Are Hindus more sinned against than sinning?

The background

For nearly two thousand years the Abrahamic faiths have been seeking to extend
the hegemony - odd as it may sound, of their respective philosophies - by
proselytizing people for love or for money and quite often by the sword. They
have been vying for space in Europe and West Asia, which was the cause for
intense strife known in the past as crusades. Their onslaughts in Africa and the
rest of the world have often resulted in bloody demographic decimation and
genocide of the infidel.

The persecution of Jews in various countries of Europe including in non-religious

communist nations ironically by those who profess to be followers of the prince
of peace has been well documented. The creation of Israel as a culmination of
their persecution by one of the crusading faiths has only extrapolated into the
twentieth century the strife between them; the other bitterly complaining it as a
sleight-of-the-hand awarding of land belonging it.

Their campaigning for hegemony in South Asia has been equally bloody. Hitler’s
genocide of six million Jews in six years appears minuscule compared to the
genocide of eight hundred million Hindus by Islamic invaders in five centuries
between the tenth and the fourteenth.

The approach of Christians in India has been much more subtle although
proselytizing campaigns with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other
have not been unknown. The campaigns of Francis Xavier (Sainted later) in Goa
and Robert Clive in the rest of India may be cited as examples of this approach.

Health, education and exploitation of the weaknesses of the Hindu faith such as
the caste system are subtle vehicles that the clever Christian proselytizers have
employed to achieve their objectives. The naïve under-privileged or the tribal
populations in the far reaches of India have never been told that there are as
many distinctions, denominations and hierarchical rungs and under-privileged in
the Christian world, only they had a different nomenclature.

The two principal objectives of corporate management are growth and profits.
The organizational structure of the Church is often cited as a typical management
case study, the other universal application being the armed forces. Just as in
corporate management, the harvesting of souls is run like a business with the
twin objectives of growth and profits, each feeding the other. The dwindling
numbers of Church-goers in the West following secularization of societies is
naturally a cause for concern for the top management. (The word secularization
has an altogether different connotation in contemporary India which simply
means adopting an anti-Hindu intellectual stance!) The remedial strategy
adopted by the top management ironically is akin to Hitler’s Lebensraum
concept but by more subtle means.

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The current strife in context!

As is their wont the secular exponents found in the recent Hindu-

Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka grist to their anti-Hindu
mill. The violence in Orissa followed the brutal murder of a revered
Hindu pontiff Swami Lakshmananda Saraswathi who happened to be
the state vice president of the Viswa Hindu Parishat. He was
murdered along with four other inmates of his Ashram including a
woman devotee.

In the zeitgeist of Indian secular ethos Hindus are expendable.

Swamijis and office bearers of Hindu organizations like the Bajrang
Dal, the RSS and the VHP are even more equal - in being expendable!
The Hindus should shrug off violence against them so that exponents
of the Indian brand of secularism can praise the resilience of Indian
secularism and syncretism.

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

Pics by Ritesh Uttamchandani, reproduced from:

http://mumbaitrainblasts.wordpress.com/

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

The refrain of - the resilience of Indian secularism - continued till

Delhi was bombed in 2008. The bombings of Jaipur, Bengaluru and
Ahmedabad were explained away as an expression of Muslim anger
against the BJP as these states were ruled by the party. The secular
alibis for the mass murders included social alienation, exclusion from
main stream society, poverty, poor representation in government jobs
and anger against Ayodhya and Gujarat riots that followed the savage
burning of fifty nine Karsevaks in February 2002.

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

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

The following may be summed up as the report’s errors of commission and

omission. The report did not take into account the bulk of educated employed
Muslims that migrated to Pakistan when the country was partitioned. It did not
take into account the numbers of Muslims engaged in trades and other
professions. It excluded the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes from
corresponding Hindu figures thus annulling any equity in its comparisons. Last
but not least it excluded educated / well off Muslims from comparisons.

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

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

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

When it was found that highly educated and well-paid professionals

too took part in the terror attacks the groundswell of public opinion
forced the secular exponents to change their refrain but only just.
Forced on the back foot they had to a do balancing act by finding
villains in the majority religion to appease their minority vote banks.
Therefore the bogey of the Bajrang Dal was raised with a pliant media
orchestrating it as the root cause of anarchy.

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

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

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

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

Swami Laksmananda a Vedic scholar has been running schools and colleges, for
the unconverted Panas. However both the converted Kandhas and the
unconverted Panas were thronging to his satsangs and discourses in great
numbers. This is the fly in the proselytizers’ ointment. They wanted to do away
with him and according to a recent report of the region’s inspector general of
police – ‘a religious group’ - recruited the Maoists to do the hatchet job. Is it
difficult to imagine who the unnamed religious group was? India’s secular media

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

For a detailed analysis of the issue see “Kandhamal and Bengaluru” by S.

Gurumurthy (The New Indian Express, 11.09.2008).

The happenings in Mangalore Karnataka were again true to form: a neo-convert

pastor in Andhra Pradesh wanted to be lauded for being more loyal than the
King. His pamphlet, the product of a prostituted, putrefied and suppurating mind
portrayed Hindu gods and goddesses in the most obnoxious manner possible
accusing them of incest, debauchery and worse.

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

“Urvashi - the daughter of Lord Vishnu - is a prostitute. Vashistha is the son of

this prostitute. He in turn married his own Mother. Such a degraded person is
the Guru of the Hindu God Rama.” (p. 48).

“When Krishna himself is wallowing in darkness of hell, how can he enlighten

others? Since Krishna himself is a shady character, there is a need for us to
liberate his misled followers.” (p. 50).

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

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

“When the Trinity of Hinduism (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) are consumed by
lust and anger, how can they liberate others? The projection of them as Gods is
nothing but a joke.” (p. 39)

“God, please liberate the sinful people of India who are worshipping False
Gods.” (p. 39)

This was the background for the Bajrang Dal activists’ protests in Mangalore.
They were protesting mainly against Newlife prayer houses but as they could not
distinguish one denomination from the other, it appears, they protested against a
catholic church too.

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

More sinned against than sinning?

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

The Archbishop of Bangalore chose to berate the Chief Minister of the state in the
full glare of media cameras, when the CM sought to meet with him and
commiserate with him for the violent protests. The secular exponents did not
utter a word of reproof against such a blatant insult meted out to the
democratically elected leader of a state.

Consider the secular exponents’ quiescence vis-à-vis Muslim protests against the
cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper and the furore against granting
political asylum to Taleema Nasreen.

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

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

The quintessence of Indian secularism as it is in vogue appears to be not in

separating the state and religion as the word originally connoted but in opposing
Hinduism, its philosophy and social mores. On the other hand a pilgrimage to
Azamgarh to commiserate with the families of those arrested for acts of war on
the Indian nation and seeking a ban of the Bajrang Dal was seen as an avowal of
their secular credentials by some!

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

Tags: Bajrang Dal ; Managalore; Hindu-Christian violence; Kandhamal, Newlife

Church; Proselytization; Secularism;