Hijacking India's History

[Jagat]

<center><h2>Hijacking India's History</h2>

By KAI FRIESE</center>

 

NEW DELHI -- New York Times, Dec. 30, 2002

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/30/opinion/30FRIE.html

 

While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men who run India are busy rewriting it. Their efforts, regrettably, will only be bolstered by the landslide victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat.

 

The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands.

 

Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

 

The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several novel chapters to Indian history.

 

Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years. (The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.) We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" — the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. — that appears without a single date.

 

The council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual Quotient," of gifted students in addition to their I.Q. Details of this plan are not elaborated upon; the council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only that "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted will have to be devised."

 

More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the leading lights of the B.J.P., justified this atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost their lives.

 

The ruling party's subsequent election campaign was conducted against the rather literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. The murdered Muslims were not accorded the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success.

 

The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., along with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but "social service organizations" that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.)

 

In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the uncompromisingly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that "Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of the Aryans." They will learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners."

 

But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale were books that show humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script: they are of Vedic origin.

 

After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old. They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion? About Hinduism, Christianity?

 

They were silent for a few seconds — until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating them."

 

He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.

 

 

Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.

[Guest guest]

 

Teachers and academics protested loudly.

 

 

 

What are they protesting, the Truth?

[Jahnava Nitai Das]

That line is just propaganda. Out of the millions of teachers in India, how many were out protesting? In percentage terms, none. This reporter was paid 1000 rupees, and he wrote an article against the BJP.

 

It's good to see India finally throwing away the British authored history and recompiling it based on more traditional sources.

[Avinash]

The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

 

The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was added in the revised version. But it was not emphasised that the person who killed him was a Hindu.

According to the head of the committee, it will be bad to emphasised that he was a Hindu. He says that if it is said that the murderer of Gandhi was a Hindu, then one must mention that the murderer of Mrs. Indira Gandhi was a Sikh. These will give rise of religious intolerance.

[Jahnava Nitai Das]

Even in the daily newspapers the religions of criminals are not published to avoid community backlashes.

 

For example, every day in the paper you will find some article saying "In Kashmir, members of one religious community were attacked and killed by members of another religious community..." Of course, it is obviously that Muslim terrorists were attacking non-muslims. But the papers choose not to publish this.

 

This is a daily occurence.

[Avinash]

It is proper not to mention the religion of criminals, otherwise it may lead to fight between two religious communities.

[Jahnava Nitai Das]

This is especially necessary in India where there is already so much religious and caste hatred. Rogues manipulate these sentiments to bring about violence in parts of the country that would otherwise be peaceful.

 

[madhav]

Intolerance towards the six types of aatataayies is dharma.

 

To tolerate aatataayaies is adharma

because it encourages them to do more sin/harm towards the society.

 

Jai Sri Krishna!

 

 

[karthik_v]

I am surprised that an American newspaper should lend itself to such blatant politicisation. It is certain that Kai Friese didn't pen this article. It is a mere rehash, often verbatim, of the hate campaign lauched by the leftist historians of India. This articles is also full of several factual errors, a few of which I would point out.

 

 

Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization (IVC), which is generally agreed to have appeared around 4600 B.C. and to have lasted for about 2,000 years.

 

 

Indus valley civilization, in its mature phase, lasted between 2600 BCE and 2000 BCE. A few sites have flourished from 3200 BCE. NYT has been very careless in publishing this without even checking the basic facts.

 

Of the 2800 sites, in India and Pakistan together, discovered so far, which belong to the IVC, over 2000 are located in India. This includes all important port sites like Lothal. The oldest agricultural site in the world, which is again from IVC, is also located in Kalibangan, India. Discoveries and digging in the past 4 decades have shown that a bulk of these sites, 70% of the total of IVC, are located on the banks of the dried up Saraswati, and only the rest on the banks of Sindhu or Indus. So, is it wrong to call this civilization Saraswati Sindhu Civilization (SSC)?

 

 

The all-important addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central to Hindu myth, is meant to show that Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization.

