by Subhash Gatade
The issue related to proceedings in a court in Tomsk which supposedly had found portions of ’Gita’ objectionable and ’extremist’ and was contemplating to ban it. . . .
The tempers were down only when foreign minister S.M. Krishna gave a assurance to the parliament that the government is looking into the matter and would take all necessary steps. The Russian ambassador’s assurance also played a soothing role who said that nobody would be allowed to sabotage the long frienship between peoples of two great countries. In the meanwhile penpushers - or should one say ’bytemovers’ - had a fieldday explaining to the lesser mortals how Russians have always looked to ’Gita’ with respect and toleration and its first translation appeared way back in 1788 when Czars ruled the country. The saffrons who yearn to turn India into (what Jawaharlal Nehru use to say) ’Hindu Pakistan’ and who had found themselves on the wanting when the issue was raised in the Parliament, sensed a golden opportunity to mobilise their core constituency and organised demonstrations at few places. Sushma Swaraj, leader of the BJP in Lok Sabha, even demanded that ’Gita’ be declared a national book. In this melee nobody bothered to know whether the actual ’Gita’ was on the agenda of the Tomsk court or some other book which was based on it. Only when the dust settled one came to know that the book in question in the Tomsk court happened to be a Russian translation of Gita with detailed commentaries on it, titled ’Bhagwad-gita As It Is’ written by the founder of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada. In a briefing in Moscow Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said (Interfax, 23 Dec 2011) "As evident from the materials available, the admonitions of the law enforcement authorities are not so much about the text of the book proper, whose double translation is not without the sin of semantic distortion, as about the author’s comments which were classified as falling under Article 13 of the Russian Federation Federal Law ’On countering extremist activities’," he said.
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.sacw.net/article2468.html
|
