Author: Jay Bhattacharjee
Publication: Niticentral.com
Date: March 20, 2015
URL: http://www.niticentral.com/2015/03/20/ribeiro-ko-itna-gussa-kyun-open-letter-julio-sahib-bursting-blood-vessels-307600.html

Shri Ribeiro is in an almighty huff. And he has got the majority of the country’s English MSM, specially the TV wallahs with him. The “vernacular” (as our school teachers would disdainfully refer to our mother tongues) media is less enthusiastic about the diatribes of Ribeiro and his groupies, but are trying to tag along.

What is it that has upset Senhor Ribeiro, as he probably calls himself subconsciously, going by some of his current posturing?

 It is the ghastly and utterly condemnable rape and violation of an elderly nun near Kolkata a few days ago.

Let me be completely categorical on this issue – I am as outraged and appalled as Ribeiro as far as this outrage is concerned.

That is because I am culturally a Bengali bhadralog and primarily a Vedic civilization adherent. On both these charts, the Ranaghat incident measured record lows, as Ribeiro should know. And for him, not to know this, would be unpardonable. And there is also the John Donne factor, which Ribeiro should be more au fait with: about “no man being an island, entire of itself; ….a part of the main: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” I trust I have made my position crystal clear – and this is the corner of the ring where millions of my comrades in the Indic civilisation also stand.

For Ribeiro and his cohorts to immediately jump to the conclusion that the perpetrators of the Bengal atrocity were Hindus or Hindutva followers who were targeting Christians or Christianity is as outrageous and despicable as the original crime itself. This is what has compelled me to write this rebuttal, since what we are witnessing is a completely ersatz and contrived uproar that has purely political nuances and are designed to serve ulterior interests. More on this later.

There are many instances in history where some incidents are used for purposes that ordinary people are completely unaware of. The classic example that I wish to cite here is an episode that had major implications for world history – the Reichstag fire on the 27th February 1933. The parallels between what is happening now and what happened in Berlin on a cold wintry night more than eighty years ago are uncanny. The Nazis engineered a fire in the German parliament (the Reichstag) in order to discredit the Socialists and the Communists, and compel the President, a senile and doddering figurehead, to sign an emergency decree. This permitted Hitler to suspend all democratic rights and to rig the elections that followed. Even in the rigged elections, the Nazis did not win a majority but Adolf and his gang soon managed to ensure that the Reichstag was rendered toothless and redundant. During the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46 after the war, it emerged that the Nazi SA lot was responsible for the fire and the Socialists-Communists were made scapegoats.

This elaborate historical backdrop is necessary to show that Ribeiro and his coterie are playing an extremely dangerous game that could blow out of proportion. Just witness the obscenely provocative statement made by a Bengal Minister, as if on cue, that echoed the views of the Ribeiro group. This TMC functionary, of course, has his own agenda but it must be stressed that his al-Qaeda type outburst can have an incendiary impact on the nation’s public life. Ribeiro, who has been one of the senior-most police officials of the country, should know perfectly well how dangerous it is to jump to conclusions about the identity of an offender without going through any investigation at all.

He should also know that Bengal, under Mamata Banerjee’s administration, is rapidly degenerating into a rabidly Islamic enclave that manifests some of the most dangerous symptoms of Islamo-fascism. It is an Alice-in-Blunderland scenario, where Hindus are routinely assaulted and Maulvis regularly issue fatwas that are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. However, the Ribeiro cabal is so determined to carry on with their Hindu-bashing that they evidently do not mind that their sympathisers in Bengal and in the rest of the country have a world-view that encourages beheading of Christians in front of video cameras and then sending the grisly footage around the globe.

Another disconcerting aspect of the whole tamasha is the company that Ribeiro is keeping. There is one former Naval chief who has been accused of serious malfeasances during his career and one of these relates to a housing scheme for retired services personnel. There is the other character who heads the country’s foremost centre for intellectual posturing, a grotesque caricature of a Cambridge college set up in the heat and dust of imperial Delhi by Anglican missionaries. This renowned secularist qualified for his position as principal of this college, on the basis of a PhD in theology from an agricultural university. You cannot get more creative than this. Most of the others in the merry gang of Julio are equally risible.  If I were him, I would be constantly looking over my shoulders to find out what other skeletons are falling out from the cupboard.

The other major theme in babu Julio’s outburst is the role of Christianity.

I respect his right to follow his faith, so long as he does not irresponsibly blame my brothers and sisters, who follow the Indic faiths, for offences they have not committed or condoned.

When he starts this game, as he and his group have done, there is the chance of the Pandora’s Box opening up. Then it becomes a no-holds-barred exercise. We, perforce, have to talk about the utterly violent and murderous record of Christianity in India, with specific reference to the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa. There is enough evidence that this was a genocidal and sadistic campaign, in the course of which Hindus were converted to Catholicism through unimaginable brutality.

And this debate invariably leads to the overall record of Christianity worldwide. Here the distinction between the Church of Rome and the non-Catholic versions of Christianity gets blurred. The Protestant massacres of the North American indigenous population (grotesquely labelled “Red Indians”) by the British conquerors were matched by the atrocities of the Spanish Conquistadors in South America in a neck-to-neck race that was unmatched in its obscenity. Yes, Christianity mellowed after the Reformation and its worst excesses were curbed. Yet, the Vatican continued its crimes against humanity, including its Concordat with Nazi Germany, and its systematic assistance to Nazi war criminals escaping from Europe to South America after the war.

Even now, scandals about the involvement of the Church (whether Catholic or Protestant) in child-abuse cases and similar crimes, routinely surface. Indic culture groups don’t drive themselves into frenzy and point accusing fingers against Christianity when this happens.

Mother Teresa, the great icon of Christian benevolence, has been clinically exposed by experts like Dr. Aroup Chatterjee (Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict, 2006), and a team of doctors and medical scientists from the Université de Montréal and the Université d’Ottawa in Canada. The latter’s study concludes by saying that Teresa was “anything but a saint”, but was

“A creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation’s millions when it came to humanity’s suffering.”

Now, Mother Teresa was very dear to Ribeiro; after her debunking, Hindu groups did not go into overdrive by telling Ribeiro, Dayal and company that they had effectively been conned.

Why, then do these people, time and again, get into top-gear and scream “guilty” to those who follow the Indic faiths?

We live in unsafe times; even President Obama got into an accusatory mood and harangued us, before and after we welcomed him with open arms.  I gave him a piece of my mind; if POTUS can get it straight from the heart, Ribeiro and company certainly cannot be allowed to get away with their aberrations without an intellectual rejoinder.