Cow Dung Sales Boost E-Commerce in India
Cow patties -- cow poop mixed with hay and dried in the sun, made mainly by Indian women in rural area -- are among the hottest selling items by online retailers including Amazon and eBay in India, according to media reports. Some retailers are offering discounts for large orders and offering free gift wrapping.
Cow dung has a special spiritual significance in Hindu religion. The cows in India do not eat non-vegetarian items and only eat grass or grains which makes cow dung holy and acceptable. In a lot of pujas (worship rituals), both dried and fresh cow dung is used. From Govardhan Puja to havans, cow dung is used during pujas.
In many spiritual "yagnas", the fire is lit using dried cow dung and desi ghee (clarified butter). It is believed that burning cow dung with ghee is one of the best ways to purify the home, according to BoldSky.com.
In addition, cow dung is the most widely used fuel in India for heating and cooking in rural areas. However, the online orders are coming mostly from cities where it would be difficult to buy dung cakes. The cakes are sold in packages that contain two to eight pieces weighing 200 grams (7 ounces) each. Prices range from 100 to 400 rupees ($1.50 to $6) per package.
Hindus do not eat beef but cow urine and cow dung are considered sacred. Urine is believed to be beneficial by Hindus as both a beverage and used for purification of buildings. American newspaper USA Today published a story earlier this year about a urine bottling plant in Haridwar, India. A recent Times of India report said cow urine was used by a group of Hindu activists for cleaning some government buildings.
Online sales of cow dung offer a uniquely Indian blend of ancient Hindu culture and modern information technology being embraced in the country. Rise of Hindu Nationalists to power under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given renewed impetus to total Hinduization of India.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Coffe, Tea or Pee?
Hinduization of India
Brievik's Hindutva Rhetoric
Indian Textbooks
India's RAW's Successes in Pakistan
Cow dung has a special spiritual significance in Hindu religion. The cows in India do not eat non-vegetarian items and only eat grass or grains which makes cow dung holy and acceptable. In a lot of pujas (worship rituals), both dried and fresh cow dung is used. From Govardhan Puja to havans, cow dung is used during pujas.
In many spiritual "yagnas", the fire is lit using dried cow dung and desi ghee (clarified butter). It is believed that burning cow dung with ghee is one of the best ways to purify the home, according to BoldSky.com.
In addition, cow dung is the most widely used fuel in India for heating and cooking in rural areas. However, the online orders are coming mostly from cities where it would be difficult to buy dung cakes. The cakes are sold in packages that contain two to eight pieces weighing 200 grams (7 ounces) each. Prices range from 100 to 400 rupees ($1.50 to $6) per package.
Hindus do not eat beef but cow urine and cow dung are considered sacred. Urine is believed to be beneficial by Hindus as both a beverage and used for purification of buildings. American newspaper USA Today published a story earlier this year about a urine bottling plant in Haridwar, India. A recent Times of India report said cow urine was used by a group of Hindu activists for cleaning some government buildings.
Online sales of cow dung offer a uniquely Indian blend of ancient Hindu culture and modern information technology being embraced in the country. Rise of Hindu Nationalists to power under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given renewed impetus to total Hinduization of India.
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Coffe, Tea or Pee?
Hinduization of India
Brievik's Hindutva Rhetoric
Indian Textbooks
India's RAW's Successes in Pakistan
Comments
"I may be poor but I am an honest man. I beg as it fetches me more money, Rs 200 a day. My last job of a ward boy in a hospital got me only Rs 100 a day," said Dinesh Khodhabhai (45), a class 12 pass who can speak half-way decent English.
Dinesh is part of a motley group of 30 beggars who seek alms around Bhadra Kali temple in Ahmedabad. Before their work begins, they sip hot tea offered gratis by a city philanthropist.
Sudhir Babulal (51) is a third-year BCom fail beggar who earns Rs 150 per day. Sudhir had come to Ahmedabad from Vijapur town with dreams of a good life but masonry jobs were erratic, fetching him Rs 3,000 for a 10-hour shift and nothing for weeks on end. "After my wife left me, where was the need to keep a house? I sleep on the riverfront and beg," said Sudhir.
Dashrath Parmar (52), who has an MCom degree from Gujarat University, is another pan-handler. This father of three, who aspired for government service but lost even the private job he had, today lives off free meals offered by charity organizations. His mother is hospitalized.
Ashok Jaisur, who cleared high school from Mumbai, begs in Lal Darwaza area. He left his job as a security guard after he lost sight due to cataract and now begs.
"I have only one wish: to make my son Raj an animator," says Ashok who feeds his nine girls and wife from income earned off the streets.
"It's difficult to rehabilitate beggars as they get lured back due to easy money," says Biren Joshi of Manav Sadhana, an NGO working with beggars.
"People with degrees turning to begging reflects the grim employment scenario. People turn to soliciting alms when they do not get decent jobs and have no social support to fall back on," says sociologist Gaurang Jani.
It's never dung me any harm... Parents roll children and babies in COW MANURE in Indian village where locals believe it protects them from disease
Parents have been rolling their children in cow dung in an Indian village
They believe the manure brings children good luck and a healthy life
The practice takes place after India's biggest Hindu festival, Diwali
Cows are sacred in Hindu faith and they they believe the dung has medicinal properties
Its a tradition that Indians believe will bring their children good luck and protect them from disease.
And scores of parents have been lining up in the tiny village of Betul in Madhya Pradesh to roll their youngsters in cow pat.
People in the small village believe that smearing the dung on their young sons and daughters help to give them a healthy life free from ailments.
Groups of villagers gather around the heap and wait for their turn to place their children in the excrement.
The practice continues from dusk until dawn until each child in the village has had their turn.
The bizarre ritual has been followed for centuries and locals says their children have benefited because of the dipping.
The cow is considered one of the most sacred animals in Hinduism and they are worshipped as revered creatures.
Many Hindu preachers believe that cow urine and dung have medicinal properties.
Meanwhile cow slaughter and the consumption of beef is banned in certain parts of India.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3344099/It-s-never-dung-harm-Parents-roll-children-babies-COW-MANURE-Indian-village-locals-believe-protects-disease.html#ixzz3vpATd3Un
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"Today we are talking about nuclear tests. Lakhs of years ago, Sage Kanad had conducted a nuclear test. Our knowledge and science do not lack anything," the Indian Express quoted him as saying in Parliament on Wednesday.
Sage Kanad is believed to have lived around the 2nd century BC.
Nishank, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP from Haridwar, also seconded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's citing of plastic surgery and genetic science with reference to Lord Ganesha getting an elephant trunk and birth of Karna.
"People are raising questions on Modiji's comments on Ganesha's surgery. It was actually a surgery. The science available to us is not available elsewhere in the world… science or knowledge to transplant a severed head existed only in India."
Nishank also batted for astrology, saying it is the topmost science in the world. He said our ancient astrologers dwarfed all other sciences.
The Haridwar MP's comments triggered a protest from Left members even as he said there should be a "proper discussion on it and it should get the respect it deserves".
Nishank's comments are in line with a series of assertions doing the rounds of late; the most notable being from retired school headmaster Dinanath Batra who got American academic Wendy Doniger's book on Hinduism pulped on the grounds that it insulted Hindus.
Batra has written books as well. Earlier this year, the Gujarat government mandated some of them as supplementary reading for its primary and secondary students.
From preaching about ancient India's gurukul style of learning, redrawing the Indian map to include other countries to interpreting history through stories about rishi-munis (sages and seers), dev-daanav (deities and demons) and "heroes" of pre-Independence India, these books try to conform to "Bharatiya sanskriti" (Indian culture).
eeling nostalgic? There's no better way to take yourself back than with your nose: Research shows that aromas can bring back powerful memories. And for some in India, nothing brings back childhood quite like the distinct smell of cow poop. As the Associated Press reports, patties made of dried cow dung and hay has become an internet sensation for nostalgic shoppers, who use the fragrant cakes for fuel and in ritual fires.
The Associated Press writes that cow dung cakes are selling out on websites like Amazon. The cakes appear to be selling mainly to urban areas that do not have a ready supply of cow dung, with demand spiking around traditional festivals such as Diwali in November or the upcoming Lohri in January.
India has a massive bovine population—nearly 300 million as of 2012. All those cows produce a lot of poop, which is then used as both fertilizer and fuel. Chris Copp writes for Full Stop India that dung is "a commodity so intertwined with daily survival that it is nearly impossible to think of life without it." India is thought to use as much as 400 million tons of cow dung for cooking fuel alone each year, with approximately 30 percent of rural fuel production dependent on animal waste.
But rapid urbanization in India means that more and more people are moving from rural areas to cities that don't rely on cow dung for fuel. That's leading to new demand for cow dung in urban areas—and thanks to sites like Amazon and eBay, cow patties are just a click away. The cakes are selling out around Hindu festivals, when people burn the cakes for ritual fires and to stay warm. And yes, smell is a factor: A spokesperson for Amazon India tells the Associated Press that "people who grew up in rural areas find the peaty smell of dung fires pleasant" and nostalgic.
HARIDWAR, India— Baba Ramdev, one of India’s most-celebrated yoga gurus and an outspoken critic of Western capitalism, has built a consumer-goods empire using his fame to peddle an ever-expanding portfolio of products based on traditional Indian medicine.
Patanjali Ayurved Ltd., the company he founded in 2006 near his ashram on the Ganges in this Hindu holy city, has blossomed into one of India’s biggest brands by making creams, cleansers and supplements infused with centuries-old Ayurvedic remedies.
Among them: soap that contains dung and urine from cows, revered animals in Hinduism; acacia-infused shampoo; gooseberry juice, which the company says delays aging; and a herbal spread the company advertises as a cure for asthma and memory loss.
“Our products are taking Indians back to their roots,” said the saffron-robed Mr. Ramdev, standing beside a mountain of fresh herbs at Patanjali’s factory. “Foreign companies are fooling Indians by selling products tainted with chemicals and artificial flavors.”
Patanjali aims to surpass global giants like Unilever PLC, Procter & Gamble Co. and Nestlé SA as a new wave of Indians, flush with national pride, join the consuming class. It is the latest twist in the evolution of the Indian shopper and could be tougher for international firms to follow.
India’s traditional Ayurvedic system encourages therapies like yoga and holds that ailments—from back pain to the common cold—can be fixed by certain foods, herbs and oils.
Mr. Ramdev is one of the country’s best-known teachers of yoga, meditation and Ayurveda. His disciples include Prime Minister Narendra Modi and some of Bollywood’s biggest stars.
Hundreds of thousands of people turn out for his rallies across the country at which he often shows off his signature move, sucking in his stomach and making his abdominal muscles undulate.
He also uses the stage to push Patanjali’s products. The big-bearded guru preaches about the evils of Western consumerism. Colas cause stomach cancer, he says, and salty snacks like potato chips weaken bones. He says international brands take millions of dollars in profits out of India.
“The cosmetics and food people are buying are poison. It’s slow poison,” Mr. Ramdev told disciples in one televised yoga session, sitting in the lotus position next to a spread of Patanjali’s products.
He recounted the story of a woman who spent thousands of dollars on shampoo only to lose her hair. Then she switched to Patanjali. “Now her hair is long and strong,” he said.
Unilever, P&G and Nestlé wouldn’t directly comment about Mr. Ramdev or his cures but say their products are backed by months of scientific research and rigorous testing. Our “brands have been loved by consumers for their high standards of quality, safety, taste,” a spokesman for Nestlé’s Indian arm said. “We are very proud of this heritage.”
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The company has received a boost from Prime Minister Modi, who has Hindu nationalist roots, and has been ratcheting up awareness about all things Indian. Since taking office last year, he has increased government spending on yoga and Ayurveda and successfully lobbied the United Nations to declare an international day for yoga. On the first one this year, Messrs. Modi and Ramdev together helped lead 35,000 people through poses.
This is the kind of event that has convinced consumers like Hari Lal to spend their hard-earned rupees on products from Patanjali.
“There’s a wave of excitement in the air,” said Mr. Lal, who cleans cars for a living. “Everyone’s talking about how good yoga and Ayurveda are. So I thought, ‘Why not Patanjali. It has the backing of Ramdev after all.’”
Convinced Ayurveda had secrets to make her hair stronger and shinier, bank employee Himani Arora says she switched from a P&G product to a Patanjali shampoo made with milk.
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/232244/those-dung-cakes-could-harmful.html …
A study conducted by Jadavpur University shows that villagers in the Ganga, Meghana and Brahmaputra plains were exposed to smoke containing high levels of hazardous gases every day. This region’s groundwater is contaminated and this water is used by farmers to grow paddy. Cattle feed on polluted paddy and the dung is likely to contain arsenic.
When people burn dung cakes, over 25 per cent of the arsenic in fumes could be absorbed by the respiratory tract and this leads to lung cancer and other diseases. But there are solutions to this problem. One of them is the construction of gobar gas plants. The government offers a huge subsidy for gobar gas plant construction, but there is a lack of commitment in implementing the scheme.
Tens of thousands of Hindu hardliners, dressed in khaki shorts, white shirts and black hats, gathered for an elaborate rally in western India on Sunday (Jan 3) in a massive show of strength.
It was set to be one of the largest ever gatherings of the controversial Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a group seen as the ideological parent of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
More than 150,000 activists, almost all men, had registered for the rally at which RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat was due to deliver a speech from a stage designed to resemble a fort.
A marching band composed of 2,000 RSS volunteers was also scheduled to play. A giant saffron flag, the colour most associated with Hinduism, was to be hoisted on a post over 20 metres high at the 182-hectare rally site in Pune, Maharashtra state.
Analysts say the RSS's influence has never been greater following the election in May 2014 of Modi, a former RSS foot-soldier. Attendees, who arrived in their hordes throughout the morning, were in bullish mood.
"People in the RSS look up to Modi as an example of what we can become. He gives our organisation a great image," Vinayak Deshpande, 32, told AFP.
Another volunteer, who asked not to be named, said the RSS had witnessed a 20 per cent increase in activists since Modi became prime minister.
"With Modi as prime minister the RSS is on the right track," he said.
The RSS, formed in 1925, is India's biggest grassroots religious organisation and is believed to have around five million activists, known as "Swayamsevaks".
It styles itself as a cultural organisation devoted to protecting India's Hindu culture but critics accuse it of being an anti-Muslim pseudo-fascist organisation with a history of fuelling religious tensions.
The RSS is notoriously secretive - volunteers do not formally register as members and communications are often done verbally. Sunday's event was rare for its size and for its open invitation to the media.
Pravin Dabadghav, a senior RSS official in Maharashtra who helped organise the gathering, said it was set to be the largest ever meeting of RSS volunteers in western and southern India.
The previous high was in 2010 when 90,000 attended a gathering in Kerala.
The RSS has been banned three times in post-independence India, including after a former member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 and following the 1992 demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya which led to deadly nationwide riots.
It favours a uniform civil code for India rather than personal laws for different religions, the protection of cows - which are sacred to Hindus - and the construction of a temple on the disputed Ayodhya site.
Modi helped the group out as a boy and became a full-time volunteer as a young adult, taking the requisite vow of celibacy, for more than 15 years before joining the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The Times of India reports that Rajrani Gaud from Madhya Pradesh suffered a severe shoulder injury when she was hit by a football-sized chunk of frozen human feces last month.
Her injuries could have been much worse, according to eyewitnesses. They say she only avoided being killed because the icy ball crashed into the roof of a house before hitting her.
