Conversions

CHANDRU1849 said:

Today's The Hindu reported that educated youths embracing Buddhism in AP and Telengana.

Click to expand...

renuka said:

Buddhism just Advaita in a different mode.

So its cool if anyone wants to follow the Buddhist school of thought..after all it is rightfully viewed as a school of thought just like Shaivaism or Vaishnavaism.

Click to expand...

CHANDRU1849 said:

Is it part of Hinduism? If Buddhists are majority, will they allow Hindus to practise their religion?

The need of the hour is drastic refinement of Hinduism, which is already very late.

Click to expand...

Iyyarooraan said:

More religious conversions are taking place under this BJP/ModiJi rule than at any time. Then what it is: Bouquets to ModiJi or brickbats to BJP.

Click to expand...

sangom said:

There has been a vast majority of people in this country, consisting of the Shudra, and still lower castes, who were never a part of the so called hinduism. I will call them the non-hindu hindus. They continued to be the counterparts of the Afro-Americans in the USA, working like serfs for the "true" hindus (which consisted of the three higher castes and some fringe categories of the Vaishyas) which was one main reason, perhaps, for Angus Maddison proclaiming India to have been the 'richest' country sometime in the past.

The country suffered wave after wave of alien invasion and, all through these periods, the role and status of the "non-hindu hindus" continued in their age-old role or swadharma, with occasional conversions here and there to the faith system of the invading ruler/s. After Independence, these non-hindu hindus were slowly getting courage to come out of their role of serfs to the higher castes and proving their independence. This has been one of the major reasons for the killing, rape & murder, etc., of dalits by higher castes and is so even now.

With Modi coming to power, it has become clear as daylight that the high caste hindutwa will now become the official religion. Nobody will learn this better than these non-hindu hindus because they are directly affected. Therefore, there is every possibility that these non-hindu hindus as well as some of the lowest fringe castes in the hindu society of high castes, deciding to shift to another fold like Buddhism, Christianity or Islam.

Of course, BJP/RSS/Modi combine will try performing "Ghar Vaapasi" and give an impression, with cooked up data to show that conversion to hinduism far exceeds the reverse flow!

Click to expand...

renuka said:

Is there something called Hinduism in the first place? I do not think so.

What we call Hinduism today is a conglomerate of various school of thoughts...ranging from Shaivaism,Vaishnavaism,Shaktaism,Culturalism, Tribalism etc.

Everything has been grouped under one umbrella and given a new name that is Hinduism..countless new gods/goddesses were added as time went on to assimilate with the local population who would have had their own cultural believes prior to introduction of some amount of Vedic form of worship.

Coming to if Buddhist are majority ..will they allow Hindus to practice their religion? Frankly speaking hardly anyone in this world practices any form of religion in the true sense.

Many use religion just as a form of identity to hold on strongly for an ego boost of some kind.

The human ego will survive in some form or the other..so there is nothing to worry.

Click to expand...

Vaagmi said:

Sangomji,

That is far from truth because there is too much of generalisation. The fact was that "the vast majority" was not shudras as mentioned by you. I do not know from where you got this inforamtion that the majority of the population was shudras and "still lower castes". If you can indicate the source, it will be useful.

It appears from what you say that everyone other than Brahmins are shudras which is not the fact. The kshatriyas and Vysyas of yore are not known as Kshatriyas and Vysyas and so they are clubbed with shudras and hence they become majority. The correct division will be that brahmins and harijans were always minority communities in the hindu population while the so called aggregate of shudras today which includes Thevars, Konars, Gounders, Vanniyars, Pillais, Nadars and muththaraiyars were actually part of the kshatriyas and vysyas or mixed castes.

So what you are saying is equivalent to saying that these so called "shudras" were never part of hinduism. And that is not true. If anyone was outside hinduism it was only the harijans who post-independence constitution became S.C and S.T. And these shudras had the cake and ate it too. In fact they continue to have the cake and eat it too. If you take a survey of the landless agricultural labourers in the villages of say Tamilnadu, you will find that they are all mainly harijans. The majority of land owners will be these so called shudras.

The simple fact is that you can not talk about Atma and Paramatma to a hungry man and these landless labourers daily go to bed with hunger and an uncertain next day. It is these castes (SC and ST) who have been converted to Christianity in large numbers in Tamilnadu. Islam is a different cup of tea and I am not going into that. And these western religese ions to which conversion was happening also spoke about the atma and paramatma only. The difference was only that they supplemented their parmatma with milk powder and cash. It was a heady mixture.

