Sita Ram Goel Quotes

Why does the West continue to maintain a museum piece like the Pope for whose sanctimonious postures the West itself finds it difficult to contain its contempt ?
Why does the West spend such staggering sums of money on propagating in Asia and Africa, a creed for which the West itself has no use ?
Why does the West let loose on the poor and unsuspecting peoples of Asia and Africa, whole platoons of priests and monks and nuns whom the West itself views as worse than a plague?
Why does the West proliferate in Asia and Africa a monolith like the Catholic Church which the West knows from its own experience as the worst repository of superstitions and totalitarian tyrannies ?
These are weighty questions for which the peoples of Asia and Africa have to find adequate answers. (111)

The Mission in its pristine purity could always be met in the Seminaries which trained team after team of native converts and turned them into saboteurs for Western imperialism. The brainwashed fanatics fanned out to every nook and corner of the country, manning mission stations and directing the task force behind the smoke-screen of services. They exploited every weakness in Hindu society and probed every soft spot in the Hindu psyche for promoting the Mission. (76)

The 19th century has been called the Great Century for Christian missions... It was so because it was the Great Century for Western imperialism. (73-4)

The Pope could not proclaim immediately that he was planning to take over the missions all over the world. Spain and Portugal were bound to protest and make things difficult for him. The new Congregation was supposed to supervise the missions and coordinate their activities. In due course, it came to be known as Propaganda from its Latin name—Propaganda di Fide, An otherwise innocent word was to acquire a bad odour in succeeding centuries because of its association with Popery. Though this department is still an integral part of the Pope's establishment at Rome, it has been renamed the Sacred Congregation for Evangelisation of Peoples. The shame which this set-up has brought upon the Pope by its close cooperation with Western imperialism for four-and-a-half centuries, is being sought to be hidden by a bit of linguistic surgery.(71)

There is, in fact, no end to the deceptions being designed by the Mission to pass off Christianity as a native creed, while more and more Hindus are being alienated from their ancestral faith and society and turned into instruments of Western imperialism. (71)

The missionaries had sensed from the very first that it was the Brahmin who stood in their way of breaking the barriers of Hindu society. But it was St. Xavier who made anti-Brahminism the central theme of his missionary thrust. ... After that, the killing and persecuting of Brahmins became the principal programme of the Portuguese. It became such a scandal as to be noticed specifically in the treaty which the Nayakas of Keladi in Karnatak signed with the Portuguese in 1671. The treaty laid own that the Portuguese shall not force conversions, nor take orphans, nor kill Brahmins. (64)

Frustrated on all sides, the missionaries advised their masters, the Pope and the king of Portugal, that the only way left for imposing Christianity firmly on Indian soil was the Rigour of Mercy to be employed wherever the Portuguese exercised absolute power over their subjects. This was a euphemism for the use of force for the spread of Christianity. The Pope agreed and the king of Portugal issued orders accordingly. Once again, it is a very well-documented story. Hundreds of Hindu temples in Portuguese possessions were demolished and churches were built out of the debris The lands and other incomes attached to temples were transferred to the churches. It was made a crime punishable with confiscation of property and imprisonment to make images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses or to worship them even in private homes. Hindus were prohibited to celebrate their religious and social ceremonies. Hindu sannyasins and yogis were forbidden to enter Portuguese territories. Brahmins were forced to attend church services compulsorily on Sundays. It was made increasingly difficult for Hindus to live in their ancestral homes by depriving them of the means of livelihood. Their places in trade and services were reserved for converts who were provided with many other incentives. Hindu laws of inheritance were altered so that a convert could claim a share of the parents” Properties during their life-time. Hindu Women who married Christians and got pouverted were offered rich dowries, Those who deserted their husbands for the new faith could get a share in the family Property. Every Hindu child whose father died was declared an orphan and taken away forcibly by the friars, Mothers and relatives refusing to part with the infants or hiding them away were severely punished. Hindus who removed their images to neighbouring Kingdoms or went to Worship them outside Portuguese Possessions Were liable to lose their civic tights and Properties. There were many other ways in which Hindus were humiliated and converts enabled to strut around as lords of all they surveyed. (p 62)

The record in respect of how the Catholic Church was imposed upon India by papal Bulls and Portuguese bayonets, is equally impeccable, It can neither be wished away, nor tailored to the current needs of the Church. There was a time when the Popes and the kings of Portugal were not at all secretive about their plans and methods. (58-59)

But when Vasco da Gama arrived in Cochin on November 1 1498, the Syrian Christians rallied round him in warm welcome. Some time earlier, Vasco da Gama had bombarded Calicut when the Samudrin (Zamorin) ruler of that place refused to be dictated by him. He had plundered the ships bringing rice to the city and cut off the ears, noses and hands of the crews. The Zamorin had sent to him a Brahmin envoy after securing Portuguese safe conduct. Vasco da Gama had cut off the nose, ears and hands of the Brahmin and strung them round his neck together with a palm-leaf on which a message was conveyed to the Indian king that he could cook and eat a curry made from his envoy's limbs. (53)

