Plurality in Hinduism Shouldn't be Used to Deny its Integrity

 

 

 

http://swarajyamag.com/culture/interview-vamsee-juluri/

Ramesh N Rao

Chair of the DN3 Program and Professor of Communication at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.

4 Feb, 2015

Prof. Juluri's earlier work has focused on media and media influences, especially in the Indian context.  His two books, "Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television" (Peter Lang, 2003/Orient Longman, 2005), and "Bollywood Nation: India through its Cinema" (Penguin India, 2013), establish his reputation and standing as a media scholar.  However, Prof. Juluri is also a raconteur of tales, and his novel, "The Mythologist: A Novel" (Penguin India, 2010) has been well-received in India and the US.  His commentaries and op-ed articles have appeared regularly in the Huffington Post, Times of India, Open, and other newspapers and magazines, and his latest foray is into India and Hinduism studies, and his book "Rearming Hinduism" (Westland Press), already published as an e-book, will be out in print in early February 2015 (visit www.rearminghinduism.com for more information).

In this book — a passionate, inspired, and even lyrical account of the nature of Hindu beliefs, practices, and faith – Prof. Juluri focuses his ire and his disapprobation on Western academics and media for a calculated campaign of calumny against Hinduism and Hindus.  He does not spare the Indian Left/liberal elite for their participation in this demonization and marginalization campaign, and argues that only with a celebration of the timeless values enshrined in Hinduism can the world discover afresh the essence of life and love.  

Prof. Juluri is the son of the well-known Telugu actress, Jamuna, who acted in more than 200 films, in four languages, and who also served as a Member of Parliament representing the Rajahmundry Lok Sabha constituency from the Congress Party.  Vamsee's father, J. V. Ramana Rao, a professor of zoology at Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupathi, and later Osmania University, Hyderabad, passed away recently at the age of 86. Vamsee has also written aboutgrowing up as the son of a famous film star , and of his other big influence, Sri Sathya Sai Baba His memoir about Baba, "The Guru Within," will be published by Westland Press later this year.

It seems the immediate trigger for your book was Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus: An Alternative History".  Is that so, and if so, what is it about her book that set you off on this reverie, this response?

The media storm that erupted over the withdrawal of The Hindus: An Alternative History in early 2014 silenced any kind of reasonable and informed discussion of the book.  It turned into a grotesquery of what free speech and debate really ought to be about. In a way, the silencing of debate about this book was more harmful than the lawsuit and actual withdrawal of the book in India.  At least the latter was seen by the world as an assault on free speech and intellectual freedom, even if it was done within the scope of the law of the land. But the sweeping way in which elite commentators in New York and London, and even New Delhi, rushed to dismiss even measured and informed criticism of the book as Hindu fundamentalism was monumentally ignorant.  I suspect that some of the book's supporters did not even read the book, and blindly bought into its heroic "alternative" subaltern reading premise—something I think was fundamentally questionable.

Your criticism of Doniger is not in the form of a point-by-point rebuttal of the claims she makes in her book but more in terms of the overall tone and approach of hers to Hindu matters.  Were you more angered by the mocking tone of hers than the specific historical details which she presents to build her "alternative history"?  

My criticism comes from a somewhat different place than that of Hindutva activists, or purists.  I understand why they are offended by her mocking tone though.  To a large extent, I too don't find the tone intelligent or mature. But if that were the only issue, then probably one could have tolerated it. The real problem is not that it offends extremist sensitivities, as her supporters have made it out to be, but that it perpetuates a much bigger and more serious tendency in academia and media, the total denial of Hindu thought and self-understanding.  Worse, this systemic denial is backed by serious national, class, and racial privilege.  An "alternative" viewpoint is one that lacks privilege.  In the global context, the self-styled "alternative" is actually the dominant viewpoint.  It denies Hinduism its validity (it says Hinduism was a 19^th century invention, Yoga isn't Hindu and such, but also insists every social injustice in South Asia is rooted in Hindu notions of caste for millennia), and it denies devout, educated, and reasonable Hindus a stand in the debate, let alone even a letter of disagreement in the papers (check out Stephen Prothero's piece in USA Today for example, where he portrays Doniger as a latter-day Sojourner Truth, and the voice of liberal Hindus).  What we have today is a bizarre travesty of the goals of secular progressive activism and scholarship.  A totally dated racist, orientalist and colonial fantasy that would have been named and condemned in any other context gets celebrated instead because it seemingly represents liberal thought against religious fundamentalism.

You are upfront in your assertion that there is something rotten in academia and in the media in the way Hindus and Hinduism are portrayed, and that the challenge to Hinduism comes not from armies and governments but from academics and journalists.  You call this Hinduphobia, and some may take umbrage at that.  What fuels and sustains this Hinduphobia, and could you give us a couple of examples to support your claim?

Slumdog Millionaire changing the name of its protagonist from a religious everyman to a victim of Hindu oppressors; the Economist describing the sacred Amarnath Lingam as "a penis shaped lump of ice"; The New York Times blaming Hinduism for sanitation problems in India.  These examples are just the surface.  Think of how the media and experts responded to the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai, blaming India and Hindus for Kashmir and Ayodhya rather than admitting there was a serious problem elsewhere.

What you term "Hinduphobia" is not something new, is it?  We saw the rise of a shrill campaign against Hindus and Hinduism in conflation with Hindutva, by many of the Indian Left/liberal academics and their Western collaborators who have made it a career venting their ire on Hindus and Hinduism, didn't we?

One of the biggest consequences of centuries of misrepresentation is the fact that we lose the ability to even recognize it. For lack of a better word, I use the term "Hinduphobia". I know it seems to offend a bunch of otherwise socially sensitive commentators, perhaps because many of them are drawn from very privileged social and economic strata, true transnational elites whose passports and credentials place them above the struggles most average middle class Hindus and Indians face in a global world, including the disdain and biases they face in school and work because of the nasty stereotypes that exist about them. They argue that there is no Hinduphobia, maybe on the strength of the narcissistic certainty that they never faced it. But the fact remains that objectively speaking there is a systematic distortion and misrepresentation of Hinduism and Hindus in the media that has never been challenged by activists or academia in the way they have challenged misrepresentation of other groups.

You write that Hinduphobia comes at Hindus in America from both the Left and the Right. How do the Left/liberals end up as bedfellows with Right/conservatives in their critique of Hindus and Hinduism?

This is one of the strangest follies of our intellectual climate. There is perhaps no other issue on which you find Left and Right making common cause than in denigrating Hinduism.  The Right might be hostile say to Islam and Hinduism. But the Left often comes to the defense of other immigrant and minority communities when they are attacked by the Right. Islamophobia, for example, is a recognized concern for the US Left.  However, when it comes to Hinduism, we find the Left strangely silent, even denying that there is such a thing as Hinduphobia, or a bias against Hindus.

It is interesting that while American universities have faculty and graduate students who write passionately in support of Islam and Muslims, and that mainstream American media have their Fareed Zakarias and Aasif Mandvis to showcase benign Islam, there seem to be none who are called to speak for Hindus and Hinduism. How come?

I talk about some of this in a chapter called The Academic Mayasabha. The problem is that a lot of the academic discourse today has got caught up in a calculus of identity-based posturing. Some identities are expected to confer authority to scholars automatically, while others have been deemed suspect. You are right in noting that this has led to a near complete exclusion of Hindu voices in the media. It will change only when the community starts taking an interest in fields beyond engineering and business, and takes the world of culture and politics seriously as well.

These critics claim that they have nothing against Hinduism but are against political Hinduism or Hindutva. Do you buy their argument?

I wrote about this in some length in my review essay Hinduism and its Culture Wars: How Secularism Lost its Way to Hinduphobia (now available as an e-single from Westland Books).  The secular argument against Hindutva, at least as it exists in the form that has gained global visibility through the writings of Doniger, Mishra, Nussbaum, Sen and others, suffers from a lack of understanding and respect for Hinduism. I don't think many of us would have disagreed with them had their critique been precisely against the excesses and follies of Hindutva (and with things like flying chariot fantasies they are not hard to find or critique). But what they have done instead is to propose and present a normative fantasy about what a secular-liberal is supposed to be like (you will notice I didn't say "secular-liberal Hindu" because the word itself seems anathema to them). Their response to Islamic extremism is to say let's not make it hard for Islamic liberals by being too harsh on terrorism. Their response to Hindu extremism such as it is, is not to offer the same courtesy to Hindu liberals but to savage Hinduism altogether, as we saw with Doniger. This is all part of the same flawed "alternative" premise which presumes that Hindus are elites and oppressors and is at the core of much of their preposterous posturing—after all, who would describe the Vedic-age Hindus as forerunners of Nazism and their "invasion" of ancient India as being not unlike the conquest of the Americas by colonial Europeans? There was no holocaust or genocide in India done by ancient Hindus, as far as we know. And yet, this is the kind of comparison Doniger makes. Such is their resistance to respecting mainstream, rational Hindu self-perception, let alone Hindutva.

In a recent interview with India Abroad (January 9, 2015), Prof. Vinay Lal says that there is a lot of support for Hindutva among Indian-Americans, and he labels these Indian-Americans "Vanguards of Post Industrial Vedic Civilizations" stereotyping them as well-to-do simpletons who think they can influence politics and culture in India.  Lal also says that many Hindus in the US are more Hindu than Hindus in India, and to support that claim he points out to the many pujas listed in the temple bulletins and on temple websites, and performed in the temples. Would you not say that these identity issues are the same for any ethnic, religious or national group – Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Bangladeshis or Italians, to pick a small set of them?  And finally, Prof. Lal says that Hindus in the US are arrogant about their religion, that they think theirs is a tolerant religion, and that their religion is superior to other religions. Is that so, and what do you have to say in response to such an assertion?

