India Congress scion Rahul Gandhi says radical Hindus a threat
Rahul Gandhi, seen as an India prime minister in waiting, told the U.S. ambassador radical Hindu groups could posed a bigger threat to the country than the Islamists who attacked Mumbai in 2008, a leaked cable showed. The comments made to Timothy Roemer last year were immediately criticised by the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), adding to political sparring that has deadlocked parliament and pushed policymaking into limbo.
Gandhi’s comments, made in response to a question from Roemers on the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group, referred to religious tension created by more extreme BJP leaders, according to the cable dated August 3, 2009. It was released by WikiLeaks and published on Friday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
Gandhi said there was evidence of some support for the LeT among Indian Muslims, the ambassador wrote, according to the cable. “However, Gandhi warned, the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community,” Roemer wrote. The ambassador added a comment that “Gandhi was referring to the tensions created by some of the more polarizing figures in the BJP such as Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.”
Gandhi, son of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, has sparked the BJP’s ire before. He once compared the opposition party’s parent organisation to the banned Students Islamic Movement of India. On Friday, the BJP said Gandhi’s comments were adding grist to propaganda from Islamist militants and Pakistan.
India has a history of communal tensions between majority Hindus and minority Muslims, and critics say several political parties play on insecurities amongst Muslims to win votes. Radical Hindu groups, some with ties to the BJP or the BJP’s more extreme sister organisations, have been linked to bomb attacks against Muslim targets.
India says local Islamists bombed Hindu pilgrim city Varanasi
India said Wednesday a home-grown Islamist group with ties to Pakistani militants was behind a bomb attack in one of its holiest cities, Varanasi, and local media reported two people were questioned over the attack. Home Secretary Gopal Pillai said traces of explosives were found at the site of Tuesday evening’s blast in the northern city that killed a two-year old girl and injured 37 Hindu worshippers and foreign tourists.
Pillai said the crude bomb was set off by the Indian Mujahideen (IM), a local group India says has been trained by militants based in Pakistan, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The IM claimed responsibility for the attack in an email to local media, police said. That email was traced to a Mumbai suburb and two people were questioned over it, local media said.
“The main players of Indian Mujahideen are based in Pakistan and they are definitely running the game from there,” Mumbai Police Commissioner Sanjeev Dayal told a press conference. Pillai has said it was “too premature” to say if individuals or groups operating from Pakistan were involved.
India remains jittery about the threat of militant strikes, especially since the Mumbai attacks in November 2008 which killed 166 people and raised tensions with arch rival Pakistan. New Delhi says Pakistan-based groups aid and train militants to carry out attacks against India, a claim Islamabad rejects.
IM is a fake name given to confuse the realtors sitting in Pakistan and orchestrating the show under cover of ISI guidance. Their agents are many but Lashkar is such one culprit. It is all officially planned and effected since the 1971 but will Pakistan succeed in her clandestine operations?
For Pak civil leaders, this is a attention diversion tactic from their incompetency of governance and rampant corruption, poverty and public unrest. There are ethnic wars like one in Karachi killing hundreds and regular ongoing bomb blasts in NWFPs but army is finding it difficult and US forces are being attacked.
Hence they encourage such overseas terror attacks to evoke public sentiments
God bless
Dr. O. P. Sudrania
from Tales from the Trail:
Golden Temple off Obama’s India agenda, Gandhi on
. U.S. President Barack Obama will not visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar during his trip to India next month, the White House confirmed on Wednesday
But he will make several other cultural stops, including two related to the revered Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, who is a hero to many African-Americans and was an inspiration to the U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Obama is visiting the Gandhi Museum in Mumbai and will also lay a wreath on Gandhi's grave in New Delhi during his visit.
"The example of Gandhi is one that has inspired Americans, inspired African Americans, including Dr. King, and it’s very personally important to the President. So we're looking forward to visiting the Gandhi Museum to underscore those shared experiences and shared values," Deputy Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters.
Other cultural events during the trip include a celebration of the Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, with schoolchildren, and a visit to the tomb of the Mughal Emperor Humayun in New Delhi.
