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From: Sushama
Hindu dharma humiliated – By Sandhya Jain
Tulsidas's seminal rendition of the Ram story makes no mention of the Lakshman rekha in the episode dealing with Sita's abduction. The line surfaces only later, in distant Lanka, when Ravan's wife, Mandodri, advises him to give up his obstinacy and refrain from fighting the illustrious Raghus. She points out that Lakshman had drawn a protective line around Sita in the forest, which Ravan couldn't even cross! Sita could be abducted only after she was tricked into breaching it; the Lakshman rekha has since become the ethical standard of Hindu self-restraint, discipline, and sense of limit.
This moral dimension was shaken when a Union Government-approved affidavit claimed before the Supreme Court that there is no 'historic' or 'scientific' evidence of the existence of the maryada purushottam. This contemptuous attitude towards Hindu civilisation's greatest moral exemplar has caused shock all over the Hindu universe, from Jammu & Kashmir to Kanyakumari, to Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, Myanmar, Kampuchea, Indonesia, Bali, Malaysia, Nepal, Java, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand; regions whose national culture has been shaped by the benign presence of Lord Ram.
Originally a dispute over a sand and coral formation uniting the Indian mainland with its island neighbour, Ram Setu has catapulted into a bridge of India's Hindu identity and nationhood, straddling centuries of collective sloth and amnesia. The Tamil Kings of Jaffna (13th to 16th centuries AD) once called themselves "Sethu Kavalar", protectors of Rameshwaram and the surrounding seas; south India principally reveres Lord Ram as Kodanda-Rama, deity with the bow.
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