Letters To Be Cut Pasted

Shambhu · 12-04-2008, 07:45 AM

Hindu Dharma and True Secularism

Generations of Indian Hindus have been growing up with a feeling that they are second or third class citizens. Muslims and Christians come first, they say, then come Hindus. Even then, the "then come Hindus" part is not said out loud and clear, but in hushed, apologetic tones. This, Indian Hindus aver, is the meaning of secularism.

Muslims and Christians in India, of course, rejoice at this definition, and spare no effort to reinforce it, sowing it deep into impressionable Hindu minds.

The last time I checked, secularism meant giving equal importance to all religions.
One again, for clarity: The last time I checked, secularism meant giving equal importance to all religions.

Stopping the all-pervasive appeasement of muslims and christians in India and stopping the humiliating maltreatment of Hindus in India (second-guessing Hindus, arresting their religious leaders, taking money away from Hindu temples and giving it to muslim and christian causes etc) will have three effects. Two obvious and one not so obvious.

First, the obvious effects

1. It will lead to better governance; it will set many of India's problems on the path to solution.

2. It will cause muslims and christians to protest at the sudden removal of the shock absorbers that were giving them a smooth ride in India. This protest will open the Hindu's eyes even more to the fundamental problem of Bharat desh: depradations of islam and christianity.

The not so obvious effect, which will follow in due time:

It will allow Hindu Dharma to shine in its full glory, since the damp blankets that the appeasers put on dharma will be gone. Islam and Christianity will be pulled down from the undeserving pedestals on which these religions have been put by appeasers. Their drawbacks will be open for people to see, their not-so-distinguished past will be openly talked about. The glorious past of Dharma will come out in the open too, much to the pleasure of Dharmics. Lies about Dharma will not be allowed to be sold to unwitting Hindus any more. Conversions will go down, re-conversion will increase. Illegals will be deported. A uniform civil code will be implemented.

And given a level playing field, Dharma will beat out Islam and Christianity.

Bodhi · 12-04-2008, 08:02 AM

^Shambhu.
==

a rejoinder by a Hindu, to Time Magazine article about poverty of Muslims in India being a cause for terror. Email.

QUOTEHere is my response to this article in Time magazine.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8...1862650,00.html

DS
Â
November 30, 2008

Dear Sir,

The statement attributed to one of the terrorists by Aryn Baker about the plight of Muslims in India is highly suspect and does not stand to scrutiny considering the remarks made by the TV media including CNN and several hostages about the motives of the terrorists in carrying out the mayhem and cold blooded killing of hundreds of innocent people in Mumbai. The terrorists were looking specifically for the Americans and British citizens. They also targeted Jewish Shabad House which clearly confirms that the Islamic terrorists were not interested in the conditions of Indian Muslims in India as mischievously portrayed in the article by the author. Obviously, Aryn Baker has shamefully built her case to justify the recent Islamic Jihad in Mumbai by using alleged quote from one of the terrorists.Â Â

The rest of the article lacks the in-depth journalistic analytical standard and is one sided and based on distortions and misinformation. Besides, the author seems to be completely ignorant of India's history, particularly of the last 1200 years.Â

India has suffered Islamic terrorism from the seventh century onwards. The American historian Will Durant said: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history." French historian Alain Danielou said in his Histoire de l' Inde: "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races." Mahmoud Ghazni, was an early example of Muslim ruthlessness, burning in 1018 of the temples of Mathura, razing Kanauj to the ground and destroying the famous temple of Somnath, sacred to all Hindus. His successors were as ruthless as Ghazni: 103 temples in the holy city of Benaras were razed to the ground, its marvelous temples destroyed, its magnificent palaces wrecked." Indeed, the Muslim policy vis a vis India, seems to have been a conscious systematic destruction of everything that was beautiful, holy, refined." Based on the Islamic evidences, several million Hindus were killed, thousands were taken as slaves and many temples were destroyed between 7th to 18th centuries by the Islamic invaders. All along, the iconoclasts remained convinced as per their own records that they were putting into practice the highest tenets of their religion.

Jinnah said in Lahore on 23 March, 1940: "The Hindus and Musalmans belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions." Though the majority Indian Muslims had voted for the creation of Pakistan on the basis of religion, many of them decided to stay back in India. While the Muslim population in India has grown from about 10% in 1947 to nearly 17%, Hindu population in Pakistan has come down from 26% in 1947 to about 2% now. The census of 1951 reports that Hindus constituted 22% in East Pakistan (Bangladesh), but 2001 it is 9.2 %. Can this be called persecution of Muslims by Hindu majority as the article implies?

At the economic level, as per The Economic Times' Survey, "Hindus and Muslims, at a national level, run neck-and-neck on average annual household income (AHI) of Rs. 61, 423 and Rs. 58,420, respectively". http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Econom...how/1858719.cms. The survey thus completely demolishes the argument that Indian Muslims are economically poor.

Indian Muslims have done very well socially and politically by any world standard. There have been Muslims Presidents, cabinet ministers, attorneys, doctors as well as rich businessmen like Azim Premji, owner of Wipro, one of the largest IT houses in the world.

The Muslims in India, though in minority, wield considerable power as they exploit their self-imposed victim status and demand special privileges under threats of uncontrollable violence. As a result, they are given Haj subsidy ( going to Mecca for pilgrimage)Â which is denied to Hindus for their pilgrimage. Whereas Hindu temples and their funds are controlled by the government, Mosques and Madressas are allowed to run independently without any interference from the government. Muslims are allowed to divorce their wives by calling 'Talaq' three times and marry four wives. Rajiv Gandhi (ex-Prime Minister of India) altered the Indian constitution to overrule the Indian Supreme Court's decision in the divorce case of Shah Banu just in order to please the Muslim mullahs. The Indian politicians, particularly the current Indian government in power, have been using Muslims as a vote bank and hence their appeasement by sacrificing the welfare and interest of the majority community, Hindus. As a matter of fact, it is India's Hindus who are facing the real crisis in their own homeland and not Muslims since the political power is in the hands of anti-Hindu politicians.

Finding the roots of Islamic terrorism in India and other parts of world requires study of the Islamic scriptures and the history of Islam which play a central role in promulgation and advancement of a comprehensive political ideology which the author has completely ignored to justify the Mumbai terror to suite her personal agenda.

It is indeed sad and disappointing that a magazine of the Time's stature has allowed itself to be used by the apologist of Islamic Jihad to propagate the hateful political ideology of killing innocent non-believers.

Shambhu · 12-04-2008, 08:25 AM

<img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clap.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='clap.gif' /> May BhagawAn always keep his kripAdrIshti on this Hindu. We need more such people. The brain exists, the language skills exist, vast troves of material to be cut-pasted from exist, just the will is needed..and from what I have seen over the past few years, the will is increasing too! Har Har Mahadev! Haribol!

12-04-2008, 11:52 AM

Good job <img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='cheers.gif' />

Shambhu · 12-09-2008, 11:56 PM

My letter to a radio show:

-------------------------------------
Dear Katty Kay,

I am a huge fan of yours, you are one of the role models of your profession, in my opinion, as is Diane Rehm.

I would like to bring certain facts to light regarding today's DR show about India, Pakistan, and the Mumbai terror. I could not call in, since I was driving, plus I would have had to call in 4-5 times!

1. Your guest talked about the "pogrom" in Gujarat. Well, 750 muslims and 250 hindus dies in this "pogrom". Hardly a pogrom (in which you would expect no deaths on the part of the executioners of the pogrom). The Gujarat riots were thoroughly reprehensible, but hadly a pogrom. They occurred because a crowd of muslims burnt alive 56 hindus religious/social workers. These 56 hindus were travelling together in the same bogey on a train. The train was stopped, stones were thrown on the bogey -just one bogey, the perpetrators knew which one to target- to make the occupants shut the windows, and then the bogey was set ablaze.

You will note that Los Angeles burnt for two weeks after a black man was merely *beaten up* by white cops. Some perepective, please!

2. Your guest said educated hindu youth of the RSS were talking calmly about a "pure" India, implying intolerance for muslims.

The RSS is the most tolerant organization when it comes to religion, it is absolutely intolerant of people who want to disguise their disloyalty to India as a requirement of their religion:

--Muslims who care only when muslims are hurt around the world, but do not give a damn if hindus are killed in India itself.

--Muslims and Christians who have no problems asking for subsidies to travel to Mecca or Jerusalem, but who erupt in anger when Hindus want subsidies (or at least proper facilities) too. (Read about the recent Amarnath situation).

3. Hindu Nationalism and the BJP: The Hindu Nationalists are being called terrorists because they have the temerity to ask for an end to muslim/christian appeasement (an electoral gimmick of the present government to guarantee minority votes).

--Minorities get subsidies (out of taxpayer money) for their pilgrimages. Hindus dont. Minorities get

money from Hindu temples; the money donated by Hindu faithful is quietly diverted to support muslim and christian schools and other causes.

--Hindus dont even get to run their own schools without being called terrorists, forget about getting money!! Tens of thousands of illegal (muslim mostly) Bangladeshi imigrants are given citizenship by the current government, since it knows that it is just adding votes to its kitty.

There are many other examples of blatant appeasement. The west does not know, and many Indians do not either. The BJP and its followers certainly do keep tabs on what is going on in India, and the current government does not like Indians to know. It just wants to portray the BJP as an rabid, fundamentalist party that is angry at muslims and christians.

4. Muslims being disenfranchised: I have several educated muslim friends, whose families gave shown that if the chooses to be educated, he can live a well-rounded, affluent life. However, many muslims choose the other path available to muslims: have as many children as possible, and send them to madrassas of quasi-madrassas. The status of such parents increases in muslim society, and the children are alienated from the mainstream. Is that the hindus' fault?

5. Kashmir: When India was partitioned, the princely state of Kashmir said it wanted a year to decide whom to join, India or Pakistan. So it was given a year. But Pakistan could not wait a year. Within 2 months, the Pakistan Army and irregulars invaded Kashmir. They started looting and raping. The Hindu prince came to Delhi and asked for Indian aid, even the islamic spiritual head of Kasmit wanted India to stop the looting. India agreed on the condition Kashmir accede to India. The prince and the islamic spiritual head agreed, and so the Indian Army went in and drove out the invaders. We would have driven them all out, but Pakistan went to the UN, and so our army was called back. The part of Kashmir which was still to be liberated from teh invaders is called "Pakistan Occupied Kashmir".

Also, about the "indigenous freedom struggle" of the Kashmiris news outlets are fond of talking about: Does any news outlet care that 350,000 Hindu Kashmiris were cleansed out of the Kashmir valley by rape, arson, and lynching? These poor Hindus are living in tents in a state just south of kashmir.

Please challenge your guests (or any caller) about their opinions..use this email to do so. Or get an RSS spokesman on the panel. It is easy to label Nationalist Hindus as fanatics. But there must be a reason why the nationalist Hindu movement is gaining prominence in India! Hindus do not go on jihads or crusades. Many don't eat meat because they don't want to kill animals. Hindus don't even knock on your door and ask you to convert to Hinduism to avoid going to hell. But Hindu Nationalists are terrorists. Don't you think there is something wrong with this picture?

I am Hindu. If you think I am biased, please read articles by Francois Gautier if you want a non-Hindu's views on India. There are thousands of references I could send you to buttress my arguments, most of which you could google for yourself. Most are collated on Hindu Nationalist websites. But as long as such websites are seen as anathema, the truth will stay dispersed all over the web, and will never be visited.

Regards,

12-10-2008, 09:12 AM

Excellent Shambu-sir.

Only nitpick (could be wrong as I am not sure of the context) is that we have to start disassociating K word from the terrorisim in India. Pakis want this to the issue hence their war of thousand cuts.

But as events since 9/11 have it, West is not too interested in 'root-causes' of terrorism argument. So any discussion of justifying/apologizing/sympathizing for terrorism under the grab of 'understanding the root-causes' should be nipped as it's just not acceptable. When terrorists start blowing up trains in Madrid we don't go into 'root-causes'; when they bomb subways in London, we don't offer an inch to discussions centered around 'root-causes'; same for 9/11, Bali, etc..

Let's be clear and make sure all point to terrorism for what it is. It can't justified one way in one part of the world and another way for other parts of the world.

One dork I know was talking to me about a week ago, offering condolences etc and then brought up the K word and fantasized about world peace if only K was settled.
By the time I was done with him, *I* felt sorry for him <!--emo& Tongue

--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tongue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tongue.gif' />

Shambhu · 12-10-2008, 07:59 PM

QUOTE(Viren @ Dec 10 2008, 09:12 AM)Excellent Shambu-sir.
[right][snapback]91671[/snapback][/right]


No, Viren, I would not have brought up K by myself. All the points I made up there were in response to callers, who called in with various pieces of psec lies. The panel guest too were not too informed. One caller said K was the root of terrorism, and should be "resolved".

One caller even said, "The BJP's links to terror would have been exposed, but the officer He-maant Kur-care was ambushed by the terrorists in Munbai". Katty was quite increduluos on this one, and sort of cut off the caller; and anyways I forgot to address that one. .. These are white/black callers..onlt 1 asian..I think Paki "Haifa" or something..he was the Karkare call.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 12-12-2008, 05:00 PM by Husky.)

