In the context of the national imperative of bringing back kaalaadhan, shehzada, ramzada, haramzada are valid terms in political discourse. Kaalaadhan represents corrupt moneys held abroad and denied to the poor people to whom the money belongs.
NaMo, nationalise kaalaadhan.
Kalyanaraman
NaMo, nationalise kaalaadhan.
Kalyanaraman
Rama is a Universal Icon – Secular narrative is bigoted
Ram has been a cultural icon of the Indic civilisation. Even today, Muslims of Indonesia consider Ram and Ramayana as part of their cultural heritage and Muslim actors take part in an annual Ramlilas, Ramayana operas on a grand scale. (Photo: Ankit Gupta, via Wikimedia Commons)
With the opposition baying for blood, the Sadhvi’s own party forcing her to apologise, and the Prime Minister censuring the Sadhvi’s words, it is foolhardy to offer a sympathetic take on what the Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti said.
But there are several important reasons to challenge the accounts. The first is to counter a pattern of distortion by the media, reporting what is different than what the video evidence supports, the second is to examine the substance of what the Sadhvi said beyond the one colloquial abuse-word she used, and third, and most importantly to examine the narrow communalisation of Ram in our public-secular discourse.
The Hindu, in an editorial advocating that “Mr Modi must do the right thing” by sacking the Sadhvi, claims that the Sadhvi was “alluding to religious minorities as illegitimate children.” This charge has also been picked up by international news outlets and repeated in social media.
Let us see examine the full segment where Sadhvi used the word “haramzadon”, the only reference to “illegitimate children” that I could find in her speech. If there is another place or a longer recording of her speech that I have missed, I would be happy to be corrected. But this is what she says.
Minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti’s controversial speech – Focus News
“Parirvar Vaad ke sahare rajniti chalti hai kya, parivar vad ke sahare nahin, Maa bete ki sarkar? Kitni ghotale hue haryana me damaad ke dwaraa , jo sadharan parivar mein steel ke bartanon ki dukhan rakhne vaala, uska beta, sonia gandhi ka damaad ,itna arab kharab pati kaise ho gaya? garibon ko loota hai, garibon ko choosa hai, modi ji keh rahen hai, na khayenge, na khane denge. Yaad rakhiyegaa, yeh aapko tey karna hai Yeh aapko tey karna hai ki dilli mein ramzadon ki sarkar banega ya haramzadon ki sarkar banegi.”
“Does politics work on dynastic succession? A government of mother and son? There were so many scams in Haryana by the son-in-law (Vadra). The son of someone who had a small shop selling steel utensils, the son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, how did he get to be so rich? They have looted the poor, sucked them dry. Modi ji has been saying he won’t be corrupt nor let anyone else be corrupt. Remember, you have to decide whether in Delhi you want a government of the righteous or of corrupt bastards.
I have deliberately translated Ramzadon as righteous and Haramzadon as corrupt bastards since, though she used an earthy rhyme, that is the clear meaning of her statement. It is explicit that the Sadhvi is using “haramzadon” in the context of corruption, and is not, as The Hindu misrepresents “alluding to religious minorities as illegitimate children.” She is also specifically using it as “what kind of government do you want?” She is targeting the opposition, the dynasty, that she says has looted the poor, she is not talking about the voters or any community. Haram is equally a word for the corrupt (“haram ka paisa”) as illegitimate, and she links it to the Congress dynasty by taking on Vadra’s land deals in Haryana. Ram is maryada purushottom, the symbol of righteousness. Ram vs haram is setting up the contrast of Modi, who she says has sworn to neither be corrupt or let others be corrupt with Congress who has practiced dynastic corruption. It is a political attack, not remotely a communal one.
There is an issue with her using the term haramzada (bastard) in the colloquial rhyme with ramzade as it is a profanity (though hardly the worst of them). Even Congress analyst Pawan Khera writing about this issue agrees that “Our villages are brutally honest about what they feel on any given issue… (As city dwellers) We gradually learn to cover our instinct, sometimes with guarded expressions and sometimes with studied silence.” But he is wrong about the topic of her brutal honesty. It is about disgust with Congress corruption and divisiveness, not about “minorities.”
Plain-speaking is comparatively natural to the village sadhvi. The sophisticated say one thing publically and another when they think it won’t get out. When British PM John Major was caught on a microphone calling his colleagues ‘bastards’ he stillbrazened it out saying “It was absolutely unforgivable. My only excuse is that it was true.”
Regarding the clearly false charge that the word “haramzade” was used for minorities, Sadhvi, in a later interview, clarified again that she meant those that divided and looted the country. She was being as plain speaking as she had been in the speech. It is atrocious that this was made into a charge that she used that terms for minorities, as The Hindu claims, labeling Muslims and Christians as “illegitimate children.” If she had done that, she should be justifiably charged with “hate speech” and for being a bigot. In talking about her corrupt political opponents here, she can at worst be considered as using “unparliamentary language”, though she was clearly not in parliament but in an election rally.
