The Eternally Stupid Politics of Religion

The latest examples of the eternally stupid politics of religion come in the call to give official status to the Bhagavad Gita and a dump on Hinduism by the new Hindi language Epic channel.

The first is stupid because the Gita is so far above the government’s poor power to add or detract that giving it official status is somewhat like endowing it on the sky.Those pushing for it do it only to discomfit the proponents of minority faiths.

It does not matter that their targets are people who try to subvert Hinduism with niggling malicious propaganda such as the Yam Kise Se Kam Nahi sitcom on the Epic Channel.

The show presents Yamraj, the god of Death in the Hindu pantheon, as a narcissistic, corrupt dimwit using his power to get his wife things like furniture, a microwave, a refrigerator and a high-definition television set.

Given that depiction, the title of the series takes on an additional layer of malice, for it slimes all other Hindu deities. (The images that appear with the title include none from another tradition.)

With media reports announcing that another Yamraj sitcom is in the works for another channel, it is necessary to ask why some people seem to have decided to make that unlikely deity a figure of fun.

I think it has to do with Yama’s role in the Katha Upanishad, which explains one of Hinduism’s cardinal beliefs, that death is merely a door to another life.

As I noted in an earlier post, that teaching, long derided as absurd by the missionary faiths, has been validated by science, making nonsense of the Heaven-Hell carrot and stick essential to keep their followers in line.

Presenting Yama as a clown is the first step to closing the minds of the faithful to a destabilizing truth.

So who are the people behind Yam Kise Se Kam Nahi?

The producer is one David Polycarp. The “creative” brain is a Debbie Rao.

Polycarp used to be with the Disney Channel. He is now a partner with Vasant Valsan in Troublemaker Productions, the company responsible for this atrocity.

Epic is described as “India’s first genre specific channel,” whatever that means.

Epic went on air on 16 November 2014, and from what has been on offer so far it seems the channel will rely on a mix of the Mahabharata serial, cloak and dagger "history" (the Mughal era Siyaasat) and docudramas about real events.

As that potent mix of content can shape Indian opinion on key aspects of national life it is important to know who is behind the venture.

According to a report in Hollywood Reporter, Mukesh Ambani in his personal capacity owns a quarter of the Epic Channel; the Mahindra Group is reported to own a similar share. No mention of the remaining 50 per cent.

From that information I would jump to the conclusion that there is a directive foreign element in the venture. Indian corporate biggies are extremely vulnerable to pressure from the managers of their assets abroad, and when told to provide camouflage they are in no position to demur.

Based on that leap, I predict the channel will soon be airing a slew of the BBC productions rewriting our history and subverting our national consciousness.

As our Intelligence agencies and the Information and Broadcasting Ministry have little capacity to police this cultural front, and as Indian mass media have long been bribed into a comprador role, nongovernmental organizations must take on the task of raising public awareness.

The danger is not confined to television; it comes also from the teachings of mysteriously rich Babas, Sants and Gurus in command of armed thugs.

This should not be viewed as a purely Hindu concern, for Indians of all faiths are affected by the malicious few.

But Hindus have to play catch-up in terms of paying attention to what is being said and done in their name.

To begin with, they might set about systematically examining the content of the extremely low cost and well produced books that purport to contain English translations of ancient Sanskrit works. Those I have read contain much gibberish and seem to be an exercise in misinformation.

Even seemingly prestigious publishers should not escape inspection. For instance, The Times of India's translation of the Bhagavad Gita subverts some key teachings; the Introduction is incredibly obtuse. (Reading it made me think of the Jain recensions of the Ramayana that turn the plot upside down.) 

In undertaking all this Hindus should discourage politicians from coming to their support: our religion has survived thousands of years on its own formidable strengths.

Britain's True Role in Operation Blue Star

As I predicted, the “investigation” into the disclosure that Britain clandestinely “advised India” on Operation Blue Star has turned up nothing believable; but it has clarified one thing.

Britain’s proxy media in India are entirely unjustified in reporting that “Mrs. Gandhi asked for British help” in the 1984 assault on terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple.

It turns out there was a request from an anonymous “Intelligence” entity in India; the British thought it had Mrs. G’s authorization. Considering that the evidence of a "request" could have been generated by a mole expressly to cover Britain's real role in the Punjab, there is very little in the revelations so far that we can take seriously.   

Why are our suborned "elite" media reporting this fake story as a scandal?

I think they are following a game plan aimed at manipulating the Sikh community.

The British have a long history of such manipulation.

It goes all the way back to 1849 when, after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, they defeated the leaderless Sikhs and took as a “gift” from his 12-year old son the priceless Kohinoor diamond. They took the boy too and debauched him with opium and sex in Britain to prevent his emergence as a leader. He died under mysterious circumstances while trying, as an adult, to return to India.

During and after the 1857 Indian war of independence, the British made out that the Sikhs had supported their savage repressions, when, as Amaresh Misra has pointed out, the great majority of the community were supportive of the national struggle. 

At Partition, the British inflicted heavy costs on all Indians, but they were especially vindictive towards the Sikhs: the new border cut the community in half and gave Pakistan some of its holiest places of pilgrimage.

