8-BOOK REVIEW: THE QUEST FOR FREEDOM AND DIGNITY:
VISHAL MANGALWADI (2001) [199P] ISBN: 81-7820-063-2 GLS PUBLISHING
BOOK REVIEW BY KAVNEET SINGH            (Part 1)
Vishal Mangalwadi a Dalit who had the courage to educate himself and get a MA in Theology from the US, returned to his urban home only to make a life changing decision to help his poor brethren in rural India. After working and studying at Hindu Ashrams, working at the Janata Party headquarters and the Bahujan Samaj Party his experience and knowledge has brought some harsh insights & inequities of Hindu India to the limelight.Chapters 1-5:
Mangalwadi has narrated five stories some true and some fictional to depict the plight of the Dalits in modern India. The continuous crushing humiliations heaped not only on the on the poor downtrodden but anyone who has had the courage to become a professional such as a physician is also not spared in the sticky suffocating web of the caste apartheid perpetuated by the Brahminical Hindu-ism.
Chapter 6:
_Dr.Ambedkar’s thesis, that conversion was the best available means of India’s_ _emancipation, .Many people dismiss the idea of conversion……,”Oh! All religions are_ _the same; so what’s the point of conversion?”………[Page 92]_
Dr.Ambedkar had studied all the Hindu religious texts in depth and experienced the brutal practice of Hindu-ism first hand to finally convince him as a highly educated and mature human being that the emancipation of 85% of India’s population lay in their conversion out of Hindu-ism. Secondly Hindu-ism is definitely unlike any other social system or [non]religion on Earth. It is the most diabolical, digressive socially stratified system ever designed by man disguised as a religion to usurp, control in perpetuity the huge underclass to reap economic benefits but simultaneously making sure the underclass can never climb up the super slippery ladder of either educating themselves or doing constructive profitable work lest the Manuvad puppeteers lose their hegemonic control.
A Hindu loses his religion if he disavows his caste and you cannot claim to be a Hindu if you have no caste. Therefore caste is an intrinsic tightly woven part of so-called Hinduism. So it is indeed very different from other faiths because at its core it is a socially engineered straightjacket covered by archaic forms of rituals to please the thirty three million, ‘gods’ by paying the Brahmin priests.
_Macro-historian David Landes points out in his landmark study, The Wealth and Poverty_ _of Nations: Why_ _Some Are So Rich And Some So Poor, that a common factor behind their_ _stagnation of every single one of these nations was their decision to close their mind to_ _the challenge of alien religious ideas……[Pages101-102]_
Any faith-group if fearful of new ideas stagnates. If any faith-group is keenly aware of its core religious shortcomings and refuses to change but instead chooses to coerce people through intimation and terror to accept and remain within the status quo then it is asking for trouble especially in today’s information age.
_Both postmodern secularism and traditional Hinduism believe that human reason is_ _incapable of knowing objective truth and morality……..it has to make personal quests for_ _truth subservient to the authority of “traditional Hindu culture” as defined by the_ _changing whims of the Hinduvata movement. Hinduvata’s core assertion is that India_ _should be held together not by truth, morality of law, but by one minority’s particular_ _idea of a “common culture.”_ _Personal freedom and rights, especially the freedom of_ _religion and conscience to reject some aspects of one’s own culture, issingle biggest threat to Hinduvata’s belief-system……[Page 113]_
Mangalvadi has accurately summarized and described the phobia of the Brahmins due to which these same base schemers have planned and engineered hundreds of pogroms and genocides of various minorities in last 70-80 years, murdering millions of innocents while the world remains a mute bystander as they are told again and again that these were unplanned riots. Teaching minorities a lesson has a multiple effect on them thereby keeping a check on further conversion, more religious freedom and much more.