Sacrilege at Tirupati hills
by Sandhya Jain
The current initiative of Sri Swarupanandendra Swami of the Visakhapatnam-based Sri Sarada Peetham to mobilise Hindu seers to protect dharma in the face of rising depredations by evangelists has not come a day too soon. While religious conversions are innately offensive, the rising political eminence of an Italian-born Roman Catholic has witnessed a corresponding growth of aggressive proselytising at famous Hindu pilgrimages and holy sites.
Ms Sonia Gandhi has reinforced missionary muscle by sponsoring the rise of Christians in Congress State Governments and party units on an unprecedented scale. Non-Christian Congress Chief Ministers have been made to acquiesce in missionary activities, and outrageously 'leaky' welfare schemes have been floated for the benefit of the tax-free NGO industry, most of which is anti-Hindu.
The latest affront to India's civilisational ethos comes from missionary activities at Tirumala and Simhachalam, where police were compelled to take the offending preachers into custody. This has forced the normally quiescent authorities of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) to urge Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy to enact legislation to prohibit propaganda by non-Hindu faiths on the seven Tirumala hills, traditionally regarded as the sacred body of Sri Vishnu.
It is inconceivable that the TTD authorities are unaware that the Chief Minister avidly promotes the activities of his Seventh Day Adventists sect, and has even built a church upon his family lands. They must be at the end of their tether to appeal to a proselytiser to respect their faith and ban physical and psychological encroachment upon their sacred spaces. The TTD is demanding a two-year jail term and fines for violating the law it wants enacted. It is pertinent that while the State Government does not permit panchayat elections in Tirumala in view of its spiritual eminence, predatory faiths are permitted a free run of the hills. It would, therefore, be in the fitness of things if the Government steps in before matters deteriorate further and declares all seven hills as the TTD zone, where politics or alien faiths cannot enter.
Actually, both conversion activities and willful trespass by missionaries upon the sacred spaces of other faiths can be prosecuted under Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, provided the authorities are willing to punish the offenders. It is undeniable that the determination to convert devotees of a faith(s) maligned as "false" by the proselytiser is an intentional insult to the said creed. This cannot be condoned and disguised as "freedom of religion" in order to facilitate the missionary agenda, which is almost wholly funded by Western Christian nations. Secondly and more seriously, deliberate intrusion into the holy spaces of other faiths for proselytisation and conversion to one's own dogma falls squarely within the gamut of a "malicious intention to outrage religious feelings." The growing temerity of missionaries at the Golden Temple, Tirupati and other Hindu temple towns calls for speedy redress by the law.
Sadly, it is fairly certain that neither the UPA regime at the Centre nor the Congress State Governments will act to mitigate the victimisation of the Hindu community. Indeed, sinister plans are reportedly afoot to bolster the conversion industry by a backdoor capture of SC/ST reserved seats in Parliament and the State Assemblies, by surreptitiously making these available to converts (so-called Dalit Christians). This could seriously erode the political empowerment of historically deprived sections of Hindu society, and Bahujan Samaj Party leader Ms Mayawati would do well to take cognisance of this move to forge a new minority-based electoral vote-bank in Uttar Pradesh.
Briefly, the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities (NCRLM) is currently (but quietly) seeking public opinion on extending "constitutional benefits" to SC/ST converts. In the prevailing reservation-prone atmosphere, I initially thought this meant that the UPA intended to include Dalit Christians in the SC/ST reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. Had this been the case, however, the issue could have been simply framed in such terms.
The coy usage of the term "constitutional benefits," instead of specifying caste or community-based reservations, suggests that the NCRLM's real objective is to recommend a blanket extension of all constitutional benefits of Hindu SC/ST groups, to Dalit Christians. This will provide backdoor political reservations for Dalit Christians by helping them to contest from and grab the existing SC/ST parliamentary and Assembly seats.
This would be consistent with the UPA agenda of fragmenting the nation by privileging non-Hindu social groups. It also explains Ms Gandhi's indiscreet overtures to the Muslim community on the issue of reservations in Government (Andhra Pradesh's failed attempt), educational institutions (Aligarh Muslim University), and armed forces (Mr Sachar's infamous but aborted head count). Worse, like Minto-Morley, she recently instigated Muslims to demand greater representation in public life, which certainly suggests communal reservation in Parliament and the State Assemblies.
Of course, Ms Gandhi does not actually intend to empower the Muslim community. Repeating the familiar Western political subordination of Muslim communities all over the world, her intention is to create a Christian oligarchy in India, with Muslims serving as beasts of burden (captive vote-banks). Hence the mollycoddling of the Muslim community in a manner designed to raise the hackles of Hindus, with obvious repercussions for the 'winability' of Muslim candidates. This is expected to drive the community back into the Congress embrace. An NCRLM recommendation to extend SC/ST constitutional guarantees to converts will, therefore, mainly benefit the Christian community.
If there is no resistance to this diabolical scheme, Ms Gandhi could soon have a significant Christian lobby in Parliament, through a fraudulently procured amendment altering the basic structure of the Constitution. An East Timor-like situation could develop in any part of the country where Western Christian nations have a geo-strategic or purely economic interest. Their lust for the mineral-rich north-east predates independence and is fostered by insurgency movements backed by various church denominations.
Indians need to acknowledge the abiding kinship between the Church and political power in the West. Christianity underwrites Western civilisation, a fact its ruling elite never loses sight of, unlike India, where it is fashionable to use Euro-centric slogans to undermine the native ethos. Little wonder Ms Gandhi's Indian ascent has seen the appointment of Indian Catholic theologian Ivan Dias as ex-Cardinal Ratzinger's heir to the (renamed) office of Grand Inquisitor. It is almost midnight for India's Hindu community.
