The Telegraph - 17 October 2014
RSS Gita festival week at Red Fort
BASANT KUMAR MOHANTY
New Delhi, Oct. 16: An RSS-backed organisation will hold a six-day festival from December 2 at the Red Fort grounds to commemorate what it claims is the 5,151st anniversary of the Bhagavad Gita.
The Global Inspiration and Enlightenment Organisation of the Bhagavad Gita (GIEO Gita), formed two years ago to promote the book, will hold the Gita Prerana Utsav. On December 7, the last day of the event, 5,151 couples will recite texts from the Gita.
Indresh Kumar, an RSS leader and GIEO patron, said the Lal Qila Maidan had been chosen as the venue because it’s a “symbol of India’s nationalism”, and hosts the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech every year.
“Last year, Gita Jayanti was held at Kurukshetra, where the Mahabharat war was fought,” Singh said.
He asserted that the Mahabharat war was fought 5,151 years ago and Lord Krishna’s gift of enlightenment to Arjuna — which forms the text of the Gita — happened on the 11th day of the waxing moon in the month of Margaseersha. He said the date’s anniversary would fall on December 2 this year.
The festival will feature an exhibition on “The Gita and the World”, the Gita’s role in India’s freedom struggle and translations of the Gita in various languages.
The organisation has asked all its followers to hold events in honour of the Gita across the country on December 2. It has drawn up a schedule of daily programmes to be performed by the participants.
Sangh pracharak Balmukund Pandey, national organising secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana, which is writing the “correct” history of India, said that calculations done on the basis of planet positions at the time of the Mahabharat war — as described in the epic — proved that it was fought 5,151 years ago. He claimed that carbon-dating had shown that certain objects found on the seabed near Dwarka in Gujarat and associated with the Mahabharat dated back to that time.
Pandey added that the Yugabda, the traditional Indian calendar, also suggested the war was fought 5,151 years ago.
GIEO treasurer Mohan Goel said the RSS was supporting the six-day event but clarified that the GIEO was an independent organisation and took its own decisions.
P.S. Dwivedi, former head of history at St Stephen’s College, said the date of the Mahabharat war had not been determined beyond doubt. “There are no reliable data. Calculations on the basis of (purported) planet positions are not reliable,” Dwivedi said.
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