Stop War against Adivasis of India

inst the poor and Adivasis.
http://www.facebook.com/thomasvanbeersum)
In late 2009, with an array of military forces, hi-tech support and utmost cruelty, the government of India launched Operation Green Hunt. India is economically on the move and its rulers are eager to upgrade their partnership with global imperialism. They cannot tolerate the fact that large swaths of the country are no longer under their control, and are determined to crush anything that stands in their way, especially the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change. This unprecedented internal military offensive is taking place in the forests and hills that are the homeland of many different Adivasi (Indigenous) tribes in the central and eastern Indian states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkand, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal. Indian and international corporations are itching to tear up these lands to get their hands on the riches that lies under them, minerals like bauxite, coal and iron ore. The forests are a source of livelihood for the Adivasis, but to be able to use them they have had to struggle against the forest police, local police and vigilante groups like the Salwa Judum who destroy their crops, steal their farm animals, rape the women and kill young and old alike. Since the early 1990s through an economic liberalization fostered by the then finance minister Manmohan Singh (now prime minister), India has been on a fast track to playing a more major role in the global economy. In the process the contrast between the fabulously rich and the desperately poor has widened tremendously. In between, a growing middle class of call centre agents, IT specialists, market research company employees, etc., has grown to 200 million. India has been welcomed into the fraternity of global nuclear powers on signing a joint nuclear treaty with the U.S. in 2008. The economic growth rate has been around 8 percent for a number of years and the country’s elite is bursting with self-confidence in their ability and desire to exploit superprofits from the productive forces, the enormous pool of cheap labour and land and mineral resources. There has been no trickle-down to the bottom rungs of society. Instead the situation for about half of India’s people has become worse since liberalization. One such group of exploiting capitalists are the Tatas. The Tata family owns the sixth largest steel company in the world and some of its companies are located on the edges of the tribal areas. Tata has lined up a number of “greenfield” projects in and outside of India to expand their steel production by millions of tonnes. A greenfield project is one built where nothing has been constructed before, so the land is cheap and there is no need to remodel or demolish any existing structures or pay other large expenses. Tata has already signed agreements with the government to build industrial sites on tribal lands in Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Operation Green Hunt’s precursor was the Salwa Judum, vigilante militias funded by the governing parties and local state governments. The leaking of a draft government report stating that Salwa Judum was first funded by Tata and Essor Steel created an outburst in the press; that part was subsequently edited out of the final version. Salwa Judum recruited those local people who could be bought to work as bullies and informers, sometimes offering free mobile phones in exchange for information. For those they couldn’t buy, they exercised a reign of terror. The official figure of emptied villages in Chhattisgarh is 644. Thousands of villagers were murdered. Thousands were arbitrarily arrested and left rotting in jail. Over 300,000 people were displaced. In attempting to separate the people from the CPI (Maoist), nearly 50,000 were forced to live in Vietnam-style strategic hamlets. Villagers who did not move into the hamlets were considered Maoists by the authorities. Independent journalists and intellectuals who tried to report on these atrocities were beaten, jailed or otherwise prevented from investigating Salwa Judum’s actions. During this same period Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the CPI (Maoist) the “gravest internal security threat” to India. The “land to the tiller” views of CPI (Maoist) are in contradiction to India’s rising capitalist development at its most competitive and cutthroat. As a CPI (Maoist) cadre told the activist and author Arundhati Roy, “They want to crush us, not only because of the minerals, but because we are offering the world an alternative model. “ Some accounts of