New Delhi: Putting down the criticism of Modi government’s decision to award the Gandhi Peace Prize to Gorakhpur-based Gita Press as “attempts to defame” the publishing house, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) Hindi mouthpiece Panchjanya claimed “conspiracies” were being hatched against a “selfless institution”.
“Despite all this, Gita Press is following Rachna Dharma (fulfilling duty to create). Panchjanya has always exposed the conspiracies against Gita Press,” author Santosh Kumar Tiwari said in his article.
Last week, the central government announced it was awarding the Gandhi Peace Prize 2021 to Gita Press — reputed to be the world’s largest publisher of Hindu religious texts — for its contribution towards “social, economic and political change”. The Congress called the move a travesty, triggering a war of words between it and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
Among the other topics covered by Hindu Right authors and columnists this week were the financial problems at GoFirst and SpiceJet airlines, the Congress party’s opposition to the Uniform Civil Code and Himachal Pradesh’s debt crisis.
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Gandhi and Gita Press
Among those who questioned the central government’s decision to award Gita Press was All India Congress Committee general secretary Jairam Ramesh. The party’s communications in-charge, Ramesh quoted senior journalist Akshaya Mukul’s book on Gita Press to say that it “unearths the stormy relations it had with the Mahatma and the running battles it carried on with him on his political, religious & social agenda”.
In his opinion piece in Panchjanya, author Santosh Tiwari dismissed the argument. The book, he said, makes a “baseless and false” claim that after the assassination of Gandhi on 30 January, 1948, Hanuman Prasad Poddar, the editor of Kalyan magazine, and Jayadayal Goyandka, the founder of Gita Press, were arrested.
Kalyan is a monthly magazine published by the Gita Press.
“The second lie in the book is that after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, no tribute was published on him in the next issue of Kalyan. Both the allegations are so serious and untrue that how can any author mention this in a book without ascertaining the facts in full (sic),” he asked, claiming that many “scholars“ have written and researched on the subject and debunked the claim.
He added further that in 1926, when Kalyan first began, Gandhi had ruled that no advertisement should be published in it.
“To date, Kalyan is following these words and no advertisement is published in it. The relationship between Gandhiji and Kalyan was very deep. Gandhiji used to write in Kalyan,” he wrote.
Rising airfare and aviation crisis
RSS-affiliated Swadeshi Jagaran Manch’s national co-convenor Ashwani Mahajan wrote on how the crisis in two airlines was pushing up airfares.
The financial crises in two airlines — SpiceJet and GoFirst — are sending ripples across the aviation sector, Mahajan wrote in his piece in the Daily Pioneer.
“If both GoFirst and SpiceJet go bankrupt, IndiGo and Tata Group will virtually have a monopoly in the aviation sector,” he said, adding it was important to save both SpiceJet and GoFirst to help promote a healthy competition and, as a result, stabilise airfares.
“It’s important to understand that these companies are in trouble not because of financial vagaries but because of negligence and misconduct by multinational aircraft and engine manufacturers. These companies have to be taken to task at the highest level, rather than allowing them to ruin our efficiently run airlines. In such a situation, the intervention of the Government of India in this matter becomes even more necessary,” Mahajan wrote.
UCC and Congress’ ‘hypocrisy’
Former BJP member Hriday Narayan Dixit wrote an article in Dainik Jagran pointing out how Congress is disagreeing with its ancestors by opposing the Uniform Civil Code (UCC).
Arguing that “communal personal laws are a hindrance to women’s rights and empowerment”, Dixit, a former speaker of the Uttar Pradesh assembly, said that UCC was on the agenda of the the All Parties Conference in British India, a group of Indian political parties that was pushing for dominion status for India and an Indians-governed federal set up, in the 1920s.
For context, the draft constitution put forward by this group of Indian leaders came to be known as the ‘Nehru Report’, after senior Congress leader Motilal Nehru. It was adopted by the conference at a meeting in Lucknow in 1928.
“In the mass convention of the Congress, an all-party convention was tasked with drafting an alternative constitution,” he wrote. “The conference constituted a committee under the chairmanship of Motilal Nehru, with senior leaders including Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Ali Imam, Tej Bahadur Sapru and Subhash Chandra Bose. It was called the ‘Nehru Committee’.”
