Two Muslim criminals – Javed and Iklash – who shot and injured two cow protection volunteers (Gau Raksha Dal) on June 25 morning were arrested late Wednesday night, said Gurgaon Police. The shooting took place when six volunteers were attempting to confront beef transporters on the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway.
Sexism In Politics Hits A New Low – Targets Smriti Irani
In a new low, the recent cabinet reshuffle by the Central Government led to extremely cheap sexist attacks on Ex-HRD minister, Smt Smiriti Irani. While the cabinet saw some other shifts too, personal sarcasm and sexist attacks were seen only on Smriti Irani in social media and even mainstream media. There have been questions raised on her performance through out her tenure, mainly because of her humble educational qualifications, but most of the attacks from left and so called ‘secular’ spectrum have been unrelated to her performance and very personal in nature.
A Hindu Sanyasi Writes to PM Modi to Honour Promise on Bhojshala
Bhojshala in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh is the site of an ancient school of Sanskrit studies which houses the only Hindu temple in the world dedicated to Goddess Vagadevi (Saraswati). It was established around 1034 CE by Raja Bhoj, the the most celebrated ruler of the Paramāra dynasty. However, Bhojshala and the city of Dhar were ransacked by successive Muslim invaders and a mosque/dargah established in the erstwhile Bhojshala complex. The pratimaa of Maa Saraswati was taken away by the British Viceroy Lord Curzon in 1902 CE to be housed in the British Museum at London.
Ever since Independence, Hindus have been struggling to regain their right to worship in the Bhojshala temple and to reinstall the divine pratimaa of Maa Saraswati at the temple. A pratimaa is NOT a museum piece – It is sacred, divine.
As part of the movement to bring back the pratimaa from Britain, an open letter has been written by Swami Bharati Maharaj to Prime Minister Modi asking him to honour his promise of bringing back the Bhojshala pratimaa from British Museum.
Enraged by FB comment, Samajwadi Party MLA in UP Gets Entire Family Arrested
The main allegation hurled at Hindus during the fake ‘Rising Intolerance‘ narrative peddled by mainstream media and Adarsh Liberals last year was that Modi’s ascent to the PM post had emboldened bigoted Hindus who were trampling all over the so-called religious minorities.
Before Lok Sabha elections 2014, each and every controversy involving Gujarat was highlighted without fail in media, and the buck stopped with Modi (then CM of Gujarat) – he was put squarely in the dock for anything and everything. For eg. this piece from 2013 makes Modi answerable for children from Rajasthan alleged to be working in cotton factories of Gujarat (for some reason, the Congress CM of Rajasthan escapes all questioning). Such razor sharp questioning of elected representatives is exactly what one expects from the media, and one thought that the advent of the Modi era would see all CMs across the nation being grilled with the same intensity to explain crime under their watch, growth figures, human indicators, policy decisions etc.
NIA Busts Another IS Module – This Time In Hyderabad
The NIA (National Investigation Agency) along with Telangana state police raided about 11 locations in Hyderabad last Wednesday and detained IS (Islamic State) terror suspects who were planning attacks on multiple locations. NIA has busted this IS module proactively and deserves applause for it as the attacks seemed imminent had these suspects not been detained.
Right To Education (RTE) Gives Birth to a New Scam
Right to Education (RTE) continues to haunt the non-minority private schools across the nation. The problems and corruption related to RTE are already exposed in our previous articles. Under the RTE act, 25% seats from all private non-minority (aided or unaided) schools are reserved for children from underprivileged socio-economic backgrounds. The government reimburses fees of these students. Cases of corruption and malpractices in the root level of RTE have drawn out the real face of RTE, which is hidden behind the facade of social justice.
RTE has given birth to a new scam, where in order to get admissions under the RTE quota parents have started producing fake documents to show that they belong to Economically Weaker Section (EWS).
Troubling Documentary Reveals Kairana like Hindu Exodus in Heart of Delhi
A troubling new documentary has revealed that a Hindu exodus similar to that in Kairana, West UP is currently underway in the Sundar Nagri area of the national capital, Delhi.
The documentary was created by Ravijot Singh, a video blogger, poet and speaker, and posted on his YouTube Channel with the title ‘Truth of Sunder Nagri – Are Hindu’s at risk?’ The 20 minute documentary can be seen below –
Colonialism to Star Dot Star Colonialism: A Contracting Universe
(This article is being presented as a 4-part series. It talks about the various forms of colonialism which thrive even today)
Part 1: Colonialism is Dead. Long Live Star-Dot-Star Colonialism?