And the strong suspicion now is that it this chilly projectile was composed of more than just frozen water.
The newspaper claims that aviation scientists believe she may well have had the misfortune to become one of an incredibly rare group: people who have been hit by what the airline industry coyly calls "blue ice".
That's its euphemism for the frozen human waste that very occasionally forms around the overflow outlets for aeroplane toilets, and then falls to earth. "Blue" because of the chemicals added to the toilets in planes to reduce odour and break down the waste.
http://www.tehelka.com/2016/01/hindutva-pranks-and-scientific-cranks/#.VpnXJWjviDc.twitter …
Similar to Zia’s Pakistan, apart from creating an atmosphere where those who uphold a scientific temper are physically attacked and even killed (for instance the murder of anti-superstition activist Govind Pansare in Maharashtra in February last year), the government has also appointed Hindutva supporters with questionable academic credentials as heads of scientific institutions. There have also been instances of public funds used for researching ‘Hindutva science’. This raises the important question that many are asking: Is the Hindutva brigade aiming for the creation of a ‘Hindu Pakistan’?
“By contaminating science with absurd claims based on an ultra-nationalist political project, these self-proclaimed scientists are out to make the society regressive,” says Gauhar Raza, a scientist and poet based in Delhi. “Religious epics are narrated to younger generations as historical truths. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan.”
India may have a selfie-loving prime minister, Narendra Modi, but Indians in general seem to be bad at selfie safety.
Of at least 27 “selfie related” deaths around the world last year, about half occurred in India, reports show.
In 2015, Indians taking selfies died while posing in front of an oncoming train, in a boat that tipped over at a picnic, on a cliff that gave way and crumbled into a 60-foot ravine and on the slippery edge of a scenic river canal. Also, in September, a Japanese tourist trying to take a selfie fell down steps at the Taj Mahal, suffering fatal head injuries.
Mumbai police said this week that they had identified more than a dozen “no-selfie zones” around India’s largest city after three young girls were swept out into the Arabian Sea while taking selfies in a rocky part of the Bandra area Saturday. One of the young women is presumed to have drowned, as did a man who jumped in to save them.
A Mumbai police spokesman, Dhananjay Kulkarni, told the BBC that police would be asking city officials to take steps to reduce the risk of selfies at popular tourist spots such as the city’s famous Marine Drive, including deploying life guards and posting warning signs. Police would also be giving warnings, authorities said.
Last year, no-selfie zones were also established in certain areas of the massive Hindu religious gathering called the Kumbh Mela because organizers feared bottlenecks caused by selfie-takers could spark stampedes.
To tell you the truth, I am not sure exactly what it is except perhaps that every year I attend at least one session that reminds me of how backward India remains intellectually and academically. And of course economically but there is inevitably a connection. As the economist Nouriel Roubini pointed out in the NDTV Davos debate, India needs to invest in human capital. It is not good enough, he said, to have a handful of brilliant engineers and computer programmers if hundreds of millions of Indians continue to lack basic education.
Images of rural government schools came into my head as I listened. It is true that decades of criminal negligence will take time to correct but if correction does not happen India will remain in its time warp.
On the first day of the conference I attended a session called ‘A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions’ moderated by Niall Ferguson that reminded me painfully of how much of an academic laggard India is. This panel included professors of history and politics from Britain and the United States and the exalted level at which they discussed the theme of this year’s conference, ‘Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, reminded me painfully that it could never happen in India. I am not going to bore you with details; you can go to the WEF website and watch the whole discussion. You can go to it as well to see what is happening on the frontiers of medicine, science, environment and technology. On account of the reputation that this Davos meeting has gained in its 46 years of existence, it attracts the best minds in the world. Not just “the 1%” as leftist critics of Davos like to believe. And by the way, these same leftist critics come running to Davos when invited to receive awards for social work or achievements in music and the arts.
I met Sandeep Pandey days after he was sacked from his position as a visiting professor at a prestigious technical institute at Banaras Hindu University. We sat in a dreary guesthouse on the university campus. Mr. Pandey had just finished a long train ride. With his wrinkled kurta pajama and rubber slippers, he was every bit the picture of an old-fashioned Indian leftist.
That was why he’d been fired. “Ideologically, I am at the opposite extreme to the people who are at present in power,” he said. “These people not only cannot tolerate any dissent; they don’t even tolerate disagreement. They want everybody who disagrees with them out of this campus.” Mr. Pandey was referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and — more to the point — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the B.J.P.’s cultural fountainhead.
The R.S.S., a Hindu nationalist organization, was founded in 1925 as a muscular alternative to Mahatma Gandhi’s freedom movement. Its founder admired Adolf Hitler, and in 1948 the organization was blamed for indirectly inspiring Gandhi’s assassination. The B.J.P. has not always had an easy relationship with the R.S.S. With its fanciful ideas of Hindu purity and its sweeping range of prejudices, the organization is dangerously out of step with the realities of India’s political landscape. When the B.J.P. wants to win an election, it usually distances itself from the R.S.S.’s cultural agenda.
Mr. Modi’s 2014 election had very little to do with the R.S.S. and everything to do with his personality and promises of development. But the R.S.S. doesn’t see it that way. Like a fairy-tale dwarf, the group has sought to extract its due from the man it helped into power. As payment for the debt, the R.S.S. wants control of education. Specifically, it wants to install its men at the helm of universities where they will wreak vengeance on the traditionally left-wing intellectual establishment that has always held them in contempt.
At a prestigious film institute, students are protesting the appointment of a president whose only qualification, they feel, is a willingness to advance the R.S.S.’s agenda. The group’s members have met with the education minister in the hope of shaping education policy; in states that the B.J.P. controls, the R.S.S. has been putting forward the names of underqualified ideologues for advisory positions on the content of textbooks and curriculums. It has also sought to put those who share its ideology at the head of important cultural institutions, such as the Indian Council of Historical Research.
This is the background to Mr. Pandey’s dismissal. His new boss, Girish Chandra Tripathi, the vice chancellor, is an R.S.S. man. The Ministry of Education helped push through his appointment after Mr. Modi’s election. One B.H.U. professor, who wished not to be named, described Mr. Tripathi as “an academic thug with no qualifications.” (He was previously a professor of economics.)
The new vice chancellor soon turned on Mr. Pandey. “It was all engineered,” Mr. Pandey said to me. First, the professor said, he was denounced by a student. Then a local news website printed a bogus story accusing him of being part of an armed guerrilla movement. (Mr. Pandey, a Gandhian, opposes all violence.) Soon after, the university’s board of governors decided, on Mr. Tripathi’s recommendation, that he be fired. He is an alumnus of the university and a mechanical engineer with a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He has won awards for his social work. None of this made a difference. He was given a month to clear out.
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The problem with the vice chancellor is not just that he is right-wing. It is that he is unqualified for his position. This was never more apparent than in his total inability to grasp the value of dissent at an institution of learning.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/india-s-government-is-becoming-increasingly-antiscience/?wt.mc=SA_Twitter-Share … #science
Three murders, a suicide and a rash of political appointments at universities have thrown Indian academia into an uproar against the conservative (right-wing) government. Prominent artists, writers, historians and scientists are speaking out against an intensifying climate of religious intolerance and political interference in academic affairs.
“What’s going on in this country is really dangerous,” says Rajat Tandon, a number theorist at Hyderabad Central University. Tandon is one of more than 100 prominent scientists, including many heads of institutions, who signed a statement protesting “the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country.” The statement cites the murder of three noted rationalists — men who had dedicated their lives to countering superstition and championed scientific thought — and what they see as the government’s silent complicity.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won the 2014 general elections in India in a landslide victory. The BJP and Modi, in particular, are aligned with the extremist right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. (This unholy alliance is comparable to the relationship between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, but the RSS is a paramilitary group with more violent overtones than the Tea Party has shown so far.) Together, the BJP and RSS promote the agenda of Hindutva, the notion that India is the homeland of Hindus and all others — the hundreds of millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others in this sprawling, secular democracy — are interlopers.
“The present government is deviating from the path of democracy, taking the country on the path to what I’d call a Hindu religious autocracy,” says Pushpa Mittra Bhargava , who founded the prestigious Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology in Hyderabad.
Despite his blatantly anti-secular stance, Modi’s stated goals for economic development are wildly popular, particularly among the country’s majority Hindus. But academics and intellectuals have been protesting the erosions on academic freedom almost from the start.
In January 2015, at the 102nd session of the Indian Science Congress, several members of the BJP government led a session on ancient Indian science and claimed that thousands of years ago, Indians had built planes that could fly not just on earth but between planets. There were other outlandish claims — that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha is proof that Indian ancients knew the secrets of cosmetic surgery, for example. Scientists were dismayed, and some did call for the session to be canceled, but their primary response then was still ridicule, rather than outrage.
In February 2015, economics Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen stepped down as chancellor of Nalanda University in Bihar, protesting the “considerable government intervention” in academic decisions. That same month, gunmen attacked a left-wing politician called Govind Pansare and his wife; Pansare later died of his injuries. Then, in August, gunmen killed Malleshappa Kalburgi, a leading scholar and rationalist, at his home. “They were a threat, so they were eliminated,” says Tandon.
The attacks shocked the academic community and ignited protests from writers, filmmakers and historians; many returned their national awards as a symbol of their dissent.
Scientists were late to the table, which is not surprising, given that most of Indian science relies on government funds. Still, in October, three separate groups of scientists made statements — the total signatories now number nearly one thousand — protesting the government’s inaction against the acts of violence. (Bhargava returned his Padma Bhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in India, to the president.)
Hindu nationalists have long propagated their belief that many discoveries of modern science and technology were known to the people of ancient India. But now for the first time an Indian prime minister has endorsed these claims, maintaining that cosmetic surgery and reproductive genetics were practiced thousands of years ago.
As proof, Narendra Modi gave the examples of the warrior Karna from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata and of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha.
“We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time,” the prime minister told a gathering of doctors and other professionals at a hospital in Mumbai on Saturday. “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb.”
Modi went on: “We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”
While much of Modi’s speech was devoted to how to improve healthcare facilities in modern India, he also dwelt on ancient India’s “capabilities” in several fields.
“There must be many areas in which our ancestors made big contributions,” he said. “Some of these are well recognised. If we talk about space science, our ancestors had, at some point, displayed great strengths in space science. What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago is being recognised by science today. What I mean to say is that we are a country which had these capabilities. We need to regain these.”
This is not the first time that Modi has publicly articulated such ideas. But he did so earlier as chief minister of Gujarat state, and not as prime minister. He also wrote the foreword to a book for school students in Gujarat which maintains, among other things, that the Hindu God Rama flew the first aeroplane and that stem cell technology was known in ancient India.
Modi’s claims at the Mumbai hospital initially went unreported in the Indian media, except on the website rediff.com.
But on Monday night Headlines Today TV talk show host Karan Thapar focused on it in his primetime programme, with opposition politicians criticising Modi. The speech has also been posted on the prime minister’s official website. No Indian scientist has come forward as yet to challenge him.
If you have a mental image of what a yoga guru does then it would probably tend towards promoting inner peace and good posture. It probably wouldn't include making public statements that it's only the rule of law that's holding them back from beheading thousands of people who don't chant their nationalist phrase of choice.
But just such a bloodthirsty remark has been made by the prominent Indian yoga teacher Baba Ramdev, making collective jaws drop and raising questions about how religious and patriotic sentiments are exploited in Indian political debate.
Ramdev is a successful modern yoga teacher - he's taught all over the world, been credited with re-popularising the discipline among India's young middle class, spoken at the UN, and even branched out into selling his own brand of noodles.
But in recent days, Indian twitter users have been using the hashtag #TalibaniRamdev to compare him to an Islamist extremist after he waded into a debate about a controversial phrase.
The phrase - "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" - means "Hail Mother India", and refers to the nation personified as a Hindu goddess. It's widely used as a statement of patriotism by the BJP, India's Hindu nationalist ruling party. Some politicians have called for all students to be taught the phrase in school.
But some Muslim clerics say it goes against the Islamic belief that there is only one God, and they're trying to stop the phrase being imposed. In March, a prominent Muslim leader said he would never utter the slogan "…even if you put a knife to my throat", and a few days later another politician from the party was suspended from the state assembly in Maharashtra after refusing to repeat it.
Debate on the slogan has raged ever since, with one BJP politician saying those who refused to hail Mother India, whatever their religion, should have no right to remain in the country.
But Baba Ramdev escalated the rhetoric even further when he spoke at a meeting on Sunday, organised by the right wing Hindu organisation RSS with the aim of promoting community harmony. Ramdev made it very clear that only respect for the rule of law was restraining him from beheading anyone who disrespected Bharat Mata. "If someone says that he won't chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai even if his head is chopped off, I want to say there is a rule of law and we respect the constitution, otherwise we can cut hundreds and thousands of heads," Ramdev said in remarks that were filmed and later posted on YouTube.
His outspoken comments have caused outrage in a country where many have commented on a rise in intolerance and bigotry. Last year 200 academics signed a letter saying that the current atmosphere in India encouraged "greater hostility and aggression, especially against religious and caste minorities."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-india-cow-urine-industry-20160718-story.html
India-trained veterinarian Navneet Dhand, who is an associate professor in veterinary biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Sydney, points to three diseases prevalent in India that could potentially be transmitted to people in the raw urine of infected cows: leptospirosis, which can cause meningitis and liver failure; arthritis-causing brucellosis; and Q-fever, which can cause pneumonia and chronic inflammation of the heart.
That's not dissuading Jain's Cow Urine Therapy Health Clinic, which buys 25,000 liters (6,600 gallons) of cow urine a month from a dozen gaushalas. Virendar Kumar Jain, who founded the 15-doctor practice in the central Indian city of Indore, said his center has administered urine-derived medicines to 1.2 million patients over the past two decades for ailments from cancer to endocrine disorders, such as diabetes.
His staff field inquiries from 4,000 online patients daily, Jain said. Consumers can also buy the products via e-commerce websites, such as Amazon. He estimates cow attendants can make 1,200 rupees a month from the sale of a cow's liquid waste, which can easily pay for the beast's upkeep.
Urine distillate sells for $1.20 to $1.50 (80 to 100 rupees) a liter, says Balkrishna of Patanjali.
Still, the value of cow urine is not a great incentive for keeping unproductive cows until their dying day, said Pankaj Navani, a former engineer whose 300-cow Binsar Farms produces 2,200 liters of milk a day. The lifespan of a cow is about 15 years, though most stop producing milk years earlier.
Navani's herd, established in 2012, is still relatively young and he's yet to face the challenge of what to do with his former milkers, he said. "A more logical policy approach is required to deal with the issue in general," Navani said.
Vishal Gupta, 37, gave up his job to become a full-time practitioner of cow urine therapy and attended a cow medicine training school in the district of Kanchipuram, southern India, before launching a store selling products made from cow urine.
"Cow is the only animal whose everything has medicinal value," he said. "From milk and dung to urine, everything can be used for a medicinal purpose."
While the belief that cows have curative powers has been part of Hindu practices in India for centuries, these traditions got a big boost when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was elected in 2014.
Some leaders of Modi's rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) advocate cow urine as a cure for all kinds of illnesses — including cancer — and cow urine therapy appears to be taking off.
In fact, cow urine typically trades for as much as $25 per gallon, compared to 25 cents per gallon of its milk.
