INDIA SECULAR

Discover India’s past to find its future

S. Gurumurthy, Covert.co.in

Modern Indians, including Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who argued the case for a modern India with Mahatma Gandhi, could neither own nor reject India’s past.

Nehru bluntly told Mahatma Gandhi once that he did not consider Ram Rajya of the past, revered by the Mahatma, as the ideal road map for India’s polity, nor did he want it back.

But with most Indians refusing to snap their links with the past, many modernists, silently — and some, even openly — had written off India as a lost cause, almost agreeing with the likes of Max Weber who asserted that Hindus and Buddhists who believed in karma and rebirth could not develop in a modern world.

But it is now evident that India, once written off, has more than just survived, with loyalty to its past reasonably intact. Today it is perceived as a rising global power.

If India could handle the future without disowning its past, is it not time that Indians also debated whether it was their past that is wrong, or their adjudication about it?

Begin from the run-up to India’s freedom. Winston Churchill predicted that free India would slip into anarchy; he even counselled the British “to leave India to God; and, if that is too much, leave her to anarchy”. But India did not oblige Churchill. Instead, within a couple of years, it formulated a Constitution based on the rule of law on which the British had based their right to civilise, even rule, others.

India unfailingly conducted elections, installed elected governments. More. When Indira Gandhi attempted to undo this, the Indian villagers, whom the West and the Westernised in India — like Nehru did in his letter to Mahatma Gandhi way back in 1928 — despised as illiterate and uncivilised, handed an unforgettable defeat to her and restored democracy.

Some two decades after Churchill, another accomplished Westerner, but from the United States, J.K. Galbraith, confirmed India as an “anarchy”, but a “functioning” one. Galbraith, US Ambassador to India, was an admirer of Nehru, who proudly confided to Galbraith that he, Nehru, would be the last English Prime Minister of India!

Many in the West believed that “anarchic” India would function only till Nehru was around.

A leading American journalist, Welles Hangen, even wrote a book titled After Nehru, Who? which concealed the implied question, what after Nehru — anarchy?

But India has, by now, seen after an inevitable Nehru, two more inevitables from the Nehru stable, and many non-Nehrus, as Prime Ministers. It has proved that it could do business with even a Deve Gowda, a farmer, or Inder Gujral, a refugee from Pakistan, or Manmohan Singh, a World Bank pensioner, as Prime Ministers.

Far from one Nehru or one party in charge, coalitions of two dozen parties have been running governments successively for full terms, something which an Italy, which is some 2% of India, could not do; and Japan — less than a tenth of India — did not; which is something unthinkable for a Britain, that is about 5% of India; and is something that might even break the United States.

Free India has handled a Constitution that is based on an Anglo-Saxon worldview, with marginal indigenous input. The Indian Constitution instituted parliamentary democracy, but Indian polity has formalised dynasty; it preaches secularism, but our politics patronises communal vote banks; it celebrates socialism, but our economy functions on free market; it proscribes caste-oriented discrimination, but our polity prescribes caste-based differentiation; it is centred on individuals, but our politics is built around crowds; it makes Hindi the link language, but India is branded as the world’s second largest English-speaking nation.

What does this mean? Indian civilisation seems to possess unbelievable flexibility to handle these seemingly irreconcilable contradictions.

Destiny has given India a durability which it seems to have denied to its cousins in the West and Middle West.

There is no Greek or Roman or Egyptian or Babylonian or Arab or Persian civilisation today.

Spiders weave a web where Caesars ruled, said Swami Vivekananda. Yet, more than a century ago, he foresaw India’s rise, when no one suspected it would ever happen.

India is now seen, even by those who had earlier written its obituary, as a rising geopolitical, economic power.

Responsible analysts assert that three decades from now, India is likely to rank on par with the US as the second largest economy in the world; and as one of the top three world powers — the other two being US and China — reducing Germany, England, France, Japan and Russia to just regional status. Is this the rise of a backward nation?

British historian William Dalrymple sees rising India as merely claiming back its original status as a leading global power. Pre-colonial India was the leading economic powerhouse of the world.

But, led by the colonial view that India had no proud past, distant or recent, free India’s leadership worked, unsuccessfully, to bury the past which it found difficult to handle. Worse, it trivialised its past by labelling the slow progress of the nation under a socialist regime as the “Hindu rate of growth”, implying that India’s past was holding down its growth rate. But the truth is the other way round. If the label Hindu rate of growth is acceptable in economics, it has to be equally conceded that it had made India the leading economic power for 17 centuries.

A study of global economic history by Angus Maddison, adviser to OECD, has confirmed that from the dawn of the Common Era, till 1700 India was the global economic leader. Maddison’s study says that, in 1725, China overtook India, but India was the next, with France and Britain much lower down. This order continued till 1800. Later, the deepening colonial exploitation pushed India to the third position, and slowly, with the rise of the US and other countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, India was pushed into backwardness.

It was colonialism, as Dadabhai Nowrojee substantiated first and as Will Durant eloquently articulated later in his paper, “The Case for India”, that ruined India.

It is not over yet. The education system that free India adopted from colonialists kept these facts away from young Indians and instead addicted them to self-flagellation and negativism, making many of them feel shy, rather than proud, of their past. Result?

Most Indians, finance minister P. Chidambaram included, are unaware that India was the global economic topper till the 18th century and that it lost that position only due to colonial assault. Recently the finance minister even chided those who maintained that India that was once prosperous was ruined by colonialism.

Free India’s leaders had blamed its underdevelopment on its past, trusting Western sociologists like Max Weber who certified in the 1920s that India was unfit for socio-economic development on modern lines as it believed in caste, karma and rebirth.