More recently, the manipulation has involved the Khalistan movement and its aftermath.  

The violent upsurge of the Khalistan movement coincided with the appearance in Mumbai of one Mark Bullough, a member of the elite Scots Guards unit of the British Army. He had fought in the 1982 war in the Falklands and was obviously a career military man; but oddly, he came to India as the Director of Hong Kong-based investment bank, Jardine Fleming. His bank had its roots in Jardine Matheson, one of the most prominent opium traders of the 19th Century, and had a reputation for being neck-deep in British spooks. During Bullough’s time in Mumbai Punjab saw the worst violence, ostensibly funded by anonymous “rich Sikhs” in Britain, Canada and the United States. (As I have noted in an earlier post, Bullough's decade-long presence in Asia -- he moved from Mumbai to Hong Kong and Singapore -- coincides with a great deal other mayhem.)

In June 1984, the Indian Army ousted a band of heavily armed terrorists occupying the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar -- the Operation Blue Star for which the British claim to have provided advice. The operation created great outrage among the Sikhs, which the BBC fed with incendiary coverage; on one show, an activist called for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The government of Margaret Thatcher dismissed a protest from the Indian government on the grounds of “Press freedom.”

A few weeks later, two Sikh members of Mrs. G’s security detail killed her as she was walking towards a BBC television crew set up for an interview on the occasion of a visit to Delhi by Princess Anne (with whom the Prime Minister was to dine that evening). The interview was delayed a half-hour at the last minute, just the time needed for one of the two assassins to begin his shift at the spot where the killing occurred.

Initially, one of Mrs. Gandhi's aides was suspected of arranging that delay, but the official inquiry exonerated him. The investigating judge noted the involvement of a foreign intelligence agency without explaining what that meant; whether he had more to say on that point is impossible to say, for a part of the report remains secret; it could be to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). For what it’s worth, the BBC interviewer waiting for her on that fatal day was the actor Peter Ustinov, whose father had worked for MI-5 (the domestic service of SIS).

When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to Delhi for Mrs. G’s funeral, she held an extraordinary Press conference, at which a reporter asked about the incitement to murder on the BBC. She responded: “Whether or not what he [the Sikh on the BBC] said actually amounted to a possible crime was a matter for the director of public prosecutions and the police, not for a politician. But I believe they looked at it, looked very carefully at what was said, and came to the conclusion that they could not in fact prosecute. You know there are sometimes very difficult cases. But whether they decide to prosecute or not is a matter for them. But they did not and that must have been because there was in their view not a sufficient case to prosecute.”

A reporter asked if there was not a case “for tightening up or altering the law” on “incitement to violence.” She replied, “Incitement to violence – I think the law is fairly clear. Sometimes it is not easy to get the precise evidence but we will have a look at it if need be. … But we must recognize again what is an apparent paradox, that if you are a free country then you are free to say what you think within the law, but a free society offers many more opportunities for doing the wrong thing than of course a tyranny. But then of course, who would wish to live under tyranny? And there are occasions when you do have a difficult question to ask. Do you resort to the methods of a tyrannical society in order to preserve freedom? You can see the paradox. Now I believe that we have got just about the right answer in Britain.”

[It is necessary to note that the BBC has been from its founding an organ of State propaganda; some prominent BBC “journalists” have a reputation for being spies, a matter of concern to professionals on its staff; see this fascinating blog. The recently revealed scandal about rampant pedophiles among senior BBC staff -- one of them arranged to rape children in hospitals near his office -- can only be explained as impunity resulting from connections to the Intelligence community.]

A month after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination and anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, a set of multiple safety-system failures at Union Carbide’s chemical plant at Bhopal caused the “world’s worst industrial accident.” There was every indication that it was sabotage, but the new Rajiv Gandhi government sagely decided not to publicize that angle for fingers could have pointed to a Sikh employee. Clearly, whoever sabotaged the plant wanted to set off another assault on the community.

A few months later, in June 1985, another atrocity was blamed on “Sikh terrorists,” the blowing up of Air India Flight 182 over British waters as it made its way from Montreal to Delhi, killing all 329 people on board. One of the questions that has gone unanswered for three decades as Canadian prosecutors try to prove the heavily circumstantial case is why and how the amateur terrorists timed the explosion for that location. Whether it was a missile or a bomb that brought down the aircraft is an open question.

Against that background, the current controversy over a British role in Operation Blue Star appears to be an effort to manipulate the Sikh community a few weeks before a general election that will see a close contest in the Punjab.

It could also be that the effort to provide a new narrative for the events of 1984 is linked to the e-publication of my book 1001 Things Every Indian Should Know. The book tells the story outlined above about Bullough et al. Another recent development that points to MI 6 tying up loose ends is the murder of Mangla Prasad, the only living witness of the December 1995 British arms drop over Purulia, West Bengal. He disappeared early in January 2014 and his body was found on the 9th near Kiul Railway Station in Bihar; he had been strangled.

Thank You Very Much Indeed, BBC!

Someone at the BBC probably got tired of having to say "Thank you very much indeed" and decided to do something that really deserved that effusive expression.