Arun Shourie on
Hinduism
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A case in which the English
version of a major book by a renowned Muslim scholar, the fourth
Rector of one of the greatest centers of Islamic learning in India,
listing some of the mosques, including the Babri Masjid, which were
built on the sites and foundations of temples, using their stones
and structures, is found to have the tell-tale passages censored
out... more
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"But why do you refer to it as a
mosque at all? Where is the mosque, my friends, when the namaz is
not performed? When for forty years idol worship is going on there,
what kind of a mosque is it? That is just the temple of our dear
Ram."... more |
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At first, the demand-cum-assurance
was, "If you can bring any proof showing a temple had been
demolished to construct the mosque, we will ourselves demolish the
mosque". A host of documents -- reports of the Archaeological Survey
of India going back to 1891, Gazetteers going back to 1854. Survey
reports going back to 1838 were produced which stated unambiguously
that a Ram temple had been demolished to construct the mosque"...
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Of course, he said, Hindus who
became Muslims must be taken back into the Hindu fold. Otherwise our
numbers will keep dwindling- we used to be around 600 million by the
reckoning of Ferishta, the oldest Muslim historian, now we are just
200 million. "And then", he continued, "every man going out of the
Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more."... more |
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The depths to which society had
pushed sections of its own induced the latter to convert to Islam,
for them the conversion was a liberation, and the people who even
today do not see this are "lunatics", says Swami Vivekananda...
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On January 2, 1937 a Professor of
Philosophy from Poland, Krzenski came to see Gandhiji. Krzanski told
Gandhiji that Catholicism was the only true religion... more |
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The traditions of India were rich
as can be. They had attained insights of the first order. A person
who has reflected on what the Buddha has to say on the workings of
the mind for instance, one who has even a little acquaintance with
Buddhist works on psychology will find the writings of, say, Freud
to be high-school level reductionism... more |
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But in looking at the ritual, at
the idol, at the concept, why not start with the opposite
assumption? Why start by assuming that they are empty, that they are
the remnants of superstition? They had occurred to, they had been
devised by seers, by persons of great insight... more |
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'It is a miracle... can be likened
to the building of the Gothic cathedrals of Europe... There is no
doubt that London has acquired a significant new building of
traditional Indian beauty and interest... We can be grateful that
this has happened in a part of London that needed transforming'...
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The super-speciality hospital
which Satya Sai Baba has set up in Putaparti, the water schemes
which have been inaugurated in Anantpur district to mark his 70th
birthday will, of course, make the difference between life and death
to vast numbers. The other point about projects undertaken at the
direction of these teachers is their managerial excellence. The
projects are invariably completed on schedule: it took just three
years from the permission being granted for the temple in London to
its being opened for worship..... more |
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In holding that not all references
to religion in election speeches necessarily amount to corrupt
electoral practices; that it is the soliciting of votes on the
ground of the religion of the candidate or that of his opponent
which is a corrupt electoral practice; that statements made by
others do not have the same effect as those made by a candidate
himself -- in all this, as we saw, the Supreme Court has merely
reiterated what the the law itself says and what the Supreme Court
has itself held on previous occasions. What then accounted for the
fury of the secularists ?... more |
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Some months ago an official of the
United States state department met me through a common scholar
friend... Last week the same scholar friend sent me an account which
that officer had written and circulated about the way India, in
particular Hindus, are again being portrayed in the USA. The note
deserves to be read in full, so what follows is the verbatim text of
his note... more |
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"And what about the pogroms that
go on from time to time ?," the caller asked. Late at night, an
editorial writer with one of the world's best-known papers was
calling from the USA. It was becoming evident that the BJP would
form the Government, he was gathering background information...
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As we have seen, the explicit part
of the Circular issued by the West Bengal Government in 1989 in
effect was that there must be no negative reference to Islamic rule
in India. Although these were the very things which contemporary
Islamic writers celebrated, there must be absolutely no reference to
the destruction of the temples by Muslim rulers, to the forcible
conversion of Hindus, to the numerous other restrictions which were
placed on the Hindu population... more |
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Who wrote the book, Sri
Ramachandra, the ideal King? Who wrote that he was "Not simply a
great warrior, a mighty King. He was an Avatara, a divine
incarnation, and a divine incarnation of a special kind." The very
Annie Besant whom sycophantic Congressmen are citing as precedent
today! There literally cannot be a greater contrast between her and
the one these sycophants seek to legitimize by invoking her. She did
not alight into the Congress presidency from a helicopter... more |
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"A thousand Pakistani militants
have entered the Baramula and Poonch sectors of Kashmir" -- that was
the lead story on the 9 p. m. news bulletin of a leading TV channel
on 27 July. I was properly alarmed. And so I was even more surprised
when the next morning not one paper carried anything about fresh
infiltration. But it might have been a scoop of the TV channel, I
thought. And was therefore triply surprised to see that the TV
channel itself had no follow-up on the story the next day. The story
vanished as swiftly as the terrorists... more |
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For a year and a half you keep
issuing statements to the press, and writing ostensibly scholarly
articles, and holding forth in interviews that the Babri Mosque was
not, most definitely not, built by demolishing or even on a site of
a temple. Documents of the other side are sent to you. You are
nominated by the All India Babri Mosque Action Committee as an
expert who will give his assessment of them. A meeting is scheduled.
