We
are living in interesting times. A comical debate about intolerance of Hindus, initiated by a
communal cabal supported by the
Congress Party, is raging across the country.
A number of communalists,
masquerading as secularists, have been
railing against the Narendra Modi led
government by painting it as intolerant. Some Bollywood biggies
like Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan have joined the raucous mob of protestors.
Even the well known musician, A R
Rahman, has jumped into the flawed debate.
Worldwide Hindus
are known to be one of the most
tolerant and pacifist communities. The narrative of
their immense tolerance of
the savage persecution by the Muslim and
Christian invaders is
a heart-rending chapter of our
eerie history.
Taking undue advantage of the Hindu tolerance the UPA government led by
Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh practiced blatant discrimination against
them on several occasions in broad
daylight. Yet no secular -communalist protested, nor raised his or her voice
against discrimination against the majority community.
To set the record straight, some prominent instances of intolerance
against Hindus perpetrated during the ten year long UPA regime must be
recounted to set the record straight.
In the year 2011 , the then Home
Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, announced with the beat of drum that a Muslim IPS officer was being appointed as
Director of the Intelligence Bureau. In the process three Hindu competent IPS
officers, senior to the Muslim incumbent
were superceded unceremoniously. The three senior officers having better
record than the Muslim officer were V.
Rajagopal, R.N. Gupta and Yashovardhan
Azad. Astoundingly neither the ever-ebullient media, nor any secular
busy body dare accuse the ruling duo, Sonia-G and Dr. Manmohan Singh of intolerance and discrimination.
Another instance of intolerance and gross discrimination against
Hindus was displayed in 2013 when a new Lt. Governor of
Delhi was to be appointed. In
response to an RTI inquiry by Subhash
Agarwal it was revealed that a panel of
the following names had been
proposed for the post of Lt.
Governor in a Home Ministry note on 5th
October, 2012 :
1.
S.Y.
Quraishi, former Chief Election
Commisioner
2.
Salauddin
Ahmed, former Chief Secretary of Rajasthan
3.
Anwar
Ahsan Ahmed, former Secretary, Border Management
in the
Ministry of Home Affairs
4.
Shamim
Banu, former Additional Chief Secretary, Karnataka
5.
G.S.
Kang, former Chief Secretary of
Bihar
It was clear that a decision had already been taken by the
powers-that-be to
ensure
that no Hindu shall be appointed as Lt. Governor of Delhi. According
to the Lutyen’s gossip gazette a verbal command to this had been given by an adviser
close to Sonia Gandhi. Ultimately the
choice of the Adviser fell on Najeeb Jung, a former Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia who had organized a
demonstration alleging that the Batla House shoot out of September 19, 2008, was a fake encounter
staged by Delhi Police against the Indian Mujahideen.
Interestingly one of the retired officer on the panel had faced a
CBI investigation. The total exclusion of
Hindus, howsoever honest, from
the panel reminds one of the infamous remark of
Maulana Mohamed Ali in April 1924, that even a fallen Muslim was better
than a good Hindu like Mahatma Gandhi !
The most important instance of intolerance, however, was the famously
infamous statement of Dr. Manmohan Singh on December 9, 2006, was
that in future the Muslims and minorities will have the first claim to
India’s
resources. With that historic statement of the then Prime Minister the
fate of Hindus
was sealed by pushing them down as second class citizens who will have
to be
content with the crumbs left-over by the Muslims and other minorities.
The said
statement was made by the then Prime Minister on the birthday of Sonia
Gandhi due to some mysterious
reason. And thereby hangs a shadowy tale
!
Another
glaring instance of intolerance was
the appointment by the UPA of Leela
Samson as chief of the Kalakshetra and the Censor Board. Her sole qualification
for selection for the two top posts was her close connection with Sonia Gandhi
on the Christian net. She had been a
dance teacher to Priyanka Vadra, too.
During her tenure she worked over-actively to erase the Hindu identity
of Kalakshetra by removing the Hindu
symbols and icons like Lord Ganesha,
apart from being neck dcep into corruption. She also cleared Aamir Khan’s controversial
movie ‘PK’ despite the film containing highly objectionable scenes casting
slur on the Hindu faith.