But today in many American universities, says the International Business Week, capitalism aligned to the philosophy of karma is being taught as the way out of the current corporate capitalist mess.

Back in India, a Harish Damodaran from the Marxist stable, being the grandson of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, and others write books on how different castes — not just Vaishyas or other Savarnas, but also OBCs and even Dalits — have risen up on the development ladder.

And thanks to their entry, business has generated a mass entrepreneurial movement in India. The Global Entrepreneur Monitor Study [2002] identifies that 18% of the Indian people in the age group of 16 to 64 are entrepreneurs, while in China it is 12% and in the US it is 10%.

That is why the growth story of India, with foreign investment less than 2% of its total investment, is regarded as entrepreneur-driven, while China’s is seen as largely foreign investment-driven.

Finally, India has only 12,404 police stations, as per Indian home ministry’s statistics for December 2004, to supervise thousands of towns and lakhs of villages, and yet it has the lowest crime rate, according to UNDP.

Evidence is mounting against those who blamed India’s past to escape all blame for the present.

William Dalrymple is right when he says that for India it is back to prosperity, not backwardness to prosperity. Hence the question:

Is its past that is to blame for India’s underperformance for half a century after freedom, or was that just an alibi for a leadership that did not perform? [¼]http://www.covert.co.in/gurumurthy.htm 

I am provoked to write this
-M.S.N. Menon , Organiser

Yes. When I’m told that Hindus “live in darkness” I’m provoked.

I’m a Hindu, not the usual one, for I took the trouble to make a special study of human civilisations and religious atrocities. Naturally, I see religions in a different light. Not the way the “faithful” see them.

Religions are full of lies and false claims.

The Jews claimed they were “the chosen people of God.” Where did this delusion take them? To the worst persecution known to man! They remain the object of the longest hate in human history.

Take Christianity. What is its claim and what is the reality? It claims to have civilised Europe. In fact, it destroyed one of the greatest civilisations of man—the Greek civilisation.

Vassili Vassilevsky, one of the most stimulating authors of Greece, says: “It took us inheritors of a joyous paganistic culture, a long time to internalise the notion of ‘guilt’.

Even today we do not wholly accept the idea that the body is the source of evil.” And yet Jesus had said that the “Kingdom of God is within you.” Then, who put the Devil inside the Christian to torment them? The Organised Church.

And it also destroyed the Roman empire. One of the first acts of the Christians (that of Emperor Theodisius), when they came to power in Rome, was to order the destruction of the most splendid library in the temple of Serapis.

Obviously, the Church had no desire for enlightenment. The Hindus pray for light daily.

The Church converted the pagan temples into tombs, says W.E.H. Lecky, “for the adoration of the bones of the basest and most depraved of men among the Christian monks.” (History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe”, Vol.II)

And a Christian mob stripped and cut into pieces a gifted, virtuous and beautiful lady in Alexandria. What was her crime? That she was the leader of the Neo-Platonists!

The Roman empire had produced some of the great men in history like poets Horace and Virgil, historians like Livy and Polybius, philosophers like Epictetus and Plotinus, orators like Cicero, lawgivers like Cato. What did Christianity produce in the 1500 years of its dominance over Europe? Not one man of greatness! And almost every great man who was born in Europe after the Renaissance was outside the Church.

And the Roman empire spread the Hellenistic civilisation in half the world. What has the Christian empire to show?

It is the claim of the church that it made a major contribution to the growth of morality in Europe. In fact, it made little contribution. It called Descartes, father of moral philosophy, an atheist!

The Church gave its blessings to both capitalism and imperialism. And later to colonialism. Secretary of State Amery (UK) says that an active empire and an inactive Church cannot go together.

The Church had a big hand in slave trade. If there was a conscience problem, it helped to ease it by saying that the black man was the son of the Devil.

Denouncing the trade in black men, Lord Palmerston says: “If all crimes committed from creation down to the present day were added together, they would not exceed, I am sure, the guilt of the diabolic slave trade.” In America Lincoln had to fight a civil war to outlaw the trade. The Church was behind the rebel southern States.

According to the Church, the dark races were not required in God’s scheme of things.

The genocide of the Incas, Mayas and others has no parallel in human history. They were more civilised than the Europeans. “By millions upon millions” says Draper “whole races and nations were remorselessly cut off.

The Bishop of Chiape affirmed that more than 15 million were terminated in his time. From Mexico and Peru, a civilisation that might have educated Europe, was crushed out.” (Intellectual Development of Europe, Vol. II)

On Galileo’s incarceration, Draper writes: “What a spectacle! This venerable man, the most illustrious of his age, forced by the threat of death to deny the facts…treated with remorseless severity during the remaining ten years of his life….” In the dungeon.

There is nothing in human history as diabolic as the Inquisition. It was created by the Popes to perfect the “art” of torture of the apostates. I can only think of the gas chambers of the Nazis, which did away with six million Jews.

“What strikes me most in considering medieval torture is not so much this diabolic barbarity, which is impossible to exaggerate, as the extraordinary variety and what may be termed the artistic skills they displayed”. (Lecky)

What else can one expect from a religion which had thought of eternal hell fire as a punishment for even small wrongs of men!

What about Islam? Space compels me to make it a short review. In his book “In the path of Mahatma Gandhi”, George Catlin, the American philosopher, asks: “What has Islam to offer to compare with the philosophy of Vedanta and the Upanishads?” So much for its “Superiority” claim!

Be that as it may, what is the record of Islam’s atrocities? “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history,” says Will Durant, the American historian.

The Muslims do not want to be reminded of their past. But it is necessary, says S.Bashiruddin, former Vice Chancellor of Dr. Ambedkar Open University. (See his ‘Deen and Dharma”).

