‘My family descended from Lord Ram’s son Kush’: BJP MP Diya Kumari

BJP lawmaker Diya Kumari, a member of the erstwhile Jaipur royal family, claimed on Sunday, 11 August, that her family has descended from Lord Ram's son Kush, days after the Supreme Court sought to know whether anyone from the 'Raghuvansha' was still residing in Ayodhya.

She said descendants of Lord Ram are all over the world and the dispute in Ayodhya should be resolved soon.

"Court has said where are the descendants of Lord Ram... Descendants of Lord Ram are all over the world, including our family who descended from his son Kush," Kumari, the MP from Rajsamand in Rajasthan, said.

She said that her comments were based on manuscripts, genealogy and documents available with the royal family.

Curious to know whether anyone from the 'Raghuvansha' (descendants of Lord Ram) was still residing in Ayodhya, the Supreme Court on Friday had put this query to 'Ram Lalla Virajman', the deity and one of the parties in the politically sensitive Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land dispute case.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi had asked the question to senior advocate K Parasaran, appearing for 'Ram Lalla Virajman', when he was arguing that the deity and the birth place both were "juristic" entities and hence, capable of holding properties and instituting lawsuits.

“We are just wondering if anyone from the ‘Raghuvansha’ dynasty is still living there (at Ayodhya),” the bench had said.
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"I have no information. We will try to find it out," Parasaran had responded.

Kumari said, "Everyone has faith in Lord Ram. It is our request that hearing in the Ram temple case should be expedited and the court give its verdict soon."

She said that if needed she will present documents proving links of her family to Kush in the court, but will not interfere in the Ayodhya case by taking a lead.

The law suit filed by the deity in the case has also made the birth place of Lord Ram as co-petitioner and has sought claim over the entire 2.77 acre of disputed land at Ayodhya where the structure was razed on 6 December, 1992.

Fourteen appeals have been filed in the apex court against the 2010 Allahabad High Court judgment, delivered in four civil suits, that the 2.77-acre land in Ayodhya be partitioned equally among the three parties -- the Sunni Waqf Board, the Nirmohi Akhara and Ram Lalla.

On 6 December, 1992, the Babri Masjid, constructed at the disputed site in the 16th century by Shia Muslim Mir Baqi, was demolished.

The Supreme Court is currently holding day-to-day hearing in the case.

(Source: The Quint)

India, the 7th largest country, has no place but Ram Janmabhoomi's 2.77 acres for university?

Manish Sishodia responds to the Ram Mandir row with a question that has become the sole refuge of “intellectuals” every time the question, “Whether or not – Ram Mandir” crops up. “Why not build university in Ayodhya?” This pretentious question has many variations – all done to death. Those who pose these questions assume an air of virtuous supremacy, relegating others who covet the Ram Mandir as lowly beings of questionable morals and inferior education.

Now I can very well throw in that the same political party Mr. Sisodia is an honorable member of, has promised a 100 crore Haj House in the capital city. While Delhi government is struggling to fulfil its promise of free internet, this amount could have been used in a better and, if I may say, ‘secular’ way. But let me refrain from drawing this and many other similar comparisons because creating a Hindu/Muslim divide is not the impetus of this conversation. Our politicians are way more talented at that job, so let’s leave them with it.

I know that this country will ever see a Ram Mandir at the Janmabhoomi. This dispute started long before I was born, is alive and kicking now, and will remain so for our grandchildren to fight over. The holy pilgrimage has been reduced to an election issue and every single party is milking it, so the doomed hope of the temple aside, let’s confront the owners of morality in their own way.

Image Source : Facebook

These people make it look as though all the education of Indian youth, all the treatment of our patients, the welfare of all orphans and elderlies, precisely, all the development in India have come to a halt because we are not able to make a university, a hospital, an orphanage or an oldage home on Janmabhoomi. When it comes to land area, India is the seventh largest country. The lawn of Shantivan spreads across a land area of 52.6 acres. The kind of intense affection Chacha Nehru held for children, would his soul not be satiated to see a university built at his memorial instead of a never-ending lawn? Indira Gandhi’s memorial covers 45 acres of land and that of Rajiv Gandhi sits on 15.

A decent university needs thousands of acres of land area. IIT Kharagpur occupies 2100 acres, JNU sits atop 1019 , AMU 1155 and Jadavpur University – much smaller than these universities – consumes close to 100 acres of land area. But everyone wants the gullible Hindu to surrender the 2.77 acres of land he holds at the center of his heart.

That archaeological reports and evidences support the existence of a Hindu temple at the site is common knowledge now. Those who want to deny science are welcome to do that, but one’s acceptance or denial doesn’t fret reality; truth stays its ground unperturbed by the prejudices of polluted minds.

