Dargah diplomacy: promises and perils

by Virendra Parekh

India is going through one of its periodic bouts of exuberance over prospects of better ties with Pakistan. Islamabad’s recent willingness to liberalise bilateral trade between the two countries has met with enthusiastic response from the Indian side. While good relations with a neighbour is a highly desirable objective, what should worry us is that powerful sections of the Indian establishment, including the current Prime Minister and the dominant English-language media, are more than willing to go overboard to befriend Pakistan, throwing national interests to the wind. This is what is happening now.

Pakistanis claim that this time, everybody (add, including Army) is on board in the move to improve relations with India. This makes eminent sense. Even the most hardnosed Pakistani policy makers realise that their country is spectacularly isolated. With Afghanistan on boil, relations with US on ice and fair weather friends turning their backs, Pakistan has discovered the benefits of dealing with the enemy that knows you well.

And then there is the economy. Pakistan GDP growth rate has dwindled from 6.8 per cent in 2007 to 2.4 per cent in 2011. Its industrial sector contracted by 0.1 per cent in 2010-11. Private corporate sector is shrinking. Pakistani elite classes are shifting not only their capital but even their families out of the country. There are no buyers for Pakistan government bonds outside the government. In its wisdom, Pakistan threw out IMF and went out of its way to displease the only country that has the financial muscle to help it out of trouble: US. The only bright spot is exports: textiles, cotton, rice. Pakistanis have realised that it makes no sense to keep away from one of the largest markets in the world: India.

Pakistan made the first gesture last month to deepen trade ties with India. Earlier, it had a positive list of 2,000 items which alone were allowed to be imported from India.  This was replaced with a negative list of 1209 banned items. This straightaway increased the number of exportable items from India more than three-fold. On its part, India has now agreed to reduce its sensitive list of 865 items that are not given preferential market access under the South Asia free trade agreement by 30 per cent within four months.

India exported goods worth $2.33 billion to Pakistan last year, while imports from there were worth $330 million. Trade through third countries, such as Dubai, is estimated at $10 billion per year. So, if direct trading is allowed, bilateral trade can grow several times. Pakistan feared earlier that if it opened its gates, its markets will be swamped by Indian goods. Now it has taken a more realistic stand. It has promised to grant India the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status under WTO by the year end. This should be welcomed.

What is not welcome is the move to ease visa restrictions for businessmen between the two countries. India and Pakistan are reportedly working on a mechanism to issue multiple-entry and reporting-free visas for businessmen. India must proceed with extreme caution here, because businessmen are not the only people in Pakistan keen to enter India. Terrorists, mullahs espousing Wahabi Islam, havala operators and traffickers in fake notes and drugs are even keener to enter India than genuine businessmen. With the connivance of the Pakistani establishment, it would not be difficult for them to pose as businessmen.

And what must be rejected out of hand is the idea of allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) from Pakistan. The ‘in-principle’ decision taken by the government in this regard must be reversed immediately.

It is amazing that at a time when most countries are wary of letting in Pakistanis even as visitors, the Manmohan Singh government is all set to roll out the red carpet for them in the garb of economic cooperation.

India is considering removing Pakistan from the negative list of countries for FDI, so as to allow Pakistani companies to make investments in India. Countries in the negative list are debarred from investing in India. At present, Pakistan is the only entry in the negative list under the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The government had deleted Sri Lanka in 2006 and Bangladesh in 2007 from the list.

Nowhere in the world is Pakistan regarded as a worthwhile investor. A country surviving on American doles is not expected to generate investible surplus for other countries. Pakistan’s total overseas investment in the last five years works out to a paltry $418 million dollars, which will hardly merit mention in a footnote in any official document.

The move is intended to be a political signal, and the reason behind it is as sloppy as can be. “When we can allow investment from China, there is no reason to block Pakistan,” a senior official is reported to have said. Forget the fact that China is an economic giant wooed by all, whereas Pakistan is a tinderbox whose chief exports are Wahabi Islam, terrorism and drugs. Notice that this is the same logic used by Congress leaders in the pre-independence period while slowly yielding ground to Jinnah’s Muslim League: now that we have conceded so much, why not a little more?

