A grim joke on The Indian Essence

A blogger Pradeep has written an excellent write-up on the Ram-setu: http://treebeard31.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/a-bridge-too-far/

The Lord surveyed the Ram Setu and said “Hanuman, how diligently and strenuously you and your vanara sena had built this bridge several centuries back. It is remarkable that it has withstood the ravages of the climatic and geographical changes over centuries. It is indeed an amazing feat especially considering the fact that a bridge at Hyderabad built by Gammon using latest technology collapsed the other day even before they could stick the posters on its pillars.” Hanuman with all humility spoke “Jai Sri Ram, it is all because of your grace. We just scribbled your name on the bricks and threw them in the sea and they held. No steel from TISCO or cement from Ambuja or ACC was ever used. But Lord, why rake up the old issue now.”

Ram spoke “Well, Hanuman some people down there want to demolish the bridge and construct a canal. The contract involves lot of money and lot of money will be made. They will make money on demolition and make more money on construction. “Hanuman humbly bowed down and said “Why not we go down and present ourcase”

Ram said “Times have changed since we were down there. They will ask us to submit age proof and we don’t have either a birth certificate or school leaving certificate. We traveled mainly on foot and some times in bullock carts and so we don’t have a driving license either. As far as the address proof is concerned the fact that I was born at Ayodhya is itself under litigation for over half a century, If I go in a traditional attire with bow and arrow, the ordinary folks may recognize me but Arjun Singh may take me to be some tribal and, at the most, offer a seat at IIT under the reserved category. Also, a God cannot walk in dressed in a three-piece suit and announce his arrival. It would make even the devotees suspicious. So it is dilemma so to say.”

“I can vouch for you by saying that I personally built the bridge.” “My dear, Anjani putra, it will not work. They will ask you to produce the lay-out plan, the project details, including financial outlay and how the project cost was met and the completion certificate. Nothing is accepted without documentary evidence in India. You may cough but unless a doctor certifies it, you have no cough. A pensioner may present himself personally but the authorities do not take it as proof. He has to produce a life-certificate to prove that he is alive. It is that complicated.”

“Lord can’t understand these historians. Over the years you have given darshan once every hundred years to saints like Surdas, Tulsidas, Saint Thyagaraja, Jayadeva, Bhadrachala Ramdas and even Sant Tukaram and still they disbelieve your existence and say Ramayana is a myth. The only option, I see, is to re-enact Ramayana on earth and set the government records straight once for all.” Lord smiled “It isn’t that easy today. Ravan is apprehensive that he may look like a saint in front of Karunanidhi. I also spoke to his mama Mareecha, who appeared as a golden deer to tempt Sita maiyya when I was in the forest and he said that he won’t take a chance of stepping on earth as long as Salman Khan is around!!!”

Mommie Dearest

Mommie Dearest
The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 20, 2003, at 4:04 PM ET

I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism.

It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century.

As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)

According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done.

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize*. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one …

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.

Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise "natural" family planning.(Return to corrected sentence.)
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of the book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/

NGOs, activists and foreign funds: A book review

NGOs, activists and foreign funds: A book review
THE WELL-researched book is the result of two events; the national systemic bending-over-backwards to ‘render justice’ to the Muslim victims of the Gujarat riots and the denial of a visa to the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, by the US state department. The first was a process and the second an incident, and both the process and the incident were authored by the same group of prominent ‘peace’ and human rights NGOs and individual activists whose signature tune is ‘anti-Hindu’.

This book is not about the hundreds of NGOs working with great dedication among the socially and economically backward sections of our society motivated only by the inspiring vision of transforming social attitudes and the quality of life of the people amongst whom they live and work. But it is about those NGOs and activists whose ’peace’ and human rights activism cloak deep political ambitions and objectives not restricted to participating or influencing electoral politics but aimed at shaping the character and direction of the Indian polity in a manner which derives from their warped notion of the Indian nation. Their political ambitions and activism are essentially undemocratic and anti-India nation.

Notwithstanding the fact that important democratic institutions including the NHRC, Parliament and the Judiciary have repeatedly shown a marked tilt towards minorityism and have rushed to do the bidding of the ‘peace’ and human rights activists profiled in this book, these persons have nevertheless shamed our judiciary, our men in uniform and our polity with their criticism of these pillars of our democracy on foreign soil and even before foreign governments. Parliament should consider suitable restrictions being placed on retired judges, retired armed force personnel including and above the rank of Brigadier, retired bureaucrats including and above the rank of Assistant Secretary and retired policemen including and above the rank of SP from undertaking projects for foreign or foreign-funded think-tanks and from deposing before foreign governments and their departments on any issue without prior permission from the Government of India.

