero. Tall. Fair. Convented. Her janamkundli.Her first line of defence. A matrimonial ad. A marriage market. A manglik.

"Thoda kam khayakar, shaadi se pehle dus kg kam karna hain…" you remember your bestie. Shuddering at your stretch marks. After your second C-section.

A daughter again.

As your arthritic mother-in-law points fingers accusingly, hollering, "log kya kahenge? Do bacchon ki ma ho ab tum. Hamare ghar ki bahuyein aise kapde nahin pehenti… Bunty apni wife ko sikhao…"

You cover your shoulders, at once. The Kellogs, 13-day challenge clearly gone to waste. The Zumba DVD you bought online. The first you shopped on Flipkart. The neighbour's wife you can’t tolerate. The one your husband letches at in secret, playing songs as he watches her change. Her full figure, a torment, a threat. The way she can get away.

"Sarika, Mummyji thik bol rahin hain," you know the rest….

The battle has started.

Source: dailyo

Sad, sorry state of Indian liberals under Modi sarkar

The need of the hour is to save the Indian liberalism from its Left-liberal elite.

POLITICS  |   Long-form |   05-12-2014

Shekhar Gupta  @ShekharGupta

National interest

By the time this week's India Today hits the stands, one thing would have become clearer: whether Narendra Modi is essentially an old-style politician under an extroverted modern gloss or a game changer. Because an old-timer would be a partisan to the core, defending the indefensible to the very logical end, that is, the loss of an argument and some political capital. If he is an original new phenomenon, one of a kind, or sui generis as the more scholarly people prefer to say (my venerable first news editor, late DN Singh, had banned the use of "foreign" words), he would have fired Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti. Earlier she is sent back to prayer and penance, rather than waste public money in the ministry of food processing, making a pickle of the BJP's image, the better it will be.

But really? Think again, and think hard. Do we, the currently besieged and cornered minority of Indian liberals, even want the story to end that way, and this soon? Do we want it to end at all? A sadhvi in the BJP ministry, even if a junior minister in charge of achar and chutney, while I presume her senior, Harsimrat Kaur of the Akali Dal, takes care of jams and juices, brings such solace to us liberals. It is living proof that we are intellectually right and morally superior. And most importantly, that we are losing. Poor us. Is there any future left for the Indian liberal with the rise of Narendra Modi? Why isn't the rest of the world feeling sorry for us? How can we, such a small, brave but increasingly disenfranchised community of liberals, be expected to rectify the consequence of the stupidity of crores of voters? The future is lost, a mythical past is upon us, the barbarians are at the gates. Where is my ticket to a genuinely liberal American East Coast campus or think tank?

Even for a bout of self-flagellation, this sounds harsh. If Modi lacks the political wisdom to cut his losses early enough, it is his problem and not that of his critics. In fact, the longer he perpetuates this, the more the Indian Left-liberal, will say, I told you so. From Niranjan Jyoti to Adityanath, the new saffron-robes are welcome evidence of all our warnings gone unheeded. Just as Sadhvi Rithambhara and Ashok Singhal were in the early 1990s, and Praveen Togadia and Pramod Muthalik of Sri Ram Sene in the interregnum. It would be such disappointment if Modi did the right thing now and sent Sadhvi Jyoti home. He can't deny us this living, walking and talking evidence for our unheeded warnings.

Credit must be given where it's duly deserved. In this case to American liberal academic Steve Almond, whose June 8, 2012 article ("Liberals are ruining America, I know because I am one") in the New York Times triggered this week's central thought of liberal masochism, self-isolation, mourning or, in the more apt Indian usage, rona-dhona, or even better, in Punjabi, syapa. Almond talked of how he briefly acquired liberal martyrdom in 2006 by resigning his teaching job at Boston College to protest the selection of then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker. His biggest reward, he said, was an invitation to appear on an abusive Right-wing chat show on Fox News, and he thought then that he had paid his liberal dues by standing up to sour-mouthed, shouty anchor Sean Hannity. By 2012, he said, he saw that action as less heroic. "I hadn't spoken truth to power or caused anyone to reassess secretary Rice's record. I merely provided a few minutes of gladiatorial stimulation for Fox News. In seeking to assert my moral superiority, I enabled Hannity."

