Comment by Riaz Haq on February 9, 2023 at 6:20pm

Ramayana is anti-OBC and anti-women


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64556116

Ramcharitmanas is counted by many scholars to be among the world's greatest literary creations. Celebrated author Pavan Varma calls it "a deeply philosophical work" which "is akin to the Bible for many Hindus".

Composed by Tulsidas, the poem is a retelling of Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic written by Hindu sage Valmiki 2,500 years ago. It's widely believed that Tulsidas's version, which is written in Awadhi - a dialect very similar to Hindi - is what made Ram's story accessible to the masses and why it became so popular.

The story of the crown prince of Ayodhya and his victory over the demon king Ravana is performed every year during the Dussehra festival across India. He is a god who's revered by millions of Hindus for his sense of justice and fair play.

But in the past few weeks, politicians on opposing sides have been arguing over whether the text is derogatory towards women as well as Dalits, who are at the bottom of India's deeply discriminatory caste system.

This is not the first time Tulsidas's epic, written more than 600 years ago, has been criticised, but what sets it apart this time is the scale of protests by both its supporters and critics. General elections in India are due in a year and politicians from both sides accuse each other of using the controversy over the book to polarise voters along caste lines.

Since January, protesters have burned pages allegedly containing excerpts from the book - and counter-protests have been held, demanding critics of the work be arrested.

At least five people, accused of desecrating the sacred text, have been arrested and, at the weekend, police invoked the National Security Act (NSA), a draconian law that makes bail nearly impossible, against two of the arrested men.



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Trouble started in January when a minister in the northern state of Bihar said the book was "spreading hatred in society". At a gathering of university students, Education Minister Chandrashekhar (who uses only one name) recited a few lines from Ramcharitmanas to prove his point.

"It says that if people from lower castes receive education, they become poisonous, like a snake becomes after drinking milk," he said.

A few days later, Swami Prasad Maurya, a prominent leader of a socially-disadvantaged community known as Other Backward Classes (OBC) and a member of the regional Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh state, expressed similar sentiments.

Insisting that some verses of Ramcharitmanas were "offensive", he demanded that they be removed from the book.


"Why hurl abuse in the name of religion? I respect all religions. But if in the name of religion, a community or caste is humiliated then it is objectionable," The Indian Express quoted him as saying.

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Prof Hemlata Mahishwar of Delhi's Jamia University told BBC Hindi that "it's not just one or two lines but there are several verses" in Ramcharitmanas that are derogatory to women and Dalits.

"There's one couplet that says that a Brahmin is to be worshipped even if he's full of bad qualities. Whereas a Dalit, even if he's a Vedic scholar, cannot be respected. So how can we accept a book that's so biased?"

Some experts, however, say that Tulsidas was not a reformer and did have his biases, but the controversial lines are spoken by his characters and can't be taken to be a reflection of the author's opinion.

Akhilesh Shandilya, an expert on Ramcharitmanas, told BBC Hindi that the lines appear derogatory to Dalits and anti-women only when taken out of context and read in isolation.

But critics say that Ramcharitmanas has to be approached in the present-day context and deserves scrutiny and discussion, especially as it is a book that has such a hold on the imagination of Indians.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 9, 2023 at 6:39pm

Why did Tulsidas ask his God Rama to punish Shudras and women not Mughal rulers?
in Life/Philosophy — by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd —

https://countercurrents.org/2023/02/why-did-tulsidas-ask-his-god-ra...

The anti-Shudra, Dalit and women language of Tulsidas in his Ramcharitamanas engendered a major controversy in North India. Its impact could also be seen in the South, which already had a strong Shudra mobilization history. He equated them with animals and drums and wanted to keep punishing them forever. The new consciousness of the Shudras, Dalits and women is not going to accept this kind of writing. They do not want their children to study these historical humiliating books in the schools, colleges and universities. It is a known fact that the RSS/BJP want to impose all such books in our educational institutions.