life under the shadow of Salwa Judum The following are soundbites from a major article by Arundhati Roy called “Walking with the Comrades”. They are accounts from women who are part of Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan, a mass organization led by CPI (Maoist) that claims a membership of 90,000 women. The KAMS takes up issues like forced marriages, bigamy, domestic violence and the need to break with traditional tribal thinking that oppresses women. When the men are taken away, these women also go en masse to the jails and sometimes succeed in getting them released. “As police repression has grown in Bastar, the women of KAMS have become a formidable force and rally in their hundreds, sometimes thousands, to physically confront the police. The very fact that the KAMS exists has radically changed traditional attitudes and eased many of the traditional forms of discrimination against women. For many young women, joining the party, in particular the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army, became a way of escaping the suffocation of their own society. Comrade Sushila, a senior officer of KAMS, talks about the Salwa Judum’s rage against KAMS women. She says one of their slogans was Hum Do Bibi layenge! Layenge! (We will have two wives! We will!) A lot of the rape and bestial sexual mutilation was directed at members of the KAMS. Many young women who witnessed the savagery then joined the PLGA and now women make up 45 percent of its cadre. Comrade Narmada sends for some of them and they join us in a while. “Comrade Rinki has very short hair. A bob-cut as they say in Gondi (language). It’s brave of her, because here, ‘bob-cut’ means ‘Maoist’. For the police that’s more than enough evidence to warrant summary execution. Comrade Rinki’s village, Korma, was attacked by the Naga Battalion and the Salwa Judum in 2005. At that time Rinki was part of the village militia. So were her friends Lukki and Sukki, who were also members of the KAMS. After burning the village, the Naga battalion caught Lukki and Sukki and one other girl, gang raped and killed them. ‘They raped them on the grass,’ Rinki says, ‘but after it was over there was no grass left.’ It’s been years now, the Naga Battalion has gone, but the police still come. ‘They come whenever they need women, or chickens.’ “Ajitha has a bob-cut too. The Judum came to Korseel, her village, and killed three people by drowning them in a nallah [stream or canal]. Ajitha was with the [guerrilla] militia, and followed the Judum at a distance to a place close to the village called Paral Nar Todak. She watched them rape six women and shoot a man in his throat. “Sumitra tells the story of two of her friends, Telam Parvati and Kamla, who worked with KAMS. Telam Parvati was from Polekaya village in South Bastar. Like everyone else from there, she too watched the Salwa Judum burn her village. She then joined the PLGA and went to work in the Keshkal ghats [an area in Chhattisgar] . In 2009 she and Kamla had just finished organizing the March 8 Women’s Day celebrations in the area. They were together in a little hut just outside a village called Vadgo. The police surrounded the hut at night and began to fire. Kamla fired back, but she was killed. Parvati escaped, but was found and killed the next day. “Comrade Laxmi, who is a beautiful girl with a long plait, tells me she watched the Judum burn thirty houses in her village Jojor. ‘We had no weapons then,’ she says, ‘we could do nothing, but watch.’ She joined the PLGA soon after. Laxmi was one of the 150 guerrillas who walked through the jungle for three and a half months in 2008, to Nayagarh in Orissa, to raid a police armoury from where they captured 1,200 rifles and 200,000 rounds of ammunition.” The Adivasis, through with the PLGA lead by the CPI (Maoist), succeeded in putting up stiff and effective resistance to the Salwa Judum. Over the last year in Lalgarh, in the state of West Bengal, an important movement arose against police repression and a major corporate development project planned by the state government. Unnerved by their tenacious resistance, the government meted out terrible atrocities to the tribals. Consequently over a 1,000 villages formed People’s Committees against Police Atrocities (PCPA). They demanded that the officials responsible for the atrocities be punished. They threw out the existing administrative structure, and started constructing a new society, building roads, digging wells, distributing land and creating collective agricultural formations. They started schools, built clinics, and invited doctors and nurses from outside. They are trying to build a self-reliant economy