If you recall 2012 America, the Right-Left polarisation cut across American society. But in 2014, six months into Modi's reign, India sounds quite similar. Almond's self-diagnosis seems to fit us too now: "This, to be blunt, is the tragic flaw of the American liberal," he said. "We choose to see ourselves as innocent victims of an escalating Right-wing fanaticism. But too often we serve as willing accomplices... and to the resulting degradation of our civic discourse." Then, turning the sword into his own belly he said: "We do this, without even meaning to, by consuming conservative folly as mass entertainment."

It is challenging for me to delve deeper into the marginalisation of the liberal in western democracies because I do not know those societies enough. But in India, the issue is compounded by the deeprooted, terminal elitism of the liberal. I have fretted for years that politically our liberal constituency is shrinking because it had become, post-independence, hyphenated with the word Left. Our national ideology emerged from the freedom movement, which was very liberal. The Congress then was a political umbrella wide enough to give room to liberals of the Left as well as the Right, and also intellectual space for them to argue. Remember, Syama Prasad Mookerjee was even a member of Nehru's cabinet, and Sardar Patel his deputy. But over the next two decades, the right was purged, artfully by Nehru and then crudely by his daughter. India's only truly liberal party therefore morphed into a Left-liberal party. You need to read Ramachandra Guha to learn more about it. But people of my generation do remember the "star" symbol of C Rajagopalachari's Swatantra Party, where much of the old Congress right collected and which once was a formidable opposition force, netting 44 Lok Sabha seats in 1967. Indira Gandhi destroyed it, and thereby India's liberal right, with her post-1969 "revolutionary" push.

This reduced liberalism to a Left monopoly as the right merged into saffron. It lasted as long as Indian politics and popular mind were dominated by old, anti-imperialist, non-aligned, West-phobic ideas of the Cold War. But it did not have the flexibility to change with new realities as the Cold War ended, global power and economic equations were rewritten and successive generations of aspirational, ambitious, impatient and post-ideological Indians rose. I am not sure Dr Manmohan Singh quite looked at it this way, but post-1991, he was probably the only famous liberal of old who thought it was time to delete the hyphenated left. By the middle of 2009, with a bigger second mandate, he was winning this campaign of ideological correction. But he was defeated by the party's embedded pinko immune system.

Pop sociology has its hazards, but I have got away with it often enough in the past, so here we go again. While Singh had the intellectual honesty to acknowledge, or to borrow the words of his political mentor Narasimha Rao, do "what to do when the ground under your feet is moving", he failed to see the very formidable elitism underpinning this left-liberalism. To be liberal, you had to be left, and to be left-liberal, your parents should have done very well, given you Doon-Stephen's-Oxbridge education, a Delhi Golf Club membership and definitely a home in the capital's Little Kremlins, Diplomatic Enclave and couple more neighbourhoods to its immediate south, in bequest. Singh and Rao didn't check out on this, and failed. That is why the liberals are back in their lefty, but also elitist, hole, or rather their ivory bunker. Why bunker, not tower, we will just get to.

It is now an uch-koti (superior) brahminical club (I use that purely in its intellectual manifestation, not a Manuwadi one). "Outsiders" are rejected. And so what if its ranks continue to shrink. A reminder was served on me very recently in a very exhaustive profile of me in a self-avowedly liberal publication that traced my apparent success over four decades and marvelled that I could get here despite being the son of a "minor bureaucrat from Haryana" and "lacking the eloquence" of my Oxbridge peers. Now, the second is a fact, but the first an exaggeration. My late father, in fact, would have been quite flattered to be described as a minor bureaucrat. He slogged all his life to rise to become one, a gazetted officer, even if a day before his retirement, so he would also have the "power" to attest somebody's certificates. He was mostly a clerk, or rather an assistant, despite his relatively high education. He struggled with money, with his tiny salary sent his children mostly to sarkari Hindi medium schools and colleges, but still made sure we bought two English and Hindi newspapers, three magazines and listened to cricket commentary on BBC regularly in English.

I say all this not to praise him, or to write belatedly an obit he was not famous, powerful or rich enough to deserve when he passed away in 1998, but to provide the sociological point of this week's National Interest.