These "non-hindu hindus" as you prefer to call them were in fact just poor souls unattached to any formal religion. They were exploited to the hilt by "middle caste hindus". This is the history of hinduism and castes in India in just two sentences. The middle caste hindus were always at loggerheads with the harijans at the lower end and brahmins at the higher end of the caste totem pole.

If religion is a carefully chronicled and recorded system of thought which explores the existence and origins of life at a higher plane, then hinduism is the best possible religion in that category.

As India grows and become an economic power there will be ghar vapasi and the flow may become reverse, why not?

The rest of what you have written is all politics. And we do not see eye to eye on that plane. LOL.

Click to expand...

Brahmanyan said:

This subject has appeared a number of times for discussion in the Forum.
What is Hindu or Hinduism, is it the name of a religion or religious way of living ? There is no legal or religious definition for the word.

Click to expand...

கால பைரவன்;323604 said:

Post # 12

I feel that these are arguments of convenience and do not represent the facts.

I think when it comes to benefits such as reservations etc every community is portrayed as shudras or coming outside the ambit of hindu religion i.e. the "brahminical" hindu religion. However, when it comes to practice of casteism among these communities or when they ill-treat the dalits or when the dalits practice casteism among themselves, these very same people somehow are considered brahminical!

We have people promoting Dr. Prabhakar Kamat or Kancha Illiah in this forum, whose arguments against brahmins is dependent on their convenient definition of being brahminical!

The non-brahmin communties want to play victims to claim benefits, but when they play oppressors they seek to put the blame on brahmins! This, they are able to achieve with no-small help from "brahmin-hating" brahmins. That the brahmins are not able to see through this is the sad reality!

Click to expand...

sangom said:

The said post (#12) was only to show that the three upper castes form not even 25% of the total population and not for any other purpose. The caravan article says the caste -wise census data was put on hold because these uppercastes have very little presence but still dominate all the government positions; and so the officer rushed to Raisina Hills for further orders!


Kamats are Konkana Saraswat Brahmins, though many of them do not observe any Brahminical life style. Yet, we cannot simply write off all Kamats, including Dr. Prabhakar Kamat simply because he tells the truth! Kancha Ilaiah is a Dalit and Is so. But he says his Dalit pov about brahmins and high castes. The disease affecting some of the brahmins seems to be that they have imagined themselves to be something supernaturally good, satwik and so on and if any evidence comes to the contrary, their minds reject it, without any rational scrutiny. People who hold a somewhat more open approach become 'persona non grata' for those diseased minds!

Click to expand...

Iyyarooraan said:

Talks of "minorities" and "secularism" were rhetoric so far as congress governments are concerned. They did try to keep a balance and each others sentiments at a bay. ModiJi is just deepening the cleavage and hence he is riding on 2 horses at the same time - One is primeministership and the other to support that. Every chance is there that he might fall between the two.

Click to expand...

In July 2013, communal violence flared in Nanglamal near Meerut in Uttar Pradesh (UP). Two people died and a dozen were injured when Hindus and Muslims clashed over complaints by the latter group of music blaring from loudspeakers outside a temple. The incident erupted into violence when a few Muslims switched off the temple loudspeaker and a Muslim mob beat up a few temple-goers.


This is but one example of communal violence in the tinderbox state of UP. The state is replete with incidents of communal violence over flashpoints such as music, procession routes, rumours of cow slaughter, of temple idols or the Quran being desecrated and so on. In each case, there’s a spark which lights the tinder, police are either inept or look the other way and local politicians who are leaders of different communities try to profit from the mayhem.


The most recent such incident which galvanised the nation was the lynching to death of a Muslim man in Dadri by a Hindu mob because he was suspected of having cow beef in his home.


In October 2014 in Bangalore in Congress ruled Karnataka, a well-known anti-cow slaughter activist was attacked and beaten by a Muslim mob for merely distributing his book arguing against cow slaughter.


Violence around consumption of meat need not even have a communal angle. In September 2014, in Bhopal in BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh, a group of female Muslim activists from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling for a vegan Eid, were threatened with stoning and stripping by a mob of Muslim men. One of the activists was badly roughed up.


In UP alone, incidents of violence associated with rumours or allegations of cow slaughter, which is illegal in that state as in many other Indian states, are legion. For instance in 2008, in Agra, riots broke out between Hindus and Muslim, after the mysterious deaths of seven cows. According to one report, a Hindu group present on location claimed they were protesting peacefully when stones were pelted at them by a Muslim mob.


It’s noteworthy that a firestorm of criticism has been directed towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) after the Dadri incident, some of it justifiably because of irresponsible statements made by some of its leaders and Modi’s prolonged silence. But the commenting class has completely let the Samajwadi Party (SP) in power in UP off the hook. One is led to believe that somehow Modi and the central government are to blame for a law and order failure in SP-ruled UP.