He says: “Through the present generation of Muslims is not responsible for what has been done centuries ago, an awareness of such a legacy can sensitize the Muslim opinion leaders…”

With such a record of their past, I would like to know from Christian and Muslim brothers, in which way they are “superior” to the Hindus.

Do not tell me that your religious texts do not permit these things. This is an easy explanation. I don’t take it.

Men are judged by what they do, not by what they believe or by what is written in their scripture.

http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=243&page=14

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jun/06guest1.htm

Stand up for the Indian soldier

Harsh Pant, Rediff.com

It is with a sense of disbelief that one hears the Indian minister of state for defence, sitting in his cozy air-conditioned seminar room, pontificating that ‘it is unbecoming’ of  former soldiers to protest against the treatment meted out to them by the government. So here’s a non-soldier making a public protest. One hopes that it is not below the dignity of the minister to read this.

Sixth Pay Commission, it can make the issue go away. A country that refuses to respect its armed forces will eventually end up getting forces that will not respect the nations’ aspirations. A country makes a sacred contract with its soldiers that while he/she will lay down his/her life when called upon to do so, the nation will take good care of his/her and his/her family’s needs to the extent its resources would permit.

This contract underpins the very survival of a nation as when its territorial integrity and political independence are under threat, the nation looks upon the only instrument that can protect it — its armed forces.

While all governments have to look for a considered bargain between their commitments and power and between power and resources, a responsible government will always be aware of the serious implications of not spending adequate resources on defence.

The debate as it has been made out to be in some quarters between defence and development is a spurious one. Unless adequate provisions are made for defence, no state will be able to pursue its developmental agenda.

This is much more important for a country like India that faces a unique security environment with two of its ‘adversaries’ straddling it on two sides of its borders and problems on all sides of its periphery.

A government can keep spouting pious rhetoric about global peace and non-violence but it realises fully that force is the ultima ratio in international relations. Politics among nations is conducted in the brooding shadow of violence. Either a state remains able and willing to use force to preserve and enhance its interests or it is forced to live at the mercy of its militarily powerful counterpart.

Even Nehru, after neglecting defence for all the years after independence had to eventually concede in 1962 that India’s military weakness ‘has been a temptation, and a little military strength may be a deterrent.’

The Indian public and press remain apathetic on defence issues. We make Kargil into a television spectacle, an opportunity for our journalists to try to show their temporary bravery by going to the frontlines for a few hours and getting the excitement of covering a war from the inside.

And then when it is all over, our soldiers have been interred into their graves, we move on to new and more exciting spectacles — to our song and dance reality shows and saas-bahu sagas, forgetting that soldiers are still on guard.

This is a nation that will cry with Lata Mangeshkar when she sings Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon but will not make any effort to understand the real problems and concerns of its soldiers.

It is a sign of the highly skewed priorities of the Indian media that the rising turmoil and dissatisfaction within the ranks of nations’ armed forces is being given only perfunctory coverage.

It is an issue of nation’s very survival yet the media seems busy with its devotion of superficialities.

Every rave and rant of Bollywood actors is religiously covered, detailed dissection of seemingly never-ending cricket matches are conducted, exorbitant pay rises in the corporate sector make it to the headlines but the one issue that can make or break the future of this country is consigned to the margins.

We continue to pray at the altar of our false heroes while our real heroes continue to face neglect and scorn.

The armed forces feel they have never got their due from various pay commissions over the years but the government in its wisdom decided to keep the armed forces away from any representation in the latest Pay Commission.

The dominance of bureaucrats meant that while the interests of the bureaucrats were well-recognised, the armed services once again ended up getting a raw deal.

The discontent is so serious that some of the best and brightest in our services have refused to go for the Higher Command Courses and more and more are seeking an early retirement.

Indian armed forces are desperately trying to fill vacancies as other professions are luring the young of the country.

Against the sanctioned strength of 300 per batch, the National Defence Academy finds that it can only attract 192 cadres this year.

The same story repeats itself in the Indian Military Academy. A country that purports to be a rising power is facing a shortage of more than 11,000 officers.

The reason is pretty obvious: One can’t think of any major power in the world that treats its soldiers the way India does. It is indeed a sorry sight when India’s bravest have to literally cry out for help from a callous politico-bureaucratic elite.

Our politicians remain more than willing to waste tax payers money by routinely boycotting Parliament and have never shied away from increasing their own pay and allowances, claiming that they remain underpaid.

Yet those who defend the sanctity of Parliament are given a short shrift.

The abysmal knowledge of defence issues that pervades the Indian political class probably gives them an illusion that the country is being protected by divine blessings.

Political apathy and bureaucratic design are rapidly eroding the self-esteem of our forces. A functioning liberal democracy needs a loyal soldier that can take care of the state’s security, allowing the state to look after its citizenry.

In India, the State is gradually withering away, all that’s left is the loyal soldier. How long will this soldier, under siege from all sides, remain steadfast to its commitments, is a question all Indians should seriously ponder on.

Dr Harsh V Pant teaches at King’s College, London

(( Views expressed here are of authors’ own and not of this website.))

Islamic Lust for Hindu women: Psychological Warfare

Jagmohan Singh Khurmi, ivarta

India-Pakistan one-day cricket match is something more than just a match. It is clash of egos, ideas ( and sometimes brickbats also ). Now and then certain things happen to certain people which they will regret for a lifetime, even to those who have lots and lots of control over their emotions i.e. professional actors like Shah Rukh Khan : in heat of the moment the thin mask of secularity slips off and for a spilt-second a keen observer is able to see the ugly face of Islamic supremacy.