Versions that are boiled and condensed, sweetened, or have added herbs are sold internationally on Amazon under the Hindi name "gomutra ark."
All doctors contacted for this story declined to comment on whether cow urine was an effective cure for any disease.
However, devotees swear by it.
Ajay Dube, a 54-year-old jewelry-maker, came to Vishal Gupta for advice on how to treat intestinal bloating caused by inhaling gas from the acids used to clean gold.
He believes the recommended solution of two teaspoons of cow urine mixed with herbs and berries cured his problem.
"When I first tasted it, it was very bad but I got used to it in few days and in one month's time my gas problem was over and also my appetite increased," Dube said.
Vishal Gupta has entered a business partnership with Gyanendra Kumar, a farmer turned entrepreneur who wakes every morning at 4 a.m. to fill large pails with urine from his cows.
The urine then is boiled and condensed to make the "ark" extract. Last month, one of India's biggest cow shelters began producing 10,000 liters of ark a day at a production facility inaugurated by the health minister, and similar sites are springing up all over the country.
And it's not just medicine — other products made from cow urine including insulin substitute and mouthwash.
Reverence for cow urine has become a political issue in India, where hindus worship cows as "gau mata" — "mother of all." Hindus seek nourishment through milk, dung and urine but almost never cow meat — they regard the cow as sacred and many see its consumption as an abomination.
Since the BJP was elected, a raft of cow-protection laws were implemented as were vociferous demands for their strict enforcement.
Last year, a professor at the Indian Science Congress, in Mumbai, claimed that India possessed airplanes seven thousand years ago. He isn’t alone in such beliefs. When a certain swathe of India’s population considers the country’s ancient past, it doesn’t see a country fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in poverty; rather, what’s envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari. This imagined entity brims with characters from Indian epics and spits out grand inventions that would put scientists in the twenty-first century to shame—not only airplanes but cars, plastic surgery, and stem-cell research. What these Indians see, in other words, is an India that was once greater than any other nation on earth, and which has since fallen into a cruddy, postcolonial despair. Muslim and British invaders, they insist, have sapped the subcontinent’s energies over the past millennium.
This is a major strand of the nativist philosophy espoused by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the flotilla of parties and social organizations that escorted him to power, in 2014. It is, in the rippling and echoing way of world events, in step with archaic right-wing movements everywhere—Make India Great Again would be a suitable slogan—and it is untroubled by facts. In the past year, right-wing mobs have lynched and beaten Muslims and Dalits (the former untouchables, who have often refused to be co-opted by upper-class-dominated Hindu nationalism) in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand for allegedly eating beef, a crime that these nationalists cannot condone after a millennium of their religion’s supposed persecution. (Hinduism has always been the majority religion on the subcontinent.) Dormant laws in Indian states banning cow-slaughter and beef consumption are now being enforced. In January, a Dalit Ph.D. student at Hyderabad University hanged himself from the ceiling fan in his room after right-wing groups bore down on him for his activism. Elsewhere, emboldened nationalist groups have intimidated fiction writers, scholars, and publishers into silence for wounding religious sentiments. Student protests are branded “anti-national” and slapped with sedition charges.
In India, right now, the past is violently alive, and it is being bandied about like a blunt instrument, striking down those who try to speak sense to the present or who try to point out that this past is itself a fiction.
One of the intellectuals involved in calling the right’s bluff is the Indian scholar Sunil Khilnani, who has just published an incisive work of popular history, “Incarnations: India in Fifty Lives.” Where the opposition is clamorous, the book is calm; where the opposition flexes its Vedic muscles, the book is undercutting, irreverent, and impish. It attempts to show, through prodigious but lightly worn scholarship, how complex and heterodox the Indian past was, and how it has been, and continues to be, constructed.
Khilnani begins with the Buddha, who lived around 500 B.C.E., and is thus, Khilnani writes, the “first individual personality we can recognize in the subcontinent’s history,” as well as an apostle of neutrality and nonviolence. The Buddha’s religion has receded in India, except as a balm to the Dalits, who escaped into it, and as a self-help tool for a sliver of the upper classes, who have embraced it the way that some people in the West do. Buddha prefigures many of the themes in the book. A sheltered man, he is moved by his first encounter with suffering, and leaves behind his wealthy family to wander India in the thrall of slowly budding new ideas. He is serene and centered amid violence. He is open-minded and against sects in a Brahmin-dominated society. He calls for a total reinvention of Hinduism—one that becomes its own religion.....
The Indian government is planning to support and promote large-scale research on medicinal properties of cow urine by infusing ancient knowledge with modern science at the upcoming Cow Science University.
New Delhi (Sputnik) – If you are in India, do not be alarmed if someone suggests you to gulp down cow urine to cure a fever or joint ache. Cow urine, commonly known as ‘gomutra’ is used in many Indian cultures for therapeutic purposes. Concoctions having cow urine as the main ingredient are mentioned in the Ayurveda (the traditional Hindu system of medicine) as miracle medicine for a number of diseases including cancer.
The Bharatiya Janata Party– led Indian Government hopes to introduce this elixir to the world by promoting large scale research to validate its medicinal properties. A recent workshop held at New Delhi’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) witnessed a number of research proposals floated by scientists and medical practitioners. Sources in the Ministry of Human Resource Development told Sputnik that the government is seriously considering one of the proposals that envisage setting up of a ‘Gow Vigyan Vishwavidyalaya’ (Cow Science University). Research at the university would mainly be geared towards validating cancer curing properties of Panchgavya- a concoction of cow urine, cow dung, milk and milk products. The government has set up a steering committee that would examine all the 40 proposals floated at the workshop and shortlist some for further action. The proposed research would be supported and funded by not only India’s Ministry of Health but also the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development and the Indian Council of Medical Research. Dr RS Chauhan of College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Uttarakhand, claims that his research on cow urine has revealed that certain components help in enhancing immunity and kills cancer. If approved, he will take the research further to test its effects on humans. Cow is revered as a holy animal in India by Hindus. It has been a priority for the Narendra Modi led government to protect this bovine creature and support industries derived from its waste. The government has spent around $87 million on cow shelters, ban on cow slaughter and sale of cow meat and tightened measures to stop the illicit sale of cattle to neighboring countries. The increased protection and reverence given to cow has even led to inter-faith conflict in recent times.
Read more: https://sputniknews.com/asia/201612191048747631-india-research-cow/
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http://www.dawn.com/news/1313938/analysis-india-pakistan-in-race-to-destroy-young-minds
Consider the latest attempt at subversion from India. According to reports on Thursday, ministers in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled (BJP) Rajasthan state have proposed that the outcome should be rewritten in the mediaeval battle of Haldighati that was fought between the forces of Mughal emperor Akbar and Rajput chieftain Rana Pratap.
It ended in a stalemate with the latter retreating deeper into Mewar, but Hindutva historians are determined to show him as the clear victor.
It is less widely admitted that his Rajput General Mansingh led Akbar’s 1576 campaign.
If Hindutva historians have their way they would project even Alexander of Macedonia as an anti-India Muslim marauder.
Cinematic versions of Alexander’s war with King Porus have already attempted this in a way, showing the foreigner speaking in Urdu, implying a Muslim language, while the vanquished Indian ruler spoke chaste Hindi, erroneously projected as a Hindu language.
It would be equally embarrassing for Hindutva historians to admit that Maratha king Shivaji communicated with his arch-foe Emperor Aurangzeb in Persian while conducting his Maratha empire’s administration in Modhi, a less discussed precursor of Marathi.
It is routine among Hindutva historians to claim mediaeval monuments as Hindu structures grabbed by Muslims. According to P.N. Oak, an early myth-maker in this genre, Taj Mahal was a Hindu palace as was the Asafi Imambarha of Lucknow.
According to Oak, Christianity is Chrisn-nity, an ascription to Lord Krishna. “Christianity is in fact a popular variation of the Hindu, Sanscrit [sic] term Chrisn-neety, i.e. the way of life preached, advocated or exemplified by the Hindu incarnation Lord Chrisn, spelled variously as Crsn, Krsn, Krishn, Chrisn, Crisna or Krisna also,” Mr Oak wrote.
To keep the spirit from flagging, even Wagner’s theory of continental drift was harnessed to claim that light-skinned Indians originally came from the border of Bihar and Orissa.
Later, the border drifted away to form the North Pole, thus implying that Caucasian and Central Asian genes travelled from India to their current abode, not the other way round.
As in India, rigging the chronology of history has been honed into a craft in Pakistan too, and it is difficult to say who between the two is better in conjuring myths that exhort young minds to violence.
A recent study in Pakistan found that the country’s public school textbooks negatively portrayed religious minorities, including Hindus, Christians and Ahmadis, as “untrustworthy, religiously inferior, and ideologically scheming”.
The report, “Teaching Intolerance in Pakistan: Religious Bias in Public School Textbooks”, analysed 78 textbooks from all four provinces covering grades five through 10.
Paul Marshall
In the past decade, extremist Hindus have increased their attacks on Christians, until there are now several hundred per year. But this did not make news in the U.S. until a foreigner was attacked. In 1999, Graham Staines, an Australian missionary who had worked with leprosy patients for three decades, was burned alive in Orissa along with his two young sons. The brutal violence visited on Muslims in Gujarat in February 2002 also brought the dangers of Hindu extremism to world attention. Between one and two thousand Muslims were massacred after Muslims reportedly set fire to a train carrying Hindu nationalists, killing several dozen people.
These attacks were not inchoate mob violence, triggered by real or rumored insult; rather, they involved careful planning by organized Hindu extremists with an explicit program and a developed religious-nationalist ideology. Like the ideology of al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists, this ideology began to take shape in the 1920s as a response to European colonialism. It rejected the usually secular outlook of other independence movements; in place of secularism, it synthesized a reactionary form of religion with elements of European millenarian political thought, especially fascism.
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Twentieth-century agitation against the British led to the rise not only of the secular and socialist Congress movement but also of the rival Hindu nationalist movement collectively known as the Sangh Parivar (“family of organizations”). The Parivar proclaims an ideology of “Hindutva,” aimed at ensuring the predominance of Hinduism in Indian society, politics, and culture, which it promotes through tactics that include violence and terror. Its agenda includes subjugating or driving out Muslims and Christians, who total some 17 percent of the population. It castigates them as foreign faiths, imposed by foreign conquerors—even though Christians trace their origins in India to the Apostle Thomas in the first century and Islam came to India in the seventh and eighth centuries.
The Sangh Parivar’s central organization is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded by Keshav Hedgewar in 1925. Hedgewar was influenced by V. D. Savarkar, who believed that Hindus were the descendants of the ancient Aryans and properly formed a nation with a unified geography, race, and culture. Savarkar’s 1923 book Hindutva—Who is a Hindu? declared that those who did not consider India as both fatherland and holy land were not true Indians—and that the love of Indian Christians and Muslims for India was “divided” because each group had its own holy land in the Middle East.
M. S. Golwalkar, the RSS’s sarsangchalak (supreme director) from 1940 to 1973, sharpened these themes. In 1938, commenting on the Nuremberg racial laws, he declared: “Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us … to learn and profit by.” In an address to RSS members the same year, he also asserted: “If we Hindus grow stronger, in time Muslim friends … will have to play the part of German Jews.” He insisted that “the non-Hindu … must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and revere Hindu religion… Or [they] may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges.” On March 25, 1939, the Hindu nationalist Mahasabha Party, an RSS ally, likewise proclaimed: “Germany’s solemn idea of the revival of the Aryan culture, the glorification of the swastika, her patronage of Vedic learning, and the ardent championship of Indo-Germanic civilization are welcomed by the religious and sensible Hindus of India with a jubilant hope.”
https://hudson.org/research/4575-hinduism-and-terror
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/19/for-state-leader-modi-taps-firebrand-politician-who-once-advocated-killing-muslims/
Yogi Adityanath is a saffron-robed Hindu priest, a five-term member of India’s Parliament and has more than a dozen criminal cases pending against him, including an attempted murder charge. In incendiary speeches across the sprawling and impoverished Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, he has long advocated for Hindu ideals and even exhorted his followers to kill Muslims.
On Saturday, in a surprise move, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party tapped him to lead Uttar Pradesh, which analysts see as a clear signal that Modi is building on his party’s recent win in the state’s elections and moving to consolidate his Hindu base in a run-up to the 2019 general election.
In a front-page story Sunday, the Times of India called the selection of the “saffron hardliner” a “defiant assertion” of the party’s Hindu nationalist credentials.
“By picking him to govern India’s largest state, Modi and Shah have sent a clear message that they will be bound by neither the norms of ‘politics as usual’ nor the requirements of political correctness,” the Times wrote.
Adityanath, 44, has held sway in eastern Uttar Pradesh since he was first elected to Parliament at age 26, as a “sanyasi,” or devotee, of the Gorakhnath temple religious community.
Known as a controversial and fiery orator, he has vowed to cleanse India of other religions and in 2014 suggested that mosques feature Hindu deities.
“This is the century of Hindutva, not just in India but in the entire world,” he said.
He once accused Mother Teresa of being part of a conspiracy to Christianize India and likened a well-known Bollywood star, Shah Rukh Khan, to a terrorist. At one rally, Adityanath vowed, “If one Hindu girl marries a Muslim man, then we will take 100 Muslim girls in return.” He went on, “If they [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.”
He was arrested in 2007 and spent 11 days in prison for violating prohibitory orders in what was deemed a “communally sensitive area,” with tensions between the Muslim and Hindu communities. He had 18 criminal cases registered against him, according to one tally during the 2014 parliamentary elections, including attempted murder, criminal intimidation and rioting.
During rallies for state elections this winter, Adityanath’s supporters often chanted for Hindu-centric rule and demanded that Muslims leave the country. Adityanath also praised President Trump for his first travel ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and added that similar action is needed in India.
Adityanath was credited with helping the BJP and its allies win 325 of Uttar Pradesh’s 403 assembly seats during the state’s recent elections.
Uttar Pradesh, roughly the size of Brazil and with a population of more than 220 million people, has a history of Hindu-Muslim riots. In 2013, riots between the two groups resulted in the death of more than 60 people, with thousands displaced.
Analysts said the state’s electorate will now look to Adityanath to deliver on the party’s campaign promises, including the banning of cow slaughterhouses and the building of a temple on a mosque site that has been the subject of a decades-long controversy.
The BJP's announcement about Adityanath caught even some of the party’s most staunch supporters by surprise. “I am thankful to the party and PM Modi for considering me worthy of the post,” Adityanath said. “I will take UP forward with ka saath sabka vikas,” meaning "development for all.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/the-guardian-view-on-a-key-poll-victory-for-anti-muslim-bigotry
he world breathed a sigh of relief last week as the Islamophobe populist Geert Wilders failed to become the head of the biggest party in Holland. The respite from elected bigotry did not last long. On Sunday an even more stridently anti-Muslim extremist took power in the biggest election of this year. Uttar Pradesh, with a population of more than 200 million, is not an independent nation. It is India’s biggest and most important state. UP, as it is known, by itself would be the world’s fourth biggest democracy – behind the rest of India, the United States, and Indonesia. In a stunning victory, the ruling Bharatiya Janata party swept the state elections, winning, along with its allies, 80% of the seats. Elections here are the most significant in India. UP sends 80 MPs to India’s national parliament of 545 seats. Regardless of party, they pay careful attention to the mood of UP’s electorate. If the nation’s governing parties do well in UP, parliamentarians feel they ought to stay in line. If opposition parties do well in UP, then gridlock rules in Delhi.
