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Re:RFD on Reorgn of SRH (response to V K Rao)
Before I respond to Gopal Ganapathiraju Sree Ramana (gopal@ecf.toronto.edu),
I must give a short history of the thread for the sake of those who
don't follow news.groups.
Several weeks back, one Sue Breish posted an article in news.groups
that said that when she became a Vaishnava, the shape of her nose, her
pigmentation etc. did not change and that, for that reason, she was
not a Hindu. I challenged this on the ground that there is a religion
called Hinduism, and that the usage of the terms today does not allow
its interpretation as a biologically defined racial category. Eventually
the thread petered out. Ms. Breish then explained that the reference to
physical features were not meant to be offensive, only her understanding
of the meaning was different. There the matter rested, till one of the Pais
said, during the srh-reorg discussion, that no one had answered Mani
Varadarajan's objections to the definitions of Hinduism. I agree that
Mani's criticism of the verbose description in the Supreme Court decision
he was talking about is not quite suitable. I proposed an alternate
definition and pointed out that Mani's objections to the two points in it
are not really valid.
Shrisa Rao followed up on that, editing out part of the definition. All of
a sudden Gopal started posting articles based on the >mutilated< definition.
[In <9601011158.AA11281@qasid.cc.iitk.ernet.in>, sghosh@iitk.ernet.in quotes
> gopal@ecf.toronto.edu wrote:
>> (2) Belief in Vedas as infallible and their acceptance as
>> (i can not speculate on the continuation of the clause(2) if there is
>> any, as it was not given in VK Rao's post)
Note that Gopal simply refers to `VK Rao's post', and has removed the `>'s
that would allow the reader to make the suitable attributions. This makes
it appear that the root article itself is being quoted.]
Gopal has made no attempt to obtain the text of the root article. Ignoring
that fact the original definition explicitely said ``accept Vedas as part
of their scripture', he claimed that the original definition said no
such thing. This sort of misrepresentation is the guilt I referred to.
In my zeal to avoid long convoluted sentences (which, as you may notice,
I do not avoid any more :-), I made a mistake in my punctuation. My
intent was point out that Gopal Ramana critized a definition which he had
not---and for all I know still has not---read completely.
If I don't know what the definition is, how can I argue that it is
wrong? If Gopal Ramana does so, how can you rely on him?
Now, posting to groups where the original thread did not appear, Gopal
quotes me as saying, in article <4cb5i6$bnu@babbage.ece.uc.edu>:
>V Rao wrote probably obliquely referring to my post:
>
>* A certain nettor (name withheld to protect the guilty) argued that the
> definition proposed in this thread excluded some vaishnavas from hindus.
> Thanks for the "fatwa" of guilt, outperforming AK's decree against
> Salman Rushdie. I am just curious to know: what the charges were, what
> the due-process was, what the judgement was, what the punishment is,
> and where the speaking order is.
The charge is that Gopal, without reading it in its entirity and without
making any effort to obtain the original definition, critized it by
representing that it did not contain what it did and posted the same
to groups where the original article did not appear, thus deliberately
misrepresenting the truth.
All this, in which one person edits the original article and another
goes on and on without any effort to read the original article, smacks of
``plausible denial''. Mani Varadarajan never responded to my original
criticism; S. Rao did not respond to my follow-up. Gopal refuses to
find and read the original article. I leave it to the readers to decide
who is trustworthy.
P.S.: I had told Mani what I would have thought of as a compromise offer
(please note that I do not speak for Ajay Shah or Raj Bhatnagar; this
was merely what I would have considered, if I were a mediator, a
genuine compromise proposal) and promised to hold my peace till I
had some response. But I find Gopal Ramana's tactics highly offensive
and I no longer feel bound by what I told Mani.
--
Vidhyanath Rao It is the man, not the method, that solves
nathrao+@osu.edu the problem. - Henri Poincare
(614)-366-9341 [as paraphrased by E. T. Bell]