But Obama will not visit the Golden Temple, a pilgrimage site for Sikhs in the northern city of Amritsar. Obama had been expected to visit the holy site, but Indian media reports said that plan was canceled after Obama's handlers balked at the idea of the U.S. president wearing a headscarf or skullcap while touring the site.
Obama faces persistent talk among some members of the U.S. public that he is a Muslim and, the reports said, aides feared pictures of him wearing such headgear could fuel such rumors.
Hindu and Muslim Bollywood stars urge calm before Indian mosque verdict
It’s a sign of how explosive the Ayodhya mosque verdict in India could be that several Hindu and Muslim film stars in Bollywood have issued a public appeal for calm once the decision is announced. As we’ve posted here on FaithWorld, an Indian court is due to announce on Thursday whether Hindus or Muslims own land around the Babri mosque, which Hindu nationalists demolished in 1992. The Hindu-Muslim riots that followed killed some 2,000 people.
Bollywood, the Bombay (now Mumbai)-based Hindi-language film industry, walks a tightrope in making mass-audience films in what may be the most religiously diverse country in the world. Some of the most popular Bollywood stars are Muslim, although the majority of viewers are Hindu (Muslims make up 13% of the Indian population). Like the actors and actresses in this appeal, many of them publicly work, play and love (see here) across the religious divide. But tensions like those after the Ayodhya mosque riots — including riots in Mumbai itself — have left their scars. Some Muslim writers (see here and here) say suspicion of Muslims is a recurring theme in Bollywood films.
In the video below, the stars mostly speak in Hindi sprinkled with occasional English words. That’s nothing unusual and can be useful as well. For example, when actress and former Miss World Priyanka Chopra says (at 00:48) that “in our country all religions have been living together for so long…”, she uses the English word “religion.” That was a neutral alternative to local words she might have used with either a Hindu (dharma) or Muslim (din) background.
The other speaker, actor-director Farhan Akhtar, urged the media not to “sensationalise” the news of the verdict and switched to English for the rest of his message.
Ranbir Kapoor, Ajay Devgan, Farhan Akhtar, Zayed Khan, Anil Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra cooperated with Mumbai Police for the appeal, delivered last Thursday evening when the verdict was originally expected the following day. The national release of “Anjaana, Anjaani,” a romantic film starring Ranbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra, has been put off until Oct. 1 to avoid opening during any tensions.
New rabbi for Mumbai Jewish centre attacked in 2008
It was almost two years ago that Islamist militants attacked Mumbai and killed at least 166 people. Among them were six Jews, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. Most non-Jewish readers probably had no idea what a Brooklyn-based Jewish couple was doing there. Many Jews would have known right away — they were running the Chabad House, one of a worldwide network of Jewish centres run by Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement devoted to supporting Jewish life wherever it may be found.
The news angle to this story is that the Mumbai centre has a new rabbi, just in time for the High Holidays, as reported in my feature here. Rabbi Chanoch Gechtman arrived there recently with his wife Leiky to take up the challenge of filling Holtzberg’s shoes. “I still can’t quite fathom that they are not here, they were such extraordinary people,” he said in an email from Mumbai. After all the damage to the original building, they’ve moved to another building not far away, but the address is not advertised on their website for understandable reasons.
This could be a daunting assignment, but Gechtman, 25, seemed eager to get to work. “People really believe in this city. It’s a place with a lot of energy; it’s full of life,” he said. “There is really an endless amount of work to be accomplished. And the Holtzbergs set the bar very high.” The work is literally endless — a couple that goes out on an assignment like this is expected to stay permanently. The commitment for the “shluchim,” as these emissaries are called, is supposed to be for life. And it’s a job for both the rabbi and his wife. Running a Chabad House means offering services such as kosher Sabbath dinners, Torah classes, youth programmes, day care facilities, summer camps and women’s ritual baths. It’s an open house for any Jew who wants to participate — locals, expatriates or tourists passing through the city.
“The Mumbai Jewish community definitely wants to move beyond 26/11. While we will obviously never forget what happened, we need to focus forward on helping the many people who need our assistance, so that Jewish life flourishes here,” Gechtman said.