Shambhu, two parts that may need some further clarification and correction:
QUOTE(Shambhu @ Dec 9 2008, 11:56 PM)5. Kashmir: When India was partitioned, the princely state of Kashmir said it wanted a year to decide whom to join, India or Pakistan. So it was given a year. But Pakistan could not wait a year. Within 2 months, the Pakistan Army and irregulars invaded Kashmir. They started looting and raping. The Hindu prince came to Delhi and asked for Indian aid, even the islamic spiritual head of Kasmit wanted India (Pakistan, I think you mean) to stop the looting.[right][snapback]91652[/snapback][/right]QUOTE(Shambhu @ Dec 9 2008, 11:56 PM)4. Muslims being disenfranchised: I have several educated muslim friends, whose families gave shown that if the chooses to be educated,[right][snapback]91652[/snapback][/right]

From Shambhu's post to Katty:
QUOTEYour guest said educated hindu youth of the RSS were talking calmly about a "pure" India, implying intolerance for muslims.How convenient of the terrorists to forget that christos and islamics have always talked about destroying Hindus and Hinduism in India and making it islamic or christian.

Recent examples:

1. Islamania's plans:
http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2008/12/pak...-capturing.html
See images here, from TSP newspaper. Plans of what parts of India will be islamised and which they intend to steal into TSP by 2012 and 2020.

Islamic plans above are the objective of all the present TSP, BD and 'Indian' jihadism (islamic attacks) against Bharatam, Hindus and Hindu Dharma. Such plans (Mughalistan, etc.) are the direct cause of the mass infiltration of islamic peoples from BD and TSP into Bharatam, their hoisting of BD and TSP flags in the Assamese villages they've taken over and in Mumbai (as psecular Simi Garewal admitted) and elsewhere in India.

On the matter of Kashmir: Kashmir is not particularly special to 20th and 21st century islamism other than that it is merely their *first* open claim on Bharatam/Hindus' land. It is them trying to get their foot in the door.
Look how their map for 2020 at the link marks the southern region of Hindu Bharatam (the land the christoDMK currently imagine is theirs) as "disputed territory" for that future year. "Disputed territory" is what Pukestan - and their missionary and Amerikkkan helpmates - try to get the world to designate Kashmir as now.

2. Examples of christomaniacs terrorising Hindus into conversion and trying to take over Bharatam.

http://freetruth.50webs.org/Overview4.htm
QUOTEThe twin militant outfits, NSCN(IM) and NSCN(K) have demanded annexation of land from the Buddhist and other indigenous faith followers and issued a decree for their conversion to Christianity
Â Â The militant outfits have left the villagers with two options â embrace Christianity or face capital punishment.
Â Â -- Arunachal Buddhists allege militants harassment - Assam Tribune online, August 23, 2004QUOTEBaptist Church is involved in backing separatist rebels
Â Â ... rebel National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) ... forcing Tripura's indigenous tribes to become Christians and give up Hindu forms of worship in areas under their control. ...
Â Â The NLFT manifesto says that they want to expand what they describe as the kingdom of God and Christ in Tripura
Â Â -- Church backing Tripura rebels - BBC News, 18 April, 2000Shambhu, do ask Katty her opinion on the US churches funding genocide in India. And ask her when she is finally going to report some well-documented facts, instead of merely interviewing bigoted christian/islamic apologists for terrorism who wish to spread their christoislamic propaganda to conceal what the massacres their kindred are committing against Dharmics in our land.

http://christianaggression.org/features_nlft.php
QUOTEFunding and Church Support
The National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) is heavily funded by many Baptist Churches. Just a year before the Baptist Church assisted the foundation of the NLFT, they called for Christians to target the âmillions of Hindus and Jews lost in the darknessâ of their respective faiths. The NLFT is basically a violent muscle arm of the church and its missionaries.

Since the foundation of the NLFT, the Baptist Church has been supporting this violent campaign by providing funding and arms for the group. (Confirmed even by BBC news above.)
In April of 2000, Nagmanlal Halam, secretary of the Noapara Baptist Church in Tripura, caught providing 50 gelatine sticks, 5kg of potassium and 2kg of sulphur and other ingredients for making explosives to the group. Afterwards, Halam confessed to buying and supplying explosives to the NLFT for the past two years. In another incident in August of 2003, police arrested the Secretary of a Baptist Christian Missionary church in North Tripura District who was in possession of five kg of potassium, one kg sulphur, few gelatin sticks and 45 gm of high explosive materials.

In Tripura, such arrest and seizures of arms and explosives from the members of the Baptist church is a common occurrence and the link between the National Liberation Front of Tripura and the Baptist Church has been well established.
Ishwar Sharan's hamsa.org site:
QUOTEThis activity is especially evident in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In Arunachal Pradesh where proselytizing and conversion are illegal, Christians claim whole villages and put up signboards that say "Non-Christians Not Allowed" at their entrances. These Arunachal converts originate from Mother Teresaâs institutions in Assam where they are indoctrinated and baptized and then sent back to their villages to convert the elders. In Tamil Nadu Christian slogans appear on Hindu pilgrim routes to Tirupati and on the route around Arunachala Hill at Tiruvannamalai that pilgrims circumambulate on full moon days. ... The theoretical ground for this "good deed" has been laid years ago by Catholic theologians and missionaries like Fr. Raimundo Panikker and the Benedictine monk Abhishiktananda. They have already claimed the holy hill and all of India for Christ in their writings.Catholics are about 75-80% of all Indian christians.
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/books...ion17.html
QUOTESangh is even less combative vis-Ã -vis Christianity than vis-Ã -vis Islam. The Christian Churches must be counted among Hindutva's most determined enemies. Much of the negative image which the BJP has acquired internationally is due to the lasting powerful impact of the Churches on the information stream concerning the Third World. In quarrels between the Hindutva forces and the Muslims or the secularists, the Christian institutions are invariably on the anti-Hindu side. There are also ChrisÂtian armed separatÂist movements in Nagaland and Mizoram, which are openly supported by the World Council of Churches and by a number of Catholic institutions.
And not to forget:
Nagaland for christ, DailyPioneer. (Pioneer article also at IF, second part of post: Nagaland for Christ: Muivah)
Yet the same christo militant NSCN Isak Muivah group says this claim of "Nagaland for chwist" is still a very 'secular' wish. Very psecular. Meanwhile, though NSCN Isak Muivah is a faction of NSCN, it nevertheless - as christos are wont to do - clashed very violently with another very faithful christian militant group:
QUOTEThousands flee as Nagaland militants clash
www.hindu.com/2006/10/28/stories/2006102804161200.htm
Guwahati: Over 4,000 people have fled their houses in Nagaland's Zunheboto district after a gunbattle broke out between the rival militant factions â National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak Muivah) and the NSCN (Khaplang).Non-existent jeebus acts through them. Hence their christo group name of NSCN "national socialist" - which their earlier German christian counterparts had shortened to nazis. So Hindus should call these christos by the same term as well.

That's some examples of christoterrorists making open claims about our people and our land. Something which no one wants to discuss on christo tv in India or outside of course. Because christoislamaniacs making claims on heathens is very secular. But - by their non-existent gawd - they will absolutely never let heathens exert any rights on their own heathen persons or their own heathen property. The very idea is considered blasphemous to the plans of their fictive jeebusjehovallah: how dare heathens live (let alone prosper) in peace *somewhere*/anywhere on the planet. It is not allowed. Invade India, rest of Asia, Africa. Undermine, convert, steal, genocide them all. Jeebusjehovallah wills it so. And the media will not cover it (and if the heathens resist, the international christo media will invert such resistance and make it look like the heathens are the intolerant aggressors).

Predictable that Katty has no qualms (or otherwise she merely has amnesia) about how her own illegal presence in AmeriKKKa was made possible only by the near-complete genocide of the real population of the continent. The christian invaders have bloodied - not even she/her interviewees would dare use the word 'purified' (probably because they'd just rather pretend it didn't happen at all) - the land that they stole from its legitimate native American inhabitants.

Maintaining a studied *christian* silence on their own genocide in the Americas, they but naturally condone their own nazi christoislami kindred's genocide of Dharmics in India and the rest of Asia (Africa, and elsewhere), while pretending that Hindus are the aggressors.
How any person may tell that the international christian condones what's really going on, is by the way they:
- do careful one-sided reporting on all matters pertaining to the religious terrorism of christoislaminazism in India;
- choose liars to interview to present the Indian situation in its most inverted form: that the christoislami nazis are in fact the victims when it so obviously is the christoislamiterrorists that are committing a systematic genocide in India;
- refuse to educate themselves on the real situation, even as they insist on spinning more and more lies about it

We have a right to our own country. A Dharmic heathen country for Dharmic heathens. Enough of christoislami stealing of others' lands. They stole Rome, Greece, all of Europe, all of the Americas, the Phillipines. Arabia, Anatolia, Persia, huge parts of larger Bharatam, much of Southeast and Central Asia. Now much of Africa, large parts of China (through christian infiltration into the 'communist' party), most of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura and Mizoram, Nepal (through christian maoists in power). Parts of Serbia. And yet their bloodlust is not satiated. They will claim all. And some Hindus are foolish enough to let the cannibalistic nazi sheep continue to make these illegitimate claims on our land and people, as if that were the height of psecularism. And - worse: they will denounce any Hindus making legitimate claims about our own land and people as committing the most unspeakable and unsecular act. People standing up to their complete destruction is not unsecular.

There is No Room At All for christoislamism=nazism anywhere in the world. Because forever and all over, christoislamism has spelled only genocide, holocaust, pogroms and terrorism to all indigenous traditions and inhabitants. To say No to this world genocide is a natural and just reaction. None sane would agree to continue to live with a *known* serial murderer, thief and liar. To finally say No to christoislami genocide (which is all there is to christoislamism) is *not* intolerance on anyone's part. And it's well past time that Hindus/Dharmics in India said it.
Bharatam is Hindu Rashtra. A place where all Dharmics and Natural Traditionalists have refuge, just as many had obtained in the past as well. But it is also a place that must (will) challenge and defeat christoislamism definitively.

Any negotiating with christoislamism is the same as striking a deal with nazism.
There can be no deals. Both christianism and islamism have clearly stated that their intention is to wipe our very being off the face of the world. And yet 'Hindoos' are still only too eager to negotiate the terms on which this will happen ("please eat my grandmother, she's old and moreover believes in some mythological Gods anyway; just don't take me... Not yet. Wait, I'll toss in my granddad tooooo.")

>> Cont.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 12-12-2008, 04:37 PM by Husky.)

Continued from the previous post.

Other things Katty/her chosen interviewees conveniently 'forgot' to discuss:

http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/article...illeniumBC.html
QUOTEBoth the US and India have been major targets of terrorism, so the US cannot continue to sponsor anti-Indian terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir all while combating anti-American te! rrorism in the Middle East.
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/article...ics/robert.html
QUOTEYet, it is precisely on the Kashmiri frontline that America is most directly concerned, for it has provided indirect support to the terrorists for more than a decade. Many Hindus have been killed with American-made weapons and bombs.
...
the American support to the Muslim side in many other conflicts: against the Greeks in Turkish northern Cyprus, against the Soviets in Afghanistan, against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, against India in Kashmir.
...
What anti-American Muslims also fail to understand, is the structural economic reason for America's preferring the Muslim world over the fledgling infidel superpower India. The Muslim world is not very dynamic and has a lot of purchasing power, so it is the perfect market for American hi-tech (and low-tech, e.g. agricultural) products. India, by contrast, has only limited purchasing power but is a very dynamic competitor in all advanced industrial sectors. For this reason, and also to compensate the Muslim world for the permanent grievance over American support to "the Zionist entity", America is bound to take the Muslim side in purportedly peripheral conflicts, especially against India. The peptalk about India and the US being "natural allies" as "the biggest and the oldest democracy" has little impact on real-life policies. In practical terms, Bush and Hathaway are the running-dogs (or rather, to borrow another Leninist term, the "useful idiots") of Pakistani jihadism. (Or it's the other way around.)
...
If Hathaway wants to thwart religious "charities" promoting both "religious bigotry" and "violence and religious and ethnic intolerance", he can start much closer to home. American Baptist and Evangelical groups are financing the propagation of Christian religious bigotry of the most obscurantist kind in India's Northeast and tribal belts. Much of this bigotry has resulted in armed separatism, terrorism and ethnic cleansing of tribes refusing to become Christians.
...
The Indian people is not financing movements violently disrupting American society. By contrast, American citizens are financing Church activities in India which often shade over into armed separatism, social disruption of tribal societies and ethnic cleansing. The American state is arming Pakistan, and even if it were to fully stop arms deliveries to Pakistan, it still carries a legacy of having armed the Pakistani Army and trained the Pakistani secret service, agents of terror against Indian citizens and the Indian state. The guilt for keeping Indo-American relations unfriendly is entirely on the American side. If Dr. Hathaway believes in a "new partnership between our two peoples", he had better advise his Government to investigate American private support to missionary-cum-terrorist subversion and to halt every form of American state support to Pakistani jihadism.
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/reviews/hock.html
QUOTEMany of V.T. Rajshekar's brochures (Dalit Sahitya Akademy, Bangalore) are transcripts of speeches given at Christian conferences. Like pure Indian Marxism before, this lumpen anti-Brahminism is also well-liked and even patronized by Western academe. Thus, Ilaiah was invited to contribute to the American University Press book Democracy in India, a Hollow Shell edited by Prof. Arthur Bonner.

Shambhu · 12-12-2008, 07:22 PM

Husky:

As expected, they sent me a form letter..we can be contacted at this and that etc etc...

Anyway, it was the guests and the callers who were to varying degrees anti-Hindu. Katty was asking questions about the attcaks on Mumbai and the guests (Teresita Sheaffer and Robert someone..) were pontificating and callers were displaying their disgusting mix of cluelessness and bigotry...Hope Katty Kay keeps a printout of my mail with her next time she interviews. She herself is pretty balanced..but clueless on Hindu affairs..

