India must face up to Hindu terrorism

[GUNS-N- ROSES]

each nation is entitled to few disgruntled citizens and india is no exception.

 

[Jet Li]

each nation is entitled to few disgruntled citizens and india is no exception.

so what you are saying india is entitled to have citizens terrorize its Muslim popuation with impunity. not suprising.

 

[ajtr]

Seeking unlimited happiness​

Jawed Naqvi
(15 hours ago) Today
Jared Lee Loughner killed six Americans and left Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life in Tucson.

His motives are variously given as drug-related lunacy and links with America’s Christian Right, of which Republican politician Sarah Palin is deemed an icon. A copy of Mein Kampf was recovered from his belongings.

Malik Mumtaz Qadri killed Pakistan politician Salman Taseer in a similarly unequal contest between a liberal worldview and zealotry that claims a divine alibi. In India, Swami Asimanand, a self-confessed guru of Hindutva terrorists that wreaked havoc across the country and blamed it on Muslims, is in jail.

Clearly, religious revivalism is a global scourge and there isn’t much on the horizon to lend hope to its quarries. If change is likely it seems it has to come from within the extremist heap. And this is where Asimanand — whose name translates as ‘unlimited happiness’ — could show us a way out. Of the three killers I have cited, he is alone in expressing regret.

And it is not any ordinary regret at the sight of blood one may have spilt. The saffron-clad swami has followed a tradition of many a contrite ancient Indian sage who left crime to become symbols of their enlightened faith. Valmiki was a highway robber before he wrote the Ramayan. His words became Sanskrit’s first shlokas. Angulimaal was a killer before he became a follower of Buddha. However, Asimanand’s reported confessions have enormous political implications for immediate purposes.

In his confession before a magistrate, which makes it admissible evidence, he gave a heart-tugging account of how a Muslim boy who was with him in jail changed his thinking. The boy, Kaleem, had been tortured by police as a suspect in the bombing of a mosque in Hyderabad. When Asimanand heard his story from the boy who would otherwise ply him with tea and refreshments in prison, he was moved to tears.

And he decided to confess to his role in the bombings that were undertaken in revenge against Muslim terrorists that had harmed Hindu temples. Asimanand’s statement has blown the lid off the seamier side of Hindutva, an ideology favoured by many from India’s middle classes as an expression of nationalist fervour. He twisted the knife further by shooting off letters to the presidents of India and Pakistan, advising them on how they could benefit from his decision to own up. The undelivered letter to President Asif Zardari has a telling irony. It reads thus:

“The President, Islamabad, Pakistan, Dec 20, 2010,

“SUB: Request for chance to reform Hafiz Saeed and other terrorists in Pakistan.

“Dear Sir,

“I am Swami Asimananda. I am the one who had organised and motivated persons to blast Samjhauta Express and other places because I was angry about jihadi attacks on Hindu temples.

“After my arrest, when I was in jail, one Muslim boy Kaleem was very kind to me in Hyderabad. After some time, I asked him why he was inside jail, and he told me that he was earlier wrongly arrested and tortured by Hyderabad police in connection with Mecca Masjid bomb blast. This pierced my conscience. It transformed me.

“The man who has every reason to hate me, showed me love. After all, he had been made to suffer for my work. I understood that love between two human beings is more powerful than the hatred between two communities. I decided on prayashchit and told this to the CBI when they took me in their custody. They told me that we cannot do anything about prayashchit, only the court can. So, I told them to take me to the court in that case. After that, I told the judge the truth.

“Before the criminal legal system hangs me, I want an opportunity to transform/reform Hafiz Saeed, Mullah Omar and other jihadi terrorist leaders and jihadi terrorist in Pakistan. Either you can send them to me, or you can ask the Indian government to send me to you.

“Yours truly

“Swami Asimananda, Chanchalaguda Jail, Hyderabad”

Will Asimanand’s confession make a difference to the worldview of the likes of Hafiz Saeed or for that matter Mumtaz Qadri? My instinct is it may not. And yet there is no harm in replicating the Indian example. For starters, put Qadri and people with his tendencies in a prison cell with Christians, Hindus, etc. Let them come face to face with each other. Let Aasia Bibi write a letter to Qadri and append Asimanand’s confessions to it. No harm trying.

Which brings me to the politics of aggressive religious revivalism. In the Indian and Pakistani examples, we find a heavy dose of the state guiding the upsurge. The role of intelligence agencies is all too well known. In the American example author F. William Engdahl has claimed that one of the most significant transformations of American domestic politics came over the decades since the early 1970s, when George H.W. Bush was the head of the CIA.

It spawned a deliberate manipulation of significant segments of the population, most of them undoubtedly sincere, believing people, around the ideology of `born-again` evangelical Christian fundamentalism to create something that became known as the Christian Right.

If religious bigotry has political roots, what are its economic beliefs? Going by the praise that leading Indian tycoons Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani lavished on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi last week, there is an economic basis to bigotry. Modi is widely believed to have been a close associate of Asimanand. Their idea of unlimited happiness may have sprung a yawning gap though.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

 

[GUNS-N- ROSES]

so what you are saying india is entitled to have citizens terrorize its Muslim popuation with impunity. not suprising.[/QUOT]

i never said that. i jus said there will be a few disgruntled citizens who will find faults in their own country. the author of the article is no different.

may be next time we can discuss an article written by now famous chineese nobel prize winner on human rights abuses in communist china.

or perhaps we can discuss the population trend of hindus in pakistan in 2010 vis a vis 1947.

see the people will always find fault with u. but i can say for certain, we r a secular country where each individual has right to grow and accomplish his/her dreams. now i m not denying abt gujrat riots and human right abuses. the fact is such things have also happened in each country of the world including china and pak.

