Training swayamsevaks

Temple tales

This week’s editorial slams the chief ministers of both Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu for tampering with Hindu temples. Congress Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhar Reddy has become “a land shark” who is selling temple lands to raise money for government expenditure “in the guise of protecting the temple lands from grabbers”. Accusing the state government of also diverting temple revenue to the state exchequer, it says, “needless to add that the Chief Minister Samuel Reddy is proactive in all this”.

If Reddy is referred to by his Christian name, the editorial attacks the “atheist” Karunanidhi for seeking to appoint non-Brahmins to the post of priests. The editorial notes that there is nothing “revolutionary” about the move—made more than two decades ago. Jayendra Saraswati of the Kanchi mutt “had begun training the socially backward classes into temple rituals”.

But “Karunanidhi, being an atheist, has no business deciding on issues related to religion. Reforms ought to and will come from within the society. Karunanidhi can play patron, if he dares, to churches and mosques”.

Middle class blues

Organiser columnist Geeta, who writes on ‘Money Matters’, maintains that “the middle class, flaunted by the government as the backbone of the Indian economy, is under siege”. Signs of the siege include Arjun Singh’s quota move to cut into the seats for the middle class in university and professional colleges; P Chidambaram’s decision to complicate tax returns; the fuel price hike; and the proposal to impose a TDS on post office savings schemes.

The trouble for the middle class, she adds, “is that none of the mainline political parties is bothered about them. According to political parties, this class does not have votebanks and they do not even go to poll centres”.

But in a warning that appears aimed as much at the BJP as the UPA, she concludes that “middle class people are opinion leaders and the opinion can trickle down fast enough to uproot a government”.

Jesus Christ!

Continuing his thesis on the ‘coming clash of religions’ between Hinduism and Christianity, Subramaniam Swamy says Hindus must be prepared for the combat “by developing a new mindset of virat Hindutva and by building an armoury of counterarguments to undermine the theological self-assurance of foreign missionaries”. The “core weapon” for Hindus is the new research on Christianity. This includes the theory that “Jesus Christ may have indeed been a Mahayana Buddhist, i.e. de facto Hindu” who went from Kashmir to Jerusalem to educate the Jews in Buddhism but was crucified. “However, thanks to the yogic powers he had acquired in India, he escaped and came back to Kashmir.”

Urging Hindus to take the “war of theology to the Christian camp”, Swamy says, “let them be on the defensive and answer all these researches including the Da Vinci Code of their own co-religionists, and leave us in peace”.

Compiled by Manini Chatterjee