Shambhu · 12-23-2008, 10:10 AM

Just another short and sweet letter I sent to some "historian" muslim apologist trying to blame the Mumbai attacks on the "Kashmir issue". This liar's piece was posted on sanghparivar.org, no less. Sarve Samachar, sanghparivar.org (tho not officially connected to sangh parivar) don't filter what they put up, they just put things up randomly. B@stards.

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Sir, the Qu'ran and the Hadis inflame muslim passions. The Sangh Parivar is not communal. Jihadi muslims and their apologists (like you) are.

Since this is the real nature of Islam, no wonder Islamic countries never do well. Their wealth is either looted or from oil; their "culture" is just a remnant of the pre-islamic culture the country had (like Egypt has its pyramids); they spend their pitiful existence on money borrowed from "kaafir" countries; they spend their time whining that all would be well only if the world was converted to Islam; they believe in loot, rape, and plunder, and adore a man who invented a "god" to justify this loot, rape, and plunder.

Take care.

Shambhu · 12-24-2008, 06:49 AM

Saving 1 more for future cut pastes
---------------------------------------------------
The truth about a lie

http://freetruth.50webs.org/Index.htm

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

http://www.caesarsmessiah.com/main.html

....more on the borrowing, stealing, looting, retrofitting done to make "Christianity" a "religion"

...and more on how this 'religion" was spread

http://www.burningcross.net/

http://www.christianaggression.org

Shambhu · 12-28-2008, 04:44 AM

Via a Gujarati:

---------------------------

This is English translation of letter written in Gujarati in Janmabhoomi eidtion from Mumbai.
http://www.narendramodi.in/images/mailer/mailer_001.gif

Extract of a letter to the Editor â in Janmabhoomi edition from Mumbai.

Story is of Terror: Agony of a Muslim

I am a Muslim born and brought up here, studied here, grew up here and living happily with my family. This is my heaven. Today, I am a 65 year old man.

Today, it is a matter of great shame that the terrorists who had created recent chaos are supported by Pakistan and traitors within our own country. Such an act of terror is not possible without the active support of traitors inside. Pakistan is unable to tolerate the progress made by India and that we live happily. We and the people of Pakistan or Bangladesh are all brothers of one family. Just like water cannot be separated by beating with a stick, our hearts also cannot be divided. In the same family, brothers and sisters do not attain same level of progress and all of us get our happiness and sorrows in our life as per the wish of Allah and as per our deeds. Such jealousy and envy, hatred and vengeance are not good.

Many people defame our Chief Minister Narendraji Modi, but lot of Muslims in our State love him. He is only against anti-nationals and not against any particular community. Post Godhra incidents are natural and havenât 350 Hindus died then? Havenât 60-70 Muslims died in the recent cowardly attacks? Modiji had the courage and was the first one to come to Mumbai and declare help. We will go to the extent of saying that Chief Minister of every State; whichever government they may belong to ( there have to be other parties in true democracy ); should be like Modiji and so also the Prime Minister. I have grown old but, if I get cooperation, I am self- motivated to sacrifice my life for my beloved country. I am ready to bombard the camps of traitors Dawood and Masood â for the sake of my country.

- Anees Mohammed

Shambhu · 01-06-2009, 04:24 AM

<img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/b_woot.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='b_woot.gif' />

"Islamic Anti-Semitism"- LETTER TO INDIAN EXPRESS
02/01/2009 06:39:19 H. Balakrishnan

Reference Faizur Rahman's " India is about democracy not Hindu theocracy " (TNIE-02 JAN).

The writer deploys a " smokescreen " when he wrote: " Swamy expects readers to dogmatically believe that the 'Jews were hated by Prophet Mohammed', without quoting a single statement of the Prophet in support." On the contrary, Islamic Holy Texts are replete with " Anti-Semitism ".

For starters, Palestinian cleric Wael Al-Zarad during a television program which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on February 28, 2008 intoned the following about the Jews of Israel: " By Allah, if each and every Arab spat on them, they would drown in Arab spit." The crux of Al-Zarad's remarks explained that the Muslims' blood vengeance against the Jews, " will only subside with their [the Jews] annihilation, Allah willing, because they tried to kill our Prophet several times."

These allegations are part of a central antisemitic motif in the Koran which decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ reiterated at 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. It should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured in the pre-amble to Hamas' foundational Covenant. This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been "...cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary's son" (5:7. Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322). And the related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews-as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64-of being "spreaders of war and corruption," a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Indeed the Koran's overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment, conviction, and punishment process. The Jews' ultimate sin and punishment are made clear: they are the devil's minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam-the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)-they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14-19).

Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote these words in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in 1968/69, and then re-issued in 1986: " [The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness...only a minority of the Jews keep their word....[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims {Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not. "

Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, " carefully researched" views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope-the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents some 90% of the world's Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on "dialogue" (January 1998) with Jews, the Jews as " enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs" (April 2002), and the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews (April 2002) make clear. Tantawi's statements on dialogue, which were issued shortly after he met with the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Israel Meir Lau, in Cairo, on December 15, 1997, provided him another opportunity to re-affirm
his ongoing commitment to the views expressed about Jews in his Ph.D. thesis.Al-Azhar Grand Imam Tantawi's case illustrates the prevalence and depth of sacralized, "normative" Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world.

Historian David Littman has waged an heroic personal campaignâin public, at the United Nations Human Rights Commission, since January, 1989âto elucidate key aspects of Hamas' genocidal ideology, demonstrating unapologetically how this annihilationist hatred is sanctioned by Islam's foundational texts.He quotes Salah al-Khalidi (fl. late 20th century), who makes plain how these motifs of Koranic Jew-hatred are interpreted by Hamas in a manner that is entirely consistent with classical exegeses. " Humiliation is attached to the Jews for their entire lifetime: they were humiliated in Egypt, and when they arrived in [sic] Palestine, and when they were exiled from Palestine, and when they dispersed into the valleys of the earth. What concerns us hereâin our discussion of the Jewish characterâis to indicate that this humiliation is to be considered as an inveterate Jewish character trait, and a destructive Jewish perversion. Humiliation is one of their historical attributes, a fixed fact of their existence, and a qaa`ida, basis of their lifeâ¦
(Koran 2:61) The Jews are humiliated because they disbelieved in God, killed His prophets, disobeyed His emissaries, transgressed His prohibitionsâ all of this is humiliation. They are humiliatedâand this is why they search out lustful indulgences, and have become their slaves. All of this is humiliation."

Again. " It is impossible that the Jews could not be cursed. How could they not be accursed when they are attributed with such degenerate inveterate character traits, twenty of which we have demonstrated above. (Note: Khalidi earlier states, 'We have extracted from Koran twenty Jewish traits. The Jews are: liars, perverters (of the Text), envious, tricky, fickle, mercurial, sardonic, treacherous, in error, causing others to be in error, merchants, fools, humiliated, dastards, misers, avid for (this) life, disloyal to their firm contracts, rush into sinful aggression, concealers of true evidence, corrupters in the earth, and obstructors in God's path.' They are worthy of eternal curse because of the villainous traits they display and the corrupt evils they have perpetrated." And so on, and so forth, it goes!!

Littman's two decades of appeals and admonitions having gone entirely unheeded, the global community must now grapple with the bloodthirsty, Jew-annihilationist aspirations of an unreformed Hamas, which, on its official website (posted December 31, 2008 at the site hosted by Emirnet, United Arab Emirates) urged Muslims to attack Jews across the world, making the ugly claim that, " â¦a Jewish adolescent boy in an Australian synagogue, a Jewish minister in the Georgian government, a Jewish businessman at the New York Stock Exchange, and an illiterate Jew from the Ethiopian desertâ¦ they all belong to the same gang and the same nation, apart from the rest of humanity."

Where is the 'mad mullah', the writer refers to? Unless quoting the Koranic verses and the Hadiths is 'mad'?!!

And, as regards the Hindu - Muslim relationships go, it is best to quote Albureni,writing about Mahmud Ghaznavi : " This prince chose the Holy War [ jihad ] as his calling - -. God be merciful to both father and son! Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions - - Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion of all the Muslims."

As for the writer's reference to 'Hindu theocracy'- its laughable, to say the least. Sanatana Dharma believes in "AHOM TVA BRAHMOSMI" (YOU ARE THE DIVINE). In islam it is "blasphemy'. And his quoting ' Ekam Sad Viprah Bahuda Vadanti ', it is a Rig Vedic shloka. At the time of the Rig Veda, mercifully, the Abrahamic 'revealed' religions had not come into existence. The shloka was evidently directed at the various sects and sub-sects within Sanatana Dharama.

I throw the gauntlet down at the writer to show JUST ONE SHLOKA in any Sanatana Dharma texts that is an equivalent to : " The punishment for those who oppose Allah and His messenger is Execution or Crucifixion or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides or exile from the land." (Q -5:33)

As long as Muslims continue to live in 'denial mode',as Fizuer Rehaman has just demonstrated, strife lies ahead. However, Rehman has fooled none.

Happy New Year,

Vande Mataram

http://www.haindavakeralam.com/HkPage.aspx...EID=7930&SKIN=M

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-08-2009, 08:45 PM by Husky.)

Want to post a whole bunch of stuff concerned with the following two Rajeev 2004 blog entries about the sinister christoterrorist motivations and propagandic fictions of Slumdog Millionaire (SlumMovie).

Not letters to be cut and pasted, but information to be passed around. Probably little, if anything?, you've not seen before: almost all of it was posted by one or other IF member somewhere on this forum, or otherwise obtained from hinduwisdom.info. (I can't recall who posted what, sorry. I just describe all of it as "IF posted it".) However, I thought it would be useful to have it all in one place.

I like referenced information, information that can't be disputed - or at least you know someone is not making it up, but is referring to more reliable persons whose work you can check up on. So that's the sort of IF data I'm collating here, in Shambhu's temporarily hijacked thread.

The two posts at Rajeev2004 are:

1. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/02/s...ffect.html
QUOTESlumDog Effect
A surge in child sponsorship inquiries for Indian children is being reported in Britain (uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090228/ten-slumdog-surge-in-indian-child-sponso-a56114e.html), in the aftermath of the movie SlumDog Millionaire. They're calling it the 'SlumDog Effect'.

Posted by san at 2/28/2009 02:13:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: gutter inspector, india shining, media In relation to the above, I'd like people to cast another glance at A Critique of Inter-country Adoption by Lee Sam-dol (Tobias) @transracialabductees that Dhu had posted on earlier.

Also of relevance is that this hypocritical interest could further encourage the christian terrorists in India to go into even larger scale kidnapping of Hindu children to hand over to the 'caring' christian terrorist centres (christian 'orphanages'). Like:
http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?opti...id=31&Itemid=26
QUOTEWith the promise of providing their children an education, a Catholic priest from the neighboring district of Nagaland reportedly charged parents 10,000 rupees per child (about US$250 each) for tuition, room, and board at the St. Emmanuel Mission Convent in Rajasthan, some 2,500 kilometers away in India's northwest. That price was high, but parents considered it a bargain for a "sahib-run" (i.e., Western-style) school. Some parents later developed misgivings, however, and traveled to Rajasthan to visit their children. On arrival they were shocked to discover that the children were not enrolled at St. Emmanuel's. In fact, they were not in any school at all--they had been placed in an orphanage. The priest who ran the orphanage said he had paid 5,000 rupees per child to a fellow priest--from Nagaland--and allegedly demanded compensation to the tune of this sum before releasing the children to their families.
...
Both Rome and its Protestant competitors have been particularly aggressive in efforts to convert the tribals. Exploiting customs that make female children economic burdens on their families, missionaries reportedly induce tribal mothers to relinquish baby girls shortly after birth. Often the mothers are promised that rich Westerners will adopt their daughters and they will live a "much better life." The mother is typically paid about $70 for her child, who is then adopted by Western parents for a "donation" of $2,500.

2. http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2009/02/chr...ctor-using.html
QUOTEchristist Evangelist director Using Islam to Batter Hinduism
feb 25th, 2009

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <info
GAUTAM SEN wrote the following:

Christian Evangelist Producer Using Islam to Batter Hinduism

Danny Boyle, maker of the film Slumdog Millionaire, is evidently a committed Christian, the kind who is usually keen to advance the interests of his faith. The agenda of his Catholic Church is to convert Hindu India into a Christian enclave like the Republic of Korea , which is apparently what Slumdog Millionaire wishes to further by portraying the grimly violent nature of Hindus.

And of course the West and their lowly scum politicians (from Lord Morley and Lord Wavell to whippersnapper Miliband) have long used Islam as the battering ram with which to undermine Hindus.

This explains Boyle's espousal of the Teesta Setalvad version of the fate of Muslims in India in the film, also the excuse of Pakistanis terrorists for killing Hindus. I am glad Vikas Swarup made more than the standard thirty pieces of silver for selling India down the river since I remember him pretending to be a militant patriot when he was a diplomat in London . But, hey, the money, was too good to turn down and he got to become friends with the pucca, gora sahib and Hindu-baiter, extraordinaire William Dalrymple!

And of course the fierce evangelical NDTV and the execrable Barkha were all over Boyle earlier this evening.

http://vivekajyoti.blogspot.com/2009/02/da...illionaire.html

http://www.snapnetwork.org/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/42...e-a-priest.html

Posted by nizhal yoddha at 2/25/2009 08:47:00 PM 1 comments

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2009, 03:48 PM by Husky.)