and develop a collective agriculture. The Maoists played a leading role in this from the beginning. The struggle in Lalgarh gained support from many progressive forces throughout the country and internationally. It demonstrated that the Salwa Judum was insufficient to drive the tribals off their land. As a repressive force, it was inadequate for the task. Enter Operation Green Hunt With Operation Green Hunt the burning, killing, looting, torturing and raping has increased exponentially. Unlike Salwa Judum this operation is coordinated by the central government, which predicts a long and bloody war until the tribal area is “sanitized” and the Naxalites (as the government calls the Maoists) defeated. More than 10,000 military and paramilitary troops are being sent into the Adivasi areas. The plan is for the occupiers to gradually spread from one “sanitized” area to another. Twenty Warfare Training Schools are being built in India. Mahmohan Singh recently spent $18 billion in the U.S. to buy huge amounts of military supplies and munitions, including the latest state-of-the- art global positioning systems and night-vision- capable automatic rifles. Drones are being provided by Israel. And the Israeli Mossad is training Indian police as snipers. Media reports suggest that their mission is to assassinate leaders of the CPI (Maoist) and the mass movement. According to numerous well-documented reports from sources not necessarily friendly to CPI (Maoist), 30 to 40 tribal people are being killed each week in the Adivasi belt. In Goompad village, Chhattisgarh, witnesses who reported a police massacre were disappeared. (Tehelka.com, 24 February, 2010). On 22 February, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) murdered one such leader, Sri Lalmohan Tudu, the elected president of the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities, and two other people in Lalgarh. Conflicting police versions emerged about how Tudu died. One said he was killed while attacking a police camp, another that he was with a Maoist squad and was apprehended in a CRPF raid. Eyewitness accounts say he was killed near his home and his body was dragged into the paddy fields nearby. Tudu was one of the main representatives of the PCPA in negotiations with officials of the state government. At no time was he accused of being a Maoist. According to Tudu’s wife, the authorities “had been hunting him since last June. He tried to come to the house that day but he was kidnapped that night. We heard gunshots and feared the worst. We never found out what had happened until the next morning when we heard his body was in the morgue.” A member of a democratic rights organization said there is a shoot-on-sight order against the Maoists but “nobody knows what a Maoist is. Police say everybody is a Maoist.” The villagers say, “in the eyes of the police, the cows and chickens are Maoist”. (World News, 8 March 2010) The military has set up camps in the forests and along streams and ponds. They have closed schools and taken school buildings for their own use. They have cordoned off the area around the forests, preventing the Adivasis from getting food and marketable items that allow them to earn a livelihood and access to water. And they are trying to prevent the Maoists from merging with and being nourished by the masses of Adivasis. One third of the world’s poor Although the statistics vary, by most accounts one third of the world’s poor lives in India. The World Bank says 42 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people live on $1.25 per day. A United Nations study says 72 percent live on $2 or less a day. And an Indian government report from the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector says that 70 percent of Indians live on half a dollar a day (Reuters, 10 August 2007). Tribals, lower castes and Muslims are especially numerous among those desperately poor sections of the people, working and living under conditions as bad or worse as any in the world. The global market is moving into the centre of many people’s lives in a new way, with devastating effects even among the somewhat better off parts of rural India. For instance, the government and international organizations have pressured Indian farmers to plant crops to compete on the global market. Unable to pay their debts when prices slumped or bad weather conditions destroyed their crops, thousands of them have found no way out but suicide. Dr Binayak Sen, internationally renowned for the voluntary health clinic for the rural poor in Chhattisgarh he has run since 1981 and a human rights activist, recently lectured a university crowd on “Violence and justice in our