Hindu Dharma Newsletter Issue # 1

This post has been edited slightly and some links have been updated

Dear Friends,
Namaskar,
As some of you know, for quite some time now, I have been conscious of the need to enhance my awareness and knowledge about Ancient India (“Bharatvarsha”) and Hinduism and counter the apathy amongst fellow Hindus and the occasional falsehoods that are published in the media abroad (either due to ignorance, deliberate distortion or mis-interpretation of facts).

I have finally been spurred to do something by the monstrosity of Beslan.

This modest and occasional newsletter is an attempt at sharing some of my thoughts on current events (including excerpts from interesting articles and news stories on contemporary happenings) and their impact on Hinduism and Bharat. I will also include commentaries on events happening in India that I believe will shape our destinies this century.

Contributions, comments, suggestions and corrections gratefully received. If you have questions, I will do my best to answer them to the extent I can.

Do pass this along to friends and fellow Indians who may be interested OR send a reply with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject to let me know if you do not wish to receive this for any reason at any time.
I am fiercely protective of my own privacy and I will ensure that you are not treated any differently..
This list is anonymous and will remain so unless you wish to reveal your identity to the broader audience.
Dhanyawaad and Jai Hind,

hindu_dharma@yahoo.com

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To start off, a recent article in the Sunday Times from London [“Back off, British Muslims Are On Our Side”, Sunday Times, Aug 15th ’04, Ferdinand Mount] which included the following remark: “…And some of the worst communal violence of the past 10 years has been directed against Muslims, by Hindus in India and Christians in the former Yugoslavia”.
This typifies the sort of ill-informed, careless and flippant remarks that pass of as informed opinion in foreign media. Worse still, such comments perpetuate the propaganda and the fallacy of a violent Hindutva ideology.
Below excerpts from an email I sent to the Editor in response:
“…this comment very unfairly portrays Hindus as a violent community perpetrating atrocities on Muslims in India; Worse, it gets its facts wrong.
I suspect Mr. Mount had the riots in Godhra (2002) in the back of his mind when he made this comment. The facts of those riots are however only part of the story. It has now been established that about 900 people were killed in these riots of which more than a quarter were Hindus. If this is Mr. Mount’s illustration of “communal violence directed against Muslims by Hindus in India,” he should also note the unprecedented violence in Kashmir directed against Kashmiri Hindus which has left at least 2000 dead and several hundred thousands displaced.
Even at an extremely crude (and offensive) level of comparison, (such as numbers killed and families displaced,) the violence in Kashmir that has been going on for almost 15 years now**, makes every other communal incident in India pale into insignificance, And yet, the world knows little about it (and cares even less).
I wish respected columnists like Mr. Mount would do a bit more research before making flippant comments like these….”
* Source (amongst others): http://www.kashmir-information.com/Atrocities/index.html
** In fact the numbers far exceed the scale of violence and displacement in Kosovo which prompted NATO action in ’99