This happened when he tried to defend his co-religionist Shoaib Malik”s cliché of apologizing to the pan-Islamic world for failing to defeat the Indians. Instead of denouncing him he went ahead to justify his co-religionist”s dumb remark.

There has been a drastic change in Bollywood’s movies. Where we used to see “BHAJANS” in movies, now we see “QAWALLIS” of Dargahs or Church bells. Movie Heroes wear crosses in their necks, and villains wear “Tilak” on forehead and aum in their necks. This is a clear attempt to show Hindus as bad characters, and portray minorities, Muslims and Christians, as good characters. Dubai’s Muslim dons have cleaned Mumbai’s film industry of good Hindu heroes. Every movie funded by Dabai’s mafia has to have Muslim hero, be is Shahrukh Khan or Salman Khan or Amir Khan or Saif Ali Khan, or Irfan Khan or Emran Hashmi.                                                                                                           - Global Citizen

                                         *********************************

Then there is no wonder that these Khans went after Hindu and Sikh girls.

Amir Khan - 2 Hindu wives: First Reena Dutt, second Kiran Rao

Saif Ali Khan - ex-wife Amrita Singh, Sikh

Shahrukh Khan - wife Gauri, Hindu

Salman Khan - previous girlfriend, Aishwarya Rai, Hindu

Poet Gulzar- x-wife Rakhi,  Hindu

Crickter Nawab Pataudi- wife Sharmila Tagore, Hindu

Writer Salman Rushdie - ex-wife Hindu

Feroz Khan aka Feroz Gandhi - wife Indira Gandhi, a Hindu

- by Samarth

The Persecution Industry : What are the stakes?

Ramapriya Abraham

CrusadeWatch Org. 

Human rights issues have the power to bring nations to their knees in the International arena by forcing major policy changes.    

Evangelical groups worldwide are abusing this issue to achieve their selfish goals by turning human rights into a game called ‘Persecution’ and making it an essential ingredient of their evangelism plan.  

What is the truth? Was there really a crime? 

Who is the true offender in these conflicts?  Why is it that only the evangelicals have problems with others? A rational analysis of their claims answers many questions.   

Missionaries claim that they are persecuted by everybody for ‘their beliefs’ and thus have problems with everybody else. What are their beliefs?  The answer is in the Bible itself, which the missionaries believe to be the inerrant, uncompromising word of God.  

As quoted by Frank G. Huling: There are the two groups in the world, children of God ” those who have received Christ (John 1:12)”, and the children of the devil “those who reject Christ (John 8:44).”  

This concept was redefined by Jerry Falwell, the inspiration behind many modern day Western missions, as: If you’re not a born-again Christian, you’re a failure as a human being.  

The missionary groups see the other side namely, all other groups, both Christian and non-Christian alike, that do not share their strict interpretation of the Bible as ‘children of devil’.  Such animosity has inspired an evangelical war that has been raging for centuries, with no end in sight.    

Intentionally or inadvertently, the evangelical groups continue to preach and practice intolerance.  

Yet for as often as they claim to be persecuted, nobody has come to their homes and abused them. Instead, they go to the communities of others and preach their beliefs; the resulting resistance if any is then reported by the evangelicals as persecution.    

They have problem with everybody because their beliefs, which repeatedly emphasize exclusivity and superiority over others, provoke hostility from the communities to which they preach. 

Are the crimes against Christian missionaries true?  

Are all Christians affected, or is it only those who aggressively seek to convert others?  Only through a detailed analysis of these events can such questions be answered.   

Let us evaluate some persecution stories reported from India:   

Case 1 : Throughout January 2007, an incident was flashed repeatedly almost everyday in the evangelical world.  The table below provides a sample of the titles used by various missionary news networks to describe the incident.

The central message of all these news items is “Bansi Lal , a 18-year-old Christian convert from Hinduism , was pushed out of a train by Hindu militants.  Christians are persecuted for their beliefs.”  Christian organizations, including the All India Christian Council (AICC) and the Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC), condemned the incident, alleging that Hindu extremists had thrown Lal out of a moving train. John Dayal said it seemed like “murder, and nothing else.”  

However, a closer look at the sources from which the incident was reported reveals a very different story.  

An 18 year-old youth, who was later identified as Bansi Lal, was lying with a severe head injury at the S-12 signal post near the Bolai railway station in Shajapur district at about 7 p.m. on January 8, 2007. A good samaritan took him to a hospital nearby.  Chinmay Rai, the Station master of the Bolai railway station who did a preliminary investigation, said that passengers saw Mr. Lal sticking too far out of the door, which could have possibly caused him to hit against the signal post and fall out of the train.  In India, it is common among youth to hang around the doors in trains, buses or any other public transport.   

The fact that the injured youth was lying clung to a signal post confirms that Mr. Lal was hit by the signal post, which seems to have happened because of the teenager’s careless attitude.  As described by the other passengers who are the sole witnesses, there was no indication of any pushing, dragging, struggle or aggressive force against Lal.   

But if this is so, then how did the “Hindu militants” come into picture?  Where did the attack and murder conspiracy theories originate?  It may take weeks or months for the official investigation to give its final report.  

If the report says it is an accident, the missionary news networks are not going to publish any correction because the original newsflashes served their purpose to depict Christians as targets of abuse by other religious groups. 

Sadly, not just Hindus but a common man around the world  wouldn’t understand these lies and the reasons behind such propaganda.  

Case 2 : When the bones  of infants and fetuses were found in the backyard of the Ratlam missionary hospital in Madhya Pradesh, the following headlines were shown by various news sources, both Christian and secular/mainstream:  

*(Other popular Christian news sources did not even report this incident)

 In this case, Christian news sources either blocked or misrepresented the facts. Christian sources were creating conspiracy theories or promoting hate against Hindus. Hindus are blamed in which they had no role to play.  

