Boom Blast In Goa

[harmandeal]

http://worldsikhnews.com/21%20October%202009/Image/WSN-12-13.pdf

Hindutva Terror

Sach Kanwal Singh

Ugly militarist face of saffron Hindutva’s terror outfits is being revealed in India. After Malegaon and Orissa’s anti-Christian atrocities comes the blast in Goa. Now, it is clear that the blast was the work of Sanatan Sanstha, a right-wing extremist Hindu organisation that, like tens of hundreds of others, thrives on a philosophy of hate against the minorities, a philosophy that is blessed by right wing RSS and BJP in India.

On Friday, a low-intensity crude bomb went off around 10 pm at a crowded Diwali celebration in Margao in Goa where Chief Minister Digambar Kamat was present. Two men were badly wounded in the blast of the bomb that was placed in a scooter parked near Grace Church Marg and later one died.

By Sunday, it was clear that the bomb blast was the work of Sanatan Sanstha, a right-wing extremist Hindu organisation that, like tens of hundreds of others, was thriving on a philosophy of hate against the minorities, a philosophy that is blessed by right wing RSS and BJP in India.

The Goa government has set up a Special Investigating Team (SIT) to probe the blast. The man who was killed Malgounda Patil, was a member of Sanatan Sanstha, as was Yogesh Naik, the one who was injured. Now, police says both were planning to plant the bomb but it went off before they could get to their target. Police also found two more crude bombs near the scooter, a third was found in Sancoale town, about 20 km from Margaon, close to an effigy of the demon Narkasur, which is set ablaze during Diwali celebrations to symbolize the victory of good over evil.

The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) which had earlier too uncovered saffron terror bodies and the role of some so-called religious figures, is investigating the Sanstha's links with the perpetrators of the 2008 Malegaon blasts. Sanstha’s ashram-cum-headquarters in Ramnathi village in Ponda tehsil are under the lens while its printing press in Nivse near Margao is also being probed.

Prithviraj Hazare, group editor of Sanatan Prabhat, the Sanstha’s mouthpiece in Marathi, four editions of which reach a fairly large readership in western Maharashtra and Konkan, was detained for questioning on Sunday.

The Sanstha initially denied its role in the blast but then owned up Patil, the man who died in the blast, decribing him as "a sadhak" (follower). As for the blast, it said it was engineered by “unidentified people”.

Sanstha activists precipitated Miraj violence by distributing magazines with communal content. Activists of Sanstha’s sister organisation were earlier held for attacks on theatre houses. Inflammatory — and often inventive — polemic characterises the Sanstha’s propaganda.

“The organisation is with the family of Patil, who was our follower, during this trying time,” said the mouthpiece.

The Goa Police had raided the Sanstha’s Ramnathi village ashram within hours of the blast, and detained Degvekar, Shinde, Naik and Marathe for questioning. Police said Degvekar and Shinde shared a room with Patil at the ashram. Suresh Naik is Yogesh Naik’s brother. Yogesh, who was injured along with Patil, is critical.

While Degvekar and Patil are from Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg and Sangli districts respectively, Shinde is believed to be from Pune. Police suspect Suresh Naik bought the scooter used in the explosion.

Patil was associated with the organisation for about two years. A native of Jat in Sangli, he used to be a propagandist for the Sanstha. He had visited the Ramnathi ashram eight days before the blast. Both Shinde and Degvekar were sharing a room with Patil and were doing the computerised art work of the organization.

The Goa-headquartered Sanstha is very active in parts of Maharashtra.

By Monday, the can of worms seemed wide open. Goa home minister Ravi Naik asked police to probe the links of state transport minister Ramkrishna Dhavalikar’s wife, Jyoti Dhavalikar, with the Sanatan Sanstha. Jyoti Dhavalikar was part of the Hindu hate-spewing outfit for four years now through the Bandora branch which ostensibly published magazines. Jyoti is also associated with Hindu Dharma Jagruti Sabhas held by various right-wing outfits, including Bajrang Dal.

Now, the Goa government is contemplating a ban on the Hindu group but it is not clear whether it will be only a ban in the state or countrywide. Advocate General Subodh Kantak said the issue was still being discussed.

Many are projecting Sanatan Sanstha as a militant group and are talking of its association with Pragya Singh Thakur, one of the main accused in the Malegaon blast on September 29 last year which killed six persons.

Goa home minister Ravi Naik asked police to probe the links of state transport minister Ramkrishna Dhavalikar’s wife, Jyoti Dhavalikar, with the Sanatan Sanstha. Jyoti Dhavalikar was part of the Hindu hate-spewing outfit.