The sinister implications of this needless appeasement hardly need to be spelt out. ISI agents posing as businessmen will be able to buy large properties, set up expansive factories and offices, and employ Pakistani spies and local fifth columnists as legitimate employees with the right to move all across the country. They will be able to receive large sums as lawful investment and launder havala money as business profits.

“But Pakistani businesses here will be subject to our laws on excise, sales tax, income tax, isn’t it?” Are you kidding? The smallest Indian factory owner, the lowliest trader, the humblest businessman, knows how to manage these watchdogs. Will Pakistanis, flush with currency – silver as well as leather – and political patronage, have any difficulty in dealing with them?

In another voluntary abandonment of national interests, India last year withdrew its opposition to the controversial trade-aid package proposed by the European Union (EU) for Pakistan, at the General Council of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Under the package, around 75 tariff lines or products from Pakistan would get concessional access to European markets for three years, of which 67 would have zero tariff. On the remaining eight, tariff rate quotas (TRQ, limited imports at reduced duty) would apply. This concession was offered by the 27-nation EU to help Pakistan in the wake of the devastating floods last year. It would boost Pakistan’s exports by 88 million pounds per year.

Note that the proposal was shot down, not once, but thrice. The move was opposed by India, Brazil, Bangladesh, Peru and Vietnam, as it would impact their exports to the EU. Besides commercial logic, such a waiver would set a bad precedent and go against the WTO spirit of non-discrimination. In fact, WTO has never taken up such a waiver before. This is not a relief package. If EU wants to help Pakistan, let it give cash. But EU wants to favour Pakistan at the expense of other, poor countries. There is no way one can approve this.

Yet India, which should lead opposition to the idea, caved in after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh personally intervened to ease things for Pakistan. 

Apparently, the FDI proposal was discussed between Dr. Manmohan Singh and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani when the latter came here to watch the cricket World Cup final in March. In other words, when the country was euphorically celebrating its victory in the cricket World Cup, its Prime Minister was quietly preparing to sell it down the river. 

Many industrialists and investors (both Indian and foreign) have rightly accused the Manmohan Singh government of policy paralysis, poor governance and endless dithering on important issues. But when it comes to the Prime Minister’s own agenda (appeasement of Pakistan and protection of US interests), the same government is found to be full of clarity, vigour and resoluteness.

Dr. Manmohan Singh did not resign as the Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi described Indian planners as a bunch of jokers. But he was all prepared to resign as Prime Minister on the issue of nuclear deal with US. That tells us something about both, Dr. Singh and the deal.

A fool messes up everything he handles. A confused man cannot take decisions on any issue. But if you act foolishly or in a confused manner on most matters and are a picture of wile and resoluteness on a few, you are not a fool. You are a clever man with your own agenda. India is blessed with a Prime Minister who is clever – too clever, perhaps, for its own good.

Courtesy: http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=2282

Inventing Muhammad?

by Robert Spencer

Why would it matter if Muhammad never existed?  Certainly the accepted story of Islam's origins is taken for granted as historically accurate; while many don't accept Muhammad's claim to have been a prophet, few doubt that there was a man named Muhammad who in the early seventh century began to claim that he was receiving messages from Allah through the angel Gabriel.  Many who hear about my new book Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry Into Islam's Obscure Origins ask why it would matter whether or not Muhammad existed -- after all, a billion Muslims believe he did, and they are not going to stop doing so because of some historical investigations.  

Yet the numerous indications that the standard account of Muhammad's life is more legend than fact actually have considerable implications for the contemporary political scene.

These are just a few of the weaknesses in the traditional account of Muhammad's life and the early days of Islam:

-  No record of Muhammad's reported death in 632 appears until more than a century after that date.

 -  The early accounts written by the people the Arabs conquered never mention Islam, Muhammad, or the Qur'an.  They call the conquerors "Ishmaelites," "Saracens," "Muhajirun," and "Hagarians," but never "Muslims."

-  The Arab conquerors, in their coins and inscriptions, don't mention Islam or the Qur'an for the first six decades of their conquests.  Mentions of "Muhammad" are non-specific and on at least two occasions are accompanied by a cross.  The word can be used not only as a proper name, but also as an honorific.

