Communalism: July 2004 Archives

RAW cannot carry out terrorism without internal help, says Jabbar

PROUT Editor's Note: The news article below concerns a recent terrorist act carried out in Pakistan. The majority of Pakistanis believe that the RAW (Research Analysis Wing of the Indian government) is behind all the terrorist incidents in Pakistan. Similarly, the majority of the Indian people believe that the ISI is behind all terrorist attacks in India. Both countries suffer not merely from outside terrorism but from dysfunctional mindset. Both countries are caught in the grip of fundamentalist paranoia. Both countries believe that they are in imminent danger of being annihilated by the other. What is the way out of this madness? Long ago, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar commented about how two villages in British India that had close ties, with families from one village marrying members of families in the other village, one day were told that from now on this must all come to an end. One village must regard the other village as the enemy and as Pakistanis. Similarly, the other village was now told by its new government that it must hate its former close friends because they are now Indians. This is what the disease of religious nationalism has done to South Asia. If India and Pakistan and Banglaadesh can overcome these religious pathologies, South Asia can once again be a dynamic force, just as Europe by uniting has become a united force after the Berlin Wall. However, if the present religious fundamentalism prevails in both countries, then both will face further disintegration and splintering along with endless violence, from whom priests, mullahs and politicians alone will derive any benefit. The people of South Asia must take their future into their own hands, and not allow themselves to be sacrificed at the altar of the megalomania of fundamentalist politicians.

Report by the internationally respected Human Rights Watch

On the morning of February 27, 2002, the gruesome attack on the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, Gujarat, left fifty-eight dead. The train cars set alight were carrying Hindu kar sevaks (religious volunteers) returning from Ayodhya. By evening, retaliatory attacks against Muslims had begun, including in Rajkot, Vadodara, and Bharuch.50 That same day the Vishwa Hindu Parishad called for a statewide bandh (shut-down) for February 28, a call that according to press reports, its cadre interpreted as a call to action.51 The state's endorsement of the bandh, announced through a press note issued at 8 p.m. on February 27, was taken by the VHP/Bajrang Dal as an endorsement of its stand.52

State support of the bandh also sent a message to the police. A reporter for the Hindu observed that, "In such a situation, the police would always be hesitant to act lest it hurt the interests of the political bosses. And the saffronised police also found a common cause with the criminals to `punish' the minorities."53 The same reporter wrote that, "insiders in the Bharatiya Janata Party admit that the police were under instructions from the Narendra Modi administration not to act firmly."54

by Arundhati Roy

Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy has said that 'fascism is alive and well and living in Gujarat'.

"Gujarat, the only major state in India with a government headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has for some years been the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political experiment and in spring of 2002, the initial results were put on public display," Roy wrote in the inaugural issue of the Indobrit, a quarterly magazine launched in London on Tuesday night.

Prout Editor’s note: Communal riots remained as a shameful phenomenon even in this era of scientific and intellectual achievements. It is a common practice when such communal riots take place to blame each other to be at guilty. If we analyze this issue properly, we can come to a conclusion that religious intolerance plays a key role behind all these riots.

Security is tightened at St Patrick's church, Karachi Tufail Ahmad of the BBC's Urdu service looks at the position of Christians in Pakistan after 16 were killed in a church attack on Sunday. These killings came at a time when the United States is fighting a war against Afghanistan opposed by many Pakistanis.

PROUT Editor's note: The article below, published in today's prestigious Christian Science Monitor, provides clear evidence why readers should not put excessive stock in the mass media, including any newspaper, regardless of its reputation. Scott Baldauf has no idea and hence did not research properly into the kind of material found in BJP-produced textbooks in India. If he had visited the website, "Communalism Combat," he would have found plenty of evidence to indicate that the BJP textbooks (1) completely distort Indian history and convert it into a Hindu history, (2) propagate a hatred of all minorities in India (such as Muslims, Christians and Parsees) and encourage their elimination/ extermination. In HIS last discourse, the great humanitarian, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, talked about the dangers of communalism. He explains clearly that there are groups or forces having fissiparous tendencies. They want to divide the society, and if given the chance to do so, may cause the physical disintegration of India. Due to this very communalist/racist mentality on the part of some people, India became trifurcated into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. For the same reason, Sri Lanka and Burma also separated from India. BEngal was bifurcated, the Punjb was bifurcated, Assam was bifurcated, and Sind and North West Frontier Province were lost to India. According to Sarkar, if we do not take active steps to fight this fissiparous mentality of divide and rule held by these communalists/racists, then India will splinter still further. He says, communalism is unnatural. Today Bengal is divided on the basis of communal consciousness, and that consciousness, that mentality, shows no sign of abatement. Sarkar said that there was both physical disintegration and psychio-social disintegration in India, with the sole reason being lack of proper education, in particular political education or political consciousness. The solution to this problem, he also says, is proper education. Sarkar goes so far as to refer to communalists as "serpents... exhaling venom everywhere..." and says that now is the right time, the right moment to fight this venom. We must expose these demons in human form, and through proper education, through neo-humanism, universal education which emphasizes the unity of all human beings, we can stop this tide of communalism. While fighting this communalism, at the same time we can continue the good work of the RSS in re-introducing the teaching of Sanskrit, ayurveda and astrology in schools across India. But, fight we must.
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Allies of the new Congress government call for revisions of school textbooks currently oriented toward Hindu values

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
July 16, 2004

NEW DELHI – In the past five years, Indian school children of all faiths have learned quite a bit about the culture of the Hindu majority. With the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party in charge, history textbooks were rewritten to extol the virtues of Indian kings like Shivaji and the Mauriyan and Vijayanagar empires. Hindu values were openly promoted in school, and ancient subjects like Hindu astrology, Ayurvedic medicine, and even the system of mental calculations known as Vedic mathematics were taught alongside more modern subjects such as astronomy, chemistry, and accounting.

by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

Is the division of people into castes and communities natural balkanisation or artificial balkanisation? Natural balkanisation is just like one cell becoming two. Artificial fissiparous tendencies are unnatural. So is the division of people into castes and communities a process of natural balkanisation or artificial fissiparous tendencies?