Sati and other suicide
by Dr. Koenraad Elst
Original: "Sati en andere zelfdoding"

(In the September 2000 issue of Hinduism Today the meritorious journalist and leading feminist Madhu Kishwar criticizes the law that prohibits the religious glorification of widow self-immolation or Sati. According to her, this is an encroachment on freedom of religion that prepares the way for other forms of limiting freedom. On account of her opinion-piece I have unearthed the text below from my work, which appeared in India, the paper of the Belgian-Indian friendship-society Shanti Darshan, in 1994. The article in the version presented has been completed on Makar Sankranti day 14 January 1995, the 25th anniversary of Jan Pallach's suicide in Prague. A few new additions are italicised. Apologies for the messy transcription.)

Today there is much talk of multi-cultural co-existence. It remains to be seen whether people are ready for that. Because another culture, that is not so much another way of eating or dressing, but another system of fundamental values, another stance on the fundamental parameters of life, e.g. on individual liberty, of the womanâs status, of death. When we are confronted with another stance on death, then the xenophobic reflexes of non-understanding and judgement immediately rear their heads.

An excellent example is what has already recently been written about Sati, the self-immolation of widows on the pyres of their husbands. Now here is a custom that is really alien to our culture. Whoever wants multi-culturalism shall therefore welcome this and wave away all foolish prejudices against it. Isnât it so?

The central prejudice in this case is that only a few in the Western culture-sphere are prepared to believe that this deed is voluntary. On the contrary, people want to desperately reduce this practice to something that is better-known in our cultural pattern: murder.

Do note, âWestern culture-sphereâ does not so much refer to the geographical West. The English-speaking elite in India is far more fanatical in her hostility toward and determined incomprehension for the traditional Indian culture than the British ever were. The student is after all more fanatical than the master. Nowadays one can defend all possible colonial prejudices in a very learned manner using modern Indian sources as authority for argument.

The case of Rup Kanwar

A good example are the reports about the last sensational Sati, the self-immolation of Rup Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987. The English-language paper India Today stated that hundreds of bystanders had seen how Rup Kanwar worthily fulfilled her rituals, climbed the pyre and, singing, underwent the death-by-fire. This hundred-fold testimony was unfortunate for a newspaper that crusades against the âobscurantismâ of âhuman dishonouringâ practices like Sati which, after all, cannot possibly be anything other than a disguised form of murder. What does the paper of the modern Indian, that chooses empirical observance over blind belief, do with an unwelcome hundredfold empirical testimony? This: âThey probably saw what they wanted to see.â Okay, there was a unanimous testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses, but that doesnât count, because those backward villagers âprobably saw what they wanted to seeâ.

Not only does this clincher show the boundless contempt of the urban westernised Indian for the turbanned villagers of Deorala. It especially proves the prejudiced character of the âSati is murderâ message that the English-language press would like to give its readers in connection with Rup Kanwarâs self-immolation.

The newspapers, to their own dissatisfaction, had to report that the surroundings of Rup Kanwar confirmed that she had acted of her own accord, against the village elders' attempts at dissuading. However, the papers continued undiminished with inventing alternate scenarios. That the in-laws would have been bothered by the fact that the dowry had been chased away by it, whereas the dowry to Rup Kanwarâs family had to be paid back because Rup and her husband didnât have any children yet: thatâs why they would have forced her to the Sati. That [scenario] would then be a variant on the dowry murders which rather occur quite often in precisely the westernised environments.

Dowry Murders

At this point, let us make a clear distinction between the self-immolation of widows, and the kitchen fires that are often orchestrated (thousands a year, in India as well as in Pakistan) to murder brides if the dowry (dahej) that they bring along is less than expected or demanded. Traditionally, a dowry was a gift of personal items, especially jewels, given to the bride: while her brothers remained in the parental home and took over the family business or family lands, the bride got to take her share in the inheritance with her in the form of shiny movable goods. In any case, it was not a gift of the brideâs family to the bridegroom and his family, whereas such is indeed the case in less traditional circles today.

This practice only originated in the 13th century, and then only among the martial Rajput caste (coincidentally the same where, since ages prior to it, Sati also occurs the most). Among other castes it never involved more than a nominal gift, and it is only in the 19th century that the dahej has taken on scandalous proportions and become a real social problem, starting with the most anglicised environments, such as the Parsees and the Sindhi Banias (merchants). The first dowry victims that made it into the newspapers were young girls who committed suicide to safeguard their fathers from the impending dowry-bankruptcy.

Nowadays, the giving of enormous presents to the groomâs family is a rather common custom, which finds entry even in the lowest classes and which reduces families with many daughters to beggary. Particularly in modern households, marriage is the golden occasion for a young man is the golden occasion to reel in all kinds of luxurious goods in one go. Which is why it is there [in such households] that the dowry has started becoming a reason for bride-murder. To suppose that bride-murder is an evil of the traditional society that "still continues" to occur often, is completely wrong. On the contrary, it is a typical example of how an innocent custom of the native people has become a poison through contact with our consumer-culture.

Rup Kanwar: what we donât know

The allegation that Rup Kanwar would supposedly have been forced into Sati has remained unproven. The journalists who with fanfare had asserted that they had seen through the conspiracy and had found witnesses for the murder-scenario, were absent at the trial or appeared emptyhanded.

This, in spite of the fact that (as Mark Tully observes in the Sati chapter of his impressive book No Full Stops in India) the police could most definitely have put pressure on the villagers to testify for the (Sati-demonising) sentence that the government wished for. Which is why the in-laws, who were summoned to the judge by the government, were acquittedâa sentence against which the government has given a notice of appeal of which nothing further has been heard.

Still, those that had maintained their belief in the murder-scenario might have been right. Firstly, there were witnesses that declared that Rup Kanwar changed her mind once the flames soaked her body and wanted to jump off the pyre, but was pushed back onto it. But perhaps they too saw âonly what they wanted to seeâ? Besides, the occurrence of panic while carrying out a difficult decision would still not alter the voluntary nature of that decision. Secondly, it was asserted that Rup Kanwar was visibly drugged when she climbed onto the pyre. This claim was unverifiable due to the nature of the case. But the fact that the cremation, according to some, had taken place uncommonly soon (however: a cremation always takes place before the first following sunset), and that Rup Kanwarâs parents were not timely informed, threw even more suspicion on the in-laws. On the other hand, Rup Kanwarâs father has declared to be certain that his daughter acted entirely voluntarily. He has even appeared with Rupâs father-in-law in several public forums in India to testify about this. That does not prevent the English-speaking press from systematically referring to the case as âthe murder of Rup Kanwarâ.

From this distance we do not want to judge the true facts of the Rup Kanwar case. Most people in Deorala, and most Rajputs, have steadily remained believing in the authenticity of this Sati and in the innocence of Rup Kanwarâs in-laws. The anti-Sati expressions due to the press, the government and some judges are discarded by them as a smear-campaign by prejudiced city-dwellers who do not wish to understand anything of the heroic Rajput-code.

Irrespective of the true facts of Rup Kanwarâs Sati, it must be said that the suspicion of prejudice among the westernised circles is completely correct. Because in both cases, murder or voluntary suicide, the English-speaking elite in India will nevertheless maintain that it could only have been murder. With this it sinks its own credibility. Its potentially correct diagnosis that Rup Kanwar was murdered, was sincerely rejected by many (among others in the Hindi and Marathi press) because the action-committees, politicians and members of the press involved declared with that same absolute certainty that Sati is always and by definition involuntaryâand that is manifestly untrue. If they had restricted themselves to the facts of this case, then they might have been able to convince; now that they wanted to couple this with a general (and as we shall see, untenable) dogma, their judgement of this one case was seen in the light of their general position, and thus rejected.

The anti-Sati law

The self-immolation of Rup Kanwar was the cause of the new anti-Sati measures on the part of politics. Even in 1987, the Parliament adopted the âCommission of Sati (Prevention) Billâ. This draconian law deals out the death penalty or life imprisonment to whoever aids a Sati in one way or another. This includes: talking a woman into believing that Sati is of any merit or has any heavenly reward, preventing her from withdrawing from the Sati or hindering her rescue, taking part in the procession that brings the woman to the pyre or to even be present in any capacity at the Sati or its related ceremony. In case an action is brought out against this, the burden of proof lies with the accused. The woman who attempts Sati can herself get a prison sentence for up to one year, depending on the degree to which it was voluntary, and taking into consideration all the social and psychological factors.
In addition, this law forbids and punishes all practices that could be considered as âglorification of Satiâ. Ceremonies for remembrance of a Sati and the building of Sati temples are forbidden, and the government is even authorised to break down existing Sati temples. The tens of existing Sati temples in Rajasthan quickly converted themselves into âShakti templesâ (shakti is the female force, and is a relatively applicable term, because Sati is seen as a great display of this specific female force). Still, their popularity and the income from them have been heavily curtailed.

This law has not provoked a storm of protest: few will want to put out their necks for something as controversial as the right to commit or commemorate Sati. Still, the law could be annulled, because it has been challenged at the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

An oft-heard objection concerns the prohibition of religious ceremonies and temple construction and the threat of breaking temples down: this would be an apparent desecration of religious freedom. The constitution does say that the practice of religious freedom can be limited by considerations of morality, hygiene and public order. But it is an apparent absurdity that mausoleums of massmurderers like Aurangzeb and traitors like Muinuddin Chishti (who functioned as a spy for Mohammed Ghori) can still operate as places of pilgrimage, whereas temples for the âloyal suicidesâ of Sati women should be forbidden. If people fear that the glorification of these women shall lead to unwanted imitation, then what about for example the glorification of monsters like Stalin and Mao in countless publications of the communist party?

We can find other objections in the most important challenge (without outcome) to this law at the Supreme Court, the one by Jivan Kulkarni, a historian from Bombay [and a veteran of the war against China in 1962; in the meantime deceased, from cancer]. He says that he too is against the self-immolation of widows, but that the law implies a whole lot more than the discouraging of Sati. His position is that, firstly, the law in its terminology assumes that Sati is âthe burning of a widowâ, not a self-immolation but a burning carried out by others, i.e. a murder. Well, neither the written mentions of Sati, nor the eyewitness accounts drawn up by unbiased witnesses in tempore non suspecto ['in times above suspicion'] (especially British colonials), leave any doubt that in principle and usually also in practice itâs about voluntary self-immolation.

Secondly, seen as how the ban on Sati by the British was established in 1829 not as a ban on a particular form of murder (superfluous, because of its inclusion in the general ban on murder), but as a ban on suicide, namely from the christian taboo on suicide, itâs a violation of religious freedom, in the sense that suicide counts as an accepted and frequently as a particularly honourable practice in Indian traditions.

Origin

People sometimes say that widow-burning was brought into India in a later migration from Central Asia, that of the Shakas or Scythians, in the middle or end of the first millenium B.C.E. These Scythian tribes are then supposed to have been the ancestors of the martial Rajput caste in Rajasthan, the caste to which Rup Kanwar and the most famous Satis belonged. This to me seems to be an attempt to push away from oneself a difficult to defend custom. Of the Scythians, it is indeed known that they sent widows to their death with their husband, as well as servants and horses with their master â whether burnt with them or buried with them. From archaeological excavations in Southern Russia it appears that widows were already climbing the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in the fourth millennium before our chronology, in the so-called Kurgan-culture, an apparantly proto-Scythian and definitely Indo-European culture.

[The connection with India should however not be sought in the Scythian invasion of the 1st century B.C.E., but in the much older common Indo-European roots, because the custom also occurred among the Celtic and Germanic people. So we hear in the Edda, in the book Sigurdarkvida, that Brunhilde stabs herself after the death of Siegfried in order to be buried with him; in addition she first has her slaves killed and she also invites free servants to voluntarily die with her. So she doesnât climb the funeral pyre, but nevertheless follows her husband into death. Also among the Celts did this custom occur in large scale. Great power and wisdom are ascribed to a woman about to commit Sati, which is why for e.g. Brunhilde predicts the future at the last moment for next of kin.

Bernard Sergent (Les Indo-EuropÃ©ens, Payot, 1995, p.223), observes a connection between Sati and the status of a woman. In spite of feminist claims that this custom once again proves the male contempt for woman, it in fact occurred the least in those Indo-European societies where the woman was most disparaged in both practice as well as mythology, like the Greek [society]. A woman who does not have much honour to maintain, wonât accompany one to the pyre; itâs precisely the proud and relatively emancipated Celtic and Germanic women who did this.]

See quoteblock at end concerning the above

In India, besides the Rajputs, the martial Marathas and Sikhs also knew this custom, though to a lesser extent. Other castes did not know this practice at all or specifically disapproved of it, in particular the Brahmanas (although they too practised Sati in British Bengal, in particular after the modernisation of the law of succession). In most duty-prescribing books (400 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.?), Manu and Yajnavalkya among others, there is no mention of widow-burning at all. Only the Vishnu Dharmashastra gives the widow the choice between celibacy and self-immolation.

Suicide, not murder

That in principle itâs about self-immolation and not murder is apparent from many British testimonies. For that matter, these are in agreement that this practice only occurred among a few higher castes. They keep stressing that those present continually tried to make the woman give up on her resolve, and that there wasnât a single stigma associated with forsaking this resolution, unless it only happened after the ceremony had started (which might perhaps have been the case with Rup Kanwar).

