Soul Of India Is Pluralism, Tolerance: Pranab Mukherjee At RSS Event

Carrying the weight of his party's disapproval, Mr Mukherjee, 82, delivered messages on India's history of tolerance, inclusion and pluralism.

All India | Edited by Deepshikha Ghosh | Updated: June 08, 2018 13:41 IST

Former President Pranab Mukherjee said we derive our strength from tolerance at the RSS event

NAGPUR: It may not have been succinct but Pranab Mukherjee's speech to the RSS on Thursday evening had a clear message: "We derive our strength from tolerance. We accept and respect our pluralism... Any attempt at defining our nationhood in terms of dogmas and identities of religion, region, hatred and intolerance will only lead to dilution of our national identity."

Mr Mukerjee's term as President of India, a post enabled by his party of over five decades, the Congress, ended in July last year. His decision to address thousands of RSS volunteers has been questioned and bemoaned by the Congress as a political gift to its opponent, the BJP, at a time when the country is being landscaped for the next general election.

The RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh is the ideological mentor of the ruling BJP. It has been assailed by Congress president Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders for promoting a culture of intolerance underpinned by majoritarianism. Mr Mukherjee's quality time with the RSS, Congress leaders said, loans it respectability. 

It was reportedly at the instance of Mr Gandhi's mother, Sonia, who was the party's top boss till December, that Mr Mukherjee was questioned for his voyage to Nagpur on Twitter last night by top Congress strategist Ahmed Patel . "I did not expect this from Pranab da," Mr Patel tweeted. It wasn't just former colleagues who offered public remonstrance. Mr Mukherjee's daughter Sharmistha Mukherjee, who is a member of the Congress, said, also on Twitter, that while Mr Mukherjee's speech would be forgotten, the visual imprint of his visit would linger damagingly.

Pranab Mukherjee served as one of the most senior cabinet ministers in the two-term coalition government of Dr Manmohan Singh. His proximity to Sonia Gandhi and his ability to win consensus among opposition parties -- or at least draw them to the negotiating table during tricky impasses -- gave him mega bonus points.

There were few signs in his speech on Thursday of shifting allegiances -- the former president did not tread gently around allegations that his hosts regularly confront from critics. "The soul of India resides in pluralism and tolerance. This plurality of our society has come through assimilation of ideas over centuries. Secularism and inclusion are a matter of faith for us," he said.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala told reporters: "He taught the (Narendra) Modi government rajdharma." The remarks suggested Mr Mukherjee had redeemed himself. But not all Congressmen agreed. Manish Tewari tweeted:

THIS COUPLET APPLIES APTLY TO @CitiznMukherjee TODAY
ज़फर आदमी उन को ना जानिएगा
गो हो वो कैसा ही साहिबे फह्मो ज़का
जिसे ऐश में यादे खुदा न रही
जिसे तैश में खौफे खुदा न रहा
CALL HIM NOT A MAN,’ZAFAR', HOWSOEVER WISE, WHO,IN JOY, FORGETS GOD,IN RAGE HAS NO FEAR OF THE ALL MIGHTY

— Manish Tewari (@ManishTewari) June 7, 2018

Earlier on Thursday, Mr Mukherjee was warmly welcomed at the RSS headquarters, where he paid homage at the memorial of KB Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS.

"Today I came here to pay my respect and homage to a great son of Mother India," he wrote in the visitor's book at the memorial. Not long after, the Congress tweeted what it called a "primer on what the RSS really stands for".

Anand Sharma, one of the Congress leaders who had tried to dissuade Mr Mukherjee from the visit, tweeted: "Images of Pranab Da, veteran leader and ideologue at RSS Headquarters have anguished millions of Congress workers."

Since Mr Mukherjee, 82, accepted the RSS' invite to serve as Chief Guest at its event, there have been reports that he is seeking to rise above his party - that he is foraying into the non-BJP, non-Congress terrain of a "Federal Front", a loose and nascent league of regional leaders like Mamata Banerjee who believe that the Congress, decrepit and no longer a national force, must buckle itself into the backseat while they steer a combined opposition into 2019 to roadblock PM Modi from getting re-elected.