-  The Qur'an, even by the canonical Muslim account, was not distributed in its present form until the 650s.  Casting into serious doubt that standard account is the fact that neither the Arabians nor the Christians and Jews in the region mention its existence until the early eighth century.

 -  We don't begin to hear about Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, and about Islam itself until the 690s, during the reign of the caliph Abd al-Malik.  Coins and inscriptions reflecting Islamic beliefs begin to appear at this time also.

-  In the middle of the eighth century, the Abbasid dynasty supplanted the Umayyad line of Abd al-Malik.  In the Abbasid period, biographical material about Muhammad began to proliferate.  The first complete biography of the prophet of Islam finally appeared during this era-at least 125 years after the traditional date of his death.

The lack of confirming detail in the historical record, the late development of biographical material about the Islamic prophet, the atmosphere of political and religious factionalism in which that material developed, and much more, suggest that the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him.

How to make sense of all this?  If the Arab forces that conquered so much territory beginning in the 630s were not energized by the teachings of a new prophet and the divine word he delivered, how did the Islamic character of their empire arise at all?  If Muhammad did not exist, why was it ever considered necessary to invent him?

Every empire of the day had a civic religion.  The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire was Christian.  Its rival Persia, meanwhile, was Zoroastrian.  The Arab Empire quickly controlled and needed to unify huge expanses of territory where different religions predominated.  The empire was growing quickly, soon rivaling the Byzantine and Persian Empires in size and power.  But at first, it did not have a compelling political theology to compete with those it supplanted and to solidify its conquests.  It needed a common religion -- a political theology that would provide the foundation for the empire's unity and secure allegiance to the state.

Toward the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth, the leaders of the Muslim world began to speak specifically about Islam, its prophet, and eventually its book.  Stories about Muhammad began to circulate.  A warrior-prophet would justify the new empire's aggressive expansionism.  To give those conquests a theological justification -- as Muhammad's teachings and example do -- would place them beyond criticism.

This is why Islam developed as such a profoundly political religion.  Islam is a political faith: the divine kingdom is very much of this world, with God's wrath and judgment to be expected not only in the next life, but also in this one, to be delivered by believers.  Allah says in the Qur'an: "As for those disbelieving infidels, I will punish them with a terrible agony in this world and the next. They have no one to help or save them" (3:56).  Allah also exhorts Muslims to wage war against those infidels, apostates, and polytheists (2:191, 4:89, 9:5, 9:29).

There is compelling reason to conclude that Muhammad, the messenger of Allah came into existence only after the Arab Empire was firmly entrenched and casting about for a political theology to anchor and unify it.  Muhammad and the Qur'an cemented the power of the Umayyad caliphate and then that of the Abbasid caliphate.

This is not just academic speculation.  The non-Muslim world can be aided significantly in its understanding of the global jihad threat -- an understanding that has been notably lacking even at the highest levels since September 11, 2001 -- by a careful, unbiased examination of the origins of Islam.  There is a great deal of debate today in the United States and Western Europe about the nature of Islamic law; anti-sharia measures have been proposed in at least twenty states, and one state -- Oklahoma -- voted to ban sharia in November 2010, although that law was quickly overturned as an infringement upon Muslims' religious freedom.  Others have been successfully resisted on the same grounds.

If it is understood that the political aspect of Islam preceded the religious aspect, that might change.  But that will happen only if a sufficient number of people are willing to go wherever the truth my take them.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.  His latest book, Did Muhammad Exist?, is now available. 

Courtesy: 

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/04/inventing_muhammad.html   

The India-China Rivalry

by Robert D. Kaplan

As the world moves into the second decade of the 21st century, a new power rivalry is taking shape between India and China, Asia's two behemoths in terms of territory, population and richness of civilization. India's recent successful launch of a long-range missile able to hit Beijing and Shanghai with nuclear weapons is the latest sign of this development.

This is a rivalry born completely of high-tech geopolitics, creating a core dichotomy between two powers whose own geographical expansion patterns throughout history have rarely overlapped or interacted with each other. Despite the limited war fought between the two countries on their Himalayan border 50 years ago, this competition has relatively little long-standing historical or ethnic animosity behind it.

