In a
strange coincidence both the ‘secular’ leaders of the Left parties and
the ‘communal’ leaders of the BJP are elated over ADMK chief and TN
Chief Minister Jayalalitha’s speech read out by her party MP
M.Thambidurai at the ‘Mass Convention in Defence of Secularism and
Against the Offensive of Communal Forces’ held in New Delhi on October
30, convened by the Left parties. Jayalalitha has proved to be an eel
fish, which according to a Tamil saying, “shows its head to fishes and
tail to snakes and dupe both.
CPI national secretary D.Raja is elated that he has told Times of India “The TN CM not only sent her representative, but also her speech” and added that the Left parties had a fruitful association with ADMK chief Jayalalitha. “We fought the 2011 Assembly election together. She offered her support to us during the Rajya Sabha elections. Now, we are supporting ADMK for the Yercaud by-poll”.
“The announcement of Modi as BJP’s PM candidate is bound to divide the rightwing vote in the state. The right wing leaders who supported Jayalalitha in the past are now backing Modi. So she may play the secular card this time to her advantage,” an ADMK minister has told the daily.
“If Jayalalitha is sending a representative for an anti-communalism meet, it only means she would not prefer a pre-poll alliance with BJP,” a CPM leader has pointed out, of course unsure of her position in the post-poll scenario.
BJP’s Tamil Nadu unit president Pon Radhakrishnan has said the Lok Sabha elections were some months away and every party was keeping their options open. “We can’t read much into mere participation in a meeting. Left parties have lost much ground in Tamil Nadu. BJP is not looking for support of any leader or party”. But another BJP leader H.Raja, after the end of the convention, said Jayalalitha’s speech was just an ‘academic exercise’ but it underlined the stand that secularism did not mean ‘appeasement of one section and suppression of the other section’ (a stand of the BJP and Sangh parivar) and while “parties like the SP and JD(U) spoke about alliance formation, the ADMK was non-committal”.
The text of Jayalalitha’s speech for the convention must have been prepared by some RSS ideologue, as it states so many points that the Sangh parivar had been propagating for long. For instance she finds the roots of secularism in Vedas and stated,
“The idea of secularism is not recent. It has been a part of our culture since time immemorial. Acceptance of all religions and different ways of life is the cornerstone of our Indian culture, heritage and polity. The policy of tolerance, which constituted a historical basis of secularism,
‘Sarva Dharma Samabhava’ has its roots in the Vedas. In the Arthashastra, the line between politics and theology has been clearly defined. Its author, Kautilya, has classified polity as a separate branch of science”.
This is not only the interpretation of Saffron brigade but anti-thesis of the principles and ideology of the Dravidian movement and Thanthai Periyar’s teachings but also misinterpretation of the history of India and its religions. The history of the Hindu religion, based on Vedas and Upanishads, is soaked in the blood of intolerant persecutions of people of other faiths, like Jainism and Buddhism.
There is a profoundly disquieting myth about Hinduism which has been put about by its adherents so often and so successfully that it is in danger of crystallising into a truth – that of its essentially pluralistic and tolerant traditions. They put forth the argument that “There are thousands of sects within Hinduism, and violence between them is unknown.” This is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, dishonest. They appear to gloss over the troublesome fact that caste Hindus have been callous towards their own – the Dalits or the “Untouchables” as they were previously known. To argue that they are not a sect would be pure semantics.
There were nearly 10, 200 cases of recorded crimes against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe members in 2007 alone and we know that most crimes do not get recorded in India because of a corrupt and brutal police force; many Indians are still reeling from the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, one of several over the years; and in 2007 vicious attacks in Orissa left at least 60 Christians dead.
Far from being sprinkled with the magic powder of tolerance, all those religions that rubbed shoulders with Hinduism picked up its divisive caste system. The gift of the caste system by Hindus to well over one-fifth of the world’s population wipes out the beneficial impact of any wisdom in its philosophical traditions. Until caste is eradicated, anyone trying to claim the mantle of tolerance for Hinduism must be trying to hoodwink people and must be opposed.
In all certainty, the Communist parties committed to Marxist ideology of dialectical and historical materialism vis-à-vis the spiritualism propounded Indian context essentially in Vedas and Upanishads, cannot willingly coexist with the interpretation advanced by Jayalalitha.
Next is her dangerous interpretation of secularism in the modern context. She says,
“Secularism does not mean appeasing one section of Society while suppressing the other. It means engaging in a meaningful process of uplifting the economically and socially weaker sections so that an equal platform for opportunities of development is made feasible”.
”Appeasement of minorities and suppression of the majority” is the dogma of the RSS and its parivar including the BJP against secular forces, and anyone in the Saffron brigade will rattle this ‘mantra’ even if he is woken up from deep sleep. To the leaders of other parties including the Left parties who attended this convention would have been shocked and taken aback to hear one of the participants uttering these words from that platform.
Further developing her stand of “uplifting the economically and socially weaker sections so that an equal platform for opportunities of development is made feasible”, Jayalalitha says, “My Government is committed to the social and economic upliftment of the socially and economically disadvantaged sections of Society. By ensuring the protection of the economically vulnerable, we are able to usher in a renaissance that has become evident – a change that is here to stay”.
