Congress says toilets better than temples

By Rajeev Srinivasan

Congress Minister Jairam Ramesh said something the other day that was clearly flame-bait, that is, a gratuitous insult, not to mention something at variance with the facts. Ramesh said that toilets are more important than temples.

This is notably inane for several reasons. First, he didn’t say toilets are more important than Churches, or that toilets are more important than Mosques. He didn’t, for very good reason. If he had said either of these things, he would have been in serious trouble. However, he knows that hate speech against Hindus will not get him in trouble. On the other hand, it will get him brownie points with the hate-Hindu brigade; and so it has happened.

This is par for the course, and another example of the apartheid practiced against the minority Hindu population. I use the word minority advisedly. If you look up any encyclopedia, you will see that there are some 2.5 billion Christians in the world, and some 2 billion Muslims. So they form the majority of the world’s population of about 6.5 billion — any other religion is a minority religion.

Far from being given legal protection as a minority community, Hindus are hounded, offended and demeaned at every turn, especially by the Congress and other ‘pseudo-secular’ types in India. This religious bigotry is the same as racism, and is not acceptable in any civilised society.

Second, it is a little-known fact that temples were traditionally the centres of all civic activity — education, famine relief, dam-building, entertainment, and all sorts of other activities were centered in the village temple until the time imperialist Christians deliberately impoverished temples by taking away the land that had been bequeathed to them in perpetuity.

This was done most visibly by the religious bigot Colonel Munro in Travancore circa 1819 CE. He coerced the regent Maharani of the state at the time into commingling temple lands with Government lands. Thus the loot of temple property by governments started in Kerala then, and continues unabated till today. All temples, but not a single church or mosque, are administered and looted by the Government’s Devaswom Board — surely a contradiction in an allegedly ‘secular’ state, which should be equally benign or equally malign to all religions. The Indian soi-disant ‘secular’ state is malignant only towards Hindus.

Oh, and by the way, Colonel Munro forced the Maharani to donate Rs 10,000 to the Church in 1819 CE. With a modest assumption of 6% inflation, that is worth Rs 765 million today. At a more realistic 10% inflation, that money is worth almost a billion rupees today. Given away, gratis, tax money.

Third, and I am indebted to blogger Karyakarta for this thought, if there are too few toilets in India, well, exactly whose fault is it? It is the Congress that has been ruling for the vast majority of the last 65 years, and it is indeed a national shame that people defecate all over the place. How about a program to turn all those taxpayer-funded shrines to the glory of the Nehru Dynasty, starting with Jawaharlal Nehru University, into giant public toilets?

Fourth, Congressmen have been in the habit of talking trash about temples. Jawaharlal Nehru said, infamously, that the new temples of India were its dams. Fifty years later, it is quite clear he was talking through his hat, and his fantasies about a socialist paradise, a la the Soviets, were hogwash.

I am reminded of an in-joke in Silicon Valley some time ago. Sun Microsystems had the rather confusing motto: “The network is the computer” (which has come true now with cloud computing). In response, Apple Computer came out with a snarky T-shirt that said, “The network is the network. The computer is the computer. Sorry for any confusion”.

Likewise, Congresspeople, the temple is the temple. The dam (or toilet) is the dam (or toilet). Sorry for any confusion.

Read more @ http://www.niticentral.com/2012/10/congress-says-toilets-better-than-temples.html