I say this because I now believe that my parents' generation (my father would have been 85 today) was not atypical of post-independence liberal Indians, mostly Congress voters, who were willing to challenge earlier acceptance of elite domination with "Bhagwan teri maya, kahin dhoop kahin chhaya" resignation. They believed early enough that education would bring equality. Economic reform brought opportunity and then suddenly, it was no longer so life-and-death, that your parents should have done very well for you to be taken seriously. That is the reality India's elite liberals have failed to understand or embrace. In defining liberalism as an exclusive "brahminical" value of the intellectual, economic and academic upper crust, they have closed their doors to the enormously more numerous rest, as our ancestors had shut them out of Sanskrit scholarship and even science. If Mahabharata is a reality, so is the legend of Eklavya.

One of the most stirring speeches in defence of Indian secularism was once made by Ram Vilas Paswan when Vajpayee's short-lived government was seeking a confidence vote. How many Muslims came with Babur, he asked, and then answered, only 40. So how did they swell to crores? Because "people like us", he said, Dalits and lower castes, were not allowed entry in the temples, "so we went to the mosques". This is precisely what today's liberal elites have done to the tens of crores of rising, aspirational, we-don't-owe-nobody-nothing Indians, children of poorer parents like mine who beg, steal, borrow, scrounge, starve, deny themselves that pack of cigarettes to give them opportunity, if not houses in Shanti Niketan or Kautilya Marg or Golf Club memberships. Instead, Modi has embraced them and now enjoys power that no Indian prime minister has since Indira in 1971. They are now coming, smashing the defences of the elite liberal ivory, well, bunker.

Source: dailyo

India, the world’s first astro-nuclear power?

Our ancient knowledge and aviation supremacy was destroyed in the nuclear test conducted by sage Kanad in 2 BC.

HUMOUR  |   6-minute read |   05-12-2014

Kamlesh Singh @kamleshksingh

BREAKING NEWS INTO PIECES

Ajay Devgn would be so proud, his chest would become blouse if he knew about the house that meets, adjourns and meets again to engage in the fruitless exercise of writing India’s destiny. Because our destiny lies in the stars. Man may have reached the moon and may know all about stars but never as much as the stars know about us. An honourable member of our Lok Sabha thumped the desk when he said astrology is the No 1 science. Wipe that smirk off your face because he did not make it up. He read it in an astrology book. You can doubt him, but can you doubt a book?

Ramesh Pokhriyal informed the Lok Sabha about how Indians conducted a nuclear test lakhs of years before Indira Gandhi. "Today we are talking about nuclear tests. Lakhs of years ago, sage Kanad had conducted a nuclear test. Our knowledge and science do not lack anything," he said with his chest expanding to 55 inches in diameter and stopping there, owing to chest expansion restrictions in his party. By the way, this rishi Kanad is not a canard. He actually lived in the 2nd century BC. He died and evaporated with mushroom cloud as a result of the first nuclear explosion.

Our forefathers were definitely far ahead of westerners, in writing fantastic books about technology. All the mathematics of the world is dwarfed by Vedic maths. You hear of cargo flights today. Lord Hanuman flew with a mountain in his hand from here to Sri Lanka 10,000 years ago. In fact, most Indians could fly lakhs of years before Wright Brothers wrongly appropriated the technology. The Ganga was brought to earth from Shiva’s locks by a man called Bhagirath, a grand-old from the Raghuvanshi family of Ayodhya. BJP is reviving the plan to interlink rivers because the technology to create rivers was lost in the nuclear explosion that wiped out all over knowledge, skills and science.

Nuclear radiation is one of the most dangerous things and it can affect generations. The radiation affected the thinking faculties of a generation of Indians and continues to warp some honourable members of parliament. It made Pokhriyal a poet and forced him to adopt a pen name: Nishank. Doubtless. The man doesn’t doubt anything he reads. He is not into questioning literature. You give him Harry Potter and tomorrow he would inform the Lok Sabha about how young school students in the United Kingdom use the broom to fly. “Our prime minister uses it to clean India, Aam Aadmi Party uses it as a symbol but pupils of Hogwarts fly brooms. Vroom!” he would say, conscious of his shrinking chest.

You know where his belief comes from. He became the chief minister of Uttarakhand by accident. For an average speaker and below-average poet, this was an achievement he couldn’t explain. In ancient times, cavemen blamed it on God whenever they couldn’t explain something because their brains had not evolved to understand the universe. So when lightning struck, they said God’s angry. Much later when we understood the ways of nature, we got to know that the flash you see is God clicking your photo because you are wet. Nishank couldn’t convince himself that he could become chief minister, so he blamed it on the stars. And to really believe he was eligible for the post, he blamed it on specific stars. His stars.