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Amidst the anguished commentaries post Beslan, it is interesting to see that even ardent and die-hard believers in “a peaceful Islam”, like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, have finally woken up to the fact that although all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims.
In her recent piece in the Daily Mail [Sept 7th ’04, titled (aptly), “Why we Muslims are now viewed as monsters…”], she finally used the “M-word” to identify the Chechen terrorists.
To quote, “…I cannot understand how a large group of Muslims could systematically lay down explosives in a school, kick or stab to death babies, violate, terrify and torture children, parents and teachers, and deny them water and sustenance”.
Note the use of the word “Muslims” in place of the watered down “Chechen rebels” or plain “terrorists” that some liberals favour.
Going on to display some remarkable foresight, she adds “…yet again, the world will perceive all Muslims as barbarians unfit to share the planet with the rest of humanity.” How true.
We need more of such statements. Outright condemnation is the only sensible reaction that Muslim leaders can have in this situation. There cannot be any justification, excuse or a qualified rejection (e.g. a recent statement issued by the Muslim Association of Britain that could not resist a “but” in the very first sentence condemning the mass murders in Beslan).
Separately, Abdul Rahman al-Rashed (Director of al-Arabiya television network and prominent Arab writer) has been widely quoted in the past few days as saying, “All world terrorists are Muslim…we must admit the scandalous facts…our terrorist sons are an end product of our corrupted culture” (from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s piece in the Daily Mail quoted earlier) .
The Times (Sept 7th, ’04, Editorial) quoted him as saying, “…terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women”
In another op-ed piece this week, Michael Gove makes a deeply disturbing comparison between Beslan and Belsen (in Ukraine where 90 children were “processed” by Nazi troops in August 1941) [“Beslan is not far from Belsen”, The Times, Sept 7th ’04].
He goes on to note the how the modern Chechen movement has more ideological affinity with contemporary fundamentalist practice rather than the historic Caucasian resistance – although this can be disputed – see for example Melanie Philips’ piece (excerpts below) in the Daily Mail which points to a long history of Islamic insurgency in Chechenya going back to 1858.
In a hard-hitting column in the Mail on Sept 6th, ’04 re. Beslan, Melanie Philips provides strong arguments to support her view that this atrocity is part of the global jihad being waged against all infidels – Americans, Europeans, Russians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or moderate Muslims – in order to re-establish the medieval Islamic global empire.
She accurately points out the flaw in the argument which some Muslims use to explain the upsurge in terrorist violence – namely the war on Iraq. “…It is argued though that the war on Iraq has merely recruited yet more enraged Muslims to Al Qaeda’s cause. But it was the Al Qaeda that attacked the West, not the other way round…”
One thing that 9/11 and the atrocities that have followed since (including the kidnappings and shootings of innocents in Iraq, the blasts in Madrid and Bali, the deaths in Beslan) have done is to open the eyes of Western (including the US) governments to the evil and the scourge of Islamic terrorism.
But we now need to go a step further.
It is time to stop blaming Al Qaeda – for the origins of this evil go far deeper than this shadowy organization.
They lie in the Mullahs and Maulvis trained in Wahhabi orthodoxy; they lie in the Saudi-money that funds weapons of this war; they lie in the drug trade along the Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan triangle; they lie in the lawless frontier provinces of Pakistan; they lie in the Pakistan-supported terrorist training camps in Kashmir; they lie in the millions of dollars of CIA funding that went to support a Saudi businessman who had got religion in Afghanistan and above all, they lie in the seething cauldron of hatred against the infidels in the most inflamed regions of the world today – Kashmir, Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa.
And this is a poison that is now finding roots amongst the increasingly vocal and assertive Muslim immigrants in Europe.

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In the meantime, the latest census from India gives credence to the widely held belief of Muslims out-producing Hindus (and practically everyone else) in India.
While the Muslims saw an increase in their growth rate from 34.5% to 36.0%, the Hindu growth rate went further down from 22.8% (already considerably lower than the same number for Muslims) to 20.0%.
Then, in a feat that would have made Orwell proud, the Census Commission did a remarkable volte-face..
From [Rediff.com, Sept 9th ’04, news story, “It is ‘adjustment time’ at census office”, ],
“Under attack over its methodology that reflected in ‘high growth’ figures of Muslim population, the Census Commission on Thursday excluded the data of Jammu and Kashmir and Assam in the 2001 Census figures to show that the Muslim growth rate has actually declined over 1991 figures…. Denying that the revision of data was done ‘under pressure’, Census Commissioner J K Banthia said there were several ways to interpret data and ‘the simplest is not to make any interpolation’.”
Amazing – and almost farcical were it not for the profound implications of these statistics on long-term demographics.
For quick reference, here is the latest breakdown:
Hindus: 827.5m – 80.5%
Muslims: 138.2m – 13.4%
Christians: 24m – 2.3%
Sikhs: 19.2m – 1.9%