All over the country the Shudra consciousness is opposing such books. Regional language articles and opinions keep appearing in the South Indian languages. It will not die down soon, because the defenders of Tulsidas are not saying that such abusive sentences were interpolations, not of original writer, as they do in the case of ancient Sanskrit books that used caste cultural abusive language. They earlier were making the Muslims and colonial rulers and writers responsible for caste division among the Hindus on caste lines to sustain their political power and economic exploitation.

This line of argument was first developed by the RSS supporting Dwija writers and speakers, as there were hardly any Shudra or Dalit writers in those ranks. All the defenders of Tulsidas and his book as their spiritual grandh are Dwija RSS/BJP leaders or the saints, sadhus, who are Brahmins. No Shudra/Dalit from the RSS/BJP ranks can defend this kind of abuse of food producers, cattle grazers, pot makers, leather workers, barbers, weavers and so on. This abusive language of Tulsidas is against the nation’s wealth creators, which in essence means against the nation. The Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis working in RSS/BJP cannot defend that language, as they too have self respect.

Tulsidas wrote this book during Akbar-Jahangir rule. As information available on the internet shows that it was written in the end of 16th century. That in essence means that it was written during Akbar’s rule. Akbar died in 1605 while sitting on the throne. Tulsidas died in 1623. That was the time Shudras/Dalits were struggling with nature to bring vast areas of land under cultivation. Deforestation, agriculture expansion were the main burden of the Shudras and Dalits. The Dwijas, more particularly the Brahmins, to which community Tulsidas belonged, were not even respecting agriculture work as spiritually respectable. They designated all agricutural operations as Shudra kaam (work). It was then he was writing that “ढोल गवाँर सूद्र पसु नारी। सकल ताड़ना के अधिकारी।(ḍhōla gavāomra sūdra pasu nārī. sakala tāḍanā kē adhikārī). “A drum, an illiterate, a Shudra, a beast and a woman — all deserve punishment”.

Punishment by whom? Punishment by his God Rama and by the Mughal State, which was imposing heavy land taxes on the Shudra farmers. Agrarian masses- men and women–were starving. But the Dwijas had protective valves in Akbar’s administration.

Tulsidas knew that the Mughal state during Akbar rule was run by Birbal and Todar Mal. According to Wikipedia Birbal, was a Saraswat Bhatt Brahmin advisor and main commander (Mukhya Senapati) of the army in the court of the Mughal emperor. . He had a close association with Emperor Akbar and was one of his most important courtiers, part of a group called the navaratnas (nine jewels).

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 9, 2023 at 6:52pm

Lying in Hinduism

https://vedkabhed.com/index.php/2014/05/14/lying-in-hinduism/


Krishna said,
Brahma Vaivarta Purana, Krishna Janma Khanda 98.38-44 ”…Hari began to laugh and thus addressed Uddhava, using words of good import and worlds sanctioned by the Vedas, ”O Uddhava, untruth spoken to women or on the sporting ground, or in an emergency which endangers life or for the good of the vows or the Brahmin is not contemptible…” Tr. Rajendra Nath Sen

Matysa Purana 31.16 ”Sarmistha said:- ”King! there is no sin in speaking untruth at the time of indulging in sexual pleasures, on the occasion of marriage, when life is in danger, wealth is at stake, and in joke. Lying on these five occasions is venal.” Tr. Various Sanskrit Scholars, Edited by B.D. Basu

Mahabharata 8.69 ”In a situation of peril to life and in marriage, falsehood becomes utterable. In a situation involving the loss of one’s entire property, falsehood becomes utterable. On an occasion of marriage, or of enjoying a woman, or when life is in danger, or when one’s entire property is about to be taken away, or for the sake of a Brahmana, falsehood may be uttered. These five kinds of falsehood have been declared to be sinless. On these occasions falsehood would become truth and truth would become falsehood.”

Mahabharata 1.82 “Sarmishtha then said, ‘It hath been said, O king, that it is not sinful to lie on the occasion of a joke, in respect of women sought to be enjoyed, on occasions of marriage, in peril of immediate death and of the loss of one’s whole fortune. Lying is excusable on these five occasions.” Tr. K.M. Ganguli

Vasishtha Samhita 16.35 (Men) may speak an untruth at the time of marriage, during dalliance, when their lives are in danger or the loss of their whole property is imminent, and for the sake of a Brâhmana; they declare that an untruth spoken in these five cases does not make (the speaker) an outcast.