Precisely this clause of ‘socially and economically disadvantaged sections’, bringing in economic criterion for providing opportunities for development, i.e., in education and employment, that the Dravidian movement had been strongly resisting since its inception and hence Jayalalitha has also discarded of the ‘Dravidian’ mask she was wearing to hoodwink people of Tamil Nadu.
As a whole, hers was the voice of the RSS heard in the convention in defence of secularism!
CPI national secretary D.Raja is elated that he has told Times of India “The TN CM not only sent her representative, but also her speech” and added that the Left parties had a fruitful association with ADMK chief Jayalalitha. “We fought the 2011 Assembly election together. She offered her support to us during the Rajya Sabha elections. Now, we are supporting ADMK for the Yercaud by-poll”.
“The announcement of Modi as BJP’s PM candidate is bound to divide the rightwing vote in the state. The right wing leaders who supported Jayalalitha in the past are now backing Modi. So she may play the secular card this time to her advantage,” an ADMK minister has told the daily.
“If Jayalalitha is sending a representative for an anti-communalism meet, it only means she would not prefer a pre-poll alliance with BJP,” a CPM leader has pointed out, of course unsure of her position in the post-poll scenario.
BJP’s Tamil Nadu unit president Pon Radhakrishnan has said the Lok Sabha elections were some months away and every party was keeping their options open. “We can’t read much into mere participation in a meeting. Left parties have lost much ground in Tamil Nadu. BJP is not looking for support of any leader or party”. But another BJP leader H.Raja, after the end of the convention, said Jayalalitha’s speech was just an ‘academic exercise’ but it underlined the stand that secularism did not mean ‘appeasement of one section and suppression of the other section’ (a stand of the BJP and Sangh parivar) and while “parties like the SP and JD(U) spoke about alliance formation, the ADMK was non-committal”.
The text of Jayalalitha’s speech for the convention must have been prepared by some RSS ideologue, as it states so many points that the Sangh parivar had been propagating for long. For instance she finds the roots of secularism in Vedas and stated,
“The idea of secularism is not recent. It has been a part of our culture since time immemorial. Acceptance of all religions and different ways of life is the cornerstone of our Indian culture, heritage and polity. The policy of tolerance, which constituted a historical basis of secularism,
‘Sarva Dharma Samabhava’ has its roots in the Vedas. In the Arthashastra, the line between politics and theology has been clearly defined. Its author, Kautilya, has classified polity as a separate branch of science”.
This is not only the interpretation of Saffron brigade but anti-thesis of the principles and ideology of the Dravidian movement and Thanthai Periyar’s teachings but also misinterpretation of the history of India and its religions. The history of the Hindu religion, based on Vedas and Upanishads, is soaked in the blood of intolerant persecutions of people of other faiths, like Jainism and Buddhism.
There is a profoundly disquieting myth about Hinduism which has been put about by its adherents so often and so successfully that it is in danger of crystallising into a truth – that of its essentially pluralistic and tolerant traditions. They put forth the argument that “There are thousands of sects within Hinduism, and violence between them is unknown.” This is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, dishonest. They appear to gloss over the troublesome fact that caste Hindus have been callous towards their own – the Dalits or the “Untouchables” as they were previously known. To argue that they are not a sect would be pure semantics.
There were nearly 10, 200 cases of recorded crimes against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe members in 2007 alone and we know that most crimes do not get recorded in India because of a corrupt and brutal police force; many Indians are still reeling from the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, one of several over the years; and in 2007 vicious attacks in Orissa left at least 60 Christians dead.
Far from being sprinkled with the magic powder of tolerance, all those religions that rubbed shoulders with Hinduism picked up its divisive caste system. The gift of the caste system by Hindus to well over one-fifth of the world’s population wipes out the beneficial impact of any wisdom in its philosophical traditions. Until caste is eradicated, anyone trying to claim the mantle of tolerance for Hinduism must be trying to hoodwink people and must be opposed.
In all certainty, the Communist parties committed to Marxist ideology of dialectical and historical materialism vis-à-vis the spiritualism propounded Indian context essentially in Vedas and Upanishads, cannot willingly coexist with the interpretation advanced by Jayalalitha.
Next is her dangerous interpretation of secularism in the modern context. She says,
“Secularism does not mean appeasing one section of Society while suppressing the other. It means engaging in a meaningful process of uplifting the economically and socially weaker sections so that an equal platform for opportunities of development is made feasible”.
”Appeasement of minorities and suppression of the majority” is the dogma of the RSS and its parivar including the BJP against secular forces, and anyone in the Saffron brigade will rattle this ‘mantra’ even if he is woken up from deep sleep. To the leaders of other parties including the Left parties who attended this convention would have been shocked and taken aback to hear one of the participants uttering these words from that platform.
Further developing her stand of “uplifting the economically and socially weaker sections so that an equal platform for opportunities of development is made feasible”, Jayalalitha says, “My Government is committed to the social and economic upliftment of the socially and economically disadvantaged sections of Society. By ensuring the protection of the economically vulnerable, we are able to usher in a renaissance that has become evident – a change that is here to stay”.
Precisely this clause of ‘socially and economically disadvantaged sections’, bringing in economic criterion for providing opportunities for development, i.e., in education and employment, that the Dravidian movement had been strongly resisting since its inception and hence Jayalalitha has also discarded of the ‘Dravidian’ mask she was wearing to hoodwink people of Tamil Nadu.
As a whole, hers was the voice of the RSS heard in the convention in defence of secularism!
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