 

 

Another ill informed and ideological observation. The paleo channels of the dried up Saraswati have been traced by Indian geologists entirely following its description in Rk veda and puranas like Mahabharat. Rk veda describes this river as Naditama or the great river, and also provides many interesting geological pointers about the swallowing up and dessication of its tributaries. Mahabharat provides several such pointers, which were used by the geologists to reconstruct and tap the paleo channels. In the desert state of Rajasthan, where the Saraswati flowed till it dried up entirely in 1900 BCE, experimental projects to sink bore wells into the paleo channels to supply water have been highly successful. Do we need any more proof that Saraswati is not a mere "myth"? Now a full fledged project has been kicked off by the BJP government to tap this channel entirely, and provide water to this desert state.

 

 

We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization" &#8212; the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. &#8212; that appears without a single date.

 

 

The discovery of Saraswati has demolished all those silly dates that the invasionists proposed all along. Now we know scientifically that Saraswati was completely dried up by 1900 BCE, so how can the Aryan authors of the Rk veda describe it as naditama, if they entered India only in 1700 BCE? What is wrong in revising such wrong notions? We don't yet know of the actual date the vedas were compiled, so why should the schools hazard a guess? Archeological discoveries of the past decade have thrown up umpteen vedic fire altars in SSC, which clearly confirms that the vedas were authored before that era. What is wrong if this truth is made known to the students?

 

 

More recent history, of course, is not covered in school textbooks. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They were held in the wake of the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property.

 

 

Our schools also don't teach that the Kashmiri Muslims have raped, killed or cleansed 4,00,000 Kashmiri Hindus from the Indian state of Kashmir. Nor do the schools make it known to the students that 80% of the crimes are committed by the 12% Muslims. Nor do they teach that all the bomb attacks in India after independence have been committed by Muslims, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Hindus. Would NYT prefer that we teach these too?

[karthik_v]

 

The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

 

 

I have no objection if one were to mention that Naturam Godse, the killer of M K Gandhi, was a Hindu. But, to suggest, as NYT has done, that he was a member of RSS in 1948 is wrong. He had quit as a member of RSS, if I remember correctly, in 1945, and acted independently. He had also been a member of Congress.

 

If students are to be taught that the killer was a Hindu, then in all fairness, they should also be taught why he killed Gandhi. In which case, the trial of Godse should be declassified. The judge who presided that trial would say that if the public had sat on the bench, they would have acquitted Godse unanimously.

 

Then, I would also expect that the students be taught that the Indian Christians and Muslims never participated in India's freedom struggle. The former never did. The latter did only once in 1921, that too during Khilafat agitation.

 

Fair deal?

[madhav]

>>In which case, the trial of Godse should be declassified<<

 

it makes no diffrence now when internet is almost everywhere, where it is available to read it.

 

the congressees suppressed godse's information so much

that until recenlty i did not know that godse was an intellectual and had very good reasons to shoot.

 

he loved hinduism and he loved bharat desh.

i see nothing wrong it it.

 

jai sri krishna!

 

[karthik_v]

Very true Madhav. Yet, the details of the trial itself is still classified. Gopal Godse says that is so because, if released, it will generate sympathy for Nathuram Godse. Gandhi was a great man, of many admirable qualities, but at one stage he must have decided to live upto the title of Mahatma, and his way of doing that was through Muslim appeasement, causing untold harm to the Hindus, and India in the long run.

[Jagat]

<center><h3>Resurrecting India’s True History </h3>

 

By Hari Chandra </center>

 

http://www.sulekha.com/hoppercomments.asp?pg=2&cid=281778

This is with reference to “Hijacking India’s History” Op-Ed piece by Kay Friese published in The New York Times of Dec 30, 2002.

 

India’s identity battles are nothing new, but recent archeological evidence seems to be unnerving quite a few of yesteryear history gatekeepers and their apologists – the so-called secularists, who have for long enjoyed the establishment backing up until the mid-nineties. Kay Friese’s ranting Op-Ed is typical of the paranoia that has gripped the self-appointed history gatekeepers in India in recent months - more so after the riots that followed the Godhra carnage in Gujarat, where a train car full of Hindu women and children were burnt alive by fanatic Muslims.