times”, describing how Operation Green Hunt is worsening health conditions for an already undernourished population. He said that over 50 percent of tribals have a body mass index of 18.5. According to the standards set by the Health Organisation, this means that the population is in a state of famine. Dr Sen was recently released after two years in a Chhattisgarh prison on charges of “treason and waging war against the state”. He was accused of passing a letter from a Maoist prisoner he had been treating medically in jail to someone on the outside. After an international outcry, he was released on bail. (14 March 2010, Indian Express) During Arundhati Roy’s “Walk with the Comrades”, one of the very few doctors in a camp visited by her expressed a similarly dire view. Many diseases that result from long term anaemia are on the rise, in addition to the “usual” diseases like malaria that are preventable or can be attended to if you have access to medicines. The grim life-and-death character of what Operation Green Hunt means to millions of tribals in India’s heartland is not lost on many thinking individuals, irrespective of their views on Maoism. Until recently such wide-scale military mobilizations were reserved for India’s war with Pakistan over Kashmir or against the secessionist movements in the eastern part of the country. A movement against OGH is gaining momentum in many parts of the India, despite the risk of being tarred with the “terrorist” brush or labelled a Maoist by the Indian government. This opposition and resistance comes from a wide-ranging political spectrum. OGH has created significant polarization in society. Within this, there are contrasting views. Some oppositional voices focus on the fundamental violation of human rights underway to further the interests of India’s corporate elite, Tata, Essor and Vedanta, who have made several billion-dollar deals with the government to plunder the riches in the hills and forests occupied by the Adivasis in the areas “infested” by the Maoists. Some understand why the Maoists, with their different view of how the world can be, represent an attractive force to the Adivasis. Despite its regional and global ambitions the Indian state fails to provide public services like health care and education, minimal employment, safe drinking water, food, seed plant credits or even law and order for the Adivasis and the rest of the “poorest of the poor”. Instead the state has served them daily humiliation, oppression and superexploitation. An article in Frontline magazine, no friend of the Maoists, wrote the following: ” [T]he state has lost legitimacy in tribal India. It is laughable to claim that its project of militarily overpowering the Maoists has popular support. Its police force is inefficient, corrupt, trigger-happy and anti-poor. The State represents little more than predatory, rape-and-run industrial groups, besides super-corrupt Ministers (like Madhu Koda who allegedly amassed wealth equivalent to a fourth of Jharkhand’s tax revenue in three years). It is no accident that the Centre [India's central government] has intervened to assert its full coercive power in an area that contains much of India’s immense mineral and forest wealth, now under transfer to private capital. If the operation continues, the civilian death toll is liable to rise from several hundred to several thousand a year, as had happened in Argentina and Peru, where 50,000 to 100,000 people ‘disappeared’ in decades-long counter-insurgency operations. ” (Frontline, issue 6, 13-26 March 2010) Others contend that the masses are caught between “two fires”, the Maoist army and the state military apparatus. In India this idea is called the “sandwich theory”. It claims to see the armed might of the state and forces for revolution as equally bad. They object to the “war on the people” and say the line between civilian and military targets is being blurred, as though it would be okay to hunt down the revolutionary Maoists. Some uphold the use of Greyhounds, an elite anti-Naxal force who will be marauding in the jungles, specializing in guerrilla tactics to counter those of the Maoists. This view does not correspond to reality, because the violence of the state whose armed forces rain terror on the masses in order to maintain the exploiters’ rule is not the same as the liberatory violence of the oppressed rising up. In a very different sense, the masses of Adivasis are caught between two fires: that of the enemy directed against the revolution and the fire of everyday exploitation and oppression. When they understand the interconnectedness of that, they come to learn that revolution is the only way out.

