Budhism - Why India should be Secular

["Sam Garg" <gargsam@hotmail.com>]

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There are some striking inaccuracies and outright misstatements in this
post.  I will highlight just a few:

1.  “The historical evidence shows that while Indo-European speakers did

come from outside, they came in various groups and waves; “

Current scholarship, both Western and Indian, has rejected both the
Aryan
Invasion and the Aryan Migration theories.  Prof. Witzel of Harvard
makes
this clear in his own website.

2. “there is no archeological evidence that they destroyed the Indus
civilisation,”

Absolutely correct.  Current evidence points to geological, topological
and
climatic variation leading to the decline if the IVC.  Among other
causes,
the drying up of the Sarasvati Satellite imagery showed the dried up
river
bed of the famous Sarasvati which was part of a massive drainage system.

3.  though t here is a good deal of evidence from the Rig Veda that the
Vedic peoples looked on others as dark-skinned inferiors, scorned them
and
treated them as enemies;

There is no such thing in the RV and this claim is not only ridiculous
but
quite inaccurate.  There is no “Vedic Peoples” versus “Others” divide in
the
RV, only a “Bharata family” versus “other families” divide.  In fact,
the RV
is properly described as a pro “bharata family” book where the Bharata
family was just one of many families in the Puru clan, which itself was
just
one of 5 clans of the ‘Chandravanshis’.  And, we have not touched on the

Suryavanshis yet!
Dr. Ketkar is right when he insists that ‘all the princes whether they
belonged to the so-called Aryan race or to the so-called Dravidian race,

were Aryas.  Whether a tribe or a family was racially Aryan or Dravidian
was
a question which never troubled the people of India until foreign
scholars
came in and began to draw the line.’ (Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in his paper
“Castes
in India”, reproduced in his Writings and Speeches, Gvt. of Maharashtra,

1986, vol. 1, p.21, with reference to S.V. Ketkar: History of Caste in
India, Low Price Publ., Delhi 1990 (1909), p.82)

4. “and theidea that the upper castes are descended from Aryans and the
lower castesfrom the conquered natives is simply unscientific: India is
a
land of fairly compete racial intermixing. “

Agreed.  Recent genetic studies have confirmed that the genetic mix in
India
has been unchanged at least since  5000 BCE.

5. “The social fact re mains, though, that many people believe, if not
in
the "Aryan theory" as such, that they themselves are the lineal and
social
descendents of Aryan s - and this isthe most damaging aspect.”

But this attitude is more an artifact of colonial (european and islamic)

racism/ marxist atomism which needs to be cleansed from Hindu society.
Europeans made aryans into a ‘race’ to feed their own egos – nobody has
yet
isolated an ‘aryan’ gene yet!

More later…..


Sanjay Garg



>From: "Mr. Henry Thiagaraj" <hremi@vsnl.com>
>Reply-To: debate@indiapolicy.org
>To: debate@indiapolicy.org
>Subject: Re: Budhism - Why India should  be Secular
>Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 08:51:24 -0800 (PST)
>
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>Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate it!
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>[Note from Moderator: Friends, please refrain from attaching any
documents
>to this email list (MSWord, HTML), as this system works best with text
>email, it took really long time for me to reformat this email in this
>format. Alternative would be to convert your HTML or Word document as
text
>and put them onto the body of email].
>
>prabhu.guptara@ubs.com wrote:
>
> >
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> > Please help make the Manifesto better, or accept it, and propagate
it!
> >
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> > dear Sanjay
> >
> > Please do not be patronising to 140 million of our fellow-Indians.
> > There are
> > people from all communities who "need to see themselves as part of
the
> > same
> > secular solution".
> >
> > At present, as is evidenced by some of the contributors to our
debate,
> > it is
> > mostly us Hindus who need to come to a conclusion about the value of

> > secularism
> > (I do not see a single Muslim in our debate, or for that matter
anywhere
> > else,
> > decrying secularism).
> >
>
>Dear Friends:
>Greetings of the Season! The attached file contains an article from
Gail
>Omveldt, an outstanding scholar on  Babasaheb Amedkar and Dalit issues.

>Some
>of you may be interested.
>With Best Wishes
>Henry Thiagaraj
>
>Buddhism And Brahmanism


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