Towards Hindu Rashtra

We become like our enemies. The Sangh Parivar is proving the saying right if the latest issue of Outlook is to be believed.  The Parivar which never tired of accusing the Christian missionaries and the Islamic fundamentalists of converting people into their respective religions is now indulging in the same activity much more ruthlessly and heartlessly, according to the Outlook cover story. 

Children between the age of 5 and 12 are weaned away from their parents under fraudulent promises and with fake documents and taken to institutions in Gujarat and Punjab.  Most of the children belong to various tribes in Assam and other North-eastern states.  According to the Outlook reports which quote official sources, about 5000 children were taken away from Assam alone in 2012-15.  These and other similar children from other states are sent to the various institutions run by Sewa Bharati which was set up in 1978 by Balasaheb Deoras with the purported goal of promoting the welfare of the marginalised.

The parents never get to know where their children are once they are taken away.  They are denied any contact whatever with the children.  It is mostly girls who are taken away.

In June 2015, 31 girls between the ages of 5 and 8 were rescued from a train that arrived from Assam at a Delhi railway station. But none of the girls reached back home because political powers intervened. The Outlook reporters traced them in the various Sangh Parivar institutions in Gujarat and Punjab. 

Saraswati Shishu Mandir at Halvad in Gujarat is one such institution where the reporters discovered many of the girls whose parents in Assam are worried about. The report says that the children are indoctrinated with radical religious teachings.  They are taught to hate Christians and Muslims.  They are taught to admire the Hindu traditions such as the sati system.  The walls of the institution carry pictures of Hedgewar, Savarkar, Shivaji, Jijabai and Bharat Mata.  Of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel too find place among them.  Guru Gobind Singh is labelled as a “Hindu Dharmarakshak.” 

History is distorted in the teachings. So is religion. The distortions can go to ridiculous extents sometimes. For example, Rukmini, Krishna’s wife, becomes a Bodo when Bodo children are being taught, a Naga when the students are Nagas, and so on.  One of the reports mentions the RSS Joint General Secretary, Krishna Gopal, who claimed that Rukmini was from a tribe in Arunachal Pradesh while he was flagging off the Gyanodaya Express, Delhi University’s annual ‘Train of Learning’ on 7 Dec 2014.

Saraswati Shishu Mandir in Gujarat which houses many of the girls brought from Assam was inaugurated by none other than Mr Narendra Modi in 2002.  It is now following very faithfully Mr Modi’s motto of ‘Beti bachao, beti padhao.’  It is ‘saving’ the betis even from their parents!

The reporters say that little children are being radicalised in these institutions.  The children are not allowed to meet people from outside except under high supervision.  They cannot ever meet their parents or relatives.  They become “indoctrinated and embittered,” according to the reporters.  Are we creating suicide bombers for the future India which, according to the vision of the Sangh Parivar, will be “hundred percent Hindu”?