Unguarded slips reveal an inner mindset. The Queen of England’s comment on Chinese rudeness was one such. And then there was one from Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, founder of Netscape and a Director at Facebook, was miffed when authorities in Bharat did not accept a Facebook proposal on grounds that it compromised net neutrality. In an exchange in twitter-world, Andreessen’s tweet termed anti-Colonialism as an ‘economic catastrophic for the Indian people for decades’ (see box below).
In the time and space between this tweet and its panic stricken deletion by Andreessen, a veritable storm blew up. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, applied some balm to calm things down. He issued politically correct comments and laced up sugary references to Indian ‘history and culture’. The incident got swept under the carpet in an attention deficit world.
It does not stop at mere slips that emerge out of a façade of political correctness. There are outright apologists too. In his article, ‘Revisiting the British Raj’, in Swarajya Magazine, Jaitirth Rao states that Lord Curzon and Lord Irwin were more worthy than Baba Kharak Singh and Kasturba Gandhi. He goes on to paint Lord Curzon as the saviour of Historical Monuments of Bharat by enacting the Preservation of Ancient Monuments Act of 1904 which he says was instrumental in protecting ancient monuments of Bharat (this itself is scrutinized later). Elsewhere, Rao suggests that we should have a balanced look at British Rule. To rub salt further, he adds that such a balance would indicate a maturity that is lacking now. He conveniently attributes this imbalance to the leftists who have been perhaps the mildest critics of colonial rule. This is a red herring too. What he really desires is that the current efforts to correct our history should be kind to the colonizers: his comments come at a time when the influence of Leftists is on the wane and an emerging narrative detailing the perspective of Bharat is being developed.
These comments and incidents deserve a closer scrutiny and perhaps a deeper understanding of the Colonial forces at play.
Firstly what these incidents reveal is a mindset prevailing amongst many policy decision makers in government, politicians, bureaucracy, international bodies, business, social bodies, think tanks that span a vast , visible and vocal section of society, but by no means is it universal. This mindset is an integral part of an ecosystem that rationalizes, legitimizes and strengthens colonialism in different flavours, shapes, sizes and creates new forms when old colonial games have played out their life.
The term Star-dot-Star Colonialism is used in this article to cover all forms of past, existing and yet to be manifested colonialism. The prefix Star-dot-Star (*.*), a term familiar to computer geeks, refers to all forms of colonialism including post-colonial institutions which are merely sophisticated ways to apply paint lipstick to a colonial pig that has proliferated everywhere.
Star-dot-Star colonialism is a Win-Lose paradigm where the underlying rules ultimately crystallize into a Heads-I-win-Tails-you-lose scenario for the colonized classes. There is no win-win in any form of Star-dot-Star colonialism even though all initiatives of Star-dot-Star Colonialism are packaged to appear so whenever they are released in new versions. The Colonizers have developed great expertise, institutions and elaborate methods to confuse the lay public and ultimately inflict great damage on their targets.
Consider four examples from a large number of documented articles, books and accounts of our forefathers a mere four to eight generations ago:
(a) The creation of the Forest Department in Colonial British India in 1864 was presented as an outstanding effort to save forests. In practice, it accelerated the depletion of forests with ‘lip service to principles of sustainable harvest’[1]. Adivasis and tribals were isolated from their sources of sustenance, timber exploited, species hunted and sacred groves withered. This form of colonialism marginalized adivasis and tribal communities in one stroke, affecting the livelihood of millions and dismantling a large knowledge base of sustainable forestry that had been in existence for thousands of years. There were a series of wars fought between the British colonizers and tribals from the Malpahariya conflicts right upto the struggles of Lakshman Naik in Orissa in 1942. Ironically, the displaced and dispossessed tribal victims of such policies who had been living in mutual interdependency with agricultural and urbanised societies of Bharat from time immemorial are now represented as victims of Hindu ‘oppression’ by a leftist academia while the colonizers are depicted as saviours who worked against Hindu ‘caste’ oppression![2] It is also rather strange that Dr. Ambedkar, the Architect of the Constitution, and a champion of the oppressed chose to keep such an oppressive Act essentially intact in the new Constitution. Thus the forest dwellers felt that no material change had occurred despite Independence.
b) A narrow, rigid Intellectual Property interpretation became the framework to ensure high profits in the Pharmaceutical Industry internationally. All other possible win-win forms are brow-beaten into submission and obscurity by the ferocity of opposition from ‘experts’ orchestrated for this very task. Bharat is an exception and a victim of this: it was ostracised and also a victim of active piracy of bio-resources and traditional knowledge. A Traditional Knowledge Digital Library “… expert group estimated that, annually, some 2,000 patents relating to Indian medicinal systems were being erroneously granted by patent offices around the world”[3]. The countries which champion rigid IP interpretations and have populations facing high medical costs, have well established barriers to pharmaceutical generics and a healthcare crisis.