The man chosen by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to lead UP, home of Hinduism’s holy Ganges river and the Moghul tomb of Taj Mahal, is a fellow Hindu nationalist, Yogi Adityanath. Mr Adityanath is a Hindu priest who, while elected five times from his temple’s town, has been shown repeatedly to be contemptuous of democratic norms. He has been accused of attempted murder, criminal intimidation and rioting. He says young Muslim men had launched a “love jihad” to entrap and convert Hindu women. Mother Teresa, he claimed, wanted to Christianise India. He backs a Donald Trump-style travel ban to stop “terrorists” coming to India. On the campaign trail, Mr Adityanath warned: “If [Muslims] kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men”. This cannot be dismissed as mere rhetoric. The argument that once in power the BJP would become more reasonable does not wash. There’s little sign India’s constitutional protections would enable the BJP to continue in power while the dynamics of its wider movement are kept in check. Mr Adityanath, now a powerful figure, is signalling that in India minorities exist merely on the goodwill of the majority. Step out of line and there will be blood. For some of India’s 140 million Muslims the threat is enough to see them debate withdrawing from public life to avoid further polarisation.
Even in these days of rising Hindu nationalism, the remains of India’s Islamic past are of monumental significance.
There is no conjecture here: The Mughals are still the biggest money-spinners on India’s tourism circuit, according to data furnished by the Narendra Modi government (pdf) in parliament on March 20.
Five out of the country’s 10 highest-earning ticketed monuments under the Archaeological Survey of India in 2016 were built by Mughal emperors. And all five monuments that rake in the most ticket money anywhere in India are the handiwork of Islamic rulers in Agra and Delhi.
Close behind is the Agra Fort, another medieval structure from the neighbourhood, followed by the threesome from India’s capital city. It’s only at the seventh spot that the Sun Temple in Odisha’s Konark breaks the hold of the Agra-Delhi circuit, with the temples of Mamallapuram (Mahabalipuram) in Tamil Nadu further down India’s eastern coast at the eighth position. The cave complex of Ellora in Maharashtra, which contains Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain structures, and the intricately sculpted Hindu and Jain temples of Madhya Pradesh’s Khajuraho bring up the rear.
With foreign tourist arrivals in India growing at a steady clip over the last couple of years (pdf), you’d expect ticket earnings to rise, too. That’s mostly the case, except—surprise—at the Taj.
GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
MINISTRY OF CULTURE
LOK SABHA
UNSTARRED QUESTION NO.2888
TO BE ANSWERED ON 20.03.2017
PHALGUNA 29, 1938 (SAKA)
http://164.100.47.190/loksabhaquestions/annex/11/AU2888.pdf
Aurangzeb's life, widely misrepresented by the Hindutva brigade as that of a cardboard despot's, was far more complex
To impose on Aurangzeb the standards of the modern world is to thus make a grave historical error
It's no big news that contemporary India is brazenly partisan about its national heroes, especially the ones who tower over the subcontinent's history. But few figures have elicited as much contempt from a section of the public as well as the political class as the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
Aurangzeb's legacy, in the popular imagination, is one of unmitigated tyranny — reviled as the destroyer of Hindu temples, executioner of Sikh guru Teg Bahadur, and an austere Muslim ruler, who imposed unpopular taxes and curbed expressions of liberal Islam.
In 2015, amid a raging controversy, the ruling government acceded to an extraordinary request from the New Delhi Municipal Corporation to have the name of Aurangzeb Road in the national capital changed to APJ Abdul Kalam Road. The idea was to remove the association of evil, represented by Aurangzeb, from the name of the street and replace it with the name of the former president of India, who, presumably, embodied goodness.
The hatred for Aurangzeb also comes through in his denunciation by the Shiv Sena and other groups that admire his arch-rival, the Maratha warrior, Shivaji. In 2004, a biography of Shivaji by James Laine was banned in Maharashtra because it had dared to raise questions deemed unseemly by his fans. In 2015, a Shiv Sena MP abused an officer on duty on camera by calling him "Aurangzeb ki aulad" (a descendant of Aurangzeb), after he razed some temples during a demolition drive sanctioned by the district collector in Aurangabad, based on high court orders.
Historian Audrey Truschke took it upon herself to write a biography of Aurangzeb for the common reader to disabuse them of the many misconceptions around the Mughal king. At a little over 100 pages, without the paraphernalia of footnotes, it is as accessible as a complex historical narrative can get, without losing its essential core of erudition.
Debunking The Myths
As Truschke says in the Preface, the idea for the book, fittingly, came to her in an exchange on Twitter, a minefield for peddling divisive political agenda by interested groups and individuals. The spirit of the book, with its crisp prose and controlled polemics, hits out at the easy generalisations of social media.
Aurangzeb's life, widely misrepresented by the Hindutva brigade as that of a cardboard despot's, was far more complex, as anyone with common sense would expect, as well as riddled with many contradictions. Those who are familiar with politics should not be surprised by the persistence of the latter either.
Culture police vandalism and politics force the Maharashtra Government to ban the biography of the Maratha warrior king.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/james-wlaines-book-on-shivaji-sparks-controversy/1/196669.html
James W. Laine wanted to redeem history from legends. What the professor of religious studies at Macalester College in Minnesota did not realize was that some Indians find legends more comforting than history.
Laine's slim volume, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, published by Oxford University Press, is the latest victim of the culture police. Following the rage of the self-styled keepers of the Maratha heritage against Laine's blasphemy, the Government of Maharashtra has now banned the book.
What about the lost manuscripts, though? On January 5, an angry mob calling itself the Sambhaji Brigade of the Maratha Mahasangh stormed the 87-year-old Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), Pune, and destroyed priceless manuscripts and artifacts.
They targeted the institute, one of the finest archival centres of the country, because it was acknowledged in the book as Laine's "scholarly home" in India during the time of his research. The loss was a piece of India's own heritage.
A rattled Laine,who considers Pune his second home, even made an appeal that he alone, and not those who assisted him in his research, should be held responsible for the book. The Sambhaji Brigade, saying the ban is more political than official, is threatening to take the book-burning protest beyond Pune.
What's Laine's blasphemy? By "reviewing" the narrative evolution of the legend of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the 17th century Maratha hero who defied the Mughal Empire to found an independent kingdom, he hopes to rescue the biography of "this great man"from"the grasp of those who see India as a Hindu nation at war with its Muslim neighbors".
Today Laine's work is struggling to rescue itself from the grasp of Maratha pride because it raises some "personal" questions about the warrior king. Questions like: Did he have an unhappy family life?
Did he have a harem? Was he more interested in building a kingdom than liberating a nation? Was he least interested in the religion of Bhakti saints? Laine calls them "cracks" in the Shivaji narrative.
Writing in LA Times on January 12, Laine, "always drawn to stories of heroes", defends his scholarly freedom to entertain what he calls "unthinkable thoughts". As he says in the article, "The owners of Shivaji's story had their own set of questions, delivered with a punch: who should be allowed to portray this history?
Should an outsider working with Brahmin English-speaking elites have a greater say in Shivaji's story than Shivaji's own community?" Defenders of the Maratha pride see an intellectual conspiracy in the cracks.
Outraged by a reference in the book to Shivaji's "absentee father", Purushottam Khedekar, founder member and president of the Maratha Mahasangh, says, "We strongly condemn the Brahminic attitude and the heinous propaganda against Shivaji Maharaj."
And politically too, Laine is not getting any support.Sharad Pawar, the veteran Maratha leader, has already warned that scholarship should not clash with public sentiments and faith. Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee, as usual, was an exception. He condemned the violence and upheld the importance of disagreement and debate in a democracy.
Chief Minister S.K. Shinde, under pressure from the Maratha lobby in the NCP and his own party, the Congress, is hesitant about taking action against the violent protesters.
In the time of elections, few political leaders can afford to be on the wrong side of Maratha pride, and fewer can afford to take the side of free expression.
Commentary
In India, 'the Unthinkable' Is Printed at One's Peril
January 12, 2004|James W. Laine | James W. Laine, a professor of religious studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, is the author of "Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India" (Oxford University Press, 2003).
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/12/opinion/oe-laine12
Growing up in Texas in the 1950s, I spent many days roaming my neighborhood wearing a coonskin cap, carrying a toy rifle and singing "Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier." I was always drawn to stories of heroes.
In western India, not just kids have heroes. In recent years, the figure of Shivaji, a 17th century Hindu king, has attained almost divine status among the Hindu population. He had long been a regional favorite, for he founded an independent kingdom against all odds in the face of the Mughal Empire to the south and other sultans in the north. There is a way to read his story as the first chapter in a tale of Indian independence -- first from Muslim rule and then from British. His portrait is everywhere and his name is always invoked with reverence, especially among Hindu fundamentalists, in a time of polarized religious politics in India.
In 1985, I began to translate the Shivabharata, "The Epic of Shivaji." It contained a great story about Shivaji: How, as a young prince, he was attacked in a diplomatic meeting by an arrogant general but, forewarned by a goddess to wear chain mail, he instead fatally stabbed his attacker and led his troops to victory over a much larger force. I was hooked.
I began to realize that everyone knew these tales. Some were historical, some fictive, but they fell into a neat and commonly accepted narrative, reproduced in popular histories, school textbooks and comics. I decided to write about that narrative process, an account of three centuries of storytelling that produced a tale that lived in the minds of people celebrating Shivaji's legacy today. The book came out this summer, and even ranked up with Hillary Rodham Clinton's in the local list of English-language bestsellers in Pune, the city south of Bombay where these cultural traditions are most in evidence and where I had spent months in the library at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Back in Pune this summer, I saw a couple of bland but positive reviews in the Indian papers. I thought, "As long as they don't get to the last chapter."
And then someone did. The last chapter is where I entertained what I called "unthinkable thoughts" -- questioning "cracks" in the Shivaji narrative. I wondered, for example, why no one considered the possibility that Shivaji's parents were estranged, given that they never lived together during the period the three were alive (1630-1664), and that the tale provided "father substitutes" for the king-to-be. Why not entertain such an idea? What made it unthinkable?
As it turned out, the "owners" of Shivaji's story had their own set of questions, delivered with a punch: Who should be allowed to portray this history? Should an outsider, working with Brahmin English-speaking elites, have a greater say in Shivaji's story than Shivaji's own community?
In November, in response to protests over the book, Oxford University Press stopped distributing it in India. With the book unavailable, rumors piled on rumors. Misreadings lapped the globe by e-mail. A colleague, a man mentioned in the book's preface, distanced himself by condemning its contents but was still roughed up by zealots, who smeared tar on his face. Another Pune scholar tore up his manuscript of a biography of Shivaji, proclaiming scholarship an impossibility in such a context. Horrified, I faxed letters to Indian newspapers, taking full responsibility for my book and apologizing for causing offense.
Controversial “anti-Romeo” squads to police and control young couples in public are spreading across India after they were introduced by the firebrand Hindu leader of the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh.
The squads of plain-clothed and uniformed police officers have been accused of “Taliban-like" moral policing by patrolling public spaces to prevent men from loitering near women. The authorities claim they are only trying to protect women from sexual harassment.
The patrols were launched just over a week ago on the orders of Yogi Adityanath, 44, a right-wing Hindu monk repeatedly accused of fanning religious tensions and who was jailed for 15 days in 2007 on charges of inciting riots, but who now rules a state of over 200 million people.
The idea has since spread to Jharkhand, north-east India, where reports emerged that the squads had “rounded up some young men and slapped them” for being found too close to women-only colleges.
In cities across Uttar Pradesh local parks, where many young couples traditionally find privacy, are said to have emptied.
“Between 300 and 400 couples visit the park every day, but since 21 March, only 5 or 10 have showed up,” Atul Kumar, a ticket seller at a park in Ghaziabad, told the Hindustan Times, claiming to have seen nine young men rounded up for no reason.
On Monday, 50 couples were apprehended for “immoral activities” after police raided two hotels in Ghaziabad.
“India is going through a very conservative and orthodox, almost Stone Age, where we can’t accept young boys and girls, above the age of 18, may freely choose who they want to be with,” said Shehzad Poonawalla, a lawyer and official with the opposition Congress party.
“How is this any different from Taliban culture?”
Poonawalla is one of many Indians who fear the squads form part of a wider right-wing Hindu political agenda by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who appointed Adityanath despite his controversial past.
The move coincides with a widespread crackdown on Uttar Pradesh slaughterhouses to protect cows, considered sacred animals by India’s Hindu majority.
Most butchers are Muslims and many suspect that they are being unfairly targeted as they face the loss of their livelihoods.
What is Hindutva?
A.G. NOORANI
https://www.dawn.com/news/1301496/what-is-hindutva
Savarkar wrote, “... Hindutva is not identical with what is vaguely indicated by the term Hinduism. By an ‘ism’ it is generally meant a theory or a code more or less based on spiritual or religious dogma or system. But when we attempt to investigate the essential significance of Hindutva we do not primarily — and certainly not mainly — concern ourselves with any particular theocratic or religious dogma or creed”. His concern was politics; the political mobilisation of Hindus into one nation.
If not religion, what, then, is the basis for the divide? With crystal clarity, he wrote, “To every Hindu … this Sindhusthan is at once a pitribhu and a punyabhu — fatherland and a holy land. That is why in the case of some of our ... countrymen, who had originally been forcibly converted to a non-Hindu religion and who consequently have inherited along with Hindus, a common fatherland and a greater part of the wealth of a common culture — language, law, customs, folklore and history — are not and cannot be recognised as Hindus. For though Hindusthan to them is fatherland as to any other Hindu yet it is not to them a holy land too. Their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and god-men, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their name and their outlook smack of a foreign origin”.
The divide cannot be bridged except by obeying Hindutva’s demand for conversion to Hinduism. Savarkar exhorted, “Ye, who by race, by blood, by culture, by nationality possess almost all the essentials of Hindutva and had been forcibly snatched out of our ancestral home by the hand of violence — ye, have only to render wholehearted love to our common mother and recognise her not only as fatherland (Pitribhu) but even as a holy land (Punyabhu), and ye would be most welcome to the Hindu fold”.
Gandhi’s assassination put paid to Savarkar’s ambitions, but the RSS picked up the baton. Its supremo, M.S. Golwalkar, drew inspiration from Hindutva and coined its synonym, ‘cultural nationalism’, in contrast to ‘territorial nationalism’ in his book, A Bunch of Thoughts (1968). Everyone born within the territory of India is not a nationalist; the nation is defined by a common ‘culture’ (read: religion).
Golwalkar wrote, “... here was already a full-fledged ancient nation of the Hindus and the various communities which were living in the country were here either as guests, the Jews and Parsis, or as invaders, the Muslims and Christians. They never faced the question how all such heterogeneous groups could be called as children of the soil merely because, by an accident, they happened to reside in common territory under the rule of a common enemy … The theories of territorial nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis for our concept of nation, had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our real Hindu nationhood ...”
This explains the RSS’ ghar wapsi (‘return to your home’) campaign, simply a repeat of the past shuddhi (‘purification’) movement. Nothing has changed; an unbroken ideological thread binds Savarkar’s Hindutva, Golwalkar’s ‘cultural nationalism’ and the RSS-BJP policies today. On Sept 24, 1990, BJP president L.K. Advani launched “a crusade in defence of Hindutva”, which culminated in the demolition of Babri Masjid, in his presence, on Dec 6, 1992.
