sandhya jain on the swami nityananda affair

mar 22nd, 2010

the swami nityananda affair has succeeded beyond the missionaries' wildest dreams -- it has driven a wedge between two groups of hindus. bheda, successfully enacted. kautilya would understand. fortunately, the catholics are on the back foot right now because of how godman ratzinger has been more or less implicated in scandals about pedophilia and ensuing cover-ups. but of course they will be back in fine form soon. and in any case, it is just as likely to be the protestant lunatic-fringe cults who are behind this.

it may well be that this scandal was timed to erupt at the same time as ratzinger's problems (or maybe that was a co-incidence) but it is very likely it was timed as a counterpoint to hindu responses to wendy doniger's nasty sex-starved fantasies about hinduism. now wendy's children can point to this affair and say, "see, we told you so. all hindus are sex-crazy".

regarding this article, i do not personally agree with sandhya jain in her attack either on swami dayananda or on rajiv malhotra -- and it leaves me in a dilemma because i have interacted with all three and think it's a great shame that there is a divide amongst them. all of them are trying to do their best for hinduism. 

i also disagree with sandhya on her claim that you can only be a hindu in india. no, this is the holy land, but hinduism is a universal religion. my humble belief is that pretending that hinduism is a narrow, circumscribed religion that only applies to some set of people or to a particular geography is a vast denigration of hinduism. it is a universal religion. In fact it is *the* universal religion -- because prior to the semitic patriarchal conquests, the various pre-semitic faiths that animated people all over the world were quite similar to hinduism in many respects, and hinduism is the only surviving *old* religion, whereas its sisters were decimated. it was only in india that the old religion survived.

i can understand some of sandhya's virulence in view of the kinds of things whites have done to hinduism -- first the demonisation over centuries, and more recently the types of guerilla tactics adopted by church-sponsored people such as sarah caldwell and jeff kripal who infiltrated ashrams, were treated as genuine seekers after truth, and then turned around and performed hatchet-jobs on them. yes, the church is nasty -- as we hear daily these days in relation to their cover-ups of brutalization of small children (yes, white children, so you can imagine what the white church has done and is doing to brown children) -- but that is no reason to be, in effect, afraid of them.

i have some sympathy with rajiv malhotra's views, because i think he's more in tune with the realities of guerilla warfare in the US, where much of the lunatic-fringe protestant villainy is hatched. these guys have successfully made inroads against the papists in latin america; they are active all over india, especially in the northeast, with their 'charismatic' wailing and suchlike and their clever marketing approaches targeting women as well as vulnerable people in distress. it is useful to hear from someone who has seen the belly of the beast; and to use his insights. and in any case, rajiv is extremely lucid, and he cannot be dismissed as some sort of extremist, as the RISA folks in the US have found to their discomfort. 

sandhya is in effect paranoid about whites. not that she is wrong in assuming that whites, particularly their standard-bearer now, the yanks, are malevolent and mal-intentioned towards india and hinduism. but it also leads her to take on a monomaniacal stance where she finds white malfeasance and conspiracies in everything, even when there is none. it amused me to see how she is, on her website vijayvaaniu, espousing the views of certain cranks, including, if i am not mistaken, those who claim the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by the american state. more alarmingly, she has begun to espouse the views of people who are manifestly paid by the chinese. surely, it is not sandhya's case that the hans are any more friendly to hinduism than whites are. their treatment of the dalai lama we have seen.

ironically, a foreign-born swami whom i respect (and he is a genuine swami, who has taken diksha and a vow of poverty) agrees with sandhya. but wouldn't that be paradoxical -- how can sandhya accept him as a genuine hindu, even though he lives in india?

i am also distressed by what i consider sandhya's ill-considered and personal attacks on swami dayanand sarasvati, who is is the one person who has been brave enough among all the swamis in india who push the 'all religions are equal' nonsense to stand up and say 'conversion is genocide'.

having said all this, i think it is still important to have sandhya's views heard, so here i publish them as a counterpoint to rajiv malhotra's views that i published earlier on this blog. do visit sandhya's piece because the comments are interesting. 

http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1144