Gautama Samhita 23.29 Some (declare, that) an untruth (spoken) at the time of marriage, during dalliance, in jest or while (one suffers severe) pain is venial.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 6, 2023 at 8:13am

Dalits, who account for about 20 percent of India’s population, in many cases remain stuck at the lowest rungs of society. Although India has made large strides in helping the poor, almost a third of the Dalit community, or some 100 million people, still live in poverty, according to the United Nations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/world/asia/india-caste-discrimin...


The Hindu nationalist party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has courted and increasingly drawn a bigger share of the Dalit vote. But it has done little to persuade the religious ideologues among its support base to let go of a centuries-old Hindu social order that relegated Dalits to the most undesirable tasks like cleaning toilets, skinning animals and disposing of dead bodies.

Ms. Kotwal had no business plan for The Mooknayak, but she knew there were millions who desperately needed their stories told. She hired Dalits, Indigenous people and women as reporters, editors and video journalists. Publishing articles and videos in Hindi and English, they aspire to cover everything from individual injustices to policy debates.

“I want the marginalized community to be able to say, ‘We have our own media, we report on all kinds of stories, and we raise issues that haven’t been raised until today,’” said Ms. Kotwal, 33.


The Mooknayak’s audience has grown steadily and now draws nearly 50,000 unique visitors a month to its website. It runs on crowdfunding — readers have donated phones, small amounts of money, even a motorbike — and grants. The Mooknayak has received more than $12,000 from Google and roughly $6,000 as part of a training program led by YouTube, which helped fund salaries for a team of 11, as well as to pay for a teleprompter and office furniture.

Its growing influence allowed Ms. Kotwal to nab an interview with Rahul Gandhi, scion of a once-mighty political dynasty who is seeking to challenge Mr. Modi in next year’s election. Her rising public profile, though, has also brought her multiple rape and death threats.

Even making it this far as a Dalit woman is a victory in India’s caste-ridden society. Born to manual laborers, Ms. Kotwal grew up in a Dalit neighborhood in New Delhi. Before leaving for school each morning, she stuffed her notebooks in a jute sack, which she also used as a seat on the ground. Her family’s meager earnings meant that as a 16-year-old she needed to work to pay for both her education and her personal needs.


Soon she was pursuing a degree in journalism, a path where she had few role models from her community, which still faces rampant employment discrimination.

But her persistence paid off in 2017, when Ms. Kotwal strode across the Italian marble floor of a tower in New Delhi and started work as a broadcast journalist for the BBC’s Hindi-language service. The job and its trappings left her and her family in awe. “Do you sit in a swivel chair? Are you served tea at your seat?” her mother, an illiterate laborer, asked.

The honeymoon did not last long. A dominant-caste colleague nudged Ms. Kotwal to reveal her own caste, she said, and then outed her to colleagues. It was the beginning of what she described as public humiliation and discrimination at work.

Her bosses brushed off her concerns. One used a refrain often heard from people of dominant castes, telling her that Dalits no longer existed in modern India, according to messages viewed by The Times — denying not just her complaint, but her community’s very existence.

After two years on the job, she filed an official complaint with BBC officials in London. The company reviewed her claims of discrimination, according to an internal document, but ruled that her grievances were without “merit or substance.” Her contract, due to end soon, was not renewed.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 18, 2023 at 6:34pm

I won a birth lottery on caste, but learned fortune need not mean cruelty
Shree Paradkar
By Shree ParadkarSocial & Racial Justice Columnist

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2023/04/15/i-won-a-birth-lotter...


I come from a Brahmin family. This means I won a birth lottery. It means that while other identities may pose barriers, caste is never one. In fact, in certain situations, it is the secret handshake that opens doors, sometimes literally.

Caste privilege looks like — among many things — never hesitating to say your last name, being considered to come from a “good family,” having a higher chance of a sheltered upbringing (innocence is prized but not granted to all women) and being treated with deference in public spaces.

