New Delhi's President Pranab Mukherjee releasing postal stamp commemorating Anagarika Dharmapala in October 2014

The fundamental flaw in Arundhatis article is confining the origins of caste exclusively to Brahmanic Hinduism. She also confuses Varna that was theoretically constructed from the Brahmin point of view, especially applied on to them by themselves and imposed on others, with Jaathi, which had altogether different origins. English has only one word, caste, for both.

From time to time there were revolts in South Asia against such oppressive religious constructs and the foremost of them could be seen in the Tamil Bakti movement, in which a woman Kaaraikkaal Ammai, a hunter Kannappan or a Paraiyan Nanthan were shown as attaining salvation straightaway through devotion, defying norms of Brahmanism, Buddhism or Jainism. It later inspired the rest of India but compromising elite oppression was always reconfirming itself.

Arundhati speaks of Dalit Sikhs, Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians, noting that conversion has not changed the status. But, if she wants to talk about Sri Lanka then there exist Dalit Sinhala-Buddhists too. [Dalit is of course a Marathi word, meaning broken people. But it is a word of Dravidian etymology and it has to be. The word, by D/ N interchange, is a cognate of Nalintha or Nalivu, meaning ruin, destruction, affliction, distress etc., in Dravidian.]

However, these are relatively minor issues in getting the thrust of Arundhatis article, Indias Shame written on 13 November and published in the December issue of Prospect Magazine.

Tamils have to read it carefully and absorbingly in understanding the inner mechanism and larger dimensions of the New Delhi-Colombo partnership and the role of Indias leading media houses in the genocide of Eezham Tamils, in the on-going genocide, and in the destruction of Eezham Tamil militancy that sought a new construction in South Asia, achieving something against caste and gender oppression besides ethnic oppression.

Unfortunately, intellectuals in India were blinded from seeing the dimensions when the unprecedented genocide in South Asia was taking place in the island.

C.V. Wigneswaran at World Hindu Conference

A diaspora delegate who attended the conference cited a fellow delegate from Colombo telling him that Buddhism is not a threat to Tamils but Islam and Christianity are worse threats. This is a typical talk that always originates from certain Colombo-centric sections envisaging reconciliation and partnership of traditional elite in the pursuit of material gains and domination. New Delhi Hindutva also thinks in the same way and it is prepared to export a new religion to suit the purpose. A small example is the Gitopadesha panel seen in the renovated hall of the Wesleyan Jaffna Central College, where the Indian consulate in Jaffna held an education marketing meeting recently.

Our forefathers had worked hard to preserve the Hindu society in the face of successive assaults by Portuguese, Dutch and English colonizers, who wielded their religions as weapons against the Hindus, Wigneswaran said at the conference.

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Sri Lanka: Arundhati misses Buddhist casteism, Wigneswaran massages Hindu imperialism

December 7, 2014|10:37 am

In 73 years (I was born December 5, 1941, two days before Pearl Harbor) I have never seen the world situation more volatile.

The Pearl Harbor attack is loaded with personal as well as geopolitical lessons. To learn them is to make oneself less vulnerable to the adversary's surprise attacks. Here are a few:

1The spiritual is everything.

As discussed in Part 1, Pre-Pearl Harbor Japanese culture was a blending (syncretism) of the Samurai spirit made sacred through Shintoism and the Zen Buddhism of that period. However, all cultures even atheistic ones ultimately arise from and try to sustain themselves through mystical spirituality.

Marxism embraced the Hegelian idea that history was being guided to the "paradise" of pure Communism. Mao and his Red Book became the spirituality of the destructive Red Guard Movement in the late 1960s. Crowds lined up in bitter cold to see the embalmed remains of their gods Lenin and (for a while) Stalin in Red Square. North Koreans pray to the founder of their atheistic state, sanction marriages, and lay flowers at the base of his statues. Goebbels dressed Hitler rallies in mystical spectacle.

Even professed Christians are sometimes guilty. Some pastors in the American slavery era tried to get biblical sanction for the hideous institution that saw fellow human beings made in the image of God as chattel.

Sociologists Pitirim Sorokin and Samuel Huntington, as well as historians like Will Durant, David Aikman, and even Edward Gibbon (in a back-handed way) have demonstrated the primacy of the spiritual in the development and behaviors of civilizations.

The Bible, however, gives us not mere theory, but literal truth, when it says, in Ephesians 6:12, "We are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places..." (NLT)

The ultimate enemy in the Second World War was not the Japanese Samurai warriors or the German Nazis, and is not now Islamic terrorists, would-be global tyrants, young black men, white policemen, illegal immigrants, Barack Obama, House Republicans, or any other individuals or groups varying partisans see as villainous.

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Pearl Harbor: 4 Spiritual Lessons We Can Apply Personally (Pt. 2)