These assertions seem to be skewed and decontextualized, as you point out in your questions. Many of the identity-claims that Hindus in North America make are no different from the claims made by other immigrant groups.  Yet, the secular criticism asserts that to even speak as a Hindu-American is a mere front for some fascistic Hindu nationalist fantasy back home. The Hindu-American community includes not just a few prosperous first-generation doctors and engineers but the children of less privileged immigrants from India and the whole global diaspora as well. There are Hindus in America who are the descendants of families taken as indentured laborers to island plantations. There are Hindus in America who have faced very similar racism and marginalization as other minority communities in school. To paint them all out to be oppressive elites is inaccurate.  It is partly true that many Hindus may think of themselves in simplistic civilizational terms and end up appearing arrogant about their religion (though I would prefer a religion being "arrogant" about tolerance over intolerance and violence any day). But what Lal appears to have not noticed is that this whole idea of "my religion (or culture) is better than yours" is not something innate to Hindu thought or philosophy; we have not typically gone around labeling non-Hindus as "unbelievers" in the past.  So where has this identitarian discourse come from? We need to recognize that there is a lack of intellectual capital in the community that leads to this kind of superficial chauvinism.  Liberal scholars should seek to speak to the community and elevate the discourse, rather than condescendingly throw a cut-and-paste simulacrum of critique at them (I'm thinking of Doniger's pet phrase "Dead Male Brahmins" for example, or Lal's bizarre dig at the twice stateless Telugu Brahmin community which he alleges is a powerful force). As for the claim that Hindus here are more Hindu than in India, the examples Lal gives are frankly quite inane, if not rather rudely normative. So, is there something wrong if temples in the US offer a lot of puja services? We go to our temples not just to make deals with God but to restore our attention to the divine in the midst and in the forms of our very real, human, and social obligations. We are serving our parents, our children, and our communities when we go to our temples.  The "people" are not just revolutionary fantasies we have about them in some far corner of the earth, they are right here too. And the struggling and less privileged among them are coming to the temples for food, for healthcare, and many of the good things that a devout community also does in God's name.  If his criticism is addressed to second-generation Hindu Americans who don't understand the complexities of Indian pluralism, frankly that kind of misunderstanding has also played out in the perception of some second-generation Hinduphobic secular journalists and academics too!

Tell me about your interest in Hinduism and what early experience growing up in India gave you the wherewithal to pursue that interest and commitment to a "Hindu way of life"?

I am drawn to Hindu thought because it helps me confront injustice and pain in this world, helps me believe that we can leave this world with a little less violence and untruth in it than when we came in. Can one do all these things without religion? Sure. But given the accident, privilege or destiny of my birth in the Hindu culture, I have found these resources in the idioms of Hindu art, thought, customs, and most of all in our popular culture and media. I was born into a fairly traditional and devout South Indian Hindu family.  I grew up in a world of gods and festivals (and of course Amar Chitra Kathas) but my view of religion was fairly simple and instrumental.  You prayed to God to get stuff, that's all. I lost interest in much of the customs as a teenager. I was not necessarily skeptical or atheistic, because those things take commitment. I became somewhat indifferent, that was all. I was also quite indifferent to the identity politics that exploded in the 1980s. I honestly did not feel anything strongly about the Ram temple, perhaps because I thought we had a lot of temples already and the past was past. I did, however, recognize that it was not just fanatics but many devout Hindus too who became supporters of the movement. I chose to learn more, much more, before I made a claim on what it all meant. But more importantly though, my parents became devotees of Sri Sathya Sai Baba in the late 1980s. My plans to escape from home and parents coincided, if not collided, with a powerful and new sort of religiosity in our lives. It took many years, but I think I gained a much more respectful understanding of religion and history through the teachings of Baba. Throughout the 1990s, even as I read Marxism passionately in grad school, I also read Hindu philosophy, and could see that it did not have to be one or the other. We had incredibly influential religious figures in India like Baba who had come from poverty, from lower castes, and were able to connect spiritual yearning and social understanding in millions of people around the world. Baba was not just promising a better afterlife or mystical notion of happiness to devotees for praising him. He was inspiring millions of people to volunteer, bring water to the dried villages of Rayalaseema, the homeless in U.S. inner cities, simply serve and love, just as many other spiritual movements have done.  And his teachings are far more radical and critical of dominant economic and political structures than cynics would give credit for too.

Was there a particular point/moment in the recent past that forced you to take up cudgels on behalf of Hindus and Hinduism? What was that moment?

I think I was heading towards understanding Hinduism seriously ever since I started reading Gandhi for a class I taught on media and violence, especially in the anxious days after 9/11. However, it was only during the California textbooks controversy in 2006 that I felt it was time to disagree, however respectful I might have felt towards some of them, with the academic community's rather sweeping dismissal of Hindu concerns as Hindutva campaigns to saffronize history books in America.

You say in your book that a billion or so Hindus still call God by the same names that people did thousands of years ago, and while Hinduism could have been wiped out a long time ago, it was not.  What do you mean when you say that "your (Hindu) culture's existence is a triumph of survival" and that "we came from a world of wisdom we can barely fathom in today's terms"?

Colonialism wiped out most other worldviews.  Ours has still survived. It is amazing that a set of ideas, values, stories and symbols have been coming down for several centuries now, across generations, not unchanging, but somehow using change to restore what is important to our sense of self. It is a stunning accomplishment as far as Hinduism is concerned. Why did so many of us somehow hold on to these things, these poems, images, feelings most of all, even against great odds? In that sense, we are a survivor religion.  The important thing is that the way we survived was not through brute force but through a particular kind of intelligence, a way of knowing the world that is beyond mere doctrines. I think the challenge now is that modern educated Hindus are highly self-aware and assertive, but are not yet fully intellectually equipped to flesh out what a modern Hindu global worldview might look like. We are grasping at fantasies at the moment. We get excited, for instance, about things like Vedic aviation. I do not know why it is important to believe we had missiles and planes in the past. Why would we need planes in a pre-modern society when most trade was local, when most people lived with families in the same village or area? We are merely projecting present day biases into our vision of the past. It is a distraction from real intellectual imagination.  But I think in a few years we will see Hindu historiography maturing, and we will begin to appreciate the real wisdom that lies in our philosophy and heritage.

You say that the basic premise of your book is that Hinduism is "about intelligence, more than anything else".  How is Hinduism different from other religions and faiths, and if your claims about Hinduism are to be taken seriously would it not affirm Lal's assertion that Hindus think of their religion as superior to other religions?

My book is a celebration of what I think is good, noble, and indeed "eternal" about Hinduism.  I use the term "intelligence" to describe it, because I approach Hinduism in the book as simply as a cultural resource for living smartly with others, people and nature. I don't know enough about other religions to compare them with Hinduism, but I am Hindu enough to respectfully believe that such intelligence is not exclusive to Hinduism. I suppose I think of all religions as essentially cultural resources for ethical and meaningful living. The question is who gets to speak for and speak up for each religion at a time and place in history, the philosophers and the saints, or the ideologues and the assassins?

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"When Hindu thought truly informs the social sciences and humanities, it will revolutionize knowledge, humanity, and indeed the future of the world itself", you say. Can you elaborate?

My book is a beginner's attempt to look at the world, or more precisely, look at the dominant worldview today, as a Hindu trained in the social sciences, and see what is wrong with it.  The problem with Hinduism being misrepresented is not the only problem here. What we have to recognize is that the world, and not just India, is confronted by an incomplete decolonization. For several centuries, European colonialism profoundly reshaped the way we think about ourselves, nature, and life itself. Since the end of colonialism, a bunch of nationalist and transnationalist fantasies have come to the fore. We have a world as Samuel Huntington described, of competing civilizations armed with technology and very modern attitudes towards identity and power. In some places, this is tempered with a respect for modern democratic institutions. In others, it is raw and ruthless fundamentalism. But Hindu civilizational thought, and Gandhi's Hind Swaraj in my view is the best introduction to it, rejects even this. We need to name what is wrong with the world itself, and not just with its attitude towards Hinduism, though both are interrelated. Today, we have decolonized our views about gender, race, sexuality and so on, but not quite our views about nature, animals, and life in general. That's what we could do if the next generation of writers, scholars and artists take Hindu thought seriously.

You take issue with the "Aryans from Central Europe" version of history and Hindu beginnings still being proffered as authentic history.  You call this an "absurdly false story" of Hindus.  What has been the political, social, and cultural fallout from this version of Indian/Hindu history?

The fallout has been ridiculous, and not in the good way the word "ridiculous" is used these days!  We have Hinduism experts like Doniger still making Hindus and Nazis comparisons on the basis of that strange old relic. Different groups of people seem to have an entrenched interest in imagining some kind of ancient European lineage for Hinduism and Hindus.  We just need to acknowledge that tall claims about origins like this are at best debatable. I do not engage directly with the politics of the Aryan Invasion Theory, but I do raise some questions about biases in how history is narrated more broadly, and how all sorts of assumptions and projections are made in asserting that Hinduism is alien to India thus. The defenders of Aryan Invasion Theory view any questioning of it as Hindu nativism, and I think that's a disservice.  Scholars must accept that we must begin to discuss a better way of presenting these "origin" stories than what colonial Indologists gave to us, especially at the school level. Hinduism has constantly changed, absorbed, influenced, and been polycentric in ways that elude easy categorization like other religions. But that innate plurality in Hinduism shouldn't be used to deny it its integrity, and its deep connection to places in the Indian subcontinent.

Your book seems inspired by a passion, by some kind of a deep response within you to what you thought were affronts to your way of worship and life. Was this something that you had been mulling over, and how much time did it take you to complete the manuscript?

That is a very perceptive way of putting it. Yes, the book is indeed a response to a sense of affront to a way of worship and life.  That sense of affront however is not simply that my identity or my community is being misrepresented, for that would be merely narcissistic. The book is born out of perhaps many years of wondering about the question of why there is so much unnecessary suffering and pain in the world. It is not a metaphysical question at all, but a social, historical and political question. I think that the world as it exists today is profoundly violent, cruel and unjust to life. I think that we barely manage to even recognize this, given our distraction by media, given the modern global culture's inability to understand life on its terms.  I do think though that a better understanding of Hindu thought will help us confront these questions, and that is why I wrote this book. It is not a conventional academic book, and while it reflects years of reading in Hinduism, Gandhian thought, nature and animal studies, it is in the end a short, direct expression of pain, anger and hope, all written in a matter of a few weeks last April.  As the epigraph from theSri Rudra Prashna Laghunyasa says, it is about righteous anger, anger born not out of self-concern but out of outrage against whatever is wrong in the world.

You take issue with philologists' interpretation of the term "yagna" or sacrifice.  You say that these academics have made killing the prime meaning of the term "yagna", especially Doniger who you say declares her intent to "confront violence in the Vedas". She is a Sanskritist (though other Sanskritists have taken issue with her command over the language), whereas you are not. What would you tell your critics about violence in the Vedas that they don't know or have not cared to acknowledge? You also say that violence is prime and center in Western thought and myth, and that is the reason why Western academics seek to see analogies in Indian/Hindu thought and myth.  Can you throw some more light on this claim of yours?

I think that the biggest myth that still remains entrenched as much in academia as popular culture and everyday commonsense is that of nature and violence. I examine these in the book in the light of some of Doniger's claims about Vedic violence. I am not a Sanskritist and cannot argue over what certain words mean or meant. But as someone who critiques the way stories are told in the world for a living, I can see how a lot of Hinduphobic historiography suffers from certain normative assumptions about violence and human nature. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the popular Hindu response to Hinduphobic history too suffers from a lack of self-reflexivity about violence and nature. I argue in the book that we need to learn to recognize that what we have been taught in our schools and popular culture about nature, human nature, pre-history and early civilizations all need to be reexamined carefully on this count

"There is no denial of the consequence of violence in our stories. There is no pornography around pain in our stories", you say. What do you mean?