The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has been sitting for over five decades on the title suit of the Ramjanmabhumi while the Supreme Court promptly issues interim orders on cases filed by the Muslim community seeking to deny Hindu access to the site; those guilty of the genocide of Sikhs during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, those guilty of the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus and those that render Kashmiri Hindus alive in the notorious Radhabai Chawl incident during the Mumbai riots of 1992, have all escaped the notice and attention of these very national institutions and the same ’peace’ and human rights activists who continue to campaign for the Muslim victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002.

There is a growing perception among the Hindu intelligentsia that ‘peace’ and human rights NGOs and activists are holding all democratic institutions in the country hostage to international opinion about democracy and good governance to serve the cause of ’secularism’ in a peculiarly on-sided fashion, which may be interpreted to be anti-Hindu

The well researched book exposes that India’s so-called secular polity is teetering perilously on the brink of minorityism aided and abetted in no mean measure by this well-networked group of Hindu-baiters who have succeeded in cleverly cloaking their congenital anti-Hindu bias in the garb of constitutional ’protection of minority rights’ discourse. These NGOs and other politically motivated activists have embarked on the twin mission to weaken India’s political will to deal ruthlessly with Islamic, Christian and Naxal terrorism and to de-Hinduise the nation. A group of nationalist Indians - some of them residing abroad - came together to profile these ’internationally acclaimed’ ’peace’ and human right NGOs and activists with a view to exposing their anti-India and anti-Hindu activism

The most striking feature of this book is that, in spite of the fact that the authors never discussed which NGOs to put under the scanner and which activists to expose when they began to write the book, they all zeroed in on the same groups! The book offers a veritable mine of information on these NGOs and activists – who are their supporters, partners and collaborators, what they say, what they write and their position on important national issues. What the compilers have presented, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. They have provided endnotes and appendices, which will enable the interested reader to dig deeper.

The book argues that contrary to doctored public opinion, these internationally- acclaimed NGO’s and activists are a threat to communal harmony and India’s democratic ethos. Communal harmony and democracy are naturally and best protected only when 85 per cent of this nation’s population repose faith in the country’s democratic institutions.

The book exhorts the reader to raise his voice too as a political Hindu to render service to this great nation’s well being.

In this second and revised edition of the book a new chapter, exposing AID, has been added, as well as a number of new appendices that include Narendra Modi’s speech at a book release function. The book exposes Nirmala Deshpande, Arundathi Roy and Admiral Ramdas and their kind much better and the kind of industry of which they are a part. Arundhati Roy, soon after Pokharan 2, said that she was a mobile independent republic. Roy also said she is not a flag-waving patriot. But since Roy has a passport, it must have something to do with the Indian nation. So, the Indian nation is relevant at least to the extent that it allows these people to travel abroad to badmouth this country.

The clearly reveals the position of these so called NGO activists in regard to national territory, to opinions they express in regard to Jammu and Kashmir, the kind of nonsense they speak on American and Pakistani soil about our jawans, is a cause of grave concern, because they are members of either the National Integration Council or of CABE or of the National Advisor Council of the UPA government. And they are not above glorifying terrorism.

With facts the book argues that the so-called NGOs have no faith in our elected parliament, they have no faith in our judiciary, they have no faith in the NHRC. They go to the US state department to depose before it, begging the US State Department to come to India and protect India’s democracy. It is high time legislation is put in place banning such people from deposing before alien governments against the Indian Army and India’s democratic institutions. Very little is generally known about the kind of position these people take on American soil against the Indian nation, or their position on Jammu and Kashmir, or what they are to say about our army. We have our jawans dying day in and day out protecting our territory, protecting our right to live. Why is it that the media does not do an expose of these people, on what they have stated about Jammu and Kashmir, what they have stated about Naxal terrorism, what they have stated about India’s defence requirement, what they have stated about the Indian Army? What is the opinion that they have about India’s democratic institutions? Every major issue concerning national security, every issue concerning national interest, they reduce to the politics of minoritysm.

Arundhati Roy, for example, speaks for effect. She puts words cleverly together. And, mindless that we are, we are so fascinated by the English she speaks that we fail to subject the contents to critical scrutiny. In fact, she has run down everything that is sacred or reverent to large sections of India’s people. The book has documented, word for word, what they have said, and the kind of patrons they have found abroad. Why do the European Parliament and the US State Department support these activists? The compilation prompts us to look at these questions and gives us the need to have the courage to look at the answers. Releasing the book on September 9, 2006, KPS Gill noted his surprise ‘that anti-nationals in our country are respected, and nationalists are derided. These days our country is fighting terrorism. But our so-called intellectuals have made efforts unparalleled in the history of the world to decry and deny our success in fighting terrorism’.