But you can’t blame everything on God and Nishank when our prime minister believes Indians pioneered plastic surgery and genetic science before plastic came into being or genetics was a subject. He referred to Lord Ganesha getting an elephant trunk and the birth of Karna.

According to the holy books, Lord Ganesha was guarding the door when his mother was taking a bath. Lord Shiva arrived and he asked him not to enter the house. Shiva, being the angry man he was, beheaded him. When Parvati told him that the little boy was their son, Shiva brought Ganesha’s body back to life by surgically planting a baby elephant’s head. According to Nishank: "It was actually a surgery. The science available to us is not available elsewhere in the world… science or knowledge to transplant a severed head existed only in India."

There’s one problem here. We are what we think and we think from our heads. So when our head is planted on some other body, the head acquires the body, not the other way round. But please stop thinking scientifically or logically because we are supposed to think mythologically. Gods could do anything and Lord Shiva is the biggest God in the pantheon.

One could always ask LK Advani but contrary to popular belief, I don’t think he’s that ancient. I would rather go by authentic books. Karna was conceived because the Sun God impregnated Kunti in a makeshift genetic lab. Or fertility clinic of old days. The Sun not only provides us with light and energy but also children. Please perform a surya namaskar before reading the next paragraph.

I grew up in Bihar, where people love discussing current affairs over there at the tea stall. In the days of the jungle raj, things were worse. The state of affairs was so bad, we would start talking about how glorious our history was. The discussion would veer to facts like Bihar gave India its first president. Then we would go back further into the annals of history to dig out gems like GT Road, first republic on earth, the largest university, Buddha, Mahavir, Arthshastra, Aryabhatta and, of course, Karna, the first IVF baby.

Later I learnt that we Biharis had nothing but our past to hold on to. The present was all goons and guns without glory. The future was dark, like its villages in the night. Both present and future had nothing pleasant to offer that could go with the kadak tea. So we always relied on history and seamlessly crossed over to mythology to feel good about it. Those were the achchhe din. Bharat sone ki chidiya tha. Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere moti. Then I read Ghaus Khwamkhwah’s Deccani couplet.

Apne desh mein kyan ki mitti sona-chandi kab ugli ji,

kaay ku jhooti baatan kar rae, kuchh bhi nahin hai kya bhi nahin hai.

This is the best time India has ever had. We are a thriving democracy with a vibrant economy. India is a knowledge powerhouse like it has never been. We are a confident of going far and competing with the best in the world. These are the most achche din and this government needs to focus on making it better for us as Prime Minister Modi has promised. Our present and future is not at all bleak so as to force us to rely on some glorious period in the past. Period.

Source: dailyo

Prime minister’s choice

Written by Brinda Karat | Posted: December 5, 2014 12:18 am

Niranjan Jyoti knows exactly what she said. She also knows what her party line is. 
She correctly interpreted the PM’s silence when Adityanath was speaking as tacit 
support for what he said.

The prime minister was forced to break his silence on the hate speech made by his minister, Niranjan Jyoti, by the strong protests of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha. He had to come on record against such speeches. He was present in the Lok Sabha the day before, when the demand for her resignation had been raised. He refused to say a word. The difference in his approach in the two Houses is not difficult to fathom. In the Lok Sabha, his party has the numbers. It can steamroll everything through. In the Rajya Sabha, if the opposition unites, as they rightly did on such a sensitive issue, the prime minister is forced to respond.

Just as the minister’s expression of regret, for whatever it was worth, was forced by the outrage inside and outside Parliament, so was the prime minister’s criticism of the “language used” by her. It is strange that the prime minister advises “grace” in accepting her apology. The national interest demands that he send a strong message by asking her to resign, gracefully or otherwise. If it is the prerogative of the prime minister to choose his ministers, it is also his responsibility to ensure the first principle of good governance, namely, accountability.

If the prime minister’s statement was not taken at face value and the Rajya Sabha did not function even after his statement, it is also because hate speech is not an aberration or an exception.