The signal geographical fact about Indians and Chinese is that the impassable wall of the Himalayas separates them. Buddhism spread in varying forms from India, via Sri Lanka and Myanmar, to Yunnan in southern China in the third century B.C., but this kind of profound cultural interaction was the exception more than the rule.

Moreover, the dispute over the demarcation of their common frontier in the Himalayan foothills, from Kashmir in the west to Arunachal Pradesh in the east, while a source of serious tension in its own right, is not especially the cause of the new rivalry. The cause of the new rivalry is the collapse of distance brought about by the advance of military technology.

Indeed, the theoretical arc of operations of Chinese fighter jets at Tibetan airfields includes India. Indian space satellites are able to do surveillance on China. In addition, India is able to send warships into the South China Sea, even as China helps develop state-of-the-art ports in the Indian Ocean. And so, India and China are eyeing each other warily. The whole map of Asia now spreads out in front of defense planners in New Delhi and Beijing, as it becomes apparent that the two nations with the largest populations in the world (even as both are undergoing rapid military buildups) are encroaching upon each other's spheres of influence -- spheres of influence that exist in concrete terms today in a way they did not in an earlier era of technology.

And this is to say nothing of China's expanding economic reach, which projects Chinese influence throughout the Indian Ocean world, as evinced by Beijing's port-enhancement projects in Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar. This, too, makes India nervous.

Because this rivalry is geopolitical -- based, that is, on the positions of India and China, with their huge populations, on the map of Eurasia -- there is little emotion behind it. In that sense, it is comparable to the Cold War ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, which were not especially geographically proximate and had little emotional baggage dividing them.

The best way to gauge the relatively restrained atmosphere of the India-China rivalry is to compare it to the rivalry between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan abut one another. India's highly populated Ganges River Valley is within 480 kilometers (300 miles) of Pakistan's highly populated Indus River Valley. There is an intimacy to India-Pakistan tensions that simply does not apply to those between India and China. That intimacy is inflamed by a religious element: Pakistan is the modern incarnation of all of the Muslim invasions that have assaulted Hindu northern India throughout history. And then there is the tangled story of the partition of the Asian subcontinent itself to consider -- India and Pakistan were both born in blood together.

Partly because the India-China rivalry carries nothing like this degree of long-standing passion, it serves the interests of the elite policy community in New Delhi very well. A rivalry with China in and of itself raises the stature of India because China is a great power with which India can now be compared. Indian elites hate when India is hyphenated with Pakistan, a poor and semi-chaotic state; they much prefer to be hyphenated with China. Indian elites can be obsessed with China, even as Chinese elites think much less about India. This is normal. In an unequal rivalry, it is the lesser power that always demonstrates the greater degree of obsession. For instance, Greeks have always been more worried about Turks than Turks have been about Greeks.

China's inherent strength in relation to India is more than just a matter of its greater economic capacity, or its more efficient governmental authority. It is also a matter of its geography. True, ethnic-Han Chinese are virtually surrounded by non-Han minorities -- Inner Mongolians, Uighur Turks and Tibetans -- in China's drier uplands. Nevertheless, Beijing has incorporated these minorities into the Chinese state so that internal security is manageable, even as China has in recent years been resolving its frontier disputes with neighboring countries, few of which present a threat to China.

India, on the other hand, is bedeviled by long and insecure borders not only with troubled Pakistan, but also with Nepal and Bangladesh, both of which are weak states that create refugee problems for India. Then there is the Maoist Naxalite insurgency in eastern and central India. The result is that while the Indian navy can contemplate the projection of power in the Indian Ocean -- and thus hedge against China -- the Indian army is constrained with problems inside the subcontinent itself.

India and China do play a great game of sorts, competing for economic and military influence in Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. But these places are generally within the Greater Indian subcontinent, so that China is taking the struggle to India's backyard.

Just as a crucial test for India remains the future of Afghanistan, a crucial test for China remains the fate of North Korea. Both Afghanistan and North Korea have the capacity to drain energy and resources away from India and China, though here India may have the upper hand because India has no land border with Afghanistan, whereas China has a land border with North Korea. Thus, a chaotic, post-American Afghanistan is less troublesome for India than an unraveling regime in North Korea would be for China, which faces the possibility of millions of refugees streaming into Chinese Manchuria.