I make this point in reference to the vague and inexact way in which recent critiques of violence and terror in the name of other religions have been transposed onto the Hindu context by poorly informed critics ("But Ram carries weapons!") I agree that there has been a general decline in the aesthetics of popular Hindu representation with the proliferation of digital technologies (Rama, and even Sri Raghavendra are more muscular for example). However, in spite of how much our TV and comic book stories obsess about bows and arrows and fights, our stories are rooted in a foundational concern about the enormity of violence. Our narratives do not portray our gods killing whimsically or unjustly. Some of our popular media forms may play it up, but in general, our aesthetic traditions don't.

Doniger, you say, describes "the violence that followed India's partition as similar to the Vedic culture of revering violence".  How does one rebut such a provocative/vulgar generalization?

This statement is on par with The New York Times piece blaming the Manu Smriti for where Hindus go to defecate. I think that there is such a vested interest in Hinduphobic discourse in equating the place of violence in Hinduism with that of other religions that all respect to facticity and balance are forgotten. I do not suggest that Hindus are literally non-violent. Hindus, like Muslims, Christians, Stalinists, others, are not above committing acts of violence, deplorably so. And religious identity politics sometimes do play a role in them. But to somehow pretend that Hindu thought is rooted in prescriptions for violence and mutilation seems a very far-fetched claim to make.

By challenging the Western/modern analyses of Hindu thought and myth, are you not aligning yourself with Hindu "fundamentalists"?

It would be an outrageous cop-out to dismiss a reasonable intellectual challenge in that manner!  I am not aligned remotely with any kind of fundamentalism for the simple reason that I do not believe there is such a thing as one authentic, originary or literal scriptural injunction that Hindus have to follow. I have several versions of the Bhagavad Gita simply because I enjoy the flavor of the same noble ideas being expressed in different ways. But I think I do share with devout Hindus a sense that whatever the plurality of forms we may use to describe the divine, affection and reverence are important. I do differ from the modern academic insistence on bestowing an equal and relativistic status to all forms of mythological expression. Insisting that a version of the Ramayana where Rama is mocked or villainized, for example, be taken as seriously as a version where readers feel love for Rama, is itself a kind of academic literalism, if not fundamentalism.

You say that Hindus believe God is one, but do not insist that there is only one God.  What is the difference in meaning and consequence?

Saying God is one is an elegant way of recognizing that the divine can be known by many names and paths. Saying there is only one god can also mean the same thing, but more often than not is used to imply that "my god" and "your god" are somehow different. The former makes it possible for different groups of people to live together in peace.  The latter has often led to unending disasters.

You say that academics are "hell-bent" on proving that our god stories are fiction, and in response some of us have claimed that our gods too are historical.  But you say the stories are neither fiction nor history but are altogether something else.  What?

I think we have seen some really puerile misrepresentations of our god stories by well-meaning critics from the Left and the Right.  The Left insists that they are all myths, and presumes that we ought to be thinking about Rama and Krishna the same way we think about Hercules or Batman. The Right tries to clumsily defend Hindu sentiments by insisting that we speak about Rama and Krishna the same way we speak about say Ashoka or Shivaji, and then leaping ahead to insist that every bit of what we have seen or heard is literally true, notwithstanding whether these magic boxes, airplanes and arrows were imagined by Doordarshan in the 1980s or someone else over the centuries. There is, I think a better way, but we do not quite have the intellectual capital yet to assert a suitable language about it (read Chaturvedi Badrinath's study of The Mahabharatha for a great insight into this).  To begin with, we might simply recognize that our god stories are essentially a civilizational investment of great exquisiteness in ensuring we think rightly about ourselves and the world.  They are only as good as the artists and writers who breathe them into form. But whether the gods that live at the center of these stories are mere "fictions," it would be too presumptuous of us to answer.

You say that "even the terms on which we argue about history need to change".  How so?  

When I was in school, I used to think of history as a set of dates and names that happened in the past. But now I see it, perhaps in a Hindu social scientific way, as something more karmic, immediate, consequential. I see history as a living thing, as all the forces and events that have brought each of us to exist in this moment in time, in this place, in this particular experience of pleasures and pains.  Think of why all of us are here, say in America. We might think we made choices, as individuals. But we were also part of a great displacement, the aftermath of colonialism.  Some of us came in desperation, some us less so. But we are all but ants before the hurricane of time.  It is an enormously disparate situation, our minds and our place in the world. We need to think, speak, and act urgently, and we need to know what to say to the future, to our children and grandchildren.  Can we tell them where we came from, and where we are going?  We are trying, for sure. But at best, we tell them we come from an ancient civilization that was very advanced and had flying chariots. But that is not enough. We can't simply go on thinking history is just kings and wars and gadgets and stuff, though that's about all we are taught. We need to also start thinking about the history of worldviews.

How did our ancestors see the world? What did they feel when they chanted the mantras we still chant? How did they balance their duties between their own elders and towards their children?  What did water and food mean to them? How did they see the living world, the world of ants, birds, plants, monkeys, snakes, and elephants? One of the biggest challenges with Hindu historiography today is the fact that neither the Left nor the Right have woken up to the limits of their own perceptions of history. What I try to do in Rearming Hinduism (and there's an animal god on the cover for that reason) is get us to think more about how the past few centuries of colonization (and Macaulayization) have warped not just our identity, but the way we look at nature itself. When Hindu history is decolonized, we will also begin to decolonize natural history, the way we narrate the story of life itself (see my article in the Huffington Post on Big History).

You are both a social scientist and a novelist/writer. So, you have a way with words but you also bring the rigor and attention necessary to unpack academic theses.  How difficult was it to balance the two in the writing of "Rearming Hinduism"?

The writing came first, borne out of a sense of pain and urgency. I care about how I write because I see writing as an aesthetic, if not always sacred, experience. Words are seldom a mere tool for me, I feel a presence in them the same way I feel when I see, say a picture of Shiva, or a word from a Sanskrit hymn. But having said that the book also reflected several years of reading on a range of topics, and I have shared many of these sources in the endnotes so the academically inclined can enjoy reading them too.

There is some wonderfully lyrical prose, writing that makes "one's hair stand on end", to use a typical Hindu expression, in your book.  It is as if you were on some kind of spiritual trip, a psychedelic journey as you wrote this book.  What and where did you seek and get the inspiration for such writing?  I give an example here, though there are very many in your book: ""Sons and daughters.  Mothers and Fathers.  Brothers.  Cousins.  Friends.  Between them, sometimes, also burns all the folly of hate in the universe.  Eviscerating Hate. Body-eating hate.  Hiranyakasipu hate.  Kamsa hate. Kaurava hate. Kingdom-scorching hate…"  Also, "For us, God is always someone's someone. Rama is not just Rama; but Hanuman's master, Sita's husband, Ayodhya's king, and most of all, that moment where it all started, Dasaratha's, and even Kaikeyi's son…"  And about Krishna: "And he stands, in life, disguised as rock. He lives, in Udupi. He lives, in Pandharapur.  He lives, in Tirumala.  He doles out food. He doles out music.  He doles out wealth. He is a giver. He is our god".

These excerpts from Part II are perhaps the heart of the book. I wrote it to share how I feel about our gods, about our culture. I don't fall in worship at the feet of our gods because I think our culture is superior. I do so because I cannot think of any other way to be. I cannot think of how else to find something like love again because in this world and in this life we do see from time to time and from close quarters what it is like to be loveless.  It's the poetic, less "scholarly" part of the book. But I hope it will prove educational too.

"What if sanatana dharma really was the primeval and universal way of knowing the world?", you ask.  What if?

Unanswerable, for me at least. I have to wonder now what it will come to mean in the words and hearts of those still to come.

What do you tell readers who expected a support for or explication of "Hindutva" but instead found little or no mention of Hindutva?

I do not offer an explicit engagement with Hindutva because my love is for Hinduism more broadly, rather than with the issue of nationalism.  At the same time, I acknowledge that Hindutva has become an important part of Hindu life and aspiration today. I do not offer an endorsement of it because I know where it's been. I do not offer a condemnation of it because we cannot preclude the possibility, or hope, that it will outgrow the less intelligent and uncivil aspects of its past. In either case my sense is that the present moment of civilizational awakening and renewal among Hindus is way bigger than what the usual debates about secularism and Hindutva have framed it as.  The challenge is whether the Hindutva movement which has clearly gained from this civilizational energy will rise above the more petty aspects of identity politics and avoid becoming a pseudo-Hindu mirror of what used to be called pseudo-secularism or prove more worthy of the causes and ideals they wish to represent.  Civilization cannot be won any other way.

What did you want to accomplish with this book?  What is your goal, your aim in dismantling Hinduphobia?

I just want to suggest that there is a better way to talk about Hinduism and the Indian civilizational vision than what we have been offered so far. We have an intellectual establishment that denies the place of Hindu thought and culture in India's past, except to say it's responsible for all social evils in the subcontinent. We have a rising counter-narrative in the Hindutva movement which rightly recognizes the mistakes in this view, but is simply incapable of articulating critique in an educated manner, choosing to offer slogans and clichés instead of hard intellectual work. My hope is that readers will get a feel of what it means to look at the world today in the best spirit of Hinduism, to understand that we must reject not just Hinduphobia in the form of media misrepresentations of us, but that we must reject the violent and exploitative foundations of modernity's rapacious view of nature altogether.

It is also my hope that Rearming Hinduism will open up a better conversation between Hinduism and the social sciences. Because of the general absence of social and historical training in our school curricula, many of us think of Hindu philosophical ideas like karma only in metaphysical or even superstitious terms. But I think it's not just metaphysics and afterlife concerns when we talk about things like karma. We can also see the ethical imperative in such concepts rationally. When we live in the kind of cultural and social order that we do today in the world, we are accumulating the karmic debt if you will, of being a part of a way of life today that is profoundly destructive and systematically unjust. Conversely, the social sciences, and especially those of us in critical or progressive intellectual and activist traditions, need to get over Hinduphobic biases and recognize that what Hindu, and Indian spirituality broadly, is saying is profoundly revolutionary: control your senses.  Control your senses, and you begin to cut loose from the predatory way of life that rules the world today. Imagine a billion people deeply content within themselves, deeply at peace within and with others, seeing pain and untruth clearly, resisting it. Hinduism can fuel social change in ways none of the progressive icons or ideologues have even dreamed of. 

