Welcome to H&C,,, where I aggregate news of interest. Primary topics include abuse with "the church", LGBTQI+ issues, cults - including anti-vaxxers, and the Dominionist and Theocratic movements. Also of concern is the anti-science movement with interest in those that promote garbage like homeopathy, chiropractic and the like. I am an atheist and anti-theist who believes religious mythos must be die and a strong supporter of SOCAS.
A man was tonsured, garlanded with shoes, and paraded in disgrace on
the streets of Jalaun in Uttar Pradesh by Bajrang Dal activists who
accused him of converting Hindu men to Christianity.
The Bajrang
Dal activists tonsured the man for allegedly converting Hindus and
paraded him through the town after his shaving his hair, eyebrows and
moustache.
The mob reportedly accused Awdhesh Savita of luring
Hindus on the pretext of attending a satsang and allegedly converted
them to Christianity.
However, the arrival of four Delhi-based DJJS leaders turned things
on its head. The dera started claiming that Ashutosh was in “samadhi”
(state of deep meditation) and he would come out of it “very soon”.
Two years on, dera managers continue to assure Ashutosh’s disciples
that he will be back. The devotees themselves look forward to this
‘second coming’ as Ashutosh had told them: “My soul will disappear and
return after completing a few important tasks of mankind.”
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Though the DJJS continues to give the impression that the sect is
functioning normally even in Ashutosh’s absence, the Punjab Police’s CID
(criminal investigation department) has witnessed a sharp drop in the
number of visitors to the dera.
A senior CID official, who is tracking DJJS activities, told HT that
due to the controversy over Ashutosh’s death, the number of political
leaders usually visiting the dera has also decreased.
“Ashutosh was a spiritual leader whose knowledge of mankind was vast.
Since there is no dera leader now of that stature, there is no point in
making repeated visits,” said a senior BJP leader who has had an old
association with the DJJS.
A Nakodar-based senior sect follower, who is in favour of performing
Ashutosh’s last rites, said: “The DJJS may have its reasons to advocate
the ‘samadhi’ theory, but the negative publicity has brought disrespect
to Ashutosh.”
__
But somewhere inside the ashram, Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan, hidden away in a secret chamber, is the frozen body of its spiritual leader, Ashutosh Maharaj, who was declared clinically dead of a heart attack on Jan. 29. The local news media, using a Hindi word for a holy man, have taken to calling him the “frozen baba.”
His followers — men and women who flock to the ashram by the thousands — as well as the ashram leadership, do not deny that “Maharaj ji” is there, frozen in a chamber. But they swear that he is alive, having attained “samadhi,” a high state of consciousness reserved for the holiest of men, beings so evolved they can control their heartbeat, a state indistinguishable to the unenlightened from death.
“Whenever a saint goes into samadhi, it is his disciples’ duty to preserve his body,” said an ashram preacher, Swami Vishalanand, sitting in orange robes under a framed photo of Mr. Maharaj, whose likeness dominates the ashram’s walls.
On Dec. 1, however, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana issued a 129-page order citing the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, and referring to the embalming of Lenin. The upshot: Government and police officials were ordered to cremate Mr. Maharaj’s body within 15 days.
The ashram’s leaders are planning a monthly gathering on Sunday, just before the deadline, where they expect 60,000 people from all over the state, an event many fear could lead to a violent confrontation with the police.
The last time something like this happened, the results were catastrophic. In November, a powerful spiritual leader, Baba Rampal Maharaj, who was wanted on a murder charge fended off thousands of police officers with the help of an army of volunteers armed with diesel bombs and acid pouches. The standoff left six dead and many more wounded.
I am going to admit that parsing news stories concerning religious based crimes, particularly those from India, is becoming difficult. With that said, another example of debauchery inspired by religious belief.
Villagers in northern India
beat a Muslim man to death and injured four others who were accused of
smuggling cows to be slaughtered for beef, police have said.
The survivors were arrested for alleged animal cruelty.
Hardline Hindus have been calling for a national ban on cow slaughter, triggering mob violence. A Muslim man was lynched in Uttar Pradesh state last month over false rumours that his family had eaten beef for dinner.
Hindus worship cows as a sacred animal and some states have a ban on
their slaughter. The country of 1.3 billion is about 81% Hindu and 13%
Muslim.
Officer Somya Sambhasivam said police were searching for villagers
who fled after the attack on Wednesday in Sarahan, a village in Himachal
Pradesh state. The area is about 160 miles (260km) north of Delhi.
