[Advaita-l] Fwd: {viprasamhitha} Fwd: Hindu Terrorism!! A perspective from a western eye....

[Dr D Bharadwaj]

 Forwarded message ----------
From: Thimmappa M.S. <thimmappams at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 10:40 PM
Subject: {viprasamhitha} Fwd: Hindu Terrorism!! A perspective from a western
eye....
To: viprasamhitha at googlegroups.com


 By Francois Gautier

*Is there such a thing as 'Hindu terrorism', as the arrest of Sadhvi Pragya
Singh Thakur for the Malegaon blasts may tend to prove? Well, I guess I was
asked to write this column because I am one of that rare breed of foreign
correspondents — a lover of Hindus! A born Frenchman, Catholic-educated and
non-Hindu, I do hope I'll be given some credit for my opinions, which are
not the product of my parents' ideas, my education or my atavism, but
garnered from 25 years of reporting in South Asia (for Le Journal de Geneve
and Le Figaro).*



*

**In the early 1980s, when I started freelancing in south India, doing photo
features on Kalaripayattu, the Ayyappa festival, or the Ayyanars, I slowly
realised that the genius of this country lies in its Hindu ethos, in the
true spirituality behind Hinduism. The average Hindu you meet in a million
villages possesses this simple, innate spirituality and accepts your
diversity, whether you are Christian or Muslim, Jain or Arab, French or
Chinese. It is this Hinduness that makes the Indian Christian different
from, say, a French Christian, or the Indian Muslim unlike a Saudi Muslim. I
also learnt that Hindus not only believed that the divine could manifest
itself at different times, under different names, using different scriptures
(not to mention the wonderful avatar concept, the perfect answer to 21st
century religious strife) but that they had also given refuge to persecuted
minorities from across the world—Syrian Christians, Parsis, Jews, Armenians,
and today, Tibetans.**

**In 3,500 years of existence, Hindus have never militarily invaded another
country, never tried to impose their religion on others by force or induced
conversions. You cannot find anybody less fundamentalist than a Hindu in the
world and it saddens me when I see the Indian and western press equating
terrorist groups like SIMI, which blow up innocent civilians, with ordinary,
angry Hindus who burn churches without killing anybody. We know also that
most of these communal incidents often involve persons from the same
groups—often Dalits and tribals—some of who have converted to Christianity
and others not. However reprehensible the destruction of Babri Masjid, no
Muslim was killed in the process; compare this to the 'vengeance' bombings
of 1993 in Bombay, which wiped out hundreds of innocents, mostly Hindus. Yet
the Babri Masjid destruction is often described by journalists as the more
horrible act of the two. We also remember how Sharad Pawar, when he was
chief minister of Maharashtra in 1993, lied about a bomb that was supposed
to have gone off in a Muslim locality of Bombay.**

**I have never been politically correct, but have always written what I have
discovered while reporting. Let me then be straightforward about this
so-called Hindu terror. Hindus, since the first Arab invasions, have been at
the receiving end of terrorism, whether it was by Timur, who killed 1,00,000
Hindus in a single day in 1399, or by the Portuguese Inquisition which
crucified Brahmins in Goa. Today, Hindus are still being targeted: there
were one million Hindus in the Kashmir valley in 1900; only a few hundred
remain, the rest having fled in terror. Blasts after blasts have
killed **hundreds
of innocent Hindus all over India in the last four years. Hindus, the
overwhelming majority community of this country, are being made fun of, are
despised, are deprived of the most basic facilities for one of their most
sacred pilgrimages in Amarnath while their government heavily sponsors the
Haj. They see their brothers and sisters converted to Christianity through
inducements and financial traps, see a harmless 84-year-old swami and a
sadhvi brutally murdered. Their gods are blasphemed. So sometimes, enough is
enough.**

**At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to
slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in
uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened
in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again
elsewhere. What should be understood is that this is a spontaneous
revolution on the ground, by ordinary Hindus, without any planning from the
political leadership. Therefore, the BJP, instead of acting embarrassed,
should not disown those who choose other means to let their anguished voices
be heard.**

**There are about a billion Hindus, one in every six persons on this planet.
They form one of the most successful, law-abiding and integrated communities
in the world today. Can you call them terrorists?*
*
*
*Francois Gautier*




 --
|| Nahi Jnanena Sadhrsham Pavitram Iha Vidyate ||

Respect other's views always.Be Sensitive to other's emotions

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