In Bengal at the start of the 19th century, several cases have been mentioned where the Sati was under pressure by the in-laws. A part of the cause was the British reforms of the law of succession, which suddenly made it worthwhile for the in-laws to not be left with a surviving daughter-in-law. This was therefore an aberration, partly induced by colonisation, of the general practice where Sati was completely voluntary. For that matter, itâs significant that such women did not become the object of worship, as opposed to the many non-suspect Sati women in Rajasthan.

The mentions of Sati in mythological, judicial and historical texts of the Hindus are without exception concerned with voluntary self-immolation. The name actually cames from Sati, the beloved of Shiva, who sets herself on fire in protest against the unjust treatment of her lover by her father; this story therefore has noting to do with widow-burning. It is quite possible that this might be a later-constructed myth to explain the name, and that the practice of Sati is much older. Sati actually means âgoodâ or âloyal [woman]â, from sat/sant, âtrue, goodâ. The most famous mention is that of Madri, the favourite wife of Pandu, the father of the five Pandavas from the Mahabharata epic: she climbed Panduâs pyre, while the other wife, Kunti, declined the honour. The Greek author Diodorus Siculus tells of how in 316 B.C.E. the Indian commander of a hired army is killed in action in Iran, upon which his two spouses argue about the privilege of becoming the Sati.

Countless examples are known from the Middle Ages. The Arabian writer Albiruni writes that widows were treated badly and thatâs why they chose self-immolation. Marco Polo, on the other hand, states that they did this âout of love for their husbandâ. A special case is the jauhar, the collective Sati of Rajput women when a city besieged by Muslims no longer had a chance to be saved: the men did a desperate sally in order to die heroically, and the women were kept out of the hands of the enemy by the firedeath. Much more recent examples are the voluntary immolation of Shivajiâs wife Putalabai (1680), of Madhavarao Peshwaâs wife Ramabai, and of the wives of Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Sikh realm, in 1839.

Of more import for the biased westerner is rather, that also the unsuspectable British shared the opinion that the widows involved carried out their Sati voluntarily. Before the British rule banned this practice in 1829 on Lord Bentinckâs initiative, it had a report drawn up with the significant title: âThe Report on Hindu Widows and Voluntary Immolationsâ. H.T. Colebrooke, H.H. Wilson, Jonathan Duncan and other British authorities advised against a legal ban on Sati, because this ritual does not occur under duress/coercion. A few citations from the assessments collected in this report, and also from other British testimonies, deserve to be heard.

Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote in his History of India: âOn occasion it has been said that the relatives encourage the widow to immolate herself to obtain her possessionsâ¦ People can however be sure that the relatives usually beg the widow not go through with it, and to this end also call in the intervention of friends and figures of authority. If she is of high rank, even the monarch will come to console her and to advise her against it.â

Lieutenant-colonel John Briggs in a letter stated: âWhoever has witnessed the self-immolation of Hindu widows, and of their attitude/bearing towards this as I have seen them, will find it hard to free themselves of the idea that these devoted women have reached the highest grade of faith. The justness of the law that robs them of their only religious solaceâ¦ is therefore at the very least doubtful.â When Lord Bentinck in 1829 issued the ban on Sati, it was under rather general opposition from his (British) subordinates.

Lord Holwel, lieutenant-governor of Bengal, wrote: âIf we viewed these women in the correct light, then we would think more openly about them, and admit that they act out of heroic as well as rational and pious principlesâ.

As evidence for the involuntary nature of Sati, people constantly refer to the mention of a forced immolation in F. Bernierâs Travels in the Moghul Empire, a travel report from the pre-colonial time. Pointing to this, professor Prabha Dixit said, short after the self-immolation of Rup Kanwar, that âSati is never a voluntary deedâ and âalways took place under brazen pressureâ. Well, the same Bernier, who stayed in India from 1656 to 1668, writes in the same book: âMostly it was the practice that Sati was carried out voluntarily.â

He mentions several voluntary self-immolations, and gives among others this description: âwhen I left Surat for Persia, I witnessed the devotion and firedeath of another widow. Several English and Dutch [people] were present. The woman was middle-aged and not at all ugly. With my limited ability for expression, I do not expect to convey a complete idea of the brash courage or fear-inducing liveliness on the womanâs countenance, of her sure tread, of her freedom from all disturbance, with which she spoke and let herself be washed, of the look of confidence or rather indifference that she gave us; of her easy air, free of doubt, of her distinguished bearing, without any embarrassment, when she searched her seating place, which consisted of thick dry milletstraw mixed with small wood, and when she went to sit on the pyre, placed the head of her deceased husband on her lap, took a torch, and with her own hands set it on fire from the insideâ¦â

Contemporaries of Bernier, like Nicholas Withington, William Hawkins, Edward Terry and others, have left behind a few more eyewitness accounts, and they confirm that it practically always concerned voluntary self-immolation.

General Sleeman described in his Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official (1844) the self-immolation of the widow of a rich landlord: âI must do the family the justice to say that they all exerted themselves to dissuade the widow from her purpose, and had she lived she would assuredly have been cherished and honoured as the first female member of the whole house. There is no people in the world among whom parents are more loved, honoured, and obeyed than among the Hindoos; and the grandmother is always more honoured than the mother.â

A more recent example: in september 1991 in Adig (western U.P.) a certain Lakshmi, about 35 years old and mother of five, announced that she wanted to follow her lately deceased husband Mangatu Singh on the pyre. Her in-laws prevented this, made the police guard her, and cremated the body of her husband. But a few days after, two policemen who carried out the watch in front of her door, noticed that there was fire in her room. Apparently she had succeeded in smuggling in some inflammatory materials, and had set fire to herself. Her daughter poured water over her and she was brought to the clinical hospital with 70% burn wounds, where she passed away hours later. At her formal cremation days later, the police was required to prevent a revering crowd.

We may conclude that Sati in the great majority of the cases was a voluntary deed. One can only understand Sati if they give up the prejudice that people can only be coerced into self-immolation, and if one comes to see the completely different views on loyalty to marriage and death. Sati is the extreme consequence of the idea that the woman is gifted with a magical power, and of the belief in reincarnation. Hindu women undergo all kinds of ascetisms for the welfare of their husband, or to be together again in another life, e.g. fasting on the eleventh day of both halves of the moon cycle; Sati is the ultimate ascetism. The belief in reincarnation makes of death just a step on a much longer path, and of suicide something much less dramatic than a selfdestruction, [itâs] sooner the discarding of a not-as-yet worn out dress.

In christianism, there existed for a long time the reverence of martyrs. They too were people who voluntarily chose death, e.g. as an alternative to giving up their faith. They too were people who were convinced that with death all was not over, that their self-chosen death was not a complete selfdestruction. The modern abhorrence for practices like Sati comes from the materialistic idea that death is the absolute end, an idea that also explains the modern taboo on death. For any who believes that he is in reality eternal, the view of death changes completely, and there is not that fear and loathing for the end.

Right to suicide

That the British forbade the practice of Sati, was not a measure against murder, but against suicide. As was and is known, suicide is forbidden in christianism; in some countries there was even the death penalty for attempts at suicide. In India however, people have always judged it differently.

In this way, it is well-known that old Jain monks, once they felt their time had come, just refused to feed themselves still, and thus fasted themselves to death. From this tradition Mahatma Gandhi derived his tactic of âfasting unto deathâ to force others to yield. As a matter of fact, heâs never used this tactic against people of whom it was known that they would not yield anyway, like M.A. Jinnah. His political opponent Swatantryavir Savarkar (1883-1966) had nothing but aversion for Gandhiâs âaffectationâ with his dramatic plays of a fast-unto-death that always ended with a glass of fruit juice and acquiescence to Gandhiâs wishes anyway. He thought that such ascetic stunts didnât have a place in politics. But he did recognise the value of the self-chosen death: when he himself was old and ill, he carried out a real fast-unto-death.

After Mahatma Gandhi, the âfast-unto-deathâ as a political pressure device has become greatly trivialised. The most common everyday report in an Indian newspaper is that yet again someone has started a fast-unto-death to force the authorities to do this or that. The inevitable end to such actions within a few days is often not even mentioned: after all, everyone knows that it ends this way. It was out of frustration, due to the slight attention given to their initial âfast-unto-deathâ, that students in 1990 set themselves on fire to add power to their protest against prime minister V.P. Singhâs caste-reservation plan.

A fast-unto-death with a political goal that was actually carried out was that of Potti Sri Ramulu for the formation of a state corresponding to the Telugu language region in 1952. Before Independence, the Congress party had promised to redraw the map of India according to language boundaries, and to give the large language-communities their own linguistically homogeneous state. Prime Minister Nehru however was against this, and the promise remained unfulfilled. Potti Sri Ramulu went on a hunger strike against this. The government ignored him, but he kept going and died. The government could no longer cope against the wave of sympathy with the cause of the hutatma (self-sacrificer), and the state boundaries were redrawn. The Telugu language-group got its own state, Andhra Pradesh (1953). This suicider is still honoured at official occasions and with portraits in official buildings of the Andhra state.

At the death of M.G. Ramachandran, filmstar and Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, about thirty of his fans attempted suicide in a showy and dramatic manner. The ones that did not succeed with their intention received 5000 rupees as support from the state government, the next of kin of those that did succeed received 10,000 rupees: so whoever commits Sati without calling it as such, is rewarded. Such a suicide of followers is in itself not a new occurrence either: at the death of the Sikh Guru Hargovind (17th century) a number of (male) students followed him into death. Jaya Lalitha, the lover of M.G. Ramachandran and now [=1994] Chief Minister herself, declared later that she had been close to committing Sati in order to have died with her great love. Immediately, anti-Sati activists (like Swami Agnivesh, the Hindu equivalent of our âleftist pastorsâ) demanded her arrest on the grounds of a brandnew legislation against the committing or glorification of Sati. Whoever commits Sati informally is rewarded, but whoever does so formally or speaks about it even, would be punished for it.

Another legitimate ground for suicide in the Hindu tradition is quite universal: just like a minister resigns as a consequence of his political responsibility in some scandal or another, in the same way people can take their lives to thus clean up their own guilt in a catastrophic development. In this way, king Jayapala of Kabul took his own life in 1001 when he had not been capable of protecting his people against the muslim invaders. He made a pyre, climbed it and set fire to it himself.

A few recent cases of elderly ascetics who went to meet death by refusing food, are Vinoba Bhave and Badri Prasad Maharaj. Vinoba, the famous follower of Mahatma Gandhi, began a fast-unto-death in 1982. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi went to visit him to get him to give up on his resolve, but she could only establish that the old man was not to be convinced.

When people asked Indira whether his fasting could not be stopped against his will, she said: âThis is after all what he wants.â Indian Express-columnist Arvind Kala, spokesperson for the westernised elite, pleads for the prevention of all suicide, and writes about Vinoba, pointing to article 390 of the Penal Code: âIn actual fact, he was transgressing the law of the land in full view of the public.â

In reality, Vinoba followed in the footsteps of many of the thousands of ascetics who since times immemorial have gone the same way, and about whom the Indian population has never pronounced a negative judgement; if the law forbids him this, then this law is in conflict with the views of the population. This law illustrates how the Indian legal system is not philosophically neutral (âsecularâ), but is, on the contrary, a powerful instrument of westernisation, just as it was meant to be by the constitution-legislators Ambedkar and Nehru.

Badri Prasad Maharaj was an aged monk of the extremely ascetic Jaina tradition. In 1987 he fasted to death. Among those present at this fasting was Girilal Jain, who passed away in 1993, who as head editor of the Times of India on account of Rup Kanwars self-immolation had become fiercely opposed to Sati.

In short, in the Indian culture there is no stigma attached to certain types of suicide, not today either. However it is there in the Indian law, as became apparent in a grotesque way in June 1991. After the murder of Rajiv Gandhi (the suicide action of a female christian Lanka Tamil militant) the heavies of the Congress party wanted to take revenge, like they had done after the murder on the Mahatma in 1948 against the Brahmanas, and after the death of Indira in 1984 against the Sikhs. This time it was not such a clearcut group that could be attacked, so the aggression of the Congress in the state Andhra Pradesh just focussed itself on the rival parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the regional Telugu Desam Party. The actions were much less serious than what had been done against the Sikhs in 1984, however it was still serious enough for the leader of the TDP, the filmstar/director and ex-Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao, to react. He began a âfast-unto-deathâ at a public place, to demand from the Congress state government an official investigation into these allegations. The demand was conceded, after which Rama Rao ended his six-day-long fasting. Because the state government wanted at all costs to prevent that the popular Rama Rao would die during an anti-Congress fast, the police had meanwhile taken him and brought him to a hospital, where he could, if necessary, be fed through a tube. What's noteworthy about this is however that the police filed a complaint at the court against Rama Rao on grounds of article 390, which declares attempts of suicide as a punishable fact.

This law was put in question before the Bombay High Court, that in 1986 decided that an Indian citizen did constitutionally have the right to suicide (a decision against which an appeal was made once again, exactly because it undermines the anti-Sati policy). But apparently people still hold that man is not allowed to have a say about his own life, a christian viewpoint that has already been abandoned in the legislation of many Western countries. Another court of justice, that of Andhra Pradesh, decided in April 1987 that the law which makes suicide punishable, is consitutional: âThe right to life does not imply the right to die.â

Judge Hon. K. Amareshwari accounted for this pronouncement by pointing to the following implication: âIf the attempt to suicide is not punishable, then anyone who helps or incites others to suicide, could go free.â This line of argument is not entirely sound, because the legislator could very well pronounce different judgements for attempt at suicide and inciting to suicide. The Canadian law does not punish suicide, but incitement to it is 14 years imprisonment. The Indian law at least differentiates quantitatively: thereâs a 1 year prison sentence for attempted suicide, 10 years for inciting to it.