The missionaries who went with the Portuguese pirates to the various countries of Asia, could not match the performance of their brethren who were working with the Spaniards on the other side of the globe. The Asian countries were not inferior in the art of warfare on land. Nor could the guardians of great religions like Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Shintoism be easily confused by Christian casuistries. The missionaries could prescribe use of force only in small coastal pockets... (49)

Nehru ... simply picked up a prestigious word from the Western political parlance and made it mean the opposite of what it meant in the West. The outcome of this perversion proved disastrous.... In pre-Independence India, the "Muslim minority" had exercised a veto on who was to be hailed as "nationalist" and who was to be denounced as "Hindu communalist". Now the same "minority" reacquired the same veto on who was to be applauded as "secularist" and who was to be hounded out as "communalist". (Foreword)...After having studied Islamic scriptures and Islamic history as unfolded in my own country and abroad, I have reached the definite conclusion that Hindu society has committed a fundamental and suicidal blunder. ... The blunder is to recognize Islam as a dharma.(32)...It cannot be said that Islam had left anything undone in making itself well known. Slaughter of the defeated armies after they had surrendered, public auction abroad of thousands of men and women and children who had been captured and sent there, mass rape of helpless women, destruction of temples, burning of the sacred books of dharma, breaking of idols of the gods, plunder of all kinds of property - all these doings of the Islamized Arabs have been applauded by the Muslim theologians and historians and proclaimed as the great triumph of Islam. (33)...Nor is there any indication that anyone censured the swindlers known as sufis on account of their questionable character. ... In the khanqahs (monasteries) of these sufis, there were caged those helpless Hindu women who had been captured by Ghaznavi and presented to them as their reward. (35)...Most of the historical masjids and khanqahs found in India today, have been built by destroying Hindu temples... many other atrocities - rape of helpless women, dishonouring and killing of sadhus and saints, cold-blooded slaughter of people defeated in war including the young and the aged, capture and sale of Hindu men and women and children as slaves, ...... (38)...But no Hindu took the trouble to know the fact that practising deception with the Kafirs was sanctioned by the scriptures of Islam... But Gandhi's slogan of sarva dharma samabhava, had sent the country into a deep slumber. (47) ... Some of them joined the Communist Party, and began to advance the designs of Islam behind the smoke-screen of progressivism. (47)

Still more serious was the emergence of an insidious image of Hindu personality as a direct result of this loss of the national perspective on Indian history. In due course, most Hindus, particularly the English-educated Hindu elite, have been made to believe that a Hindu is not true to himself nor to his religion and culture unless he 1) honours as his own heroes all those invaders and crusaders who demolished his temples, desecrated the images of his Gods and Goddesses, burnt his Shãstras, humiliated his holy men, dishonoured his women, pillaged his property, massacred his countrymen en masse, sold his children into slavery, trampled upon every symbol of his religion and culture, and coerced his co-religionists to swear by an aggressive and intolerant dogma glorified as the Kalima; 2) shows reverence for an ideology of calculated and cold-blooded gangesterism masquerading as the only true religion; 3) pays homage to all those pretenders, scoundrels, and hoodlums which this ideology presents as its sufis, saints and heroes; 4) practises patience and tolerance towards those who vow openly and work ceaselessly to destroy his religion and culture, and to take forcible possession of his homeland; and 5) is always prepared to surrender everything he possesses or cherishes in order to avoid violence and bloodshed.

On the other hand, we have come out of the latest contest more confused than ever before, so much so that while a highly humanitarian national culture gets condemned as a narrow and militant communalism, an ideology of totalitarian terror gets registered as a religion, a closed and theocratic creed struts about as secularism, and a fanatic fraternity addicted to frequent rounds of violence passes for a “poor and persecuted minority”. The situation is far from reassuring.

Let us not be taken in by the howls of contrived grievances which the spokesmen of Islam in India have started hawking in increasingly hysterical voices. In the history of Islam this has always been a prelude to predatory action. Hajjaj had hawked some grievances against Raja Dahir on the eve of equipping an armed force more formidable than any that had ever been sent against Sindh. The Pirpur Report of the Muslim League was only a preparation for the demand for Pakistan.

The one lesson we learn from the freedom movement as a whole is that a religious and cultural awakening in Hindu society has to precede political awakening. The language of Indian nationalism has to be the language of Sanatana Dharma before it can challenge and defeat the various languages of imperialism. The more clearly Hindu society sees the universal truths of Hindu spirituality and culture, the more readily it will reject political ideologies masquerading as religion or promising a paradise on this earth.