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The sarcastic tone of my letter indicates my lack of respect for
people who carp about minor issues when there are so many major ones
wide open. A few weeks ago, there was an article about how the "evil"
Christian missionaries were converting Gujarati tribals.
In the article, it showed that in many cases, the tribals were being
converted because the Christians were providing _basic_ medical care
for them. So, the right-wing Hindus were up in arms, but over the
years, nobody had apparently given a damn about the plight of these
tribals until the Christians showed up. Isn't it a sad testament that
nobody had bothered to give these people a single aspirin until the
missionaries did? Worse yet, all the right-wing Hindus wanted was to
stop the spread of Christianity, rather than actually helping the
tribals.
It's more than just a little hypocritical that the right-wing Hindus
are championing social service while getting offended when someone
else happens to do it better than they do. I don't necessarily agree
with the actions of the Christian missionaries, but when the Hindus
get upset that tribals are being converted by giving them aspirin, the
question in my mind is "so what prevented you from helping them all
these years?"
>But at the same time, one should try to unite ourselves so that we can
>effectively counter these threats by lobbying against them. There
>strength lies in their unity and our weekness lies in the fragmentation
>within our community.
As long as our community focuses on shows of strength rather than on
any meaningful changes, there won't be any foundation on which to
build real strength. In India, it seems that it's more important to
fight with Muslims to reclaim old temples than it is to actually do
anything about the temples that currently exist. With that sort of
attitude, someone might succeed at building an empire, but it will be
a hollow one for sure.
I could give personal examples of how I've seen these same attitudes
present politically-oriented Hindu groups in the United States, but
that would be a different topic.
-Vivek
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