 

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ડૉ.આંબેડકર અને ટિળક પિતા-પુત્ર : સંબંધોના બે ધ્રુવ

સામાજિક સમરસતા ના મુદા ને સ્પર્સતો આ લેખ છે.

gujarati world

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ડૉ.આંબેડકર અને ટિળક પિતા-પુત્ર : સંબંધોના બે ધ્રુવ Posted: 10 Dec 2014 07:35 AM PST લોકમાન્ય ટિળક મહાન દેશભક્ત છતાં જ્ઞાતિની બાબતમાં રૂઢિચુસ્ત હતા, જ્યારે તેમના સુધારક પુત્ર શ્રીધરપંતે ૩૨ વર્ષની વયે આપઘાત કરતાં પહેલાં, જીવનનો છેલ્લો પત્ર ડૉ.આંબેડકરને લખ્યો હતો. સ્વરાજની લડતમાં સંકળાયેલા કેટલાક આગેવાનોના ઘરમાં 'દીવા તળે અંધારું' જેવા કિસ્સા બન્યા હતા. તેમાં સૌથી જાણીતો કિસ્સો ગાંધીજી અને હરિલાલનો. મોતીલાલ નેહરુના સમકાલીન, 'દેશબંઘુ'  ચિત્તરંજન દાસનો એકનો એક પુત્ર ભૂંડે હાલ મૃત્યુ પામ્યો હતો. એમ તો, ગાંધીયુગ પહેલાં ભારતના રાજકારણમાં જેમનો ડંકો વાગતો હતો, તે 'લોકમાન્ય' બાળગંગાધર ટિળકના એક પુત્રે પણ આત્મહત્યા કરી હતી. પરંતુ બીજા કિસ્સા અને લોકમાન્ય ટિળક/ Lokmanya Tilakના પુત્ર શ્રીધરપંત / Shridhar Pant Tilak ના કિસ્સામાં પાયાનો ફરક હતો : શ્રીધરપંત તેમના રૂઢિચુસ્ત પિતાનો બ્રાહ્મણવાદી અભિગમ છોડીને, સમાજસુધારાના રસ્તે આગળ વઘ્યા, ડૉ.આંબેડકરના સંપર્કમાં આવ્યા અને તેમના સહયોગી બની રહ્યા. ૧૯૨૮માં અકાળે આત્મહત્યા કરતાં પહેલાં છેલ્લો પત્ર ડૉ.આંબેડકરને લખ્યો હતો. ડૉ.આંબેડકરે જેમનામાંથી પ્રેરણા મેળવી એવા 'મહાત્મા પહેલાંના મહાત્મા' જોતિરાવ ફૂલે લોકમાન્ય ટિળકના સમકાલીન હતા. ટિળકનાં સાપ્તાહિકો 'મરાઠા' અને 'કેસરી' જોતિબાની જુસ્સાભરી સુધારક પ્રવૃત્તિઓની ટીકા કરવામાં કશી પાછી પાની કરતાં નહીં. છતાં, એક વાર કોલ્હાપુરના દીવાને ટિળકનાં બન્ને સાપ્તાહિકો સામે બદનક્ષીનો દાવો કર્યો, ત્યારે તે ટિળકના પક્ષે રહ્યા. એટલું જ નહીં, જોેતિબાના કહેવાથી તેમના એક સાથીદારે લોકમાન્ય ટિળક માટે જામીનગીરી આપી હતી.  અદાલતી કાર્યવાહી પછી ટિળક અને તેમના સાથીદાર અગરકરને ૧૦૧ દિવસની જેલ થઇ. ત્યાર પછી સજા ભોગવીને બહાર આવેલા ટિળક-અગરકરનું સ્વાગત કરવામાં પણ જોતિબા મોખરે હતા. છતાં, ટિળક-અગરકર-ચિપળૂણકર જેવા રૂઢિવાદીઓનું માનસપરિવર્તન થયું નહીં. ટિળક મહારાજની દેશભક્તિ અને અંગ્રેજો સામેની તેમની લડાયકવૃત્તિ પૂર્ણપણે આદરણીય હોવા છતાં, જ્ઞાતિભેદની બાબતમાં તેમનું વલણ ખેદ ઉપજાવે એવું હતું. બાળગંગાધર 'લોકમાન્ય' તિલક / Lokmanya Tilak  ૧૯૨૦માં મૃત્યુ પામેલા ટિળકનો અંતકાળ જાહેર જીવનમાં ડૉ.આંબેડકરનો ઉદયકાળ હતો. તેમણે ૩૧ જાન્યુઆરી, ૧૯૨૦ના રોજ મરાઠી પાક્ષિક 'મૂકનાયક' શરૂ કર્યું અને તેની જાહેરખબર લોકમાન્ય ટિળકના 'કેસરી' છાપવા માટે મોકલી. એ વખતે ટિળક જીવીત હતા, પરંતુ 'કેસરી'માં ડૉ.આંબેડકરના 'મૂકનાયક'ની જાહેરાત ન છપાઇ. અલબત્ત, આ ઘટનાક્રમ અંગે થોડા મતાંતર છે. કેટલાક લખે છે કે 'કેસરી'એ મફત લખાણ છાપવાની ના પાડી હતી અને રૂપિયા લઇને જાહેરખબર છાપવાની તૈયારી બતાવી હતી. ખુદ આંબેડકરે ૨૮ ઑક્ટોબર, ૧૯૫૪ના રોજ મુંબઇના પુરંદરે સ્ટેડિયમમાં એક પ્રવચનમાં કહ્યું હતું, 'એક વાર મેં 'કેસરી' માટે જાહરખબર મોકલી. સાથે રૂ.૩નો મનીઑર્ડર પણ મોકલ્યો. પણ જગ્યાના અભાવનું કારણ આપીને મારી જાહેરખબર પાછી મોકલી આપવામાં આવી. 'ટાઇમ્સ ઑફ ઇન્ડિયા'ને ફોન કર્યો ત્યારે તેમને એવું લાગ્યું, જાણે બૂમબરાડા પાડતો કોઇ ભીખારી તેમની સાથે વાત કરતો હોય. તેમણે કશો પ્રતિભાવ ન આપ્યો.' ('થૉટ્‌સ એન્ડ ફિલોસોફી ઑફ ડૉ.બી.આર.આંબેડકર'- સી.ડી.નાઇક, પાનું ૧૩૩) આમ, 'લોકમાન્ય' ટિળક અને ડૉ.આંબેડકર જ્ઞાતિસંઘર્ષના બે અંતિમો પર ઊભા હતા. ટિળકનું અવસાન થયું ત્યારે આંબેડકર લંડનમાં હતા. ટિળકના મૃત્યુનાં સાત વર્ષ પછી તેમણે લખ્યું હતું,  ''ટિળક જેવી એકાદ વ્યક્તિએ બહિષ્કૃત સમાજમાં જન્મ લીધો હોત અને બ્રિટિશ રાજના સમયમાં આવેલા પલટાનો લાભ લઇને તેમણે એવું જ ઊચ્ચ શિક્ષણ મેળવ્યું હોત તો, 'સ્વરાજ્ય મારો જન્મસિદ્ધ અધિકાર છે' એવી ગર્જના કરવાને બદલે તેમણે 'અસ્પૃશ્યતા નાબૂદ કરવી એ મારું કર્તવ્ય છે' એમ કહ્યું હોત.'' ('બહિષ્કૃત ભારત', ૨૯-૭-૧૯૨૭. સંદર્ભ : ધનંજય કીર) સમાજ સમતા સંઘના સાથીદારો સાથે ડો.આંબેડકર/ Dr.Ambedkar ડૉ.આંબેડકરની આ કલ્પનામાં થોડો આશાવાદ અને થોડો ટિળકયુગ પછીના ગાંધીયુગ માટેનો નીચો અભિપ્રાય પણ કારણભૂત હશે. બાકી, 'લોકમાન્ય'ના પુત્ર શ્રીધરપંત ઉર્ફે બાપુરાવે ક્યાં બહિષ્કૃત સમાજમાં જન્મ લીધો હતો? તેમ છતાં, અસ્પૃશ્યતા સામેની ઝુંબેશમાં તે પૂરા જુસ્સાથી જોડાઇ ગયા હતા. લોકમાન્ય ટિળકે અંગ્રેજી રાજ સામે રાષ્ટ્રિય ભાવના જાગ્રત કરવા માટે ગણેશોત્સવની ઉજવણી શરૂ કરાવી. પરંતુ શ્રીધરપંત ટિળકે ૧૯૨૭ના ગણેશોત્સવમાં અસ્પૃશ્યોનો શ્રીકૃષ્ણ મેળાનો કાર્યક્રમ પૂણેના ગાયકવાડ વાડામાં રાખ્યો. અસ્પૃશ્યો નક્કી કરેલા સ્થળે પ્રવેશ્યા ત્યારે ભારે ધક્કામુક્કી થઇ હતી અને શ્રીધરપંતનો ઉગ્ર વિરોધ થયો હતો. પરંતુ તેમણે ધીરજ ન ખોઇ. તેમની આવી લાગણીના પ્રતિઘોષ તરીકે પૂણેના દલિતોએ એક સભા ભરીને શ્રીધરપંતનું સન્માન કર્યું હતું. ડૉ.આંબેડકરે ૧૯૨૭માં 'સમાજ સમતા સંઘ'ની સ્થાપના કરી, તો બીજા જ વર્ષે શ્રીધરપંતે પોતાના ઘરમાં એ સંસ્થાની શાખા શરૂ કરી. તેની પહેલી બેઠકમાં ભાગ લેવા માટે પૂના ગયેલા ડૉ.આંબેડકરે ઊંડી લાગણી સાથે કહ્યું હતું, ''એમાં કોઇ શંકા નથી કે શ્રીધરપંતે (સમાજ સમતા) સંઘને સ્થાન આપીને અને સમાનતાના સિદ્ધાંતને ટેકો આપીને ભારે સાહસનું કામ કર્યું છે. જો આ ફરજ યોગ્ય રીતે અને સતત અદા થઇ શકશે, તો લોકો કહેશે કે તેમણે તેમના પિતા કરતાં હજાર ગણું વધારે મહત્ત્વનું કામ કર્યું છે. લોકમાન્ય ટિળકના ઘરમાં રહીને તેમની ટીકા કરવાનો મારો કોઇ ઇરાદો નથી. રાજકીય ક્ષેત્રમાં તેમણે દર્શાવેલી હિંમત વિશે સૌ સંમત થશે. પણ સામાજિક બાબતોમાં તેમણે પોતાની જવાબદારી અદા કરી નહીં, તેમાં કોઇ શંકા નથી.' શ્રીધરપંત ઉર્ફે બાપુરાવ ટિળકની દુર્લભ તસવીર Rare photo of Shridhar Pant aka Bapurao Tlak ફેબ્રુઆરી, ૧૯૨૮માં શ્રીધરપંતનું પુસ્તક 'માઝા વ્યાસંગ' પ્રગટ થયું. તેની પ્રસ્તાવનામાં તેમણે લખ્યું હતું, 'હવે મારાથી વિશેષ સાહિત્યસેવા થશે એવી ઉમેદ રાખવી વ્યર્થ છે...બાકી રહેલું આયુષ્ય કઇ ઘડીએ પૂરું થઇ જશે...' તેમના જીવનમાં એક દુઃખ કોર્ટ-કચેરીનું હતું. 'કેસરી'નાં ટ્રસ્ટનો વિવાદ હતો. તેમના બે બનેવી (લોકમાન્ય ટિળકના જમાઇ) તેમની સામે પડ્યા હતા. એક તરફ સમાજસુધારાનો સંઘર્ષ અને બીજી તરફ કોર્ટકાર્યવાહીનો ત્રાસ, આ બન્નેથી કંટાળીને  આત્મહત્યા કરતાં પહેલાં તેમણે પૂનાના કલેક્ટરને લખ્યું હતું, 'હું વકીલો ને અદાલતોનો શિકાર થવા જન્મ્યો ન હતો. અદાલતોનું વાતાવરણ મને ગુંગળાવે છે. હું સ્વતંત્રતા ચાહું છું ને મારો આત્મા આઝાદી ઝંખે છે. આત્મહત્યાથી તે મુક્ત બની જશે.' (મૂળ લખાણ અંગ્રેજીમાં) શુક્રવાર, તા.૨૫ મે, ૧૯૨૮ની સાંજે, ૩૨ વર્ષની વયે શ્રીધરપંતે ભાબુર્ડા (પૂના) પાસે ટ્રેન નીચે પડતું મૂકીને આત્મહત્યા કરી. એ જ દિવસે, આપઘાતના થોડા કલાક પહેલાં જીવનનો છેલ્લો પત્ર તેમણે ડૉ.આંબેડકરને લખ્યો. અત્યંત સુઘડ, મરોડદાર અક્ષરે મરાઠીમાં લખાયેલો એ પત્ર અહીં આપ્યો છે. (મૂળ લખાણ વાંચવા માટે ફોટો પર ક્લિક કરો) આત્મહત્યા કરતાં પહેલાં શ્રીધરપંત ટિળકે ડો.આંબેડકરને લખેલો છેલ્લો પત્ર : એક દુર્લભ દસ્તાવેજ  Shridhar Pant Tilak's departing letter to Dr.Ambedkar  પત્રમાં શ્રીધરપંતે 'ક.સા.ન.વિ.વિ.' ('કળવણે સાદર નમસ્કાર વિનંતી વિશેષ'- સાદર નમસ્કાર સાથે વિશેષ વિનંતી પાઠવું છું કે) એવી લાક્ષણિક મરાઠી શરૂઆત પછી લખ્યું હતું, 'આ પત્ર તમારા હાથમાં આવશે તે પહેલાં હું આ લોકને છોડી ગયો છું, એવી વાત મોટે ભાગે તમારા કાને પડી ગઇ હશે. તમારા સમાજ સમતા સંઘના કામને સરસ રીતે આગળ વધારવા માટે, વઘુ ને વઘુ પ્રમાણમાં સુશિક્ષિત અને સુધારાવાદી યુવાનોનું લક્ષ્ય આ ચળવળ તરફ જાય તે જરૂરી છે. તમે અહર્નિશ આ કામ કરો જ છો એનો મને સંતોષ છે. તમારા આ પ્રયત્નોને પરમેશ્વર યશ આપશે એવી પણ મને ખાતરી લાગે છે. મહારાષ્ટ્રના યુવાનો નિશ્ચય કરે તો  અસ્પૃશ્યતાનિવારણનો પ્રશ્ન પાંચ જ વર્ષમાં ઉકલી જાય. મારા બહિષ્કૃત બંઘુઓની તકલીફોની કથની ભગવાન શ્રીકૃષ્ણના ચરણોમાં પ્રત્યક્ષ મૂકવા માટે હું આગળ જાઉં છું. મિત્રમંડળને મારા સપ્રેમ નમસ્કાર. આપણી વચ્ચે આવો ભાવ રહે એવી જ વિનંતી.' લોકમાન્ય ટિળકે માર્ચ, ૧૯૧૮માં મુંબઇમાં ભરાયેલી એક સભામાં અસ્પૃશ્યતાનો અંત આણવાની વાત કરી હતી, પરંતુ પોતે તેના અમલની પ્રતિજ્ઞા પર સહી કરી નહીં. એ જ પિતાનો પુત્ર પોતાના છેલ્લા પત્રમાં 'બહિષ્કૃત બંઘુઓની તકલીફોની કથની ભગવાન શ્રીકૃષ્ણનાં ચરણોમાં' રૂબરૂ મૂકવાની વાત ડૉ.આંબેડકરને લખે, એ ઘટના સમાનતાના સંઘર્ષમાં નાની પણ નોંધપાત્ર ગણવી રહી.