Because India's population will surpass that of China in 2030 or so, even as India's population will get gray at a slower rate than that of China, India may in relative terms have a brighter future. As inefficient as India's democratic system is, it does not face a fundamental problem of legitimacy like China's authoritarian system very well might.

Then there is Tibet. Tibet abuts the Indian subcontinent where India and China are at odds over the Himalayan borderlands. The less control China has over Tibet, the more advantageous the geopolitical situation is for India. The Indians provide a refuge for the Tibetan Dalai Lama. Anti-Chinese manifestations in Tibet inconvenience China and are therefore convenient to India. Were China ever to face a serious insurrection in Tibet, India's shadow zone of influence would grow measurably. Thus, while China is clearly the greater power, there are favorable possibilities for India in this rivalry.

India and the United States are not formal allies. The Indian political establishment, with its nationalistic and leftist characteristics, would never allow for that. Yet, merely because of its location astride the Indian Ocean in the heart of maritime Eurasia, the growth of Indian military and economic power benefits the United States since it acts as a counter-balance to a rising Chinese power; the United States never wants to see a power as dominant in the Eastern Hemisphere as it itself is in the Western Hemisphere. That is the silver lining of the India-China rivalry: India balancing against China, and thus relieving the United States of some of the burden of being the world's dominant power.

Courtesy: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/india-china-rivalry-robert-d-kaplan

Religious fundamentalism on rise among Sinhalese, Muslims

Following the threats issued by Buddhist monks against a mosque in Dambulla on Friday that they would demolish it unless the Muslims relocated the mosque from the area, which the monks claimed as a holy Buddhist site, the SL Prime Minister DM Jayaratne, who is also the minister of Buddhist affairs, on Sunday instructed the Muslims to relocate the mosque, triggering anger among Muslims. The Buddhist monks, who are engaged in setting up new Buddhist viharas and Sinhala colonies in the country of Eezham Tamils, have carefully timed their action against the Muslims in Dambulla after successfully wooing the votes of the countries with overwhelming Muslim populations, either to back Sri Lanka or to abstain from voting at the recent Human Rights Council session in Geneva, Muslim circles in Colombo said. 

The Muslim leaders in the island are now appealing to influential Muslim countries to condemn the decision by the Sri Lankan Prime Minister. 

Almost all the Muslim member countries of the UN Human Rights Council stood with the Sri Lankan state when the voting took place in Geneva on the resolution tabled by the USA. 

Bangladesh, Maldives, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, Kuwait, Qatar voted against the US-proposed LLRC-based resolution, while Malaysia, Senegal, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Burkina Faso and Djibouti abstained, an act which was also interpreted as indirectly backing the Colombo regime. 

Similar to the Dambulla episode, in September last year, a group of Buddhist monks in Anuradhapura went amok on a Muslim shrine and destroyed it claiming that the Muslims were trying to make the shrine into a Mosque and also claimed that the said mosque was situated in a holy Buddhist site. 

In the meantime, a Muslim deputy minister from Kaaththaankudi in Batticaloa district, has been allegedly engaged in destructive activities with the intention of causing disharmony among the Tamil speaking people of the district. 

On Thursday, the letters on the welcome board, which read ‘Batticaloa Urban Council welcomes you‘ in Tamil and located at the border between Batticaloa city and Kaaththaankudi town on Batticaloa - Kalmunai Road, were painted with dark ink, hiding the Tamil letters. The incident has taken place 150 meters from Kaaththaankudi Police Station. 

The same welcome board was also destroyed on 23 September 2011 by some Muslims, who claimed that the Tamil greeting “Va'nakkam” was a “haram” for the Muslims of Kaaththaankudi.

Meanwhile, the Sinhala-Buddhists and their military consider it as their inalienable right to build Buddhist stupas in Saiva sacred centres such as Thirukkeatheesvaram and in any part of the country of Eezham Tamils in the island, whether there are Buddhists or not.

Courtesy: http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=35119

Growing beef trade hits India's sacred cow

When 33-year-old Ashoo Mongia visits the supermarket it's rarely for stocking up his fridge for the week. As head of a cow protection enforcement team, he regularly scours Delhi grocery stores and outdoor markets for food products containing cow beef.

