Why then did he suggest that his Cabinet was more coherent
Faith does not make us communal, human nature does. A politician has as much right to be a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian as any other citizen. Any doubt about an aspirant to power can be cleared by a simple question: is he committed to sarvadharmasambhava or not? If the answer is unclear, vote for someone else.There is no need to criticise Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism or any other religions here, please. Let’s maintain a sense of perspective. Umno that is the root of all evils. It’s Umno that are the real religious deviants. It’s Umno that are playing dangerous race and religion games with the population.
Najib has been too awfully quiet even when we can see the economy and racial harmony spiralling downwards at breakneck speed.’I hope Najib will not allow his people to ridicule him as a deaf and dumb PM later on. As captain of the ‘submarine’ called 1Malaysia, Najib must show leadership. Keeping silent is not an option.Let those who want to pray, do so; let those who want to watch television instead, switch on. Faith is a freedom. Let us celebrate this freedom with a smile, not a snarl.Can the prime minister of 1Malaysia, Najib Abdul Razak, say something? People used to ridicule former prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, or Pak Lah, as the sleeping prime minister without understanding
Interfaith relationships can only be built if people of different faiths are allowed to “come into contact and appreciate” one another’s religions, said a senior clergyman.
Council of Churches Malaysia secretary general Reverend Dr Hermen Shastri said events in the last few weeks showed that religious intolerance is eating at the country’s peace and unity.
“All through the years in my experience here and overseas, one of the most meaningful things has been when people of one faith have offered their sacred space for people of another faith,” he said in statement today.
“And by doing that they did not feel that their place was desecrated. In fact it was a testimony of the spiritual generosity of their faith,” the Council of Churches Malaysia general-secretary noted.
Dr Shastri was commenting on the recent incident in Johor where a surau was allegedly used by a group of Buddhists from Singapore.
The Johor religious authorities may demolish the surau as it was used by non-Muslims for religious activities.
Dr Shastri shared an example of religious tolerance which he experienced recently in Indonesia while attending an international interfaith conference.
“For one of the sessions, we were taken to the main mosque in Jakarta and invited to the main prayer hall to help us observe Muslim prayers. After that we were taken to a room within the mosque compound where each could engage in their own prayers and for further sessions.
Years ago, when Kanti Lakra converted from Hinduism to Christianity and adopted the surname Kerketta, little must her family have realized that the consequences would follow her to the grave.
Kanti’s body lay at her home in Kesura village in Hazaribag for more than 36 hours as first a Hindu crematorium and then four churches refused her husband to perform the last rites. The 60-year old had died of kidney failure on August 12 at the Hazaribag sadar hospital.
DSP Ratneshwar Thakur said Kanti’s husband, Shiv Prakash Ram, first decided to bury the body as per Christian tradition at the village burning ghat because there was no cemetery there. However, the villagers stopped him from digging a grave. The DSP said they told Ram that they could only allow a Hindu funeral at the ghat and advised him to cremate his wife as he was the only Christian in the village.
“We can’t allow burial of a body in the burning ghat although Ram could have carried out the last rites as per Hindu norms,” said Balram Mahato, the village head.
Ram then decided to bury her body in his own orchard, but this, too, was opposed by Hindus. “The villagers refused to let Ram use his residential plot as a graveyard because the house has an old Shiva temple,” a police source said.
Ram finally approached the cops and met officer Arvind Kumar Singh and a police team visited the village to help him find a suitable space for the grave. But the team failed to convince the villagers and the police had to approach higher authorities in the district for a solution.
Finally, DSP Thakur and a magistrate were sent to the village as the body required to be disposed at the earliest. They asked four churches, Church of North India, Gossner Evangelical Lutheran Church, Society Of God and All God Church, in Hazaribag and adjoining areas for space in any of their cemeteries, but all four disallowed burial of a person who had converted to Christianity.
“The family adopted Christianity under CNI and we cannot allow him to use our graveyard for burial of his wife,” said Mukund Barla, pastor of GEL Church. When Ram approached CNI, authorities there refused as well saying she belonged to a different village.