It was made in the context of the campaign by Niranjan Jyoti’s party for the Delhi elections. In the last two months, the capital has seen the flaring up of two communal incidents in Trilokpuri and Bawana. In both cases, the involvement of BJP leaders has been reported. In the run up to the Lok Sabha elections in UP, similar tactics of creating communal polarisation were successfully utilised by the BJP, following the “riots for votes” mantra. At that time, it was Amit Shah who led the campaign. The Election Commission had banned him from addressing rallies in UP during the elections after he made a series of highly provocative speeches, which further intensified, as they were designed to, the polarisation that had reportedly been engineered under his guidance in Muzaffarnagar. The ban was lifted only after he gave a written undertaking that he would not use “abusive or derogatory language”.

What happened to him? He was promoted as BJP president. After he became chief, did he warn his party against committing the same crime he was banned for?

On the contrary, as president, he deputed five-term BJP MP Adityanath as chief campaigner in the UP by-elections. Adityanath, with his known history of making inflammatory speeches against Muslims, was not sent there to preach universal brotherhood. He did what he was sent there to do by Shah. He made a series of communal speeches that bring shame to any democratic country. The Election Commission reprimanded and cautioned him. It asked the UP government to proceed against him under the relevant sections of the IPC.

Yet, it was precisely this MP who was chosen as the first BJP speaker in the Lok Sabha debate on communalism in the last session of Parliament. There too, he made highly provocative statements on the floor of the House. He was loudly applauded by his BJP colleagues. The prime minister did not say a word.

The prime minister chooses his ministerial colleagues. He has included men like Sanjeev Baliyan, riot accused from Muzaffarnagar, and Giriraj Singh, charged with crimes under Section 153A in his ministry. In fact, Giriraj Singh had also been banned by the Election Commission from campaigning in Bihar and Jharkhand after his provocative statements. The same Section 153A also applies to Niranjan Jyoti. The relevant portion states that any advocacy “that promotes or attempts to promote, on grounds of religion… disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious [groups]” will invite punishment of up to three years imprisonment or fine or both.

Venkaiah Naidu, the minister for parliamentary affairs, called Niranjan Jyoti a “village woman”, implying that she couldn’t understand the niceties of language. Apart from being highly insulting to “village women”, he has read his colleague absolutely incorrectly.

She knows exactly what she said. She also knows what her party line is. She correctly interpreted the prime minister’s silence when Adityanath was speaking as tacit support for what he said. She cannot be faulted if she read the promotion of chargesheeted ministers as a reward for their efforts at communal polarisation. She knows who her party president is. She knows what he wants and she delivered that in her speech in the Delhi campaign.

Hate speech is a weapon to ridicule, to humiliate, to terrorise and to polarise. Yet, the laws against it are weak and ineffectual. The enforcement of the legal framework is so weak that, in spite of so many examples of communally charged speeches in election after election, there has not been a single case in India where a candidate has been disqualified for making a hate speech. In fact, candidates should be held responsible even when their supporters make hate speeches — such as those made by Niranjan Jyoti. The only time a leader felt the heat was when the late Shiv Sena supremo, Bal Thackeray, was debarred from exercising his franchise after the Supreme Court in 1999 upheld the indictment made against him for hate speeches.

During the term of the UPA government, there was a draft legislation before Parliament against communal violence, which included an important clause against hate speech. But it was iced because the then government was too arrogant to engage in a dialogue on the legitimate objections raised about some other clauses by several state governments.

Yet, India desperately needs such a law. In March this year, in response to a petition filed by the Pravasi Bhalai Sangathan against hate speech, the Supreme Court directed the Law Commission to draft guidelines to define such infractions. The Law Commission should make its report public. The bill against communal violence should be brought back on the agenda of Parliament. Niranjan Jyoti should be removed from the ministry. The RSS pracharak in the prime minister should not overshadow his duty to uphold the Constitution of India.

The writer is a member of the CPM politburo and patron, AIDWA

express@expressindia.com

Source: indianexpress

Don't shame item girls: Bharat, our country is named after an item girl's grandson

If crypto-Wahabis are trying to turn Bharatvarsh into a fiefdom of ISIS or the Taliban, it's time they're reminded of such facts.

