Founder Acharya His Divine Grace
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

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Assam: A Secular Protocol
By Tarun Vijay   |  Nov 01, 2008
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Patience is the key that defines facilitating others’ survival more than your own. Earth, mother we call her, symbolises that element of life. She lets the barbarian exploit her boons and the bliss, and waits for a millennium to show she is angry.

Indian society, which believes in the values of the civilisational flow so painstakingly preserved and handed over to us, is being subjected the same kind of test of patience by the forces that represent the colors of Roman and Arab ancestry.

Like history can’t be understood through secondary or tertiary sources, original references have to be consulted, watershed incidents in a nation’s life have to be analysed through original events. Hence after Meenakshipuram, the forced exodus of Kashmiri Hindus, Godhra and Kandhmal murders, its now the turn of Bodo Hindus in Assam to face Muslim attacks.

So far 40 Hindus have been reported killed and 76,000 people have left their villages out of fear and taken refuge in 32 state government camps in Udalguri and Darrang. Twelve villages have been burnt. In Jhakuapara village the gaon budhaa (village head) was burnt alive along with his mother and sister. It all began after local Hindus resisted the forcible occupation of their lands by Muslims. The area has suddenly seen Bodo Hindus reduced to a minority and a spurt in the activities of the All Assam Minority Students Union (AMSU), SIMI, All Assam Muslim Chatra Parishad and Muslim Students Association (MUSA). Now, having burnt Hindu villages and forced them to flee, Muslims are occupying the villages vacated by Hindus.

The Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF – Badruddin Ajmal’s Muslim Political Party) MLA Rasul Haq Bahadur and AAMSU president Abdul Aziz have been demanding a separate autonomous area for the Muslims in lower Assam. The recent violence is considered as a ‘warming up’ exercise’ to chase away Hindus from their traditional hamlets.

Saw any report or interviews of the victims or front page ‘shame’ editorials condemning the roasting alive of Hindus, or making them refugees in their own land? Got any call from Vatican or admonishment from Paris? Sorry, the victims happened to be Hindus so we can devote our space and time on matters more earthly like ICL cricket and red alerts in the stock exchange.

Hate sells. The more you add poison to it, the more you get elevated on the scales of leadership and fame. They say terrorism is the main issue. But do you think any one wants to fight it? All that appears on the list are a few ghastly pictures of the terror-struck common people, a few ‘good’ slogans, emotional lines of poetry and the election plank is ready. Greed, intolerance, revenge and bigotry of the secular kind have taken centrestage to constitutionalise a hate regime that thrives on disrobing India of her unique characteristics. Anything that defines that uniqueness is under assault and like a colonial dispensation; this has become a business of profit and comfort. Grants, awards and fellowships are reserved for those who yield and say yes to the secular protocol that defines India as a non-Hindu entity, using terms like ‘shackled in the old’, ‘outdated’, ‘obscurantist Brahmanism’ and ‘weird ritualism which makes the practitioner rigid, backward looking’ and ‘pot-bellied, unintelligent creature with a tuft’.

The sultans of this secular protocol define an assertive Hindu as anti-women, anti-minority (read Muslims and Christians), Hindi chauvinist, having a fossilized vision that tries to revive a dead language like Sanskrit, worshipper of snakes, rats, cow, phallus, trees, who uses cow urine, cow dung for various purposes including medicine. They light fire and throw some herbs to please gods, who are elephant-shaped, and use peacocks, oxen and owls as their vehicles. They have to be civilized. And to do that they get grants from the ministry of culture.

From the Germans and Dutch.

The contemporary seculars use exactly the same language and show identical concern as was used and shown by the British when they urged the Christian missionaries to civilise the Hindu savages a hundred years ago.

In 1913, British forces under Major Hamilton shot dead 1,500 Hindu Bhil freedom fighters who had waged a struggle under the leadership of a great reformist, Govind Giri, a disciple of Swami Dayananda. Having performed this act of “valour”, Major Hamilton invited the church to start work amongst the Bhils to “give them the divine message”. He made the following appeal to Rev. D.G. Cock of the Presbyterian mission, Neemuch: “Against my wishes, I ordered police to fire on the innocent persons. Knew and loved them for years together.

Really it was a sad experience of my life. You go there and do work which I could not do for them. Their hearts have broken. Give them divine message. I want to do something and I know the best one will be to establish a mission centre.” (Planting a mission among the Bhils of south Rajasthan’, in man and Life, vol 10, pp 77-96).

Fifteen hundred innocent Bhils were killed. And the British officer asks the Church, almost as an order, to go and work among them. First physical annihilation, then organizing efforts for disrobing them of their culture and religion.