So how has is it that this irresponsible charge that “she called minorities illegitimate children” has been made, and largely repeated unquestioned in media such as The Hindu and by the “intelligentsia.” International media, including in Pakistan, made it a big news that she made “insulting comments against non-Hindus”. Other international outlets also claim that she used “an abusive terms to refer to non-Hindus.” No doubt, the authority of The Hindu will make it into gospel to be cited as reference in academic writings of the future.
#Muslims, #Christians sons of #Ram.
Well, don’t count the professional secularati out. They are using a another statement where the Sadhavi says “Is Desh mein chahe Isayee ho ya Musalman how, vo saree ke saree Ram ki santan hain” i.e. “The Muslims and Christians of this country are the children of Ram. “ Coming from someone who is a Ram-Bhakt background, this is possibly the highest praise she can offer anyone. You would need a particularly twisted mind to make that into a statement of abuse.
The remaining evidence the secularati make is the statement “jo nahin mante, vo desh ko bhi nahin manenge.” “Those that do not accept Ram, would they even accept India?”
Two points here. Firstly, the statement has been translated as “those who do not believe in Ram should leave India.” As far as I can tell. I have not found anywhere where she says that. She is instead asking a question of all the elite idea-of-India wallahs. If Ram is not acceptable to you, are you really attached to India? George Bush made a far stronger statement that he didn’t consider atheists citizens or patriots, but even as President there were few serious calls for his resignation on that account.
The Sadhvi’s idea of India can be debated but it is motivated ignorance to label it as a hate speech against minorities. There are probably more “Hindu” seculariti that reject Ram as a cultural icon than members of any minority religious community. In my article “Need I belong to Only One Religion” I had mentioned that Indian notions of religion are not exclusive and celebrated India’s syncretic pluralism.
“Of the numerous examples here, I will choose a recent one, an article by Saeeq Naqvi in the Indian Express, where he waxes nostalgic about the dharmic pluralism of India:
“…In fact in this long poem, ‘Lamp in a Temple’, Ghalib describes Varanasi as the ‘Kaaba of Hindustan’, somewhat in the same vein as Iqbal’s description of Lord Rama as the ‘Imam of Hindustan’. …Krishn ka hun pujari/ Ali ka banda hoon/ Yagana shaan-e-khuda/ Dekh kar raha na Gaya (I am a pujari of Krishna and a devotee of Ali/ I cannot help myself when I see the wonders of God).” …
Visit Ustad Alauddin Khan’s house in Maihar and you will be witness to one of the great spectacles of composite culture. The great master said his namaaz five times a day but his music he derived from Saraswati, who adorns all the walls of his house.
The sad part is that we are nostalgic for pluralism — wasn’t secularism, the antidote for the disease of religion, supposed to make us “more plural”? Why do we then find ourselves less so after 50 years of taking secularism pills? Or are we suffering from a misdiagnosis instead?”
It is a strident secularism that rejects Ram and makes him into a communal Hindu figure. They have no idea that plenty of Muslims, especially the common people, un-infected with the secularism virus, are happily comfortable with regarding Ram as a noble iconic figure. Even the Muslim plaintiff in the Babri case in Ayodhya has recently expressed this feeling in his call for “Ram Lalla to be restored.”
Ram has been a cultural icon of the Indic civilisation. Even today, Muslims of Indonesia consider Ram and Ramayana as part of their cultural heritage and Muslim actors take part in an annual Ramlilas, Ramayana operas on a grand scale. Similarly Buddhist Thailand’s head of state is King Rama IX, and the kings of the Chakri dynasty have been referred to as Rama for generations. The Thai kingdom was the Kingdom of Ayuthya, a variant of Ayodhya. While India adopted the Westminster model, the Indian model of statehood itself has had wide impact over South-East Asia. That Thailand is over 90% Buddhist has not come in the way of their reverence for Ram, just as Ram remains a cultural icon for majority-Muslim Indonesia. Religion does not supplant culture.
The Indian secularist projection of Ram as an exclusively Hindu icon, where “Hindu” gets defined in narrow religious terms shows both ignorance and contempt of India’s syncretic culture. It is a way to box India’s cultural roots into “Hindu religion,” and then exclude this culture from public life by using the pretext of “secularism.” It breaks and divides India by projecting onto it monotheistic conflict and mutual exclusion and then offers “secularism” as the salve for the problem it creates. It doesn’t help that there are now young Hindutva warriors, who have equally started looking at “Muslims” with a black and white lens. This is a distressing trend. But in this the secularists are their forbearers.
When Goa’s Christian deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza made the comment that he is a “Christian Hindu”, he was again referring to the fact that one can be culturally Hindu and religiously Christian. The most agitated by this remark are not the common people but institutions with an agenda, the religious only-we-go-to-heaven exclusivists and the professional secularists, who want to constrain India into silos of narrow non-overlapping religious labels. The Congress party staged a predictable walkout on Francis D’Souza’s statement of syncretic inclusion. But this inclusion is how India has worked.