POLITICS  |   3-minute read |   03-12-2014

Renuka Narayanan


Bah, what a reek of rancid ghee today in Bharatvarsh of once-upon-a-time "malayaja-sheetalam" ("cool winds of delight", in Vande Mataram). Another foul gust just blew our way from Navin Tyagi, general secretary of the UP unit of the Hindu Mahasabha, the nationalist organisation that once had adherents like Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of Banares Hindu University.

Navin Tyagi, who does not sound like he paid attention to the nolej in kolej, wants to brand under-clad actresses who dance item numbers “prostitutes”. He also wants a khap-style ban on skirts, jeans and mobile phones for schoolgirls.

This self-declared authority on Indian culture, manners and morals (for women) reportedly said: “The girls who perform item numbers in films and remove clothes should be declared prostitutes. We feel the women who earn money by indulging in obscenity are prostitutes. They are spreading filth in society”. He apparently plans to take the matter to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the very law he plans to supplicate has taken a dim view of Akil Malik (who sounds like Tyagi’s blood-brother lost in childhood at the mela) for slapping actress Gauahar Khan. And why did he do that? When he slapped Gauahar, he told her it was because she, a Muslim woman, was dancing in “short dress”. And when the police took him away, he told them that it was because he was attracted to Gauahar, whom he saw dancing in public that he slapped her - for dancing in public.

Well, I have something to say meanwhile to this crypto-Wahabi, Tyagi, who’s trying to call the shots for women in India and I hope he falls off his buffalo hearing it.

Our country, "Bharat", is named after the valiant king Bharata of myth, right? So, get this, Tyagi and all Ram Sainiks and Rahim Sainiks: King Bharata’s granny, our Desh ki nani, no less, was an item girl, the apsara Menaka. Our country is named after an item girl’s grandson... and his mother, Shakuntala, was technically illegitimate.

It’s never bothered me because I’m a Hindu, not a crypto-Wahabi. Consequently, I’m proud of these vivid and fascinating heroes and heroines of our myth and legend and do not think judgmentally of modern women who dance for a living.

But if crypto-Wahabis are trying to turn Bharatvarsh into a fiefdom of ISIS or the Taliban, it's time they're reminded of such facts.

Perhaps the BJP is learning from how that "sadhvi" of theirs just united the Opposition with her uncultured rant on "Ramzadas".

Certainly, Swami Chakrapani, national secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha and Lalitha Kumaramangalam, newly-appointed chair of the National Commission for Women (NCW) did not hand out a swarna-kamal to Tyagi. Even BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra reportedly distanced himself from this caballero and said the party was “…proud to have a culture where women have led from the front.” 

We’ll see what the BJP actually does to curb its Tyagis and bogeys.

As for us, let’s remember how, at the stroke of the midnight on August 15, 1947, when India finally attained "her" freedom from slavery, it was Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya’s son, Govind Malaviya, who reportedly blew the conch thrice to announce India’s Independence.

January 26 will soon be upon us. The women of India, and their supporters, should blow a loud raspberry that day at the hostile "men" of India, these Ram-Rahim Sainiks, who are united in being horrible to Indian women, if nothing else.

Source: dailyo

Sadhvi Niranjan and almost all Indians are not Ramzaadas

If only those who are born of Ram are to rule, the Raghuvanshi kshatriyas will lord over Lutyens’ Delhi

POLITICS  |  BREAKING NEWS INTO PIECES  |   4-minute read |   03-12-2014

Kamlesh Singh @kamleshksingh

You must give credit to people when it’s due. After 10 years of Congress spokespersons playing cute in the face of evidence, we now have their BJP counterparts trying hard to look cute. I have been watching them defend the beautiful Persian-laced Sanskrit expletives from the holy chops of a Sadhvi of no less than the ministerial order. While they admit she was way out of line, they also pretend that the media hasn’t got the gist of it. According to them, to get a metaphor is beyond our collective mental capacity. Incredibly sweet. But let us go meta on the metaphor and the defence.

She said: “Dilli mein yaa to Ramzaadon ki sarkar banegi, ya haraamzaadon ki (Delhi will have a government of either those born of Ram or those born in illegitimacy).”

 The Opposition says, she has not only abused non-BJP leaders but also used communal politics to divide people by invoking Lord Ram. The accusation is that the statement was aimed at othering non-Hindus, primarily Muslims, Christians and so on.