You do not get to define my love for Ram as hate for Abdul, Shaheen or Sayeeda. You have played that game for far too long. I refuse to accept the tag of ‘Bad Hindu’ bestowed upon me by the ‘keepers of morality’, just because I desire a respectable place of worship for my Lord at the site  he had chosen as his place of incarnation. I do not yearn for the title of ‘Good Hindu’ from you either.

As an educated, informed and still a devout Hindu, I have all the right to question, ‘why every time the Ram Mandir is brought in a conversation, the guardians of ethics, the liberals as they call themselves, resort to strawmen like ‘build a hospital, a university, an orphanage, an oldage home’. Will they dare say that a university should be built at the site of the Mecca Pilgrimage, or the Vatican? They won’t. Then why is it so easy to make callous comments about the Janmabhoomi? Because the land is under controversies?

There is a poor man’s hut near my home. He is old and vulnerable. Someday, when he is away, I will drive a bulldozer over his hut, and make that land an extension of my backyard. The poor man will drag me to court with all his documents and prove that the land was his. In my neighborhood, this little plot would become a piece of ‘controversial’ land. Would you ask the poor man to build a children’s park at his property and sleep somewhere else? I leave you with this question. Your answer to this, is what your answer ought to be, every time the legitimacy of a Ram Mandir at the Janmabhoomi is questioned.

(Source: Yahoo News)

Can a Bombay strongman explain Trump?

As I watched Donald J. Trump campaigning, I thought, I’ve seen this show before. It was in the 1990s in Bombay (now called Mumbai). And the man playing the Trump part was Bal Keshav Thackeray, the leader of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party, who rode to power on a wave of outrageous stories, bluster, lies, bigotry and showmanship. He died in 2012 after ruling — and ruining — the city I grew up in. The road to understanding Mr. Trump might just lie through understanding Mr. Thackeray, and what became of Bombay.

Mr. Thackeray, who founded his Shiv Sena party in 1966, began his career as a political cartoonist. He had a gift for outrageous parody. His own appearance was a caricature of a Bollywood guru: In his later years, he took to wearing dark shades, an orange robe and a necklace of holy beads, holding a Cohiba in one hand and a glass of warm beer in the other. His party workers, his ministers and the press referred to Mr. Thackeray as “The Supremo.”

He was a master of the art of the outrage, of politics as performance. He would castigate his opponents as “vampires,” “a sack of flour” and various untranslatable epithets like calling South Indians “yandu-gundus.” Periodically, he would express admiration for Hitler, immediately attracting thousands of news pages of free publicity. He regularly called for books and films that he felt were antithetical to Hindu values to be banned. Egged on by his invective, his legions would go out and beat up artists and journalists.

Though Mr. Thackeray neither inherited nor ran businesses as Mr. Trump did, the two men’s support base was remarkably similar in its political contours. The people Mr. Thackeray represented were the native Maharashtrians, the “sons of the soil.” The list of his enemies varied with the seasons, from Communists to South Indian migrants to Gujaratis to Muslims and, eventually, North Indians.

Working-class Maharashtrians felt excluded from booming Bombay, capital of Maharashtra State, as it made the transition from manufacturing to a postindustrial financial and services economy. They resented both the moneyed cosmopolitan elites as well as the North Indian migrants who competed with them for low-skill jobs.

Mr. Thackeray promised to restore their jobs, by threatening mob violence against industrialists who hired non-natives. He promised to make Maharashtra great again by reversing the clock: His idol was the 17th-century warrior-king Shivaji, who held the Mughal emperors at bay. He demanded the requirement of a visa to enter Bombay.

Mr. Thackeray played fast and loose with the facts, claiming that the Indian Constitution allowed the imposition of a ban on non-natives in Bombay. His party newspaper, Saamna, was the Breitbart News of its time, chock-full of fake news about Muslims, outsiders, celebrities.

Bal Keshav Thackeray, the founder of Shiv Sena. His party workers, his ministers and the press referred to Mr. Thackeray as “The Supremo.” Credit Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos

Bombay accommodated every faith and was relatively untouched by the mass violence that accompanied the Partition of India in 1947. But after a Hindu nationalist mob destroyed a medieval mosque in the North Indian town Ayodhya in December 1992, Bombay erupted in sectarian riots, which continued through January 1993. More than 1,100 people, most of them Muslims, were killed. Mr. Thackeray organized the violence, leading his troops “like a veteran general,” according to a judicial inquiry.

In June 1993, when a court was about to admit a case against him for his writings in Saamna, Mr. Thackeray responded, “I piss on the court’s judgments. Most judges are like plague-ridden rats against whom direct action must be taken.”

After the riots, Muslims were pushed to or sought out their own ghettos. Muslim dons of the Bombay underworld retaliated by exploding 13 bombs across the city, which killed 257 people, Hindu and Muslim alike. Mr. Thackeray had destroyed the cosmopolitan, secular Bombay of my adolescence. The violence consolidated the Hindu vote behind Mr. Thackeray and propelled his party into power, in Bombay and in Maharashtra.

