IN BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA’S U.S.A:
HINDUPHOBIA -- INTOLERANCE, RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS February 19, 2015 10:45 IST
RAJEEV SRINIVASAN http://www.rediff.com/news/column/hinduphobia-intolerance-racial-andreligious/20150219.htm?print=true Also Read the Comment Below (page 5): “MODI AND INDIAN LEADERS SHOULD STOP BEING HIJRAS (EUNUCHS) ON THE GLOBAL SCENE” =============================================== President Barack Obama made two rather unfortunate speeches alleging religious discrimination in India. Given American moralising, this is par for the course -- but two incidents suggested that the emperor is the one without clothes. One could make the case that there is considerable phobia against non-Christians in the US, and on occasion this has led to violence. Of course, there is much racial discrimination as well. Blacks have long complained about the 'driving while black' syndrome, whereby a random black driver is far more likely to be stopped and questioned by police than a white: They are in effect guilty until proved innocent. I do hope the Patel family sues the hell out of the state of Alabama, and I hope the Hindu American Foundation and other community organisations are helping with legal aid and monetary support. For, there is reason to believe that it is religious and racial bias that led to the incident: In other words, a hate crime. There is no reason to suffer that silently. There is some history of Hindus (and Sikhs) being brutalised by the AmericanState. There was Khem Singh, an elderly Sikh priest who was starved to death in a California prison. There was Charanjit Singh Aujla, a liquor-store owner shot to death by plainclothes police. There was an Indian-origin Fijian man, Maya Nand, who died of untreated diabetes in immigration prison. In effect, these were judicial murders. And two or three years ago, a number of Indian students in the US were murdered. Apparently Americans, especially the Christian fundamentalist or redneck varieties, view Indians, especially the non-Abrahamic variety, as sub-human, with few human rights. Although on average I concede that the US is quite good to its Indian-origin immigrants, every one of us has tales of racial and/or religious bigotry directed at us. I do accept that there is racism in India, too: Alas, our own Northeasterners find casual insults and even violence directed at them quite often. And I am sure that black African students in India face all sorts of problems. But at the very least, Indians are not hypocritical, going around pontificating, unlike Americans. =============================================== 1
I was in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. So far as I can tell, the #BlackLivesMatter protests (external link) over police brutality in the shooting of teenaged Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have run their course, and we are back to business as usual. In the meantime, of course, President Barack Obama has made two rather unfortunate speeches alleging religious discrimination in India. Given American moralising, this is par for the course -- but two incidents suggested that the emperor is the one without clothes. One could make the case that there is considerable phobia against non-Christians in the US, and on occasion this has led to violence. Of course, there is much racial discrimination as well. Blacks have long complained about the 'driving while black' syndrome, whereby a random black driver is far more likely to be stopped and questioned by police than a white: They are in effect guilty until proved innocent. On the other hand, in a recent book, Ghettoside, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy shows how rampant crime against blacks goes unpunished, as the police don't care to investigate adequately. I'd like to ask the sanctimonious POTUS, 'Wouldn't Martin Luther King be shocked that happens to blacks?' It appears Mississippi Burning is relevant even today, 50 years after civil rights marchers Schwerner, Goodman and Cheney were murdered by bigots. Racial prejudice by the police affects browns as well, as in the sad case of Sureshbhai Patel, a 57-year-old Indian grandfather visiting his developmentally-challenged, 17month-old grandchild. Patel was slammed to the pavement by a white policeman, paralysing him. His crime? 'Walking while brown': All Mr Patel did was walk in the neighbourhood where his son lives in Alabama. A neighbour complained that a 'black man in his 30s was walking in driveways, peering into garages.' Mr Patel does not speak English: He told the policemen who drove up: 'No English, Indian.' Since he hadn't committed any crime, he was not alarmed when the three officers accosted him. In the startling dashboard video from the police cruiser, you see a young white cop questioning Mr Patel, and then slamming him face first into the sidewalk: Mr Patel is thrown like a rag doll, and the unarmed, non-threatening man is seen slumping into the ground, and then he is handled roughly by the cops, which quite likely exacerbated his spinal injuries. I do hope the Patel family sues the hell out of the state of Alabama, and I hope the Hindu American Foundation and other community organisations are helping with legal aid and monetary support. For, there is reason to believe that it is religious and racial bias that led to the incident: In other words, a hate crime. There is no reason to suffer that silently. There is some history of Hindus (and Sikhs) being brutalised by the AmericanState. There was Khem Singh, an elderly Sikh priest who was starved to death in a California 2
