New Delhi: The secularism of the Congress and the Muslim League is the same, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Hindi mouthpiece Panchjanya said in an editorial. The reaction came after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s statement in Washington earlier this month that the Kerala-based Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) was a “secular party”.
Other topics that kept the Hindu Right press abuzz were Delhi University’s new value addition courses, the Modi government’s sweeping New Education Policy 2020, and the alleged “online conversion racket” that Ghaziabad Police claimed to have busted last week.
Here’s a look at all the topics that made headlines in the Hindu Right press this week.
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Rahul Gandhi and IUML
In response to a question about the Congress party’s alliance with the IUML in Kerala, Gandhi had said: “Muslim League is a completely secular party, there is nothing non-secular about them”. The IUML are allies of the Congress in Kerala and are part of the United Democratic Front led by the latter.
Gandhi’s comment has been met with criticism from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
An editorial in RSS’s Panchjanya said the secularism of the Congress and the Muslim League is “two ways to reach the same destination”.
“Any member of Muslim League will always consider Muslim League as secular, even if the aim of the Muslim League is to get another partition of India. History confirms that the so-called secularism has in practice been only a facade to strengthen Islamisation in India,” the editorial said.
The “so-called secularism” is a tool to give protection to those sects which “forcefully work to convert weak people to their faith”, it added. “As the purported secularism progressed, the patronage of Islamists, missionaries and communists also entered the next phase and the situation was to support them through the legal power, financial power and force of the state.”
New Education Policy EP 2020
An editorial in Organiser, the RSS’s English mouthpiece, appreciated the NEP 2020 saying that the changes will lead to decolonising education.
“The colonial structure of education continued for many years. Despite recommendations from various committees and commissions, the ‘national’ part was missing in our education system. As per the British requirement, the centrality of the English language, job — that also preferably government — as the sole objective of education, undermining of our cultural traditions, scientific wisdom and historical glory mainly through the distorted representation of secularism became the salient features of the curriculum,” the editorial said.
It added that the “manufactured controversy” over the rationalisation of its curriculum by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) was just a “symptom of the deeper rot or stagnation we have created about ourselves through education”.
Another article in the Organiser, by author Niranjan Kumar, said that Delhi University’s new “value added courses” could help “infuse Bharatiya values” — imperative for “Bharat to become a jagadguru”.
DU’s Value Additional Courses (VAC), include vedic mathematics, social and emotional learning, yoga: philosophy and practice, and literature, culture, and cinema, among others, in line with the spirit of the NEP 2020.
“A unique attribute of the VACs is that elements of the rich Indian Knowledge System (IKS) have been duly incorporated, as specified in the NEP-2020. For example, ‘Vedic Mathematics’ is a unique course of its kind, which is being taught as a credit course in a prestigious university like the DU in the country. Similarly, ‘Panchkosh: Holistic Development of Personality’ will prove helpful in dealing with the increasing personality imbalance, mental stress and aggressive behaviour among the youth today,” Kumar wrote.
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Sardar Patel and economy of temples
In his blog this week, Swadeshi Jagran Manch’s national co-convenor Ashwani Mahajan took exception to Indian Overseas Congress chairman Sam Pitroda’s comments that building “temples will not create jobs”.
“According to the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India, where in the last year 2022, 14.33 crore Indian people visited temples and pilgrimages, and 64.4 lakh foreign tourists visited these places. In the year 2022, an income of 1.35 lakh crore was generated at these pilgrimage places, while the total contribution of religious and pilgrimage tourism, which constitutes 60 per cent of total domestic tourism, was nearly Rs 11 lakh crore… It can be understood that those who say that temples do not create employment or that temples do not contribute to the Indian economy are ignorant of these facts,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, retired IPS officer and right-leaning commentator M. Nageswara Rao wrote an article for news portal Taazakhabarnews.com asking if India’s first Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel was a truly Hindu icon. It’s significant to note that several Hindu right organisations, among them the BJP, have been accused of appropriating Patel.
In the opinion piece, Rao admitted Sardar Patel has been “lionised by the Sangh Parivar and it has been their constant refrain that Patel was a victim of Gandhi’s indifference and Nehru’s machinations”.