To put matters in perceptive, data from the Ministry of Home Affairs on communal violence tells a very sobering tale. As summarised here, there were 668, 823, and 644 incidents of communal violence nationwide in the years 2012, 2013, and 2014 respectively, the last three full years for which we have data. In each of these three years, UP recorded 118, 247, and 133 communal incidents, which resulted in 39, 77 and 26 deaths respectively, and, 500, 360 and 374 injuries respectively.


While UP has the dubious distinction of leading the nation in these statistics in absolute numbers, it must be noted in per capita terms, the state is not always the worst performer because it’s a large state.


Looking at incidents, UP’s share of the total is 18%, 30% and 20%, in these three years respectively. Given that UP accounts for approximately one fifth of India’s total population, you would expect incidents of communal incidence in the state to be in accordance with its population share. In 2012 and 2014 that was indeed the case, but in 2013, the year in which widespread communal violence took place in Muzaffarnagar, its share was much higher.


We can get more precise information on which states exhibit more communal violence than their population share by comparing each state’s incidence of communal violence with its share of the population over each of the last three years. (See charts for all states and union territories for the years 2012,2013 and 2014 respectively. Each dot represents the incidence of communal violence in a given state in a given year from which is subtracted its share of the total population of the country. The line through zero would be a state, which has the same incidence of communal violence as its share of the total population. Dots above the line represent states that have greater incidence of violence than their population share would suggest, and similarly, for dots below the line representing states that have a lower incidence of communal violence than their population would suggest.)


This statistical exercise reveals that as noted UP is slightly above average in 2012, 2014 but a huge outlier in 2013, a year after Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party became chief minister.


Other states in 2014 that exhibit a greater share of communal violence than their population would suggest, apart from UP, include Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Of these Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have long-standing BJP rule, Karnataka is Congress-ruled, while both Maharashtra and Rajasthan switched from Congress to BJP-led governments in 2014.


Recall that law and order is a state subject, so the political stripe of the party in power in a state is as relevant, if not more, than the party in power at the centre when looking at law and order disturbances. Looking at this data, it’s impossible for a fair-minded person to assert that there’s a greater prevalence of communal violence in either BJP or Congress ruled states.


Nor is it possible to assert on the basis of the available data, that there’s been some sort of upsurge in communal violence since the election of Narendra Modi and the BJP-led government at the centre in May 2014. There have been some dubious attempts to make such an assertion by looking at truncated and incomplete data. Thus it was asserted that communal violence increased by nearly 25% in the first five months of 2015 under the Modi government as against the first five months of 2014 during the last days of the UPA. The actual raw numbers are 287 incidents in January-May 2015 as against 232 incidents in the corresponding period 2014.


Leaving aside the fact there’s a relatively small absolute difference between the two numbers and there’s no way to know if the difference is statistically significant, the larger point is that by comparing any two arbitrary time periods, one can get just about any result you want. Thus, by using Ministry of Home Affairs data of the type analysed here, but using different start and end dates, one could reach a politically motivated conclusion like here that there’s a higher incidence of violence in states ruled by one political party or another.


To take an extreme case, suppose we compare March 15 across any two years and find that there was one incident last year and two incidents this year on that date. Would we then be entitled to assert a 100% increase in communal violence on that day? Of course, not. That would be like comparing the temperature on two different days a year apart and asserting that climate change is or is not accelerating. But yet Indian journalists, no doubt keen to score a political point, run with such comparisons.


Even more egregious are Indian journalists who claim that somehow communal violence associated with cow slaughter or other flash points is something new on the Indian scene since the election of the Modi government, whereas in point of fact there’s a long history of communal violence and indeed violence of all kinds in places like Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere.


Here a well-known data journalist who presumably ought to know better seems to be arguing that death instigated by issues surrounding cow slaughter is something new, whereas as we’ve seen it’s been a communal flashpoint for decades if not for centuries, at lease since the mid-nineteenth century when British colonial rulers stoked communal tension between Hindus and Muslims over cow slaughter issue as part of their wider divide and rule strategy. You just have to pick up a history book.




There appears to be what can most charitably be described as selective amnesia or, more likely, an agenda driven selective presentation of facts with the aim of trying to discredit the Modi government by creating the false impression that communal violence and intolerance is on the rise since their advent.


You have to ask the Sahitya Akademi award winners who’ve been returning their awards claiming that communal violence is on the rise in India, where are they getting their facts to make this assertion? Or is it a politically motivated stunt to generate publicity?