prison. There was Charanjit Singh Aujla, a liquor-store owner shot to death by plainclothes police. There was an Indian-origin Fijian man, Maya Nand, who died of untreated diabetes in immigration prison. In effect, these were judicial murders. And two or three years ago, a number of Indian students in the US were murdered. Apparently Americans, especially the Christian fundamentalist or redneck varieties, view Indians, especially the non-Abrahamic variety, as sub-human, with few human rights. Although on average I concede that the US is quite good to its Indian-origin immigrants, every one of us has tales of racial and/or religious bigotry directed at us. My personal stories include the epithet 'dothead' thrown at me, and a voice shouting 'We don't want any Indians' when I was being shown around an apartment complex, both in New Jersey. I do accept that there is racism in India, too: Alas, our own Northeasterners find casual insults and even violence directed at them quite often. And I am sure that black African students in India face all sorts of problems. But at the very least, Indians are not hypocritical, going around pontificating, unlike Americans. It is not only in America, but also in Australia: there was a lot of violence against Indian students there a couple of years ago. Why is this? I think Indians are hit with a double whammy: Bias against brown people, and bias against Hindus (and I include Sikhs and Jains under that heading for the sake of making this argument). For, when I went to Italy a couple of years ago, I noticed the animosity against the Roma or Gypsy folks in that country (and I am told this is replicated all over Europe). I found old Roma women prostate, begging on the streets of Rome. Recently, I read that Italians have been dumping garbage on Roma encampments; France has expelled some of its Roma. As is widely known, the Roma are migrants who went westward perhaps a thousand years ago from India. Culturally Judeo-Christian Westerners (even if they are atheists) undoubtedly have picked up the typical prejudices that fundamentalist Christians have about Hindus. You know, the usual 'caste, cows and curry' stories, as well as the 'caste = race' libel, both assiduously propagated by Indian-origin leftists in the West as well. It is much easier for Westerners to deal with Muslims because of their common Abrahamic heritage. I find this comes out in odd, small, but telling ways: Westerners gravitate to Indian Muslims rather than Indian Hindus. I was watching the old film Gravity on a flight, and there was an Indian-accented person in the film (of course, he was the first to die, as is usually the case with non-whites), and his name was Sharif! Similarly, I was watching a television programme called Silicon Valley, and there is a subcontinental there, and he is a Pakistani Muslim named Danish, though the valley probably has ten times more Indian Hindus. In A Passage to India as well as Slumdog Millionaire, if I remember right, the sympathetic characters are Muslims. 3
That's not to say that Muslims don't face discrimination; it's just that they are more 'people like us' than Hindus. The other recent incident was of three Muslims shot dead in a university town, and the first reaction was this was a hate crime, although there was some talk of ongoing animosity over parking space. The hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter began to trend. And it is true, Muslim lives do matter. (But these were white (Arab or Turkish?) Muslims, so they did not face racial prejudice, only religious bias at worst.) But how come #HinduLivesMatter didn't start trending in the unfortunate case of Sureshbhai Patel? Do Hindu lives actually not matter? Perhaps they don't matter even in the subcontinent, as the media and intelligentsia have devalued Hindu lives (Muslim and Christian lives do matter, though: Think Graham Staines and Ishrat Jehan and compare them to Rajbala, beaten to death by a Delhi Congress government for the crime of attending a Yogi Ramdev yoga camp. Rajbala who, did you say?) Jews have a lot to teach Hindus. Once upon a time, Jewish lives didn't matter: Kristallnacht, Warsaw Ghetto, Buchenwald, Auschwitz etc. I was at UNESCO in Paris, and there is an arresting exhibition there about the Shoah and death camps and the way ordinary Jews were rounded up, stripped, robbed and shot into mass graves. Having Israel as a strong State that would stand up for the rights of Jews made a big difference. Unfortunately, anti-Jewish sentiment