 

[hillman32]

This should be no surprise to anyone with even a sketchy idea of the ideology of the parivar, especially its patriarch, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This ideology was spelt out in unmistakable terms by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, better known to his flock as Guru Golwalkar, who headed the RSS from 1940 to 1973 (thus constituting a bridge between the parivar generations before and after independence). A Bunch of Thoughts, a post-independence collection of the Guru’s sayings and speeches, was prescribed reading for the parivar for long years.

The book ends with a chapter titled ‘Internal threats’. The three threats listed and treated at some length are: Muslims, Christians and Communists. The present-day parivar leaders may pretend now and then to have given up some of the Guru’s extreme ideas. But the hit list has continued to guide the operations of the so-called Hindutva brigades.

The operations have included a holy war against a minuscule Christian minority, totalling 2.4 percent of the country’s population. Gujarat under Narendra Modi holds the dubious record of having witnessed the goriest and most horrendous anti-Muslim violence in 2002. It is not so well-known that an attack on tribal Christians in the Dangs area of Modi’s territory preceded and paved the way for the more infamous pogrom.

Violence erupted in the southern Gujarat district on Christmas Day, 1998. Churches and missionary institutions were attacked and many of them burnt down. Later, investigations left no doubt that the attacks by the parivar armies on several villages around the same time had been meticulously planned.

The Christmas campaign followed a year-long propaganda offensive through parivar leaflets portraying the missionaries, in true far-right style, as traitors. The leaflets urged the Christian tribesman to “purify yourself through yagna (ritual sacrifice) and become a Hindu”. They were warned of dire consequences if they did not heed the counsel of Hindutva.

All this was accompanied by a campaign against education imparted by Christian missionaries. One leaflet, baring a familiar stamp of the far-right, said, “Friends, we Hindus keep awake day and night and earn our living through hard work but do we ever think about the education of our children? With the intention of giving them the best education, you get them admitted in schools such as St Xavier’s and St Anne’s and consider it prestigious. In fact, this is the biggest mistake of your life.”

The leaflet added, “On account of... the Christian education influenced by the Christian tradition, when your child becomes a youth, he or she is already a half Christian.” This was a lie that millions of non-Christians educated in these institutions could nail easily. The campaign, however, continued.

A parivar propagandist, Nagendra Rao, sounded like former US President George Bush when he said, “If Muslims and Christians use perfidy and force in conversion, as they frequently do, we have to meet it with merciless ferocity and militant determination....Collateral damage in such cases is regrettable (but cannot be helped).”

The then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reacted predictably to the black Christmas in Dangs. Initially, in New Delhi, he called the incidents “shameful”. On proceeding to Gujarat, however, his tone underwent a total transformation. He declared, “There is need for a national debate on conversions.” The parivar militants took this as a go-ahead for furthering this particular far-right campaign, and not only in Gujarat. Orissa on India’s eastern coast became their next target.

Orissa claimed world attention with the assassination of Australian missionary Graham Staines. Binayak Sen was not the first medical missionary to incur the parivar’s wrath. Baptist preacher Staines, ministering to leprosy patients since 1965, was killed along with his sons Philip (10) and Timothy (6), burnt alive in a jeep while sleeping in it in January 1999. The parivar had hounded him for “harvesting souls”, though his efforts led to no dramatic rise in the district’s Christian population.

It was yet another cruel Christmas, when minority-baiting mobs struck again. Mobs attacked churches and burnt down houses and other property. The affected villages had no protection from the police or any paramilitary force against the 4,000-strong far-right army.

There was yet another round of anti-Christian violence in August 2008. This followed the killing of a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a vanguard of the violent campaigns in both Gujarat and Orissa. The minority community faced retaliatory attacks of brutal ferocity despite the fact that a Maoist group, active in the area, had owned responsibility for the killing. Over 3,000 Christian tribesmen fled for their lives and ended up as refugees in relief camps. Many stayed on in these camps without the minimum of facilities. The parivar mobs made sure that the refugees could not return to their homes unless they were ready to publicly renounce their faith and perform appropriate prayashchit (atonement).

The political front of the parivar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), played its part as well. The party was then a junior partner in the government of Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and used its crucial support for the government’s survival to fuel the violence.

This unremitting orgy of violence in the unfortunate Kandhamal region of Orissa has actually continued to be justified by the parivar. Right in 2008, the Orissa BJP took the stand that “the Kandhamal riot occurred because NGOs (a euphemism for Christian organisations) have instigated and conspired to bring about conversion with the foreign funds. It was necessary to implement hard the laws pertaining the ban on conversion.”

The party and the parivar have stuck to the stand, even while several human rights organisations have reported the state of terror in which the minority population continues to live here. Even in October 2009, then BJP President Rajnath Singh said that there “is a need to check large scale religious conversions carried out by foreign forces”, because “foreign missionaries are using religion to infiltrate India and corrupt its culture”. Ultimately, “illegal mass conversions” are a “threat to national security”.

The fanatics in Pakistan, in other words, share a common target and hate object with the far-right in India. No wonder, over 70 Indian Muslim organisations and a large number of Muslim intellectuals have condemned Salmaan Taseer’s killing. The intellectuals have also denounced the “reprehensible law” on blasphemy, sought to be enforced in so brutal a manner.

They were speaking as one minority for another. What the cause of democracy demands in India and South Asia is an assertion of the solidarity of the peace-loving majority with persecuted minorities of religions and all other kinds.

 

[Water Car Engineer]

so what you are saying india is entitled to have citizens terrorize its Muslim popuation with impunity. not suprising.

How about you worry about your minorities and not talk about or talk for them. You as a Pakistani is the last person to teach Indians about their problems. You have enough back home, worry about them and not India's.

Put your problems out in the open first before India's.