I speak only for myself. The gruesome public lynching of the two hapless Sanyasins and the ghastly, gut-wrenching visual of the 70 year-old sadhu will also be forgotten. Although it sounds heartless, the most appropriate analogy to what I call the present Hindu Condition is that of a beast of burden that is so habituated to getting beaten that the sudden, random, unexpected, brutal blows on its body no longer hurt…sure, the searing pain, the boils and the warts and the welts that invariably follow the beating…will eventually mean nothing, not even pain.
The entire Hindu society can verify for itself. It is only when one more sanyasi or sadhu or swami is murdered publicly that the contours of the picture of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati reemerge as a hazy blur in our minds. And then the name of this newly-murdered sanyasi will be added to this gory picture gallery in the graveyard of our memory.
It is largely futile to even write or outrage about these two poor murdered Sadhus…excessive mourning has become a habitual excuse for inaction. The guy who weeps and wallows is the one who’s kicked even harder by a crowd that only grows with each blow that he endures.
I wrote the following piece more than six years ago on the brutal massacre of Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati. This was my third piece on this courageous Sanyasin and I suppose it is as relevant today as it was then. In light of later developments, the original text has been slightly modified to include the updates.
When the eighty year-old Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati was brutally gunned down by a heavily armed mob of fanatical Christians on the fateful night of 23 August 2008, I wrote the next day that he was not Graham Staines, one of the innumerable wreckers of Hindu society using the weapon of love and compassion. The Swami’s grisly death remained unmourned by our secular establishment of which the media is a highly-paid courtesan.
The real cruelty lay not in his gruesome murder which was unmourned but was quickly made to fade away into obscurity. However, when communal riots erupted following his murder, the secular establishment swung into action and blamed the retaliating Hindus and Hindu groups for attacking Christians!
Barely two days after his murder, Somini Sengupta (in those days, a highly visible and active Indian slave of the West) wrote in the New York Times blaming the Hindus for inviting this cruel plight upon themselves. The then avatar of Newsweek too, carried a story titled ” “Christians fear attacks by Indian Hindus,” which painted a picture of Christians being terrorized by Hindus in India. This is one of the modus operandi of gangster-like US government bodies like the USCIRF, which collects news cuttings of such propaganda and publishes an annual evangelical pamphlet called the religious freedom report funded entirely by the US taxpayers. The fact that the US government even allows this sort of intervention-by-subterfuge is a great self-commentary on the profoundly adharmic national character of that country.
But those were different times where subtlety was still possible because India was ruled by a nexus of breaking India forces and didn’t have a decisive leader like Narendra Modi as its Prime Minister. All bets are off now. Almost without exception, the entire US media since 2014 is brazening out attacks against Hindus, justifying that they Hindus deserve being attacked and killed.
Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, a Sanyasin came to Kandhamal in Orissa in 1968 and established an ashram in Chakapada to work for the welfare and upliftment of the Dalits, tribals and the downtrodden. This selfless service also included combating the large-scale conversion activities of foreign Christian missionaries whose parasitic tactics to harvest innocent Hindu souls in backward areas we’re all sickeningly familiar with. Rampant conversion activities result in violent damage of the social fabric eventually leading to separatism as in the North East, which remains part of India only in name, and genocide as in the case of Rwanda.
Indeed, in a cruel twist of fate, Swami Lakshmanananda was himself one of the awful victims of this phenomenon–his murderers were erstwhile Hindus who had converted to Christianity and mercilessly gunned him down precisely because of his efforts to prevent more Hindus from becoming like them.
In a rare instance of vindication, Swami Lakshmanananda’s lifelong tapasya was proven correct posthumously because the Judge at the Phulbani court convicted seven people–all of them Hindus, converted to Christianity–who were part of the mob that bombed his ashram and opened gunfire indiscriminately, killing several people including the Swami. The judgment also reveals, yet again, the Missionary-Maoist nexus in Orissa.
