THE BIBLE, LAND GRAB, CHURCH, KERALA-TN, ECOLOGICAL SENSITIVITY, SOUNDS, LANGUAGE, MEANINGS AND ITS PRESERVATION !!!!
One of the main concerns in the first six books of the Bible is the promise of LAND . This promise is initially made in Genesis 12:1-2, by the GOD of the Bible. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing”. The last part of the command and promise of God, ie ‘so that you will be a blessing’ implies that those associated with Abraham and his heirs will flourish as well. This is the interpretation according to Bible scholars. (On the other hand,if it is literally interpreted, far from being a blessing, ............... !!!!)
Protestant Britain and its planters, and close on their heels the Catholic Church in Kerala , sincerely adhered to this tradition of land usurpation from the Bible. Now how could God’s promise not be fulfilled ? But the omniscient God had done the unthinkable, by fanning the flames of rapacity in these sections of human population. They raped and plundered virgin and sensitive forest lands, felled valuable timber and planted cash crops. To get more yield they poisoned mother earth and her milk giving veins, by using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They thus usurped more than their share !!! In their case, they flourished very well, and not to be outdone those from other communities also vied with them to get a piece of the cake. This includes the crony capitalists in the Hindutwa camp, like Bellary Reddy brothers.
Restraint exercised by many by-gone generations, gained through spirituality and simple living were thus contemptuously overlooked, in the wake of the new-found prosperity riding piggyback on non-native values. All these did not happen in the remote past, and is at the utmost 200-250 years old.
The prosperity thus experienced turned out to be short-lived, and at great COST to the rest of the state/world. So much so that man-made restrictions are being pursued (Madhav Gadgil/Kasturirangan report) to account and even annul Gods promise to his exclusive and chosen people. This is now being challenged,resisted through violence and cunning and machinations by Gods own people. Which makes one wonder about God, Godliness and the real nature of Gods own people !!??? Millions of people are living on both sides of the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats., in Kerala & TN. Their and their future generations peaceful living greatly depends on regular climatic patterns, that is guaranteed by an un-spoilt and unexploited Western Ghats.
There is only God, and he cannot be wrong !!!! Did Abram hear Gods words properly, attentively and understood it in the correct sense ? Or the chain of persons who transmitted and later wrote down God’s words unwittingly committed a mistake ? Or the narrator/compiler/ author had motives !??. Compared to India and the Vedas, is there any tradition in the middle-east to exactly preserve & transmit ancient sounds to the present, with minimal error ??? Here in India religious studies necessarily included grammar, phonetics, etymology, poesy etc. Thus ancient sounds and meanings could be transmitted with minimal loss and error.
If such a tradition like in India, did never exist in the middle-east with respect to Hebrew or Aramic languages/dialects, - that places the entire content and meaning of the Bible in jeopardy. Even in India, though the systems are there and fairly preserved, modern Indians are failing in their understanding of the Vedas /Upanishads and Gita. (Reason : Declining intellect of the human-race)
TODAY'S PAPER » NATIONAL
KOTTAYAM, March 17, 2014
Eco-politics
churns the election scene in Kerala
GEORGE JACOB
It is seldom that major political parties in Kerala have had to
confront fundamental ecological questions when venturing out to face the
electorate. The State, which was the site of historic battles for protecting
the Silent Valley and shutting down the Coca-Cola unit at Plachimada, is now
discussing electoral prospects and ecology in the same breath as it goes to
polls on April 10.
At the heart of the debate is the
Kasturirangan Committee report on the protection of theWestern Ghats, which is itself a watered-down version of the more
rigorously prepared Madhav Gadgil Committee report. The whole debate has thrown
up what can only be described as situation extraordinaire: strange logic,
stranger friends and, possibly, weird outcomes.
The CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF)
in Kerala, which had won plaudits for pushing a law seeking to protect
ecologically fragile stretches of the State’s verdant landscape, is today in
the company of the High Range Protection Council, an activist body led by
Catholic priests and settler farmers, who are more eager to protect their
lucrative farmsteads than the Western Ghats. On the opposite side, the
incumbent Congress MP P.T. Thomas (Idukki), who has been sharply critical of
the stand taken by the Church, his party’s traditional backers, is out in the
cold because he is persona non grata for the local top brass of the Church and the
farmers’ lobby.
In the neighbouring district of
Pathanamthitta, Peelipose Thomas, former AICC member, had no other option but
to bolt from his party’s confines and the ruling alliance before the UDF could
commence itscandidate
selection because neither the Congress nor the alliance, of which
he was a candidate in previous elections, could stomach his stand on the
controversial Aranmula international airport project, which had found a place
in the President’s address to Parliament before it got the necessary clearances
from the State or the Central government agencies.
If the question of protecting the Western
Ghats finally boiled down to a slugfest within the ruling alliance and between
the settler farmers and those whom they have traditionally backed, at Aranmula
it has assumed even more ominous dimensions with issues of religious beliefs of
the Hindu community becoming the touchstone on whether or not the project was
to be given the nod.
The debate over the Kasturirangan Commitee
recommendations saw the government giving in to Christian priests, the most
vociferous of them all, and, in the process, the 327-page report submitted by
the 15-member Western Ghats Ecology Expert
Panel (WGEEP) chaired by Madhav Gadgil got restricted in size
and scope to a 175-page report by the High Level Working Group on Western Ghats
headed by K. Kasturirangan, which again got vetted by a three-member panel
chaired by Oommen V. Oommen, chairman of the Kerala State Biodiversity Board,
ultimately ending as a terse two-page office memorandum issued by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests.
There is no such clarity on the fate of the
Aranmula airport where a popular agitation led by both the Left and Sangh
Parivar organisations is still very much on.
The outcome of the Lok Sabha elections
would reflect, in at least a few constituencies in the high ranges, on the
relative positions of the mainstream players on ecological questions, but the
real issues would remain as the voices from the margins seek to articulate.
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