is making a major comeback in Europe -- which goes to show, prejudices die hard. I saw a telling headline in a French magazine ('What does it mean to be Jewish in France?'). I suspect the answer is: 'Live in fear.' Oh, let us note that, if I remember right, Hinduism is not even recognised as a religion in France, Italy etc, while Judaism is. The other lot that has escaped from the prejudices long held against them are East Asians. This obviously has to do with the prosperity of Japan, Korea, and now China. The fact that China aggressively exposes Western hypocrisy may also be a reason why they get some respect: For instance, whenever there is talk of human rights, China produces long lists of abuses in the US, whereupon the latter shut up. On the other hand, India has never stood up against that ragtag bunch of religious bigots known grandiosely as the US Council on International Religious Freedom, whose single-point agenda is the conversion industry. The Indian government needs to act strongly to protect its citizens' rights when abroad. What India did in the case of Devyani Khobragade is salutary. A lot of noise was made, and unreciprocated privileges US diplomats enjoyed were taken away. The then US ambassador essentially got fired. At this point with the Sureshbhai Patel case, the US ambassador, ironically an Indianorigin person, should be called on the carpet and given an earful. There is no reason to be meek when the rights of your citizens are trodden on. 4
Just as China does, India should form a 'Commission on Racial and Religious Freedom,' and document the terrible crimes in America. I was reminded of the effects of meekness when reading an article in the Financial Times on Ukraine. It quotes Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian Wars about the Melians, who petitioned attacking Athenians for clemency: 'You know as well as we do that right... is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.' Exactly. Unless India is strong, or at least projects the impression that it is strong, the West will walk all over it. I was skeptical of Obama's ability during his India trip to avoid the malignant influence of USCIRF, and so it turned out to be. Despite all the talk of trade and defence and containing China, and nuclear reactors and all that good stuff, at some basic level, the Christian abhorrence of the old religions comes to the fore: for them, it is 'Pagan, convert or die!' Not all that different from ISIS, alas, except that ISIS is more direct in its bigotry, unlike the al-taqiya wielding missionary who, like a boa constrictor, digests culture, land and people. This is how it was when Cortes and Pizarro devastated Latin America, and so it is now in India. Rajeev Srinivasan http://www.rediff.com/news/column/hinduphobia-intolerance-racial-andreligious/20150219.htm?print=true
* * * COMMENT: from:Nagendra S. Rao date:Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 2:45 PM subject: Modi and Indian Leaders Should Stop Being Hijras (Eunuchs) on the Global Scene
MODI AND INDIAN LEADERS SHOULD STOP BEING HIJRAS (EUNUCHS) ON THE GLOBAL SCENE A blunt and forceful article below, but very apropos by Rajiv Sreenivasan. A number of NRIs and I are deeply disappointed with Prime Minister Modi’s interaction with President Obama on the latter’s recent visit to India. Sadly for all his vaunted Hindutva / RSS credentials Modi’s fawning attempts to ingratiate himself with POTUS was sickening. More and more we are beginning to see that Modi is behaving like Atal Behari Hajpayee, the latter’s Bharat Ratna notwithstanding. Hajpayee spent a billion dollars 5
marching our troops to the border and then tamely brought them back – thus convincing the circumcised unwashed of Pakistan that India would always fold. At least Hajpayee prided himself on being an agnostic Nehruvian socialist with a thin veneer of Hinduism for convenience. What is Modi’s excuse for hijrapan? Modi while wearing his orthodox, professing Hinduism on his sleeve is behaving in the same submissive manner as Hajpayee. Pope John Paul II on his visit to India imperiously announced like a Roman Proconsul that the 20th century was the century when Christianity planted its evangelizing staff in India to harvest it like corn for the glory of Christianity. Hajpayee sitting next to him was silent, with an inane half-smile. He should have immediately and bluntly told the Pope where he got off. Modi similarly was silent when Obama toed the USCIRF line and spoke about his government acting in a way that Gandhi would not have approved. Now I am one of those extremely politically incorrect people who have very little regard for Gandhi c.f. the problems he created for modern India along with his protégée Nehru. Even if we want to fall over ourselves worshipping the undeserving Gandhi, Modi should still have politely but firmly told Obama where he got off. This would have ensured that Obama, every other POTUS, and all other world leaders would be careful in future as to how they handled India. For heaven’s sake a miserable, crawling client state