 

India’s Hindu nationalists have a rightful quarrel with the official history, which has for long been guided by colonial masters with their own agendas, racial, regional, religious, and otherwise. Post-1947 after the partition of India and the end of the British rule, the mantle was passed on to the Congress party, which under the Nehruvian socialistic order dominated the society for 45 of the last 55 years.

 

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was an agnostic and a Fabian socialist. He never cared about India’s Hindu identity, and was more interested in the social engineering that was to accompany his socialistic ideal, which proved to be nothing but an illusion. His vehement opposition, despite popular Hindu sentiment, to the rebuilding of the Somnath Temple as resurrection of civilization pride after India’s independence is a case in point. Somnath, one of the most revered pilgrimage sites of Hinduism was plundered and destroyed by Mohammed Ghazni as many as 17 times between 1001 A.D and 1027 A.D., and evokes civilizational trauma as well strong nationalistic feelings across India even today.

 

Despite being a suave and sophisticated intellectual, Nehru and the Congress Party fully exploited the dynamics of vote bank politics, which tended to divide Hindu vote into caste/region based categories, while keeping the Muslim vote unified by pointing an accusing finger at the Hindu society - this despite the fact that India retained its multi-religious and pluralistic character after Partition in 1947, while Pakistan became an authoritarian Islamic republic.

 

It is under this setting that historians of the socialist, communist, and the neo-Macaulay variety came in handy for the ruling Congress Party to cover-up, distort, and pervert Indian history out of its geographic, cultural, religious, social, and political setting. The aim was to ensure that the Hindu votes do not consolidate under one political umbrella, even as Muslims are courted as a ready-made vote bank. Also, to use history to show that the Hindu culture is itself was an outcome of invasion by Aryans, who displaced the indigenous people. A perfect cover to justify subsequent barbaric invasions by Islamic plunderers and the rapine British rule by comparing them to the Aryans, and in projecting Indian culture to be an outcome of benign outside influences rather than the uniquely indigenous Hindu cultural traditions.

 

Specific to the issues raised by Kay Friese, rewriting history is nothing new, and is nothing wrong particularly in light of new facts that can be ascertained with the help of science.

 

The Aryan Invasion Theory – a favorite of professional secularists – is largely based on philology of Indo-European languages, and was dated around 1500 BC by Max Mueller. The dating of the theory was arbitrary, and was acknowledged by Max Mueller himself later.

 

Etymologically, according to Max Muller, the word Arya was derived from ar- "plough, to cultivate" - meaning an agriculture background and indicating a more settled, peaceful, and civilized society rather than a conquering people of nomads and hunter-gatherers that the Aryans were projected to be.

 

Surprisingly, the roots of Aryan Invasion Theory are not found in any oral, written, or archeological record of India, but in the European political discourse and more specifically, the German nationalism of 19th the century.

 

Using philological basis, a theory was constructed, whereby a homeland of the Aryans was posited to be in the southeastern Europe or Central Asia. This homeland concept was further buffeted with a supposed invasion on horses and chariots that was then tied up domestication of horse referenced in Vedic literature. As a coup de grace, the Aryan Invasion Theory was considered proven by claiming that the domestication of the horse took place at around 1500 B.C, and that the horse provided the military advantage that enabled the Aryans to conquer the indigenous people of India.

 

A major flaw of the invasion theory is that it is all based on philology and has nothing to support in terms of archeology. Oral traditions were posited in a time, place, and setting of the secularist historian’s choice, but there was nothing in terms of physical evidence to support it in India or elsewhere. Second, the Harappa/Mohenjadaro civilization excavations with large amounts of physical evidence that point to a highly evolved people are posited as belonging to the indigenous people, but there seems to be nothing that can be said of them in philological terms. Third, if the Aryans destroyed the indigenous civilizations, there seems to be no evidence of this in the Harappa and Mohenjadaro excavation sites, which largely appear to be abandoned than destroyed. Fourth, geographical as well as astronomical references in Vedic literature are largely confined to India and match with events in the third millennium B.C and earlier, and not circa 1500 B.C as per the Aryan Invasion Theory. Fifth, there is no reference in the Vedic or the Post-Vedic literature of any conquests of Dravidians, the indigenous people who were supposed to have been driven out by Aryans. More importantly there appears to be no Aryan-Dravidian divide in the historical, cultural, literary and religious traditions that can be brought to evidence.