Pragya owned the scooter in which the explosives in Malegaon were planted, just like Malgonda Patil, who was killed in the blast at Margao, owned the scooter in which the explosive was planted. Police is also questioning Jayant Athavale, chief of the Sanstha.

Investigations show that Patil, the man killed in the blast, was in his home district of Sangli in Maharashtra last month when it was hit by communal trouble over the depiction of a Shivaji cut-out during the Ganesh festival. He had evaded Goa police when they sought information about the activities and funding of the Sanstha ashram in Goa a few weeks ago.

The Sanstha's controversial past is not new though it hit headlines only now. The Maharashtra ATS had arrested Sanstha members Ramesh Hanumant Gadkari, 50, and Mangesh Dinkar Nikam, 34, in June last year in connection with crude bombs planted at auditoria in Thane and Vashi which were hosting a Marathi play the Sanstha had criticised. They were also suspected to be behind a small blast in February 2008 in a Panvel theatre screening Jodhaa Akbar.

Subsequently, four more Sanstha members, including 26-year-old Bhave, were arrested and raids at their properties in Warsai village of Pen in Raigad district yielded two revolvers, a large quantity of ammonium nitrate powder, 20 detonators, 19 gelatin sticks, timers, voltage meters, two radio circuits and remote controls.

Patil, an active member of the organisation in Goa and Sangli, was present in Miraj during the Miraj riots. Police is also probing the foreign links of the Sanstha because its Goa office was frequented by foreigners who were also found during the raid after the blast.

The police has questioned scores of residents of the ashram of Sanstha that was founded in 1990 by Jayant Athavale, a hypnotherapist. The Sanstha claims its aim is to "present spirituality in a scientific language". Those who live in its ashram are called saadhaks or seekers. They include retired government employees, engineers and homemakers.

On the face of it, the Sanstha is almost a quixotic cult where arcane discussions like differing merits of lamps using ghee and oil take place. But scrape underneath the surface and you see the other, poke marked face. Followers seeking to leave its ranks are coerced and harassed. It is seeking to have branches in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The Goa government is contemplating a ban on the Hindu group but it is not clear whether it will be only a ban in the state or countrywide.

The idiosyncratic facade and an ugly militarist face go hand in hand. Last year, Sanstha-linked Dharmashakti Sena chief Vinay Palwalkar proclaimed a coming apocalyptic war: “the war of the future will be a Dharamyudh, and the Dharamshakti Sena will be its guiding force.” Inflammatory speeches and rhetoric are common.

Discussing September’s riots in the town of Miraj, the organisation’s house-magazine Sanatan Prabhat’s October issue described the violence as “a well-planned attack on Hindus by Afzal Khan’s [a 17th century Bijapur warlord] Muslim descendants.” “Now,” it continued, “Hindus need to become warriors of Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj to repel such attacks.”

Police in Miraj say Sanatan Sanstha activists, in fact, precipitated the violence, by distributing magazines with aggressively communal content and forcing shopkeepers to down the shutters. “Fed up of Muslim innocence,” the magazine reports, “Hindus [gave] a fitting reply.” “As a result of the riots in Miraj,” the article reads, “Muslims in villages were getting inspired to become insolent. Hindus, however, had enough of their insolence and started retaliating. A mob pelted stones and damaged mosques at 7 places. Thereafter, saffron flags were hoisted on these mosques.”

Much of the reporting in Sanatan Prabhat appears to have no great concern for the distinction between fact and fiction.

The Sanstha puts up a milder face calling itself Sanatan Society for Scientific Spirituality. Their Web site talks only about meditation and spirituality, and includes philosophies of all religions including Islam and Christianity.

As a senior cop said, “That’s how they operate. The parent organisation is always the softer one, while the affiliate is the aggressor. They are all closely associated and have connections with other right-wing organisations. In a public meeting that that Sanatan Sanstha had organised, Sri Ram Sene Chief Pramod Muthalik addressed in Udupi on January 17, he told audiences that ‘Malegaon was a jhalak’. He also said ‘a lot more was possible, if every woman picked up bombs like Sadhvi Pragya, instead of ladles’.”

“Police,” one report claims, “have now discovered a kidnapping racket to provide recruits to Pakistani terror outfits through ‘Love Jihad.’ Investigations have revealed that all over India some 4,000 young women have been recruited in this manner to be trained against their will as terrorists and suicide bombers. In Kerala alone, the police suspect that over 500 women have fallen victim.”

Images like these have long been known to have incited members of the organisation to engage in acts of terrorism.