  The incident was clearly a situation to be handled by criminal authorities, an incident that seemed to be an act committed by some hospital staff in relation to abortions and possible female infanticide. 

The Christian news sources manufactured ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ and inserted a Hindu conspiracy into the story to further the evangelical goal of portraying others as merciless killers.  

Why do evangelists do that?    

One of the main purposes behind the falsehoods is to create stories that arouse sympathy for Christians, which in turn yield more financial support from the West.   

Every missionary fundraiser in the West uses these stories as part of their fundraising campaigns.   

The message contained in the stories is made up of three essential ingredients:  

These messages have a profound impact in America’s Bible Belt and particularly among senior citizens.  

For example, the Portales News Tribune ran an article on January 27, 2007 that was titled “Hopping on the train”. The story reported that   senior citizens in Portales, New Mexico were raising money donations for Christian ministries in India by playing games like dominoes and Mexican Train.  

Secondly, these stories often lacking scrutiny,  silence, demonize and preempt any potential opposition to the missionary activity in their host countries by internationalizing any issue, including law enforcement cases, as human rights issues.   

Any Hindu in India opposing missionary activity is defined a “Hindu militant”.  A majority of Western media, which revere the evangelical Christian news sources, pick up such articles which are then picked by Indian media.  

US State Department often influenced by such manufactured news writes negatively about Hindus in its annual reports.   

As a result, Hindus become divided into two categories: the ‘Good Hindu’, who shuts his eyes, ears and mouth in reaction to any anti-Hindu activity; and a Hindu militant, who is likely to  raise voice to evangelical activity happening around them.  

Finally, the evangelicals use hate as a weapon to put more political power into their hands. 

This strategy works on the premise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.  

In response to the stories of Hindu anti-Christian conspiracies, all the non-Hindu forces join hands with the supposedly victimized missionary groups, thereby strengthening each other against the Hindu threat.

The following video on YouTube explains this point in greater detail:   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx4UTHiZrzw  

The evangelical groups are using the issue of human rights to play a dangerous game with public sympathies and international law, a game that actually hurts other Christians as a result.   

People are increasingly being aware of these manufactured news stories. When true attacks against Christians do happen, they may not be taken seriously because of all the false stories that came before. I urge Christian news sources to be genuine and more vigilant about the news coming from the Indian subcontinent, where reporters tend to be overenthusiastic in proving their allegiance to their new religion of choice Christianity.  

I agree with my husband, who was born into a Syrian Orthodox Christian family. He believes that if these evangelical groups continue to resort to such blatant falsehoods and manufactured hate to gain support, they will eventually tear apart every peaceful community they touch.  

Watch the following major missionary news networks for a daily dose of purpose-driven ‘Persecution’ news:

1. Agape Press, www.agapepress.org 
2. American Daily, www.americandaily.com 
3. AsiaNews, www.asianews.it 
4. ASSIST News Service (ANS), www.assistnews.net
5. At Any Cost Jesus Mission, http://anycostjesus.baseelia.org/ 
6. BosNewsLife, www.bosnewslife.com 
7. Catholic World News, www.cwnews.com
8. Christian Monitor, www.christianmonitor.org
9. Christian Post, www.christianpost.com
10. Christianity Today, www.christianitytoday.com
11. Compass Direct, www.compassdirect.org
12. Cybercast News Service, www.cnsnews.com
13. Mission Network News (MNN), www.mnnonline.org
14. Pakistan Christian Post, www.pakistanchristianpost.com
15. Union of Catholic Asian (UCA) News, www.ucanews.com
16. Voice of the Martyrs Canada (VOMC), www.persecution.net

1) Religious Tolerance @ http://worldmonitor.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/religious-tolerance-is-the-answer/ 

2) About St. Thomas @ http://hamsa.org/forward.htm 

3) Jesus in Kashmir? @ http://www.hamsa.org/resurrection.htm

4) Artifice for Aggression @ http://hamsa.org/preface.htm 

5) Pirates @ http://www.hamsa.org/coelho.htm#pirate

http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=697&Itemid=128

India and her problem of Secularism

Kalyan Viswanathan, ivarta

ivarta.comToday Secularism is the fashion in India. It is the “in” brand. It is the brand to give oneself, lest one be called “communal”. Many Hindus who are born in Hindu families, who carry the seeds of their Sanatana Dharma in their blood and their consciousness, have become ardent and vocal secularists.

Not only does he not study other religions, he doesn’t even study his own. He most likely loathes “Swami’s” and “Gurus” and avoids them. Because he is a Hindu by birth, he is compelled to profess that he does not practice it, he does not believe in it, and he goes out of his way to condemn his own religion. He is deeply ashamed of his own religion, and keeps criticizing it at every turn.

A few of them also take to studying the Hindu religion, but specifically for the purpose of criticizing it – The intention is not to learn, but to condemn. So there are legions of scholars, who pick up topics such as Caste, Sati, Idol worship, Brahmins and heap volumes of criticism on their own religion of origin.

The Type A Secularist is someone we can call the Gandhian Secularist. Mahatma Gandhi deeply and sincerely believed in the possibility of unity amongst Hindus and Muslims in India. Whether we agree with him or not, this was his stand, and he brought the great strength of his spiritual and moral force to bear upon this possibility.