(c) Climate related negotiations show that developed countries stall emission norms being applied to them and yet they label countries like Bharat as spoil sports despite Bharat contributing 3% to global greenhouse gases while having 16% of the world population[4] – in contrast to the US contributing 27% of global greenhouse gases with about 5% of the world population. The pattern of blaming the victims and allowing the real culprits to get away continues in all forms of Star-dot-Star colonialism.
(d) In his article referenced earlier, Jaitirth Rao mentions the Preservation of Ancient Monuments Act of 1904 sponsored by Lord Curzon. This merits a closer look. Contrary to what Rao points out, the Act was a blatant piece of legislation which put the onus of preservation on owners, ensured the Centre’s rights to acquire or even be ‘gifted’[5] Ancient Monuments or Assets and appropriate land and other areas by declaring properties as Ancient. The law had provisions that allow intervention like possession of assets on the basis of a mere apprehension. In recent times, Iraq was invaded and occupied on the apprehension that it ‘might be having’ weapons of mass destruction. Presumptive clauses such as this and how many properties could be defined as ‘Ownerless’ under Section 4[6] of this Act and appropriated by the Centre gave sanction for abuse. Ironically and as a consequence, there are more manuscripts and antiques to be found in the British Museum than the Indian National Museum: and much of this was facilitated under this Act. This Act was instrumental in removing live sacred practices as was an integral part of ancient shrines from the physical monument. Thus the worship at the inner sanctum sanctorum at Shringeri or at Mahabalipuram was ceased as soon as these places were taken up by the Archaeological Society of India[6] set up for this purpose. The parallels of this with the fate of the forest dweller Adivasis affected by the establishment of the Forest Department mentioned earlier is striking.
In the same article, Jaitirth Rao credits the British for giving us a ‘united’ nation. It is comically ironical to discuss this today when UK is itself faced with Brexit challenges, demands for the breaking away of Wales, Scotland and a call for an independent City-Country of London. Either Rao’s gratefulness to the British is misplaced or we are indeed immature and unbalanced in stating that Sardar Patel stitched together a united Bharat by bringing 576 princely states to give us the map of Bharat as we know it now. Rao conveniently forgets to mention that British had actually given us on the 15th of August, 1947, a moth eaten political reality with amputated, bleeding limbs and a lopped off head –which was attached to Bharat and a part which is under illegal Pakistani colonial occupation. The myth being fashionably perpetuated about the British uniting Bharat must be examined with facts as the political map of the set-up pre-1947[7] and a current map[8] of Bharat shows:
Bharat is mature and balanced enough to keep relationships with other countries and civilizations cordial and mutually beneficial in the present despite the sordid past. But to do so, one does not have to airbrush the terrible, gut wrenching misdeeds of colonizers – just one example is pictured alongside[9] – and paint the occupation as if
colonizers had come with oodles of goodies for the ‘barbaric’ masses. This is an error the colonizers and their enablers make – perhaps because they are yet to give up their colonial mindset or paradoxically, are neither balanced nor mature enough to see the brutal reality of what the common man was faced with during colonial rule. Worse, it makes the real victims appear to be terrible culprits and terrible culprits look like benign benefactors.
With so much distortion in the narratives, it is no surprise that the colonial mindset finds its way into many assumptions in plush corporate boardrooms – from strategy to product design to supply-chain management to human resource decisions. It oozes into investment decisions for private capital allocation. It flows into developmental policies in multilateral bodies. It shapes institutional programs. It warps perceptions and policies on Agriculture, Food, Water, Education, Urban Planning, Rural Development, Forestry and much more.
Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts (FUDs) are deliberately created to present challenges to ‘humanity’ by new versions of colonialism that create new win-lose scenarios. All current or emerging waves of colonialism appear as Saviours. Simultaneously, older hapless victims of earlier phases of Colonialism are faulted. Thus colonial historians depict Hindus as oppressors – a case of painting the real victims as the designated ‘villains’ in their narratives while British and other Colonizers are the agents of ‘progress’. This is why every school child today can effortlessly rattle off the ‘evils’ of Hinduism – Caste, Suttee, Dowry, Untouchability, Dalits, Adivasis and the ‘benefits’ of Colonialism – ‘unification’ of the country, English Language, ‘Education’, Railways, Technology, Science and ‘Institutions’. At the same time, they are hard pressed to remember anything positive about Hindus or Bharat’s living knowledge systems or their methods or the excesses and impact of Colonial policy on our people. It is this imbalance that Jaitirth Rao (and others – he shows up as an example in this case only) should spend his energies and intelligence around rather than the other way around – for that is the shocking reality elites in colonized countries have avoided.
In the next part, we shall examine the conditions that have made Star-dot-Star colonialism prevalent. We look at the key drivers that make normal human beings into becoming conditioned Pavlovian cogs in mechanisms organized to inflict slavery and pseudo-slavery, destruction of family & social structures, and creating trade & financial regimes that help perpetuate this win-lose asymmetry.
End of Part 1
[1] Buchy, 1993 as quoted in The Globalization of Environmental Crisis –By Jan Oosthoek, Barry K. Gills pp 15. Ref: http://bit.ly/GllznOfEnvCrisesBook.
[2] Many adivasi heroes like Birsa Munda, Kanhu Santhal, Tantya Bhil, Lakshman Naik, Ambul Reddi, Thalakkal Chandu are ignored in the official text books which hide the colonial wars against tribals. Also see: Tribal Contemporary Issues: Appraisal and Intervention – Ramaṇikā Guptā , p 14 (http://bit.ly/TrblCntpryIss-RGupta)
[3] Source: http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2011/03/article_0002.html ; India set up the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) in 2001 and since then it has recorded over 2 million traditional medicines to prevent their appropriation by modern day methods of asset appropriation.
[4] See: http://time.com/4138055/india-paris-talks-climate-change/ for a view explaining India’s position.
[5] The act of getting things ‘gifted’ has been used in many cases of colonial appropriation. The most famous act of such coercive ‘gifting’ was the appropriation of the Kohinoor Diamond.
[6] A discussion mentioning the separation of the sacred from Sanskrit and the adoption of Temples by ASI that made worship impossible can be seen in this Youtube discussion featuring Rajeev Malhotra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAdrrmjDZm8
[7] Map source: http://www.worldstatesmen.org/India-princely-states.gif
[8] Map Source: http://www.mapsofworld.com/india/india-political-map.html
[9] Picture taken from http://worldobserveronline.com/2014/08/20/bengal-famine-british-engineered-worst-genocide-human-history-profit/
Note: There was a minor typo in the original article published on 5 July which has now been corrected. “It is oozes..” has been changed to “It oozes..”
“Terrorists killed her for being a Hindu,” says kin of Tarishi Jain, 19 year old Murdered in Dhaka Attack
Tarishi Jain was just 19, a young adult enrolled in an economics course with one of the top colleges in the world, and with everything to look forward to in life. Like most urban Hindus/Indics she was most likely brought up believing the Sanskrit maxim ‘sarv dharm sambhav‘ popularly mis-interpreted as ‘all religions are equal’. Religion most likely played a peripheral role in her life. Tragically, this young girl’s life was brutally snuffed out sometime in the wee hours of Saturday by other young adults like her – well educated and hailing from privileged backgrounds, with one crucial difference – her murderers were fanatical followers of the religion they were born into, Islam.
As per this news report,
“Sometime before 6 am on Saturday when 19-year-old Tarishi Jain’s phone went dead, her father Sanjiv Jain, who had been waiting outside Gulshan Cafe through most of the night after he got to know that heavily armed terrorists had stormed the restaurant in upscale Dhaka and were butchering guests, got a call.
It was from his daughter, cowering inside a toilet with two of her friends, Faraaz Ayaz Hossain and Abinta Kabir, hiding from the rat-tat-tat of gunfire outside the washroom’s door. ” Terrorists have entered the restaurant,” she told her father, who was planning just a day earlier to bring his wife and two children to Firozabad in UP for a short holiday before Tarishi headed back to the US where she was an Economics undergraduate at the University of California. “I am very afraid and not sure whether I will be able to come out alive. They are killing everyone here.“
It had been a long and harrowing night for Sanjiv as he gathered with dozens of anxious family and friends of those huddled in the cafe to know how the bloody strike on innocent and unarmed men and women would end. By the time the terrorists were neutralised, 20 people, mostly foreigners and among them Tarishi – the only Indian among the casualties – had died.
Tarishi was a recipient of an internship with a Bangladesh bank through the Institute for South Asia Studies at her university in California.”