Some 2,000 people took to the streets Monday in an Indian-controlled
area of Kashmir to protest the killing of a teenage Muslim truck driver
who was burned to death in the cab of his truck, apparently because he
was wrongly suspected of transporting beef.
It was the third instance in recent weeks in which a Muslim man has been killed over beef. Cows are considered sacred by Hindus.
Zahid Rasool Bhat, 18, the truck driver who died Sunday of burns,
was buried Monday in his village, Botengo, in South Kashmir. Hindu
militants are suspected of carrying out the attack, in which gasoline
bombs were reportedly thrown into his vehicle on Oct. 9. The incident
was caught on security cameras.
Bhat was reportedly carrying coal in his truck, not beef.
,,,
Five people were arrested for murder, rioting, conspiracy and explosives
charges, according to Waheed-ur-Rahman, spokesman of the state
government. He said one had fled and was the target of a manhunt. He
said the case would be held in a “fast-track” court designed to speed up
India’s typically slow judicial process.
There is also a powerful political motivation behind their activism.
Many leaders of Save the Cow here are also prominent local organizers in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which is vying to
oust the socialist party that leads Uttar Pradesh, a vast northern state
with more than 200 million residents, including the 20,000 in this
village. Mr. Tomar, 24, for example, is the general secretary of the
local B.J.P. youth wing. Mr. Nagar, 33, is the state secretary of the
B.J.P. youth wing.
By
week’s end, they and many other B.J.P. leaders were blaming the
governing party in Uttar Pradesh for the attack in Bisada. The state’s
B.J.P. president, Lakshmikant Bajpayee, said in a telephone interview
that while he “most definitely” disagreed with mob violence, “the blame
for this incident lies squarely with the state’s administration and the
law and order machinery, its police.” The failure by the police to
respond quickly and forcefully to rumors of a cow’s slaughter
understandably enraged Bisada’s Hindu residents, he said.
“This
is a fight between the cow caretaker and the cow murderer in the
state,” he said. “Had the administration done their job at protecting
our cows well, these men would not have been forced to take the law in
their hands.”
Save
the Cow and B.J.P. leaders here have also roundly condemned the
decision by the police to bring murder charges. In their view, the death
of Mr. Ikhlaq was at most the unintended byproduct of a chaotic, highly
charged situation of his own making. “He slipped and his head hit the
road and he died,” Mr. Tomar said, adding: “These things happen. It’s a
mob.”
,,,
Days
after the killing, the Ikhlaq family was still too shocked and
overwhelmed to even begin picking up the broken furniture or repairing
the shattered doors. Scores of police officers protected their home on
all sides, and a steady parade of journalists made their way down the
alley to ask the same basic question: Why were the Ikhlaqs singled out?
“We
have been living in this village for decades and never picked as much
as a fight with anyone,” Mrs. Ikhlaq said quietly. Her daughter,
Shaista, 18, was reeling from having recognized several neighbors in the
mob that attacked them so relentlessly.
“If they suspected we had slaughtered a cow, why did they not file a police complaint against us?” Shaista Ikhlaq asked.
An Indian scholar whose criticism of idol worship had angered religious groups was fatally shot Sunday, the police said.
The killing of the scholar, Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi, drew immediate comparisons to the 2013 murder of Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, who spent decades debunking gurus, sorcerers, healers and godmen.
Two
men entered the home of Mr. Kalburgi on Sunday morning, opened fire and
fled on a motorcycle, according to Ravindra Prasad, the police
commissioner in Dharwad, a town in the state of Karnataka in southern India.
A neighbor, Nagaraj Tigade, said he helped take Mr. Kalburgi, 77, to a nearby hospital where he was declared dead.
The police said they did not yet know the motive behind the killing. “Right now there is no breakthrough,” Mr. Prasad said.
Mr.
Kalburgi, who taught classes in the Kannada language at Kannada
University in northern Karnataka and was a former vice chancellor of the
university, became the target of protests and threats last year, when
he spoke out against idol worship and superstition at a public event.
A religious activist filed a complaint in June of last year accusing him
of “offending religious sentiments,” according to Hindustan Times.
Many believe Dr Kalburgi made many enemies within his own Lingayat community
- an influential Hindu sect that dominates life and politics in
Karnataka - with his outspoken remarks about its traditional beliefs and
practices.
,,,
As Raghu Karnad writes perceptively in The Wire website, Dr Kalburgi's murder may have more to do with the "fine rivalries and high political stakes within Lingayat caste politics".
