A peaceful revolution within and against Hinduism. Maybe Islam should take a leaf from how other religions evolve ?
This link about the conversion ceremony held a few days back :
siliconinvestor.com
The anaysis :
Dalit conversions: discarding oppressive gods
tehelka.com
The recent mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism was inevitable because discrimination against Dalits is a crime so humongous that its sheer magnitude ensures its perpetuation, says Shaadaab S Bakht
"I think I could turn and live with animals; they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long, and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."
Walt Whitman
But none of us will ever be able to do what Whitman would have liked to do. A good many of us don't even agree with Whitman's thought because, in our heart of hearts, we actually believe that one man must serve another, one class must rule another and one religion must dominate another.
And of that self-destructive belief is often born a set of social agents that leaves thousands of us in pain, and with a sense of unmanageable anguish. An agony that drives us to give up our homes, countries, even our faiths, in search of self-respect and peace. That's precisely what thousands of "lower caste" Hindus did in New Delhi some days ago at a public ceremony. They embraced Buddhism, according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report. The converts said they left their faith because they were being persecuted by "upper caste" Hindus.
"We have embraced a new religion from today. It also symbolises the beginning of a new life for each and every one of us. The days of persecution are over. Our stand has won support from people all over the world," said Ram Raj, head of the All-India Confederation of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, a group for downtrodden castes. Raj took the Buddhist vows himself.
He added, "The converts have walked out of India's 3,000-year-old caste system, under which millions of Indians are relegated to a life of unbelievable persecution." Caste persecution in India is an indigenous scourge given legitimacy, directly or indirectly, by almost all, except those who are victims of it.
It is a crime committed on so large a scale that its sheer size ensures its perpetuation: the integrating capacity of the victims' minds breaks down before the magnitude of the crime. For thousands of years, persecution has been wrecking one Indian province after another, yet people have learnt nothing, have offered no resistance and have perished like animals driven to slaughter.
And this has been happening in a zone from where the best lessons in human equality and human freedom should have come. It was here that through sheer tolerance (ahimsa), freedom was won for a fifth of mankind. Free India, however, turned out to be the greatest disillusionment for millions of lower caste Hindus, call them Dalits or Harijans. The upper castes, in the form of politicians, in the form of clerics, in the form of businesspersons, in the form of intellectuals, and in the form of government agencies, used authority not to decimate the lower castes, but cripple them. They didn't take their lives, only the comforts.
In the outdoor ceremony in New Delhi, the Dalits chanted Buddhist mantras to signal their conversion. "We will no longer pray to Hindu gods and goddesses," they chanted. They were happy they could change their gods. Strange that the gods were faulted for a system worked out by perverse human beings.
Harish Khare, a 36-year-old government employee, who travelled from Maharashtra to change his faith, said it all, "The message of Buddhism is that all human beings are equal and, therefore, there is no persecution." Members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) said there was a "Christian design" behind the ceremony, and had urged that it be banned, the report said. The VHP could blame the Christians all it wants, but fact remains that the converts spoke of equality; and their original religion failed to offer that.
What the VHP-types need to do, and do now, is sincerely address the issue of persecution and coarse prejudice that nearly disabled Indian democracy, and not indulge in bazaar bluster like "we will fight the evil of conversion".
The primary aim of democracy is equality; not the abuse of it. This they must remember in the interest of both social and political morality. |
