Hindu hypocrisy

Justice S. Rajendra Babu handed down a curiously convoluted ruling last month following an appeal from members of the Mahila Jagran (Women's Awakening) group.

He explained that the Miss World contest could not be prevented from being staged in Bangalore, and told the women: "Coming as you do from the land where there is worship of the phallus, worship of nude women by tantrics, where erotic sculpture is part of traditional temple architecture, where Vatsayana wrote on the art of love in the Kama Sutra, necessary sense and sensibility regarding culture and decency -- to discern between art and beauty on one hand and obscenity on the other hand -- should always be maintained."

The Hindu purists want women to remain in the home, while the feminists object to seeing women reduced to gadgets of flesh, and are against adulation of youth and beauty at a time when dowry deaths are rising.

These are respectable sentiments, but some of the views of the leader of the anti-Miss World movement, N.D. Nanjundaswamy, are risible. He sees the pageant as part of a conspiracy to thrust degenerate values on South Asia.

At the center of this plot, if Mr. Nanjundaswamy is to be believed, is the tycoon Rupert Murdoch, imposing what Mr. Nanjundaswamy calls "immature Western culture" on India via the Star satellite.

He says Godrej and Bachchan (the Miss World organizers) are "pawns in Murdoch's game plan."

The Hindu leadership has thus demonstrated a lack of perspective. It has also shown a calculating ambivalence. The country has seen violence apparently orchestrated by Nanjundaswamy, including the smashing up of the organizer's office and the spattering of excrement and kerosene tar over the contents of the sponsor's showroom.

But we also learn that, perhaps to ensure that his Indian concert is not marred by such protests, Michael Jackson is to contribute 85 percent of his earnings to the Shiv Udyog Sena. That does not argue a very principled stance on the part of those who claim to want an India that is conservative, Hindu and unbesmirched by foreign influences.

Michael Jackson's gyrations have given offense, particularly during his performances in Malaysia, so why this sudden outburst of xenophilia from Shiv Sena?

It would seem that some Hindu purists, while professing revulsion for Western decadence, are not so fastidious that they will refuse offers of Western cash.

-- The Bangkok Post