Another argument for the ban on suicide is that an honoured suicide or one that is surrounded by publicity might incite imitation. Suicide is therefore implicitly always âincitement to suicideâ. Arvind Kala sums it up: âThe death of Vinoba formed the incitement to a copycat-suicide when a year later an old Gandhian, named Patwardhan, starved himself to death in the house of his daughter. When Badri Prasad Maharaj passed away after 50 days of fasting, his example was immediately followed by a female Jain ascetic. At the self-immolation of students in protest against the caste-reservation plan of V.P. Singh, every self-immolation created the atmosphere for the next one. The government therefore was very much in the right to interfere in N.T. Rama Raoâs fast. God forbid, if heâd died, his emotional fans might have followed his example in a moment of shock.â

It is nevertheless misplaced to put the emotional deed of the students (not unknown in Europe either, see Jan Pallach in Prague 1968) on the same line with old ascetics who deem their time to have come. The Hindu morality gives no uniform rules, but distinguishes on a case by case basis. From the Hindu perspective, ascetics (a status that people can take on at any moment) have the fullest right to opt for death, and they inevitably do this in imitation of others: not just of Vinoba and Beni Prasad, but also of the many thousands before them. Emotional suicide on the other hand, on own initiative or in imitation, is plainly comdemnable, on grounds of the Vedic text: âPeople should not leave this world before they have completed the time measured out.â Point of discussion is whether this text is also directed at Sati.

Judgement of Sati

Around 1800, about thirty years before the British administrator Lord Bentinck issued a ban on Sati in Bengal, the Hindu governments in some princely states had already issued orders to discourage Sati, in particular the Maratha government in Sawantwadi and the Brahmana government in Pune. With this, they concretised the anti-Sati policy of the Maratha queen Ahalyabai who passed away in 1795. Even within the Hindu tradition there has been, at least since Medhatithiâs commentary on the Manu Smriti (900 C.E.?), always a stream that rejected Sati. The Shakta or Tantra stream was very explicit in this. The Mahanirvana Tantra says: âThe woman who in her delusion climbs the pyre of her husband, shall go to hell.â (This sentence itself has however made the philologists suspect that this text was written or was completed around 1800, when Sati had become a hot point of discussion.)

The reason for rejecting the Sati is mainly that a woman, in the middle of the crisis which her husbandâs passing after all represents, hardly has a dayâs time to think over such a grave decision. A monk who, in his old day, decides to refuse food has had a whole life of developing a stance of equanimity and non-attachment. His decision does not happen hastily or under emotional pressure.

Besides, there is an element of inevitability in his going to meet death: his candle is already going out, so he is only going along with the stream, even though in facing death he keeps his dignity. The decision of an aged monk is actually just a choice between dying of illness, disability and helplessness, and dying via self-inflicted starvation. A Sati woman on the other hand does have a real choice between life and death: that is why her suicide is more violent, going against the stream of the natural will to life. But that is also exactly whatâs heroic about it.

It is completely logical that Sati was not general practice on one hand, and yet on the other was still completely accepted in the case of the martial castes, especially the Rajputs. With the lower castes, a widow could in every respect remarry, among the Brahmanas continuing to live on alone as a female ascetic conformed with the ascetic caste-ethos, but with the martial castes it was passion and heroism that counted as pre-eminently honourable. That Sati was considered as the appointed way for some and not for others, conformed with the Hindu pluralism, that posits that everyone has their own duty or code of honour (swadharma), corresponding to the their own natural capacity (swabhava).

In the modern West, that same respect for everyoneâs âown wayâ grows more and more, including the freedom to command oneâs own life. People speak openly about âthe right to die worthilyâ. There is no longer a moral consensus that sentences suicide, only a rejection of the scenarios where complete voluntariness (which implies that people have considered it well and realise what theyâre doing) is not guaranteed. Even without blowing new life into Sati as a practice, people can from within the modern culture bring up a more honest recognition of the historic truth about Sati, and even a level of appreciation for what must indeed have been a heroic deed.

End of Elst's article

1. About the bit in the above that's succeeded by purple text:
Practices similar to Sati are rather more universal than uniquely "Indo-European". China is not considered "Indo-European" and yet its royalty knew a practice that is actually more similar (than Indian Sati is) to the Germanic suicide ritual which Bernard Sergent and Elst mention above. Therefore, Sati in India can well be independent from any "Indo-European" practices pertaining to ritualised collective suicide of household members:

Extracts from "Who was the 'First Emperor'?", taken out of 'The Giant Book of Facts', Octopus Books, 1987, London, p.248:
QUOTE"Who was the 'First Emperor'?
He was Cheng Ying, who adopted the title of Shih Huang-ti (meaning the 'First Emperor') when he became ruler of the whole of China in 221 BC.

...
Earlier rulers of China went to their graves accompanied by a large entourage of courtiers, wives and servants (who either voluntarily committed suicide or were put to death)."

2. About the sentence: "It is quite possible that this (Shiva-Sati narrative) might be a later-constructed myth to explain the name".
And it might just as well be that whichever Hindu first thought of referring thus to the practise of Hindu widows immolating themselves might have considered that they were doing this out of a devotional loyalty to their husbands, and was reminded of how Sati is devoted to Shiva and hence referred to it with the Amman's name.

2. About the paragraph starting with: "In christianism, there existed for a long time the reverence of martyrs. They too were people who voluntarily chose death, e.g. as an alternative to giving up their faith.... "

Many a christian martyr did not exist. In particular, the stories of them choosing death as opposed to giving up their faith tend to be fable. Consider pope Marcellinus, venerated as saint and martyr: history knows he never died for his faith - so he's not a martyr, AND history knows he apostasised - so he can't be a *christian saint*. Other examples abound, see Joseph McCabe. See http://freetruth.50webs.org/Appendix5.htm and http://freetruth.50webs.org/B3b.htm

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2009, 01:43 PM by Husky.)

How christian Britain made multi-millions off Hindu Bharatam by making the millions of Hindus into slumdogs

Christianism's genocide of Hindu Dharma and Hindus: Christian Britain's CALCULATED genocide of Hindus and Bharatam.

Many of the excerpts to follow are taken from
THE BOOK THAT WAS BANNED IN BRITAIN:
"The Case for India" by historian Will Durant, published in 1930 by Simon and Schuster, New York.

Christianism's deceptions (through catholic christian director Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire, World Vision and other propaganda-and-missionary outlets) are still too busy blaming Hindu Dharma for the poverty of Bharatam. Will Durant's book was banned for a reason: it shows how beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is CHRISTIANISM - in the form of the British - that is the root of India's poverty and misery. In Durant's own words: "the attempt to explain India's poverty as the result of her superstitions becomes a dastardly deception practised upon a world too busy to be well informed."

1. Christianism perpetrates exponential genocides: Inducing famines by brutally impoverishing the nation, and enabling diseases to take on epidemic proportions

Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:
QUOTEWe can now understand why there are famines in India. Their cause, in plain terms, is not the absence of sufficient food, but the inability of the people to pay for it. Famines have increased in frequency and severity under British rule. From 1770 to 1900, 25,000,000 Hindus died of starvation; 15,000,000 of these died in the last quarter of the century, in the famines of 1877, 1889, 1897, and 1900.185 Contemporary students186 estimate that 8,000,000 will die of starvation in India during the present year. It was hoped that the railways would solve the problem by enabling the rapid transport of food from unaffected to affected regions; the fact that the worst famines have come since the building of the railways proves that the cause has not been the lack of transportation, nor the failure of the monsoon rains (though this, of course, is the occasion), nor even overpopulation (which is a contributory factor) ; behind all these, as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbalanced exportation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine,137 that the starving peasants cannot pay what is asked for the food that the railways bring them.

<img src='http://hinduwisdom.info/images/famine_victims1.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' /><img src='http://hinduwisdom.info/images/famine_victims2.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Images caption: Famine: Victims of the 1876-77. Famine awaits death.
( http://hinduwisdom.info/images/famine_victims1.jpg and http://hinduwisdom.info/images/famine_victims2.jpg )

<img src='http://hinduwisdom.info/images/famine_madras.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
Image caption: Madras Famine 1877-1878
( http://hinduwisdom.info/images/famine_madras.jpg )

Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:
QUOTESir William Hunter, once Director-General of Indian Statistics, estimated that 40,000,000 of the people of India were seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger.182 Weakened with malnutrition, they offer low resistance to infections; epidemics periodically destroy millions of them. In 1901, 272,000 died of plague introduced from abroad; in 1902, 500,000 died of plague; in 1903, 800,000; in 1904, 1,000,000.183 In 1918 there were 125,000,000 cases of influenza, and 12,500,000 recorded deaths.184

There's more famines that Durant has not covered above (the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 whose toll was 10 million, and the Bengal Famine of 1943-1945 the toll of which was 4 million). See next post.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 05-08-2009, 05:35 PM by Husky.)

Famines continued

More evidence for how the poverty and misery is not remotely Hindu Dharma's fault, but caused by the ideology of christianism. Something entirely contrary to the claim of christians:

1.1 India under the terror of Christianism versus Bharatam under Hindu Dharma

http://india_resource.tripod.com/colonial.html "The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefs" states that:
QUOTEIn Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31(thirty one) serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17(seventeen) in the 2000 years before British rule.(Note there were famines induced by the islamic rulers that terrorised the nation before christianism arrived, these probably account for a significant number of the pre-British famines. See post 54 for some documented examples of islamic famines.)

Francois Gautier moreover gives us the record after the christian terror rule at http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifac...enial.html, which shows that it was indeed christianism that was squarely to blame:
QUOTESince Independence, there has been no such famines, a record of which India should be proud.

1.2 More christian-induced famines part 1: The Bengal Famine of 1769-1770

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/...s19040.htm
Dr. Gideon Polya (Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History):
QUOTEthe Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims)
The Bengal Famine of 1769-1770âthe death toll of which was 10 million Indiansâdoes not seem to have been included in Durant's summary, because Francois Gautier, who also finds the British records showing 25 million to have died by 1900, started his calculation at 1800 (not the boundary year of 1770 that Will Durant mentioned but which led him to the same 25 millions by 1900. This means Durant would not have counted the Bengal Famine, just as Gautier's count from British Records did not include it either):

http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifac...enial.html
QUOTEAccording to British records, one million Indians died of famine between 1800 and 1825, 4 million between 1825-1850, 5 million between 1850-1875 and 15 million between 1875-1900. Thus 25 million Indians died in 100 years ! The British must be proud of their bloody record. It is probably more honourable and straightforward to kill in the name of Allah, than in the guise of petty commercial interests and total disregard for the ways of a 5000 year civilisation. Thus, by the beginning of the 20th century, India was bled dry and there were no resources left.
In fact, the 15 million victims of the christian famine between 1875-1900 is the lower-end estimate, the higher-end estimate for the same period is 26 million:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/08oct/nationmo.htm
The New Nationalist Movement in India by Jabez T. Sunderland, for The Atlantic in 1908:
(Also at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/190810/na...st-india/2 where the author's name is curiously misspelled as 'Sutherland')
QUOTEDuring the last quarter of the century, what? Eighteen famines, with an estimated mortality reaching the awful totals of from 15,000,000 to 26,000,000.

1.3 More christian-induced Famines part 2: The Bengal Famine of 1943-1945

Durant's discussion of the christian genocides perpetrated on Hindus through famine, inevitably doesn't include the Bengal famine that came after his book either. However, the book The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire by John Newsinger (Senior Lecturer in History, School of Historical and Cultural Studies at the Bath Spa University, UK) states the following about the Bengal Famine of 1943-44: "a terrible death toll from starvation and disease in 1943-44 that totaled more than 3.5 million men and women." Refer to http://hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

In fact, that "more than 3.5 million" turns out to have been around 4 million:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/...s19040.htm
Dr. Gideon Polya (Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History):
QUOTEThe man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people

1.4 Christianism perpetrated deliberate famines on the heathen populace

The following interview with Dr. Gideon Polya, Associate Professor in Biochemistry whose book "Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History" deals with the topic of the Bengali Famines, shows how the famines were deliberately perpetrated on the population of Bharatam by the callousness of christianism (British), and that they were moreover accompanied by large-scale rape of the victimised populace:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/...s19040.htm
QUOTESummary:
The famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-44 ultimately took the lives of about 4 million people. The speaker talks of how this man-made famine is absent from the history books and virtually unknown to most people.

The wartime Bengal Famine has become a 'forgotten holocaust' and has been effectively deleted from our history books, from school and university curricula and from general public perception.

...
I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made.

...
One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.

...
In contrast [to the way the world and history recognises the Jewish Holocaust], during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army.

The causes of the famine are complex, but ultimately when the price of rice rose above the ability of landless rural poor to pay and in the absence of humane, concerned government, millions simply starved to death or otherwise died of starvation-related causes. Although there was plenty of food potentially available, the price of rice rose through 'market forces', driven by a number of factors including: the cessation of imports from Japanese-occupied Burma, a dramatic wartime decline in other requisite grain imports into India, compounded by the deliberate strategic slashing of Allied Indian Ocean shipping; heavy-handed government action in seizing Bengali rice stocks in sensitive areas; the seizure of boats critically required for food acquisition and rice distribution; and finally the 'divide and rule' policy of giving the various Indian provinces control over their own food stocks. Critically, cashed-up, wartime, industrial, Calcutta could pay for rice and sucked food out of a starving, food-producing countryside.