 

That the Aryan Invasion Theory was no more than a figment of colonial imagination seems to be troubling the professional secularists given their intense politicization of the debate and complete obfuscation of evidence that has been unearthed in recent years. So great is their aversion to reality and Hinduism that a tribe of secularist historians led by Romilla Thapar issued a declaratory statement that no more archeological excavations be done lest they confuse history, and hurt the feelings of the minority community - a case of acute paranoia to say the least.

 

There is no way to reconcile the philological assumptions and the anomalies and inconsistencies that crop with the Aryan Invasion Theory. The alternate Indus-Saraswati civilization theory on the other hand posits that the Aryans were indigenous people, and the original habitants of the townships along the Indus, Ravi, and Saraswati rivers, and that no invasion from outside took place during the Vedic times. Post-Vedic invasions did occur, and are well documented and are backed up with substantial evidence. This theory is backed by evidence, which is at least consistent, scientific and can stand up to critical scrutiny.

 

The archeological evidence is quite wide in range: satellite remote sensing and infra-red imagery of the long lost Saraswati river; Radio-isotope confirmation of the water from underground aquifers that fed the Saraswati river; carbon dating of the archeological evidence of numerous human settlements along the Saraswati river tracing along Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat in North India; forensic archeology of the Harappa Horse seals; and the philological connections of the Vedas with the archeological evidence. Enhancing further these findings are the discoveries of the submerged cities at Dwarka and Gulf of Cambay in Gujarat, excavation sites at Lothal and Dholavira in Gujarat, and Ropar in Punjab, underwater archaeological sites off Mahabalipuram and Poompuhar in Tamil Nadu, and off Musiris in Kerala, among others.

 

Instead of casting aspersions on Hindu nationalists via civilization history, religion, and politics, it would have been prudent if Kai Friese did his homework not just about Aryan Invasion Theory but also about India’s medieval as well as contemporary history.

 

As for religious freedom, Article 25 of India’s constitution guarantees free profession, practice and propagation of religion. However propagation does not automatically mean conversion, and religious conversion via force, economic inducements, fraud or allurement robs this very freedom to choose. This issue was specifically addressed by the Supreme Court of India in a 1977 verdict, whereby it held that the word "propagate", in the context of religion would mean to transmit, carry forward, diffuse or extend a particular religious belief or practice. But there is no fundamental right to convert another person to one's own religion.

 

Unlike Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, which are native to India, Islam and Christianity originated in a foreign land, with a cultural and philosophical tradition that is inimical to Hindu tradition, which believes in the brotherhood of all humanity irrespective of region, race or religion. Islam came into India on the cutting edge of a sword with unheard of barbarity that saw plunder, destruction, rape, slavery, and forced conversion in its wake. While there is a belief that Jesus Christ visited India during his missing years, and it is a fact that Christianity came to India via St. Thomas in 52 A.D., Christianity’s growth in India was largely due to missionaries, who had the backing of colonial rulers be they French, Portugese, or the British.

 

With respect to Gujarat, the Congress Party, secularist historians as well as the secularist media refuse to acknowledge what happened at Godhra was uncalled for, and also that the ensuing bloody riots for all the violence were brought under control within three days with the deployment of the Indian Army. Instead of having a balanced approach, and taking the state administration to task for the security lapses as well as relief efforts, they chose the ruling BJP party, and more specifically the party’s chief minister in Gujarat, Narendra Modi, and demonized him to no end. Additionally, Hindu Gujaratis were portrayed as arsonists, bloodthirsty killers, and rapists, and only the Muslims as hapless victims. This secularist appeasement of the minorities resulted in a fierce backlash that resulted in the BJP getting two-thirds of the legislature seats in the December 2002 state elections by appealing to Hindu pride, and targeting Islamic terrorism in Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir as well as other parts of India.