For the last 15 years, Mongia and his team of 120 Delhi-based volunteers have thrown themselves in a battle that pits India's billon-dollar meat industry and growing underground beef trade against Hindu traditionalists keen on preserving the holy status of cows.

"The cow is our mother, it's our duty to protect her," said Mongia, who monitors and raids hundreds of stores, butcher shops and slaughterhouses suspected of carrying, selling or slaughtering India's blessed bovines. "We do this because we believe in what the cow represents in our country, our culture and in the Hindu religion."

This year, India will displace the United States as the world's third largest beef exporter, behind Brazil and Australia. In just the first half of 2012, India exported $1.24 billion worth of meat, and a 30 percent growth in revenue from 2010 exports is projected by the end of the year, according to a U.S. Beef Export Federation study.

While the bulk of Indian exports is buffalo meat bound for Middle East and Southeast Asian markets, the growing middle class in Arab countries has sparked a new craving for cow beef. The rise in demand could make India the world's king beef exporter by 2013, according to USDA estimates.

But as India continues its struggle for economic and political dominance in South Asia, there is concern that Hindu-mandated bans on beef could hamper the industry's future growth, particularly in states like Kerala and West Bengal where the practice is legal.

Relied on by generations of Indians for tilling fields, dairy products and dung fuel, the cow is regarded by Hindus as gau mata, or maternal figure, and has had a long-standing central role in India's religious rituals. Those religious attitudes, however, are viewed by some Indian business leaders as a major hindrance to commerce.

"Cow beef could be a very lucrative business in India," said Dr. S.K. Ranjhan, the director of Hind Agro Industries Limited, who believes that religious attitudes may stand to change once the extent of business opportunities are realized. "I think five-to-10 years from now, people won't be so scandalized by the sale of cow beef."

The majority of India's 24 states outlaw the slaughter of cows except under extenuating circumstances: to stifle contagious diseases, prevent pain and suffering, medical research, etc. And several states -- including Delhi and Rajasthan, among others -- ban the sale and slaughter of cows altogether.

The strict laws against cow slaughter in the majority of India's provinces have forced the lucrative cow beef trade underground. An estimated 1.5 million cows, valued at up to $500 million, are smuggled out of India annually, which some analysts say provide more than 50% of beef consumed in neighboring Bangladesh.

"When you consider just how much money is made from underground cow smuggling, it becomes clear that not only is there a huge amount at stake, but a huge demand that butchers and slaughterhouses are catering to," said Dr. Zarin Ahmad, a fellow at the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi, who has extensively studied the work and trade among India's butcher communities.

Working with Mongia's enforcement team is Parmanand Mittal, a cow-advocacy lawyer who works from a home-office on the outskirts of Delhi. Throughout the day, Mittal fields a stream of phone calls -- tipsters who have caught wind of illegal slaughterhouses and owners of gau shalas, or cow sanctuaries, concerned with unexpected expenses associated with new rescues.

In Mittal's office hangs a painting of Lord Krishna — one of the most revered divinities in Hinduism— with his arm resting affectionately on a white calf. While Mongia's crew breaks up the slaughterhouses, Mittal builds a legal case for prosecution. His backlog of casework extensive, Mittal says.

While there might be money to be made from adding cow beef to current exports, India would incur costs elsewhere, Mittal says.

"Cows have long been the source of fuel, manure and fertilizer, among other things. These animals are revered because they've played a large role in the welfare and livelihood of all Indians," Mittal said. "Take away the cow and the repercussions will be huge."

  

Courtesy:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/18/business/beef-trade-india/index.html

Why the silence for persecuted Hindus?

The debate over whether Mohammad Ali Jinnah wanted the country he founded to be a secular or an Islamic one has been going on ever since Pakistan’s inception. This debate is a highly contentious one and shows no signs of abating or even mellowing down despite the passage of time.

Here, I will not ponder on the question regarding the vision that Jinnah really had for Pakistan. However, what no one can deny is that Jinnah was an individual who stood firmly for the generous and fair treatment of everyone, especially the minority communities.