Since 1996, the BJP’s election manifestoes for Lok Sabha elections pledge to espouse Hindutva in these terms: “The cultural nationalism of India … is the core of Hindutva.” This explains the Modi government’s systematic purge of educational and cultural institutions. It is a quarrel with history. As scholars Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph remarked, modern hatreds are supported by ancient, remembered wrongs, whether real or imagined. The RSS-BJP combine rejects the concept of composite culture that Jawaharlal Nehru and others propounded.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39598679#
The Indian minister in charge of education has ordered an investigation into a textbook that described the "best" female figure as 36"-24"-36".
Prakash Javadekar told reporters he strongly condemned the "sexist" book and had asked for "appropriate action".
Snapshots of the offending text were widely circulated on social media.
The book, printed by a private publisher, was taught in some schools which follow India's Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabus.
In addition to listing the ideal body proportions of a woman, the book went on to say that "the bones of hips of females are wider and their knees are slightly apart. Due to this shape, females are not able to run properly".
CBSE officials say they are unable to monitor privately published textbooks.
The board recommends only textbooks published by India's National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and said it was up to schools to exercise caution when choosing privately published textbooks to teach.
Textbook says 'ugliness' causes dowry
Five bizarre 'lessons' in Indian textbooks
Mr Javadekar said that schools had been asked to stop teaching the book with immediate effect. The Delhi-based publisher also said in a statement that it had "stopped the printing, selling and distribution of the revised book with immediate effect".
Controversies over Indian textbooks are not uncommon.
In February an animal rights row had erupted over a textbook which told children how to suffocate kittens.
A book in the western state of Gujarat made headlines in 2014 for claiming that Japan had dropped nuclear bombs on the US during the Second World War.
A row erupted in Maharashtra state over a textbook that said "ugly" and "handicapped" brides had led to a rise in dowries being claimed by groom's family.
Carnivores have also been a target for bile.
In 2012, a national text for 11-year-old students was discovered that said people who ate meat, "easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes".
https://www.voanews.com/a/india-minorities-face-increased-sectarian-attacks/3830816.html
Muslim and Christian leaders in India are expressing concern over what they call a sudden rise in sectarian attacks against their communities across the Hindu-majority country.
The minority community leaders have said the hate attacks, for which they blame right-wing Hindu groups, spiked with recent assembly election victories in Uttar Pradesh state by India's ruling party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Noting that most of the anti-Muslim and anti-Christian attacks are taking place in the BJP-ruled states, the leaders accuse the local governments of not taking punitive actions against the perpetrators.
One such attack occurred this month in Uttar Pradesh when Hindu activists barged into a church in Maharajganj district, confronting a congregation of 150 people and accusing them of secretly converting Hindus. After threatening to kill the pastor and demolish the church, the group left when police arrived.
"There is a very sharp rise in violence against Christians and also Muslims in the days since Yogi Adityanath has become the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh," John Dayal, spokesman of United Christian Forum, a New Delhi human rights group, told VOA.
Zafarul Islam-Khan, a New Delhi Muslim community leader, said the hate attacks against minorities by Hindu right-wing groups were rising with the growth of the BJP in the country.
"BJP-led governments at the center and the states do not take action against the Hindutva groups because they are responsible for establishing the powerful Hindu vote bank for the party. People from these groups are becoming ministers and [legislators] in the party," Khan told VOA. "So, they are part of the family, and that's why BJP in different states cannot take any action against these Hindutva groups."
Rights group critical
New York-based Human Rights Watch this week condemned India's Hindutva group cow vigilantes — those who perpetrate violence in the name of protecting cows, which Hindus consider sacred — for targeting Muslims in attacks.
"Self-appointed cow protectors driven by irresponsible populism are killing people and terrorizing minority communities. The government should condemn this violence and take prompt action against those responsible for these attacks or face allegations of complicity, " Meenakshi Ganguly, the rights group's South Asia director, was quoted saying in the report.
In India, where Muslims and Christians constitute 14.2 percent and 2.3 percent of country's population, respectively, the two communities have long alleged varying levels of persecution.
A hotel owner in the Indian state of Rajasthan has expressed his frustration over the fact that his hotel has been closed for weeks over false accusations that it had served beef on the premises.
Police on Tuesday said forensic tests on meat seized from the Hayat Rabbani hotel in March showed it was definitely not beef, but chicken, the Hindustan Times reported.
Cows are revered as sacred animals among India's Hindus, and there are strict laws on their slaughter and consumption in several parts of the country, including Rajasthan.
"From the very first day, I have been saying that it was chicken but no one from the administration listened to me," hotel owner Naeem Rabbani told the paper. "The report confirms all allegations levelled on us were false."
The hotel was closed after a group of "cow vigilantes" protested in front of it for hours in March, chanting nationalist slogans.
The Indian Express website cited a member of the group saying they had gathered there after reading about rumours of a beef party at the hotel on WhatsApp, allegedly sent by Jaipur's mayor.
Such vigilante groups have been involved with several incidents of violence in India, particularly after the Hindu nationalist BJP party came to power in 2014. Last month, police investigated the death of a Muslim man who was attacked by a vigilante group while transporting cows in Rajasthan.
http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-india-cow-slaughter-20170526-story.html
The Indian government has issued a nationwide ban on selling cattle for slaughter, the toughest measure yet imposed to protect cows, an animal that conservative Hindus regard as sacred.
Under new rules issued this week, the government ordered that no cows or buffaloes could be traded at a livestock market without a signed declaration by the owner that the animal was not being sold for slaughter.\
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Hindus form an overwhelming majority among India’s 1.3 billion people, and many of them eschew beef out of respect for the bovine.
But beef, which is cheaper in India than many other sources of protein, is a major part of the diet of Muslims, Christians and Hindus from the lowest rung of the ancient caste system, known as Dalits, or “untouchables.”
The leader of the southern state of Kerala, which has a large Christian population, criticized the move as “fascist” and a “clear attack on our plurality.”
Pinarayi Vijayan, the state’s chief minister, tweeted that the law would rob hundreds of thousands of people of jobs, cripple the leather industry and affect the diets of millions of people.
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“The aim of the rules is only to regulate the animal market and sale of cattle in them and ensure [the] welfare of cattle” in the markets, Vardhan said, according to the Press Trust of India.
But the meat trade in India, a $4-billion industry, is centered on animal markets and dominated by Muslims and Dalits, who would be most affected by the change.
In the western state of Maharashtra, where a government led by Modi’s party banned the slaughter of cows in 2015, thousands of butchers have lost their jobs and many meat shops have closed.
In the city of Aurangabad, Mohammad Qureshi, 31 — part of a Muslim community that has traditionally slaughtered cattle and sold the meat for export — said his family’s beef business has dwindled. The business has survived because the state ban did not include buffalo meat, but now buffalo cannot be sold at markets for slaughter either.
“What are we supposed to do?” Qureshi said. “I have a family to look after and this shop is all I have. By imposing these rules, the government is making lives difficult for minorities.”
The nationwide rules would also prevent farmers from selling aging and unproductive cattle to be slaughtered, which many farmers have typically done to raise money and avoid the expense of maintaining an unproductive animal.
Many observers criticized the government for imposing new layers of bureaucracy and paperwork on cattle traders, many of whom are poor and uneducated.
Anyone seeking to sell cattle at a market would need to furnish identification documents — both for himself and the animal — creating what one commentator called “a cow bureaucracy in the 21st century.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/28/opinion/vigilante-justice-in-india.html?_r=0
A shocking rise in vigilante violence is threatening the rule of law in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is partly to blame for encouraging Hindu furor over the slaughter of cows. Underlying the problem is a lack of faith by many Indians in the ability of the police and the judicial system to deliver justice.
Mob killings of Muslims and Dalits, members of India’s lowest caste, suspected of killing cows or eating beef have occurred with alarming frequency. Seven people were killed recently in two separate episodes. In both cases, the attacks were blamed on a message circulated on WhatsApp warning of child abductors in the state of Jharkand.
Yet, in one case, local strongmen intent on preventing the victims from buying land may have helped stoked the crowd’s anger. Even worse, one survivor said police officers egged the crowd on. In the other case, the three victims were Muslim cattle traders, casting doubt on that theory as the only motive.
A shocking video, widely circulated last week on social media in India, shows a man in one attack covered in blood, cowering on the ground and begging for his life before a mob kicks and beats him to death. Two officers in charge of police stations in the area have been suspended, some 20 people have been arrested and an investigation has begun.
Meanwhile, many of India’s police officers are poorly trained, underpaid and corrupt, and the country’s judicial system is staggering under an enormous backlog of cases. More than 40 percent of high court judgeships remain unfilled.
Prime Minister Modi spoke out last August against right-wing Hindu cow vigilantes after four Dalits accused of killing a cow were brutally beaten by a crowd, but he has remained conspicuously silent since, despite an alarming increase in mob violence. Mr. Modi and senior members of his party need to condemn rumormongers bent on mayhem, many of them connected to local politicians and Hindu militant groups. Mr. Modi also needs to bring the same zeal to overhauling India’s policing and judicial system that he has brought to other issues, lest law and order in India give way to the bloodlust of the mob.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-05-31/australian-beef-experts-doubt-indian-cattle-ban-will-last/8575526
There are doubts about whether India's ban on the slaughter of cattle and buffalo will last.
The ban has sparked widespread protests in India as well as claims that millions of jobs will be lost if the government stops the nation's $4 billion beef export industry.
The ramifications are being watched closely in northern Australia with Indian buffalo meat becoming a serious competitor to Australia's live cattle trade to Indonesia.
'Too much commerce at stake'
Industry consultant Ross Ainsworth, who is based in Jakarta, said he doubted the ban would last.
Dr Ainsworth said he visited India in December last year and was told at the time that buffalo would not be included in the ban, as they were not held in the same religious regard as cattle.
"I would be very surprised if what appears to be a ban on buffalo is actually real when all the detail of the ban rolls out," he said.
"I think there is too much commerce at stake for the ban to stop [slaughter of buffalo].
"The cattle trade is very tiny in India because it has always been a restricted situation but the buffalo trade has risen to be the world's largest meat trade.
"There is about 2 million tonnes of buffalo meat consumed in India and about 2 million tonnes sold internationally.
"If you took that out of the system, it would be a spectacular disruption to the world meat trade.
"It would cause the biggest disruption [to the world meat trade] since the Second World War, so I can't see it happening."
Ban could increase demand for Aussie beef
In the last 10 months, Indian buffalo meat has proved a fierce competitor in Indonesia, as the country has looked for cheaper forms of protein and slowed the importation of live Australian cattle.
CEO of the Northern Territory Livestock Exporters Association, Stuart Kemp, said India's ban could see more demand for Australia beef.
"What we've seen in the last six to 10 months is turnoff from feedlots and slaughter numbers down 40 to 50 per cent, since the introduction of Indian buffalo," Mr Kemp said.
"But if that competition is not there, you would like to think that would make trading a bit better for importers and feedlotters.
"[However] there is a lot of product [Indian buffalo meat] in the supply chain that will take a long time to filter through, so if there is an impact on our trade it will still be some time away."
Having said that, Mr Kemp went on to say detail around the ban was scarce.
"More demand for Australian product is always a good thing, but I wouldn't be high-fiving myself just yet, there is a lot of water to go under the bridge," he said.
"This may be a thought bubble, it may be serious policy, we will just have to wait and see."
Dr Ainsworth said he expected the Indian government would release more information on the ban sooner rather than later, given the size of the industry.
https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/870293234345312257
Police in the southern state of Kerala have arrested eight men who publicly killed a calf to protest against a ban on the sale of cattle for slaughter.
The group, including three from the main opposition party, are accused of animal cruelty and unlawful assembly.
The federal government announced the ban last week, saying it would "stop unregulated animal trade".
But critics say the move is aimed at protecting cows, considered holy by India's majority Hindu population.
The men, who killed the calf on Saturday, said they wanted to represent people's anger against the federal government's decision.
The Congress party, the main opposition to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), opposes the ban, but it suspended the three members of its youth wing, saying the act was "thoughtless and barbaric".
The ban has sparked protests from a number of state governments. There are several states where beef is part of local cuisine and critics say the order will hurt farmers and major industries like food processing and leather.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the central government was "encroaching upon state matters" with its ban. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the order violated "the basic right of a person to freedom of choice regarding his food".
Many states, however, have actively started enforcing bans on cow slaughter since the Hindu nationalist BJP came to power in 2014.
The western state of Gujarat passed a law in March making the slaughter of cows punishable by life imprisonment. Vigilante groups who portray themselves as protectors of cows have also been active in several states.
These groups have even killed Muslim men they suspect of killing cows, including high-profile cases in April and May.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year criticised the vigilantes, saying such people made him "angry". However, this has not stopped attacks against cattle traders.
In the backstreets of Agra's Muslim quarter, where shoes have been made for centuries, small-scale manufacturers are firing workers and families cutting back on spending as a government crackdown on cattle slaughter ripples through the community.
The election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) three years ago has emboldened right-wing Hindu groups to push harder for protection of the cow, an animal they consider sacred.
Authorities in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, started closing down unlicensed abattoirs in March, immediately hitting production and sales in the Muslim-dominated meat industry.
Last month Modi's government also banned trading cattle for slaughter, including not just cows, whose killing was already outlawed in most states, but also buffalo, an animal used for meat and leather.
Now the squeeze is spreading to others in the Muslim minority and to lower-caste Hindus who cart cattle, labour in tanneries and make shoes, bags and belts—including for big name brands such as Zara and Clarks.
Frequent attacks by right-wing Hindus against workers they accuse of harming cattle have further rattled the industry.
Social Tensions
Much of India's meat and leather trade takes place in the informal economy, meaning the impact of the closing of illegal abattoirs and ban on trading for slaughter is hard to measure.
But cattle markets are reporting a big slowdown in trade and tanneries a shortage of hides.
Abdul Faheem Qureshi, a representative of India's Muslim Qureshi community of butchers, said in Uttar Pradesh some markets trading 1,000 animals last year were now down to as few as 100.
The decline in production means fewer jobs for two of India's poorest communities, and risks inflaming social tensions at a time when Modi has vowed to boost employment and accelerate economic growth ahead of the next general election in 2019.
Some large leather manufacturers support the Uttar Pradesh state government's move, arguing that allowing only licensed abattoirs to operate will clean the industry's image.
Bigger exporters also say they have enough leather as they source hides widely, including from abroad.
Still, millions work in the meat and leather industries, which are worth more than $16 billion in annual sales.
When Reuters visited the narrow shoemaking lanes of Agra a crowd of Muslims breaking their Ramadan fast gathered, shouting angrily that they were no longer safe to trade buffalo, buy cow leather for shoes or to do work that their community has done for centuries for fear of being attacked by Hindu vigilantes.
"They want to weaken us. They want to snatch our bread," says 66-year-old Mohammad Muqeem, whose workers stitch $3 shoes in his cellar, referring to the closure of slaughterhouses and recent attacks on cattle traders.
The Indian Government has this week bowed to widespread pressure and promised to ease an outright ban on selling cattle for slaughter, which has jeopardised billions in exports and ruined livelihoods.
In New Delhi's mainly Muslim district of Nizamuddin the butchers have sat idle, surrounded by rows of empty hooks for two weeks now, ever since the ban was imposed.
