An Article..

January 1, 2006

Pranam. An article from another group... Ur comments, pls.

With Love

Shankaree

*White, Slav and a steadfast Hindu*

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL

*[ **Friday, December 30, 2005** **08:53:44 pm* *TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]*

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LONDON: Thirty-five years after a fateful clandestine meeting in Moscow

between ISKCON founder Swami Prabhupada and a young white Russian who was to

receive the dangerously secret gift of a banned Bhagvad Gita, take the name

Ananda Shanti Das, and build from scratch a 100,000-strong community of

native Krishna bhakts, the Slavonic Hindu may be emerging as the 21st

century's most potent symbol of too-successfully spreading the word beyond

Indian shores.

A gathering campaign by British parliamentarians is set to tell an

astonished world that Russia's Hindus – white, Slav and steadfast in their

faith – are living symbols of state oppression in a country counted as one

of the world's eight most advanced and industrialised economies.

The campaign in the British parliament, led by UK Indian Labour Party MP

Ashok Kumar and spearheaded by the umbrella Hindu Forum of Britain (HFB),

will claim that Russian Hindus continue to be denied the right to build a

temple and have been left without electricity, heating and water in their

freezing makeshift Moscow temple.

The campaign is set to unveil a devastating saga spanning nearly four

decades in which Russian Hindus are alleged to have been variously vilified

by the Soviet state, the Russian Orthodox church, Russian Islamist and

Jewish leaders and far-right nationalist politicians such as Vladimir

Zhirinovsky.

The British campaign is to be kickstarted when Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of

Moscowand allegedly Slavic Hinduism's most implacable foe, arrives in

London early next month.

So far, there has been no official response to the allegations from

Luzhkov's office or President Vladimir Putin's government.

But the new campaign, which aims to harness the collective might of British

and European political, press and public opinion to recall Moscow to a sense

of its human rights obligations, is thought to be dangerously poised to undo

Russia's attempts to gain global legitimacy even as it controversially takes

over presidency of the G8.

The British campaign, which is bolstered by European and Australian Hindu

organisations, comes exactly 25 years after the then deputy KGB chief Semen

Tsvigun first exhorted the Soviet Union to recognise and stamp on the three

greatest threats to the state – "Western culture, rock and roll and Krishna".

Commentators and academics, including Edwin Bacon of Birmingham University's

Centre for Russian and East European Studies, say the Russian campaign

against the indigenous spread of Hinduism is part of a " broad line taken by

the state certainly since the mid-1990s ... of encouraging 'traditional'

religions, especially Russian Orthodoxy, whilst putting in place

restrictions on other groups deemed non-traditional".

So great was the Russian sense of threat that a 1994 council of Russian

Orthodox bishops warned that "the teachings of the Bhagvad Gita are a false

religion" and that "neo-pagan, pseudo-Christian, occultist faiths (such as

Hinduism) are a threat to the unity of national consciousness and cultural

identity of Russia".