ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

The Rediff Special/ Virendra Kapoor

It is no surprise that the present-day drum-beaters of the Hindu religion have failed to produce one Mother Teresa

President K R Narayanan spoke for the entire nation when he condemned the 'barbarous killing' of the Australian missionary, Graham Stewart Stains, and his two sons in Orissa. The horrendous deed belonged to the 'world's inventory of black deeds.' It was a 'monumental aberration' in India's long tradition of tolerance. Strong words, but nonetheless necessary given the enormity of the hideous crime. A man who had given practically his entire adult life to the service of the poor and the sick did not deserve to meet his end in this gory manner.

Stains had sought to serve his faith by caring after the leprosy patents in the remotest parts of Baripada district of Orissa. His killers, in a grossly twisted reading of their religious duties, sought to serve theirs by taking recourse to murder and mayhem. Even God is unforgiving of sins committed in his name. All those who led the macabre dance of death in Orissa last week must be dealt with sternly under the law.

The nation's conscience has been jolted by the cold-blooded murder of the Stains. Naryananan, therefore, did well to cast away the tradition of Presidential silence even on such grave occasions in order to issue a brief though appropriately strong statement of condemnation. And in so doing he broke away from the recent practice by some of his predecessors in Rashtrapati Bhavan who had felt obliged to maintain a stiff upper lip even in the face of extreme provocation. The manner in which the draconian provisions of the Emergency were imposed on the entire nation by a morally weakened Indira Gandhi in collusion with a cowardly Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, who then tenanted Rashtrapati Bhavan, will remain etched in the annals of independent India as one of the blackest deeds.

Of course, the roasting alive of over 4,000 Sikhs under his very nose in the national capital by Congress goons must rank as the worst case of Presidential pusillanimity. It is public knowledge that the then President Giani Zail Singh was greatly distressed and pained at the pogrom against Sikhs obliquely sanctioned by the very man whom he had installed as prime minister in complete breach of the established drill for ensuring orderly succession only a few hours earlier and that he himself had felt insecure and unsafe in his gilded quarters at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

The Giani had kept quiet at the pain of jeopardising his own life and in the face of extreme outrage against his own co-religionists. The nation was benumbed by that macabre dance of death in the very heart of the capital conducted with the tacit approval of those who were supposed to be the guardians of law and order.

Mercifully now the President seems to be under no such constraints. He is free to give vent to the nation's outrage against the triple murder in Orissa. And as was only to be expected the prime minister unhesitatingly joined him in decrying the perpetrators of the foulest of foul deeds and in seeking salutary punishment for them. Violence, particularly against those engaged in the service of god, of any denomination, cannot but be most reprehensible.

Men of religion are per se supposed to be men of peace. The distortion of religious values alone causes one to burn down innocent children and raze churches and chapels to the ground, and pull down mandirs and masjids. Proselytism is alien to Hindu religion. A religion so magnanimous in spirit, so ancient in time and so catholic in practice that it readily embraces you even when you openly disown it cannot be in any serious danger from the presence of one Stains.

A religion that has survived the onslaught of a series of aggressors and self-avowed proselytisers cannot be so fickle as to be threatened by the presence of a couple of thousand foreign missionaries. A religion which demands no mandatory visits to the temple, no obeisance before any stone or mud idol, and no reading of any holy book cannot be in danger merely because some cash-rich missionaries have taken it upon themselves to spread the Christian word among the poorest of the poor in India.

Precisely because they are poor and deprived, they are an attraction to the missionaries. If the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its various offshoots, be it the Bajrang Dal or the newly-formed Hindu Manch in Gujarat, find the presence of missionaries unacceptable, they will have to take up charitable work, nurse the sick to health and tend to the needs of the leprosy afflicted and generally provide rudimentary education in order to help the tribals of Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh or Orissa to eke their own living.

Eventually, the issue is economic and not religious. The missionaries backed by the superior financial backing of charitable institutions back home in the Western world are able to establish their humanitarian credentials with the innocent folks who in any case have not much use for the mumbo-jumbo associated with Hindu religious practices.

It is therefore no surprise that the present-day drum-beaters of the Hindu religion have failed to produce one Mother Teresa. Charity is foreign to them. Fellow-feeling, community service, sharing one's extreme good fortune with those in need of succour are values associated more with the Christian world than with the Hindus.

Why go far? A few days ago, in the heart of the nation's capital, a young brat belonging to the family of a former naval chief who had raked in the moolah by becoming a commission agent in the sale of arms, mowed down under the wheels of his gleaming new BMW costing over Rs 5 million six hapless people after one particularly drunken binge. All six were poor and helpless. One of the lucky ones who survived the mayhem under the wheels is now recovering in a New Delhi hospital. Barring a non-governmental organisation, no one among the capital's vastly wealthy classes -- I hate to call this class elite -- has had the decency to spare a moment for this victim of the heartlessness and apathy of a very wealthy Indian brat.

In the relentless pursuit of manna and more manna, the Hindus, especially those who fund organisations like the VHP, have lost their soul. Mammon is the new Hindu god.

Wealthy Christians, especially in the affluent Western world, leave a part of their earnings for their Church and favourite charity. The Western missionaries working in India have a well-oiled machinery back home which keeps them in good nick even in the remotest parts of rural India. It may be that while donations in Indian temples go to line the pockets of individual priests, Christians ensure that their charity dollars find the right target. Thus, you had a well-provided Stains family complete with a functional home and all the necessary aids for a reasonably comfortable living doing missionary work among the tribals of Keonjhar district for over three decades.

This is not to suggest that the Stains family made no sacrifice in the service of the cause they had embraced, but only to point out the stark contrast under which a Hindu priest would operate should he at all agree to work for the poor and the destitute in the remotest parts of the country.

The point is that the VHP and its brand of militant Hinduism ill-serves the cause of Hindus. Instead of railing against other religions and their followers, Ashok Singhal and Co would do well to look inwards and try to rid Hindu samaj of the multifarious ills that have become endemic to it.

Greed, selfishness, deceit, falsehood, crass materialism are increasingly the hallmarks of Hindus. Ritualism has replaced religion. Hinduism is all about tolerance and fellow-feeling. And not about violence either in deed or thought.

The best bulwark against conversions of Hindus into Isayees or Mussalmans, the VHP would do well to remember, is literacy and economic well-being. If the VHP undertakes an adult literacy campaign in Keonjahar, Bastar, Dangs et al it would be better placed to defend the Hindu cause than if it were to merely continue to muddy the waters by spewing hate and poison against real or imagined enemies.

The Rediff Specials

Tell us what you think of this feature