Brahmins around me insist they are not casteist. They say they don’t even think about caste let alone know the names of various castes, yet their social circles are almost entirely made up of fellow Brahmins. They say that caste oppression is now reversed and that Brahmins are now the real victims, sidelined in the caste system.

These are debates without empirical data, backed up by an anecdote or two about an undeserving “lower caste” person getting this job or that. (For a Brahmin, everybody else is “lower caste.”) By various counts, Brahmins, who form about four to five per cent of the Hindu population, comprise half of Indian media decision-makers and at least a third of bureaucrats and judges. Meanwhile, according to Oxfam, Dalits’ life expectancy can be up to 15 years less than other groups.

If forced to discuss caste, Brahmins will often claim the orginal varna system was fluid at its founding thousands of years ago, again with no evidence that Dalits could ever have educated themselves enough to then be considered Brahmin. As Indian social justice advocate Dilip Mandal noted recently on Twitter Spaces, a discussion on caste is neither theological nor historical nor abstract. It’s about lived experiences today.

Being ignorant of caste is a marker of privilege. I, too, only learned of the details of the caste system thanks to the tireless advocacy of Equality Labs in the U.S. Understanding anti-Black racism awoke me to caste-based brutality. Of course, learning that one’s gloried background is the carrier of such cruelty causes harsh cognitive dissonance. Reckoning with this reality is painful, but that discomfort pales in comparison to the generations of trauma inflicted on the marginalized. There is also little point in guilt or self-hatred; both emotions, while wrenching, simply continue to centre on the self.

None of us are born with a ready-made analysis of oppression. None of us choose to be born into the identities we inherit. The least the holders of power can do is to sit quietly, listen, reflect — not “Am I complicit” but “In what ways am I complicit” — learn, make space. And then they should let go of the reins.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 5, 2023 at 6:43pm

The Education Ministry data showed that the number of Muslim students decreased to 19.21 lakh in 2020-21 from 21 lakh in 2019-20.

https://indianexpress.com/article/education/enrolment-of-muslim-stu...



AISHE 2020-21: Enrolment of Muslim students for higher education decreases to 4.6%
The Education Ministry data showed that the number of Muslim students decreased to 19.21 lakh in 2020-21 from 21 lakh in 2019-20.

The number of Muslim students enrolling for higher education in India has dropped in the 2020-21 academic year compared to the previous year, according to a report by the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2020-21.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 9, 2023 at 7:02pm

Will India Surpass China to Become the Next Superpower?
Four inconvenient truths make this scenario unlikely.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/24/india-china-biden-modi-summit-...

by Prof Graham Allison, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government


when assessing a nation’s power, what matters more than the number of its citizens is the quality of its workforce. China’s workforce is more productive than India’s. The international community has rightly celebrated China’s “anti-poverty miracle” that has essentially eliminated abject poverty. In contrast, India continues to have high levels of poverty and malnutrition. In 1980, 90 percent of China’s 1 billion citizens had incomes below the World Bank’s threshold for abject poverty. Today, that number is approximately zero. Yet more than 10 percent of India’s population of 1.4 billion continue to live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day. Meanwhile, 16.3 percent of India’s population was undernourished in 2019-21, compared with less than 2.5 percent of China’s population, according to the most recent United Nations State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. India also has one of the worst rates of child malnutrition in the world.

Fortunately, the future does not always resemble the past. But as a sign in the Pentagon warns: Hope is not a plan. While doing whatever it can to help Modi’s India realize a better future, Washington should also reflect on the assessment of Asia’s most insightful strategist. The founding father and long-time leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, had great respect for Indians. Lee worked with successive Indian prime ministers, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, hoping to help them make India strong enough to be a serious check on China (and thus provide the space required for his small city-state to survive and thrive).

But as Lee explained in a series of interviews published in 2014, the year before his death, he reluctantly concluded that this was not likely to happen. In his analysis, the combination of India’s deep-rooted caste system that was an enemy of meritocracy, its massive bureaucracy, and its elites’ unwillingness to address the competing claims of its multiple ethnic and religious groups led him to conclude that it would never be more than “the country of the future”—with that future never arriving. Thus, when I asked him a decade ago specifically whether India could become the next China, he answered directly: “Do not talk about India and China in the same breath.”