He hoped and wished that he could forge a unity between Hindus and Muslims that would allow the two communities to co-exist peacefully in Independent India. Whatever Mahatma Gandhi was, he was not ignorant. He took very studied positions on almost all issues. He saw that India’s Muslims were mostly Hindus in prior generations, perhaps long past, but nevertheless they carried the Hindu culture with them in some small measure. They had converted under the relentless pressure of Islamic rulers, and frequent threat of violence. But this was all long past. He saw that Hindus and Muslims were now cast together in this country, to weave a common destiny and they cannot be separated easily. He in fact may have been the one who created the slogan “Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava”. This is an inclusive Secularism, that believes that we must treat all religions equally, all people equally regardless of their religion etc. Even today there are many Gurus and Acharyas who say this – they even quote a Rig Vedic verse called Ekam sat vipraha bahauda vadanti and apply this verse to prove that all “Dharma’s” must be looked upon equally.

The Partition of India both on its left and right, (picture Bharat Mata with her two hands cut off) delivered Gandhian Secularism a decisive blow, and rendered the possibility of unity amongst Hindus and Muslims, as almost an utopian fantasy.

The Partition was brought upon India, because the Muslim leadership decided that it was impossible for them to live in a Hindu majority India, and they needed their own Islamic State.

The Hindus kept on saying that we can all be friends – Hindu-Muslim Bhai Bhai etc., and held out the hope that we can be one country. The Muslim leadership said – No; that is not possible.

The matter is really simple – If in a relationship between a man and a woman, if the woman or the man decide that a relationship is no longer possible, then the relationship breaks down; it matters little whether the other person keeps saying “No, we can still be in a relationship”.

Similar is the case with Hindus and Muslims – Only the Hindus keep saying “all religions are the same; we can all live peacefully together”; The Muslims laugh at the naivety of the Hindus, and say – “No Islam is special and different. We can all live peacefully together but only if you convert to Islam first”.

So now we have unfriendly states on either side of India which have actively decimated the Hindu population within their respective countries, and are supportive of terrorists who have the most evil designs on India.

The Type B Secularist is someone we can call the Nehruvian Secularist. Jawaharlal Nehru believed that religion itself was irrelevant and somewhat backward and superstitious. With his western education and temperament, he was attracted to Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin and the Russian experiment. These were all “Godless” and “Unspiritual” ideologies.

It did not matter to Nehru, that the Communist experiment in Russia had resulted in the massacre of millions of people under the regime of Josef Stalin.

He ignored that, (by what logic he justified this in his own mind remains to be discovered) and allied himself and our country closely with Russia and the Socialist way of life.

Nehru thought that the primary ill of Indian society was its poverty and lack of development, and he committed himself energetically to India’s modernization, albeit driven by the State. In doing this he and his people fashioned a Secular State out of India, which ignored its Hindu Dharma, its Dharmic institutions, and Dharmic education.

Nehruvian Secularism has also been dealt a mortal blow in more ways than one. Communism is dying all over the world – Only in India it seems to have some left over momentum.

Socialism has given way to Capitalism all over the world; In 1991, in India, a Congress Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh presided over the reversal of the trajectory that Nehru had set for India.

India is rapidly demonstrating that left alone, people develop themselves. Development need not be moderated and regulated by the State.

Power when concentrated in the hands of a few, ultimately corrupts people – Indira Gandhi and her Emergency was a demonstration of that. But as much as she loved staying in power, even she could not cross the line as Joseph Stalin did – through dictatorship and murder on a vast scale.

This can be attributed to the essential dharma of our land. Russian communism had no dharma at all – It was pure Adharma. Pakistan has no Dharma at all – It’s leaders have no regard for its own constitution. They amend it left and right to suit their private needs. Most of their transitions of power have been through murder and bloodshed, which is an essentially Islamic tradition.

But what is indeed strikingly common to both kinds of Secularists (both Type A and Type B) is that they don’t apply themselves and study the major religions and scriptures of the world, nor the history of major civilizations.

Because even a cursory study of the Bible and Islam, will reveal how violent they are towards unbelievers and kafirs.

Every religion has to deal with the ethics of human behavior – both amongst the followers of their religion, as well as between the followers of their tradition and those who do not follow their tradition. Equality, Tolerance and commitment to Peace, is good not only for the believers, but also necessary between believers of a particular faith, and those who subscribe to a different faith.

In this latter characteristic, Hinduism is vastly different and has an infinitely superior record compared to both Islam and Christianity.

While Hinduism is inherently pluralistic, and it allows many traditions to co-exist peacefully, Christianity and Islam are very severe towards the non-believers.

While Hinduism is inherently Dharmic towards all people independent of what they believe in, Christianity and Islam offer their protection and allegiance to you, only if you convert to their creed.

They prescribe the worst form of violence towards the kafirs and unbelievers – And this is borne out both by their scripture as well as their history. It only takes a cursory study of their scripture and their history, to find the patterns and correlations emerging.

Their history is consistent with their ideology as embedded in their scripture, and their scripture contains the kernels of their ambitions and conquests, in the past, present and future.

Christianity and Islam are fundamentally organized to be in a state of permanent conflict with the world of non-believers and kafirs.

Whatever rudimentary notion of Dharma they may have, when it comes to their interactions with unbelievers, they are 100% Adharmic, even Asuric.

Why do Hindus reach their “Secular” positions and conclusions without proper inquiry? This is what is called “Avichara Siddhi” – A conclusion reached without much thought or research. It is like a conclusion “The sun goes round the earth”. Well it is obvious - We can see it go round and round, yet it takes some inquiry (Vichara) before we can say, No – The earth is spinning on its axis, and that merely creates the impression of the sun going around the earth.

Why have Hindus become so lazy intellectually, that we will not apply ourselves to the proper study of these topics? Why do we jump to some conclusion first, without appropriate research and then keep repeating our position, ad nauseum?

