'It is Easy to Abuse the BJP/RSS - Just Ask the Pseudo Secularists'

What I am saying is that those who commit the crime get away more easily than those who point out the criminals. What the Hindutvavadis are saying, as far as I can make out (since I wasn't ever a RSS member) is that the land we call India was first influenced by Vedic culture. Vedic culture, or Sanatana Dharma, is grounded in the idea of Sarvadharma Samabhava, i.e., allowing different belief systems to co-exist based on the idea that there are different paths to God. But that was before the Muslims invaded India. Islam does not allow such an idea. At a seminar on "The Muslim View of Spirituality", it is reported that the chief speaker was Prof. Hasan Askari, a noted Sufi expert, and described by some Westerners as "one of the eight most knowledgeable authorities on Islam this century". Prof. Askari spoke of the difference in Islam between the "two forms of Oneness". He said the Qur'an is not merely "One" ("Wahid") but "The One" (Ahad). The relevant passage he is said to have reverted to buttress his point was supposedly, "...Nothing have we ommitted from this book..." (6:38). "Shall I seek other than God as a source of law, when He has revealed to you this book fully detailed? Those who received the scripture recognize that it has been revealed from your Lord, truthfully. You shall not harbor any doubt. The word of your Lord is complete, in truth and justice. Nothing shall abrogate His words. He is the Hearer, the Omniscient." (6:114-115). So, what would you as, the reader, as a proponent of goodwill and believer in co-existence have to say about this aspect of Islam?

Finally, I come to the events of recent vintage, and of the supposed atrocities committed on Christians after the BJP came to power. The Ghouses, the shrill screamers of the "BJP Government Watch" and others of their ilk would like you to believe that the country is being torn apart by the BJP and the RSS. They have pretty well succeeded in their propaganda. Cunning, systematic, persistent, immoral, and blinkered, these people who would make Goebbels proud, have besmirched and continue to castigate those who wish to challenge their version of history and their version of Hinduism. To make my task easier, I am going to quote from Shourie's articles (The Law of the Land vs. Their Singular Focus) in which he, in his usual painstaking manner, details the chronology and the relevant facts. Here it goes:

There were seven sets of incidents. The first -- the one that most blackened the name of the country -- was the rape of four nuns in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. The Madhya Pradesh Government has completed investigations, and arrested the suspects. It turns out that there are as many Christians in the wretched lot as non-Christians, and that the rapes were committed not in furtherance of any religious cause, but because of local animosities -- two groups were contending with each other, one side concluded that the local church people were siding with the other group, and decided to teach them a lesson.

"Jhabua re-enacted in Jhajjar," proclaimed a four-column headline of The Hindustan Times in regard to the second incident. It reported -- on the authority of one of the chief propagandists of Christian organizations, he also doubles up as an Editor -- that nuns in Jhajjar, Haryana had been set upon and molested. The Observer of Business and Politics sent its correspondents to follow up the story. They found that the story was a complete fabrication. The nuns had arrived in Jhajjar some two-three years earlier. They had started teaching sewing to the local girls -- we will hear more of setting up such services as we proceed. There was an election for the local mahila mandal. Two groups were locked in a spirited contest as through the mandal they could get control over the profitable tailoring business. The nuns began to espouse the candidate of one group. Members of the other group came, shouted at them, remonstrated with them, and asked them to stay out of local rivalries. No one was molested. The entire conversation with the nuns was taped by the reporters. The paper published the facts. Neither the propagandist-Editor nor The Hindustan Times returned to the story they had played up so much.

"The third incident originated in a story put out by the Associated Press. An American doctor, Dr. John Sylvester, working in Allahabad attacked by Hindu fundamentalists, the agency reported, has had to seek shelter in a Baptist Church, his clinic broken up.... Sylvester is not a medical doctor, he has a Ph. D. in Economics. He is not an American, his wife is. He has no clinic, instead he runs two schools. Neither he nor his wife, nor their schools had ever been attacked. But the assault was the talk in atrocity-circles : in the papers, on Internet.

