Hindus feel persecuted: Dayananda Saraswathi

CHENNAI: A majority of Hindus in the country feel they are treated badly and are being persecuted, said revered religious leader Swami Dayananda Saraswathi.

Speaking after releasing a book, “Breaking India — Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines” authored by Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan here on Thursday, Saraswathi said, “In no other country, the majority will feel persecuted like they do in India. If you belong to the minority, you have got privileges. Therefore, a Hindu group started calling itself a minority.”

The spiritual leader said that on the same count every Hindu, including himself, would qualify to be a minority, belonging as they do to different smaller groups.

Commenting on the book, columnist S Gurumurthy said, “This work was long overdue and there has been a lot of efforts to expose the kind of machination that is going on to pervert our nationalism, our path, our great heroes and even spiritual personalities like Tiruvalluvar, raising questions like ‘Is Tiruvalluvar a Christian?’

“We have to understand the extent of damage this kind of perversion can cause in a society where there is no organised effort to counter this view,” Gurumurthy said.

“The Dravidian movement has been a product of an imperial conspiracy to divide and dismantle India. They could not succeed physically, but they achieved it psychologically. The recovering process needs to be initiated because the physical political structure, which the Dravidian philosophy yielded, is decaying today. This is the right time for us to launch a psychological counter attack,” Gurumurthy said.

Rajiv Malhotra said, “We have presented various misconceptions about Indian history and how these have now become part of our accepted identity.”

Well-know journalist Cho Ramasamy and retired Madras High Court judge T N Vallinayagam were present.

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