Even before the tears of Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan’s mother could dry up, Congress general secretary and heir apparent Rahul Gandhi went partying with his pals at a farmhouse on Delhi’s outskirts.

The Prince partied hard, till 5 in the morning, on Sunday at the ‘sangeet’ for the forthcoming wedding of Samir Sharma, his childhood friend. They were at a sprawling farmhouse at Radhey Mohan Chowk, the haven of people who lead charmed lives beyond Chhatarpur.

Just a day earlier, his sister Priyanka Vadra had caused a flutter by saying the late Indira Gandhi would have “made us very proud” by the way she would have reacted to the Mumbai terror strikes. Mumbai appeared to be far from her brother’s mind as he boogied at the farmhouse with Samir Sharma, US-based furniture designer son of Captain Satish Sharma, the late Rajiv Gandhi’s flying partner who nursed the First Family’s pocketborough, Rae Bareli, till Sonia Gandhi chose to contest from there in 2004.

The Prince seemed to be completely out of sync with the mood of the nation post-26/11. Since Wednesday night, officials have been cancelling parties they were meant to host and even restaurants called off special events.

Saturday night’s ‘sangeet’ was a lavish affair. It was hosted by Leena Musafir, sister of the woman with whom Samir is getting married, and her husband Inder. The party was attended by over 800 guests, including regulars at Page 3 dos. “When everyone is cancelling parties or just keeping them low-key, Rahul Gandhi had no business to be celebrating. His action makes us lose faith in future leaders,” said Ajay Bahl, a leading corporate lawyer who was trapped in the thick of the action on 26/11 at The Oberoi, Mumbai, but managed to escape with the help of the hotel staff.

The Gandhis, including Sonia Gandhi’s mother Paola Maino, were present in strength at the 2004 wedding of Samir’s sister, Sarika, who is married to actorturned- TV producer Rahul Bhatt. Sarika and Rahul now manage a television production house.

The two families may be very close — Captain Sharma and his wife, Sterre, were present throughout the very private wedding of Priyanka Gandhi and Robert Vadra — but the circumstances now are very different.

As a guest at the ‘sangeet’ remarked on the condition of anonymity, “We were all partying, but none of us is a public person. Rahul Gandhi, however, is. He must be more responsible in his social appearances.

Courtesy: Mail Today

The Truth behind the Jammu Revolt by MV Kamath
If the Hindus of Jammu have erupted in volcanic fury, it has nothing to do with politics, but it has everything to do with the anger of a people who have for years been feeling betrayed and hurt by an effete and spineless government in Delhi run by a foreign-born Congress president and a smug bureaucrat, both of whom seem indifferent to Islamic brutality. All that the Hindus of Jammu had asked for was temporary transfer of a little less than 40 hectares of land to the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board to enable the latter to provide accommodation facilities of a purely temporary nature to Hindu pilgrims who visit the Shrine every summer.

That land sought was unused forest land of no significance or material use. The plan was to set up temporary shelter to the pilgrims and provide them with water and toilet facilities during their brief stay near the shrine. And this was to last no longer than just two months. Instead of being graciously helpful, the extremists and jihadis raised a hue and cry spreading rumours that the Governor, Lt Gen SK Sinha, was trying to bring Hindus from Jammu to settle in the forest land that could change the demography of Kashmir and the eco-cultural character of the State. How the temporary and fleeting presence of a few thousand people will change the eco-culture of any land is best answered by the hate-ridden jihadis themselves. Besides, Kashmir is not the exclusive preserve of Muslims. Kashmir belongs as much to Kashmiri Pundits who were there even before Islam itself came into existence.

But what have the jihadis done? They have ruthlessly driven the Pundits
from their ancestral homes. On January 4, 1990, Aftab, a Srinagar Urdu paper, published a press release issued by the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad in Kashmir. Notices were pasted to doors of Pundit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death. Three taped slogans were repeatedly played all night from mosques. One said: Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-o-Akbar kehna hai (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar). Another slogan said: Yahan kya chalega? Nizam-e-Mustafa (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah). A third unashamedly said: Asi gachchi Pakistan batao roas to bateney san (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).

In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them Kashmir Pundits, had been slaughtered. On September 14, 1989, a noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, had been brutally murdered. Soon after that, Justice NK Ganju of the Srinagar High Court had been shot dead. About the same time, Pandit Sarwanand Premi, an 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their eyes gouged out and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pundit nurse was abducted, raped and sliced to pieces at a saw mill. And these people are not people from Kerala or Tamil Nadu, not even from a nearby State like Punjab or Haryana, but right from Kashmir itself. Their crime was that they were Hindus!