"You can see the situation by yourself — it's bare," Mohammed Javed Qureshi said as he gestured at his shop.
Generations of his family have been butchers. Mr Qureshi, 36, says unless the ban is revoked, he will go broke.
"It will finish completely," he says.
It is believed $14 billion in meat and leather trade are under threat.
The Government now concedes it did not anticipate the impact of the ban, which has been condemned as religiously-motivated and an unconstitutional attack on freedom of religion.
Stung by the criticism, environment minister Harsh Vardhan — who is responsible for the regulation — is promising changes.
The decree, made on animal cruelty grounds, requires bovine buyers to guarantee in writing the animals will not be killed.
The feeling among Muslims is that India's Hindu nationalist government is targeting them in a religious quest to protect cattle revered in Hinduism.
"These rules are in violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed under the constitution of India to the citizens of India," lawyer Abdul Faheem Qureshi, who is challenging the ban in India's Supreme Court, said.
The regulation is being contested on the grounds it denies people a right to livelihood and impinges on freedom of religion.
Mr Qureshi said because most slaughtering and cattle handling was done by Muslims and lower caste Hindus, the "religiously motivated" ban had the effect of "targeting particular communities".
Hardliners cheered the restrictions
In India's north-east and south, beef-eating Christians, Muslims and Hindus are also angry over what they see as a government attempt to dictate what they eat.
In Tamil Nadu, the state's top court has stayed the ban for four weeks.
Hardliners within and linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government had cheered the restrictions, which they saw as reflecting their desire to see India's culture and institutions more closely aligned to Hindu values instead of secular ones.
However, the Government's promise to revisit the ban in the face of deep and widespread anger is now being seen as recognition that the religious right had overstepped.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/26/asia/black-eid-india-muslim/index.html
New Delhi (CNN)A shadow hangs over Eid celebrations this year in India.
Across the country, thousands of worshippers marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan are donning black armbands during special prayers following the high-profile killing of a Muslim teen in an allegedly Islamophobic attack.
The black band is a way of showing "solidarity with the people who have lost their kin," said Ali Khan Mahmudabad, one of the people behind the movement.
Dubbed #BlackEid on social media, the idea was conceived as a way to draw attention to an apparent increase in mob violence aimed at minority groups.
"Silence is tantamount to complicity, especially at a time where the events are happening with increasing frequency," Mahmudabad said.
Mob attacks on the rise
India, home to one of the world's largest Muslim populations, has been gripped by a spate of widely publicized mob attacks in recent months, with many of the victims being Muslim.
On Friday, a young Muslim man was stabbed to death by a group of men after an alleged dispute over a seat on a train near Ballabhgarh in Haryana. The attack, believed by many to be religiously motivated, has been widely reported in the Indian media, prompting calls for a period of national soul-searching.
In March, Muslim residents of a village in Gujarat reportedly faced an attack by an angry mob from a neighboring village. In April, a Muslim farmer in Rajasthan was beaten to death by a mob after he purchased a cow for milk, according to reports. In May, two young Muslim men in Assam allegedly were killed on the suspicion that they were stealing cows.
"Hate crimes against Muslims, Dalits, and marginalized sections have increased," said Navaid Hamid, president of the All India Muslim Majlis e Mushawarat in Delhi, a decades-old umbrella group for Muslim institutions.
"My perception is the central government and the state governments of states are complicit with violence against minorities and other marginalized sections of society," Hamid said.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many crimes are being committed against Muslims. India's most recent criminal data, which cover 2015, track only caste-based crimes.
But an investigation by the Hindustan Times that tracked "communal incidents" -- conflicts between Hindus and Muslims -- in India's most populous state found a rise in incidents over the last several years.
The public nature of recent attacks has led Muslims in India to think twice about what they wear, what food they buy or carry, and how they present themselves in public, Mahmudabad said. "Being a Muslim in public is something that can draw the ire of a mob."
Protest image sparks a movement
Mahmudabad first created an image of a person wearing a black armband with a message of unity in English, Hindi and Urdu. He posted the image to various social media accounts but didn't expect to get much response.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-40404102#
A photography project which shows women wearing a cow mask and asks the politically explosive question - whether women are less important than cattle in India - has gone viral in the country and earned its 23-year-old photographer the ire of Hindu nationalist trolls.
"I am perturbed by the fact that in my country, cows are considered more important than a woman, that it takes much longer for a woman who is raped or assaulted to get justice than for a cow which many Hindus consider a sacred animal," Delhi-based photographer Sujatro Ghosh told the BBC.
India is often in the news for crimes against women and, according to government statistics, a rape is reported every 15 minutes.
"These cases go on for years in the courts before the guilty are punished, whereas when a cow is slaughtered, Hindu extremist groups immediately go and kill or beat up whoever they suspect of slaughter."
The project, he says, is "his way of protesting" against the growing influence of the vigilante cow protection groups that have become emboldened since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, came to power in the summer of 2014.
"I've been concerned over the Dadri lynching [when a Muslim man was killed by a Hindu mob over rumours that he consumed and stored beef] and other similar religious attacks on Muslims by cow vigilantes," Ghosh said.
In recent months, the humble cow has become India's most polarising animal.
The BJP insists that the animal is holy and should be protected. Cow slaughter is banned in several states, stringent punishment has been introduced for offenders and parliament is considering a bill to bring in the death penalty for the crime.
But beef is a staple for Muslims, Christians and millions of low-caste Dalits (formerly untouchables) who have been at the receiving end of the violence perpetrated by the cow vigilante groups.
Nearly a dozen people have been killed in the past two years in the name of the cow. Targets are often picked based on unsubstantiated rumours and Muslims have been attacked for even transporting cows for milk.
Some people also contacted the Delhi police, "accusing me of trying to instigate riots and asking them to arrest me".
Ghosh is not surprised by the vitriol and admits that his work is an "indirect comment" on the BJP.
"I'm making a political statement because it's a political topic, but if we go deeper into the things, then we see that Hindu supremacy was always there, it has just come out in the open with this government in the past two years."
The threats, however, have failed to scare him. "I'm not afraid because I'm working for the greater good," he says.
A positive fallout of the project going viral has been that he's got loads of messages from women from across the globe saying they too want to be a part of this campaign.
So the cow, he says, will keep travelling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/asia/india-lynchings-attacks-on-muslims.html
“It does no damage whatsoever to Modi and his party, because what this protest says is, ‘Muslims are getting lynched,’ and a lot of Hindutvas out there will say, ‘That’s the point,’ ” Mr. Vij said, referring to far-right Hindus. “Society at large is turning right-wing. How long that crest is going to be is the most interesting question, and the fact is nobody knows. Not anytime soon.”
On Thursday, Junaid Khan, a 15-year-old madrasa student, was riding a crowded passenger train home from Delhi when a group of assailants, after deriding him as a “beefeater” and removing his skullcap, fatally stabbed him and threw him off the train. The same day, in Kashmir, Mohammed Ayub Pandith, a plainclothes police officer, was beaten to death outside a mosque by members of a mob who took him for an informer.
The hashtag “Lynchistan” trended on Twitter. “May the silent be damned,” wrote the scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta in a furious column. And Saba Dewan, a filmmaker living outside Delhi, wrote a Facebook post calling for a protest against rising violence toward Muslims and lower-caste Indians, and the idea spread with extraordinary speed, inspiring demonstrations in 11 cities. On Wednesday evening, about 2,000 people gathered at sunset in central Delhi, carrying posters with the words “Not in My Name.”
“One needs not only to protest, but to record our complete anguish,” said Amitabha Pande, a retired civil servant who voted for Narendra Modi in 2014, in the hope that as prime minister he would modernize India’s economy. He said his faith in Mr. Modi collapsed the following year, when the prime minister failed to condemn the lynching of Mohammad Ikhlaq in the village of Dadri.
“He has forgotten the fundamentals of the Constitution that he was supposed to uphold, which is the right to life,” Mr. Pande said. “The fact that he did not come out openly and condemn the Dadri murder, that is when I decided this man does not deserve to be here.”
Firebrand Hindu Cleric Ascends India’s Political Ladder
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/world/asia/india-yogi-adityanath-bjp-modi.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
the taproot of Yogi Adityanath’s popularity is in a more ominous place. As leader of a temple known for its militant Hindu supremacist tradition, he built an army of youths intent on avenging historic wrongs by Muslims, whom he has called “a crop of two-legged animals that has to be stopped.” At one rally he cried out, “We are all preparing for religious war!”
Adityanath (pronounced Ah-DIT-ya-nath) was an astonishing choice by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, who came into office three years ago promising to usher India into a new age of development and economic growth, and playing down any far-right Hindu agenda. But a populist drive to transform India into a “Hindu nation” has drowned out Mr. Modi’s development agenda, shrinking the economic and social space for the country’s 170 million Muslims.
Few decisions in Indian politics matter more than the selection of the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, because the post is seen as a springboard for future prime ministers. At the age of 45, the diminutive, baby-faced Adityanath is receiving the kind of career-making attention that projects an Indian politician toward higher office.
“He is automatically on anybody’s list as a potential contender to succeed Modi,” said Sadanand Dhume, an India specialist at the American Enterprise Institute. “They have normalized someone who, three years ago, was considered too extreme to be minister of state for textiles. Everything has been normalized so quickly.”
Adityanath did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.
In March, when the Bharatiya Janata Party won a landslide electoral victory in Uttar Pradesh, political prognosticators expected Mr. Modi to make a safe choice — Manoj Sinha, a cabinet minister known for his diligence and loyalty to the party. On the morning of the announcement, an honor guard had been arranged outside his village.
But by midmorning, it was clear that something unusual was going on. A chartered flight had been sent to pick up Adityanath and take him to Delhi for a meeting with Amit Shah, the party president. At 6 p.m. the party announced it had appointed him as minister, sending a ripple of shock through India’s political class.
They were shocked because Adityanath is a radical, but also because he is ambitious, even rebellious. As recently as January, he walked out of the party’s executive meeting, reportedly because he was not allowed to speak. Mr. Modi is not known to have much tolerance for rivals.
---------
Political observers in Delhi are watching him as one might watch an audition. Journalists filed reports of his first 100 days last week, and some were lukewarm, noting his failure to contain violent crime.
Neerja Chowdhury, an analyst, said Adityanath has two years to establish himself as an effective administrator.
“Remember, he is 20 years younger than Modi, and he is a known doer, so if he manages to deliver on some fronts, he would then become a possible candidate” in 2024, she said.
“India is moving right,” she added. “Whether India moves further right, and Modi begins to be looked upon as a moderate, I think that only time will tell.”
Adityanath may be interested in rebranding himself a mainstream politician, but his followers in the vigilante group do not all agree.
During the days after the election, some 5,000 men came forward to join the organization every day, prompting organizers to stop accepting applicants, said P. K. Mall, the group’s general secretary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/opinion/indias-turn-toward-intolerance.html
Narendra Modi’s landslide victory as prime minister of India in 2014 was borne on his promises to unleash his country’s economic potential and build a bright future while he played down the Hindu nationalist roots of his Bharatiya Janata Party.
But, under Mr. Modi’s leadership, growth has slowed, jobs have not materialized, and what has actually been unleashed is virulent intolerance that threatens the foundation of the secular nation envisioned by its founders.
Since Mr. Modi took office, there has been an alarming rise in mob attacks against people accused of eating beef or abusing cows, an animal held sacred to Hindus. Most of those killed have been Muslims. Mr. Modi spoke out against the killings only last month, not long after his government banned the sale of cows for slaughter, a move suspended by India’s Supreme Court. The ban, enforcing cultural stigma, would have fallen hardest on Muslims and low-caste Hindus traditionally engaged in the meat and leather industry.
It would also have struck a blow against Mr. Modi’s supposed priorities: employment, economic growth and boosting exports. The $16 billion industry employs millions of workers and generated $4 billion in export income last year.
More disturbing was his party’s decision to name Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu warrior-priest, as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and a springboard to national leadership. Mr. Adityanath has called India’s Muslims “a crop of two-legged animals that has to be stopped” and cried at one rally, “We are all preparing for religious war!”
This development led the analyst Neerja Chowdhury to observe: “India is moving right. Whether India moves further right, and Modi begins to be looked upon as a moderate, I think that only time will tell.”
On Tuesday, India’s film censor board, headed by a Bharatiya Janata Party stalwart apparently intent on protecting Mr. Modi and the party from criticism, ruled that a documentary film about one of India’s most famous sons, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, cannot be screened unless the director cuts the words “cow,” “Hindu India,” “Hindutva view of India” — meaning Hindu nationalism — and “Gujarat,” where Mr. Modi was chief minister at the time of deadly anti-Muslim riots in 2002.
This might seem like merely a farcical move by Hindu fanatics, if it were not so in line with much else that is happening in Mr. Modi’s India, and if the implications for India’s democracy weren’t so chilling. But this is where Mr. Modi has brought the nation as it prepares to celebrate 70 years of independence on Aug. 15.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41169817
A prominent Indian journalist critical of Hindu nationalist politics has been shot dead in the south-western state of Karnataka, police say.
Gauri Lankesh, 55, was found lying in a pool of blood outside her home in the city of Bangalore.
She was shot in the head and chest by gunmen who arrived by motorcycle. The motive for the crime was not clear.
India journalists are being increasingly targeted by radical Hindu nationalists, activists say.
Gauri Lankesh, who edited a weekly newspaper, was known as a fearless and outspoken journalist.
She had returned home in her car on Tuesday night and was opening the gate when the attackers shot her, police said. She died on the spot.
Officials said they suspected she had been under surveillance by the gunmen. An investigation has been opened.
Her death has been widely condemned, with Karnataka state's chief minister Siddaramaiah calling it an "assassination on democracy".
Ms Lankesh came from a well-known family, and edited Lankesh Patrike, a newspaper founded by her father P Lankesh, a left-wing poet and writer.
She was the sister of award-winning filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh.
Who was Gauri Lankesh?
Known for her secularist criticism of right-wing and Hindu nationalists, including members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
Sympathetic to the Naxalites, or Maoist rebels, and was involved in the reintegration of former rebels
Worked for The Times of India and later ran the newspaper Lankesh Patrike, which her father founded, with her brother Indrajit for several years
She left to start several publications, including her own newspaper Gauri Lankesh Patrike
Ms Lankesh was convicted of defamation in 2016 for a report she published on local BJP leaders.
She was sentenced to six months in jail, and was out on bail and appealing the conviction at the time of her death.
In an interview with Narada News last year shortly after her conviction, she criticised BJP's "fascist and communal politics" and added: "My Constitution teaches me to be a secular citizen, not communal. It is my right to fight against these communal elements."
"I believe in democracy and freedom of expression, and hence, am open to criticism too. People are welcome to call me anti-BJP or anti-Modi, if they want to. They are free to have their own opinion, just as I am free to have my opinion."
'They come on motorbikes, kill, and vanish'
Her killing follows several assassinations of outspoken secularists or rationalists in recent years, including scholar Malleshappa Kalburgi, anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar, and politician Govind Pansare.
A Dalit (formerly untouchable) man was beaten to death in the western Indian state of Gujarat allegedly for watching people dance as they celebrated the Hindu festival of Dussehra.
Eight men have been arrested for attacking the 21-year-old on Sunday, police told BBC Gujarati.
Some Dalits were beaten up for sporting moustaches in the state last week.