While on this, check out this article, “Are the Hindus Destined to Become an Extinct Race?” by Ishani Chowdhury. It is thoroughly researched and extensively supported by footnotes. Some excerpts below:
“Pakistan’s Hindu population, once numbering 15% has been reduced to about 1%. In a recent Indian Express article, the remaining few are adopting Christian names so as to escape persecution by the Muslims6.
India Today’s November 8th (2000) article details the life of Pakistani Hindus who are crossing the border to settle in India, all due to sustained harassment by Muslims7. Bangladesh has successfully driven its once 35% Hindu population at partition to a mere 10% now. Conceivably, by 2050 Bangladesh will achieve the status of Pakistan: no significant Hindu population.
Nepal, the only Hindu kingdom in the world, has not escaped either. The Christian population, which was almost nil in 1960, has increased by leaps and bounds. Billions of dollars have been pumped in for conversion activities. Christians are asking everyone, via the Internet, to save the “lost Hindu” souls of Nepal. Islamic madrasas are cropping up in the border districts. The Muslim population of 2.5% in 1981 has increased to 3.5% in ten years. In December 1998, Muslims held rallies in Janakpur, Sita’s birthplace, calling for the conversion of Nepal to an Islamic state. It is indeed apt to ask if Nepal, in effect, is a Hindu state.8″

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Against this backdrop, in a sideshow of their own, the BJP, within the course of 24 hours, once again demonstrated the profound internal confusion over its ideology.
Even as Venkaiah Naidu was voicing some of our gravest fears, “(the increased number of Muslims is a matter of) grave concern for all those who think of India’s unity and integrity in the long term…We are strongly in favour of an even and uniform adoption of population control measures by people belonging to different communities. …Any imbalance in this regard is not a healthy trend” , he was countered the very next day by the “official” BJP line which blandly stated that the party is concerned about the population growth overall (and not just the growth in Muslim population) and at a national level. What a shame.
[See “Indian Muslim community growing” at ],
One point that has gone un-noticed in the whole brouhaha over the impact that inclusion of J&K figures has had on the census is this:
If the average birth rate of Muslims which is 36.0%, decreases to 29.3% when one excludes J&K, can you imagine what the average figure must be for J&K? I don’t have all the numbers but obviously the % in J&K must have been large enough to pull the entire national average for Muslims up by a staggering 7% points! Think about it.

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Finally, my favourite this month is Sir Vidia Naipaul. In a recent interview to Tatler, he once again proved that even at 72, his mind is sharp as a rapier. From a Sunday Times article referring to the interview [“Naipaul lashes out at ‘multi-culti’ Britain”, John Elliott Sunday Times. Sept 5th ’04]…
In a magazine interview to be published this week, the author, who writes under the name V S Naipaul… accuses Saudi Arabia of “wickedness”, of financing terrorism and filling up brothels and gambling dens around the world.”
He then topped this by not mincing any words in identifying the source of all the money that funds these kind of outrages, “All this comes from Saudi Arabian money,” he says. “I don’t know who we are kidding. Here is this war on terror and it is being subsidised by an ally.”
Is President Bush listening or is there a sinister conspiracy at work?
In remarks likely to anger the Saudi Arabians even more, Naipaul adds: “It (Saudi Arabia) has contributed nothing to the world — it has just filled the gambling dens and brothels. They are not fine people, actually.”
Well said – and that has to be the last word for this edition.
Jai Hind
P.S. Naipaul, who was knighted in 1990, has a penchant for controversy. Three years ago he called the Taliban “vermin” when he backed the war in Afghanistan to oust the fundamentalist regime.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks he argued that Islam destroyed the cultures of peoples who converted to it, comparing its “calamitous effect” on the world with colonialism.
(from the same Sunday Times news story by John Elliot)

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P.P.S. Did you know that the vast majority of the rich literature that comprises the Vedas, which have survived for over 3500 years, still remains un-translated in any major European language? Will the Government ever do something – or will we have to wait for another Max Mueller?

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