Ultimately, millions of Bengalis died because their British rulers didn't give a damn and had other strategic imperatives. The Bengal Famine and its aftermath for the debilitated Bengal population consumed its victims over several years in the case of complete British inaction through most of 1943 or insufficient subsequent action. Churchill had a confessed hatred for Indians and during the famine he opposed the humanitarian attempts of people such as the Prime Minister of Canada, Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy General Wavell, and even of Japanese collaborationist leader Subhash Chandra Bose. The hypothesis can be legitimately advanced that the extent of the Bengal Famine derived in part from sustained, deliberate policy.

The wartime Bengal Famine has become a 'forgotten holocaust' and has been effectively deleted from our history books, from school and university curricula and from general public perception. To the best of my knowledge, Churchill only wrote of it once, in a secret letter to Roosevelt dated April 29th 1944 in which he made the following remarkable plea for help in shipping Australian grain to India: 'I am no longer justified in not asking for your help.' Churchill's six-volume 'History of the Second World War' fails to mention the cataclysm that was responsible for about 90% of total British Empire casualties in that conflict but makes the extraordinary obverse claim: 'No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.'

This whitewashing of Indian famine extends to two centuries of famine in British India. I have recently published a very detailed account of this two-century holocaust in British India that commenced with the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770 (10-million victims) and concluded with the World War 2 Bengal Famine (4-million victims) and took tens of millions of lives in between. In contrast to the response to the Jewish Holocaust, these events have been almost completely written out of history and removed from general perception and there has been no apology nor amends made. While Tony Blair has apologised for the mid-19th century Irish Famine that took over a million lives, there has been no apology for the World War 2 Bengal Famine.

1.5 Counting the dead from the famines and diseases inflicted on Hindu Bharatam by christianism

One wonders what happened in the years not covered by Durant: the occurrence of christian-imposed genocide through starvation and epidemics. And also in the years of continued christian British rule after his book was published in 1930 (outside the Bengal famine of 1943-1945).

Sticking to the recorded figures of famines and epidemics introduced from abroad and due to low resistance because of malnutrition:
- Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770: 10,000,000 victims of famine
- 1800-1900: 25,000,000 to 36 million victims of famine (upper-limit derived from the higher-end estimate of an additional 11 million victims in the famines of 1875-1900 presented in Jabez T. Sunderland's The New Nationalist Movement in India)
- 1930: an estimated 8,000,000 victims of famine
- Bengal Famine 1943-1945: 4,000,000 victims of famine
- 1901: 272,000 died of plague introduced from abroad;
- 1902: 500,000 died of plague;
- 1903: 800,000
- 1904: 1,000,000
- 1918: 12,500,000
TOTAL = 62,720,000 (62.7 million) to ~73.7 million victims of christianism (British Rule) - just counting those genocided by the starvation and diseases it caused.

Dharampal wrote
http://hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm
QUOTEIn India a large number perished by British brutality and deliberate creation of famines, violation of persons bodies and dignity; in Palnad in Andhra, half of the population was said to be have perished every ten years, during several decades after the subjugation of the areas by Britain. It seems as if the intellectuals and leaders of Britain hated India, and felt outraged that in spite of all their brutalities, smashing of Indian institutions, high extortions, and tortures, men made famines and expropriation of Indian resources to the British state, and thus the all round breakdown of Indian society, the Indians on the whole, could not be wiped out that easily. " (source: Despoliation and Defaming of India â By Dharampal published by Bharat Peetham, Wardha Other India Press, Goa p. 1 - 17).
William Samuel Lilly, in his India and Its Problems writes as follows http://hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm:
QUOTEDuring the first eighty years of the nineteenth century, 18,000,000 of people perished of famine. In one year alone -- the year when her late Majesty assumed the title of Empress -- 5,000,000 of the people in Southern India were starved to death. In the District of Bellary, with which I am personally acquainted, -- a region twice the size of Wales, -- one-fourth of the population perished in the famine of 1816-77.

1.6 Christian callousness in inflicting disease and preventing its cure, versus Hindu caring and medicine

Look for the sections on how Hindus inoculated the entire Hindu community against smallpox in the following (the inoculation against small-pox is a Hindu invention) -
http://hinduwisdom.info/Education_in_Ancient_India.htm
http://hinduwisdom.info/Glimpses_IV.htm

http://hinduwisdom.info/Hindu_Culture2.htm
QUOTESmallpox inoculation started in India before the West

Smallpox inoculation is an ancient Indian tradition and was practiced in India before the West.

In ancient times in India smallpox was prevented through the tikah (inoculation). Kurt Pollak (1968) writes, "preventive inoculation against the smallpox, which was practiced in China from the 11th century, apparently came from India". This inoculation process was generally practiced in large part of Northern and Southern India, but around 1803-04 the British government banned this process. It's banning, undoubtedly, was done in the name of 'humanity', and justified by the Superintendent General of Vaccine (manufactured by Dr. E. Jenner from the cow for use in the inoculation against smallpox).

Dharmapal has quoted British sources to prove that inoculation in India was practiced before the British did. In the seventeenth century, smallpox inoculation (tikah) was practiced in India. A particular sect of Brahmins employed a sharp iron needle to carry out these practices. In 1731, Coult was in Bengal and he observed it and wrote (Operation of inoculation of the smallpox as performed in Bengall from Re. Coult to Dr. Oliver Coult in 'An account of the diseases of Bengall' Calcutta, dated February 10, 1731):

"The operation of inoculation called by the natives tikah has been known in the kingdom of Bengall as near as I can learn, about 150 years and according to the Bhamanian records was first performed by one Dununtary, a physician of Champanagar, a small town by the side of the Ganges about half way to Cossimbazar whose memory in now holden in great esteem as being through the another of this operation, which secret, say they, he had immediately of God in a dream.'

English physician Jenner is credited with discovering vaccination on a scientific basis with his studies on small pox in 1796. A group of Fellows of the Royal Society had earlier studied the method of inoculating people in India and submitted its report in the 1760s.Â Dr J. Z. Holwell, one of the members who was in the Bengal Province for more than ten years to study the Indian vaccination method, lectured at the London Royal College of Physicians in 1767 "that nearly the same salutary method, now so happily pursued in England,... has the sanction of remotest antiquity (in India), illustrating the propriety of present practice".

Dr. J. Z. Holwell writes the most detailed account for the college of Physicians in London in 1767 (An account of the manner of inoculating for the smallpox in the East Indies, by J. Z. Holwell, F.R.S. addressed to the President and Members of the College of Physicians in London). He wrote:

"Inoculation is performed in Indostan by a particular tribe of Bramins, who are delegated annually for this service from the different Colleges of Bindoobund, Eleabas, Benares, & c. over all the distant provinces: dividing themselves into small parties, of three or four each, they plan their traveling circuits in such wise as to arrive at the places of the operation consists only in abstaining for a month from fish, milk, and ghee (a kind of butter made generally of buffalo's milk). When the Bramins begin to inoculate, they pass from house to house and operate at the door, refusing to inoculate any who have not, on a strict scrutiny, duly observed the preparatory course enjoined them. It is no uncommon thing for them to ask the parents how many pocks they choose their children should have."

(source: An account of the manner of inoculating for the smallpox in the East Indies - by J. Z. Holwell M.D., F.R.S.).

On the efficacy of this practice Holwell has the following to say:

"When the before recited treatment of the inoculated is strictly followed, it is next to a miracle to hear, that one in a million fails of receiving the infection, or of one that miscarries under it.. Since, therefore, this practice of the East has been followed without variation, and with uniform success from the remotest unknown times, it is but justice to conclude, it must have been originally founded on the basis of rational principle and experiment."

Holwell's detailed account, not only describes inoculation, but also shows that the Indians knew that microbes caused such diseases.

(source: Indian Science And Technology in the Eighteenth Century; some contemporary European accounts - By Dharampal 1971.Â An Account of the manner of inoculating for the Smallpox in the East Indies. Mapusa, Goa: Other India Press. Chapter VIII p. 142 -164.Â The Healers, the Doctor, then and now - By Pollack, Kurt 1968.English Edition. p. 37-8.).

Also refer to Indian Institute of Science - Prevention of Small Pox in ancient India).

The Sactya Grantham - ancient Brahman medical text ~ 3,500 years old describing brain surgery and anaesthetics, contains the following passages giving instructions on small pox vaccination:

âTake on the tip of a knife the contents of the inflammation, inject it into the arm of the man, mixing it with his blood. A fever will follow but the malady will pass very easily and will create no complications.âÂ Edward Jenner (1749-1823) is credited with the discovery of vaccination but it appears that ancient India has prior claim!"Â

(source: We Are Not The First â By Andrew Tomas - A Bantam Book 1971 New York p. 15 - 49). andÂ http://www.habtheory.com/1/habrefs.php).

The Brahmins had a theory of their operations. They believed the atmosphere abounded with imperceptible animalculae (refined to bacteria within a larger context today). They distinguished tow types of these: those that are harmful and those not so. The Brahmins therefore believed that their treatment in inoculating the person expelled the immediate cause of the disease. How effective was the inoculation? According to Dr. J. Z. Holwell, FRS, who had addressed the College of Physicians in London:

âWhen the before recited treatment of the inoculation is strictly followed, it is next to a miracle to hear, that one in a million fails to receiving the infection, or of one that miscarries under it.â

A later estimate by the Superintendent General of Vaccine in 1804 noted that fatalities among the inoculated counted one in 200 among the Indian population and one in 60 to 70 among the Europeans. There is an explanation for this divergence. Most of the Europeans objected to the inoculation on theological grounds.Â

Small pox has a long history in India; it is discussed in the Hindu scriptures and even has a goddess (Sitala, literally âthe cool one") devoted exclusively to its cause. It seems therefore almost natural to expect an Indian medical response to the disease. The inoculation treatment against it was carried out by a particular caste of Brahmins from the different medical colleges in the area. These Brahmins circulated in the villages in groups of three or four to perform their task.

The person to be inoculated was obliged to follow a certain dietary regime; he had particularly to abstain from fish, milk, and ghee, which, it was held, aggravated the fever that resulted after the treatment. The method the Brahmins followed is similar to the one followed in our own time in certain aspects. They punctured the space between the elbow and the wrist with a sharp instrument and then proceeded to introduce into the abrasion âvarious matterâ prepared from inoculated pistules from the preceding year. The purpose was to induce the disease itself, albeit in a mild form; after it left the body, the person was rendered immune to small-pox for life.Â

The Brahmins had a theory of their operations. They believed the atmosphere abounded with imperceptible animalculae. They distinguished two types of these: those harmful and those not so. The universality of this practices ceased to obtain with the arrival of the British. Like many specialists in India, including teachers, the Brahmin doctors had been maintained through public revenues. With British rule, this fiscal system was disrupted and the inoculators left to fend for themselves.

Two of the more important medical arts of India â plastic surgery and inoculations against small pox. Both were indigenously evolved and the accounts we have, come from Westerners sent out to study them. One of these curious facts was the inoculation against small pox disease, practiced in both north and south India till it was banned or disrupted by the English authorities in 1802-3. The ban was pronounced on âhumanitarianâ grounds by the Superintendent General of Vaccine.

(source: Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1500-1972 - By Claude Alvares p. 65-67 andÂ Decolonizing History: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West 1492 to the Present Day - By Claude AlvaresÂ p.66-67).

European colonists from the sixteenth century onwards, gained knowledge of plants, diseases and surgical techniques that were unknown in the West. One such example is rauwolfia serpentia, a plant used in traditional Indian medicine. The active ingredient is today used to treat hypertension and anxiety in the West.

Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone has written: "Their use of these medicines seems to have been very bold. They were the first nation who employed minerals internally, and they not only gave mercury in that manner but arsenic and arsenious acid, which were remedies in intermittents. They have long used cinnabar for fumigations, by which they produced a speedy and safe salivation. They have long practiced inoculation."

Husky · (This post was last modified: 05-03-2009, 04:47 PM by Husky.)

2. Christian 'education' means: destroying indigenous pagan schools and introducing illiteracy (like christianism did in Ancient Greece and Rome! See http://freetruth.50webs.org/A2b.htm )

Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:
QUOTEWhen the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took no steps to replace the schools; even to-day, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago.109

Hence the 93% illiteracy of India. In several provinces literacy was more widespread before the British took possession than it is now after a century and a half of British control;118 in several of the states ruled by native princes it is higher than in British India. "The responsibility of the British for India's illiteracy seems to be beyond question."119

The Government spends every year on education eight cents a head 113 it spends on the army eighty-three cents a head.114 In 1911 a Hindu representative, Gokhale, introduced a bill for universal compulsory primary education in India; it was defeated by the British and Government-appointed members. In 1916 Patel introduced a similar bill, which was defeated by the British and Government-appointed members; 115 the Government could not afford to give the people schools. Instead, it spent most of its eight cents for education on secondary schools and universities, where the language used was English, the history, literature, customs and morals taught were English, and young Hindus, after striving amid poverty to prepare themselves for college, found that they had merely let themselves in for a ruthless process that aimed to de-nationalize and de-Indianize them, and turn them into imitative Englishmen. The first charge on a modern state, after the maintenance of public health, is the establishment of education, universal, compulsory and free. But the total expenditure for education in India is less than one-half the educational expenditure in New York State.116 In the quarter of a century between 1882 and 1907, while public schools were growing all over the world, the appropriation for education in British India increased by $2,000,000; in the same period appropriations for the fratricide army increased by $43,000,000.117 It pays to be free.