A measure of how deeply, dangerously entrenched the conversion industry is in Orissa can also be traced back to twenty-one years. The Justice Wadhwa report on the investigation into the murder of the Australian missionary Graham Staines in 1999 by Dara Singh is one of the most important documents that rips apart just one tiny facet of the Christian conversion mafia. The shrill furore that was raised by the secular establishment including but not limited to its concubine, the media, made out Staines as a brave martyr whereas he was in fact a fanatical harvester of heathen souls, which in the Hindu context means the violent breakup of Hindu societal harmony. In less than ten years after Staines’ murder, the conversion tentacles sunk even deeper roots and spread farther not at all coincidental with the fact that the UPA government was in power. Back then, if a Hindu activist like Dara Singh, fed up with Graham Staines’ vulture-like missionary activity and nowhere to turn to had killed him, the tables were turned by the selfsame missionaries ten more years later by a commando-unit style operation on a peaceable and spiritual Hindu saint and his followers.
This time, it was not just the missionaries.
But first, the missionaries. The Odisha-government’s special investigation team tasked with Swami Lakshmanananda’s murder probe found that all the major highways in the case led to an outfit called World Vision. Not coincidentally, World Vision happens to be the “world’s largest Christian church mission agency,” whose programmes, in third world countries, among others, include, something called an Area Development Programme (ADP), which “provide[s] access to clean drinking water, healthcare, education and setting up of income generating projects. But infused with such development works is the spiritual component – Bible classes.” [Emphasis added] In fact, World Vision in India projects itself as a “Christian relief and development agency,” and the United States’ Internal Revenue Service (IRS) classifies it as a “Christian church ministry.” Additionally, its mission statement is itself the loudest advertisement of its intent and activities: “World Vision is an international partnership of Christians whose mission is to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in working with the poor and oppressed, to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the Good News of the Kingdom of God.” In plain words, World Vision is a declared missionary organization one of whose aims is to convert non-Christians to Christianity throughout the world.
The special investigation team also discovered that the Congress Rajya Sabha MP from Odisha, Radhakanta Nayak was instrumental in encouraging if not instigating attacks against Swami Lakshmanananda on several occasions. Again, not coincidentally, Radhakanta Nayak–a converted Christian–happened to be the chief of World Vision’s Odisha unit at the time. The police promptly put him under investigation, and as later investigations revealed, the “net was closing in on him.”
Indeed, when Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati’s vehicle was attacked in December 2007–about eight months before the fatal shooting–Radhakanta Nayak’s name figured in the complaint made by the Swami. If that was not enough, the police had also arrested Pradesh Kumar Das, an employee of World Vision while he was trying to escape, a fact that bolsters the suspicion of the involvement of this missionary organization’s role in the Swami’s murder.
Subsequent investigations also revealed that the Maoists had colluded with the missionaries in the murder. Soon after the news of the murder broke, the Maoists denied that they had any hand in it, but later some of their cadre surrendered to the police claiming responsibility. A charge sheet was filed against Sabyasachi Panda, a dreaded CPI(Maoist) leader, the brain behind the Swami’s murder. The Missionary-Maoist nexus operating behind Swami Lakshmanananda’s murder is pretty clear.
Like in 2008, the left liberals and their bedmates in the media successfully buried even the news of the sentencing of Swami Lakshmanananda’s murderers as if it were an incident of no consequence. On the other hand, if a soul-scavenger like Graham Staines had died instead of this unfortunate Swami, the narrative would’ve been kept alive till date.
The truth is that the 82-year old Swami lived and died a hero, fighting against unbridled fanaticism in order to protect and preserve and foster the millennia-old Sanatana civilizational and cultural fibres that bind this sacred land, and still keep it united instead, preventing it from becoming a trashy hellhole like Pakistan or a Christian fundamentalist medieval Europe where Popes indulged in debauched orgies and sold pardons to the worst scoundrel in Christendom. The good Lord forgives but the Pope fixes the price.
Nobody can bring Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati back to life. Yet, we can nurture his legacy by following his lead to the extent possible both in our personal lives and within our limited circles. If even that is asking for too much, we can at least shed a drop of tear.
|| Om Tat Sat ||
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