In the fourth incident, a nun was said to have been raped in Baripada, Orissa. Again, in less than a flash, the incident was all over -- in the papers, on Internet. The local missionary was in the forefront in giving it currency : he declared that "local communal outfits" were the ones who had raped the lady. Everyone ran with this, and the rape was projected as a continuation of the attacks by Bajrang Dal types on helpless Christians. The medical examination disclosed no signs of rape, not even of struggle : the marks were reported to be "superficial and self-inflicted". Police were also struck by a telling detail. The lady was asked for the garments she had been wearing - these were the items that were most likely to have had the decisive evidence to nail the culprits : semen and all - the investigators were told that all the clothes had been burnt immediately after the assault. Police and district officials were said to be non-plussed about how to handle the matter - lest the state government take umbrage.

In the fifth incident, a young girl and boy were found murdered in Kandhamal, also in Orissa. Although the murders had taken place in a remote forest, one TV channel had pictures by the evening bulletin -- not just of the bodies but of policemen hacking their way through the forest to them. The local officials said that there seemed to be no communal angle to the murders, but they were portrayed in our papers and those abroad as part of continuing attacks on Christians by militant Hindus. The incident got redoubled prominence : it became a butt in the factional war within Congress -- local Congressmen found in it the ultimate weapon in their efforts to replace J. B. Patnaik, the Chief Minister. Soon, the murderer was arrested -- he turned out to be from the same community, and the same religion as the victims. And the killings seemed to have been triggered by the usual, not just local but personal jealousies. I would sincerely request you to scour the back-issues of your papers, and compare the prominence that was given to news of the murders originally with the way news of the suspect having been found, and of his having confessed to the crime was treated.

The sixth incident was in fact not one but a set of attacks on Churches in Dangs. Reports in our so-called "national", that is English papers portrayed the attacks as the handiwork of militant Hindu organizations affiliated to the RSS. Reports in the papers of Gujarat pointed in an entirely different direction. The local Sarvodaya leaders who have been working in the area for over forty years put the responsibility at the door of the missionaries and their aggressive proselytizing activities. In the English press, an organization styling itself as the Hindu Jagran Manch was held to have executed the attacks. The VHP said that the organization had nothing to do with it. The Indian Express showed that this organization had been listed in an RSS-brochure as one of its affiliates. The suspects have all been arrested.

The seventh incident -- the one that resounded all over the world like the rape of the four nuns -- was of course the brutal killing of Staines and his little sons. The killers are yet to be caught. The principal suspect has been widely named -- rival organizations have alleged that he has been affiliated to the opposing organization: Hindu organizations have alleged that he has been close to "progressive" politicians of UP, the latter have alleged that he has been a member of the Bajrang Dal. The press in India and the world over has portrayed the killings as part of the same series of assaults on Christians.

I think five conclusions are in order. The first five incidents show that it is wholly wrong to rush to conclusions, in particular one should not build a pattern out of one or two incidents, and then see or portray events as being part of that pattern. There was a meeting of Parliament's Consultative Committee on Home Affairs a few days ago. The murders of that young girl and boy in Kandhamal, Orissa, were much in the air. I happened to inquire of the Home Ministry officials how many murders take place in India in a year. They telephoned to get the figure: thirty one thousand and...., they said. That being the case, we should pause before we fit the latest murder taking place in some remote forest into the theory of the moment.

Second, it is evident that in this instance, a pattern came to be so swiftly constructed and every incident projected as being part of that pattern, in part because there is a very well-knit network for disseminating information as well as miasmas -- in India and the world over. Recall how the shortfall in the onion crop came to be made into a national "crisis". Because of natural factors there had been a shortfall. Suddenly, story upon story began appearing : from Nasik -- disastrous losses in the crop; from Haryana -- ruinous loss....; traders sensed the opportunity to make a killing, and held back what they had; the price climbed another notch; consumers rushed to shops; the evening TV bulletins showed long queues; prices shot up again.... Elections over, the stories just disappeared from the front pages of papers, the cover pages of magazines. How come?

Third, in the present instance of Christians, it became that much easier for that network to project the incidents as being part of a general assault because of the foolish, incendiary statements of a few who presumed that they were speaking up for Hindus.