Muslim population

मुस्लिम पोपुलेशन- --जब तक मुस्लिमों की जनसंख्या किसी देश/प्रदेश/क्षेत्र में लगभग 2% के आसपास होती है, तब वे एकदम शांतिप्रिय, कानूनपसन्द अल्पसंख्यक बनकर रहते हैं और किसी को विशेष शिकायत का मौका नहीं देते, जैसे -

अमेरिका – मुस्लिम 0.6%

ऑस्ट्रेलिया – मुस्लिम 1.5%

कनाडा – मुस्लिम 1.9%

चीन – मुस्लिम 1.8%

इटली – मुस्लिम 1.5%

नॉर्वे – मुस्लिम 1.8%

जब मुस्लिम जनसंख्या 2% से 5% के बीच तक पहुँच जाती है, तब वे अन्य धर्मावलम्बियों में अपना "धर्मप्रचार" शुरु कर देते हैं, जिनमें अक्सर समाज का निचला तबका और अन्य धर्मों से असंतुष्ट हुए लोग होते हैं, जैसे कि –

डेनमार्क – मुस्लिम 2%

जर्मनी – मुस्लिम 3.7%

ब्रिटेन – मुस्लिम 2.7%

स्पेन – मुस्लिम 4%

थाईलैण्ड – मुस्लिम 4.6%

मुस्लिम जनसंख्या के 5% से ऊपर हो जाने पर वे अपने अनुपात के हिसाब से अन्य धर्मावलम्बियों पर दबाव बढ़ाने लगते हैं और अपना "प्रभाव" जमाने की कोशिश करने लगते हैं। उदाहरण के लिये वे सरकारों और शॉपिंग मॉल पर "हलाल" का माँस रखने का दबाव बनाने लगते हैं, वे कहते हैं कि "हलाल" का माँस न खाने से उनकी धार्मिक मान्यतायें प्रभावित होती हैं। इस कदम से कई पश्चिमी देशों में "खाद्य वस्तुओं" के बाजार में मुस्लिमों की तगड़ी पैठ बनी। उन्होंने कई देशों के सुपरमार्केट के मालिकों को दबाव डालकर अपने यहाँ "हलाल" का माँस रखने को बाध्य किया। दुकानदार भी "धंधे" को देखते हुए उनका कहा मान लेता है (अधिक जनसंख्या होने का "फ़ैक्टर" यहाँ से मजबूत होना शुरु हो जाता है), ऐसा जिन देशों में हो चुका वह हैं –

फ़्रांस – मुस्लिम 8%

फ़िलीपीन्स – मुस्लिम 6%

स्वीडन – मुस्लिम 5.5%

स्विटजरलैण्ड – मुस्लिम 5.3%

नीडरलैण्ड – मुस्लिम 5.8%

त्रिनिदाद और टोबैगो – मुस्लिम 6%

इस बिन्दु पर आकर "मुस्लिम" सरकारों पर यह दबाव बनाने लगते हैं कि उन्हें उनके "क्षेत्रों" में शरीयत कानून (इस्लामिक कानून) के मुताबिक चलने दिया जाये (क्योंकि उनका अन्तिम लक्ष्य तो यही है कि समूचा विश्व "शरीयत" कानून के हिसाब से चले)। जब मुस्लिम जनसंख्या 10% से अधिक हो जाती है तब वे उस देश/प्रदेश/राज्य/क्षेत्र विशेष में कानून-व्यवस्था के लिये परेशानी पैदा करना शुरु कर देते हैं, शिकायतें करना शुरु कर देते हैं, उनकी "आर्थिक परिस्थिति" का रोना लेकर बैठ जाते हैं, छोटी-छोटी बातों को सहिष्णुता से लेने की बजाय दंगे, तोड़फ़ोड़ आदि पर उतर आते हैं, चाहे वह फ़्रांस के दंगे हों, डेनमार्क का कार्टून विवाद हो, या फ़िर एम्स्टर्डम में कारों का जलाना हो, हरेक विवाद को समझबूझ, बातचीत से खत्म करने की बजाय खामख्वाह और गहरा किया जाता है, जैसे कि –

गुयाना – मुस्लिम 10%

इसराइल – मुस्लिम 16%

केन्या – मुस्लिम 11%

रूस – मुस्लिम 15% (चेचन्या – मुस्लिम आबादी 70%)

जब मुस्लिम जनसंख्या 20% से ऊपर हो जाती है तब विभिन्न "सैनिक शाखायें" जेहाद के नारे लगाने लगती हैं, असहिष्णुता और धार्मिक हत्याओं का दौर शुरु हो जाता है, जैसे-

इथियोपिया – मुस्लिम 32.8%

भारत – मुस्लिम 22%

मुस्लिम जनसंख्या के 40% के स्तर से ऊपर पहुँच जाने पर बड़ी संख्या में सामूहिक हत्याऐं, आतंकवादी कार्रवाईयाँ आदि चलने लगते हैं, जैसे –

बोस्निया – मुस्लिम 40%

चाड – मुस्लिम 54.2%

लेबनान – मुस्लिम 59%

जब मुस्लिम जनसंख्या 60% से ऊपर हो जाती है तब अन्य धर्मावलंबियों का "जातीय सफ़ाया" शुरु किया जाता है (उदाहरण भारत का कश्मीर), जबरिया मुस्लिम बनाना, अन्य धर्मों के धार्मिक स्थल तोड़ना, जजिया जैसा कोई अन्य कर वसूलना आदि किया जाता है, जैसे –

अल्बानिया – मुस्लिम 70%

मलेशिया – मुस्लिम 62%

कतर – मुस्लिम 78%

सूडान – मुस्लिम 75%

जनसंख्या के 80% से ऊपर हो जाने के बाद तो सत्ता/शासन प्रायोजित जातीय सफ़ाई की जाती है, अन्य धर्मों के अल्पसंख्यकों को उनके मूल नागरिक अधिकारों से भी वंचित कर दिया जाता है, सभी प्रकार के हथकण्डे/हथियार अपनाकर जनसंख्या को 100% तक ले जाने का लक्ष्य रखा जाता है, जैसे –

