Monastic orders of all streams of thought focus on protecting environment, not inconveniencing others, being to the extent of one’s capacity in charge of matters and self-control… and upright sincere politics of nation building, not the destructive toxic variety fashionable these days. The practitioners of these monastic orders are the saints, or Sants, who are revered figures followed by the Hindu masses.
Today’s Hinduism, however, like so many other religious belief-systems, stands hijacked by vociferous (I was tempted to write vociferocious) militant claimants to be representative of Hinduism, peddling actually their agenda comprised of none of the values and virtues Hinduism extols, but built on concocted narratives of “us” as legitimate and minorities as “the other”, conceited disdain, derisive mocking, outright hate, defamatory insinuations and demonisation. If these are representative of Hinduism, who is responsible for all this? Since Hinduism suggests none of these, it is clear firstly that these are the antithesis of Hinduism and second, that the practitioners of this hostile behaviour patterns, whether wearing saffron or brown, white or fatigues, do not represent Hinduism at all.
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