Because for men, it teaches leadership – says Mr. Rizdam. And it helps women control their desires and jealousies and bring them closer to God, says Rizdam’s wife Dr Gina Puspita. Both of them are supporters of Polygamy Club (yes, you read it right) in Indonesia.

Coming to think of controlling the desires (and thus bringing their men closer to God), the women out there should have asked their husbands to stick to monogamy, right? So does this mean that the women don’t care if their polygamist husbands are rot in hell? But it is not just about Indonesia. About an year back, a famous cleric from Kerala had justified polygamy because “Women’s menstrual cycle prevents them from sexual contact for 5-6 days“!

Anyways, not all women in Indonesia think in the same line as Dr Gina Puspita. For example, Nursyahbani Katjasungkana says this:

“When the scripture revealed to the Prophet Muhammad its direction on polygamy, it was during the time of war,” she says.

“I believe it was a direction to the Muslims of that time that all the victims of war or widows and children who lost a father or a husband have to be protected. That’s the message of the scriptures – it wasn’t really a command to men to have a second or third or fourth wife.”

Three of my good friends who are Christians married Hindu girls. All three of them were either studying or working together when they first met and fell in love. The girls got converted to Christianity. What do I call this? Love Crusade? I would like to know what Catholic Church has to say about this.

Two of my Hindu friends married Christian girls. The girls got converted to Hinduism at Arya Samaj offices. What do I call this? Love Karseva? I would like to know what Viswa Hindu Parishat has to say about this.

I have mentioned this over and again in many communications that at least in Kerala, those who have to compromise on their religion for a wedding happen to be Women. I have said that this is more of a gender issue because I have never heard of a boy converting to his girl’s religion to get married.

However, when the boy happens to be a Muslim and the girl happens to be a Christian or Hindu, why is it linked to the word Terrorism and an immediate interest in calling it Love Jihad? Why is it that our media even called it an organization without even investigating a little? Why are they remaining silent now that the DGP has submitted a report before the court that there is no such organization and no indication of anything like Love-Jehad? How could the Catholic church shamelessly join hands with VHP in keeping the numbers of the herd intact?

To conclude, an old online acquaintance of mine who happens to be a Muslim married a Christian boy some years back. Both of them have not changed their religions.

What do I call THAT?

And now comes another blow at the Sangh Parivar and BJP. Straight from the head priest of Ram Janmabhoomi, Satyendra Das.

But Babri Masjid was demolished so that Ram Mandir could be built.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid was an unfortunate incident. It was like a mandir only [sic]. It protected Ram Lalla and pujas were regularly organised there. Thousands of devotees thronged the place. After they destroyed the masjid, Ram Lalla stands unprotected in storm and rain. There’s only a makeshift structure. They said they would build a mandir; their intention was to grab power. Earlier, nobody had a problem with the fact that pujas were held inside the masjid, nobody protested. But all problems started after the Babri Masjid was demolished.

Local Muslims never had a problem with pujas being held inside the Babri Masjid?

Nobody had any problem. They even used to say that let us all sit together and find a solution to the Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid issue. It was only when the BJP and the Bajrang Dal came and started the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that relations soured between the two communities. There was bloodshed, mandirs were destroyed. Now everything is normal again. It is not an issue in Ayodhya, never was. Hindus and Muslims have always lived in peace in Ayodhya. The BJP’s lust for power created all the problems.

Read more at Mid-Day.

(Image courtesy: Mid-Day)

The Communist party in Kerala was the only party to openly state that Muslim League is not a secular party. Their reasoning was simple, that Muslim League is a party consists of Muslims alone and it cannot be called a secular party. But it is not a secret that the CPM’s stand against Muslim League is based on League’s long-term alliance with Congress in Kerala.

But this is not the case with PDP or it’s chairman Abdul Nassar Madani. He was accused of
religious extremist activities earlier and was in jail for long. But he was acquitted of the cases against him and looked all changed and new when he came back from the jail. He said his fight would be against the imperialistic forces (read as America) and he will voice for the downtrodden and Dalits of India. But it does not seem all well and good for him.

An investigation into some recent terror incidents reported to have pointed out to Madani’s family. Majeed, an accused in the case of setting fire to a Tamil Nadu government bus in Kochi, has alleged that Madani’s wife Sufiya Madani had called him to avenge for Madani’s treatment in TN jail. Another case is about a Kashmiri militant (recruited from Kerala) who reportedly have had telephone conversations with Sufiya Madani.