 Why have we become mere sloganeers shouting ourselves hoarse with our position, which has not been properly thought out and formulated in the first place?

Lastly in our hurry to embrace Secularism, we have thrown the baby out with the bath water, we have abandoned our Dharma altogether. Today, we find secularists everywhere – on TV, in the Radio, in the news magazines; in the universities; in politics. It has become our new creed.

To falsify the Secular creed is to invite the worst form of counter attack and slander.

Today India is developing fast. Our economy is growing. A section of our society is becoming affluent. But corruption is also rampant in every walk of life. The politicians are leading the nation in being self serving and corrupt.

The concept of Dharma, Ethical Values, a sense of Sacrifice and Service that Swami Vivekananda talked about has not permeated our public life.

Will modernization solve all our problems? Is it sufficient to modernize without a corresponding effort to establish Dharma in the land?

Corruption is Adharmic. Capitalism generates great wealth alright, but it distributes this wealth in a very uneven way. What are the rich of our land going to do with their riches? Will they use their riches in service of the poor? Capitalism is Adharmic too – in that it engenders no value system. What do the affluent do for their society – during their leisure? If we were to follow the inspiring example of the west – we know the answer.

The great fruit of capitalism is mindless entertainment, endless pleasure seeking and non-stop shopping. Can the task of caring for the poor be left in private hands, or do we socialize it and give it to our politicians?

We need to resurrect Dharma into the center of our lives. How are we going to do it, if we keep on swearing by secularism?

Hindu Dharma emphasized people’s duties and responsibilities. Not their rights. Today, we have only a screaming group of casteists and castes, who are ever more shrilly demanding what is due to them i.e. their rights. There is no possibility of Dharma in this.

A secular education does not guarantee an adequate appreciation of ethical values, duties, responsibilities and a deeply imbibed sense of discernment between right and wrong action. How do we give our children a matrix of moral values and norms, if we ignore our own Hindu Dharma in our secular schools and colleges?

How do we inculcate in our next generation, a value for Dharma and Moksha which are indeed the unique civilizational characteristics of our Hindu society, if we don’t even address these in our educational institutions?

This is the unsolved problem of our time. We sowed seeds of “Godless” ideologies drawn from the west, and we are harvesting a rich bounty of corruption across the length and breadth of our land.

So, we appeal to our secular brothers and sisters – Please think first; study your own scripture first; then study the other’s scripture; then study the history of all the religions; See the correlations and correspondences for yourself. Then let us see if you continue to be secular.

You may discover that it is only in the comforting cocoons of ignorance, illiteracy and mindlessness that secularism can flourish. You may find that Secularism cannot stand even the most rudimentary intellectual scrutiny.

But please do not defend your Secular value system on the foundation of your unwillingness to study these subjects;

Please do not say – I won’t read my scripture; I don’t have time; I won’t read history; I don’t have time for that; I will not attempt to read the scriptures of other religions; I have even less time for that; But I know I am a secular Hindu; and I know I am right and all the rest of you are communal. http://www.blogs.ivarta.com/india-usa-blog-column82.htm 

Debate on Secularism @ http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=241&page=4

Interview of a Christian Evangelist in India

- Bandyopadhyay Arindam  ( ivarta blogs)

10/2/2007

The world today could have been a much better place for all of us, had we all refrained from trying to prove the superiority of our own religion………..

This is a hypothetical interview of “Father Johnson’ after his award by the Government of India for his exemplary work in India in enlightening the people in the path of the ONLY God. Father Johnson returned to the USA after 10 years of service, to uplift the people of India in the name of God. The interview was taken in July 2005 by a journalist in Houston, USA…… 

Welcome home Father. You have been in India for 10 years, where “our mission’ is still going on. Tell me Father, how is India?

India is a fascinating country, a land of contrasts. Modern India is the largest democracy, the budding economic superpower, with the second-largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world. India is also the only surviving ancient civilization with over one sixth of the world population. At one time, not so long ago, when Europe was in the “dark ages’ and America was not even “discovered’, India was a far advanced and developed country with a contribution of over 25% of world GDP till the 17th century and far advanced in all aspects of life, be it knowledge, philosophy, science, mathematics, arts, astronomy or navigation.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, (1850-1919), American poet and journalist, wrote “India – The land of Vedas, the remarkable works contain not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all were known to the seers who founded the Vedas.”

Dick Teresi, American author of “Lost Discoveries’ mentioned “Some one thousand years before Aristotle, the Vedic Aryans asserted that the earth was round and circled the sun….

Two thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive object, had to be at its center….

Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together…..

The Sanskrit speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one…..

The Indians of the fifth century A.D. calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in 19th century England were convinced it was 100 million years…

”Despite all its riches, history says that India never invaded any country. On the contrary, India has been repeatedly assaulted and conquered by numerous invaders and has been ruled by “foreigners’, first the Muslims and then the British for over a thousand years. India, before the advent of the British rulers, was a rich and prosperous country.

Rev. Jabez T. Sunderland (1842-1936), Unitarian minister and reformer, wrote that “…when the British first appeared on the scene, India was one of the richest countries of the world; indeed, it was her great riches that attracted the British to her shores. For 2,500 years before the British came on the scene and robbed her of her freedom, India was self-ruling and one of the most influential and illustrious nations of the world …..

This wealth was created by the Hindus’ vast and varied industries.

”What about Hinduism as a religion?

Hinduism has a deep philosophical and spiritual heritage that has repeatedly mesmerized the world including western scientists, leaders and philosophers. Despite propaganda to the contrary, Hindus, like us, believes in one Supreme God but they do so in many forms, that helps to develop personalized relations.