Fourth, as a Commission of Inquiry headed by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court is in place, at least now, instead of trading allegations, whoever has information on the Staines' killings -- including journalists who may have gathered primary evidence -- should furnish it to the Judge.

Fifth, in regard to the rapes at Jhabua and the attacks in Dangs, we should all press for action on proposals which the Prime Minister and Home Minister have urged. In his Address on so sacred an occasion as Martyrs' Day, the Prime Minister said that he was for day-to-day trials in such cases : as suspects in both sets of instances have already been rounded up, all should join to ensure that the trials do in fact take place at this pace. The Home Minister has said that he is for prescribing death-penalty for rape : Jhabua is an excellent case from which to commence this change. But there is a real problem, and if it is neglected -- as the growth of Bhindranwale was neglected for three murderous years, as the Babri mosque matter was neglected for decades -- grave consequences are bound to follow. That is not a warning, not a dhamki. It is a forecast -- exactly at par with the forecasts which persons like me had made in regard to Punjab, the capitulation to fundamentalists on Shah Bano, the shutting of eyes to the conversions in Meenakshipuram, and, of course, the Babri mosque. On each of those occasions, our forecast -- that the capitulation and neglect would stoke a mighty reaction -- was dismissed as the hallucination of communalists. In regard to each matter, those forebodings turned out to be true. I do hope that that will not be the sequence again.

The problem is this. The singular objective of all churchmen in India is conversion, or, to use their term, the harvesting of souls for Jesus. Their documents and publications show that in their faith everything they do is, and should be an instrument for attaining this singular objective. Moreover, because of severe problems which the Church is facing in places like Europe, church-groups have made India a special target for the coming decades. One point is that this sort of activity flies in the face of our law. The more serious point is that conversions on the scale they are aiming at, conversions by means they claim as warranted in what they insist is a "divinely ordained" task are bound to invite a grim reaction. And this is where the "success" of our secularists in preventing the State from taking corrective action -- on this matter as on infiltration from Bangladesh, on the activities of Islamic fundamentalist groups, on reform of civil law -- is pushing society into taking the law into its own hands. And in that lies a fatal difference. In contending with a problem, a State can act, it usually acts in an orderly manner. Society is too disorganized for its action to be orderly. Inundated by infiltrators, people cannot get to the authorities in Bangladesh, they will get at their neighbour in the adjoining slum. Incensed by mounting conversions, they cannot get to the Pope in Rome, or the evangelist headquarters in the USA, they will leap at the poor convert next door.

A long quote, a very long one.

I don't apologize to you the reader, but I apologize to Mr. Shourie for relying on him to do the work of explaining, clarifying, and debunking.

I also bet that the intellectuals on crutches at the "BJP Government Watch", the organizers of pseudo peace marches, the people who have held power for the last 50 years don't read Mr. Shourie.

Have you read the wild and vile abuse that the historian Romila Thapar has heaped on Arun Shourie? But have you also noticed that she and her ilk have not had one, NOT ONE clear refutation of Shourie's research into their program of abuse against Hinduism, their concoction of history, and their calculated plots to enrich themselves at the expense of the Indian tax payer?

Posturing, I propose, comes more easily and takes little effort to the pseudo secularists of this world. They spout some romantic stories about minorities not wanting any red carpet treatment, and some hilarious humbuggery about the "erstwhile and Eveready Congress Nationalistic party." The Congress, from Indira Gandhi's time, if not from earlier times, has institutionalized caste, corruption, collusion between politicians and criminals, and dynastic rule. That many pseudo-secularists have no problems with any or all of these, and instead try to slap the RSS and the BJP in their face should get the same deserving response.

But who will deliver it? I ask this rhetorically to point out how easy it is for the poorly educated, badly informed, prejudiced and blinkered of the world to call someone unpatriotic and un-Godly. The humbuggery they try to pass off as "wise counsel" will easily be gobbled up by the romantic, the easily carried away, and those wet-behind-the-ears reader. I say, "Beware"!

This article was originally published at Sulekha.

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