On assuming office, Mr. Thackeray’s party got into bed with the very elites it had scorned. Mr. Thackeray and big business loved each other. Trade unions controlled by his men were much more malleable than the left-controlled ones. On a return to Bombay in 2008, I met the Shiv Sena street fighters I had known in the 1990s, and the Muslims gangsters they had battled. They were all in real estate now. They had been hired by developers to extort slum dwellers into consenting to their houses being razed, in exchange for shabby tower blocks under a government program. The alligators in the Bombay swamp had never feasted better.

Mr. Thackeray never held a political office. He had to appear bigger than politics. “I hate politics,” he said, and bragged that he ran the state by “remote control.” I went to interview him in his bungalow, which had a perennial line of favor seekers waiting in the antechamber. They could be Bollywood stars, the chairman of Enron, gangsters or clerks. At one point during the interview, he burst into an unprompted, extended soliloquy about rats in Bombay. His answers had no relationship to my questions; they were simply stray thoughts that seemed to occur at that particular moment. It was a mismatch of scale: this small-minded man controlling this enormous city.

Mr. Thackeray had no use for theories or data; he was all about action, or the illusion of action. “I like people who can get the things done!” a sign in his office proclaimed. His solutions to the city’s vast problems were precise and petty: rename Bombay as Mumbai; increase water flow in the city’s hydrants to enable the flushing out of rats.

Mr. Thackeray was the most powerful man in the city because, like Mr. Trump, he knew how to tell a good story. Mr. Trump’s victory was the triumph of stories over numbers. Hillary Clinton had the research, the voter data. Mr. Trump went with his gut, told stories, ripping yarns. The audience laughed, cried — and voted.

I teach journalism at New York University, and none of the esteemed journalists I know predicted a Trump victory. In the 1980s, nobody in the Bombay elite could predict Mr. Thackeray’s electoral victories. Mr. Trump entertained and outraged. We sought comfort in data. FiveThirtyEight and The Upshot reassured us hourly with numbers predicting a Clinton victory. But people are too sophisticated, too nuanced, too complex, to be captured in numbers. We respond with our head to numbers; we respond with our heart to stories. God speaks to us in stories. The scriptures of every faith are collections of stories, not assemblages of data.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Thackeray understood the power of stories and spoke not in policy, but in parables. A populist is, above all, a gifted storyteller. At this point in our great democracy, most voters are … bored, and they don’t respond well to policy statements. Mrs. Clinton’s address to a Bollywood show in New Jersey read like an academic paper on multiculturalism. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, was succinct: “It’s a weakness. I love the beautiful Indian actresses. There’s nothing like them.”

Every fall during the Hindu festival of Dussehra, Mr. Thackeray would get on the stage at Shivaji Park in Bombay and deliver a performance lasting several hours, part stand-up comedy, part paranoid conspiracy theory, part scurrilous mockery of his political opponents. Hundreds of thousands of his followers cheered, laughed, engaged in frenzied call-and-response. He never used a written text. A high, or low, point was his mockery of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party leader. Mr. Thackeray would pull a sari over his head and mimic the Italian-born daughter-in-law of the Nehru-Gandhi family in a high falsetto, mocking her fumbling Hindi.

After the Bombay riots, one of his followers told me that Mr. Thackeray had powertoni, their contraction of “power of attorney”: the awesome ability to act on someone else’s behalf, to sign documents, to have people killed. Powerless factory workers in Ohio and coal miners in Kentucky see Mr. Trump as the man with powertoni. Every time your hero, your attorney, humiliates the good and the great, you feel a swell of pride; you feel, in your shabby house with the leaky roof, that you have obtained a measure of power, in Manhattan, in Washington.

Mr. Thackeray’s men took pride in watching industrialists, bureaucrats and politicians bow before him, touch his feet. They spoke in awe about Michael Jackson’s calling on Mr. Thackeray on his only visit to Bombay, in 1996. Jackson used his toilet; Mr. Thackeray later led reporters to the sanctified bowl.

He used mob violence to rule Bombay. The Muslims who were attacked in the riots were from all social classes. Their killers walked free; they had powertoni.

I don’t know if Mr. Trump’s America will bring rioting and mass violence. But his ability to sell a false story well, and our voracious need to be entertained, means that the walls are already coming up — not on the border, but between city and village, red and blue state, white and nonwhite, man and woman, native and immigrant. Bombayites never imagined that Mr. Thackeray’s riveting speeches could lead to dead bodies on the streets. Since the election, hate crimes have risen by 115 percent in New York, Mr. Trump’s birthplace and my home since I was fourteen. What happens if the violent incitement of Mr. Trump’s campaign continues into his presidency?

(Source: NYT)