Before that you meet the then Director General of Archeology who had
supervised the excavations at the site. The day the meeting is to
begin the newspapers carry yet another categorical statement from
"intellectuals", again asserting the line convenient to the AIBMAC.
You, of course, are among them... more |
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"We must at present do our best to
form a class," Macaulay wrote in his famous Minute of 1835, "who may
be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class
of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in
opinions, in morals, and in intellect."... more |
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The US campaign of bombing
erstwhile Taliban positions in Afghanistan had not been on for 10
days, and our experts began pronouncing it a failure: "Osama bin
Laden is still at large, the Taliban have just dispersed into the
hills, the Northern Alliance is stuck where it was, Bush's Grand
Alliance is coming apart... The winter is about to set in," they
said. "The Afghan is a hardy fighter, they said. He will just tie an
onion and a roti (bread), fling his blanket over his shoulder, and
disappear into the nearest mountain; and these American GIs - they
cannot fight without their Coca Colas, their hot meals... Just look
at them on TV - they are loaded with so much equipment, they have
difficulty just walking. These jokers are going to fight the
Taliban? Secure on the mountaintop, the Taliban Jehadi will pick
them one by one as they try to clamber up the mountain. Remember
Kargil? These slopes in the Afghan mountains are even steeper than
the ones our soldiers had to scale."... more |
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"Zee News at 9.40 p.m. on Saturday
(August 21) showed clipping of Vajpayee addressing an election rally
at Thiruvananthapuram," declared the spokesman of the Congress (I)
in a written statement on 24 August. "He declared that the building
of Ram Mandir, abrogation of Article 370 and bringing in the uniform
civil code were an intrinsic part of the BJP's manifesto." In fact,
Vajpayee had addressed no public meeting at Thiruvananthapuram at
all. But hardly one to be deterred by facts, the Congress (I) went
on to describe Vajpayee as "a habitual liar," as one who was making
a "completely ridiculous" statement when he expressed surprise at
what Govindacharya, a General Secretary of the BJP was reported to
have said... more |
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"There can be no doubt that the
fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the
Musalmans," writes the author. "Islam came out as the enemy of the
'But'. The word 'But,' as everybody knows, is an Arabic word and
means an idol. Not many people, however, know that the derivation of
the word 'But' is the Arabic corruption of Buddha. Thus the origin
of the word indicates that in the Moslem mind idol worship had come
to be identified with the Religion of the Buddha. To the Muslims,
they were one and the same thing. The mission to break the idols
thus became the mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed
Buddhism not only in India but wherever it went." The writer? B. R.
Ambedkar. But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of
Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the
destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the
Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have
not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate
the concoction... more |
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In painting Goddess Saraswati
naked M.F. Hussein, his secularist advocates argue, is merely
exercising his Fundamental Right to freedom of expression, he is
merely giving form to his artistic, creative urge. The first
question is : How come the freedom and creative urge of the
thousands and thousands of artists our country has have never led
even one of them to ever paint or draw a picture of Prophet Muhammad
in which his face is manifest ? I am not on the point of dress or
undress, the features could have been made as celestial and handsome
as our artists could have imagined -- why is it that they never got
the urge to draw or sculpt even the handsomest representation of the
Prophet?... more |
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The problem that illicit small
arms and light weapons constitute is well known. During the past
decade. these weapons have been the weapons of choice in 46 out of
49 major conflicts. They have claimed on an average, 300,000 lives.
90 percent of those killed have been civilians, and 80 percent of
the killed have been women and children... more |
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The first thing that strikes one
upon reading the books of these eminent historians, of course, is
the double standard. Recall how, without an iota of evidence, our
eminent historians advanced the most far-reaching assertions about
ancient India -- about its having been a period riddled with
tensions, inequity and oppression. And how, in cases such as
Aurangzeb and the Sultanate, these very historians shut their eyes
to what stares them in the face. In a word, their approach is set to
a formula : pre-Islamic India must be presented as a land of
discord, a land in the grip of a social and political system marked
by injustice, extreme inequities and oppression; and the Islamic
period must be presented as a period in which "the composite
culture" flowered, a period in which the norm was a policy of "broad
toleration"... more
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