The committee, he said, had drawn up a list of 19 fundamental rights — among them, one was equal rights to women.
“There was also talk of keeping the state free from religion. All parts of the Nehru Report are also related to the Uniform Civil Code. (Today’s) Congress leaders are going against the feelings of their superiors,” Dixit wrote in his article.
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Caste system and racism
In his article in Dainik Bhaskar, Hindutva ideologue and Indian-born American Rajiv Malhotra voiced concerns about the growing trend in the West of equating caste issues with racism — a “grave mistake”, according to him.
“Nowadays a new movement is becoming popular in the corporate world in the West, which is called E.S.G. (Environmental, Social and Governance). Now it has also become the latest import by Indian companies. Its stated goal sounds noble, but there are many ways politics is involved, as these three words are interpreted in many ways,” Malhotra writes.
For context, ESG, is a business framework for considering environmental issues and social issues in the context of corporate governance. It helps stakeholders understand how a company is managing risks and opportunities related to environmental, social, and governance criteria.
The “S” part of ESG, he claims, includes critical caste theory, which says that upper-caste Hindus have traditionally enjoyed hidden privileges within structures of Indian society, including in the areas of business, education, politics and justice.
This, he claims, puts a burden on the upper castes to prove they are not oppressive.
“Such policies also increase the likelihood that an employee may unnecessarily blame someone’s race for adverse decisions. It is simple now because it is assumed that Savarna Hindus in Silicon Valley have benefited from the structures of oppression and that they too need to own up to their guilt like White people,” he wrote.
2024 election and AI
In his weekly column in Naya India, editor-in-chief Hari Shankar Vyas conjectured how artificial intelligence (AI) could help Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP win the 2024 General Election.
He wrote that on 22 May this year, the central government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notification inviting companies to send in their proposals on how they can help the government use AI and machine learning for various activities, including translation of speeches.
“But it seems that the real aim is to create a chain of such AI companies, which silently create and broadcast propaganda videos, photos, and audio clips at the time of elections. This is why the mind of Narendra Modi’s propaganda team should be appreciated… that the Ministry of Information is getting what even the governments of developed countries like America, and Britain would not dream of, done,” he wrote.
RSS on Teesta Setalvad-Congress connection
After the Gujarat High Court reserved its order on social activist Teesta Setalvad’s bail application, Panchjanya said in an editorial that she had been used as a tool by the late Congress leader Ahmed Patel.
Setalvad, an advocate for the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots, was arrested on 25 June last year on allegations of fabrication of evidence and tutoring witnesses.
“The Gujarat government has told the high court that Teesta Setalvad was working as a tool for a Congress leader — Ahmed Patel,” the editorial said. “Apparently, Teesta Setalvad used to run an NGO (Citizens for Justice and Peace). But what did this alleged NGO do? Its aim was to discredit the Gujarat government worldwide, somehow implicate the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, in the conspiracy to riot, and in practice, to act as a wall of protection for the crime and perpetrators of the Godhra incident.”
It went on to criticise the Congress party for having given her the Padma Shri — one of India’s most prestigious civilian awards — in 2007. The Congress, it said, also made her a member of the National Advisory Council, “whose status was above that of the cabinet”.
“The question is who is the bigger threat to this country, the Congress, the Communists and the Muslim League? All three are behaving in the same way with each other, which is called ‘Useful Idiots’ in English — that is, those fools who betray their own country for their selfishness,” the editorial added.
‘Freebies politics costing Himachal?’
News that Himachal Pradesh’s government had delayed salaries for 15,000 government employees amid mounting financial liabilities made the Organiser wonder if Congress government’s “freebies politics” was pushing the state towards “its worst financial crisis”.
In his opinion piece, contributor Mahendra Thakur wrote: “How severe this economic crisis is can be gauged from the fact that Himachal Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu has spoken about bringing a ‘White Paper’ regarding the economic condition of the state”.
The CM, it said, had stated that Himachal’s debt currently stands at over Rs 76,000.
“However, the reality is that the current Congress government is finding it difficult to swallow the election-related announcements of ‘freebies’, as well as salaries for employees, pensions, and other perks. The development works are still in cold storage. Himachal’s economy has suffered enormously, and the circumstance has led to the state of economic overdraft,” Thakur wrote in his piece.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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