The current initiative of Sri Swarupanandendra Swami of the Visakhapatnam-based Sri Sarada Peetham to mobilise Hindu seers to protect dharma in the face of rising depredations by evangelists has not come a day too soon. While religious conversions are innately offensive, the rising political eminence of an Italian-born Roman Catholic has witnessed a corresponding growth of aggressive proselytising at famous Hindu pilgrimages and holy sites.
Ms Sonia Gandhi has reinforced missionary muscle by sponsoring the rise of Christians in Congress State Governments and party units on an unprecedented scale. Non-Christian Congress Chief Ministers have been made to acquiesce in missionary activities, and outrageously 'leaky' welfare schemes have been floated for the benefit of the tax-free NGO industry, most of which is anti-Hindu.
The latest affront to India's civilisational ethos comes from missionary activities at Tirumala and Simhachalam, where police were compelled to take the offending preachers into custody. This has forced the normally quiescent authorities of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) to urge Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy to enact legislation to prohibit propaganda by non-Hindu faiths on the seven Tirumala hills, traditionally regarded as the sacred body of Sri Vishnu.
It is inconceivable that the TTD authorities are unaware that the Chief Minister avidly promotes the activities of his Seventh Day Adventists sect, and has even built a church upon his family lands. They must be at the end of their tether to appeal to a proselytiser to respect their faith and ban physical and psychological encroachment upon their sacred spaces. The TTD is demanding a two-year jail term and fines for violating the law it wants enacted. It is pertinent that while the State Government does not permit panchayat elections in Tirumala in view of its spiritual eminence, predatory faiths are permitted a free run of the hills. It would, therefore, be in the fitness of things if the Government steps in before matters deteriorate further and declares all seven hills as the TTD zone, where politics or alien faiths cannot enter.
Actually, both conversion activities and willful trespass by missionaries upon the sacred spaces of other faiths can be prosecuted under Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, provided the authorities are willing to punish the offenders. It is undeniable that the determination to convert devotees of a faith(s) maligned as "false" by the proselytiser is an intentional insult to the said creed. This cannot be condoned and disguised as "freedom of religion" in order to facilitate the missionary agenda, which is almost wholly funded by Western Christian nations. Secondly and more seriously, deliberate intrusion into the holy spaces of other faiths for proselytisation and conversion to one's own dogma falls squarely within the gamut of a "malicious intention to outrage religious feelings." The growing temerity of missionaries at the Golden Temple, Tirupati and other Hindu temple towns calls for speedy redress by the law.
Sadly, it is fairly certain that neither the UPA regime at the Centre nor the Congress State Governments will act to mitigate the victimisation of the Hindu community. Indeed, sinister plans are reportedly afoot to bolster the conversion industry by a backdoor capture of SC/ST reserved seats in Parliament and the State Assemblies, by surreptitiously making these available to converts (so-called Dalit Christians). This could seriously erode the political empowerment of historically deprived sections of Hindu society, and Bahujan Samaj Party leader Ms Mayawati would do well to take cognisance of this move to forge a new minority-based electoral vote-bank in Uttar Pradesh.
Briefly, the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities (NCRLM) is currently (but quietly) seeking public opinion on extending "constitutional benefits" to SC/ST converts. In the prevailing reservation-prone atmosphere, I initially thought this meant that the UPA intended to include Dalit Christians in the SC/ST reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. Had this been the case, however, the issue could have been simply framed in such terms.
The coy usage of the term "constitutional benefits," instead of specifying caste or community-based reservations, suggests that the NCRLM's real objective is to recommend a blanket extension of all constitutional benefits of Hindu SC/ST groups, to Dalit Christians. This will provide backdoor political reservations for Dalit Christians by helping them to contest from and grab the existing SC/ST parliamentary and Assembly seats.
This would be consistent with the UPA agenda of fragmenting the nation by privileging non-Hindu social groups. It also explains Ms Gandhi's indiscreet overtures to the Muslim community on the issue of reservations in Government (Andhra Pradesh's failed attempt), educational institutions (Aligarh Muslim University), and armed forces (Mr Sachar's infamous but aborted head count). Worse, like Minto-Morley, she recently instigated Muslims to demand greater representation in public life, which certainly suggests communal reservation in Parliament and the State Assemblies.
Of course, Ms Gandhi does not actually intend to empower the Muslim community. Repeating the familiar Western political subordination of Muslim communities all over the world, her intention is to create a Christian oligarchy in India, with Muslims serving as beasts of burden (captive vote-banks). Hence the mollycoddling of the Muslim community in a manner designed to raise the hackles of Hindus, with obvious repercussions for the 'winability' of Muslim candidates. This is expected to drive the community back into the Congress embrace. An NCRLM recommendation to extend SC/ST constitutional guarantees to converts will, therefore, mainly benefit the Christian community.
If there is no resistance to this diabolical scheme, Ms Gandhi could soon have a significant Christian lobby in Parliament, through a fraudulently procured amendment altering the basic structure of the Constitution. An East Timor-like situation could develop in any part of the country where Western Christian nations have a geo-strategic or purely economic interest. Their lust for the mineral-rich north-east predates independence and is fostered by insurgency movements backed by various church denominations.
Indians need to acknowledge the abiding kinship between the Church and political power in the West. Christianity underwrites Western civilisation, a fact its ruling elite never loses sight of, unlike India, where it is fashionable to use Euro-centric slogans to undermine the native ethos. Little wonder Ms Gandhi's Indian ascent has seen the appointment of Indian Catholic theologian Ivan Dias as ex-Cardinal Ratzinger's heir to the (renamed) office of Grand Inquisitor. It is almost midnight for India's Hindu community.
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