As I’ve shown, there’s absolutely no statistical basis on which to make such an assertion. The truth is, as any serious scholar will tell you, we’ll have to wait for years and decades of data to say whether there’s been any kind of change in the trend of episodes of communal violence in India or not. So anything you read that says there’s been an increase in communal violence is driven not by fact but by propaganda.


So much for claims about increase in communal violence in Modi’s India. But what we can be sure of is that perennial flashpoints between communities such as music, processions and so on will be spun as new and dangerous sources of conflict with no basis in historical understanding. Reader, take note.


Far from solving the sources of communal violence, such as an agenda-driven media narrative only serves to reinforce stereotypes and clichés. Meanwhile those who live in communally-sensitive and violence-prone areas in UP and other states serve as little more than pawns in a political game played by politicians and abetted by the media. Whether the BJP win or lose in 2019 or in upcoming assembly elections, the law and order problem in UP is not going to change anytime soon. UP will remain an exemplar of a massive governance failure. That’s the tragedy of a politically motivated mainstream discourse on communal violence.

Click to expand...

கால பைரவன்;323707 said:

Except neither the article nor the post that followed "showed" anything. Just listing a bunch of caste names and a bunch of other castes with "expected" population percentage now does not show that some or all of the listed caste names belong or belonged to the Shudra category now or in the recent past or for millenia! The article also did not show anything about "uppercaste" dominating government positions either! Just one line about what they call central gazetted positions that too in 1993! Maybe this member wants to browbeat everyone to believing whatever nonsense he utters to be the truth and the only truth; Questioning such non-sense does not make one diseased.

I am aware of myself, my family and plenty other brahmins and they ARE good, they do not deserve the hate-mongering that the likes of you and Kamat and Illaiah dole out without fail.

Click to expand...

sangom said:

People with some commonsense whose intellect is not afflicted by the "brahmin" disease, will be able to find enough sense in my posts.

Click to expand...

sangom said:

In the beginning, i.e., at the time the Purusha sookta was composed, the society had only four divisions of brahmins, raajanya or kshatriya, vaishya and soodras. Naturally, there is no statistics about the number of people under each category of those times but it is a safe bet to conclude that the migrants comprised of the three upper groups (just as it was in the ancient Persian society) and all the rest were the indigenous people of this sub-continent who were termed as Soodras and treated as serfs, just as it was in ancient Persia too.

This broad classification must have held sway for long times and only during the British rule, many castes/subcastes tried to upgrade their status or level (even some barber subcastes in some part of the country rename themselves as some kind of "nrAhmaNa" for this purpose, I have read.) but the British, as their policy, did not interfere in caste matters. Side by side there also was a trend of demoting various castes/sub-castes further down in the ladder with the result that many castes/sub-castes became soodras and untouchables over the centuries.

Click to expand...

The caste census of 1931 showed that brahmins formed 6.4% of the total population, Rajputs 3.7% and Banias 2.7%.

Click to expand...

For instance, in the industry I belong to, journalism, there was a survey in 2006 by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies that examined the social profile of more than 300 senior journalists in 37 English and Hindi newspapers and television channels in Delhi. The study found there was not a single Scheduled Caste (SC) or Scheduled Tribe (ST) person in a senior post. Brahmins alone, the survey found, held 49 per cent of the top jobs in the national press."

Hence it is a sure conclusion that most of the top jobs in government are occupied by the three higher castes.

Click to expand...

And the killing of a Dalit by a brahmin Poojary is one example of brahmins' tendency to be criminal minded, by the same rule by which you claim for the entire brahmin clan on the basis of "myself, my family and plenty other brahmins".

Click to expand...

renuka said:

Is there something called Hinduism in the first place? I do not think so.

What we call Hinduism today is a conglomerate of various school of thoughts...ranging from Shaivaism,Vaishnavaism,Shaktaism,Culturalism, Tribalism etc.

Everything has been grouped under one umbrella and given a new name that is Hinduism..countless new gods/goddesses were added as time went on to assimilate with the local population who would have had their own cultural believes prior to introduction of some amount of Vedic form of worship.

Coming to if Buddhist are majority ..will they allow Hindus to practice their religion? Frankly speaking hardly anyone in this world practices any form of religion in the true sense.

Many use religion just as a form of identity to hold on strongly for an ego boost of some kind.

The human ego will survive in some form or the other..so there is nothing to worry.

Click to expand...

Iyyarooraan said:

If there is a circle there will be many inner circles. Every religion suffers the same kind of malady. The older the religion the wider are the conflicts within. Congress has been losing because of non-secular forces. And none is happy. The joke is ModiJi is trying to graduate on Secularism in spite of BJP. The writing is on the wall. There is time yet for forces to realign, maybe for better or worse.

Click to expand...