01-24-2005, 10:48 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>More loyal than the queen</b>
By Francois Gautier
Something terribly wrong is going on in India. On the one hand, there is the Shankaracharya, one of the most venerated Hindu leaders, arrested like an ordinary criminal on one of the most sacred days of the Hindus. On the other, politicians such as Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav, who have more corruption cases against them than anybody else - and certain others who may even have some blood on their hands - are made ministers and are strutting around with security guards in tow. The tarnishing of the image of the Kancheepuram mutt is nearly complete. Will it ever be able to recover its sanctity, even if the Shankaracharya is found not guilty?
On the other hand, there is a quack like American evangelist Benny Hinn, who even in the United States has no standing, but can come to India, a country with an overwhelming Hindu majority, to deride idol worship and paganism and convert the poor and the gullible. <b>We see former ministers and ex-prime ministers - many of them Hindus -coming to Benny Hinn live on TV, with bowed heads and folded hands like beggars asking for the White Man's grace.</b> We see the entire state machinery of Karnataka put to the service of the evangelist while all the laws are subverted so that he can conduct his fake show.
We see how, when 58 innocent men, women and children were burnt alive in the most horrible manner in Godhra, for no other reason than being Hindus, that there is not even respect for their memory, for the truth is now twisted for political purposes with the help of India's Marxists who want the death of Hinduism. Hindus are always accused of all the ills and intolerance, but where else in the world will you find a Christian supreme leader in a country with only three per cent Christians, a Sikh Prime Minister when there are only two per cent Sikhs, and a Muslim President with only 10 per cent Muslims?
I am a Westerner and a born Christian, but I am ashamed of what has been happening in the country ever since Ms Sonia Gandhi, also a Westerner and a Christian, has become the de facto ruler of this ancient and extraordinary country of 850 million Hindus and 125 million Muslims. For, what is happening is an insult to India's culture, greatness and intelligence. Even more saddening is the passivity of Indians in the face of the developments. For only a few voices have been raised in these moments of insanity. <b>India's curse is the disunity amongst its Hindus, and their infighting</b>. One is even surprised at the lack of reaction from the top Hindu spiritual leaders of India: Satya Sai Baba, Amrita Anandamayi and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Together they hold sway on at least 400 million Hindus. Why don't they form a Supreme Spiritual Conclave along with the Shankaracharya? They have only to say one word and it will be followed. But even amongst them there is disunity.
Who will save India, then? Certainly not the Congress, which was incapable of finding a worthy Indian leader amongst its own members, many of whom are intelligent and sincere. <b>By stooping down to Ms Sonia Gandhi, they have repeated the same old story of India's ancient princes and maharajas betraying each other and bowing down to a foreign ruler, be it Aurangzeb, or His Majesty's Viceroy. </b>Who betrayed the mighty empire of Vijaynagar, the last great Hindu kingdom, to Muslims? Who betrayed India to the British? Who is betraying India today? But at least the Congress is true to its ideals. The biggest culprit must be the party which, in five years of power, did nothing except project a Gandhian image of itself, rather than having India's interests at heart.
Not have to say or do anything. She does not have to instruct the Tamil Nadu Police to arrest the Shankaracharya, or tell the Chief Minister of Karnataka, Mr Dharam Singh, to attend Benny Hinn's show. By just being where she is, at the top of India's political hierarchy, she is able to ensure that her silent wishes are fulfilled. Everybody is bending over backwards to please her, even anticipating her wishes!
I have nothing personally against Ms Sonia Gandhi. She was a good wife to her husband, a good daughter to her mother-in-law, and is doubtless a good mother to her children. Many accounts have come of her dignity, grace and concern for others. But what does Ms Gandhi really stand for, as the Eminence Grise of this country, the person who is drawing all the strings behind the scene? <b>The Benny Hinn show points to not only a renewed effort at Christianisation of India (something which even the British and the Portuguese could not do), and a targeting of Hindus and Hindu spiritual leaders, but also at the Westernisation of the subcontinent</b>. India will then become just another nation cloning the West. Even Muslims and Christians in India, who are like no other Christians and Muslims in the world, would lose something.
How sad that this is happening at a time when the West is looking for other spiritual answers to its problems and the Church is in decline there. The only silver lining in the whole story is that these events - whether the arrest of the Shankaracharya, the Benny Hinn show, or the rewriting of Godhra - may open the eyes of Indians. It may be that India needs to go through this painful process, to see the forces that have been unleashed when Indians chose someone who is basically hostile to the majority culture of this country as their leader. Maybe they need to be faced with a Government which is pulling India down, just to please the minorities, the Vatican and the Western powers who do not want India to emerge as a strong and vibrant nation.