concerning astrolgy

Obscurantists don't believe in logical arguments on the basis of provable facts but in echoing socially acquired (mostly owing to the biological accident of birth) illogical prejudices and defying the laws of history's dynamics of continuous changes -- evolutionary quantitative maturing into revolutionary qualitative changes. Every next generation is always smarter as it consolidates and builds upon the achievements of the previous generations and the exceptions of stagnate societies, only prove the rule. Only obscurantists would give the regressive judgmental statements that our distant ancestors were wiser than us and the final truth and knowledge lie in what they have already said in mythological and historical worlds. The dynamics of history evolves its own laws, unpredictable by astrological knowledge and ignorance.

The nation

The nation
I am not looking for definitions that have evolved with the evolution of the nation-state and it's ideology -- nationalism-- and with the emergence and growth of the new species of hero, the hero of the finance, which began it's journey under the patronage of the absolutist monarchies subsequently to replace them and became nation in the form of trading companies. I am not looking for definition but the identity and identification.The "nation" expropriated the "national" peasantry and freed the "national" craftsmen and artisan from their means of labor and plundered those countries, which were not yet nation. Their wealth became "The Wealth of nation" and history became "the inadvertent consequence of' their indivual "profit making activities" coordinated by "the invisible hands of the market" [Adam Smith]. The notion of nation and and it's ideology are cruel jokes against humanity and my confusion remains regarding who constitutes the nation and in whose interest? If Naxalism is to be declared biggest danger for the nation, scam-tainted Chidambaram becomes the nation. When the needle of suspicion in spectram scam points to Ambani, he becomes nation and declares that nation would take care of its crisis. 11 Pepsi selling boys become a nation when they lose a cricket game, spot-fixing/match-fixing notwithstanding, one nation is trounced by another. if it is to kill the unarmed Adivasis protesting agaainst the grab of their agricultural land for facilitating profitmaking for Tata the duo of DM and SP kill them as "encounter" of anti-development activies on behalf of nation. An NCO of army becomes nation in J&K and in Assam and as nation can kill anyone in the name of danger nation. My confusion remains regarding the identity of nation. I have expressed my confusion in a verse: KAUN HAI BHARAT MAHAN? ishmishra.blogspot.com (RADICAL)
Lik

इश्क पूरी दुनिया से

इश्क पूरी दुनिया से
ईश मिश्र
इश्क पूरी दुनिया से होता है नायाब
उसमे ही होता है माशूक का भी सबाब
इसी लिए बदलो ख़ुद को
दुनिया बदलने के लिए
बनेगी अगर दुनिया एक बेहतर
पूंजीवादी मर्दवाद हो जाएगा बेअसर
सब होंगे अपनी सर्जना के मालिक,
मिलेगा सबको प्रतिभा का अवसर
सभी को होगा प्रेम का अधिकार बराबर
हवा में गूजेगें आजादी के तराने
किस्सागो बताएँगे मानव-मुक्ति के फ़साने

ऐसा अज़ीज़

इन आँखों से छलकने को है तकलीफ का इक समंदर

लेकिन जज्बा-ए- इन्किलाब भी है उसके अन्दर

चहरे के भाव में संकल्प छिपे हैं ऐसे

दुनिया बदलने निकल पडी है कोई ज्वाला जैसे

इश्क़ करने को कहता है दिल कर पार उम्र की दहलीज

मिल जाए गर ज़िंदगी में कोई ऐसा अज़ीज़

Ramanujan’s essay

this a response to an accusation of being blasphemous. my comment on that

No one is trying to be bearer or courier of rationality or the final truth, not me at least. There is no final truth or knowledge for that matter, which a continuously evolving process. Each generation consolidates and builds upon the accomplishments of the previous generations. Any statement is rational which can be proved on the basis of verifiable facts in their dialectical unity with its ideas. I do not use abuses and regret calling names to Gods/Goddesses -- the impersonal, abstract concepts. But your drawing analogy with personal comments of calling some one's father's name is misplaced. Ramanujan' essay does not condemn the scriptures/texts but only selectively quotes from them. In my post and response to your comment on that post I have not abused put consulted only and exclusively the Ramacharitmans, (the Classic, that remains one of my favorite texts) to put forth my point. Unfortunatetely the rarely the points raised have been discussed. My question remains, who will decide about which community's religious sentiments are hurt by what, how, how much and why? Is there any homogeneous, uniform community? What is the common basis of uniformity or homogeneity?