The BJP’s defence is that she may have used an inappropriate word, Haraamzaadon, but by Ramzaadon she meant all Indians —since Ram is our common ancestor. After all, even Allama Iqbal called him Imam-e-Hind. We are all Ram’s sons and daughters. Period.

How captivating an idea for communal harmony. The trouble is, it isn’t so. Since we are all going medieval on facts, let me go technical on them.

Even if we believe that all Indians were at one point Hindus, the Sadhvi’s statement doesn’t hold water. Critics say by Ramzaadon she meant BJP supporters, because at one time the party led a movement to build a temple where Lord Ram is assumed to have been born. That movement gave birth to the new, aggressive, powerful BJP. The rathyatra man has since gone to the backstage as the Gujarat man has taken centerstage. But the party owes a lot to Ram and occasionally invokes the lord. Like the Sadhvi did, presuming she is a Ramzaadi. Is she?

Ram, according to the books, was a Kshatriya. Now try telling a Brahmin that sons of Ram spawned Brahmins. They will never ever accept that because they are proud of their “superiority” and “purity”. It’s likely that they would take that as an affront. That keeps the Brahmins out.

The other large support group, the trading communities often referred to as baniyas, cannot claim being Ramzaadas because Kshatriyas will not take that lying down. Vaishyas do not claim to be born of Ram but have for ages wished well for the most just man to walk the earth. Vaishyas have eternally needed just kings because the unjust ones would tax them heavily and make doing business difficult. A lack of rule of law would make them vulnerable to thugs and plunderers. They also needed guarantee of peace and safety that only kings could provide. Who better a king than Raja Ram? So Vaishyas believe Ram to be the ideal idol to worship, but do not consider born of him.

Since Ram was the pinnacle of justice and equanimity, his people loved him. When in exile, the Maryada Purushottam shared berries with Shabri, a Dalit in modern parlance, she was overwhelmed by the gesture. This also makes it clear that she didn’t expect a man born in a higher caste to share her food even in adversity.

Since caste is a hallmark of Hindu mythology and the lords of Dwapar and Treta Yuga have castes well marked, the chance of anybody but Kshatriyas claiming to be Ramzaadas is invalid.

It can’t be all Kshatriyas, too, because Ram was a Raghuvanshi Kshatriya. So only Raghuvanshis can claim that status. Here we must consider that Ram wasn’t the only Raghuvanshi. He had uncles and brothers, who had children. They can’t be Ramzaadas either. So much so that even Lakshman’s sons and daughters are out.

The later Kshatriyas, Rajputs, Jats and Gujjars, weren’t even living in India in the period assumed to be Treta Yuga.

Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti is a Dalit and a devotee of Ram but the books that she reveres are pretty clear about lineage. If not all, most Hindus worship Ram as the moral guiding light and consider sacred everything associated with him. They are Rambhakt, not Ramzaade. Only some of the Raghuvanshis are born of Ram or Ramzaade. What does it make you and the rest of us then, Sadhviji?

Source: dailyo

‘Hugging mother’ Mata Amritanandamayi meets Pope Francis in Vatican

Amritanandamayi and other religious leaders had gathered in Rome on the 
International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

Written by Shaju Philip | Thiruvananthapuram | Posted: December 2, 2014 10:24 pm

Hindu spiritual leader from Kerala Mata Amritanandamayi has met Pope Francis in Vatican on Monday.

Her Math in Kollam said the spiritual leader, known as hugging mother, sat next to Pope and signed the joint declaration of religious leaders against modern slavery. The declaration underlined that slavery, in terms of human trafficking, is a crime against humanity. Leaders of various Christian denominations as well as Budhist, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim faiths had signed the declaration, said a Math release.

Amritanandamayi and other religious leaders had gathered in Rome on Monday, the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, to sign a common declaration, showing their commitment towards the eradication of modern slavery by 2020.

“We are honoured and thankful that Pope Francis has gathered us here today under the auspices of the Global Freedom Network. I am optimistic that all global faiths are uniting together to inspire both spiritual and practical actions towards society ending the horror of slavery and human trafficking,” the release quoted Amritanandamayi as saying.

The initiative to bring together world religious leaders on a common platform was made by the Global Freedom Network (GFN), which is a faith-based global network with a vision and purpose to eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking.

Source: The Indian Express

శ్రీ కౌముది డిసెంబర్ 2014