“It is debatable whether Gandhi had that kind of clout on the eve of independence where he could personally anoint a PM of his choice, but one should certainly ask whether Patel’s India would have been any different if he had been Gandhi’s choice,” Rao, also a former director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), wrote, wondering if Patel did indeed seek to protect Hindu interests.
“Patel in his letters dated 8th and 25th August 1947 submitted his Committee’s two reports on minorities to the Constituent Assembly… Worryingly, his Committee parroted Jinnah’s nefarious idea of including the scheduled castes among the minorities,” Rao wrote.
Given his high stature and power, comparable only to that of Jawaharlal Nehru within the Congress and the government, “surely, he could have convinced the others about how the Constitution cannot be loaded against Hindus,” Rao wrote. “Instead, as the debates of the Constituent Assembly show, he was pushing the recommendations of his Committee which indicates that they were as much his ideas.”
Brand Modi waning?
Does Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brand need a makeover before the 2024 general elections? That’s what Makarand Paranjape, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and right-leaning author, debated in his latest piece in The Times of India.
Comparing Narendra Modi’s brand campaign to former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s failed “India Shining” campaign, Paranjape said that “looking at the barrage of propaganda unleashed by the government, singing the glories of Modi and his government, there was very little humility in evidence”.
For context, “India Shining” was a marketing slogan to refer to the overall feeling of economic optimism in India in 2004. The campaign, however, failed to capture popular imagination. Vajpayee’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was voted out of power, making way for a Congress-led government.
“Any acknowledgement of failures, miscalculation or reconsiderations was, of course, unheard of. In the usual singing of hosannas to the great leader, drowning out all other voices in the deafening roar of applause, there seems little room for reflection. When there is so much self-praise, where is the room for self-interrogation, let alone self-correction,” Paranjape wrote, calling for some introspection on the part of Modi and the BJP.
“The great leader, becoming greater by the minute through incessant publicity and praise, seems to suck out the oxygen from the body politic, leaving the republic gasping for breath. That is when the still, silent voice suddenly cries out, ‘Is this Modi’s ‘IndiaShining’ moment?’ I certainly hope not. But, surrounded by so many hostile forces, not to mention the recent electoral reversal in Karnataka, the BJP — and Modi — must introspect on what needs to be done in the next year or so,” he said.
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Muslims in Japan increasing
Yet another opinion piece in RSS mouthpiece Organiser, meanwhile, worried about the rising Muslim population in Japan. Author Siddhartha Dave believes that the religious landscape of Japan was changing “dramatically”.
“The mushrooming of the Muslim population in Japan can be attributed to several factors. Firstly (sic), an increase in international migration and globalisation has led to a rise in the number of Muslims residing in Japan. This includes foreign students, workers, and their families from predominantly Muslim countries, as well as refugees and asylum seekers. It is interesting to note that Muslim refugees, mostly from Syria, and asylum seekers are not accepted by countries like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Malaysia,” Dave wrote.
He also worried about possible conversions in Japan.
“As many as one-tenth of the total — 20,000 — are estimated to be ethnic Japanese who have converted to Islam. All indications are that the Muslim population, including the Japanese Muslim population, is increasing,” he wrote.
According to an 2021 paper by Saul J. Takahashi, a professor of Human Rights and Peace Studies at Osaka Jogakuin University, Japan’s current Muslim population in Japan is estimated at 200,000 — nearly 0.17 per cent of the population. Out of this, 90 per cent are estimated to be foreign nationals from predominantly Muslim countries — mainly Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Turkey, and Iran.
Online gaming and conversion
One article in Panchjanya focused on the “online conversion” controversy sparked by Ghaziabad Police’s alleged bust of one such racket.
Last week, the Ghaziabad Police claimed to have busted an “online conversion racket” with a modus operandi that allegedly involves using online games to lure unsuspecting victims.
The victim, according to this article, was “fed that Islam is the best religion in the world”.
“In fact, this gang used to say during the online game that if you read the Quran verse, you will win continuously and the teenagers used to take their word and start doing so,” it said, adding that it’s a “matter of satisfaction that a strict anti-conversion law is in force” in Uttar Pradesh.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)