Much is made of the J & K Government spending “a huge sum of money” on deploying “thousands of security personnel” to give protection to the pilgrims round the clock for two months, as if a big favour was being done to Hindu pilgrims. How much is “a huge sum of money”? How much, may one ask, is spent on Haj pilgrims? In 2007, India sent 157,000 Muslim pilgrims to Saudi Arabia of whom 1,10,000 went through the Haj Committee and 47,000 through private travel agents. A pilgrim travelling through the Haj committee spends only Rs 12,000 for his trip, whereas the air fare alone is Rs 40,000. The government gives a subsidy of Rs 28,000 to each pilgrim. According to official figures, the Central government spent Rs 280 crore as subsidy in 2006. Now, with rising oil prices, the amount may go as high as Rs 350 to Rs 400 crore. For Haj 2007, the government sent a contingent of 115 doctors (including 63 specialists with postgraduate degrees) and 141 nurses and other paramedical staff, three coordinators, 46 assistant Haj officers, 165 Haj assistants and 186 others known as Khadimul Hujjaj, to provide assistance to our pilgrims during their stay in Saudi Arabia. Some of the facilities provided by the government include arrangement for polio, meningitis and influenza vaccinations for pilgrims before their departure, a 75-bed hospital and 12 branch office-cum-dispensaries in Mecca, a 15-bed hospital and 12 branch offices-cum-dispensaries in Medina, three medical teams at Jeddah airport to provide medical aid round the clock to Haj pilgrims in case of emergencies, and 17 ambulances in Mecca and Medina.

What does the Kashmir government provide for Amarnath pilgrims apart from physical security? There is a separate Haj Cell in the Ministry of External Affairs. And the Haj Committee of India has its own huge premises in Mumbai as it has in other Indian cities built not on unused forest land but on costly urban land provided by State governments. But in Kashmir, Indian pilgrims on a visit to a holy place in their own country cannot get temporary shelter even in unused forest land. It is difficult to miss the irony of it all.

The truth is that Kashmiri Muslims do not want anybody to stay in the Valley of Kashmir except, one presumes, certified Muslims. The Kashmiri Pundits have long ago been driven out cruelly from their ancestral properties now occupied by Muslims. There were Hindus in Kashmir long before Islam came into existence. But now those self-same Hindus are not wanted. How else can one describe the Kashmiri Muslim attitude except as an approach moved by greed, selfishness and gross inhumanity bordering on the despicable?

In Kashmir nobody other than Kashmiris can buy land and live there, while Kashmiris of whatever religion can freely buy land anywhere else in India and no questions asked. So what are Kashmiri Muslims afraid of, considering that Kashmiri Hindus have already been driven out and all the Valley is theirs? And who, among Indians, would want to live amidst an ungracious, self-centred people guilty of large-scale genocide? The unhappy truth is that our secularists have no inkling of what is behind the revolt in Jammu. It is not political. It is not communal. It is a revolt against injustice.

The fault is not of the people of Jammu. The fault lies squarely on the hate-filled communalism of the jihadis, openly supported by Kashmir’s Muslim political parties and the indifference shown by the cowardly, mindless and effeminate UPA government.

The Bangalore Baptist Hospital, one of the most primary institutions used for conversions, delivers nearly 1,500 babies a year (about 4 a day) and treats more than 100,000 patients a year. Though these medical services are needed by the local population, there have been numerous reports of extortion by the local population. Many Indians have complained that the hospital only provides services to those who either pay an exorbitant fee or convert to Christianity. For many impoverished patients, they are forced to choose the latter in this life or death decision. Others complain that the hospital clearly discriminates against non-Christians and reserves a majority of the beds for those who have already converted to Christianity. The hospital also tries to convert patients when they in emotional distress. When a man died at Baptist Hospital some years ago, the staff gave the man’s wife and family a Bible and soon after converted the family.

CHENNAI, India (UCAN) -Christian fundamentalism has grown in India as neo-conservative Christian sects mushroom, says Pradip Ninan Thomas, associate professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Such groups use television channels to project “triumphalistic, narrow and sectarian understandings of Christianity,” Thomas observes in his new book Strong Religion, Zealous Media, a two-year study of modern-day Christian fundamentalism in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state.

The India-born scholar says these groups, which now monopolize Christian broadcasting in India, support narrow understandings of Christianity, and demean other religions and lifestyles, and their content includes anti-Hindu and anti-Islamic sentiments.

….

According to him, the new sects believe that only “born-again” Christians will go to heaven because they have “a hotline” to God. They so insist on converting the world to Christ, he said, that they even use politics.

Pentecostalism has emerged as the face of global Christianity, Thomas said, mainly due to the decline of mainline Churches all over the world.

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Although such activities use no physical violence, he continued, they cause mental violence, negate cultures and discount the belief systems of others. For this reason, he called for mainline Churches to move immediately to tackle the situation. These Churches to date, he said, have taken “an ostrich-like” attitude and defend Christians without addressing Christianity’s new exclusive expressions.

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Christians in India should acknowledge that Hindus now have a heightened sense of identity, he added, and an appropriate Christian approach in such a situation would be to learn to live with people rather than fight them.