बांग्लादेश – मुस्लिम 83%

मिस्त्र – मुस्लिम 90%

गाज़ा पट्टी – मुस्लिम 98%

ईरान – मुस्लिम 98%

ईराक – मुस्लिम 97%

जोर्डन – मुस्लिम 93%

मोरक्को – मुस्लिम 98%

पाकिस्तान – मुस्लिम 97%

सीरिया – मुस्लिम 90%

संयुक्त अरब अमीरात – मुस्लिम 96%

बनती कोशिश पूरी 100% जनसंख्या मुस्लिम बन जाने, यानी कि दार-ए-स्सलाम होने की स्थिति में वहाँ सिर्फ़ मदरसे होते हैं और सिर्फ़ कुरान पढ़ाई जाती है और उसे ही अन्तिम सत्य माना जाता है, जैसे –

अफ़गानिस्तान – मुस्लिम 100%

सऊदी अरब – मुस्लिम 100%

सोमालिया – मुस्लिम 100%a

यमन – मुस्लिम 100%

आज की स्थिति में मुस्लिमों की जनसंख्या समूचे विश्व की जनसंख्या का 22-24% है, लेकिन ईसाईयों, हिन्दुओं और यहूदियों के मुकाबले उनकी जन्मदर को देखते हुए कहा जा सकता है कि इस शताब्दी के अन्त से पहले ही मुस्लिम जनसंख्या विश्व की 50% हो जायेगी (यदि तब तक धरती बची तो)… भारत में कुल मुस्लिम जनसंख्या 15% के आसपास मानी जाती है, जबकि हकीकत यह है कि उत्तरप्रदेश, बिहार, पश्चिम बंगाल और केरल के कई जिलों में यह आँकड़ा 60 से 80% तक पहुँच चुका है… अब देश में आगे चलकर क्या परिस्थितियाँ बनेंगी यह कोई भी ("सेकुलरों" को छोड़कर) आसानी से सोच-समझ सकता है…

(सभी सन्दर्भ और आँकड़े : डॉ पीटर हैमण्ड की पुस्तक "स्लेवरी, टेररिज़्म एण्ड इस्लाम – द हिस्टोरिकल रूट्स एण्ड कण्टेम्पररी थ्रेट तथा लियोन यूरिस – "द हज", से साभार)

भारतमाता की कुछ सेवा करना चाहते हैं तो अधिक से अधिक लोगों को ये मैसेज फॉरवर्ड कीजिये

Samvad 1 November 2014

Samvad Kartik Shukla 9, Vik. Samvat 2071. Yugabda 5116: November 1, 2014
1. FESTIVALS: Dhanu Sankranti	2.  1.6 LAKH SEVA PROJECTS RUN BY RSS
3. BHARAT LAUNCHES THIRD NAVIGATION SATELLITE	4. NANAJI BROUGHT INTEGRAL HUMANISM IN ACTION
5. BHARATIYAS CELEBRATE DESI FESTIVALS IN DENMARK	6.   MILLENNIUM ANNIVERSARY OF THE CORONATION OF CHOLA KING RAJENDRA  I
7. DUBAI-BASED BHARATIYA-ORIGIN EYE SURGEON HONOURED IN LONDON	8. STATE DEPARTMENT CELEBRATES DIWALI AS GLOBAL AFFAIR
9.  BHARAT TO BUILD 1800-KM HIGHWAY ALONG CHINA BORDER IN ARUNACHAL	10.  BHARAT IGNORES CHINA'S FROWN, OFFERS DEFENCE BOOST TO VIETNAM
11. MASSIVE RELIEF AND RESCUE OPERATION BY SWAYAMSEVAKS IN CYCLONE HIT AP	12.  RSS VOLUNTEERS CLEAN MOSQUE IN CYCLONE AFFECTED VISAKHAPATNAM
13.  WIDOWS PERFORM LAKSHMI PUJA AT KUDROLI TEMPLE	14. BHAGINI NIVEDITA SEWA NYAS DONATES RICKSHAWS TO PAK HINDUS
15.   MALAYSIAN HINDUS CALL TO SAVE CENTURY-OLD VIVEKANANDA ASHRAM	16. BHARATIYA ARMY'S EASTERN COMMAND TURNS 94
17. NATIONWIDE BLOOD DONATION CAMP OF VHP: 1 LAKH UNITS COLLECTED	18. BHARATIYA COP WINS UN'S   FEMALE PEACEKEEPER AWARD
19.  BHARAT - BORN SCIENTIST AWARDED WORLD FOOD PRIZE	20.  SHRI VISHWA NIKETAN: Pravas; Visitors
FOOD FOR THOUGHT	Article: RENDEZVOUS WITH A VISIONARY

---

1. FESTIVALS: Dhanu Sankranti is the sankranti (transmigration of sun from one rashi – constellation to another) related to Dhanu rashi and occurs on 16^th December.

It is celebrated as Dhanu Yatra - a colourful festival related to Bhagwan Krishna's visit to Mathura,  at Bargarh, Odisha. Different acts of puranic descriptions are performed at specific locations and the spectators move from place to place with the action to follow the performance. During this festival the Bhagwan Krishna is offered sweetened rice flakes which are specially prepared in a Conical shape.

Dhanu is also name of the month in the Malayalam Calendar. Women celebrate Thiruvathira in this month. Thiruvathira is supposed to be the birthday of Bhagwan Shiva. Married women and girls do 'upavasa' (fasting) on that day, and sing and dance. Girls pray to Lord Shiva to get a good husband while married women pray for the longevity of their husbands. -- Go Top

 

2.  1.6 LAKH SEVA PROJECTS RUN BY RSS: "Seva – Service is an integral part of sangh work and it was natural that sangh workers came forward to help fllod affected people in Jammu and Kasmir" said RSS sarkaryavaha Bhayya ji Joshi at the press meet on 20^th October at Lucknow where a 3-day meeting of its Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari mandal was held. He added that over 1.6 lakh service projects are being run by swayamsevaks all over the country in rural, tribal and urban slum areas. Replying to a question on the issue of Ram mandir, he said, "Ram Temple exists in Ayodhya and people worship there daily. The only issue is to make it a grand temple. As the matter is in the Supreme Court, hence, the Centre should try to remove the hurdle and fulfil the promise made to the people during the elections," He claimed that more than 1.25 lakh youth have joined the organisation last year.  -- Go Top

 

3. BHARAT LAUNCHES THIRD NAVIGATION SATELLITE: Bharat's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C26) lifted off with aplomb from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota at 1.32 a.m. on 16^th October and precisely put the Bharatiya navigation satellite, IRNSS-1C into its perfect, pre-designated orbit. This was the 28th successful launch of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

The IRNSS-1C, the third of the seven navigation satellites in the Indian Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), has wide-ranging applications in terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation. From vehicle tracking to fleet management and from disaster management to mapping, the satellite extends services to its clients.

The IRNSS-C1 carried two types of payloads, one for transmitting navigation service signals to the users and another consisting of a C-band transponder to facilitate Cube Retro Reflectors for laser ranging.

The first two satellites in the series, IRNSS 1A and IRNSS 1B were launched from Sriharikota on July 1 2013 and April 4 this year respectively.  -- Go Top

 

4. NANAJI BROUGHT INTEGRAL HUMANISM IN ACTION:  "Nanaji's thinking was out of box, he always tried to do something extra, beyond his given responsibility. Whatever he did he did with some value addition. He always insisted on 'self-sufficiency' approach. Optimum utilisation of local resources was the basis of his vision. He perfectly blended universal science with local technologies," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi while releasing a book on Nanaji Deshmukh in New Delhi on October 11, the 98th birth anniversary of Nanaji.

RSS Sahsarkaryavah Shri Dattatreya Hosabale, veteran Sangh Pracharak Shri Madan Das, DRI president Shri Virendrajeet Singh and general secretary of DRI Shri Bharat Pathak also shared the dais. Many distinguished personalities including RSS Sarkaryavah Shri Bhaiyaji Joshi, former deputy Prime Minister Shri LK Advani, Governor of Guajrat Prof. Omprakash Kohli, etc were present at the jam-packed Vigyan Bhavan.

Speaking on the occasion Dattatreya Hosabale said, Nanaji brought 'Integral Humanism' propounded by Deendayalji in action. "When people are looking for models of development on Bharatiya values the one created by Nanaji are the living examples.   -- Go Top

 

5. BHARATIYAS CELEBRATE DESI FESTIVALS IN DENMARK: Vijayadashmi was celebrated by Bharatiyas in Copenhagen on September 28 in a traditional way, thanks to the efforts put in by members of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS)-Denmark. The most interesting part of these celebrations was the play: Ramleela. Done with very few props, the characters were able to convey Lord Rama's story to the audience.

"The programme was designed for all age groups and involved a drawing contest based on Ramayana characters and a discussion on the main characters of Ramayana. There were 15 people in the play and we spent more than four weekends preparing for it," said Hemant Dubey, one of the active members of HSS-Denmark.

Dattatreya Hosabale, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's joint general secretary, had travelled to Copenhagen from Bharat to attend the Vijayadashmi celebrations. "He spoke on the significance of Vijayadashmi as well as key learnings from Ramayana for an hour, before ending it with a moral for the children. 

Apart from this event, many other events were also organized by different Bharatiya communities. Bharatiya Mandir in Copenhagen organised Ravana Dahan, where a small effigy of Ravana was burnt to ashes. The Gujarati community played Garba at another event on September 27. The Bengalis organised Durga Puja on a grand scale. On October 4, the newly formed Telangana Association of Denmark also celebrated Dasara and Telangana state's biggest festival, Bathukamma.   -- Go Top 

 

6.   MILLENNIUM ANNIVERSARY OF THE CORONATION OF CHOLA KING RAJENDRA  I:

The 1000th year of coronation of renowned King Rajendra I of the famous Chola Dynasty of Bharat is a matter of great pride and inspiration to all of us. Crowned in 10I4 CE, King Rajendra I had his rule extending not only from the banks of river Ganga to the whole of Southern Bharat but also up-to Sri Lanka, Lakshadweep, Maldives, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. By virtue of his well managed administration and a well organized military, trade, commerce, art, culture, architecture and sculpture flourished under his reign in this entire region.

Literature and pursuit of knowledge also flourished in his times and several books and volumes were written, both in Sanskrit and Tamil. During his rule, several grand temples and Stupas were constructed in Bharat, Sri Lanka and South East Asia which stand testimony to our living cultural heritage. It is testified from his Charter comprising 21 Copper Inscriptions with his royal insignia written in both Sanskrit and Tamil and paying obeisance at the very beginning to Lord Vishnu which are kept by Leiden University of Netherlands.

At the time of Mahmud Ghazni's attack on our north-western frontier and the turmoil of Euro-Arab conflict, King Rajendra I provided stable rule to ensure peace, prosperity and unhindered trade in the entire South East Asian Region to Bharatiyas, especially Tamil traders and their trade associations. He also established diplomatic Mission in China to promote trade.