Discrimination Against Poorest Hindus
Not
many people know that by using the
flawed and fabricated findings of Sachar Committee, Salman Khurshid, the
former Minister of Minorities Affairs, robbed the unlettered daughters
and sons of nearly 34 crore Hindus living below the poverty line,
mostly in rural areas. The High Level Committee chaired by Justice Sachar was
born in sin of grave constitutional impropriety. The task assigned to
Justice Sachar had been entrusted in 1992 by the Indian Parliament to the
National Minorities Commission by enacting a special law called The Minorities Commission Act, 1992. All
responsibilities for protection of the rights of minorities
and ensuring their welfare had been assigned by the Parliament in terms of
the aforesaid legislation to the Minorities Commission. Therefore
the very act of the Prime
Minister constituting a
High Level Committee in March 2005, by an executive fiat for one single religious
minority was patently unconstitutional and
bad in law. The worst aspect of the sinister move, however, was
that Justice Sachar did not inform the PM that what was being was a blatant
violation of the Constitution.
For
decades a false and unsubstantiated bogey has
been propagated across the country that economically and
educationally, Muslims are more disadvantaged than the Hindus. This
falsehood is being unabashedly used by the
powerful pro-Muslim vote bank lobby to bestow many unmerited
benefits and concessions, including
nearly twenty million scholarships and concessional educational loans
exclusively on the Muslims and four other minorities.
But it was revealed by Salman
Khurshid’s Press Conference on May 29, 2012, that not one single scholarship was given to the daughter
or son of the poorest Hindu. Nor was any
cheaper educational or entrepreneurial loans advanced to any Hindu poor, while funds worth several lakh crores
were advanced to the children of doubly blessed five minorities,
namely the Muslims, the Christians, the Buddhists, the Parsis and the
Sikhs.
Religion-baed
Strategy of Discrimination
This
strategy of religion-based discrimination was implemented in pursuance
of the communally divisive vote bank policy enunciated in the
Prime Minister’s notoriously famous “Muslims First”
policy statement made on December 9, 2006. Inexplicably the aforesaid
policy statement was made by Dr.
Manmohan Singh on
the birthday of Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance.
The
worst aspect of the ongoing discrimination is that crores of poor Hindus belonging to the
perennially famished hoi
polloi of rural India and those living in jhuggies have
been deliberately deprived of any share in the 20 million scholarships
awarded to the five minorities, including
four economically and educationally better placed communities than the
Hindus. These four super-privileged minorities are the Christians, the
Parsis,the Buddhists and the Sikhs all of whom happen to be show
stealers in literacy average, economic prosperity and education.
The
data pertaining to infant and child mortality, degree of
urbanization and life expectancy at birth available in public domain
proves that it is the
Hindus, not the Muslims, who are the most disadvantaged religious group. Following
are the five major globally recognized human development indicators :
i) Infant Mortality;
ii) Child Mortality;
iii) Life Expectancy at Birth;
iv) Degree of Urbanisation ;
v) Literacy.
Clearly the Hindus are far behind the Muslims in the
first four human development indices, except
literacy in which Hindus with 65.1 percent literacy are marginally ahead of
Muslims who have the literacy average of 59.1 percent. But Justice Sachar did not have the moral courage to identify
and write that one single factor responsible for lower Muslim literacy average
was the lower ratio of literacy among Muslim women at
a meagre 50.1 percent. It was lower by 3.6 percent than the
national average of female literacy at 53.7. Thus, this important
cause of lower female literacy among Muslims ignored by Justice Sachar was the
diktats of Muslim religious leaders restricting education of girls beyond a
certain age and insistence on the customary veil.
Plight
of Hindus Living Below Poverty Line
Unfortunately
most Hindus, including their spiritual gurus,
telemedia analysts, self-anointed intellectuals and political
leaders belong to the prosperous fraternity and well-to-do middle
class. Their children do not need free scholarships. No wonder they
have thus remained indifferent to the pathetic economic condition of
the poorest Hindu masses, especially those trapped in the terminally ill
rural areas. These busybodies strutting
across the political and spiritual universe have never cared to know that in
four out of the five globally recognised human development indices,
the majority community is lagging behind the Muslims, the Christians, the
Buddhists, the Parsis and the Sikhs.
That explains how the children of 34-35
crore poorest Hindus were led to slaughter on the altar of Sachar Report!
The daughters and sons of nearly 340 million poorest Hindus were robbed
in broad daylight of their rightful share in 20 million scholarships by the
ruling politicians in an ugly bid to promote the ‘exclusive development’
of five minority communities. And lo and behold, this deprivation of the poorest Hindu
children was done in the garb of ‘inclusive development’ !