Despite laws to protect them, discrimination remains a daily reality for India's 200 million Dalits.
The victim, identified as Jayesh Solanki was watching a performance of Garba, a traditional dance, with his cousins, when a man approached them, according to the police complaint lodged by Mr Solanki's cousin, Prakash.
"He told us how dare you come here," Mr Solanki alleged in the complaint. "We told him that we came to watch the Garba because our sisters and daughters were participating. But he started abusing us."
The complaint goes on to say the man left and returned with seven others, one of whom slapped Prakash. When Mr Solanki tried to intervene, he was dragged away and beaten.
The men allegedly flung him against a wall causing him to lose consciousness. But they continued to beat him, according to the complainant.
Mr Solanki was taken to hospital but he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Police said they have also provided security to Mr Solanki's family who fear they might be attacked by upper caste men for pursing a case against the accused.
Dalits have traditionally been at the bottom of the Hindu caste system. They have been subjugated by the higher castes for centuries.
Cancelled astrology workshop prompts calls for researchers to be vigilant about stamping out unscientific beliefs.
T.V Padma
07 November 2017
https://www.nature.com/news/indian-scientists-urged-to-speak-out-about-pseudoscience-1.22957
Alarm in the Indian scientific community over anti-science policies and programmes has been brewing for some time. Several scientists who spoke with Nature are reluctant to comment publicly about it for fear of jeopardizing their jobs. Others took part in the March for Science organized by the 7,000-member Breakthrough Science Society in August in around 40 Indian cities, in part to protest the government’s support for ideas not yet backed by science. One area of concern, says Banerjee, is the government’s push for a national research programme on the health and other benefits of a combination of five cow products, known as panchgavya.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, hosted a two-day workshop last December to discuss ways to validate research on panchgavya, which was supported by India’s Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, and Council of Scientific and Industrial research (CSIR), and inaugurated by India’s science minister Harsh Vardhan.
According to IIT Delhi’s website, Vardhan, who is a physician, “emphasised that use of panchgavya in practice and in daily routines will help to address the pressing global issues like climate change, resistance development, malnourishment, global health etc”.
Following the workshop, India’s science ministry formed a national steering committee to initiate a national programme on the topic.
Supporters of this research say that cow products should be considered part of India’s vast traditional knowledge base. But critics say that such unverified theories are pseudoscience, and that singling out the benefits of cow products is part of a larger political agenda by Hindus, for whom the cow is a sacred animal.
They also argue that research on topics such as panchgavya should be handled in a neutral manner rather than as a way of promoting traditional knowledge. Rahul Siddharthan, a computation biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, says that the government must accept that any research involving traditional hypotheses about health could potentially refute those hypotheses. “Refutability is the essence of science,” he says.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/unusual-move-organizers-postpone-indias-major-annual-science-conference
In an unprecedented move, organizers of the annual Indian Science Congress have postponed the prestigious event just days before it was supposed to begin. The move apparently reflects concerns that students at the university hosting the congress would stage protests against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was scheduled to open the event.
More than 10,000 scientists were expected to attend the 105th congress, a 5-day gathering at Osmania University in Hyderabad in southern India. But just 12 days before its 3 January start, organizers announced they had “indefinitely postponed” the event and that a “further course of action" will be announced. The decision was “due to certain issues [on] the campus,” the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) in Kolkata said in a statement.
The group pushed back, however, on reports that organizers were worried that students opposed to the Modi government’s policies would try to disrupt the proceedings, stating that the “postponement has no relation to the … Prime Minister’s visit to the event.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/india-s-education-minister-assails-evolutionary-theory-calls-curricula-overhaul
A new front has opened in the war on science in India. On Friday, India’s minister for higher education, Satyapal Singh, took aim at the theory of evolution. Calling himself “a responsible man of science,” Singh, a chemist, suggested that Darwin’s theory is “scientifically wrong” and “needs to change” in school and university curricula. In remarks on the sidelines of a conference in Aurangabad, in central India, Singh further noted that “nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.”
Top scientists have condemned Singh’s remarks. They “seem to be aimed at politically polarizing science and scientists, and that is the real danger we must guard against,” says Raghavendra Gadagkar, immediate past president of the Indian National Science Academy and an ecologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Yesterday, India’s three science academies released a statement endorsed by more than 2000 scientists, declaring that “it would be a retrograde step to remove the teaching of the theory of evolution from school and college curricula or to dilute this by offering nonscientific explanations or myths.”
Singh is not the only voice in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) espousing antiscience views. The government took heat last year over an effort to validate panchagavya, a folk remedy based on cow dung, as a cure-all, and in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the world’s first plastic surgery was performed in India when the Hindu deity Ganesh was created with a human body and an elephant head. “The BJP is the fountainhead of scientific nonsense,” says opposition politician Jairam Ramesh, a mechanical engineer by training.
By RUPAM JAIN and TOM LASSETER Filed March 6, 2018, 11 a.m. GMT
NEW DELHI - During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.
The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.
Minutes of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.
Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people - a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.
In doing so, they are challenging a more multicultural narrative that has dominated since the time of British rule, that modern-day India is a tapestry born of migrations, invasions and conversions. That view is rooted in demographic fact. While the majority of Indians are Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or a fifth, of the populace.
The committee’s chairman, K.N. Dikshit, told Reuters, “I have been asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.” The committee’s creator, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, confirmed in an interview that the group’s work was part of larger plans to revise India’s history.
For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous. The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.”
“The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”
Modi did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
INTO THE CLASSROOM
Helping to drive the debate over Indian history is an ideological, nationalist Hindu group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It helped sweep Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to power in 2014 and now counts among its members the ministers in charge of agriculture, highways and internal security.
The RSS asserts that ancestors of all people of Indian origin - including 172 million Muslims - were Hindu and that they must accept their common ancestry as part of Bharat Mata, or Mother India. Modi has been a member of the RSS since childhood. An official biography of Culture Minister Sharma says he too has been a “dedicated follower” of the RSS for many years.
Referring to the emblematic colour of the Hindu nationalist movement, RSS spokesman Manmohan Vaidya told Reuters that “the true colour of Indian history is saffron and to bring about cultural changes we have to rewrite history.”
https://n.pr/2DRLaZx
The shelves in Umesh Soni's little store in downtown Mumbai are neatly stacked with soaps. There are handmade translucent bars, brightly colored circular soaps in tropical variants and square black bathing bars. It looks like any other soap shop.
Except all the soaps include cow dung and cow urine as ingredients.
Why make soap from this stuff?
Cows are sacred in Hinduism. Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of life, says that cow products like dung, milk and urine have healing properties. Many rural Indian homes use cow dung to pave floors. And many Hindus believe drinking cow urine is good for health.
Boxes of soap from Cowpathy Care. Cow dung is dried and turned into a powder, then added to the bars.
Sushmita Pathak/NPR
Soni, 35, started making cow dung soaps in 2008, but he's certainly not the first to use these items in beauty products. Initially, his customers were devotees at a Hindu temple in Mumbai. Today, the microbiologist and MBA graduate sells to customers from a dozen countries.
In 2012, he launched his own cow-based beauty products line. Cowpathy Care, as it's called, offers 80 products, including cow dung soaps, cow milk creams and an under-eye gel made from cow urine.
And the market is growing. In 2014, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power and made it a special mission to elevate the role of the cow. There have been calls to ban eating beef in many states. Cow protection squads have popped up. Angry mobs have lynched people suspected of smuggling cows.
And bovine merchandise is on a roll. Stores in India are being flooded with cow-based products, from soaps to toothpaste.
In August 2018, India's Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government renamed the historic Mughalsarai Junction Railway Station in the state of Uttar Pradesh after the right-wing Hindu ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, most likely because the existing name referred to the Indian Muslim Mughal dynasty.
Three years earlier, in May 2015, many street signs in New Delhi carrying Urdu/Muslim names including Aurangzeb Road, named after the sixth Mughal emperor, were painted black by Shiv Sena Hindustan, a radical Hindu organisation. Later in that year, the ruling BJP officially changed the name of the Aurangzeb Road to A P J Abdul Kalam, a pro-BJP ex-president of India.
In April 2016, the BJP government in Haryana renamed the city of Gurgaon as Gurugram, after Guru Dronacharya, an upper caste Hindu figure from the epic Mahabharata, who is viewed as a villain by India's Dalits.
Last month, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh proposed to rename airports in the towns of Bareilly, Kanpur, and Agra. The proposed new names of two of the three airports have apparent Hindu overtones. Bareilly is to be renamed Nath Nagri, after the Hindu Nath sect. The Hindu politician Yogi Adityanath, the current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, known for his brazen Islamophobia, belongs to this sect. The Agra airport, on the other hand, is to be renamed after the Hindutva ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, just like the Mughalsarai Railway Station.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP, also demands many other places with Muslim names, including the cities of Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Aurangabad, to be renamed.
Renaming places, re-writing histories
Renaming of cities, streets or landmarks is not an act exclusive to India or the BJP.
The city that was known as St Petersburg in imperial Russia was renamed Petrograd in 1914 at the start of World War I because authorities thought its original name sounded too German. In 1924, following the formation of the USSR and the death of Lenin, the name of the city was changed once again, this time to Leningrad. The city's name was reverted back to St Petersburg in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
India also renamed several cities long before the BJP took power. In 1995, it restored the names of the cities of Bombay, Bangalore, and Calcutta to their indigenous versions - Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata respectively - to emphasize its independence from Britain and reject the linguistic symbols left over from the colonial era. The names of the cities Cawnpore and Jubblepore were also changed to Kanpur and Jabalpur to reflect native spelling and pronunciation.
READ MORE
Hindu right rewriting Indian textbooks
Although renaming has been practised widely across the world, in many cases it has been socially and politically controversial. This is because renaming is a lot more than simply changing a word on a map or a street sign. Place names are an important element of a country's cultural landscape, as they naturally document and reflect a locality's heritage and identity. Changing them is often seen as a re-writing of history. Renaming, therefore, is always a hotly debated issue.
Renaming of a place appears a lot more acceptable to the local population when it is done to erase remaining symbols of colonialism. However, when it is done solely to privilege one of the many available readings of a place's history and identity, it becomes a divisive force, helping to accentuate political, social and historic divisions within a community.
Erasing India's Muslim heritage
The supporters of the renaming of the Aurangzeb Road in New Delhi argued that the Mughal emperor was an invader and a cruel ruler, who does not deserve to be commemorated in modern India.
https://youtu.be/5R7suJE8Om8
by Rana Ayub
Twenty-six years later, as India marks the anniversary of the demolition of the (Babri) mosque (in Ayodhya), Indian Muslims continue to live their worst nightmare as they wake up each morning to humiliating and threatening discourse by legislators and members of the ruling party.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes are not just encouraged but also rewarded by those in power. According to a report on hate crimes released by Fact Checker, 76 percent of victims of hate crimes in India over the past 10 years have been Muslims. Ninety percent of these attacks have occurred since Prime Minister Narendra Modi was voted into power in 2014.
By labeling Muslims as “beef eaters” and expanding bans on the consumption of beef by putting in place new rules to curtail cow slaughter that disadvantage Muslim and lower-caste Hindus, the Hindu nationalist BJP is encouraging young Hindu men to become so-called cow vigilantes, who brandish their patriotism and faith by physically attacking Muslims. Even a rumor that a Muslim family ate beef for dinner, or a Muslim man ferried a cow to a slaughterhouse, can prove fatal in the hinterlands today.
When Muslims are not being lynched for bovine-related reasons, they are attacked for marrying Hindu girls, for sporting a beard, or for wearing a skullcap or other symbols of religious identity. They are berated on popular, state-favored news channels for being ungrateful betrayers and traitors who have no love for the national flag.
Attacks on Indian Muslims are also a part of a wider campaign to undermine the community and its rich history. The Taj Mahal is an iconic 17th-century mausoleum, built by another Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, but it is frequently disparaged in remarks by Modi’s deputies. Yogi Adityanath, Modi’s choice as chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, has stated that the Taj Mahal isn’t sufficiently Indian — code for belonging to India’s Islamic past. “Foreign dignitaries visiting the country used to be gifted replicas of the Taj Mahal and other minarets, which did not reflect Indian culture,” he said at a rally in the state of Bihar last year. “Now, [Hindu] holy books such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana are offered as gifts.” In the past six months, names of iconic cities and railway stations such as Allahabad and Mughal Sarai named after Muslim figures have been changed to reflect Hindu culture.
A 104-page report released by Human Rights Watch (#HRW) stated that at least 44 people were killed and 280 injured in more than 100 attacks by cow vigilantes across 20 #Indian states between May 2015 and December 2018. #Modi #Hindutva #India https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/india-cow-protection-groups-have-killed-over-44-people-report/10830902 … via @ABCNews
The crimes largely target minorities, and go unpunished due to the support of law enforcement and, HRW said, "communal rhetoric by members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to spur a violent vigilante campaign against consumption of beef and those engaged in the cattle trade".
HRW said 36 Muslims were killed in the reported time period, and police "often stalled prosecutions of the attackers, while several BJP politicians publicly justified the attacks".
'A free pass'
Victims are also from India's Dalit (formerly known as "untouchables") and Adivasi (indigenous) communities.
Human rights activist Harsh Mander told The Guardian many of the killings were filmed, with the footage shared.
"This 'performative' aspect of the violence recalls, for me, the lynchings of African-Americans in the US as a way of showing the status to which a community has been reduced."
Many Hindus consider cows to be sacred and most states ban slaughtering cows, but the need to "save" cows and the proliferation of cow-protection groups around the country are recent phenomena.
The Guardian reported that many Hindus in Kerala and Tamil Nadu eat beef, as well as members of less-powerful castes in need of a cheap source of protein.
HRW found a 500 per cent increase in communally divisive rhetoric in speeches by politicians, 90 per cent of which were from BJP members.
About 90 per cent of the attacks were reported after the BJP's ascension to power in May 2014, and 66 per cent took place in BJP-run states.
"Calls for cow protection may have started out as a way to attract Hindu votes, but it has transformed into a free pass for mobs to violently attack and kill minority group members," said HRW's South Asia director, Meenakshi Ganguly.
"Indian authorities should stop egging on or justifying these attacks, blaming victims or protecting the culprits."
HRW said many cow-protection groups have clear ties to the BJP.
'These vigilantes get political shelter'
The report itself focused on 11 cases in four states that resulted in 14 deaths, and the Government response in each.
In almost all the cases, HRW found, police stalled the investigations, didn't follow procedure, or were complicit in the ensuing cover-ups.
"Police face political pressure to sympathise with cow protectors and do a weak investigation and let them go free," one retired senior police officer in Rajasthan told HRW.
"These vigilantes get political shelter and help."
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/02/18/india-vigilante-cow-protection-groups-attack-minorities
At this year’s (Indian Science) congress, the head of a southern Indian university cited an ancient Hindu text as proof that stem cell research was discovered on the subcontinent thousands of years ago.
“We had 100 Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell and test tube technology,” said G. Nageshwar Rao, vice chancellor at Andhra University, referring to a story from the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Rao, who was addressing school children and scientists at the event, also said a demon king from another centuries-old Hindu epic had two dozen aircraft and a network of landing strips in modern-day Sri Lanka.
“Hindu Lord Vishnu used guided missiles known as ‘Vishnu Chakra’ and chased moving targets,” added the professor of inorganic chemistry.
Event organisers tried to hose down the remarks, saying it was “unfortunate” the prestigious event had been derailed by controversy.
