The alleged rape of a Catholic nun in Kandhamal by suspected Kandh Vanvasis has intensified the Congress-led UPA government'sfascist intention to dismiss the popularly elected, two term Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik heading the BJD-BJP coalition, hypocritically disowning their own legacy of failure under Congress Chief Minister JB Patnaik.
Big font headlines in English dailies over an event which considering the explosive situation prevailing in Kandhamal district, barely two days after Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati'smurder, seems intriguing especially since the latter'sbrutal murder along with four other Ashram inmates were shunted to page 10 by the same. Not satisfied with that, they accepted with alacrity the supposedly Maoist appropriation of the crime, even when this claim of a Maoist group had been rejected by their own peers, who are known to be in cohorts with Christian evangelists.
In India, every day over 18 women are raped, but their sordid stories rarely make headlines. However, in this case, the vested interests in the media found an opportunity to twist a case of human suffering to fit their own communal agenda. Even before ascertaining the facts of the case, they started a campaign of using this one-off incident to foster their goal of demonising anything that is Hindu. To anyone who has been following the incidents in Orissa, it would be absolutely clear that these very same groups in the media have, from the very beginning, presented a totally distorted picture of the actual nature of the conflict in the state. They have used every trick out of their propaganda manual to try to paint the conflict in such a way as to support their own nefarious thesis.
In Orissa, for decades, there has been simmering tensions between the Kandh Vanvasis and the Panis, the latter having allied with the missionaries have persistently persecuted the former and frequently been party to land grabs. A lot of this forcibly appropriated land has been used for constructing illegal churches which serve as houses of conversion. The fact is that the Panis are not even Vanvasis, but they strive to demote their caste status from SC to ST in order to conveniently usurp the very meager state doles, meant for the Kandhas in a district where 78 per cent of the population resides below the poverty line. Even The Statesman, known for its socialist viewpoint, in an editorial admitted the deep rooted Vanvasi disaffection representing the ethnic aspect of the subaltern strife which cannot be reduced to the terms of the recent pattern of VHP-Christian confrontation. This internecine struggle between two indigenous communities on considerations of caste and reservation has been further accentuated by the Christian evangelist propaganda and consequent exploitation of the situation.
The yet unknown culprits have also been explicitly identified as ?Hindu fanatics? by the very same media which dogmatically dither from denigrating terror bombers as ?Muslim fundamentalists? and instead prefer to use politically loaded terms like misguided Islamic militants or sometimes even ?misguided youth?! Not surprisingly, these Hindu fanatics will discover no guardian angels in the English language mouthpieces unlike the SIMI which has Tehelka and a host of other sympathisers in human right forums, academic circles and political parties. MC Sharma has now been declared to have been killed in a fake encounter by MJ Akbar, The Hindustan Times, Muslim fact finding teams and Mushirul Hasan, Vice Chancellor and ?JNU recognised secular historian? of the Jamia Milia Islamia. But it is certain that no Hindu activist, group or leader will allege the rape to be fake or consensual; such conspiracy theories have no place within the domains of a genuine ?Hindu mindset? despite the fact that in the infamous Jhabua rape case in 1999, six of the twelve accused in question who had been prematurely identified as Hinduvta activists by the ?secular brigade? turned out to be Vanvasi converts to Christianity. Of course, the `secular? media ran away after telling such a massive lie, when the truth was revealed. No apology was forthcoming.
The confabulating Catholics will vehemently deny the Vanvasis a place in the Hindu religious fold in order to facilitate their conversion strategies. They are animists, they say, ironically the very cult Romila Thapar reserved for the Vedic Aryans in her VI class NCERT textbook. However, the same Catholics in alliance with the ?secularists? now claim Hindus to be responsible for this dastardly drama?the accused Vanvasis in question have now been conveniently elevated to the status of ?caste? Hindus. Perhaps, we are also ignoring that in most Indian Vanvasis, the ideology of rape is minimal, if not non-existent.
The perversions of The Times View (October 4) is explicit in their illegitimate improvisation where they have the audacity to declare discovering no difference between the acts of terrorist bombings in Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and that of the rape in question. It is preposterous to suggest that an isolated solitary rape case in a remote and inaccessible region and in a highly charged atmosphere caused by the brutal murder of a popular religious icon is the same as pre-planned conspiracy to destroy the nation by Islamic fundamentalists, guided by an inhuman and barbaric ideology. The propagation of such patently false ideas is not only a great disrespect to thousands of victims killed and maimed in terror attacks but also exposes the moral vacuity and the vicious agenda of a section of India'sfourth estate.
Moreover, it is becoming increasingly apparent that sections of the ?secular? media have their own doctrinal axis to grind, which includes distortion and suppression of news involving Christian atrocities on Hindus in Kandhamal. For instance, on September 26, CNN.com, the leading American news channel, reported a Hindu man killed by a presumably Christian mob in Kandhamal. In contrast, the very next day on September 27, the communist national daily, The Hindu, applied their Goebellesque imagination by insisting that some man was killed by members of the majority community!
Rediff.com reported on October 3 that two Hindus had been hacked to death, however they had no word of condemnation for any Christian group, which is in total contrast to their behaviour when a victim is other than Hindu.
France 24, a French daily in one of their inflammatory articles, accused the late Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati to be an extremist fundamentalist eliminated by Maoists for good reasons. And yet, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi continue to bend over backwards to appease hyperbolic Christian sensitivities of the West actively engaged in funding the likes of Project Joshua which relentlessly rushes to Christianise India by the turn of the next century. While this conflagration rages on, the debate over conversion has been sidelined. Unconstitutional, unlawful conversion is cheered in the name of providing health and education services through quacks and Christian geocentric theories respectively. Any nationalist and Hindu rescuing his faith through reconversion is deemed communalist and cause of tension, a situation strangely reminiscent of the Raj'sattitude which VD Savarkar had summed up thus:
?If reconversion movement created tension, why should the conversion movement not be considered so? I emphasize that if at all anybody was to be held responsible for the tension, the missionaries and the maulvis should be held so because they had started the conversion first?moreover, I was doing sacred work for my nation which is being exploited in her fallen days by foreign faiths. It was a strange attitude on the part of a government that allowed robbers to commit robberies and prohibited the owners from protecting and defending their property?
Ultimately, cynical exploitation of an unfortunate rape victim'stragic story and zealously transforming her into a ?secular? mascot in the political crusade against ?imaginary Hindu fundamentalism? is representative of the absolute amorality of its agents.