After 36 hours, the administration found a plot on a government land far from the Kesura burning ghat. Thakur said the body was buried by Christian tradition on Wednesday amid strong police presence.
A mere handful of professions are honoured with an honorific that survives beyond the office. Priests, judges, armed services officers, professors and doctors, of both the medical and academic disciplines: that’s about it. Journalists, even editors, and politicians, even cabinet ministers, would invite ridicule if they handed out visiting cards marked ‘Editor X’ or ‘Cabinet Minister Y’. Indians are, at best, ambivalent about media and politics. They respect our guardians of law, knowledge and security. There is a new tendency among former envoys to add ‘Ambassador’ before their name, a practice borrowed from America, but this is a title snatched from vanity rather than bestowed by popular acclaim.
Ego sometimes persuades a pompous politician to flaunt a bogus ‘Dr’ on his nameplate. This is not a reward for academic brilliance but an upgrade to a peacock feather, the ‘honorary doctorate’, a worthless piece of paper handed out by an institution desperate for attention. However, this does not matter too much, since we do not expect a high level of honesty from our politicians. Only two letters separate use from abuse, so there will always be a quack preening himself in the garb of a doctor. But when a person held in high esteem dilutes the trust reposed in him, it affects the collective reputation of the brotherhood.Justice M S Liberhan did not need 17 years and a thousand pages to tell us what has been public knowledge since December 6, 1992. The Babri mosque was not torn down in the dark of night. It was brought down slowly, stone by stone, in Sunday sunlight, before hundreds of journalists, to the cheers of countless thousands of kar sewaks in and around Ayodhya. The mosque was not dynamited in a minute; it was demolished by crowbar and shovel.
The PM was either unavailable or, worse, asleep. It was a lie. Rao’s inaction and Chavan’s collaboration were deliberate.
When logic snaps, rational discourse stumbles. Why is it perfectly acceptable to applaud a Muslim nationalist, but denigrate a Hindu nationalist? Either both terms are right, or both wrong.
Mahatma Gandhi gave “Muslim nationalism” institutional credibility when, in the fractured decade after the Khilafat movement, Muslims who believed in him formed the All-India Nationalist Muslim Party on 27 and 28 July 1929, with M A Ansari at the helm. Our present vice president, Hamid Ansari, belongs to this family.
Gandhi was father of an ideology that knit the groundwork of modern India. His moral compass was set on a firm axis: politics without religion was immoral. Among the first to be impressed by this proposition were the maulvis who later banded under Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind ; their alliance would flower during the non-cooperation struggle. Hindu and Muslim are birth identities; they do not change, unless one becomes an atheist. But nationalism, a political concept, can vary. Gandhi did not. He believed that India must be a land where all faiths co-existed as equals, guided by sarvadharmasambhava. Gandhi’s nationalism was the antithesis of communalism. He was distressed to the point of agony by the slow drift within the Muslim elite towards separatism. This culminated in partition when Jinnah reduced “Muslim nationalism” to “Muslim nation” . It was a visible reduction, philosophically, intellectually, and finally, geographically. Gandhi promised Muslims honour and equality in a nation from Khyber to Chittagong ; Jinnah’s prescription eventually reduced Pakistan to a sliver of land on either side of the Indus, wracked by fundamentalism and riven by insecurity.
The difference between “Hindu nationalism” and “Hindu nation” is equally uncomplicated. If anyone wants to be a Hindu nationalist, offer a warm welcome ; if the call is for a Hindu nation, point out that religion is ineffective as a basis for nationhood. Pakistan is a good example. Indeed, if religion worked as a glue, why on earth would there be 22 Arab nations? Hindu extremism existed in Gandhi’s time, but it never got much traction beyond the fringe; and it could not, ipso facto, seek secession.
Gandhi would have been puzzled by any suggestion that Hinduism was an obstacle to secularism; his Hinduism was an inexhaustible well of brotherhood , just as his colleague Maulana Azad offered Islam as a superb rationale for inter-faith harmony. Both used a faith-influenced dialectic almost unconsciously . Hindu-majority India is not secular because Gandhi was secular; Gandhi was secular because India is secular.