These incidents come as an embarrassment not only to Madani’s new avatar, but to the Communist Party in Kerala as well. The Communist party has been against Muslim League for it’s so-called “communal nature”, but have no qualms in dragging PDP to it’s fold. Eyeing on the Muslim votes, particularly at Ponnani in Malappuram district, Madani has become the guarantor of Muslim votes for CPM in the upcoming elections. Many people in Kerala are worried about how this CPM-PDP alliance would influence the legal cases against Madani and his family. Not only that, the CPM allies in the Left front have openly come against an alliance with Madani, particularly the CPI, calling PDP as a communal party.

Madani has admitted that he had taken wrong steps earlier and promised that he would never go back to those days. His new avatar is of a savior for not only Muslims but of Dalits as well. Some people are of the opinion that Madani as a politician is better than Madani of the old days. But not many are sure as there are so many parties and organizations these days that bears the slogans of “anti-imperialism” and “anti-Americanism” and some people doubt that it is not based on an ideological level, but on a religious level. But the CPM is not worried about any of these and anything “anti-American” plus can get some votes would go well with them.

And do not forget Madani’s statements when he came out of jail. He had alleged that almost all party leaders had written to him when he was in jail, requesting his support during the elections. In his first public appearance after his release from jail, he had named leaders from all parties – Congress, CPM and… BJP.

It is not a secret that the Church in Kerala has always stood by the Congress party during elections. I have heard a story, that in the early days, during the Sunday sermon, the priest would raise his “hand” up in the air and say “every one should vote“. The raised hand was to indicate that the faithful should vote for Congress party, without openly campaigning for it. I am not sure how authentic this story is, but this was to point out the close alliance between the Congress party and the Church in Kerala.

In my days, I have seen politicians making frequent visits to the Vicars of Churches in their constituency as part of their campaigns. It was also during this time that the late Bishop of Thrissur, Mar. Joseph Kundukulam, compared K Karunakaran to Jesus Christ (I wrote an article in those days against the Bishop’s statement, in a handwritten magazine published by CLC – a Catholic youth organization). K Karunakaran’s friendship with Bishop Kundukulam was very infamous in those days.

Time flew and the Church softened it’s stand against Communists. But it did not last long. With the 7th standard text book and the self-finance college issues, the Church went on a rampant campaign against the Communists, under the leadership of Thrissur Archbishop Mar Andrews Thazhath and Changanassery Archbishop Mar Joseph Powathil. Now that the elections are approaching, different Churches in Kerala are taking different steps to make sure that they get a fair share of the political pie. But surprisingly, the Congress party chose not to play with the tunes of the Church.

First it was the Thrissur Archbishop, Mar Andrews Thazhath, who supported the candidature of Tom Vadakkan for Thrissur constituency. But the proposal was turned down by AICC, followed by a strong statement from the head of Syro-Malabar Church, Cardinal Mar Varkey Vithayathil. This statement has just added my respect to Mar Varkey Vithayathil, even though his is a lone voice in the Syro-Malabar Church supreme administration.

Cardinal Vithayahil, who is also the president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India (CBCI) says it is wrong for bishops, priests and Church leaders to intervene in the selection of candidates during the elections.

”The Catholic Church and Christian leaders should not intervene in party politics. Church can ask the people to vote for the right candidates, but should not involve in electioneering and selection of candidates for particular constituencies,” Cardinal Vithayathil told reporters. [ via ]

The Latin Church, which is an influential force in Ernakulam and Thiruvananthapuram districts have gone a step further. The Varappuzha Archbishop, Daniel Acharuparambil, sent a list of four candidates to Sonia Gandhi. But Ramesh Chennithala, the Congress chief of Kerala, rejected the communal interference.

The letter was written by the Varapuzha Archbishop Daniel Acharuparambil, who is also President of the Kerala Regional Latin Catholic Council, the body that looks after the social and other activities of the church.

The church has given three other names. The list does not contain the names of sitting Ernakulam Congress legislator and former minister K.V. Thomas or former Congress legislator and former minister Dominic Presentation. [ via ]

The Orthodox Church went even further. When their candidate request was turned down by Congress party, the Orthodox Church in Kerala decided to put up four candidates on their own for the polls. Now this is something new as no Church in Kerala has openly placed it’s candidates in elections.

The Orthodox Church had sent a letter to Sonia Gandhi expressing its wish that one of its members, who are active Congress supporters, be fielded. George Joseph, secretary of the church, said that the Congress had not even acknowledged the letter, said a report from IANS. [ via ]

The Congress party and Sonia Gandhi have wisely turned down the proposals from the Church supremos in all these cases which is a good sign. Or else BJP would have used this chance to accuse the “Christian” Sonia Gandhi playing in tunes of the Church. But now that will not have any substance.