Vigil has placed before the readers, world for word a true picture of the so-called NGOs. One must have the courage to look at the book dispassionately. The book exposes the illustrious people who find international patronage. This brilliantly analysed and thought-provoking book is a must for all those who love India.

NGOs, activists and foreign funds (anti-nation industry)
Published by:Vigil Public Opinion Forum,
H-12/3, Pari Street, Kalakhetra Colony,Besant Nagar, Chennai – 600090
Edition: 2007
Pages: 422Price: Rs 400

Artistic freedom yes, but not with Aurangzeb

Artistic freedom yes, but not with Aurangzeb
--Kanchan Gupta

Artistic freedom in increasingly 'secular' India has come to mean the right to denigrate Jesus Christ and Goddess Shakti, as was done by a callow student of the fine arts faculty of Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda last year. But permission to exhibit exquisite miniatures and firmans related to Aurangzeb has been denied, because 15 Muslims and a bogus nawab have demanded so.

French journalist Francois Gautier's Foundation Against Continuing Terrorism (FACT) has painstakingly -- and at great expense -- put together a collection of 40 miniatures and firmans that tell the story of Aurangzeb's rule. The exhibition is called Aurangzeb as he was according to Mughal records. "We have taken care to present all facets of Aurangzeb, including his piety," says Gautier.

The collection was first exhibited to critical acclaim at the Habitat Centre in New Delhi. It next travelled to Pune where one lakh people visited the show. It was equally well received in Bangalore where the popular Gallery G hosted the exhibition. FACT then decided to take the collection to Chennai where it was supposed to be exhibited at the Lalit Kala Akademi from March 3 to 9.

The exhibition was inaugurated by N Vittal, former Chief Vigilance Commissioner, and B Raman, security expert and former R&AW official, March 3 at 5 pm. Some 100 people attended the inauguration. Since March 4, a continuous stream of people came to see the exhibits.

On March 5, a group of 15 Muslims (Gautier says "they were no more than six") affiliated to the Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam, Manitha Neethi Paasarai and other Muslim organisations, entered the exhibition hall and confronted FACT volunteers who were present there. Raising their voice, they rubbished the show and alleged that it did not portray the right image of 'their' Aurangzeb.

"They threatened they wouldn't allow the show to go on, that they would send hundreds of protesters after Friday prayers from a nearby mosque," says Gautier. The organisers lodged a complaint with the local police station and the next day policemen were posted at Lalit Kala Akademi.

Meanwhile, RM Palaniappan, manager of Lalit Kala Akademi, rattled by the protest by 15 men, asked FACT to pack up and leave. He panicked after Assistant Commissioner of Police KN Murali visited the exhibition hall, had a cursory look at the miniatures and firmans (written in Persian and hence unintelligible to him), worked himself into a rage and shouted at the organisers, lacing his diatribe with expletives, before stomping off, threatening to return.

On March 6, Prince of Arcot Nawab Mohammed Abdul Ali made a surprise visit to the exhibition at 3 pm. After spending some time looking at the miniatures and the firmans, he lashed out at FACT volunteers and accused them of "misrepresenting facts". He was particularly enraged by two miniatures -- the first depicted Aurangzeb's army destroying the Somnath temple and the second showed the destruction of the Kesava Rai temple in Mathura.

He insisted that the paintings amounted to "fabrication and distortion of history" and that Aurangzeb had never done anything to harm the Hindus. He demanded that the exhibition be immediately shut down and said he would take up the issue with "higher authorities" in the State Government. Later, the 'Prince of Arcot' issued a Press statement, claiming, "the exhibition seemed to dwell only on Aurangazeb's alleged misdeeds and not a word about his munificent contribution. The exhibition would only promote enmity between various groups."
By Thursday, March 7, "higher authorities" in Tamil Nadu Government had issued instructions to the police to shut down the exhibition. Murali, along with his men, stormed into the exhibition hall on Thursday evening and began taking down the paintings. "He was looking for the paintings showing the destruction of Somnath and Kesava Rai temples. He threw them to the floor," said a FACT volunteer.

The police say they acted after receiving "three complaints that the show would disturb communal harmony". They wanted the exhibition to be shut down immediately as the next day was Friday. The police also forcibly took into custody three FACT volunteers -- Saraswathi (65), D Vijayalakshmi (62) and Malathi (47) -- although women cannot be detained after sunset in police stations. They were not allowed to contact their families.

The hall has been sealed and FACT has no idea about the fate of the paintings and other exhibits, including the priceless firmans. "I am told some of the paintings have been damaged beyond repair. This is shocking, especially because what we have witnessed is vandalism by the police," says Gautier.