Hinduism is the oldest major religion in the earth with 900 million followers. Unlike monotheistic institutionalized, religions like Judaism, Islam or Christianity, it is not based on any single prophet or scripture, but allows its followers all the freedom to pursue God and Truth in their own way, while living harmoniously with all creation.

We know that the Hindus are tolerant of other religions.

Recently, UNESCO pointed out that out of 128 countries where Jews lived before Israel was created, only one, India, did not persecute them and allowed them to prosper and practice Judaism in peace.

Similarly the Zoroastrians, when driven out of Persia by Islam were given shelter by the Hindus in India and still coexist in India peacefully. Very recently, the Dalai Lama, driven from Buddhist Tibet, has been accepted with open arms. Such is the ethos of Hinduism and India.

 I have heard that Mark Twain once said that “In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire’. I have also read Arnold Toynbee’s writing “…at the religious level, India has not been a recipient; she has been a giver. About half the total number of the living, higher religions are of Indian origin’. What do you think about it?

We know India gave birth to religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Hinduism, though the predominant religion, has, to quote Aldous Huxley, “never been a persecuting faith, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.’

What many do not know and I will not elaborate further for obvious reasons, is that there are researchers who think that the teachings of Jesus Christ have something to do with the ancient wisdom of Vedas. The Hindu concepts of “karma’, and “reincarnation’, which are part of the New Age Movement that we see today, were not unknown to Jesus.

Then Father, why do we need to convert people in India?

You see, we in the western world, have the “white man’s burden’ of civilizing the rest of the world. We also have the need and desire to spread the message of Christ, since we believe that it is the ONLY way to salvation and all other nonbelievers will go to hell. The faith in Christianity is being eroded in Europe and America.

That is why our Pope on his visit to India said, “Just as in the first millennium, the Cross was planted on the soil of Europe, and in the second on that of the Americas and Africa, we can pray that in the third Christian millennium a great harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital continent.’

Why do you target India?

India is the right country because Hindu Indians are generally peace-loving tolerant, law abiding people who are truthful and virtuous. India”s devotion to being good rather than being clever comes nearer the heart of a true civilization, said W. J. Grant, in his book, “The spirit of India’.

The unsuspecting Indians have always welcomed everybody on their shore and still keep on doing so. You cannot say the same about a Muslim country or of communist China. You see Hindus are such naive – they go out of their way to say that “all religions are same – they all lead to God’. Christians and for that matter, no other religion, says that.

Where does your resource come from?

There are five major aid-giving countries, viz., USA, Germany, Britain, Italy and the Netherlands. According to the available data, in the last decade alone, foreign aid organizations received more than 2.5 billion dollars.

This is only official statistics. According to the record and report of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, the statistics about the foreign aid being received by Indian Non Government Organizations shows that 80% of it is meant only for the Christian organizations that have been buying their ways into the Indian society and converting unsuspecting people under the guise of social service.

How powerful is Christianity in India?

Oh, though we are only 2.4% of the population officially, we have a large control over the country because of our economic invasion. You see, the present leader of the main political party of India is a Roman Catholic with close contact with the Vatican. There are Christian Chief ministers in 5 out of 29 states. Because of the British rule of India, we have a large section of the leaders of India who look up to us. Believe me, we are the second largest land owners in India. We own and control 80% of the Indian media and newspapers. We overtly or covertly have alliance with key political associations. So it is very easy for us to influence the right people.

You must have a very organized system?

Yes, we do. Have you heard about the Joshua Project? It identifies and highlights the people groups of the world that have the least exposure to the Gospel and the least Christian presence and shares this information to encourage pioneer church-planting movements among every ethnic group. The Joshua Project has identified the North India Hindi belt as “the core of the core of the core” because of its population density (40% of the Indian population- the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh lies in this region); it is the religious hub of India; and it has the smallest Christian presence in India. Thus detailed plans have been drawn up to target India’s 75,000 Pin Codes.

The Seventh Day Adventists owes its Indian success to Canadian evangelist Ron Watts, President for the South Asian Division. When he entered India, in 1997, the Adventist Church had 225,000 members after 103 years of operations. In five years, he took it to 700,000.

Some methods used include the 10-Village and the 25-Village Programs, which involve five sets of laymen, under guidance from a regular pastor, who identify 10 or 25 villages in close proximity. Once the villages were selected, the teams would approach the leaders of each village and invite them to send two leaders to a 10-day seminar at a nearby resort, at the organization’s expense.

It is before no time that the local leaders will then start working for our faith and organization. In 1998, there were seventeen 10-Village Programs and 9,337 were baptized. In 1999, forty programs were held and nearly 40,000 people baptized. Under the Christian Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Samuel Reddy, the Adventists shifted to a 50-village plan.

They began baptizing at the rate of 10,000 persons per month. The US-based Maranatha Volunteers International provides buildings for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. They are committed to build 750 churches in 2 years in India. The Oregon based, Fjarli family have a goal to build 1000 churches at a rate of 1 per day.

How do you carry out conversion attempts?

You see the local people are so simple and naïve that they do not have any clue as what out motive or means are. We target mostly the poor, illiterate, tribal people because they are the easiest to convert. We do that by various means – we establish schools, hospitals that overtly or subtly promote our faith, we allure them with money or goods to the needy when they convert, we “stage’ miracle cures, we use our influence on the media, we use our experts in propaganda, we promote the influential people and so on.

We use the money sent to us by unsuspecting religious and faithful Christians from all over the world. We have numerous NGO and AID organizations to funnel the money into the country.

There are a great number of missionaries of various denominations who are working there, all literally competing for the most number of converts. The Southern Baptists alone are a group that has nearly 100,000 career missionaries in North India, all working to spread our “good word.”