On a recent visit to New York, I went to the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch to find out more about this network, which has expanded dramatically over the past few decades. The Crown Heights section of Brooklyn seems an unlikely place for the world headquarters of anything, but the house at 770 Eastern Parkway has been Chabad’s base since 1940, when the then leader, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland. The last Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, worked there until his death in 1994. Chabad also has a large building next door.
Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, the movement’s spokesman and director of its extensive Chabad.org website, told me the first emissary went to Morocco in 1951. The network grew both in the United States and abroad, popping up on American university campuses as well as increasingly far-flung foreign destinations. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the region where the Lubavitchers originally came from, opened up many new opportunities in Russia.
Now, there are about 4,000 married couples working in around 3,500 institutions the movement runs in 77 countries around the world. Check out the directory of centres around the world here — it’s hard to say which location is the most far-flung or unlikely. How about Luang Prabang?
Islamist charity aims to be Pakistanis’ salvation in flood crisis
Lime green dresses for girls spill out of the sack of food, supplies and shoes — a gift from the Islamist charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) to help flood victims celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid this month.
Blacklisted by the U.N. over its links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group blamed for the 2008 attack on Mumbai, the JuD has been quick to help people hit by Pakistan’s floods, raising fears among U.S. officials that Islamists use aid to gain recruits.
But it does not have the capacity to establish a big presence — the devastation was so vast that roads were cut and the only means of transport is helicopter — so JuD officials say they are trying to make up for this by other, thoughtful, means.
“We don’t have the resources to meet their demands or get their houses rebuilt or give compensation for their crops,” said Yahya Mujahid, a JuD spokesman, inside the group’s headquarters in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. “So this idea came up … let’s give them this package so that they can forget their problems for at least one day.”
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Mumbai gunmen denied Muslim burial secretly interred in January
Remember the issue of what to do with the corpses of the nine attackers killed during the November 2008 siege of the Taj Mahal Hotel and other targets in Mumbai that killed 166 people? The dead attackers were all presumed to be Pakistani Muslims, like the sole survivor, but local Indian Muslim leaders refused to let them be buried in their cemeteries. Islamabad ignored calls to take the bodies back. So they were left in morgue refrigerators in Mumbai, presumably until the issue was finally settled.
FaithWorld was deluged with comments after we asked if the bodies should be cremated and the ashes spread at sea. A surprising number of them suggested the bodies should be desecrated, thrown to the dogs or dumped at the Pakistani-Indian border. The discussion tapered off and the issue seemed to have been forgotten.
The only problem remaining was that those bodies had to be kept refrigerated ad infinitum. Something had to give. Well, the Maharashtra state government finally put an end to this stalemate. As Rina Chandran in our Mumbai bureau wrote: “The badly decomposed bodies had been lying in the mortuary of a hospital in Mumbai after Muslim clerics in the city refused to let them be buried on their grounds. Maharashtra home minister R.R. Patil told the state assembly on Tuesday the bodies were buried secretly in January.”
The trial of Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving suspect, ended last week in Mumbai with a verdict scheduled to be announced on May 3.
There were lots of hot button issues in this one — Indian-Pakistani relations, how to treat the dead attackers, giving the dead a proper Muslim funeral, just to name a few — but the angle the local media seemed to highlight most was something nobody thought of at the time. Most of them — see the Times of India, the Indian Express or the Hindustan Times — seemed surprised that the government and police could keep the burial secret for so long!
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Regarding the article no religion allows to do such kind of action the proclaimed Pakistani Muslims have done in Mumbai. So no religion also allow to profanate any deadbody. Unbiasly understanding the above mentioned article we should also have a stance on those terrorist activities which have been influencing in Pakistan through Afghanistan. Media should remain unbias and present the both side of mirror.
from India Insight:
India’s 26/11 – religion no bar
A year ago, after the three-day siege of Mumbai ended and people took to the streets with candles and banners, a group of young Muslim men, carrying a hand-written poster, walked quietly with the surging crowds.
Seeing them, people began to clap spontaneously, applauding their assertion that Islam was a religion of peace, and not terrorism.
