This was in response to an article that appeared in the Daily News, but going on information I have received, this rebuttal will not be published in the said paper. My thanks to Colombo Telegraph for coming to my rescue. Please spread this around. Thanks.
Stirring The Pot
By Hameed Abdul Karim -
Hameed Abdul Karim
If anybody was looking for reasons why India split into two creating Pakistan and later Bangladesh or why Kashmir wants to be free of Indian rule, Ram Madhav of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) provides the perfect answer in his pro-Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) article that also contained intimidating views on Muslims that appeared in the state owned Daily News of Monday 17th June 2013. Ram Madhav’s article is essentially for sections of a Hindu audience in India pandering to the strongly cultivated prejudices that have been created in their minds against Islam and Christianity. The Hindus in Sri Lanka would be bewildered over Madhav’s claims about the Bodu Bala Sena and maybe laugh away his white washing of this anti-minorities organisation.
Ram Madhav is the national spokesman for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which is a right-wing paramilitary Hindu nationalist group. It has been criticised as an extremist and a paramilitary group not too different from the BBS.
The RSS was banned in India when Nathuram Godse who was a member of the organisation assassinatedMahatma Gandhi and also after the group participated in the demolition of the Barbri Masjid.
In his anti Muslim and anti Christian harangue Madhav extols the BBS as if the racist group was a gift to mankind. Erudite Sri Lanka Buddhist monks, intellectual and even some politicians have taken up cudgels against the BBS as a movement that contravenes Gautama Buddha’s teachings. The Dalai Lama called upon extremist Buddhists in both Sri Lanka and Myanmar not to harass minorities in their countries. But of course such discourse will fly in the face of RSS zealots like Ram Madhav. To people like him Muslims and Christians must be taught lessons at regular intervals to show them their respective places in India and Sri Lanka as adherents of ‘foreign’ faiths not suitable for home grown ideologies. Well, he flunks on that score, doesn’t he? Buddhism is a ‘foreign’ faith in Sri Lanka having originated in India.
At one point of time Buddhism held sway over the length and breadth of the subcontinent and virtually all ‘Indians’ were Buddhist. It was at this point that the Brahmins struck back. Over a period of time they ensured that Buddhism was wiped out and once again their ideology of Brahmanism took the place of the dominant force. And here we have an activist of the RSS, the leadership of which is almost Brahmin, crying crocodile tears for Buddhism in Sri Lanka! For a detailed report on how Brahmins replaced Buddhism with their dogma google ‘Disappearance of Buddhism from India – an Untold Story by Naresh Kumar available on ‘Sikh Spectrum’.
The Brahmins tried the same tactics with Islam, Christianity and Sikhism and continue to do so to this day. There have been no less than 45,000 racist attacks against Muslims in India since the partition of the sub continent. The Shah report gives details of how Muslims are discriminated in India and how racism has been institutionalised in the Mahatma’s land.
Modi
It is now an open secret that Narendra Modi of the Bharata Janata Party (BJP) who personally supervised the anti-Muslim riot in his home state of Gujarat is to become Prime Minister of India. Just reward for his long anti Muslim campaign.
There are more than 170 million Muslims in India and to this day they are referred to as a ‘minority’. What we have in India is minority and majority community politics with a liberal sprinkling of platitudes like ‘democracy’ or ‘liberalism’ ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘justice’ or ‘secularism’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘values’ which don’t mean a thing in India’s communal system of government. If clichés meant anything Narendra Modi should be in jail, and not a Prime Ministerial aspirant nor the Chief Minister of Gujarat. But then in the ‘largest democracy in the world’ the absurd often passes off as democracy.
Numbers game
If the sub continent had not been partitioned there would be more than 500 million Muslims in India today. The tragedy would have been that they would still be called a ‘minority’ in the numbers game in India version of democracy. Their concerns and grievances would never have been taken into account because of their minority status.
Despite this reality we have RSS’s Ram Madhav preaching to us the ‘virtues’ of the BBS whilst trying his best, in true RAW style, to carve a niche in the BBS for India and RAW to operate under their patronage to promote Mother India’s hegemony in the region. Knowing BBS, they would gladly support Madhav’s regional campaign against Muslims and Christians. After all there has to be a strong affinity between the BBS and India’s RSS on account of their mutual dislike of minorities and ‘foreign’ religions.
Halaal and hypocrisy
Of course no anti-Muslim diatribe would be complete these days without the writer pointing out to the ‘halaal’ controversy that raged for weeks until recently. And so Ram Madhav also refers to the BBS ‘victory’ on this issue in such glowing terms that will make readers imagine that Muslims were the villains in this saga.
Be that as it may, In India the ‘halaal’ industry is flourishing. India became the largest exporter of beef overtaking Australia, Argentina and New Zealand in 2012. In the land where cows are considered sacred and sometimes even worshipped, India became the number one country in cattle slaughter according to a Times of India report which also said that India’s beef exports had increased by 44% in four years. The same report, quoting Surendra Kumar Ranjan director of Uttar Pradesh based Hind Agro Industries, says ‘our meat is lean and cheaper. We supply halaal meat which is preferred in Gulf countries’.
Magnificent mosque
The writer refers to ‘a new magnificent mosque coming up in Colombo’. This is not a new mosque but one of the oldest one in Sri Lanka. It’s also on the tourist map as the ‘red mosque’. What’s happening there is that the mosque is being renovated and expanded to accommodate more people whilst maintaining its traditional architecture. For Madhav to say it’s a ‘magnificent new mosque’ is a clear admission that he has not checked on his facts. But then trivial issues like facts or truths are mere irritants and highly irrelevant for RSS operators like Ram Madhav when their objective is to provoke one community against another.
Quoting contested statistics Madhav says the Muslim population has gone up by almost two fold but conveniently fails to say that the Muslim population in the north had been reduced to nothing due the LTTE’s expulsions. Yes, the very same LTTE that India gave birth to.
Pakistan
And of course no provocative and scare mongering article by RSS types like Madhav is free from claims that Pakistan is entrenched in Sri Lanka with its ISI running covert operations. In the recent past many stories in the print media have been planted to make such unsubstantiated claims. There was one that claimed that al-Qaida was training Muslim ‘terrorists’ in the east. This is the run of the mill disinformation campaign that spy agencies like RAW carry out prior to destabilising a nation. None of these stories have been proven to be true. But like stated before, truth is not necessary when all one wants to do is stir the pot which one suspects is Ram Madhav’s chief motive in his white washing of the BBS where he claims, in a tenuous balancing act, that its activities might cause ‘racial tensions’. It’s like as if he is hoping for such a scenario. If that is the case then shame on you, Ram Madhav.
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