Tarishi’s father runs a garment business in Bangladesh for the last 15-20 years. After graduating from the American school, Dhaka she had moved to the US for higher studies.
Tarishi was killed because she was a kafir (one who disbelieves, an infidel, non-Muslim). Quoting a rescued hostage, the Daily Star, a Bangladesh daily reported those who could recite a verse from the Quran were spared and the others were tortured before being killed.
The earlier media report goes on to add –
“Her brother Sanchit, who has done his engineering from Canada, had landed in Delhi a day earlier so that the family of four, along with mother Tulika, could all head to Firozabad — where Sanjiv’s three brothers Rakesh, Rajiv and Ajit have a flourishing trade in glass — on Saturday. That family reunion was never to be. At the Jains’ Suhag Nagar home in Firozabad, there is both anger and deep grief. “We don’t want her to be cremated in the land where she was brutally murdered. Terrorists killed her for being a Hindu,” Sanjiv’s younger brother Rakesh Mohan Jain told TOI.”
The Softening of the Hindu mind
Over the last 100 years, Hindus, especially English educated ones, have gradually drifted away from their religio-cultural roots. They have started believing the secularist propaganda fed by the Nehruvian school that their religion is intrinsically backward, regressive and anti-modern. To make matters worse, Hindus have been led to believe that Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christianity (which are organized, well funded and aggressively proselytizing global religions) are more egalitarian and accessible, and that being minorities in Bharat followers of these religions are always at risk of persecution by the orthodox Hindu majority.
Our media is at the forefront of this well-oiled propaganda machinery, and hence events like the murder of Mohammed Akhlak in Dadri are incessantly portrayed as brute Hindu majority attacking the defenceless innocent Muslim minority, disregarding the fact that Akhlak had stolen and killed a calf (an illegal act in UP, as in 24 out of 29 states of the Union of Bharat) which inflamed passions leading to his unfortunate lynching.
But Tarishi’s murder will get a fraction of the coverage that Akhlak did – in any case, reference to the fact that Tarishi was brutally hacked to death only because she was a Hindu and not a Muslim will be muted at best. Another fact that will be suppressed is that most of the terrorists involved in the Dhaka atrocity were well-educated Bangladeshi Muslims from well to-do families. And that most Muslims continue to deny that IS (Islamic State) derives its legitimacy from authentic Islamic sources.
All attackers were from Scholastica, a private English immersion school in Dhaka. 3/#Bangladesh#DhakaAttackpic.twitter.com/ql0NKZcFYl
— Amarnath Amarasingam (@AmarAmarasingam) July 2, 2016
Posh rich boys who struck #IslamistTerror in #Dhaka defy liberal grievance mongers’ who blame terror on deprivation.https://t.co/rSvlPU0Z6A
— Sushil Pandit (@neelakantha) July 3, 2016
In fact, taqiya (Islamic doctrine of deception) artists like Shahid Siddiqui continue to deflect attention from IS and blame the usual trinity of CIA, Mossad and RAW for defaming Muslims by ‘staging’ attacks like the recent Florida shooting.
Shahid Siddique preaches secularism in english & then spreads venom in his Urdu papers.Very very imp this is shared https://t.co/YdJGb0YKoj
— IndiaSpeaks (@IndiaSpeaksPR) June 30, 2016
Till the time a critical mass of Hindus acknowledge the harsh reality that they are completely misinformed and unaware of the danger posed by Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christianity (and their communist allies in Bharat), they will continue to bleed, both literally and figuratively. We cannot rely on educated & ‘moderate’ Muslims to introspect and reform their religion – we will have to play an equal part in the debate.
Bangladesh Under Siege by Islamists
Bangladesh is a nation which is over 90% Muslim, where Islam is recognized as the state religion, and Islamists dominate socio-political life to such an extent that Hindus have fallen from 22% of the total population in 1951 to less than 8% today. Yet Bangladesh is not ‘Islamic enough’ for outfits like Islamic State, Al Qaeda in the Indian Sub-continent, Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), and JeI’s electoral alliance partner Bangladesh Nationalist Party (also the nation’s chief Opposition party).
For the last few years, Bangladesh has been fighting a grim war with Islamists of various hues who are opposed to even the bare minimum rule of law which allows minorities like Hindus, Buddhists etc the freedom to practise their religion. And events over this weekend should leave no one in doubt that Bangladesh today is under siege by Islamists; it is a nation on the brink and the warning bells should be ringing loud and clear in Bharat and the rest of the world.