 

No wonder India Today magazine, a leading journal, in its Dec 30, 2002 issue rightly observed in its editorial: Gujarat “election was held in the backdrop of two riots, one bloody, the other pure sophistry. In the latter, professional secularists and the conscience-keeping industry sought out the darkest entries from the glossary of hate to describe the crime of the Hindu – Holocaust, fascism, Hitler…They rhapsodized the ghettos of victimhood, and, forever scavenging for a cause, they found a self-serving monster in Modi. The election exposed their pretence.

 

“Secularism doesn’t mean a repudiation of religion. In this country, secularism in practice meant romancing the minority and demonizing the majority. The professional secularist always needed a bogeyman, the usurper of the ideal and a ghettoized victim. Gujarat provided a perfect situation. The Hindu was the bogeyman. The post-Godhra Hindu to be precise. Godhra itself couldn’t have provided the stereotypes – there the victim was the Hindu. So Godhra was just a crime. No adjectives from the history of hate were required to magnify it. The anger of the majority is as much a reality of the times as the anguish of the minority. The so-called secularists refuse to admit it. This election has corrected them.”

 

Unlike many countries, India’s civilization heritage as well memory transcends several millennia and is a product of its timeless and peaceful coexistence of the Hindu society. And unlike other religions, Hinduism is a religion without any fundamentals – the concepts of exclusivity, chosen people, racial superiority, conversion, religious head, and religious dogma via a book, edict or revelations are alien to Indic tradition. Hinduism is more of a philosophy with full freedom of thought and action, with each individual pursuing liberation of the soul via the medium of truthful self-discovery. In a true sense, Hinduism is more a way of life than a religion, a notion that has been attested to by the Supreme Court of India as many as three times in recent years during the Hindu versus the professional secularist legal battles.

 

Kay Friese’s shoot-and-scoot allegations against Hindu nationalists do more harm than good as they distort the identity and ideological debate currently underway in India. Let India and its people decide who and what they are rather than get judged by an amateur and immature outsider

[madhav]

>>but at one stage he must have decided to live upto the title of Mahatma, and his way of doing that was through Muslim appeasement, causing untold harm to the Hindus, and India in the long run. <<

 

according to prabhupada, he was not a mahatma

per definition of mahatma given by krishna in gita.

 

gandhi did not know how barbaric and aggresive and intolerant islam is. he thought his appeasement will make them friendly, and he was very wrong. now we suffer since then. now we need to fix it soon.

 

[Jagat]

INDIA: PREMIER DEFENDS CURRICULUM CHANGES Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee defended his government's decision to introduce a new school curriculum that critics say is biased. "The attempt is to correct history as it is being currently taught," he said. "All these years students were taught incorrect history by the opposition." Mr. Vajpayee, who heads the Hindu nationalist party, supported the removal of references to archaeological evidence that casts doubt on the existence of the Hindu gods Vishnu and Ram and suggests that beef was served to special guests in ancient India. Hindus consider cows to be sacred. David Rohde (NYT)

 

[Jagat]

<h3>Instruction, not indoctrination</h3>

 

<font class=sh>Public education should teach how to think, not what to think.</font>

 

<font class=body><B class=hm1>A number of different organizations and individuals have, in recent months, raised their voices in protest against what they see to be the inclusion of ideologically motivated material in the school curricula. Whereas differences among political parties understandably lead to different intentions in the exercise of administrative power, the use of authority to rewrite history or to propagate particular religious expressions are clearly outside the realm of mere differences in policy. The text below raises these concerns in a letter to the prime minister of India.</p>

<TABLE border=2 cellpadding=5 bordercolor=#000000><TR><TD><font class=body>Shri A. B. Vajpayee