It is clear that the faithful (except the ignorant lot and the power hungry creamy-layer in the community) is not going to blindly follow the orders of the Bishops like Mar Andrews Thazhath or Mar Daniel Acharuparambil. Because whenever the church has sponsored a Congress candidate, with public statements and pastoral letters, he lost. Edezhath, a close confidant of the high priests, lost by over 70,000 votes to an LDF independent in 2004 [via]. Thrissur in particular has a history of failing the over-confident power politicians. History has it that when Karunakaran contested from Thrissur he was defeated and when his son Muraleedharan contested from Thrissur in the very next polls, he too was defeated. In those two years, Thrissurians decided to send a noble man, V V Raghavan (of CPI), to parliament. And this year, it will be very interesting to see the results.

(Image source: Internet)

It looks like the Indian TV media has missed out another event of Talibanization which had occurred earlier this month – on January 16th in Mumbai. If the Mangalore incident was initiated by Hindutva brigade’s cultural-moral-religious guardians, the culprits of the Mumbai incident was self-styled Islamic religious police. This time the victim was a Pakistani woman and the attackers were a group of women. The crime? Sporting a tattoo that said ‘Shukr Alham Du Lillah’, meaning ‘Thank you, God’.

Mumbai Mirror reports:

Riyaz Ahmed Talukdar, a member of Jan Seva Sangh, a local NGO, had first spotted the tattoo on Saba’s back and informed his mother, Shabana Talukdar. Riyaz said, “When I saw the tattoo I was furious as holy words from the Quran were on her back.” Shabana, along with a few other women, then came to the mall in the next 15 minutes and confronted Saba in the washroom.

They slapped the girl several times before the mall management intervened.

Imagine what kind of image this incident, which forced the girl to leave the country, gives India before the world. I don’t know how our TV media has missed out this, but this doesn’t look good on them. They will only be taking bait from the Hindutva extremists by not giving prominence to the Mumbai incident and concentrating only on Mangalore incident.

It looks like justice is finally being done in the Sr. Abhaya murder case. After 16 years, the CBI has arrested and remanded two priests and a nun on Nov 18th and 19th. The CBI joint director Ashok Kumar said the arrests were made on strong evidence. It was evident from the news came out in May 2008 that the narco analysis points at Thomas Kottoor, Jose Poothrikkayil and Stephy as the culprits.

The arrest also renews my faith in our country’s judicial system. Reportedly, there were serious tampering of evidence right from the beginning of the case inquiry. The case was initially taken by Kerala Police and then moved to Crime Branch and finally to several teams of CBI. The Court intervened and severly criticized CBI and closely followed up the case. If not for the Kerala High Court and the latest CBI team, the case would have been lost forever and the arrests would never have been made.

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It is very common that religion being used for all the wrong purposes when it could have helped to enhance the lives of weak and the oppressed. Most of the times it would be the priests or clerics from a religion who would be misinterpreting the Holy Books to sustain their own interests and misleading the others within the community. The latest controversy about a comment from the senior Muslim cleric Kanthapuram A P Aboobacker Musaliar on polygamy shows that this trend still continues. Kanthapuram reportedly have said this: A second wife is biologically justified. Women’s menstrual cycle prevents them from sexual contact for 5-6 days.

His statement came in the backdrop of a state law reforms commission has come out with a draft bill to check polygamy and divorce by Talaq. The bill seeks that ‘monogamy shall be the rule’ and that ‘marrying again during the lifetime of husband or wife is an offence.’

The proposed bill wants that “if any married Muslim, man or woman, marries again during the subsistence of the first marriage, the party who violates shall be guilty of bigamy under the IPC and punishable as such.”

Read the rest of this entry

The Sangh Parivar and it’s supporters time and again have been saying that their violence is in response to centuries long oppression that Hindus had to face from it’s foreign invaders. They say Hindus had to suffer because of the tolerant nature of Hindus. They further explain that the Mughal raj, British raj, Missionaries and conversion are all results of this centuries long tolerance and universal acceptance of Hinduism. This has gained quite some sympathy from both national and international audience and is often used to justify the brutally violent acts of Sangh Parivar. But this story of tolerance is nothing but a myth.

