Critique of the West in Indic literature and society

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Dear Vidyasankar,

Your moderating tone about Hinduism Today not being xenophobic is quite
right; I overstepped the mark in my criticism.  But I still do think it
is more fundamentalist than you give credit for.  The child marriage
thing was -- if I recall -- presented by HT as being a special value of
Hinduism, though as you rightly say it isn't actually restricted to
Hindus as a practice.

I tend to come on rather strong on matters of right-wing and
fundamentalist Hindu politics, I know, and perhaps I am over-sensitised
to it.  But this happened due to the experience of living in India
recently for a longish time, and seeing at first hand just how
widespread these ideas are, and how very damaging they are to civilized
life in India.  There were very violent riots in Bangalore while I was
there, in which scores of people died, mostly Muslims.  My children
were briefly at (slight) risk, and most people we knew had to stay indoors 
for about three days while the trouble burned itself out.  Some parts of
town were a shambles afterwards, and I was told of "piles of corpses".

The rhetoric in the papers and about town at the time was pretty grotesque,
with some leaders openly inciting mobs to communal violence.

I often get the feeling that people living most of their time in Europe
or America, reading publications like HT, don't realize the
implications of some of the more fundamentalist views expressed.  In
India, people are being killed over these issues.

> The real right-wing Hindutva  
> fundamentalists in India have other goals in mind. 

What goals were you thinking of?  Apart from power?

> As for dangerous right-wing fundamentalist  
> Hindu agenda, it is absolutely no comparison to the right-wing  
> fundamentalist Christian agenda represented by the rich and  
> influential Pat Robertson and like-minded individuals and groups in  
> the continental US. 

I'm not comparing.  But of course ideologies that lead to cruelty and 
injustice are to be abhorred, whether masquerading as religion or 
politics.  

Dominik