Prime Minister of India</p>

Subject: <U>New curriculum changes and policy changes in education.</U></p>Dear Prime Minister,</p>We are concerned citizens who have been following recent developments in the education curriculum in India, represented by the new National Curriculum Framework put forth by the NCERT, the new Policy Framework for Reforms in Education, and by recent changes in textbooks in some states. We are deeply concerned about the future of India's education and the effect it will have on future generations. We would like to raise the following concerns.</p><B class=hm1>The Indian Education System must remain free of communalism</p><ul>[*]The communalization of education evident in recent changes in textbooks and in the tone of New Curriculum Framework is alarming. Textbooks in institutions such as Vidya Bharati and Shishu Mandir, the official text books in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan reflect narrow, partisan viewpoints that amount to propaganda rather than to education. The state's role in education is fund the intellectual and moral banks of our nation, not to invest these valuable resources in its own ideology. We call for a review of these textbooks.</p>[*]The non-secular tone of the new framework goes against the secular character of the Indian Republic. Moreover, in significant portions of the texts, history is simply rewritten in ways that distort facts to promote a particular ideology, rather than record the actual events which took place. This isn't scholarship. We demand that an unbiased and rational discussion with education experts, academicians and elected representatives be held before the new framework is endorsed as a truly national policy.</p>

Cc: Dr. Murali Manohar Joshi,

 

Minister for Human Resource Development

Dr. J. S. Rajput, Director, NCERT</p></TD></TR></TABLE>

[raga]

 

Madhav said:

 

according to prabhupada, he was not a mahatma

per definition of mahatma given by krishna in gita.

 

 

Bhagavad Gita 7.19 defines: <font color="darkblue">"After many births, one who has knowledge surrenders unto Me, understanding that Vasudeva is everything. Such a mahatma (great soul) is rarely seen."</font color>

 

As far as I can recall, Gandhiji was very fond of the Gita and a very religious man. He chanted the mantra "Om sri rama jaya rama jaya jaya rama" throughout his life, for a total of 60 years. When he was shot dead in 1948, he fell to the ground chanting the names of Rama.

 

On mahatmas, on one hand, Prabhupad says:

 

<font color="darkred">"The Lord says that all are magnanimous because anyone who comes to the Lord for any purpose is called a mahatma, or great soul." (Bg 7.18, pp.)</font color>

 

On the other hand:

 

<font color="darkred">"The mahatma cannot be manufactured by rubber-stamping an ordinary man. His symptoms are described here: a mahatma is always engaged in chanting the glories of the Supreme Lord Krsna, the Personality of Godhead. He has no other business. He is always engaged in the glorification of the Lord. In other words, he is not an impersonalist. ... One who is attached to the impersonal feature of the Supreme Lord, the brahmajyoti, is not described as mahatma in the Bhagavad-gita." (Bg 9.14, pp.)</font color>

 

Again, below is prabhupad's rather elaborate translation of the famous "mahat sevam dvaram ahur vimukteh" stanza of the Bhagavata (5.5.2):

 

<font color="darkred">"One can attain the path of liberation from material bondage only by rendering service to highly advanced spiritual personalities. These personalities are impersonalists and devotees. Whether one wants to merge into the Lord's existence or wants to associate with the Personality of Godhead, one should render service to the mahatmas."</font color>

 

The last quote is, in fact, a very surprising statement from Prabhupad, as otherwise we can find rather consistent critique of the impersonalists. I wonder what prompted him to write this, as the comments he makes don't t even appear in the translation itself. Keep in mind, the passage above is only a translation of the five words "mahat sevam dvaram ahur vimukteh". In the purport, he repeats the point:

 

<font color="darkred">"There are two types of mahatmas -- the impersonalist and the devotee. Although their ultimate goal is different, the process of emancipation is almost the same. Both want eternal happiness. One seeks happiness in impersonal Brahman, and the other seeks happiness in the association of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. As described in the first verse: brahma-saukhyam. Brahman means spiritual or eternal; both the impersonalist and the devotee seek eternal blissful life."</font color>

[Guest guest]

Please tell me what was the punishment for Nathuram godes in court and how did he die, if he is dead