The RSS earlier on Thursday said that the Congress' attack on his participation in its event reveals its small-mindedness. It described Mr Mukherjee as a "mature and experienced" politician.

Perhaps that review has been tempered by Pranab Mukherjee's frank talk. 

Source: NDTV

శ్రీ కౌముది జూన్ 2018

శ్రీ కౌముది జూన్ 2018

Meet Sadhvi Savitri Bai Phule, the rare BJP leader who has publicly criticised Modi’s policies

rebels with a cause

The 37-year-old is just the kind of leader the Bharatiya Janata Party should have been taking around the country to speak at rallies.

Jun 03, 2018 · 09:00 am

Ajaz Ashraf

Sadhvi Savitri Bai Phule is just the kind of MP the Bharatiya Janata Party should have been taking around the country to speak at rallies. The 37-year-old has renounced the householder’s life, is always dressed in saffron, boasts of terrific oratorical skills, and the Bahraich reserved constituency, from where she was elected in 2014, is not a family fiefdom. Phule’s Dalit identity is seemingly yet another advantage for the BJP, keen as the party is to break the upper caste mould in which it is fundamentally cast.

Yet, independent of her party, Phule has been presiding over meetings and holding rallies to highlight the oppression and suffering of the Bahujan Samaj (literally, people in the majority), which includes the Dalits, the religious minorities and the Other Backward Classes.

If the mission of the BJP’s other sadhvis – Rithambara and Uma Bharti for instance – is to liberate temples that were allegedly converted into mosques centuries ago, Phule’s focus is different. In the drawing room of her 65, North Avenue flat in Delhi, where on every sofa was seated a visitor with a petition, she spelt out her mission: “To bring an end to the injustices and atrocities committed daily on the Bahujan Samaj”.

The remarkable difference between Phule’s world of saffron and the BJP’s can be gleaned from her response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reiteration on May 27 to sub-categorise the Other Backward Classes for reservation. “I am against dividing the Other Backward Classes into backward and more backward, the Scheduled Castes into Dalits and Ati-Dalits [lowest of the low],” she said. “They think by dividing us they can get our votes. It is a divide and rule policy. They have been doing this since Independence, of breaking the unity that Babasaheb [Dr BR] Ambedkar forged among us.”

Charting her own path

It is rare to find a person in the BJP who has the chutzpah to publicly criticise a policy endorsed by Modi, such is the control he exercises over the party, so deep the fear of him among its MPs. Phule refrains from taking Modi’s name, but she does not leave her audience in any doubt that she is very upset, and angry, at the happenings that fall under the rubric of the party’s programme.

Nor is she afraid of being outspoken. “Afraid? Is it sin to speak out against the humiliation heaped on you?” she asked. “There have been so many MPs who cared only about their families’ well-being. Does anyone remember them?”

For sure, Phule’s refusal to lace her criticism of the BJP in diplomatese has been getting her headlines ever since the Supreme Court diluted the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in March. She held a rally on April 1 in Lucknow to demand that the Union government reverse the apex court’s judgement. She spoke out against the incarceration of Dalits who participated in the Bharat bandh of April 2 against the Act’s dilution. She breathed fire as BJP MPs, on Modi’s instruction, took to dining at Dalit homes.

“Those MP insulted us Dalits,” she said, her voice rising. “They did not eat food cooked at Dalit homes, did not use our utensils, did not drink water from our glasses. They ate food cooked by non-Dalits at the threshold of our homes.”

She added: “It only establishes that they think Dalits are untouchables.”

She drove home her point further. “They had their photos taken eating at Dalits homes and made it go viral,” she said. “How come when they dine with other castes, they don’t think the moment is worth capturing on camera?”