<b>Nobody seems to understand that India's unique identity, its Sanatan dharma, which survived so many onslaughts in its long history, is today under mortal threat.</b>
Cry my Beloved India, Look what Thy children have done to Thee.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?
main_variable=OPED&file_name=opd4%2Etxt&counter_img=4<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
By Francois Gautier
Something terribly wrong is going on in India. On the one hand, there is the Shankaracharya, one of the most venerated Hindu leaders, arrested like an ordinary criminal on one of the most sacred days of the Hindus. On the other, politicians such as Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav, who have more corruption cases against them than anybody else - and certain others who may even have some blood on their hands - are made ministers and are strutting around with security guards in tow. The tarnishing of the image of the Kancheepuram mutt is nearly complete. Will it ever be able to recover its sanctity, even if the Shankaracharya is found not guilty?
On the other hand, there is a quack like American evangelist Benny Hinn, who even in the United States has no standing, but can come to India, a country with an overwhelming Hindu majority, to deride idol worship and paganism and convert the poor and the gullible. <b>We see former ministers and ex-prime ministers - many of them Hindus -coming to Benny Hinn live on TV, with bowed heads and folded hands like beggars asking for the White Man's grace.</b> We see the entire state machinery of Karnataka put to the service of the evangelist while all the laws are subverted so that he can conduct his fake show.
We see how, when 58 innocent men, women and children were burnt alive in the most horrible manner in Godhra, for no other reason than being Hindus, that there is not even respect for their memory, for the truth is now twisted for political purposes with the help of India's Marxists who want the death of Hinduism. Hindus are always accused of all the ills and intolerance, but where else in the world will you find a Christian supreme leader in a country with only three per cent Christians, a Sikh Prime Minister when there are only two per cent Sikhs, and a Muslim President with only 10 per cent Muslims?
I am a Westerner and a born Christian, but I am ashamed of what has been happening in the country ever since Ms Sonia Gandhi, also a Westerner and a Christian, has become the de facto ruler of this ancient and extraordinary country of 850 million Hindus and 125 million Muslims. For, what is happening is an insult to India's culture, greatness and intelligence. Even more saddening is the passivity of Indians in the face of the developments. For only a few voices have been raised in these moments of insanity. <b>India's curse is the disunity amongst its Hindus, and their infighting</b>. One is even surprised at the lack of reaction from the top Hindu spiritual leaders of India: Satya Sai Baba, Amrita Anandamayi and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. Together they hold sway on at least 400 million Hindus. Why don't they form a Supreme Spiritual Conclave along with the Shankaracharya? They have only to say one word and it will be followed. But even amongst them there is disunity.
Who will save India, then? Certainly not the Congress, which was incapable of finding a worthy Indian leader amongst its own members, many of whom are intelligent and sincere. <b>By stooping down to Ms Sonia Gandhi, they have repeated the same old story of India's ancient princes and maharajas betraying each other and bowing down to a foreign ruler, be it Aurangzeb, or His Majesty's Viceroy. </b>Who betrayed the mighty empire of Vijaynagar, the last great Hindu kingdom, to Muslims? Who betrayed India to the British? Who is betraying India today? But at least the Congress is true to its ideals. The biggest culprit must be the party which, in five years of power, did nothing except project a Gandhian image of itself, rather than having India's interests at heart.
Not have to say or do anything. She does not have to instruct the Tamil Nadu Police to arrest the Shankaracharya, or tell the Chief Minister of Karnataka, Mr Dharam Singh, to attend Benny Hinn's show. By just being where she is, at the top of India's political hierarchy, she is able to ensure that her silent wishes are fulfilled. Everybody is bending over backwards to please her, even anticipating her wishes!
I have nothing personally against Ms Sonia Gandhi. She was a good wife to her husband, a good daughter to her mother-in-law, and is doubtless a good mother to her children. Many accounts have come of her dignity, grace and concern for others. But what does Ms Gandhi really stand for, as the Eminence Grise of this country, the person who is drawing all the strings behind the scene? <b>The Benny Hinn show points to not only a renewed effort at Christianisation of India (something which even the British and the Portuguese could not do), and a targeting of Hindus and Hindu spiritual leaders, but also at the Westernisation of the subcontinent</b>. India will then become just another nation cloning the West. Even Muslims and Christians in India, who are like no other Christians and Muslims in the world, would lose something.
How sad that this is happening at a time when the West is looking for other spiritual answers to its problems and the Church is in decline there. The only silver lining in the whole story is that these events - whether the arrest of the Shankaracharya, the Benny Hinn show, or the rewriting of Godhra - may open the eyes of Indians. It may be that India needs to go through this painful process, to see the forces that have been unleashed when Indians chose someone who is basically hostile to the majority culture of this country as their leader. Maybe they need to be faced with a Government which is pulling India down, just to please the minorities, the Vatican and the Western powers who do not want India to emerge as a strong and vibrant nation.
<b>Nobody seems to understand that India's unique identity, its Sanatan dharma, which survived so many onslaughts in its long history, is today under mortal threat.</b>
Cry my Beloved India, Look what Thy children have done to Thee.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?
main_variable=OPED&file_name=opd4%2Etxt&counter_img=4<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->