Over the past six decades, Pakistanis have repudiated each of Jinnah’s core beliefs. Lately, however, they have touched new lows when one takes into account the treatment that has been meted out to the Hindu community in Sindh. The Sindhi Hindu community is one of the country’s oldest communities that has lived in this land since the days of Raja Dahir and preceding that. Partition forced many of them to flee their ancestral homeland. However, their love for Sindh was so great that some of them continued to live and soldier on here despite the discrimination and the second class citizen status bestowed on them. But now all this might change. The community is facing its worst crisis as the life, honour and property of its members are under vicious attack, with the state watching on silently.

The sinister trend of kidnapping the females of this community, betrothing them forcibly to their Muslim captors and then making a show of their supposed conversion to Islam, is deplorable to say the least. An exodus of Hindus, particularly the educated ones, has started and very soon Pakistan may lose some of its most hard-working, law-abiding and oldest citizens. As a result, the country will be poorer off as it will lose whatever is left of its pluralistic landscape.

The shameful fact is that civil society and the clergy — who ceaselessly harp about Islam being a religion of peace — have not raised the slightest objection on this attack on the honour of a community we are duty-bound to protect. With the present depressing state of affairs, Jinnah’s soul must be cringing sorely in his grave.

Courtesy: http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/11079/why-the-silence-for-persecuted-hindus/

Rig Vedic Polytheism and Punya Bhumi

by Vijaya Rajiva

The Rig Vedic worship of many gods and goddesses provoked commentators from Abrahamic faiths (mainly Christians) to call the system polytheism (the worship of many gods). Modern Hindus are no longer intimidated by the polytheist label. Hindus believe that their land isPunya Bhumi (sacred earth) inhabited by the gods and goddesses of the universe, who are invited to special open air feasts (yagnas) and also housed in temples built for them by devotees. Perhaps no country in the world has so many temples, from north to south, east to west, and no other religious tradition has invoked the presence of deities in the Vedicyagnas and their successors in the Agama traditions of ritual and worship.

The Hindu bhakta knows that the gods actually EXIST, but the educated Hindu elite are reluctant to admit to their heritage thanks to the massive indoctrination by the Macaulay-ian educational system and the missionary onslaught on Hinduism which denounces it as ‘pagan’, ‘polytheist’ etc. They contrast it with their ONE true god in whose name they have visited death and destruction on the planet.

Recent commentators from the Hindu side, such as Swami Devananda Sarasvati (a Dasanami sannyasin) and earlier still, the chronicler late Sita Ram Goel, have pointed out that the contemporary educated Hindu elite have been misled by their ill-conceived identification of Monotheism and Monism, and their inability to understand that the difference is crucial to understanding Polytheism.

Sita Ram Goel prefers the word Panentheism to Polytheism (to describe Hinduism) since the former emphasises the special Hindu concept ofIshta-devata, the special deity to whom a worshipper can relate to (a phenomenon unique to Hinduism).

The crucial difference between Monotheism and Monism is that the former believes in a ONE true god, and denounces the gods of other faiths as ‘false gods’, whatever that means, for how can a god be ‘false’ if the concept of god is real?

Monism believes in the Infinite existence of the Divine, which is characterised by Existence, Consciousness and Bliss (Sat, Chit, Ananda). This is better known as Advaita Vedanta or Non-Dualism (Unity, non-divisiveness). Its best articulation came with Adi Sankara (788 -820 CE). There are two other major Vedantas, the qualified non-dualism of Ramanuja and the Dualism of Madhva.

Modern practitioners of Monism are many, the most renowned being the Kanchi Sankarachariar who specially highlighted the importance of the many gods in Hinduism:

“… a yagna is making an oblation to a deity in the fire with the chanting of mantras. In a sense the mantras themselves constitute the form of the deities invoked. In another sense, the mantras, like the materials placed in the fire, are the sustenance of the celestials invoked…” (Hindu Dharma: Chapter on The Vedas).

Elsewhere, the Sankarachariar remarked that the devout Hindu also sees the forms of the celestials appearing in the yagna fire.