Ramanujan’s essay

This is response to Rakesh Pandey an RSS activist in DUTA

I have read your essay in full. Your main objection is to treat those Rama stories which have been written without "faith and devotion to Rama's character" as Ramayana, particularly by Santhals and Thais and Jains. Let me tell you that educatioThis is response to Rakesh Pandey an RSS activist in DUTA

I have read your essay in full. Your main objection is to treat those Rama stories which have been written without "faith and devotion to Rama's character" as Ramayana, particularly by Santhals and Thais and Jains. Let me tell you that education is not about belief but scientific rationality. (It is different thing that unfortunately majority of science students/teachers study science not as science but skill and hence are bereft of scientific temperament and hence instead of proving anything by facts and logical arguments and proving the truth by questioning anything and everything resort to theological beliefs and superstitions). Your objection is comparison between Valmiki's and Kampan's description of Ahilya's seduction by Indra the so-called king of Gods or Ahilya's attraction towards Indra, both are incidents of promiscuity, which is immoral and both getting punishments. What kinds of Gods we have that they push mortals to such a shame?? according to you, redemption of Ahilya by the dust of Ram's foot should have been emphasized, whereas both are fantasies. It is a time where the institution of family is taking shape in a society where polygamy is permitted (Ram's supposed father had 3 wives, in fact Dashrath's lust for a younger woman is responsible for Ram's banishment. All these stories shouls be read with demystification) but not the polyandry. My knowledge of Ram's charecter is through Ramcharitmanas and I find his character despicably loaded with immoral and inhuman Varnashram values, a representative of Brahmanical values that are not only racist and anti-feminist but also inhuman. How you justify his cowardice plot to kill Bali for no reason and promotion of treachery to divide and rule. How a traitor like Vibhishan can be a hero? How do you justify his vanity to tell Sita that he had not fought the bloody war for her but for the ego of Raghukul? He never tells what all he had been doing aND ASKS sITA TO walk on fire to prove her chastity and even after that as a king when he is bored with her to find one or the other excuse to kick her out in a pregnant state? What crime had Sambuk committed whom he murders in cold blood? I really wonder on the wisdom that considers and ideologically perpetuates such a hegemonic character as a symbol of good. This is outcome of reading of not any "perverted" Ramayan but Tulsi's Ramcharitmanas. Tusi is devout Bhakta of Ram. There is a popular African proverb that untill the lions have their own historians, the history shall go on eulogizing the hunter. Tulsi is the historian of the hunter.n is not about belief but scientific rationality. (It is different thing that unfortunately majority of science students/teachers study science not as science but skill and hence are bereft of scientific temperament and hence instead of proving anything by facts and logical arguments and proving the truth by questioning anything and everything resort to theological beliefs and superstitions). Your objection is comparison between Valmiki's and Kampan's description of Ahilya's seduction by Indra the so-called king of Gods or Ahilya's attraction towards Indra, both are incidents of promiscuity, which is immoral and both getting punishments. What kinds of Gods we have that they push mortals to such a shame?? according to you, redemption of Ahilya by the dust of Ram's foot should have been emphasized, whereas both are fantasies. It is a time where the institution of family is taking shape in a society where polygamy is permitted (Ram's supposed father had 3 wives, in fact Dashrath's lust for a younger woman is responsible for Ram's banishment. All these stories shouls be read with demystification) but not the polyandry. My knowledge of Ram's charecter is through Ramcharitmanas and I find his character despicably loaded with immoral and inhuman Varnashram values, a representative of Brahmanical values that are not only racist and anti-feminist but also inhuman. How you justify his cowardice plot to kill Bali for no reason and promotion of treachery to divide and rule. How a traitor like Vibhishan can be a hero? How do you justify his vanity to tell Sita that he had not fought the bloody war for her but for the ego of Raghukul? He never tells what all he had been doing aND ASKS sITA TO walk on fire to prove her chastity and even after that as a king when he is bored with her to find one or the other excuse to kick her out in a pregnant state? What crime had Sambuk committed whom he murders in cold blood? I really wonder on the wisdom that considers and ideologically perpetuates such a hegemonic character as a symbol of good. This is outcome of reading of not any "perverted" Ramayan but Tulsi's Ramcharitmanas. Tusi is devout Bhakta of Ram. There is a popular African proverb that untill the lions have their own historians, the history shall go on eulogizing the hunter. Tulsi is the historian of the hunter.

