Skip to main content

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”?


Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 30, 2016 at 3:14 PM

    At this rate my prophecy of riots might come true before the next general election. But I was not aware of this issue, you seem to follow news with scrutiny :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 30, 2016 at 4:45 PM

      The Cassandra in me is beginning to see dark clouds looming this side of the horizon.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
12 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more