The Government of India has been making a lot of Hoop La and celebrating the success of NRIs. Amartya Sen is celebrated since he has a Nobel, Chawla for being an astronaut, Swaraj Paul for being super rich. And the list is getting longer by the day. How then can the Government forget those in the middle east, in Fiji, Srilanka or Malaysia? Because they have problems? Because they do not have dollars to throw?
Govt shuns Malaysia Hindu rights leader
New Delhi: Having expressed its concern about the alleged discrimination of ethnic Indians in Malaysia officially, the government on Thursday chose not to meet P. Waytha Moorthy, head of the Hindu Rapid Action Force, even as senior BJP leaders met him.
Waytha Moorthy, in Delhi to garner support from the government, failed to meet the Prime Minister, external affairs minister and senior foreign ministry officials but did get an audience with the BJP’s LK Advani and Jaswant Singh.
He told them that around 10,000 Hindu temples have been demolished in Malaysia in the last 50 years, adding: “Hindus are being stripped of their dignity and self-respect” by this vindictive action. He also said there is a steady attempt to “Islamise” Malaysia’s multi-religious population and Shariat rulings are being made binding on non-Muslims”.
The BJP parliamentary party later issued a statement condemning the Malaysian government’s policy on ethnic Indians.
Dear Col Rama,
Thank you for this post.
Unfortunately, the current Congress government somehow does not understand that being Secular does not mean being against Hindu cultural ethos. All their actions, and their pseudo-secularist followers, specifically the popular English media in India, try and dissociate Indian cultural elements from Hinduism.
They live in contradiction all the time, by denying spirituality and dissociating the cultural Hindu/Indian-spirituality from day-to-day life.
I was reading a recent magazine called Hindu Voice recently, which had a story on NDTV defending Smt. Leela Samson, the Director of Kalakshetra, who removed idols of Vinayaka (Ganesha), among other steps, from the academy. They defended the Director by supporting her version that Kalakshetra, which taught Bharatnatyam, and other arts, was an institution of arts and not religion.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, put it aptly, by asking, whether ‘Bharatnatyam can be separated from Hinduism’, and this quote was accompanies by two photographs of a Bhartnatyam dancer in a Shiva’s cosmic dance pose, which is the popular Natraja image that we know of.
Incidentally, the same Natraja is installed at the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva (CERN): http://www.fritjofcapra.net/shiva.html.
Wonder how the Congress or Ms. Leela Samon see this installation of Shiva at CERN, and whether it shakes them out of their wits. 🙂
I must add to this. An article titled “Sparking a Hindu renaissance” (and I believe recently a book) by Dr. Subramaniam Swamy has been very enlightening. The partial article is available at: http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/oct2004/debate.php.