90:98 vs 56:64-97

[Bijoy Misra]

It seems the list is degrading to political discussion and
to postings that are of little relevance to the academic discussion
that it aims to purport.  Can the participants restrain from
getting into political and social topics, which are digressions
and invite wide divergence of political views?
Just a request for everyone's consideration..

- BM


On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Michael Rabe wrote:

> Editorial in today's New York Times, by "a Hindu writer who lives in New
> York,"  and forwarded, FYI, on grounds of the Academic Fair Use, enshrined
> in US Law:
>
> January 11, 1999
>               India Steps Up Anti-Christian Violence
>               By TUNKA VARADARAJAN
> [http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/11tunk.html]
>                     On Christmas Day a school run by Christians was burned
> down by arsonists. Another school nearby was  demolished by a mob. In a
> separate incident, a church was stoned. Several women hiding inside were
> injured,  as were the nuns who sought to shield them.
>
>               This happened a month after a Roman Catholic priest was
> murdered and religious fanatics vowed to turn an entire  district into a
> "Christian-free zone." In keeping with this promise, a chapel was set on
> fire. Elsewhere, armed men  broke into a Catholic convent and assaulted two
> nuns inside, and another Catholic priest was shot dead.
>
>               This is only a partial list of crimes that all occurred in
> India, where fanatics from the far right of the Hindu nationalist spectrum
> have formed shadowy "armies" intent on ridding the country of its religious
> minorities and of turning it into a Hindu state.
>
>               So consumed are they by hatred of "foreign" religions that
> one of their leaders -- Ashok Singhal of the World Hindu Council -- said
> recently that the award of the Nobel Prize for economics to Amartya Sen,
> the renowned Indian economist, was evidence of a "Christian conspiracy to
> propagate their religion and wipe out Hinduism from the country."
>
>               What was the basis for such a preposterous statement? Simply
> that Mr. Sen (who happens to be Hindu) has written that India's development
> and prosperity depend on mass literacy. Mr. Sen's true purpose, the Hindu
> fanatics say, is to enable Christian missionaries to establish educational
> institutions across the country, using schools as Trojan Horses from which
> to unleash evangelist hordes.
>
>               What we are witnessing in India is the growth of a sort of
> Hindu Taliban movement. Although it is difficult to gauge the numbers
> accurately, the various extremist groups are believed to have tens of
> thousands of supporters. In recent years, Muslims have been their principal
> victims. Christians, who constitute 2.4 percent of the population -- 23
> million people-- had, on the whole, been left alone. But that has now
> changed. Emboldened by the first ever Hindu nationalist Government in New
> Delhi, extremist groups now feel they have friends in high places. In
> addition, the Government, which has suffered a series of defeats in recent
> provincial elections, is too concerned with its own survival to rein them
> in.
>
>               According to the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, an
> umbrella group that brings together leaders from the various Christian
> denominations in India, 90 separate acts of violence were committed against
> Christians or Christian churches in 1998. There were only 53 attacks from
> 1964 to 1997.
>
>               Unlike Muslim, Christian or Jewish fundamentalists, who
> generally base their radicalism in a sacred text, Hindu fundamentalists
> have no central text to appeal to. As a result, they have resorted to
> conflating Hinduism with "Indianness," giving their religious bigotry a
> nationalist and temporal complexion.
>
>               They have constructed a Manichaean world in which Hindus are
> "true" Indians and all others are "outsiders." The formulation is curious
> since Islam came to India about 1,200 years ago, and Christianity arrived
> even earlier. Some historians date India's Christian roots to the first
> century A.D.
>
>               But the current battle is not over the historical record. It
> is a battle for India's soul.
>
>               The secular state is not about to crumble overnight. What is
> imperiled, however, is India's tolerant, secular civilization.
>
>               Tunku Varadarajan, a Hindu, is a writer based in New York.
>