He also set up a University for study of Vedas and other disciplines at Ennayirum. Besides ensuring political stability, in order to promote cultural unity and emotional integrity he sent his General Aryan Rajrajan to bring holy water of Ganga, ceremonially received it, mixed it with Kaveri waters and built a grand lake due to which he came to be known as  Gangai Konda Cholan  [i.e. Chola who brought Ganga].

Remembering such glorious period of our history will be inspirational to the people in the work for national resurgence. All the people of Bharat including Swyamasevaks are called upon to remind Bharat and the world about the achievement of the Chola king Rajendra for providing benign rule with all round progress in such a vast area and to ensure their support as well as participation in all the events related to this incidence.

(Statement by RSS sarkaryavaha Bhayya ji Joshi on the eve of meeting of  ABKM at Lucknow )  -- Go Top

 

7. DUBAI-BASED BHARATIYA-ORIGIN EYE SURGEON HONOURED IN LONDON: Dr. Vinod Gauba, Dubai-based Bharatiya-origin doctor has been conferred the prestigious Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman for his contributions to healthcare. Dr. Gauba, 36, who has worked with the less fortunate and visually impaired, was presented with the award earlier this month by Baroness Verma at the House of Lords in London. He was awarded for his pioneering role in the field of ophthalmology.

 'Mahatma Gandhi Pravasi Samman' is presented to 20 recipients selected from over 30 million Non-Resident Indians or people of Indian origin for exceptional achievements in various fields.

"With Dubai fast becoming the Middle Eastern healthcare hub, we are proud to possess a premier level of expertise and technology in the UAE, attracting patients not only from the region but from all across the globe," Gauba said. He is based at Dubai Healthcare City, a multi-specialty surgery centre for providing specialized eye care.  -- Go Top

 

8. STATE DEPARTMENT CELEBRATES DIWALI AS GLOBAL AFFAIR: Bharatiya tapestries, silver lamps, and traditional delicacies adorned the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room as Secretary John Kerry inaugurated the U.S. Department of State's annual Diwali celebration. He lit a diya while a Hindu priest from the Sri Shiva Vishnu Temple (SSVT) of Maryland sang Vedic hymns amidst hundreds of well-wishers, including senior administration officials, Ambassadors, and community leaders. "As we celebrate Diwali this evening, we also hail the accomplishments of the many hundreds of thousands of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain Americans who live now all across our country in every community," said Secretary Kerry. "And we honor their faith and their traditions, and the indispensable contributions that they make every single day to our prosperity, to our freedom, and to our culture - to this new chapter of American history that they are helping to write." Kerry was joined on stage by Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Ambassador of Bharat, who highlighted the joyous festivities taking place around the world.

On 20th October 2014, Prime Minister David Cameron warmly welcomed British Hindu community leaders and sevaks to his residence at 10 Downing Street, with the blessing "Shubh Diwali".  At the annual Downing Street Diwali celebration, he spoke of the valuable contribution of the British Hindu community to British life, in terms of the four purusharthas (human purposes) and he spoke of the vital contribution that the Hindu philosophy of reverence for Light, encapsulated in the Diwali celebrations, had for all people of all faiths and he wished the British Hindu community prosperity and happiness.  -- Go Top

 

9.  BHARAT TO BUILD 1800-KM HIGHWAY ALONG CHINA BORDER IN ARUNACHAL: To counter China, Bharat is all set to embark on an ambitious road project along the McMahon Line in Arunachal Pradesh. The proposed Indo-China frontier highway  will run parallel along the China border and will be 1,800 km long.

The proposed highway will pass through Tawang, East Kameng, Upper Subansiri, West Siang, Upper Siang, Dibang Valley, Hawai and Vijaynagar in the bordering areas. The Government has already relaxed environmental clearances for border area projects. " The construction of the road will be a huge challenge considering the rough and hostile terrain, mostly snow-fed, through which it would pass, and will be the biggest single infrastructure project in the history of Bharat with an estimated cost of over Rs 40,000 crore," Rijiju said in Itanagar.  -- Go Top

 

10.  BHARAT IGNORES CHINA'S FROWN, OFFERS DEFENCE BOOST TO VIETNAM: Bharat took a decisive step towards countering China's assertive poweron 28^th October by committing to help Vietnam's defence modernization, a move that will resonate unpleasantly in Beijing.

After his meeting with visiting Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Bharatiya PM Narendra Modi said , "Our defence cooperation with Vietnam is among our most important ones. India  remains committed to the modernization of Vietnam's defence and security forces. This will include expansion of our training programme, which is already very substantial, joint-exercises and cooperation in defence equipment. We will quickly operationalise the $100 million line of credit that will enable Vietnam acquire new naval vessels from India."

For the first time, Bharat sent clear signals that it may be willing to sell the Brahmos short range cruise missiles to Vietnam, a long-standing demand by Hanoi. The previous Bharatiya government was a little hesitant, citing reservations by Russia (which is a co-developer).  -- Go Top

 

11. MASSIVE RELIEF AND RESCUE OPERATION BY SWAYAMSEVAKS IN CYCLONE HIT AP: The cyclone Hudhud severely hit three districts of Andhra Pradesh, Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram and Srikakulam. Although, the north-east monsoon affects every year the coastal areas of Bay of Bengal during October-November, this year the devastation is huge. Visakhapatnam is the worst hit city.

RSS swayamsevaks started relief and rescue operation on October 12 itself by cutting the trees fallen across the streets and clearing the garbage to facilitate the movement of people and the vehicles. RSS with its several associated organisations like Jana Samkshema Samithi, Sewa Bharati, ABVP, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bharatiya Vidya Kendram Educational institutions, etc, plunged into service activities from the moment they could came out of their houses.

BVK College became the centre of activity for receiving the material and disbursing to several destinations. Nearly 1,000 volunteers were engaged in the 24 hours run activity. More than one lakh water packets, 25,000 milk packets, several packets of food, bread and biscuits had been distributed in nearly 50 localities far and near in the city. Similar supplies were sent to villages of the district including the coastal fishermen villages. Several dignitaries like Minister Shri Ravella Kishore Babu, Shri Manikyala Rao, Sri Vishnu Kumar Raju MLA, Dr K Hari Babu MP, RDO and others visited the affected areas.   -- Go Top     

 

12.  RSS VOLUNTEERS CLEAN MOSQUE IN CYCLONE AFFECTED VISAKHAPATNAM: Volunteers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) cleaned mosques in Visakhapatnam, after cyclone Hudhud left behind a trail of destruction when it hit the region last week.

Coordinator of Visakhapatnam region of RSS, Ram Bahadur, said that the political leaders in the country had created a wrong perception that RSS is against Muslims and Christians.

The volunteers were seen using electric saws to cut trees that were fallen inside the mosque complex. They were also cleaning the floors and removing broken glasses that were scattered everywhere. A volunteer of RSS, Kurmit Kaur, said they were merely being human.  -- Go Top

 

13.  WIDOWS PERFORM LAKSHMI PUJA AT KUDROLI TEMPLE: A large number of widows were allowed on 22^nd October to perform Lakshmi Pooja (workship) on the occasion of Deepavali in the Kudroli Sri Gokarnanatheshwara Temple – established in the city by social reformer Narayana Guru and renovated by Senior Congress Leader B. Janardhana Poojary. Allowing widows to do the pooja is among a string of measures taken by the temple aimed at social reformation. The temple has, earlier appointed widows, a couple of them from Dalit communities, as priests.

Around 2,000 widows from Mangalore and other parts of the state participated in the programme. They were brought into the temple in a procession accompanied by beating of drums and other musical instruments.

Indira, Lakshmi and Chandravati, the three priests at the temple, performed Lakshmi Pooja that was witnessed by the large number of widows gathered in the temple. After the pooja, widows were allowed to perform 'Aarati'. The women priests sat along with idols of presiding deity on the silver chariot that was taken around sanctum sactorum by these women three times.

This is not the first time widows have been involved in the rituals. The temple believes in "One caste one religion one god" philosophy advocated by Narayana Guru. Three years ago a large number of widows performed Chandika Homa and poojas of Nava Durga idols during the Navaratri.  -- Go Top

 

14. BHAGINI NIVEDITA SEWA NYAS DONATES RICKSHAWS TO PAK HINDUS: Bhagini Nivedita Sewa Nyas Delhi, on 11^th October provided cycle rickshaws and other basic necessary things to the Hindus who came from Pakistan. Apart from it, 25 families who came recently from Pakistan were provided with various household things like clothes, mattress, etc. Speaking on the occasion, general secretary of the Nyas Shri Mahavir Prasad Gupta assured the Hindus coming from Pakistan every possible help till they are granted citizenship in Bharat. He also applauded the support of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bharat Vikas Parishad and many other organisations which have been helping the Nyas in this endeavour.  -- Go Top

 

15.   MALAYSIAN HINDUS CALL TO SAVE CENTURY-OLD VIVEKANANDA ASHRAM: An organization of Hindus in Malaysia Hindraf recently urged the National Heritage Department of Malaysian Government to take immediate steps to protect the Swami Vivekananda Ashram at Jalan Tun Sambanthan, in Brickfields.

The century-old ashram has been earmarked for major redevelopment that will see a 23-storey residential tower with 264 units and an eight-storey car park built at the site. "Hindraf strongly urge the National Heritage Department steps in to object on the proposed development to protect and preserve this cultural heritage as part of the rich Malaysian heritage," said its chief P. Waytha Moorthy.

The statue and the ashram were built by the Jaffna Tamil immigrants in 1904 in honour of Swami Vivekananda, who visited Malaya in 1893.  -- Go Top

 

16. BHARATIYA ARMY'S EASTERN COMMAND TURNS 94: Army's biggest operational command - the Eastern Command - responsible for military operations along the international borders with Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Myanmar and Nepal, turned 94 on 31^st Oct.

The Eastern Command will continue to strive for "unparalleled professional competence to ensure the highest standards of operational readiness", Lt. Gen. M.M.S. Rai, general officer commanding-in-chief, said on the occasion at its headquarters at Fort William Kolkata.

The Eastern Command was formed Nov 1, 1920, with its summer headquarters in Nainital and winter headquarters in Lucknow. The command was designated as Eastern Army in April 1942, and its headquarters moved to Barrackpore. The Eastern Command theatre consists of three distinct geographical regions - the mountainous sectors of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh in the north, the jungle-clad hill tracts of Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya in the east and the south, and the plains of Assam and Bengal.

