The New Indian Express has disclosed alarming news by a well-known commentator S Gurumurthy on Wednesday. What is well-known is that there is a sublime lady Mata Amritanandamayi whose Ashram is near Kollam, lovely and near the backwaters. I had visited the Ashram only once, met Mathaji only once and found a peaceful lady. Very simple and her whole life seems committed to serve society through hospitals, educational colleges and other allied institutions of repute.
Of course, she has such institutions in Kerala which has essentially Hindu ethos but I have not seen a trace of communalism in the hospitals or the medical staff or the nurses who are a militant lot who had recently won a strike for dignity and decent emoluments.
The article raises issues against the government and its police establishment. Certain disturbing questions raised in the article are matters of public importance.
I wonder whether the government is sensitive enough to investigate the points raised and whether any policy decisions have been reached to assure secularism, public peace and elimination of lunatic hostility by Islamic values. If it has, it should be given due publicity because more than Mathaji and the rising trend of infiltration of Islam into public institutions, we must have the preamble to the Constitution and its values like integrity, fraternity, liberty, equality, justice, social and economic as fundamental in the governance of the country.
If the government neglects its duty, chaos, terrorism and corruption can abound and after a time their behavioural barbarities may become beyond khaki control. This is not a matter of concern of Mathaji’s institutions alone but breed foul on the sentiments of Hindus and in turn, of communal rabid trends.
Dear Chief Minister, I regard you as a statesman beyond narrow fanaticism and crass superstition. Dear Prime Minister, I regard you too to be a secular statesman who came to Kerala and made a brief speech on Emerging Kerala.
It is time that the Central and State Governments alert themselves on subversive movement not merely in a Naxal or Maoist violence but also subversive movement propagating communal sentiments.
No temple, no mosque, no church while free to function can be allowed to be agencies of terrorism. A stitch in time saves nine.
Now Dear Chief Minister and Prime Minister, take up a national investigation at the state and the central level and discover what is latent in these bedlam movements.
Have a commission if necessary. What is in time today may be too late tomorrow. Will the media of national stature and vernacular publicity heed my appeal to ensure the culture of secularism? Today diversity of theology has made solidarity, humanity and divinity values on their way out and lunatic theology becoming rabid pathology.
Hasten, arise, awake and stop not till socialism, secularism and democracy become impregnable forces in our polity. Satnam is not alone and is not dead nor is Bismillah eclipsed. Both are dangerously waiting for a fresh opportunity to display barbarity.
(The views in the article are the author’s own)