Her logic is, indeed, irrefutable, as is her parsing of the motive underlying the spurt in the disfigurement of Ambedkar statues in Uttar Pradesh. One such incident took place in Matiala village in Bahraich. Two months later, in April, even the broken statue of Ambedkar was whisked away at night, Phule held a rally and organised a dharna, but the culprits are yet to be nabbed. “I even made a representation to the Chief Minister [Adityanath], still no action has been taken,” she said.

She then quickly tossed a question at her listeners: “Why do you think the Ambedkar statues are being desecrated and Dalits thrown in jail for participating in the Bharat bandh?” Phule launched her sally: “It is because they want to break our morale to fight for our rights. It is being openly said that the Constitution needs to be revised, as also the reservation policy.”

In case the connection between such demands and the desecration of the Ambedkar statues was missed, Phule emphasised, “It was Babasaheb who framed the Constitution. It is because of him we have reservation, it is because of him I am an MP.”

Phule sniffs a conspiracy to reverse the reservation policy, highlighting its inherent hypocrisy. “They want to end reservations even though they cannot fill the job quota, even as they are privatising jobs,” she said. “You have people appropriating quota jobs on fake caste certificates. I demand that the government must investigate the implementation of the reservation policy.”

‘Hold caste census’

It is her other demand that would horrify the BJP. She wants a caste census to be undertaken to determine the percentage of different social groups in India’s population and their socio-economic profile. Phule is opposed to the Supreme Court’s mandated 50% cap on reservation. “It is because of the 50% cap that the Other Backward Classes, though 52% of the population, were assigned just 27% reservation. Why? A group’s share in power should be according to its share in the population.”

All her formulations pale in comparison to her hailing Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a mahapurush or great man during the recent controversy over the presence of his portrait in Aligarh Muslim University. None in the BJP can praise Jinnah and still hope to flourish. Ask BJP stalwart LK Advani, whose career nosedived when he described Jinnah as a secularist in 2005. Yet Phule declared, “Jinnah, like so many others, fought for the country’s independence. Why should anyone have problems hanging his portrait?”

This brings us back to the question: What makes Phule so fearless, so unmindful of the consequences of being so forthright? Perhaps she unlearnt fear during her childhood. Or perhaps it is because of the oath she took many years ago.

In her home village of Husenpur Mridangi, Bahraich, nobody, whether of high or low caste, would send girls to school. Her father, an agricultural labourer, decided otherwise. Phule, who was earlier named Savitri, would walk one-and-a-half km to school every morning to attend Junior High School in the adjoining Gokulpur village. She was the school’s only female student, perhaps a compelling reason for her to overcome the fear of standing apart.

In Class 8, she had the temerity to ask her principal why he was not handing to her the scholarship money for Scheduled Caste students. “The principal said, ‘It is because of me you have got a first division,’” Phule recollects. “I retorted, I got a first because I studied.” In pique, the principal refused to hand over her transfer certificate and marksheet. Phule sat at home for three years during which she tried to persuade the principal to hand over her documents, to no avail. “Then my guru, Akshyavar Nath Kannojia, who is also my uncle, decided to take me to [Bahujan Samaj Party leader] Mayawati,” she said.

First glimpse of politics

It was 1995, and Mayawati had become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh – a stint that eventually lasted just five months. Phule narrated her woes in Mayawati’s public durbar. Mayawati asked her to meet the district magistrate, who got the principal to hand over her certificates. “Behenji [Mayawati] became an inspiration,” recollected Phule. “I thought if she could become chief minister, why couldn’t I?”

Phule enrolled at the local inter-collegiate and then went on to do her BA. But politics was her new mission now. Months after President’s Rule was imposed in Uttar Pradesh in October 1995, Phule joined a protest Dalits had organised in Lucknow. The Provincial Armed Constabulary opened fire, a bullet was lodged in Phule’s calf and she fainted. “I revived only in hospital and, subsequently, I was jailed,” she reminisced. “It was then that I decided I would not be a bride, bound to a husband and his home, but work for the Bahujan Samaj.”

