Word: hindus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...soul-music fans and leg men, TINA TURNER is already a goddess. But ISMAIL MERCHANT'S casting of Turner as a Hindu deity in his upcoming film The Goddess has outraged some British Hindus, who plan to picket the movie. (Did they learn nothing from protests against The Passion of the Christ, which did not exactly dent ticket sales?) Having Turner play Shakti--the personification of a female divinity who wears a necklace of men's skulls--reduces the goddess to a "musical joke," says a Hindu group. Of course, some who saw Turner's last try at a dramatic...
...continues to promote a Hindu agenda by rewriting school textbooks to marginalize the place of Muslims in India's history. Even as the party touts Vajpayee as its benign, paternal face at the national level, it allows some of its local leaders to ignore any harassment of Muslims by Hindus in their states. And despite the friction between the BJP and its right-wing support base, the party will still use the RSS, which has 50,000 branches throughout India and at least 2 million active members, during the coming elections. RSS members are expected to campaign...
...Though many political analysts have assumed that Vajpayee's popularity will power the BJP-led coalition to a resounding victory in the elections, the party's core base of support is confined largely to upper-caste Hindus in the north and west. The party has little appeal in the south or east and relies on small regional parties for support. The Congress has been aggressively wooing many of these regional parties?with increasing signs of success. To forge a coalition of anti-BJP parties and to strike a chord with moderate voters, the Congress appears determined to harp...
...years ago, India had a taste of what can happen if the hard-liners in the BJP seize power from the moderates. In the western state of Gujarat, Hindus embarked on a rampage that left about 2,000 Muslims dead. The police stood by while local BJP activists armed with swords, tridents and electoral lists raped Muslim women; beheaded, burned and disemboweled Muslim men, and torched Muslim-owned businesses. Tens of thousands were forced to flee. No one has yet been brought to book for the mayhem, and the Gujarat courts have proved incapable of convicting the rapists, looters...
...been other more subtle?though no less worrying?developments. Serious criticism of the government is now strongly discouraged: Te-helka.com, an online investigative-media outlet that managed to film several officials taking bribes, was shut down, and a systematic campaign of harassment let loose against its employees and investors. Individual Hindus have employed strong-arm tactics against Christian missionaries and burned down churches. And school history textbooks have been rewritten to depict India's medieval history as a long saga of unending Muslim barbarism. As Neeladri Bhattacharya, professor of modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, noted in an article published...