Mandir Hopping of Priyanka : Fake or Genuine

       If somebody wants to go to any temple, why should any objection be raised by anybody? If Priyanka Vadra Gandhi has decided to take a dip in the holy Sangam, pooja at the temple of Baba Vishwanath in Varanasi and darshan of Maa Vindhyavasini at Vindhyachal, it should not be the cause of stomach-ache for anyone. But it is a half-truth. The eyebrows are bound to be raised if anybody goes to the temple only for showing and attracting the attention of others. The motive is not the consolidation of faith but to garner votes of the gullible masses, then these visits to the temples are not only farcical but deserve to be detested and condemned in no uncertain terms.

     This is what we find in the case of Priyanka Gandhi and her brother Rahul Gandhi. Their ideas appear to be frozen in the time warp of their grandmother, Indira Gandhi. People did not have any doubt about the faith of Indira ji. Election or no election she used to go to temples and had all the respects for the religion that she espoused. Brahmins, the so-called custodians of Hindu religion, had all respect for her feelings. But that is totally missing in Rahul and Priyanka and nobody is ready to believe that they have genuine faith in their outwardly religious conducts.

      Having said it one must know that the beauty of Hinduism is that it is all-encompassing. An atheist is as much a Hindu as a theist. One may believe in any God or may not believe at all, he/she is a Hindu till he/she renounces and embraces any other faith or chooses to remain away from it. One will be aghast to know a fact that when Swami Dayanand Saraswati once visited Tehri palace (presently in Uttarakhand), the king took him to his sprawling kitchen and showed him how the buffaloes were being butchered? Swami ji could not stand there for a minute and rebuked the king for converting his kitchen into an abattoir for killing the male buffaloes in the name of satiating any Devi. He was appalled that the king was doing it at the suggestion of Brahmin priests, who were also accustomed to eating the meat.

     So when even the meat-eating Brahmins could become the priests of a religion where Ahimsa is considered to be its fulcrum, then anybody can be a Hindu provided he/she does not claim to be otherwise. Nevertheless, people have now become fully aware that who is a faithful Hindu and who is trying to cheat them by skylarking as a Hindu for the sake of votes.