Bride? Phule had been married when she was six years old, an event of which she has no recollection. As is the custom, the marriage ceremony is considered complete only when the child, on growing up, goes to her husband’s home. “After the spell in jail, I told my parents that I do not want to marry but wanted to work for my samaj,” Phule said. Her parents and the husband’s parents met and agreed he would marry her younger sister instead.

When the marriage procession came to their door, Phule told the gathering that she was divorcing her childhood husband, and took an oath that she would never marry but would work for the uplift of Dalits. “I took the oath that my samaj was my family, that I would not own a house or an inch of land,” she said. “I don’t have any possessions. Whatever I have, even the money for elections, comes from the Bahujan Samaj.”

In 2000, Phule was suspended from the Bahujan Samaj Party. She claimed she did not have any clue why this happened. She joined the BJP, and after two failed attempts, became an MLA in 2012, and then Bahraich’s MP in 2014. Given her penchant to voice views that are anathema to the BJP, Phule is perhaps preparing to take the high road, once again, alone.

On such a road, fear is perhaps a luxury. There is only the pain of others to experience, to live in the torment of it. “Look at the atrocities committed on my people, how their villages are burnt, how they are killed for riding a horse or growing a moustache, how our women are raped and killed,” she said. It is the torment of her people that makes Phule stand up for the rights of the Bahujan Samaj, regardless of whether it displeases Modi and his party.

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Source: scrollin

Go for the gongura

Prabalika M. Borah

June 22, 2017 16:17 IST | Updated: June 22, 2017 16:17 IST

Tangy and perfect to cook up a storm, sorrel leaves are the flavour of the season

Come monsoon, and most green leafy vegetables are relegated to the back burner for a couple of months. Concerns about contamination soar high. But the only variety of leafy vegetable which is consumed without any inhibition during the monsoons is probably sorrel leaves. Known as gongura in Telugu, ambadi in Marathi, pulichakeerai in Tamil, tenga mora in Assamese, the plant is called pitwaa in Hindi, khata palanga in Oriya, and mestapat in Bengali. This basically goes to show that sorrel leaves are consumed widely in India.

The reason being: they are a rich source of iron, vitamins, folic acid and anti-oxidants essential for human nutrition. A good bunch of gongura is the only key to make the right dish. When buying gongura, look for leaves that are firm and a vivid green in colour. Any sign of yellow or browning indicates that the leaves are spoilt. However, they are still fit to be consumed. Leaves that are smaller in size will be more tender and have a milder flavour. The tanginess of the leaves is directly proportional to the temperature of the region it is grown in.

Culinary uses

The very mention of gongura pachhadi will have any Telugu drooling. A very popular dish in Andhra and Telangana, gongura is also used to make mutton and chicken dishes, also revered as the show-stopper of a meal in special family get-togethers.

When cooked with toor dal, it adds a certain zing to the dish and is popularly known as gongura pappu. Apart from curries, varieties of pickles are made with gongura. Cooking gongura with colocasia is a popular ethnic dish in Assam. In Tamil Nadu, it is widely used for pulichakeerai masiyal and thokku.

Health benefits

Gongura is an excellent source of folate and a very good source of vitamin B6, both of which are needed to maintain low homocysteine levels. Apart from this, it is a rich source of iron, vitamin C, anti-oxidants, calcium, iron, zinc and vitamin A.

According to studies, the leaves are also a great way to keep your bones strong. This mineral-rich plant has calcium, magnesium and phosphorus in abundance, all of which are important for maintaining strong and healthy bones. A diet rich in these minerals can help in preventing bone loss and conditions such as osteoporosis.

The high content of vitamin C, popularly known as ascorbic acid, plays a major role in boosting the immune system and in increasing the number of white blood cells in the body. This is also one of the reasons gongura is widely consumed even during the monsoons. Also, since it grows a little higher than ground level, risk of contamination is comparatively low.

Source: thehindu