The ongoing discriminatory policy
against the majority religious group, mostly the rural
Hindus, was launched by the Prime Minister with great fanfare in June,
2006, in the garb of Prime Minister’s New 15
Point Programme for Welfare of Minorities.
Through a sleight of hand, the poorest Hindu children were deprived of
any share in twenty million scholarships showered on Muslim, Christians,
Buddhists, Parsis and the Sikhs.
The
most shocking aspect of this biggest post-independence conspiratorial scam is
that the Christians, Buddhists, Parsis and the Sikhs are the real show-stealers
in literacy and education – miles ahead of
the Hindus.
Falsehood Publicised in Sachar Report
A
careful examination of Sachar Report reveals a series of ugly
tricks devised to trample upon the Right to
Equality of eighty percent citizens of India on
the ground of religion. Could it be that the
poorest students belonging to the majority community are
being denied proportionate share in millions of scholarships and
financial largesse worth thousands of crores because they happen to belong to
the politically-pariahed religion called Hinduism? No Hindu or non-Hindu political leader showed the
guts to question this implementation of ‘exclusive
minority development’ programme tom-tomed as ‘inclusive
growth’.
Enumerated
below are two prominent instances of fudging of facts by Justice Sachar
in his report.
1.
Justice Sachar deliberately refused
to consider the documented fact that according to the National Family Health
Surveys Nos. 1 (1992-93) and 2 (1998-1999) the Muslims were better placed than Hindus in
four major human development indicators, namely the Infant
Mortality, Child Mortality, degree of Urbanisatioin and Life Expectancy at
Birth. After admitting this important fact on pages 37-38 of his report, Justice Sachar took recourse to suppressio veri, suggestio fallaci, by attributing it to
the highly inventive argument that it could be due to better child feeding
practices prevalent among Muslims. Instead of candidly admitting that the
Muslims were better fed and had access to better medical care the retired Chief
Justice decided to weave the yarn of ‘better child feeding’ practices
among Muslims. Could there be a worse example of falsification of the
data available in public domain?
2.
Another instance of suppressio veri,
suggestio falsi is the horrid
description of the plight of Muslim women on page 13 (Chapter 2) which was
false beyond belief. It boggles the mind:
“Everything beyond the walls of the ghetto is seen as unsafe and hostile–markets,
roads, lanes and public transport, schools and hospitals, Police Stations and
government offices.”
Can
any Indian honestly believe that Muslim women are treated so shabbily in India
? Many of them like Sabah Naqvi, Teesta Setalvad and Shazia Ilmi have been
boldly participating in debates on several television channels.
Many
more instances of fudging of facts and propagating lies can be cited from the
report of Justice Sachar. These are being left out because of shortage of
space.
To
sum up, a systematic and rational analysis of the comparative
scores of the Hindus and the Muslims in various human development indices
reveals that in the first four globally recognised economic development
indicators the Hindus are lagging far behind the Muslims and four other
religious minorities, namely the Christians, the Buddhists, the Parsis and the
Sikhs. This
truth was established four times by four different studies, though Justice
Sachar ignored the documented truth for reasons best known to him.
Rebuttals
Galore of Justice Sachar’s Report
The
first well-documented rebuttal of the flawed findings of
Justice Sachar came on September 2, 2006, when a paper
was circulated by Prof. Sanjay Kumar of the Centre of Studies for
Developing Studies, New Delhi, in a seminar organized at the prestigious
Indian Institute of Public Administration. The research of Prof. Sanjay
Kumar presented in a packed hall of distinguished scholars in the
auditorium of the I.I.P.A. revealed that there was hardly any difference
in the economic and educational status of the Hindus and the Muslims.
The
indepth research based on a survey by the Centre for Developing Societies
further highlighted that the
proportion of ‘the very poor’ Indians was higher among the
Hindus than among the Muslims. The survey
conducted in the year 2004 showed that the percentage of ‘very poor’ Hindus was
31 percent while the percentage of the ‘ very poor’ among Muslims was
only 24 percent. Thus, on the basis of the CDS survey the percentage of
the ‘very poor’ people among the Hindus was nearly 25 percent higher than among
the Muslims ! It was a very significant finding of Prof. Sanjay Kumar,
based on a survey comprising 27,000 random samples.
Mysteriously
this important finding based on a survey was ignored by Justice Sachar despite a
clear directive in the Prime Minister’s Notification dated March 9,
2005 to the High Level Committee to “obtain relevant information from Departments/
agencies of the Central & State Governments and
also conduct an intensive literature survey to identify the
published data, articles, and research on relative social,
economic and educational status of Muslims in India at the State,
regional and district levels” to address the problems faced by
Muslims.
