On the Red Letter Day as the foundation stone has been laid for a grand Ram temple at Ayodhya, noted American Hindu scholar David Frawley on Wednesday counseled India’s communist leaders to opt for a pilgrimage to Ayodhya and “study carefully” various facets of India’s great civilisation and the spiritual heritage.
“I don’t call them Left Liberals, I call them Radical Left or the Marxist Left. They have distorted the history of India and through media they have created a lot of negative terms to denigrate Hindus and all Dharmic traditions. They don’t support Tibet or the Dalai Lama either,” Frawley told Times Now news channel.
He said the Leftists in India have denigrated Shri Ram. “In fact, they should all do a pilgrimage to Ayodhya….they should do Sadhana. They should study carefully the Tulsidas or the Valmiki Ramayana and get to know India’s great civilisation and the spiritual heritage.”
“It is time for them to rediscover or truly discover India or Bharat and this can be certainly done through Ayodhya and the new Ram Mandir,” he said.
Answering questions, 69-year-old Frawley said, “The Left has weaponized most of the vocabulary and they like to make name calling….. (call) people fascists. Well, they don’t do that with the members of other religions those are far more aggressive”.
All these are part of the “distortion” the communists brought in the history. He said even text books in Soviet Union and China have been distorted by the same forces. He also said, more often Chinese communists “admire” their own (Chinese) past than the Indian communists admire India.
“Somehow, the far Left in India are anti nationals and also anti-Indian heritage. They are more at home with the Marxist idea that are of the west than they are with the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagawad Gita and Ramayana,” Frawley said. Therefore, he said, “It is time for them to re-educate themselves in their own tradition with humility and with respect and honouring this wonderful culture and the country’s civilisation (India) in which they were born and take their true role to raise humanity”.
To a question on those who try to dismiss faith in the Dharma and the Hindu culture as some kind of militant activities, he was against the idea of over emphasis on Ahimsa. He said, “The Ahimsa- which means we try to avoid violence at all costs. But there are some circumstances in which Dharma must be defended”.
“In fact, throughout history there were many battles, many struggles. We also know that Shri Ram went up to Sri Lanka in his fight with Ravana, and we also have the Kurukshetra tradition of the Mahabharat,” he pointed out on the significance of conflict fighting in order to uphold Dharma, piousness and truth.
In a hard hitting tweet, Frawley also wrote: “The building of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple is a defeat for Nehruvians, Marxists, Maoists, China supporters, and the media and academia that tried to deny history and archaeology and denigrate bhakti, finding Sri Ram to be a threat to their arrogant pursuit of power”.
The eminent scholar is also author of the book, ‘What Is Hinduism?: A Guide for the Global Mind’.