Field Marshal S.H.F.J. Manekshaw, who led the Bharatiya Army to victory in 1971 was one of Eastern Command's illustrious commanders. Besides the current army chief, Gen. Dalbir Singh and his predecessors Gen. Bikram Singh and Gen. V.K. Singh, others who have headed the Eastern Command are Gen. P.P. Kumaramanglam, Gen. A.S. Vaidya Gen. V.N. Sharma, all of whom rose to army chief.  -- Go Top

 

17. NATIONWIDE BLOOD DONATION CAMP OF VHP: 1 LAKH UNITS COLLECTED: In an overwhelming response to nationwide blood donation camp of VHP on 2^nd November , thousands of youth donated blood across Bharat, crossing a collection of a total of 100,000 units of blood across the nation. The blood donation drive was organised by VHP and its youth wing Bajarangadal to commemorate the Golden Jubilee year of Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

VHP Chief Dr Pravin Togadia inaugurated VHP blood donation drive at Karolbagh of New Delhi. 'In Karnataka 62 blood donation camps were held in which nearly 6000 units of blood collected', said VHP leader Gopal Nagarakatte.  -- Go Top

 

18. BHARATIYA COP WINS UN'S   FEMALE PEACEKEEPER AWARD: A Bharatiya police inspector has been named recipient of a prestigious international female peacekeeper award by the UN's police division for her "exceptional achievements" in her duty with the UN mission in Afghanistan.  

Inspector Shakti Devi of the Jammu & Kashmir Police, currently deployed in the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), has been awarded the International Female Police Peacekeeper Award 2014. 

Devi has been honoured for her "exceptional achievements" in leading the establishment of Women Police Councils in several parts of Afghanistan. She has also contributed to the improvement of the status of female police and has effectively helped the police of Afghanistan move towards achieving their goals of fully adopting democratic principles of policing. 

The award was delivered during the International Association of Women Police (IAWP) conference held earlier this month in Winnipeg, Canada.  -- Go Top

 

19.  BHARAT - BORN SCIENTIST AWARDED WORLD FOOD PRIZE:  Bharat -born Mexican scientist Sanjaya Rajaram has been presented with the prestigious World Food Prize 2014 for his agricultural research that led to a remarkable increase in world wheat production building on the successes of the Green Revolution. "It is a collective achievement, rather than that of a single person," Rajaram told while accepting the award at the Iowa State University in USA. The award "honours the innovative spirit of farmers", he said adding that "without their contributions, my research wouldn't have been possible".

By crossing winter and spring wheat varieties -- which were distinct gene pools that had been isolated from one another for hundreds of years -- he created wheat varieties that are disease- and stress-resistant and adaptable to diverse geographical regions and climates. In 2007, Norman Borlaug called Rajaram "the greatest present-day wheat scientist in the world". Borlaug is known as the father of the Green Revolution.  -- Go Top

 

20.  SHRI VISHWA NIKETAN: Pravas: Shri Ravikumar, sah samyojak Vishwa Vibhag, is on a tour to Australia. Shyam Parande, secretary Sewa International is on a short tour to Mauritius. Shri Saumitra Gokhale, samyojak Vishwa Vibhag, Dr. Ram Vaidya, sah samyojak & Ravikumar would reach Bharat on the occasion of World Hindu Congress in November. Visitors: Vikram Sharma – USA, Nicola Brown – UK  -- Go Top

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Sandalwood perfumes even the axe that hurls it down! The more we rub sandalwood against a stone, the more its fragrance spreads. Burn it, and it wafts its glory through the entire neighbourhood. Such is the enchanting beauty of forgiveness in life. – Swami Chinmayananda  -- Go Top

JAI SHREE RAM

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RENDEZVOUS WITH A VISIONARY

Asim Kumar Mitra

I just cannot remember the day. But I can definitely recall that on that day Eknathji (Shri Eknath Ranade) was coming to Kolkata from Chennai by a morning flight. I went to the airport to receive him. We were heading towards Vivekananda Kendra Karyalaya. All of a sudden Eknathji asked me, "What do you think? What should I do now?"

So sudden was the question, I was taken aback. If a giant personality like Eknathji asks such a question to a most junior worker like me what should I say? I had no answer for a moment. Then I thought when Eknathji was assigned the work of Vivekananda Memorial, he was Sarkaryavah of RSS and as a Sangh swayamsevak we have been missing him. So much so, the time before the country (1971 or 1972) was also bad so I said we hardly can afford to miss you any more from the Sangh work.

It was my honest and spontaneous reply. As a seasoned 'karyakarta', Eknathji immediately read my mind and started explaining the situation. By that time the first phase of the work of Vivekananda Memorial work was over and the then President of India VV Giri had inaugurated the grand memorial of Swami Vivekananda. In a way, the job assigned by Shri Guruji to Eknathi was successfully done. Now, puting forward a question to one and all of his acquaintances was obvious. What is the purpose of setting up of a temple? Should it not become a centre of activities to fulfill the ideal of 'Serve people, serve God'?

Answer was there in the question itself. But a junior person like me failed to understand that. Because my mind was swayed by the idea that RSS is doing this job. The idea of comprehensive upliftment of the society is very much there in the fabric of RSS ideology and its work. Why then a separate organisation is at all necessary? Then Eknathji went on at length to give me a piece of his mind. I was not quite convinced. Confusion about this was prevailed in my mind for quite some time. Then I had gone through a report of Eknathji's lecture on this very subject at Bangalore and I was totally convinced by listening his point of view. Let me quote some portions of that lecture. He said:

"Some people ask, 'Could this stone-structure alone be a fitting memorial to that great patriot saint?' To them I may humbly say that I myself have never been much of a believer in merely putting stone upon stone. The real urge in the Committee workers, including me, to work out the present memorial-plan springs forth from their faith and confidence that this granite structure would not only be an abiding source of great inspiration to posterity, but should also provide a nucleus a round which, over a period, great activities which the Swamiji preached and envisaged would spring up.

"Kanyakumari is a place, which may be considered as great symbol of purity and unity. It is a meeting point of three oceans. If the Sangam at Prayag is sacred because of the mingling of the holy waters of the three sacred rivers, this holy spot is a Mahasangam where the waters of the Ganga and Sindhu, Narmada and Goda, Krishna and Kaveri ultimately meet in the form of those three oceans the Gangasagar, the Sindhusagar and Hindu Mahasagar.

The place is, in a way, a meeting point of the East and the West also Standing at the topering end of our country, at Kanyakumari we can notice the disc of the sun rising from the sea in the East and taking a dip in the sea in the West."

"It is again the meeting point of the North and the South. The Goddess Kanya stands there at the southern most tip of our land, with a garland in Her hand to meet Her Lord, Shiva, whose abode is in Kailash, in the regions of the northernmost Himalayas.

"What a unique symbol of unity and purity! I have faith and confidence that the great memorial that is taking shape at that holy spot will, in times to come, generate a powerful current of Swamiji's thought and will envelop the entire country."

This lecture of Eknathji led me to understand him from altogether a different angle. His vision was so clear at the same time so down to earth as people of Bharat were eager to accept without any hesitation and time has proved its perfectibility. I was associated with the construction of the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at the very initial stage i.e. from 1963 to 1970. I visited Kanyakumari in the year 1963 as Eknathji wanted me to go there to get first hand experience.

Eknathji used to tell one thing that the idea of setting up of a memorial for Vivekananda would be successful only when mass participation in the construction work was assured. He said, through one-rupee coupons money should be collected so that even a poor man could participate in this Mahayajna. Mrs. Kamal Basu, wife of late Jyoti Basu, former Marxist chief minister of West Bengal, collected more that eleven thousand rupees by selling One-Rupee Coupons and deposited them to Vivekananda Rock Memorial Fund.

Eknathji was a perfectionist. When the question of constructing the bronze statue came he had engaged almost all the famous and renowned sculptors of the country. While engaging them he did not give any undertaking as to whose sculpture would be set up at the memorial temple on the rock. He only said the committee which was assigned to do this work selects the statue to be set up there at the Shilamandir. In Calcutta, he engaged Shri Debi Prasad Roychoudhury who was world famous sculptor and whose sculptures of Gandhiji or Freedom Movement of India were set up there in Calcutta, Delhi, Patna and many other places. Eknathji asked me to regularly visit the house of Shri Roychoudhury to watch the progress of the work and report it to Eknathji. Whenever I went to his house, Shri Rouchoudhury used tell me, "It was a mystery that I had accepted the proposal put forward to me by Eknathji. You know this proposal itself was derogatory for me as it had put me on the same rank of other general sculptors, which I was not. But Shri Ranade must have some kind of spiritual power by which he influenced me." The fact remained that the statue made by him was not put up at the Shilamandir at Kanyakumari. But it was placed somewhere else and in that case Eknathji abided by the condition of contract rules.

Eknathji had faced two almost insurmountable hurdles. Those hurdles were put up by (1) Prof. Humayun Kabir, Central Cultural Affairs minister and (2) Shri Bhaktavatsalam, the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Both were very tough personalities. How Eknathji managed those two guys is an interesting history. Recently, some 4/5 months back at a meeting held at Chhatubabur Rsjbati, retired Justice Shyamal Sen of Calcutta High Court, while mentioning the role of Chpalakanta Bhattacharya, former editor of 'Ananda Bazar Patrika' and Congress MP said Chapalababu was of great help to Shri Eknath Ranade in collecting signatures of Members of Parliament in support of constructing the grand temple of Swami Vivekananda at the rock at Kanyakumari. Eknathji was in Calcutta at that time to organise opposition against the comment of Humayun Kabir as "temple on the Rock would spoil the scenic beauty".

Swami Sambuddhananda was the General Secretary of Ramakrishna Mission at that time. He asked Debu Maharaj who was looking after the press section of the Mission to accompany with Eknathji and help him out in this campaign. The Press of Calcutta had given all out support to the cause of Vivekananda Temple at Kanyakumari.

In Calcutta the sentiment about Swami Vivekananda was tremendous. But the work started by the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari under the leadership of Shri Eknathji was unknown to them. At the same time Eknathji himself was also not so much acquainted with the prominent personalities of Bengal. Hence he chalked out a unique programme of writing personal letters to all those important personalities regularly apprising them of progress of the work at Kanyakumari.

Apart from this, every time he came to Calcutta he used to meet the chief minister, Mayor of Calcutta, sometimes the Governor of Bengal and the leaders of different political parties and social organizations. Personalities like the great historian Dr. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Speaker of state assembly Keshav Chandra Basu, Principal Dr. Amiya Kumar Majumdar, Bharat Maharaj of Belur Math and several other Swamijis of Ramakrishna Mission etc. Before his visit to Calcutta, every time he used to write letters to all those expressing his desire to meet them.

I know these things because as Calcutta Representative Eknathji used to keep me informed by sending copies of those letters to me. I am fortunate enough to get to work with such a visionary as a representative in Kolkata.

(This year is the birth centenary of Eknathji Ranade. The writer is Kolkata based senior journalist)  -- Go Top

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