While the weekend passed in a summer haze of bliss for many of us, the rest had their Saturday ruined by ridiculous statements made by Sadhvi Deva Thakur, Vice President of the All India Hindu Mahasabha. Thakur stoked controversy by saying that Muslims and Christians must undergo sterilisation to restrict their growing population, which was posing a threat to Hindus.
“The population of Muslims and Christians is growing day by day. To rein in this, Centre will have to impose emergency, and Muslims and Christians will have to be forced to undergo sterilisation so that they can’t increase their numbers,” she said.
This is not the first time that she has courted controversy in this manner. In the recent past, Sadhvi Deva Thakur exhorted Hindus to have more children and increase their population so as to have an effect on the world. In another controversial remark, she said idols of Hindu gods and goddesses should be placed in mosques and churches.
Sadhvi’s remarks may bring back memories from the past for many of us. Memories of another emergency declared by the Centre in 1975, under Indira Gandhi’s governance, during which her son, Sanjay Gandhi implemented a forced sterilisation program. And we all know what happened to that government during the next elections. It also takes some of us back to Germany in the 1930s, when a mad racist named Adolf Hitler decided to obliterate the entire Jewish population off the face of the earth.
The saffron brigade’s provocative behavior is again going unchecked by the BJP government, despite repeatedly being warned about it by world leaders, by the media and despite poor rating among democratic countries by U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in 2014. At this rate, we shall pretty soon arrive at the brink of a series of religious riots that will put any progress we have made back by a decade. Civil society as we know it today may change altogether.
At times like this, I am sure we all wonder who are these people whom we have voted into power. The Indian public has unwittingly played Frankenstein during the General Elections of 2014 and created a religious monstrosity. It also makes some of us think nostalgically of the UPA governance where the only problems we dealt with were rampant corruption, a mute Prime Minister and an idiot crown prince. That’s a picnic compared to the kind of communal pogroms that the saffron brigade is attempting to organise.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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