More importantly, Prof. Sanjay Kumar’s
research paper highlighting these important findings was duly sent to
Justice Sachar by our Thinktank ,Patriots’ Forum with a formal request to give us an audience.
But the former Chief Justice of Delhi
High Court chose to ignore the truth altogether.
The
second rebuttal of Justice Sachar’s fabricated findings came in
October, 2010 when the National Health Survey- 3 (2005-2006)
revealed a quantum jump of 5.4 years from 62.6 years in the life
expectancy of Muslims within a short span of 7 years, i.e., between 1998 and
2005. The advantage which Muslims had over their Hindu
counterparts in life expectancy at birth was barely 1.2 years in
1998-1999, but it grew to 3 years in 2005-2006, as revealed by the
National Family Health Survey -3.
And
the master mystery of mysteries was that the results of the National
Family Health Survey of 2005-2006 were released in October, 2010–i.e. after a
long delay of four years! This
inordinate delay was responsible for facilitating the implementation of Sachar
Committee’s recommendations favouring the Muslim community. The
discriminatory largesse of 20 million scholarships and cheaper educational and
entrepreneurial loans of several lakh crore rupees was showered on Muslims,
along with 4 minorities in gross violation of the Right to Equality enshrined
in the Constitution.
The
third rebuttal of Justice Sachar’s fudged facts was made public in the
findings of Rajesh Shukla, a Senior Fellow of the National Council of Applied
Economic Research published in the Economic Times, New
Delhi, on April 5, 2007, reconfirming that
there was hardly any difference in the economic status of the Hindus and
Muslims. Among other things Rajesh Shukla’s survey
disclosed that the Sikh community were ‘the Sardars in Prosperity’ with
Christians closely following behind them.
The
fourth rebuttal of Justice Sachar’s false findings came on February 24,
2011, in the reply to a Parliament Question answered by Vincent H. Pala, the Minister of State for
Minorities in Lok Sabha admitting that the central
government had no data pertaining to the number of
persons living below the poverty line according to religious denominations.
If as late as the year 2011, the
government had no data about the number of Muslims and Hindus
living below the poverty line, why were the fudged findings
of Justice Sachar accepted and implemented
several years ago?
The
fifth demolition of the lies propagated by Sachar
Committee came on October 24-25, 2011, when in a Seminar jointly
organized by the United
Nations Development Programme and India’s Planning Commission at
Claridge’s Hotel, two scholars of the Jawaharlal Nehru University
(Sukhdeo Thorat and Amaresh Pandey) presented a research paper reconfirming that there had been far
greater poverty reduction among the Muslims than among the Hindus
between 2004-2005 to 2009-2010.
Despite
these five research-based rebuttals of Sachar Report, the
multidimensional discrimination against the unwashed daughters and sons of the
poorest Hindus, living below the poverty line has continued at a
fast pace, perhaps in deference to the policy announcement made by
the Prime Minister in December, 2006, on Sonia Gandhi’s
birthday.
It
is, however, for the self-anointed Hindu secularists to
analyse and explain why no poorest of the poor Hindu child was considered
eligible for even one single scholarship out of twenty million freeships
showered by Salman
Khurshid on the privileged children of
Muslim and Christian parents. According to a half page advertisement published
in The Pioneer,
New Delhi, on February 15, 2014, “over Rs. 1,95,000 crore of bank credit was showered on 5 minorities”.
In sharp contrast, not one
rupee worth of bank credit was made available to anyone among the 34 crores Hindus living below
the poverty line.
Most
importantly, Prof. Suresh Tendulkar’s research had revealed
that in 2009 approximately 37.2 percent Indians were living below
the poverty line. It meant that roughly, the unwashed children of 34-35 crore
Hindu les miserables were
debarred from applying for scholarships and educational loans in an
unethical bid to consolidate a vote bank of five minorities. Such
a policy of robbing the poorest on the ground of religion by recourse to
a sleight of hand has no parallel in the history of any democratic
country. Only an over-clever legal eagle
like Salman Khurshid could
do it with remarkable dexterity !
Now
time has come for the former Prime
Minister to explain to 34 crore Hindus living below the poverty line,
mostly in rural areas, why their unwashed, emaciated and unlettered children
were robbed of the rightful share in 20 million scholarships and educational
loans totalling several lakh crore
rupees.
………
Copyright @ Ram
Kumar Ohri
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