Gandhi was proud to be a Hindu. He promised Ram Rajya, not some variation of a fashionable western dictum, whether Marxist or Fabian. Ram Rajya was a metaphor for prosperity and equality, not subjugation. Gandhi did not shy away from caste. His tongue only partly in cheek, he told the Shafi faction of the Muslim League on 22 February 1931: “Brethren, I am a bania, and there is no limit to my greed. It had always been my dream and my heart’s desire to speak not only for 21 crores but for 30 crores of Indians.” He was answering the charge that he spoke only for Hindus.
Nor did Gandhi’s disciple and heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, think that the prefix ‘Pandit’ would stain his status as a secular icon. Privately, Nehru was more agnostic than believer, but learnt from Gandhi that he could not sneer at, let alone abandon, his Brahmin identity. India is a land of the faithful. Those who today feel ‘Pandit’ might be an embarrassment have not seen Durga Puja in secular Calcutta.
Strangely, those Muslim League stalwarts who were determined to parade every mark of their religious identity as a fundamental right, spread the canard that Gandhi’s Ram Rajya would enslave Muslims . We see variations all the time, among far lesser beings, as vocal networks control debate, and stoke a fear psychosis that suits those who think the Muslim vote is better sought through fear than development.
The words of this column will make no difference. A government can reduce the past to rubble as easily as an Opposition party can erase a centuries-old mosque. My apologies for a rare detour into the personal, but this is a rare moment. I was a minor part of the Rao government and resigned on the night of December 6 since the stone wall constructed around the prime minister’s house had become impervious to anything except sycophancy. Words demand a different kind of loyalty, and one was relieved to return to the world of words.
Sharad Pawar, then defence minister, showed a filmed record of December 6 to an invited group at the home of a party MP a few days later. The Liberhan Commission could have completed half its report by taking a look at that film. The media was equally comprehensive in its coverage of the brutal riots that followed: The Sri Krishna report has done far greater justice to the truth in its findings on the Maharashtra riots, so much so that there is all-party collusion on its non-implementation. There was only one question trapped in doubt: What was prime minister P V Narasimha Rao doing while Babri was destroyed on the longest day of the last two decades? Why was home minister S B Chavan, father of the present Maharashtra chief minister, immobile, inscrutable and stolid?
Liberhan protects Rao with an equally conscious fudge, shuffling the blame on to unspecified intelligence agencies. Everyone knew what was going on, IB officers better than most. Rao called a Cabinet meeting only in the evening, when there was nothing left to be saved — not even reputation. By this time, fires of hatred were lighting up the dusk of Mumbai and dozens of cities across the nation. An elaborate programme of blame, reward and punishment was put into place. Those (including bureaucrats and journalists) who acquiesced in Rao’s charade were rewarded; Congress Muslims got a bonus for silence. Rao remained in power till 1996, but he neither ruled nor lived in peace.Shock raced through Delhi when word filtered through that an assault had begun in Ayodhya. Phone calls began to pour into the prime minister’s residence in the hope that he would use the authority of the state to uphold the rule of law and fulfil a political and moral obligation. There was a monstrous response from the prime minister’s personal secretary. The PM was either unavailable or, worse, asleep. It was a lie. Rao’s inaction and Chavan’s collaboration were deliberate.Sharad Pawar, then defence minister, showed a filmed record of December 6 to an invited group at the home of a party MP a few days later. The Liberhan Commission could have completed half its report by taking a look at that film. The media was equally comprehensive in its coverage of the brutal riots that followed: The Sri Krishna report has done far greater justice to the truth in its findings on the Maharashtra riots, so much so that there is all-party collusion on its non-implementation. There was only one question trapped in doubt: What was prime minister P V Narasimha Rao doing while Babri was destroyed on the longest day of the last two decades? Why was home minister S B Chavan, father of the present Maharashtra chief minister, immobile, inscrutable and stolid?