Love, hate, tolerance and intolerace are all human traits. Religion could either enhance it or destroy it. The choice is left to the human beings. Jesus Christ taught the message of love and forgiveness to his disciples. He asked them to spead these words whereas some of his disciples simply went after spreading the religion and setting up it’s institution in the name of spreading his words. The abuse of Christianity had resulted in wars and religious persecution. Jesus Christ was gone and a religious institution had replaced him. This abuse continues to happen as we hear US president George Bush say “God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq… And I did“.

Similarly, Hinduism is a beautiful philosophy. Many of the Hindu holy texts contain some beautiful thoughts and ideas. But by practice, Hinduism was not that universally accepting. The most celebrated “universal acceptance” of Hinduism is primarily based on our racist mentality that exists even now. I remember a couple of incidents – of how a northie wrote that “Madrasi chicks look ugly” which got the entire blogosphere in to a north-south divide discussion and then the most recent one from the first ever BlogCamp Kerala in 2008. One (and only) foreigner who attended the BlogCamp Kerala wrote this in his blog after the blog camp:

People were taking picture of me like I was a tourist attraction. 100 guys, 3 girls and one Guillaume, and everyone is interested in the Guillaume.

Yes, that happened in a so-called intellectual part of the society. Similarly, you go to an event, you see an african-american man and you don’t even feel like sitting beside him. But if he was white, you would definitely use any chance that you could talk to him and be a friend.

The above mentioned is one simple example of the racist mindset that we have. We love the color “White” or anything “foreign“. Hence we had warmly welcomed the Whites and other foreigners. This is one thing that resulted in the British Raj. The rulers of that time while they were treating their downtrodden within their social system (Dalits and poor people) like pigs, welcomed their White friends who later became their masters. Their own racist mindset resulted in all these. British Raj, Missionaries and such. And people call that racist mindset tolerance and universal acceptance. And that racist mentality is exactly what the problem behind conversion. Because it resulted in helping the foreigners, deep-rooting caste-system and poverty in it’s own society which later lead to missionaries and conversion.

If love, tolerance and acceptance were religious inventions, there wouldn’t have been atheists who are as humanitarians as some religious figures. The only difference is that such atheists (and I am not referring to some of those urban atheists who say “I am an atheist” for fashion) do not put any religion’s label in their work. So whenever you hear the Sangh’s doctrine about tolerance and universal acceptance, think again.

I was happy to hear that the Kerala Catholic Bishops Conference (KCBC) conducted an inter-religious talk with various Hindu leaders today. It took place at Hotel Sarovaram in Kochi. The talk was intended to explain the activities of Catholic church and it’s missionary policy. When the communal hatred flares up, it is the duty of religious leaders to come together, have dialogue and make something positive out of it for the greater good of the society and nation. But my moment of joy faded away in a flash when I read that the leaders of Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and RSS where invited to the talks.

VHP and their pet organizations like Bajrang Dal are communal and religious extremist forces who are spreading hatred between Christian-Hindu and Muslim-Hindu communities. Their only political agenda is to gain supreme power in India and establish a Hindu Rashtra which is based on the One Nation, One Religion concept. And above it all, VHP and RSS do not represent the majority of Hindus (if it is so, we will have to say that the New Life Church or other such new-age evangelical churches represent Christianity or SIMI and Al-Qaeda represent Muslims). Their terrorist youth wing Bajrang Dal have been killing Christians and burning their properties in many parts of the country by cashing-in on the ordinary Hindu’s sentiments against some Missionary tactics. Such extremists need to be dealt with the law of the land. The Catholic Bishops should have urged and put pressure on the state and central Governments to jail the culprits like Bajrang Dal activists instead of choosing to have dialogue with their peers of VHP and RSS.

The extremist organizations like VHP, Bajrang Dal and their political wing BJP will not refrain themselves from their activities because they are only after power (by terror). By falling on their feet, the Bishops have done injustice to the innocent people (both Christians and Hindus) who have been killed in the Christian-Hindu riots which is a result of induced hatred by VHP and Bajrang Dal in Orissa, Karnataka and Kerala. When there are respected Hindu leaders from Chinmaya Mission, Kaladi Mutt etc and various Hindu organizations like SNDP and NSS who represent the majority of Hindus in Kerala (Chinmaya Mission, Sivarigi Mutt and Amrutanandamayi Ashram were invited to the event), why did the KCBC invite extremist people like Kummanam Rajasekharan and K P Sasikala? Were they stupid enough to think that this would make a change in the mindset of the extremists of VHP? And if the KCBC could invite the extremists of VHP and RSS, why didn’t they invite the Pentecostal groups who are aggressively into conversion business? Or is this showing the Kerala Catholic Church’s newly found love for VHP to fight their common enemy of Communism in Kerala?