Ramanujan’s essay

Ramanujan’s essay
Ish Mishra
The scholarly essay by Ramanujan would not have died as those other stories of the legendary epical character named Ram have survived till date but not as popular as Tulasidas’s Ramcahritmanas, which incorporated popular imagery of his time and provided an impeccable defence of Brahmanical system, under threat due to emerging various monist and heteronomous movements from within and without. It based itself and improvised upon Valmiki’s Ramayan owing to its being written in common peoples language rebelling against the Sanskritic-elitist tradition, it surpassed Valmiki’s and other Ram Kathas, lost in oblivion and revived the legend. Tulasidas’s Ram departs from Valmiki’s super hero and becomes God-reincarnation as in Kampan’s Ramayan preceding Ramcharitmanas by around 5 centuries. The essay would have been read by few students who would opt for this optional interdisciplinary course had it not been opposed by the self-styled champions of Indian culture of their kind of lumpenism, most probably without reading, as is the glorious traditions of RSS outfits. I was aware of this essay but had not read it before the unnecessary controversy created by Hindutva zealots. Some RSS 'scholars' claim that “India does not have history of banning the books”, are you aware of ban on Salman Rushdi’s Satanic Verses and Taslima Nasareen’s works by Government of India. The entire materialist philosophical literature of Lokayat tradition was destroyed by upholders of Brahmanic spiritual tradition that has been reconstructed through pejorative references to them in Brahmanical texts. The Budhist texts were destroyed first by Shankaracharya and his followers and then by Lodis who destroyed the rich Nalanda library in the pattern of Hitler and Mussolini few centuries later. Many sections of Tulsi’s great epic are already taught in schools and colleges. Instead of calling this essay dishonest and justifying the hooliganism of ABVP lumpens you should have discussed the merits and demerits of the essay.
I grew up reciting Ramcharitmanas with my grandfather, a devout Brahman.

Who is Ram? Is he a historical character? There are references of Visvamitra and Vashishtha in Rigveda but no reference of any character with this name. Dibodas was son of a Rigvedic chief Sudas and Vishvamitra was hs chief priest. Dibodas found Vashishtha to be more knowledgeable and appointed him as chief priest in place of Vishvamitra who got so annoyed that went to mobilise 10 other chiefs to attack Dibodas. This is mentioned in Vedas as Dasragyayudhah (war of 10 kings). Dibodas emerged victorious in the war and Vashishtha and Vishvamitra reached on a compromise and both were accommodated as priests by Dibodas. Brahma-Vishnu-Mahesh didn’t exist as deities till then hence no question of their re-incarnations. In Kautilya’s Arthshastra there is no mention of these deities, he talks about Vedic gods – Arun, Varun, Indra and Agni and local deities. When he advises the Vijigishu (the Conquerer king) to worship Vedic Gods for blessings and demons for avoiding calamities he brackets Kansa and Krishna together as demons. Megasthenese mentions Krishna as a legendary hero of Surasen (Mathura) region. I mean to say that while fictionalising a legendary character the writer places him in his own historical context that explains changing nature of such characters – Valmiki’s super hero thus becomes God-reincarnate in Kampan and Tulsi’s stories. Ram of Balmiki as well as of Tulsi, though, differing in nature to a large extent, is upholder of Varnashram-patriarchal values who kicks out Sita in pregnant state, despite her passing the Agni-Pareeksha and his world gets shaken by the news of a shudra, sambuk doing meditation and instead of sending laxman/Hanuman et al to kill him goes himself to murder him.
This mythical character belongs to a tradition where women are won in competitions of muscle power like other goods and disfigures a woman of another tradition in which women also propose men, instead of telling her to get away, as he was not interested. Her brother another mythical character, who has been pictured as great intellectual by Valmiki and Tulsi, and an able ruler as he rules over SONE KI LANKA, a prosperous kingdom with hail and happy subjects, kidnaps his wife with his mythical knowledge of Maya and flies her away and keeps her in a 5-star guest house with all the honor and facilities only persuades her and never insults or uses force. Ram, in order to mobilise the Vanar tribe kills Bali cowardly hiding behind a tree and kills Ravan with the help of a traitor, Vibhishan. How such an immoral and unethical character can be the symbol of goodness? This has been done by ideological practices blunting any critical analysis.