like Pakistan was not afraid to haul America’s feet over the coals. Au contraire Modi has behaved submissively in the manner of a junior leader of a subordinate power. This is what we would have expected of hangdog PM Manmohan Singh – moderately good manager and exceptionally servile lackey of the Nehru family, but certainly no leader. One can never imagine the Chinese or the Israelis or even the Pakistanis behaving in a servile manner like Modi did. What is it with our leaders that they begin showing signs of being eunuchs or hijrapan once they come to the gaddi? Don’t they know the adage that if you are a doormat people will be glad to wipe their feet on you? Of course the bleating, obsequious Gandhi always advocated Hindus being servile doormats for Islam – to the point of allowing themselves to be slaughtered like sheep if the Muslims wanted to do so. I spit on such attitude and so do our Hindu sastras. Gita 2.37 clearly says ‘Killed, thou wilt reach Heaven; victorious thou wilt enjoy the earth. Wherefore, O Son of Kunti, arise, resolved to fight’. The wretched Gandhi perverted the Gita to feed his un-Arya / un-Hindu absolute non-violence fetish. This led to Sri Aurobindo calling him a mentally unbalanced crack on several occasions. As Aurobindo goes on to add, there is a reason that our gods and goddesses are all shown with various weapons in their hands. It is more than 60 years since Gandhi (thankfully) passed on – why do our current day political leaders still adhere to Gandhi’s servile nonsense? Swami Vivekananda the ‘Warrior Hindoo Monk’ sworn to ahimsa as a mahavrata being a sannyasin was never, never obsequious and servile like Gandhi. Churchill was considered the greatest wartime leader England ever had. Have any of our leaders bothered to see how forceful and politically incorrect he was in his speeches – there was none of the smarmy, ingratiating political correctness which is characteristic of India from independence – whether it was the Congress or now the BJP administration. 6
There is a saying in our sastras, “Veera bhojya Vasundhara”, roughly it is only the hero who enjoys / is fit for enjoying the earth. Our Indian leaders with the sole exception of Indira Gandhi have on the contrary consistently shown their hijrapan, whenever they have to stand up and be counted. Whatever we may say about the Congress Party, in the teeth of virulent pro-Pakistan hostility by Nixon and Kissinger Indira Gandhi created Bangladesh – thus permanently altering the power balance in South Asia.. Does anyone really think with all his vaunted RSS / Hindutva forcefulness, Modi will have the balls to take similar action if the opportunity presents itself??? I am not arguing for India becoming an irredentist Hindu state. As Praful Bidwai once wrote, the one thing he feared was India becoming hard-as-nails, ruthless, unforgiving military state like Israel. Of course, Bidwai is a well-known commie, sickular libtard of the ilk of Teesta Setalvad interested only in stomping on Hinduism. Without being jingoist, one can still behave with forceful dignity in a manner that the world will respect us and not treat us with contempt. Our Hindu leaders must take a vow to bury Gandhian servility and Nehruvian anti-Hindu, agnostic Fabian naïveté. Modi has most certainly not distinguished himself in his recent behavior on the global front. Let us never, never forget that India is a Hindu nation but a secular state just as America is equally a Christian nation but a secular state. There is no need to be apologetic that Bharatavarsha is a Hindu nation. Indian diplomats have to learn to develop balls in representing the country, c.f. the Chinese and Israelis. We have to bury Nehruvianism and Gandhianism. As soon as the world sees we mean business, it will shut up and give us our due instead of forever asking India to jump through hoops when it snaps its fingers. In closing as the ultimate real politick cynic, we should milk Gandhian shibboleths for all their worth. This is what one of the prior Popes being happily amoral said about the socalled non-violence of Jesus. Islam too has the well-known al taqiyyah tenet – lie to kafirs and mushrikeen to achieve the dominance and aims of Islam. But do our politicians, diplomats and representatives ever study these things besides cutting their own balls off to be court eunuchs when representing the country? Do they even know of the existence of Niti Sastra of Chanakya who created the great Maurya Empire? He existed millennia before Machiavelli, c.f. The Prince. Here is one of Chanakya’s tenets from the Niti Sastra: Asanthusta dvija nastha Santhustascha mahI-bhRitaH Salajja ganika nastha Nirlajjascha kulangana
असंतष्ु ट ब्राह्मण, संतष्ु ट राजा, लज्जा रखने वाली वेश्या, कठोर आचरण ना करने वाली गहृ िणी ये सभी लोग ववनाश को प्राप्त िोते िै.
A Brahmana without contentment is ruined, A Kshatriya / King with contentment is ruined, A Courtesan with (sexual) modesty is ruined, A Housewife without modesty is ruined. CHANAKYA, NITI SASTRA, CHAPTER 8, VERSE 18
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