And they are the adorable icons of the contemporary secular. Hindus, medical doctors, MDs, law graduates, IITians,MBAs, working among tribals to help them get better education never finds a place of honour or even a mention in the passing. Because they preserve the culture and indigenous traditions. In secular protocol, only those who dispossess Hindus of their identity are eligible for enlisting.

Hence converting tribals to Christianity is acceptable, preserving their culture is not. An assault on a nun is deplorable; a murder of a lady Hindu monk is no news. Burning alive of Hindu Bodos finds a brief mention, burning alive of non-Hindus deserve a front page editorial. Post Godhra, Kandhmal, and Mangalore, Hindu symbols like Trishul must be turned into symbols of ‘Hindu terrorism’.

Post 90s till this date, jihadi symbols like crossed rifles in the backdrop of Koran or a jihadi killing infants or a NSCN activist in Nagaland demanding Nagalim for Christ, must not be used as symbols of hate because that’s against secular tenets.

It’s a universally accepted norm of the secular fraternity. Have you ever, anywhere seen a jjhadi’s barbaric face as a symbol of terrorism? The only face you might have seen shows a Muslim tailor with folded hands, a Hindu “goon” with a saffron headband, a trishul terrifying the minorities. Even the Maoists are never depicted as barbaric goons who have killed more than 12,000 Indians so far and government has to set up a special cell in the Ministry of Home Affairs to tackle the left extremism problem. They are seculars, hence can’t be depicted as terrorists.

Recently I saw a magazine depicting Jesus crucified on a trishul. Even if for the sake of argument one may say some Hindus are indulging in such activities which these seculars find bad, is their depiction of a Jesus crucifixion on a trishul to convey their dismay and disapproval acceptable and responsible behavior? Do they think the trishul is the sole property or the patented symbol of the kind of Hindus they despise? What about those Hindus who do not vote BJP or support Bajrang Dal? Do they all belong to a non-Trishul order of faith?

Depicting and institutionalizing the trishul as a hate symbol is acceptable behavior for the secular. What about the cross of the separatists in Nagaland who kill and maim non-conformists? And the two AK-47s around the Koran used by terrorist groups? Has any one; any secular, journalist, leader or human rightists ever used such symbols to depict bloodthirsty aggressors?

A subservient media, a colonized mindset, a “manageable” pen – this is all that is needed to clothe a secular protocol.

It’s a protocol that directs them to bury and subvert the truth. When the killers of Swami Lakshmananada were arrested, the news was filtered and published in a muffled way. Only in one newspaper did I see a statement that pointed towards Christian involvement in the ghastly murders. Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda admitted to a group of media persons that “it is a fact that Christians form the majority in our organisation. Our supporters in Rayagada, Gajapati and Kandhamal also belonged to the Christian community”. According to him, Saraswati was killed because he did not pay heed when the Maoists’ warned him to end his anti-Christian activities.

Anyone condemned the confession?

This secular protocol insults a police officer even in death, humiliates his family in grief, reinstates a teacher involved in the attack on Parliament, demand a ban on Hindu organizations without any proof or court order, but comes out on the streets seeking freedom for a terrorist sentenced to death by the highest court of the land.

The secular protocol accepts permissiveness and exploitation of women as acceptable smart behavior; opposition to sex in Meerut parks was booed as “moral policing”, “they” were dubbed anti-environment and as consuming more and conserving nothing. This protocol is anti-family values – it turns homes into serais by legitimizing ‘live-in’ relations, it is anti-societal stability – which rejects institutionalised relationships, replacing them with discount coupons of pleasure trips, likes to invest in old age homes rather take care of parents. (So much power this secular protocol has wielded that the state felt compelled to make a law to punish children who do not care for their parents). It supports gay marriages as a mark of human advancement and abhors the only institution that has sustained global societies – motherhood, as a symbol of women’s slavery.

Having done that, it organizes seminars on the fall in civility and ethics.

They love to say they are not Hindus but ‘humans’ and when it comes to making profit they are in the forefront to sell Hindu songs and bhajans .All those media houses who love to deride Hindutva as a house policy, do not hesitate to make millions by selling Sanskrit mantras, bhajans, kirtans, in CDs and VCDs, and present the same dramas they deplore as “mythological” called Ramayana and Mahabharata, to increase TRP ratings. They are the same seculars who had opposed such Ramanand Sagar serials during the 90s, saying “such mythological dramas” helped fan the flames of the Ayodhya movement, which was, in their eyes, anti-minority.

When it comes to lucre and power sharing and a good berth after life, everyone comes closer to the forces representing Rama’s side. So not a single secular would say he should be buried after death and no Sanskrit mantra be chanted because it’s a dead language of deplorable Brahmins. So a sense of personal profit, here or after life, makes them to protect and support a Hindu character. If votes too begin flowing to their boxes this way, they, and not the BJP, would be the first to build Ram temple at Ayodhya.

That’s the moral of their secular protocol.

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