Since then, people in Mumbai, which has witnessed some of the worst communal riots in the country in the past, have come together in their grief, crossing barriers erected by politicians in the name of religion.
Some have accused the media of not highlighting enough, the fact that the militants asked their hostages what religion and then killed non-Muslims.
Others have speculated that the few thousands of Jews left in India would leave the country because six Jews were killed in the attack on Chabad House.
But in Mumbai today, just days after the explosive report on the Babri Masjid demolition was made public, there is a sense of community and togetherness. A big difference from 1992, when riots between Hindus and Muslims that followed the demolition killed hundreds.
And so today, multi-faith prayer services are being held everywhere in the city and there are countless stories of inter-faith friendships that blossomed in the days after the attacks.
Indians add green touch to religious festivals
Few events can rival the ancient rituals and riotous color of India’s religious festivals. This year, the months-long celebration season is also becoming eco-friendly. Alarmed by the high levels of pollution caused by firecrackers, toxic paints and idols made of non-recyclable material, schools, environmentalists and some states are encouraging “greener” celebrations.
In Mumbai, where the 10-day festival for the elephant-headed Ganesha (the Hindu deity of prosperity) is underway with giant, colored idols and noisy street parties, radio and TV stations are airing environmental messages and school children are learning to make eco-friendly idols.
The statues, made of brightly painted plaster of Paris, are usually immersed in the sea or a lake after a lively procession that can sometimes take half a day to navigate the choked streets, and which ultimately leaves dismembered idols strewn along the shore.
But a growing number of Indians are opting for smaller clay idols which they immerse in water at home.
“An idol that doesn’t dissolve in the sea is just a tragic end for something you have worshipped for so many days,” said Abhijit Karandikar, a creative director at an advertising agency. “More people are realizing they can be more eco-friendly in our festivals. It’s something that’s in our control.”
Could gagged Mumbai confession do more good than harm?
A crucial part of gunman Mohammad Ajmal Kasab’s confession at the Mumbai attack trial has been censored by the judge on the grounds that it could inflame religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India. After stunning the court on Monday by admitting guilt in the the three-day rampage that killed 166 people, Kasab gave further testimony on Tuesday that included details about his training by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistan-based militant group on U.S. and Indian terrorist lists.
The front-page report in today’s The Hindu, which noted the judge’s gag order in its sub-header, put it this way:
Ajmal made some crucial statements on Tuesday as part of his confession. They pertained to the purpose of the attack as indicated by the perpetrators and masterminds and the message they wanted to send to the government of India. Ajmal also wanted to convey a message to his handlers. However, this part of his confession faces a court ban on publication.
In view of the communally sensitive nature of Ajmal’s statements, judge M.L. Tahaliyani passed an order banning the publication and broadcast of Ajmal’s statement recorded on Tuesday by any media or person, except the part which pertains to the CST. Mr. Tahaliyani remarked that the trial was at “a delicate stage.”
Given the complex mix of religion and politics in India, it’s not unusual to see the media playing down the communal aspect of tension and violence. In the recent general election, the party that usually plays up these differences, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), hardly used the “religion card” in its losing campaign. But that doesn’t mean things are getting better. According to the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, the “unfortunate year of 2008 … proved to be worse than 2007.” See their two-part report on 2008 here and here.
But Kasab’s testimony could shed important light on what role religion plays in Islamist militancy. How could a young man who wanted to become a dacoit (bandit) be convinced by Islamist militants to try to become a shahid (martyr) instead? Was he actually convinced, or did he do it for other reasons?
Kasab told the court on Monday that he originally approached the militants to get weapons and training and won (surprisingly easy) admission to their office by saying he wanted to wage jihad. He was taken in and given extensive training in preparation for the Mumbai attack last November. All of this is detailed in published accounts of his statement in court on Monday. In earlier statements, police say, he showed little understanding of Islam or jihad, saying the latter was “about killing and getting killed and becoming famous.”
I guess it will be more important to actually see what the reactions in India are as they unfold, rather than speculate at this point in the process. But it does seem to be the typical Asian version of “freedom” at work again. The scary part: India is light-years ahead of its neighbors when it comes to free speech.
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