Author: Rashmee Roshan Lall
Publication: The Times of India
Date: December 30, 2005
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1353212.cms
Thirty-five years after a fateful clandestine
meeting in Moscow between ISKCON founder Swami Prabhupada and a young white
Russian who was to receive the dangerously secret gift of a banned Bhagvad
Gita, take the name Ananda Shanti Das, and build from scratch a 100,000-strong
community of native Krishna bhakts, the Slavonic Hindu may be emerging as
the 21st century's most potent symbol of too-successfully spreading the word
beyond Indian shores.
A gathering campaign by British parliamentarians
is set to tell an astonished world that Russia's Hindus - white, Slav and
steadfast in their faith - are living symbols of state oppression in a country
counted as one of the world's eight most advanced and industrialised economies.
The campaign in the British parliament, led
by UK Indian Labour Party MP Ashok Kumar and spearheaded by the umbrella Hindu
Forum of Britain (HFB), will claim that Russian Hindus continue to be denied
the right to build a temple and have been left without electricity, heating
and water in their freezing makeshift Moscow temple.
The campaign is set to unveil a devastating
saga spanning nearly four decades in which Russian Hindus are alleged to have
been variously vilified by the Soviet state, the Russian Orthodox church,
Russian Islamist and Jewish leaders and far-right nationalist politicians
such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
The British campaign is to be kickstarted
when Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow and allegedly Slavic Hinduism's most implacable
foe, arrives in London early next month.
So far, there has been no official response
to the allegations from Luzhkov's office or President Vladimir Putin's government.
But the new campaign, which aims to harness
the collective might of British and European political, press and public opinion
to recall Moscow to a sense of its human rights obligations, is thought to
be dangerously poised to undo Russia's attempts to gain global legitimacy
even as it controversially takes over presidency of the G8.
The British campaign, which is bolstered by
European and Australian Hindu organisations, comes exactly 25 years after
the then deputy KGB chief Semen Tsvigun first exhorted the Soviet Union to
recognise and stamp on the three greatest threats to the state - "Western
culture, rock and roll and Krishna".
Commentators and academics, including Edwin
Bacon of Birmingham University's Centre for Russian and East European Studies,
say the Russian campaign against the indigenous spread of Hinduism is part
of a " broad line taken by the state certainly since the mid-1990s ...
of encouraging 'traditional' religions, especially Russian Orthodoxy, whilst
putting in place restrictions on other groups deemed non-traditional".
So great was the Russian sense of threat that
a 1994 council of Russian Orthodox bishops warned that "the teachings
of the Bhagvad Gita are a false religion" and that "neo-pagan, pseudo-Christian,
occultist faiths (such as Hinduism) are a threat to the unity of national
consciousness and cultural identity of Russia".
Accordingly, Slavic Hindus were remorselessly
persecuted, the HFB's Ramesh Kallidai told TOI on Friday, and the victimisation
included incarceration in prison, forced labour in Siberia, mafia violence,
prevention of temple construction, abuse of Lord Krishna as "wicked and
malicious" and the Hindu faith as "a satanic obscenity...idolatorous".
The Russian Hindus' only offence, claimed
Kallidai, was that they worshipped in the Hindu way, did not eat meat, observed
Hindu religious festivals and went to the temple. "The persecution continues
today", claimed Kallidai, "and it is time Britain, India and the
world does something to stop it".
But still, Russian Hinduism continues stubbornly
to grow and flourish, claim community leaders, with 97 registered charities,
22 registered monasteries, 250 so-called 'home groups' that conduct satsang
and an astonishing 20,000 free meals served every day in Russia's estimated
100 embattled temples.
If anything, says Kallidai, Slavonic Hinduism
may be the new template for a turbo-charged globalised Hinduism with an hitherto-unremarked
reach.