These preliminary remarks are intended to emphasise the link between Hindu Monism and Rig Vedic Polytheism. It allows for an enriched Hindu Pantheism where the devotee does not consider his/her chosen deity (ishta devata) as the only true god, and does not anathema-ise the gods of other faiths, as happens in Abrahamic monotheism. This is, of course, the difference between Abrahamic monotheism and Hindu pantheism.

Abrahamic monotheism must be rejected by Hindus for two reasons: [1] political, [2] religious.

Politically, monotheism has been the source of conquest, violence and intolerance, both in Christianity and Islam. It is important that Hindus are always vigilant to this dimension in the interests of security. The security question arises not only in the crude context of everyday dangers such as the throwing of a severed cow’s head by miscreants inside a Hindu temple or the verbal abuse of Hindu scriptures and temples, but the equally looming danger of sophisticated Inculturation. Here we perceive both Islamist and Christian attempts to find their monotheistic doctrines reflected in the Rig Veda, and the sophisticated attempts to wrest the ‘Rishi tradition’ as they call it, from the Hindus, distort it and appropriate it for their own purposes.

In this project, the Vedas are no longer dismissed as ‘paganism’, but viewed as harbingers of the two monotheistic faiths. This can range from the crude attempt by evangelical Christians (and Islamic counterparts) to find references to Jesus in the Rig Veda, and/or references to the coming of the prophet and so on, to the more sophisticated attempts by scholars (mainly Catholic, but also such persons as Dr. Zakir Naik) to find parallels in the thinking of the Veda and their own scriptures and beliefs.

In this way, Inculturation, or the process by which another’s culture is absorbed into one’s own, has become a current trend. The aim, of course, is to eradicate the visited local culture. It is not some gentlemanly exercise or purely scholarly enterprise. The agenda is clearly there.

The link between Hindu Monism and Rig Vedic Polytheism establishes the richness of both dimensions: the Infinite Divinity and the infinite manifestations of this Divinity in the gods and goddesses that Hindus worship. One can theorise about this link, as have the great Hindu philosophers such as Adi Sankara, Ramanuja and Madhva. But for our purposes it is important to keep in mind that these manifestations are themurtis (derided as ‘idols’ by monotheists) that Hindus consecrate and install in temples and worship. Hence, the importance of murti reverence and temples in Sanatana Dharma.

When the barbarian invaders arrived, their first task was to destroy as many temples as they could. Thousands of Hindus lost their lives in defence of these temples. The shocking desecration of murtis by Islamists and Evangelicals continues to this day, though on a smaller scale, and mainly by Evangelicals.

If the underlying unity between Monism and Hindu Polytheism is not clearly understood, many Hindus get misled to believe that the ONE god of the monotheists is the same as Satchidananda (Infinite Divinity) and go on to downgrade Vedic polytheism as an accidental/ incidental feature of Hinduism, which Hindus outgrew in their historical development, and are now presumably moving towards the higher (sic) faith of Abrahamic monotheism. This is a profound mistake and merely parrots the narrative put forward by the ONE god-ists. Nor is the ONE god the same as theishta-devata of Hindus. The ONE god is held by its followers to be the ONLY true god with all other gods being FALSE gods. Whereas theishta-devata is only one among many gods and each devotee is allowed to worship freely his/her own ishta-devata (who may be different from the kula devata or even the grama devata).

The difference is politically significant since the ONE god-ists are prone to intolerance, violence, conquest and proselytisation, as happened historically and continues with a renewed sense of urgency by the Evangelicals today. Hinduism, thus, is always in danger of attack from the ONE god-ists. The punya bhumi is the land peopled by the gods and goddesses of the Rig Veda and many other divinities and eminences of the Indic tradition who are not mentioned specifically in the Rig Veda. It has to stay that way.

The further philosophical /religious/ spiritual dimension of theSatchidananda-Polytheism link is that while Vedanta stresses the former aspect, the latter is important for the householder (grihastha). The four stages of life (varnashrama dharma) each have their own dharma. Even Adi Sankara, as far as is known, stressed that the householder must fulfill his/her duties before taking up the last stage of sannyasa(incorporated from the Jaina ascetic tradition). In this he was different from the Buddha, for whom the monastic life could be taken up at any time that the individual desired.

Courtesy: http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=2270