“We don’t subscribe to their views and distance ourselves from their comments. This is unfortunate,” said Premendu P Mathur, general secretary of Indian Scientific Congress Association.
“There is a serious concern about such kind of utterances by responsible people.”
Another speaker, a scientist from a university in southern Tamil Nadu state, also raised eyebrows by questioning the breakthroughs of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
India is no stranger to prominent figures citing ancient Hindu texts like the Puranas and Vedas as ironclad evidence of the country’s technological prowess.
India’s minister for higher education Satyapal Singh last year said Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong, and vowed to change the national school curriculum to reflect that.
The minister hails from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules 17 of India’s 29 states and territories outright or through alliances.
BJP leader and prime minister Narendra Modi in 2015 pointed to Hindu scriptures as proof that plastic surgery existed in ancient India.
Science minister Harsh Vardhan last year said ancient Greeks took credit from India for early mathematical principles and misquoted Stephen Hawking as praising the Vedas for discoveries greater than Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The Breakthrough Science Society, an Indian-based educational charity, said it was “astounded and even horrified” at the remarks made at an academic summit.
“Puranic verses and epics are poetic, enjoyable, contain moral elements and [are] rich in imagination but [are] not scientifically constructed or validated theories,” the group said in a statement Sunday.
“Such a hallowed assembly of scientists has been misused to make false and chauvinistic claims about ancient India.”
https://theprint.in/india/how-a-govt-body-plans-to-produce-highly-intellectual-children-with-help-of-cows/286680/
Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog wants to produce panchgavya drug using cow urine. It says pregnant women will give birth to ‘smart kids’ if they take the drug regularly.
The Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog is working with the Ministry of AYUSH to produce panchgavya drug using cow urine and dung that it says will help develop “highly intellectual” children.
The commission has claimed that pregnant women may be able to give birth to “smart, highly intellectual and healthy children” if they consume the drug regularly.
The drug will be made using cow urine, dung, milk, ghee and curd, the commission’s chairman Vallabhbhai Kathiria told ThePrint.
The Aayog was set up by the Narendra Modi government in February for the purpose of conservation and protection of cattle population in the country.
Kathiria, who is a former BJP MP from Gujarat, said that shastras and Ayurveda texts also vouch for panchgavya drug, which is a mixture of five cow products.
“Shastras and Ayurveda texts say that if pregnant women consume the drug, they may produce smart, highly intellectual and healthy children,” he said, adding that they have sought the AYUSH ministry’s help in producing the drug on a large scale.
He also said the AYUSH ministry and the newly-formed Ministry of Animal Husbandry will seek the cooperation of the MSME ministry in producing and marketing the drug.
Kathiria added that once they produce the drug on a large scale, they will appoint vaidyas (practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine) in villages so that they prescribe them to pregnant women.
Kathiria said the commission’s responsibility also includes development and conservation of indigenous cow breeds, and, therefore, it has already selected 44 indigenous breeds.
Among the breeds, Gir and Kankrej of Gujarat, Sahiwal of Punjab, Gangatiri and Red Sindhi of Uttar Pradesh, Malvi of Madhya Pradesh and Krishna Valley and Vechur of south India are the prominent ones.
Kathiria further said that there is a problem of semen-shortage, which forces the government to import semen of bulls from other countries. The only way to solve the problem is by opening at least one semen-production centre and one mating centre in each state, he added.
“Semen-production centres are already operating in Bhopal and Visakhapatnam where semen of good breeds of indigenous bulls is produced with the help of genetic breeding,” he said.
In this regard, the commission is working with the Ministry of Animal Husbandry, which is gravely concerned about the dwindling population of indigenous cows, Kathiria said.
Minister of State in the Ministry of Animal Husbandry Pratap Chandra Sarangi told ThePrint that farmers are no longer interested in keeping indigenous cows due to higher milk production capacity of Jersey cows.
But due to high medicinal value of indigenous cow milk, increasing their population has been one of the top priorities of the Ministry of Animal Husbandry, Sarangi said.
The central government is also planning a scheme in coordination with the state governments to subsidise procurement of indigenous cows by farmers, he added.
Plan to set up gaushalas on PPP model across India
The commission is working on a plan to set up gaushalas (cowsheds), similar to the one built in Gwalior, which operates on a PPP model and produces phenyl, pesticides using cow dung and urine.
“India imports potassium worth Rs 7,000-15,000 crore every year as it is used as a fertiliser, but if all the gaushalas can produce pesticides on their own, it would save the government a lot of money,” said Kathiria.
The former MP said they have already written to the state governments on how to come up with such gaushalas and will soon convene a meeting in this regard.
https://theprint.in/india/how-a-govt-body-plans-to-produce-highly-intellectual-children-with-help-of-cows/286680/
More than 500 scientists have asked the Indian government to withdraw a call for research proposals on the “uniqueness” of indigenous cows and the curative properties of cow urine, dung, and milk, including potential cancer treatments. In an online letter, the researchers say the call is “unscientific” and a misdirection of public money at a time when research in India is already facing a financial crunch.
Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism, and some petitioners see the research program as another effort by the Indian government, run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to validate faith-based pseudoscience. The call does not appear to be shaped by “objective scientific inquiry,” but rather “aimed at confirming existing beliefs,” says Aniket Sule, a reader at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education who helped draft the letter. “They should prove that there is some merit in pursuing this research before throwing money at it,” Sule says.
The call for proposals, issued 14 February, is part of a larger funding program of the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa and Homoeopathy, and other government agencies. It invites projects on five research themes including: “cowpathy,” the use of cow products for medicine and health, including anticancer and diabetes drugs; the use of cow products for agriculture, such as in pesticides; cow-based products like shampoo, hair oil, and floor cleaners; and research on the nutritional value of cow milk. A major aim is the “scientific investigation of uniqueness of pure Indigenous Indian cows.”
In their letter, scientists note that the call presumes “special physiological status to select breeds of only one species,” adding that “to begin a project with such presumptions is prima facie unscientific.” Money under the scheme could be “wasted to ‘investigate’ imaginary qualities derived from religious scriptures,” they said.
It’s not the first time the current government has promoted research on the cow, or more broadly, made scientific claims for unproven traditional beliefs. In 2017, the government set up a committee to vet research proposals to scientifically validate “panchgavya,” a concoction of cow milk, curd, ghee, dung, and urine held by Ayurveda texts to have curative properties. Last year, BJP Member of Parliament Sadhvi Pragya was widely criticised by oncologists when she claimed that cow urine cured her breast cancer.
The latest call comes at a time when government grants are already being delayed, scientists say, with research projects getting stalled and young researchers not receiving their monthly stipends on time. In this context, “actively canvassing proposals under such dubious scheme is even more infuriating,” their letter says.
Sule and others have appealed to the ministry to withdraw the current proposal and reframe it “to encourage open inquiry.” They have also appealed to scientists across the country to use National Science Day on 28 February to educate the general public.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3108720/indias-latest-boycott-china-move-involves-cow-dung-diwali-lights?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=share_widget&utm_campaign=3108720 via @scmpnews
India’s latest salvo against China is not to be sniffed at. Ahead of Diwali, the country’s biggest religious festival, a campaign is urging patriotic Indians to swap once popular, cheap Chinese-manufactured festive lights for environmentally friendly oil lamps made from cow dung.
Behind the campaign is the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog (RKA), a group set up last year to conserve the nation’s population of cows, viewed as sacred by Hindus – India’s majority religion. The RKA hopes to produce some 330 million oil lamps, known as diyas, each of which will cost between 4 rupees and 20 rupees (US$0.05 to US$0.25).
More than 15 states – including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh – have agreed to be part of the campaign and 300,000 cow dung diyas are to be lit in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, and another 100,000 diyas in the holy city of Varanasi.
In recent years, cheap Chinese-made LED lights have flooded the market and on some accounts India imports 10 billion rupees (US$134 million) worth of the lights from China and a few other countries every year.
However, growing tensions between India and China – whose troops have been locked in a sometimes deadly stand-off along the countries’ disputed Himalayan border for the past six months – have led New Delhi to rethink its business dealings with Beijing. Since the beginning of the stand-off it has banned 218 Chinese apps and terminated multiple contracts with Chinese companies, while Indian traders have launched campaigns to boycott Chinese goods.
This is not the first time the RKA, which is part of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government’s Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairy, has proposed cow dung as a novel solution to a problem. Previously it suggested using chips made from cow dung to reduce radiation from mobile phones.
Buying goods made from dung also ensures local workers benefit. Making diyas in India has traditionally been a small-scale handicraft industry.
Among the fans of the campaign is Meenal Singh Deo, in Dhenkanal, Odisha. She has bought cow dung diyas from the Kanha Gaushala cow shelter in Jhansi, run by a team of 18 women, who are the sole bread-winners of their families.
“The dung lights are so inexpensive and eco-friendly that this year I have made a conscious attempt not to buy Chinese lights,” says the 52-year-old, who runs a heritage homestay. “I am going to use a mix of earthen lamps from potters and those made of cow dung.”
Diyas are especially popular during Diwali, a Hindu festival which symbolises the victory of light over darkness and good over evil. Nearly eight in 10 of India’s 1.3 billion population are Hindus, though Sikhs and Jains also celebrate Diwali.
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Despite the campaign, Chinese-made LED lights still hold an appeal for consumers. As Rakesh Kumar, a dealer in lights in Chennai, puts it: “People prefer Chinese products because of their low cost and variety.”
At Delhi’s Bhagirath Palace, the biggest electrical goods market in India, with more than 2,000 wholesalers, traders deal in all kinds of lights but the majority are imported from China.
Satish Gupta, a dealer, says the rope lights he sells are made in China and are still popular. He sells a roll of 25 metres for about US$10 and also sells a packet of 15 electric Chinese-made diyas for about US$2.
“We still see a demand for these lights as they are convenient, easy to use and need no oil or maintenance,” he says.
https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1458083442260856834?s=20
While the Citizenship Amendment Act rightly was criticised around the world for specifically targeting Muslims along with the NRC pincer, other laws India has passed since 2014 have not received as much notice.
https://thewire.in/politics/price-of-the-modi-years-book-excerpt
These are those laws the Modi years have given us:
1. The Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act, 2015
Under this law anyone found in possession of beef would be jailed for up to five years. It also banned the slaughter of bulls, bullocks and calves in addition to the existing ban on cow slaughter.
2. The Haryana Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act, 2015
Possession of beef punishable by up to five years in jail. Sale of cows for slaughter to another state punishable by seven years in jail. Cow slaughter would attract jail of up to 10 years. The burden of proof would be on the accused.
3. The Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 2017
This law extended the punishment for cow slaughter from seven years to life. It allows permanent forfeiture of vehicles transporting animals except under prescribed conditions. It also increased the fine from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. Minister of state for home Pradipsinh Jadeja said the logic was to equal cow slaughter with murder.
4. The Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Ordinance, 2020 repealed the 1964 law which allowed the slaughter of bullocks.
It made cow slaughter punishable by up to seven years. Purchase, sale, disposal or transport of cattle outside the state except in prescribed manner would be punishable by five years in jail. Fines of up to Rs 10 lakh are also imposed.
The Maharashtra law has this clause: “9B. Burden of proof on accused. In any trial … the burden of proving that the slaughter, transport, export outside the State, sale, purchase or possession of flesh of cow, bull or bullock was not in contravention of the provisions of this Act shall be on the accused.”
Meaning that you are guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent. If you are found with a bloody knife next to a corpse, you are presumed innocent. It is the State that has to demonstrate that you committed murder. But if you are found with or found near meat and accused of possessing beef you are presumed guilty of possessing beef till you disprove this to the satisfaction of the State. This is an invitation to violence. Two weeks after Maharashtra, on 17 March 2015, Haryana under the BJP passed its law criminalising possession of beef. The law has this section: ‘No person shall directly or indirectly sell, keep, store, transport or offer for sale or cause to be sold beef or beef products.’ Burden of proof was reversed here also. Punishment is up to five years.
While the Citizenship Amendment Act rightly was criticised around the world for specifically targeting Muslims along with the NRC pincer, other laws India has passed since 2014 have not received as much notice. The judiciary has been supine and allowed a de facto Hindu Rashtra to emerge through legislation. These laws have been written and passed and are being applied across India, targeting Indian Muslims, brutalising them constantly, while a demented media and a bored public have looked away.
Aakar Patel is Chair of Amnesty International India and author of Our Hindu Rashtra. His Price of the Modi Years will be released on November 14.
Cow dung cakes were found inside an Indian passenger’s suitcase that had been left behind at the Washington Dulles International Airport last month. Officials with US Customs and Border Protection said on Monday that agents found the cow dung cakes after passengers cleared the inspection area on April 4, 2021.
Authorities examining leftover baggage found the cow dung cakes in unclaimed luggage from an Air India flight, Fox News reports. A spokesperson for CBP said that officials inspect baggage left behind frequently.
Speaking to Fox News, officials said that cow dung from India is prohibited in the US since it has the potential of importing foot and mouth disease. It can spread widely leading to “significant economic losses to livestock populations,” the US Department of Agriculture said.
The cow dung cakes, thus found in the bag, were destroyed.
“Foot and Mouth Disease is one of the animal diseases that livestock owners dread most, has grave economic consequences, and it is a critical threat focus of Customs and Border Protection’s agriculture protection mission. CBP’s agriculture specialists are our nation’s frontline protectors of vital agricultural and natural resources that help keep our nation’s economy strong and robust,”Keith Fleming, Acting Director of Field Operations for CBP’s Baltimore Field Office, said in a press release cited by Fox News.
Cow dung is used as a cooking source in some parts of the world. It is primarily used in rural areas as villagers collect manure from cows and dry it, so as to use cow dung cakes for fuel. It also serves as a cheap and good fertiliser.
The federal education ministry has asked every state to submit proposal papers, which should be included in the school curriculum.
The Indian state of Karnataka has stoked a new controversy by claiming that the Pythagorean theorem and Newton's Theory of Gravity are "Eurocentric" concepts.
The state's school authorities have described the world-famous theorem as "fake news" and the apple falling on Newton's head and other issues to be "created and propagated".
Karnataka's primary and secondary education team, which has submitted its 'Position paper on Knowledge of India', even claimed that Gravity and Pythagoras have roots in Vedic math (Between 1500 BC and 600 BC in India). This is an Indic-centered approach."
The copy of the position papers submitted to the federal government reads: "Encouraging an attitude of questioning and not merely accepting whatever the textbooks (or print/electronic/social media) say as infallible truth, with a clear foundation of how knowledge generation takes place and how fake news such as Pythagoras theorem, an apple falling on Newton's head etc. are created and propagated."
Madan Gopal, chairman of the task force for Karnataka's Primary and Secondary Education Department, said that a lot of information is available on the internet to back his claim.
"Many of the theorems are debated in all international forums," Gopal said, according to the Indian news website, India Today. "Debate is part of evolving scientific temper. Accepting blindly is not correct, in my view. Let there be debate. Let there be discussions. Let there be scientific evidence and archaeological evidence."
Meanwhile, the position paper on Language education focuses on the need to learn ancient and classical languages such as Sanskrit, Persian and Pali.
In order to learn the concepts of solar eclipses and the solar system, it refers to the story of 'Taittirīya Saṁhitā' (branch of India's old school, prevalent in South India), where the Moon is said to have 27 wives, with whom he spends one night each.