Babubhai Katara,BJP MP from Gujarat, is the news right now for trying to take a woman and a 16 year old boy to Canada. So what's wrong? Nothing. It's perfectly normal for a man to take anyone along with him anywhere. But what if he was trying to take them on his wife's and son's passports? The immigration authorities detained the trio at the IGI Airport at New Delhi yesterday for questioning. There's a human trafficking angle to the story that is now being investigated.
Hindutva and Katara - what's the connection? When Vinayak Damodar Savarkar coined the term Hindutva in 1923, little did he imagine that it's upholders would be people like Babubhai Katara. The BJP swears by the Hindutva ideology.Hindutva or Cultural Nationalism presents the BJP's conception of Indian nationhood. Sadly, for the people who form the BJP it remains just an ideology.Something that's too hard to practice in reality.
This excerpt written by Jagmohan from The Hindustan Times, is from the BJP's very own website. Read on...
"Politics is increasingly coming under the sway of criminals and the corrupt. India's intellect is getting more and more disintegrated. Her emotions are being daily debased by the beams from sky. She is being virtually robbed by new agents of new imperialism and pushed, to use the words of T.S. Eliot, "Father from God and nearer to dust". And in "the kingdom of the deaf", to which the country is being increasingly reduced, the common man cries in vain: where is truth? Where is justice? And where is the great India which every leader promised to build at the dawn of independence?
The fundamental challenge that the country faces today is how to provide a healthy soil and a healthy climate in which the seeds of her constitution can get embedded deep into her psyche and flower into genuine articles of faith. And this challenge can be met mainly by redefining her cultural heritage and by reconstructing the Hindu thought and by washing out the mud and muck that her culture and religion have accumulated in the course of its long march of 5000 years.
The pure has to be separated from the fake and profound from the profane.The gems have to be picked up and the stones thrown away. Only a regenrated culture and re-awakened Hinduism can answer the country's manifold fields. The need for re-invigoration of Hinduism, which has been exposed to ravages of a vast span of history, is obvious. In fact, Hinduism itself recognises that change and dynamism are parts of life and of cosmic reality. It believes that the universe is continuously changing. It has its own creative process, its own self-generating flux.
One dynamic equilibrium is continuously giving way to another dynamic equilibrium. It is time we restored the long dynamic equilibrium of Hinduism, rejuvenated it and used it to carve out a new style of social and cultural life, a new design for our polity and administration. A fresh constructive and creative impulse, therefore, needs to be imparted to Hinduism so that it can bring on the scene a new Hindu, a Catholic, compassionate and contemplative Hindu with a clean conscience, a Hindu who cherishes the positive values of our culture, of 'tyaga' and 'tapasya', of 'satyam', 'shivam' and 'sundaram', and is ever-willing to synthesize them, in the highest tradition of Hindu thought of 'moving from a lower level of truth to a higher level of truth', with new knowledge and new perceptions that have since become available to mankind."
I wonder how often the BJP and its members refer to this article.
Today it's a Katara from the BJP, tomorrow it could be someone else from another party. Like Jimmy Carter said, the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.
Oh well...!