2.1 The number of schools that the christian british destroyed

More on christianism's destruction of Hindu schools and education system -

http://www.dnaindia.com/dnaprint.asp?newsid=1152940
QUOTEA renowned Gandhian, Dharampal, visited British and Indian archives and reproduced reports based on surveys conducted by the British in Madras, Punjab and Bengal presidencies during 1800-1830.

According to a detailed survey undertaken during 1822-25 in the Madras Presidency (present day Tamil Nadu, a major part of present day Andhra Pradesh and some districts of Karnataka, Kerala and Orissa), 11,575 schools and 1,094 colleges were in existence in the Presidency and the number of students in them were 1,57,195 and 5,431, respectively.

More important in view of the current debates and assumption is the unexpected and important information provided with regard to the broad caste composition of the students (see table). We find that the position as early as the first part of nineteenth century was significantly in favour of the backward castes as far as secular education was concerned.

Hence, the British-inspired propaganda that education was not available to the so-called backward castes prior to their efforts is not valid. The âsecularâ education was always a major tool in social transformation prior to British rule.
So, prior to the British' intervention, Hindu Dharma ensured that India was very well educated, as Durant also showed. And Durant already covered that after the British came, their christianism sank much of Bharatam into the same kind of illiteracy that christianism sank the literate Greco-Roman empire into. See http://freetruth.50webs.org/A2b.htm, including:
QUOTEThe Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for the children of all workers. Anywhere you went, in a suburb of Rome or a small Italian town, you would see the teacher, in the porch of a house perhaps, teaching the children how to write on wax-faced tablets. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480 nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until 1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed historical record of Christianity as regards education.
-- The Story Of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe

2.2 Casteist christianism: christian Britain systematically destroyed universal Hindu education

The Brahmin and the Hindu
Author: Sandhya Jain, Publication: The Pioneer, Date: December 14, 2004
Copy at http://www.hvk.org/articles/1204/59.html
QUOTEDharampal (The Beautiful Tree) has effectively debunked the myth that Dalits had no place in the indigenous system of education. Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, ordered a mammoth survey in June 1822, whereby the district collectors furnished the caste-wise division of students in four categories, viz., Brahmins, Vysyas (Vaishyas), Shoodras (Shudras) and other castes (broadly the modern scheduled castes). While the percentages of the different castes varied in each district, the results were revealing to the extent that they showed an impressive presence of the so-called lower castes in the school system.

Thus, in Vizagapatam, Brahmins and Vaishyas together accounted for 47% of the students, Shudras comprised 21% and the other castes (scheduled) were 20%; the remaining 12% were Muslims. In Tinnevelly, Brahmins were 21.8% of the total number of students, Shudras were 31.2% and other castes 38.4% (by no means a low figure). In South Arcot, Shudras and other castes together comprised more than 84% of the students!

In the realm of higher education as well, there were regional variations. Brahmins appear to have dominated in the Andhra and Tamil Nadu regions, but in the Malabar area, theology and law were Brahmin preserves, but astronomy and medicine were dominated by Shudras and other castes. Thus, of a total of 808 students in astronomy, only 78 were Brahmins, while 195 were Shudras and 510 belonged to the other castes (scheduled). In medicine, out of a total of 194 students, only 31 were Brahmins, 59 were Shudras and 100 belonged to the other castes. Even subjects like metaphysics and ethics that we generally associate with Brahmin supremacy, were dominated by the other castes (62) as opposed to merely 56 Brahmin students. It bears mentioning that this higher education was in the form of private tuition (or education at home), and to that extent also reflects the near equal economic power of the concerned groups.

As a concerned reader informed me, the 'Survey of Indigenous Education in the Province of Bombay (1820-1830)' showed that Brahmins were only 30% of the total students there. What is more, when William Adam surveyed Bengal and Bihar, he found that Brahmins and Kayasthas together comprised less than 40% of the total students, and that forty castes like Tanti, Teli, Napit, Sadgop, Tamli etc. were well represented in the student body. The Adam report mentions that in Burdwan district, while native schools had 674 students from the lowest thirty castes, the 13 missionary schools in the district together had only 86 students from those castes. Coming to teachers, Kayasthas triumphed with about 50% of the jobs and there were only six Chandal teachers; but Rajputs, Kshatriyas and Chattris (Khatris) together had only five teachers.

Even Dalit intellectuals have questioned what the British meant when they spoke of 'education' and 'learning'. Dr. D.R. Nagaraj, a leading Dalit leader of Karnataka, wrote that it was the British, particularly Lord Wellesley, who declared the Vedantic Hinduism of the Brahmins of Benares and Navadweep as "the standard Hinduism," because they realized that the vitality of the Hindu dharma of the lower castes was a threat to the empire. Fort William College, founded by Wellesley in 1800, played a major role in investing Vedantic learning with a prominence it probably hadn't had for centuries. In the process, the cultural heritage of the lower castes was successfully marginalized, and this remains an enduring legacy of colonialism.

Examining Dharampal's "Indian science and technology in the eighteenth century," Nagaraj observed that most of the native skills and technologies that perished as a result of British policies were those of the Dalit and artisan castes. This effectively debunks the fiction of Hindu-hating secularists that the so-called lower castes made no contribution to India's cultural heritage and needed deliverance from wily Brahmins.

Indeed, given the desperate manner in which the British vilified the Brahmin, it is worth examining what so annoyed them. As early as 1871-72, Sir John Campbell objected to Brahmins facilitating upward mobility: "the Brahmans are always ready to receive all who will submit to them. The process of manufacturing Rajputs from ambitious aborigines (tribals) goes on before our eyes."

Sir Alfred Lyall was unhappy that "more persons in India become every year Brahmanists than all the converts to all the other religions in India put together... these teachers address themselves to every one without distinction of caste or of creed; they preach to low-caste men and to the aboriginal tribes. in fact, they succeed largely in those ranks of the population which would lean towards Christianity and Mohammedanism if they were not drawn into Brahmanism." So much for the British public denunciation of the exclusion practiced by Brahmins!

2.3 Christianism's destruction of Indian education under the British versus the continued universal education and overall prosperity under Hindu rule

Jabez T. Sunderland, The New Nationalist Movement in India (1908), for The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/08oct/nationmo.htm
(also at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/190810/na...st-india/5 where the author's name is curiously misspelled as 'Sutherland')

QUOTEA further answer to the assertion that India cannot govern herselfâand surely one that should be conclusiveâis the fact that, in parts, she is governing herself now, and governing herself well. It is notorious that the very best government in India to-day is not that carried on by the British, but that of several of the native states, notably Baroda and Mysore. In these states, particularly Baroda, the people are more free, more prosperous, more contented, and are making more progress, than in any other part of India. Note the superiority of both these states in the important matter of popular education. Mysore is spending on education more than three times as much per capita as is British India, while Baroda has made her education free and compulsory. Both of these states, but especially Baroda, which has thus placed herself in line with the leading nations of Europe and America by making provision for the education of all her children, may well be contrasted with British India, which provides education, even of the poorest kind, for only one boy in ten and one girl in one hundred and forty-four.

About Sunderland:
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Glimpses_XXII.htm
QUOTEAmerican born, former President of the India Information Bureau of America and Editor of Young India (New York). Author of India, America and World Brotherhood, and Causes of Famine in India.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 04-11-2009, 01:41 PM by Husky.)

3. Bleeding India's population

Will Durant, The Case for India (1930), Chapter 1:
QUOTEThe Indian forces number some 204,000 men;53 60,000 of them are British,54 including all officers; 1,874 are aviators55--the last resort of despotism. There are only a few Hindu officers, and no Hindu is allowed in the air force or the artillery, but 70% of the common soldiery are natives. The Hindus are reputed by the British to be incapable of self-defense, but no British Government has been willing to believe this to the extent of allowing Hindus to learn the art of incorporated murder.

The expense of maintaining this army, whose function is the continual subjection of India by bullets, shells and air-bombs, is borne by the Indian people. In 1926 its cost was $200,735,660-a tax of 3% on the scanty earnings of every man, woman and child in the land.

Wherever the Indian army sheds its (mostly native) blood, in Afghanistan or Burma or Mesopotamia or France (for the government is free to send it anywhere), the expense is met not by the Empire which it enlarges or defends, but by Indian revenues alone. When England had to send British troops to India in 1857 it charged India with the cost not only of transporting them, maintaining them in India, and bringing them back home, but with their maintenance in Great Britain for six months before they sailed.56 During the nineteenth century India paid $450,000,000 for wars fought for England outside of India with Indian troops. She contributed $500,000,000 to the War chest of the Allies, $700,000,000 in subscriptions to War loans, 800,000 soldiers, and 400,000 laborers to defend the British Empire outside of India during the Great War.57 In 1922 64% of the total revenue of India was devoted to this army of fratricides: Hindus compelled to kill Hindus in Burma until Burma consented to come under British rule; Hindus compelled to defend on the fields of Flanders the Empire which in every year, as will appear later, was starving ten million Hindus to death. No other army in the world consumes so large a proportion of the public revenues. In 1926 the Viceroy announced the intention of the Government to build a "Royal Indian Navy"; the proposal added that this navy should be used wherever in the Empire the British Parliament might care to send it, and that the entire cost of the navy should be met from the revenues of India.58 It pays to be free.

3.1. Deliberate Genocide and Negationism: Christian Britain admires its own Hitlers, like Winston Churchill, even as it hides the colossal Holocaust it perpetrated on Hindu Bharatam

Dr. Gideon Polya (Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History) already mentioned how Churchill hated Hindus and expressly allowed them to die in the Bengal Famine his nation's christianism inflicted.

The following statements concerning Winstone Churchill are from http://hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

QUOTEAmery was bemused by Churchill's âcurious hatred of India â and concluded that he was âreally not quite normal on the subjectâ. Indeed Amery was not sure âwhether on this subject of India he is really quite sane.â Provoked beyond endurance by Churchillâs bigotry, Amery, on one occasion, said: âI didnât see much difference between his outlook and Hitlerâsâ. Amery was not a liberal or progressive, but a hardnosed right wing imperialist. And it was not just to Amery that Churchill made his feelings clear.

Churchill, âwho seemed to regard famine relief as âappeasementâ of the Congressâ. On one occasion when presented with details of the crisis in Bengal, Churchill commented, âon Indians breeding like rabbitsâ. As far as he was concerned âthe starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeksâ, a sentiment with which Amery concurred.

In February 1945 Churchill told his private secretary, Sir John Colville (1915-1987) that:
âthe Hindus were a foul raceâ¦and he wished Bert Harris (Air Marshall Bert "Bomber" Harris (1892 - 1984) could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them.â

Somewhat predictably, Churchillâs part in the failure of famine relief in Bengal , one of the great crimes of the war, is not something that his innumerable biographers have been concerned to explore. This is really quite disgraceful. To quote N B Bonarjee, author of Under Two Masters, and the district magistrate who had loyally helped suppress the Quit India revolt.

In his memoirs he writes bitterly of how the Viceroy broadcast of 13 May 1945 Churchill had thanked Australia, Canada and New Zealand for their contribution to the war effort, but could not bring himself to mention India âalthough she provided more in men and material than the rest put together.â

(source: The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire - By John Newsinger p. 157 - 159).

Note how Churchill and the rest of the christian British government were quite into genocide, just like the catholic Hitler. Note how Hitler has been rightly recognised as a genocidal maniac, but that christian Britainâthe christian Britain of faithful catholic film-maker Danny Boyleâstill reveres Churchill. Danny Boyle is continuing the christian (fascist) lies of the erstwhile christian (fascist) British Empire against Hindus and Hindu Bharatam.
Like in WWI, India saved the day for Britain in WWII as well. In this war too, Bharatam provided more soldiers than all the rest of the commonwealth put together.

More of Churchill's christian nazism:
http://christianaggression.org/item_displa...S&id=1137486332
QUOTEWinston Churchill - A Christian Bigot at Heart
Posted January 17, 2006
hinduvoice.co.uk

In fact, many of the views he (Churchill) held were virtually Nazi. For example, as Home Minister he had advocated euthanasia and sterilisation of the handicapped. In his own racial hierarchy, blacks were down below all others, Indians too were markedly inferior to Europeans. Even Italians did not have the character to rule themselves, which was why Churchill believed they needed a dictator, and therefore applauded Mussolini.

The extent of Churchill's racism can be gleaned by many extracts from his speeches. For example, in 1937 he said "I do not admit...that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia...by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place." Thus justifying one of the most brutal genocides and mass displacement of people in history. He also had hatred for Indians "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." By `beastly religion' he was of course talking about Hinduism.

3.2. Sadistic christianism and its gas chambers: experimenting on Indian soldiers

Apparently the christians from Britain were forever ungrateful to Indian soldiers for have bailed them out in World War I.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/sep/01/india.military
QUOTE"Military scientists tested mustard gas on Indians
Â· Hundreds of soldiers used in experiments
Â· Illnesses caused by carcinogen not tracked"
http://history1900s.about.com/b/2007/09/04...an-soldiers.htm
QUOTEMustard Gas Tested on Indian Soldiers 

According to recently discovered documents at the British National Archives in London, British scientists tested the effects of mustard gas on Indian soldiers for over a ten-year period. Beginning in the early 1930s, scientists at Rawalpindi sent Indian soldiers, wearing only shorts and cotton shirts, into gas chambers to experience the effects of mustard gas. The scientists hoped to determine the appropriate dosage to use on battlefields. Many of the subjects suffered severe burns from their exposure to the gas. No long term effects of exposure were documented or studied.
Will Durant had discussed how the Indian soldiers in WWI were compelled to fight for Britain, and the mustard gas experimentation probably involved the same amount of 'volunteering'.

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