by J. SRI RAMAN
Parivar operations have included a holy war against a minuscule Christian minority, totalling 2.4 percent of the country’s population. Gujarat under Narendra Modi holds the dubious record of having witnessed the goriest and most horrendous anti-Muslim violence in 2002
True, India has no blasphemy laws. But does it have no Aasia Bibis? No Indian court has sent a man or woman of Aasia’s religion to death for the crime she is alleged to have committed. Does the country, however, not have kangaroo courts of a kind that order and carry out punishments on people for the offence of being or having become Christians? The answers are affirmative in both cases. The parivar, India’s far-right ‘family’, of course, focuses its hate campaign against the country’s largest minority. Muslim-baiting has always remained its main occupation and preoccupation. It is not so well known to the wider world that Christian-bashing comes a close enough second in its list of devoutly performed duties.
This should be no surprise to anyone with even a sketchy idea of the ideology of the parivar, especially its patriarch, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). This ideology was spelt out in unmistakable terms by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, better known to his flock as Guru Golwalkar, who headed the RSS from 1940 to 1973 (thus constituting a bridge between the parivar generations before and after independence). A Bunch of Thoughts, a post-independence collection of the Guru’s sayings and speeches, was prescribed reading for the parivar for long years.
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(Thanks to Harsh Kapoor of SACW)