This syncretic mixing is part of the genius of India that constantly creates narratives of harmony that do not depend on state-enforced secularism to prevent conflict. India has a cultural unity that was not put together by the British. It is this cultural unity that the Sadhvi alludes to in saying “how will they accept India?” Sadhvi’s haramzade remark for corrupt looters notwithstanding, to label Sadhvi’s speech invocation of Ram as a “religious hate speech” is to push a totalitarian idea of separate religious silos down people’s throat. The hate that exists is in the eyes of its secular beholders that get neither Ram nor Ramayan nor Bharat. And it is worth spending the effort to counter.
Kicking-off BJP's election campaign in the national capital on a controversial note, Union Minister of State Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti on Monday used abusive words to urge voters to choose between candidates.
India 'hate speech' minister Niranjan Jyoti keeps job.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refused to sack a minister who used an abusive term to refer to non-Hindus.
Niranjan Jyoti had told crowds at a rally in Delhi that they faced a choice between a "government of followers of Rama and a government of bastards".
Mr Modi told MPs he disapproved of her language, but said she had apologised and called for politicians to move on.
Critics accuse the prime minister and his supporters of exploiting religious divisions to court voters.
Some members of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made anti-Muslim speeches while campaigning for this year's general election.
And Mr Modi was accused of failing to stop deadly religious riots in 2002 when he was chief minister of Gujarat - allegations he has consistently denied.
The prime minister has insisted that his government will protect minorities.
Ms Jyoti, who is food processing minister, was using her speech to supporters in Delhi to criticise opposition Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.
She contrasted Congress' secular politics with the BJP's reputation as a Hindu nationalist party.
She then rhymes the words Ramzada (Ram's children) and Haramzada (illegitimate children/bastards).
Opposition parties called for her to be sacked, and have refused to accept her apology.
Roughly 80% of India's population were classed as Hindu by the 2001 census.
Some 13% - more than 100 million people - were identified as Muslim.
India also has substantial populations of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.
Pakistani Media on Indian Minister Niranjan Jyoti Abusive Speech Issue
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refused to sack a minister who used an abusive term to refer to non-Hindus.
Niranjan Jyoti had told crowds at a rally in Delhi that they faced a choice between a "government of followers of Rama and a government of bastards".
Mr Modi told MPs he disapproved of her language, but said she had apologised and called for politicians to move on.
Critics accuse the prime minister and his supporters of exploiting religious divisions to court voters.
Some members of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made anti-Muslim speeches while campaigning for this year's general election.
And Mr Modi was accused of failing to stop deadly religious riots in 2002 when he was chief minister of Gujarat - allegations he has consistently denied.
The prime minister has insisted that his government will protect minorities.
Ms Jyoti, who is food processing minister, was using her speech to supporters in Delhi to criticise opposition Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.
She contrasted Congress' secular politics with the BJP's reputation as a Hindu nationalist party.
She then rhymes the words Ramzada (Ram's children) and Haramzada (illegitimate children/bastards).
Opposition parties called for her to be sacked, and have refused to accept her apology.
Roughly 80% of India's population were classed as Hindu by the 2001 census.
Some 13% - more than 100 million people - were identified as Muslim.
India also has substantial populations of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.
News Headlines Today December 4, 2014 Top News Stories Today 4-12-2014
Latest News Today 4th December 2014 News Stories Urdu December 4, 2014
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refused to sack a minister who used an abusive term to refer to non-Hindus.
Niranjan Jyoti had told crowds at a rally in Delhi that they faced a choice between a "government of followers of Rama and a government of bastards".
Mr Modi told MPs he disapproved of her language, but said she had apologised and called for politicians to move on.
Critics accuse the prime minister and his supporters of exploiting religious divisions to court voters.
Some members of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made anti-Muslim speeches while campaigning for this year's general election.
And Mr Modi was accused of failing to stop deadly religious riots in 2002 when he was chief minister of Gujarat - allegations he has consistently denied.
The prime minister has insisted that his government will protect minorities.
Ms Jyoti, who is food processing minister, was using her speech to supporters in Delhi to criticise opposition Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.
She contrasted Congress' secular politics with the BJP's reputation as a Hindu nationalist party.
She then rhymes the words Ramzada (Ram's children) and Haramzada (illegitimate children/bastards).
Opposition parties called for her to be sacked, and have refused to accept her apology.
Roughly 80% of India's population were classed as Hindu by the 2001 census.
Some 13% - more than 100 million people - were identified as Muslim.
India also has substantial populations of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists.
News Headlines Today December 4, 2014 Top News Stories Today 4-12-2014
Latest News Today 4th December 2014 News Stories Urdu December 4, 2014