Last summer, bombs went off at the Vishnudas Bhave Auditorium in Vashi, and the Gadkari Rangayatan in Thane. Both theatre managements had disregarded Hindu chauvinist protests against the play ‘Amhi Pachpute,’ a wry reworking of the Mahabharat by Santosh Pawar which is set around the travails of two middle-class Maharashtrian families locked in a dispute over a paan store.

Maharashtra police investigators arrested Ramesh Gadkari, Mangesh Nikam, Santosh Angre and Vikram Bhave for the terrorist attacks. All four men were activists of the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, an ultra-right Hindutva political group which the Sanstha lists, on its website, as a sister organisation. The men were, at the time of their arrests, reported to be living in retreats run by the Sanstha.

The investigators found that the men had earlier attempted to set off an improvised explosive device targeting a mosque on the Pen highway. Nikam, for his part, was found to be on bail facing trial for having set off a low-grade bomb in the home of a Ratnagiri-based Hindu family that had converted to Christianity.

Sanstha is possibly linked to Akhand Bharat — the Hindutva terror group responsible for the murderous 2006 bombing of a mosque in Malegaon. In a cartoon published in the Sanatan Prabhat, a police officer and a Muslim are shown kicking a Hindu. “Hindus,” its caption reads, “unite and become strong to end this brute rule.”

Akhand Bharat cadre had planned to do just that. In an audio-tape recovered by the Maharashtra police investigators, alleged Akhand Bharat operatives Prasad Shrikant Purohit, R.P. Singh and Dayanand Pandey discussed plans for displacing the Indian government, authoring an alternative constitution, setting up of a government in exile in Israel, and instituting a criminal procedure code which would include public corporal punishment.

This is what the website of Sanatan Sanstha contains

If you want to bring some sanity into fanatic Muslims …

“Hindus are facing open atrocities and injustice from Muslims wherever they are strong either in numbers or in power. If this is to be prevented, then wherever they are weak in numbers or in power, they should be pressurised in such a way that they ask for mercy; only then will we be able to survive where we are less in numbers !” - Swatantryaveer Savarkar, 1925 (http://sanatan.org/eng/masik/2009/10/issues.htm#news45)

Saffron Terror

The 1980s and early 1990s saw India tarring the Sikhs as terrorists. Who does not remember the kind of laced-with-poison advertisements of the Congress that appeared in national media depicting a Sikh taxi driver with the punch line: "Would You Send Your Daughter To School With This Man?"

Currently, India is busy for the last few years stereotyping the Muslim-is-likely-to-be-a-terrorist line. Day in and day out, right wing Hindu fundamentalist ultra nationalist RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal and their myriad fronts and organizations are busy in this propaganda, pushing Muslims into a shell or making them defensive in school classrooms, college campuses and drawing rooms of good people like you and us.

Then came the revelation, something that many saner minds were throughout pointing to but which was being brushed under the carpet by governments of all hues. Neither the BJP nor the soft communal Congress wanted to lose the huge Hindu and Hindutva votebank. So no one was talking about it.

When radical Hindu activists like Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and others were arrested, the BJP and VHP was marshalling lawyers, the Bajrang Dal was bringing the hordes to the court, and ultra Hindutva parties had offered to give them Lok Sabha tickets. Nothing very different is happening now.

Till a killer terror bomb blast culprit left behind tell tale clues in the Malegaon blast. The culprit who planted the bombs left behind the motorcycle owned by the ‘pious religious minded committed to her god Sadhvi Pragya Singh’. He left behind witnesses too. The myth was shattered that only Islamist fundamentalism breeds terrorism. Indeed the Sangh Parivar’s loaded argument has been that while all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslim. Saffron rabble-rousers have had no compunction in lobbing this charge at the Muslim community as a whole.

Now, the blast at Goa has led the police to Hindu hate spewing body once again. The atrocities on Christians in Orissa were clearly led by the RSS minded Hindu bodies.

For the RSS, it has become an article of faith to link Islamist fundamentalists with terrorism. Now, it is getting more blatant. When radical Hindu activists like Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and others were arrested, the BJP and VHP was marshalling lawyers, the Bajrang Dal was bringing the hordes to the court, and ultra Hindutva parties had offered to give them Lok Sabha tickets. Nothing very different is happening now.

Clearly, terrorism is too serious a challenge to be left to opportunistic, subjective interpretation of softcore Hindutva minds. Combating terror is a responsibility government and political parties across the spectrum must take up in a united and cooperative way.

[harmandeal]

:rolleyes::rolleyes: could it sikhs

[Papi]

There is no such thing a unbiased news.

[SaRpAnCh]

LOL RSS lot bombed themselves

[harmandeal]

we allways get this coment when its comes to hindutava