Since Lee offered this judgment, India has embarked on an ambitious infrastructure and development agenda under a new leader and demonstrated that it can achieve considerable economic growth. Yet while we can remain hopeful that this time could be different, I, for one, suspect Lee wouldn’t bet on it.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 11, 2023 at 8:07am

Hindu Violence against Buddhism in India has NO Parallel


by Syed Ehtisham


The ruthless demolition of Buddha statues by the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan has invited severe criticisms from different quarters of the world. It is quite surprising to note that the Hindu Nazi-led Indian Govt. supported by all other Hindu Nazis has condemned the Taliban action. It appears paradoxical that the ancestors of the present Hindu Nazis in India wantonly destroyed the Buddhist statues and brutally killed the followers of Buddha in India. An impartial student of history can unequivocally remark that the Indian Nazis have no moral right to criticise the Taliban action.

Hundreds of the Buddhist statues, Stupas and Viharas were destroyed in India between 830 AD and 966 AD in the name of the revival of Hinduism. Indigenous and foreign sources, both literary and archaeological, speak volumes of the havoc done to Buddhism by the Nazis in India.

Role of Sankaracharya
Nazi leaders like the Sankaracharyas and many kings and rulers took pride in demolishing the Buddhist images aiming at the total eradication of the Buddhist culture. Today, their descendants destroyed the Babri Masjid and they have also published a list of mosques to be destroyed in the near future. It is with this sin of pride that they are condemning the deed on the part of the Afghans.

The Hindu ruler, Pushyamitra Sunga, demolished 84,000 Buddhist stupas which had been built by Ashoka the Great (Romila Thaper, Ashoka and Decline of Mauryas, London, 1961, p 200). It was followed by the smashing of the Buddhist centres in Magadha. Thousands of Buddhist monks were mercilessly killed. King Jalaluka destroyed the Buddhist viharas within his jurisdiction on the ground that the chanting of the hymns by the Buddhist devotees disturbed his sleep. (Kalhana, Rajatharangini, 1:40). In Kashmir, King Kinnara demolished thousands of Viharas and captured the Buddhists villages to please the Brahmins. (Kalhana 1:80).

Demon’s role

A large number of Buddhist viharas were usurped by the Brahmins and converted into Hindu temples where the Untouchables were given no entrance. The Buddhist places were projected as the Hindu temples by writing Puranas which were concocted myths or pseudo-history.

The important temples found at Tirupati, Ahoble, Undavalli, Ellora, Bengal, Puri, Badrinath, Mathura, Ayodhya, Sringeri, Bodhgaya, Sarnath, Delhi, Nalanda, Gudimallam, NagarjunaKonda, Srisailam and Sabarimala (Lord Ayyappa) in Kerala are some of the striking examples of the Brahmanic usurpation of the Buddhist centres.

At Nagarjunakonda, the Adi Sankara played a demon’s role in destroying the Buddhist statues and monuments. Longhurst who conducted excavations at Nagarjunakonda has recorded this in his book Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India No: 54, The Buddhist Antiquities of Nagarjunakonda (Delhi, 1938, p.6.).

Non-Brahmins burnt alive
The ruthless manner in which all the buildings at Nagarjunakonda were destroyed is simply appalling and cannot represent the work of treasure-seekers because many of the pillars, statues, and sculptures have been wantonly smashed to pieces. Local tradition relates that the Brahmin teacher Sankaracharya came to Nagarjunakonda with a host of followers and destroyed the Buddhist monuments. The cultivated lands on which the ruined buildings stand was a religious grant made to Sankaracharya.

In Kerala, Sankaracharya and his close associate Kumarila Bhatta, an avowed enemy of Buddhism, organized a religious crusade against the Buddhists. We get a vivid description of the pleasure of Sankaracharya on seeing the people of non-Brahmanic faith being burnt to death from the book Sankara Digvijaya.

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