religious feelings

दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय के विद्वान उपकुलपति ने पता नहीं किस अंकगणित के ज्ञान से जान लिया कि इतिहासेतर विषय के विद्यार्थियों के लिए भारतीय संसकृतियों पर इतिहास के एक अंतर्विषयक (inter - disciplinry ), ऐक्षिक पाठ्यक्रम का एक पाठ बहुसंख्यक आबादी की धार्मिक भावनाओं को आहत करता है ( धार्मिक भाबवानाएं पता नहीं किस धातु की बनी होती हैं कि पता नहीं चलता किस बात से आहत हो जायेंगीं) और इतिहासकारों की राय लेने की बजाय चले गए सर्वोच्च नायालय कि राय लेने. न्यालोय ने कहा यह मामला विशेषज्ञों के समिति तय कर सकती है न्यायालय नहीं. कुलपति महोदय ने एक समिति बना दिया. समिति के ३ सदास्याओं ने इसे उचित ही नहीं वांछनीय बताया. चौथे सदस्य ने वांछनीयता और औचित्य की बात छोड़ कर इसकी जटिलता के आधार पर कि विद्यार्थी समझ नहीं पायेंगे और अध्यापक समझ नहीं पायेंगे, जैसे हास्यास्पद तर्क दिए. उल्लेखनीय है कि नये पाठ्यक्रम की रूप-रेखा विश्वविद्यालय के विभाग और कालेजों के शिक्षकों के बीच व्यापक विचार-विमर्श के बाद एक पाठ्यक्रम समिति आपस में विचार-विमर्श के बाद तैयार करती है. पाठ्यक्रम विषय के अध्यापकों की आमसभा द्वारा पारित होने के बाद ही लागू किया जाता है. इतिहास के अद्यापकों में ९०% से अधिक, जन्मना हिन्दू हैं. उनकी भावनाएं तो नहीं आहत हुई होंगी नहीं तो इसे क्यों स्वीकृति देते? कुलपति महोदय को कसे पता चला कि इस लेख को बी.ए. के विद्यार्थियों को पढ़ाने से हिन्दुओं की भावनाओं को चोट पहुँच रही है. २००७ से कुछ संघी शिक्षकों ने यह मुद्दा उठाना शुरू किया, वैचारिक दिवालियेपन के चलते २००८ में संघ के लम्पट ब्रिगेडों में से एक, अखिल विद्यार्थी परिषद्, के १५-२० लडके टीवी वालों के साथ विश्वविद्यालय के इतिहास विभाग में घुस गए और हुडदंग मचाना शुरू कर दिया और तत्कालीन अध्यक्ष प्रोफ़ेसर जाफरी और कुछ अन्य अध्यापकों के के साथ अभद्र भाषा में दुर्व्यहार तथा मारपीट- हाथापाई करने के बाद जाकर कुलपति से मिले. अगले दिन विश्वविद्यालय के इतिहास तथा अन्य विषयों के सैकड़ों अध्यापक और छात्र हिंसा और असभ्य-लम्पटता के विरुद्ध विश्वविद्यालय में रैली निकाला, सभा किया और कुलपति को ज्ञापन दिया जिसके परिणाम-स्वरुप लम्पटों ने स्वीकार किया कि उनका विरोध का तरीका गलत था. मैं भी उस विरोध प्रदर्शन में था और ज्यादातर प्रदर्शनकारी और लगभग सभी वक्ता नाम से कम-से-कम हिन्दू थे. ज़ाहिर है उनकी भावनाएं उस लेख से नहीं बल्कि संघी ब्रिगेड की जहालत और असहिष्णुता तथा लम्पटता से आहत हुई. [क्रमशः]