Dr
Kalburgi was a scholar of the vachana verses, the founding literature
of the Lingayats. Vachanas are like daily rituals, helping people to
lead their daily lives.
He had "frequently riled the Lingayat
orthodoxy" with his interpretation of the verses and had received death
threats from conservative members of his community. "What Dr Kalburgi was giving was a liberal
interpretation of the verses, which was more cosmopolitan and modern in
its approach", says an expert. This, writes Karnad, had "implications
not only for the theology of the Lingayat establishment, but for its
enormous political and financial power".
To understand what’s happening in Bangladesh now—both the violence
and the anemic response from the west—we need to look at some history.
In 1971, as West Pakistan violently cracked down on Bengali
nationalists in East Pakistan clamoring for independence, Washington,
D.C. remained silent. U.S. Consul General in Dhaka Archer Blood
repeatedly urged President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger to intervene.
Nixon and Kissinger, as Gary Bass would later recount in The Blood Telegram,
were so anti-India that they ignored what would become one of the 20th
century’s forgotten genocides: the killing of over three million
Bengalis (including many Hindus) and the displacement of more than 10
million.
Among those who left what would become Bangladesh was Rukhsana Hasib, a young secular Muslim whose father—an East Pakistan military officer—was killed by West Pakistani forces.
,,,
For years, beneath the loud and proud rhetoric of Bengali unity,
Bangladesh has been increasingly radicalized, particularly in rural
areas and villages just outside of major cities such as Dhaka and
Chittagong. Even under the nominally secular Awami League, land-grabs
against groups such as Hindus and indigenous tribes have gone up, and
authorities have done little to deter violence led by Islamist groups
and their allies. Now, religious minorities, atheists, and secular
Muslims are now firmly in the crosshairs of an emboldened collection of
radical groups.
,,,
The lack of U.S. involvement in Bangladesh is multi-fold. Though the
country is a trade partner with the United States, it lacks the
strategic significance of its South Asian neighbors India and Pakistan.
Additionally, the attacks against the bloggers are often presented in
U.S. media without context. Perhaps more problematically, many
Bangladeshis, particularly those living in more upscale parts of Dhaka,
the capital city, have largely been shielded from the creeping extremism
taking place throughout the country.
This is just bizarre although I'm fairly certain if he has been in a freezer and is frozen, he's dead!!
The family and followers of one of India's wealthiest Hindu spiritual leaders are fighting a legal battle over whether he is dead or simply in a deep state of meditation.
His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, the founder of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan religious order with a property estate worth an estimated £100 million, died in January, according to his wife and son.
However, his disciples at his Ashram have refused to let the family take his body for cremation because they claim he is still alive.
According to his followers, based in the Punjab city of Jalandhar, he simply went into a deep Samadhi or meditation and they have frozen his body to preserve it for when he wakes from it.
His body is currently contained in a commercial freezer at their Ashram.
[,,,]
Today the group has thousands of followers around the world and owns dozens of large properties throughout India, the United States, South America, Australia, the Middle East and Europe, including its British headquarters in Hayes, Middlesex.
While he is thought to have died from a heart attack, his devotees believe he has simply drifted into a deeper form of the meditation he promotes as a pathway to self-realisation.
A statement on the group's website reads: "His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj ji has been in deep meditative state (Samadhi) since 29th January 2014."
According to one of his aides, who asked not to be named, "Maharaj has been in deep meditation. He has spent many years meditating in sub-zero temperatures in the Himalayas, there is nothing unusual in it. He will return to life as soon as he feels and we will ensure his body is preserved until then", he said.
In the north Indian city of Agra, dozens gather at the cow shelter of DD Singhal to have a fresh glass of cow urine.
“Lots of people come here. And of late, the numbers have been rising. We all gather in the morning and drink fresh urine that Mother cow offers us,” Singhal said.
“Just a few years ago, there would hardly be anyone interested in taking cow urine from our shelter. But today lots of people come to our cow shelter. There are cancer patients sometimes – they want to see the benefits of cow urine.” he said.
Many say the recent increase in the number of people drinking cow urine can be attributed to campaigns run by spiritual leaders. Followers of the cult claim cow urine can successfully be used to combat cancer, diabetes, tumours, tuberculosis, stomach problems and much more. They also claim that drinking cow pee is the only effective solution for treating baldness.
“Only two things are pure in this universe, in this world. One is the water from the Holy Ganges river and the other is urine from mother holy cow,” Ramesh Gupta, a Hindu priest, said.
