Why ’Sanatan Sanstha’ and ’Hindu Janajagruti Samity’ should be Banned

[It is really difficult to believe how an organisation which supposedly ‘aims to present religious mysticism in a scientific language for the curious and to guide-seekers’ and which ‘conducts weekly spiritual meetings, discourses, child guidance classes, workshops on spirituality, training in self-defence and campaigns to create awareness of righteousness’ to further these aims can double up as an organisation which can invite prosecution under ‘laws meant for unlawful and terrorist organisations’.

But any impartial observer of the activities of ‘Sanatan Sanstha’ and ‘Hindu Janajagruti Samiti’ would concur with the view that these organisations should not be allowed to spread their venomous agenda among innocent people any further.

Whether it is their recent intervention during the International Film Festival held at Goa (November 24, 2008) where they did not allow the screening of an M.F. Husain film or the few months old bomb blasts in Maharashtra where members of these organisations have been found to be involved—the danger which these organisations pose to communal harmony in our country does not bear repetition.]

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The International Film Festival held at Goa in the last week of November 2008 would be remembered for altogether wrong reasons. The manner in which India’s greatest living painter M.F. Husain’s short film, ‘Through The Eyes of a Painter’, made way back in 1967, was dropped at the last moment under pressure from the Hindu supremacist organisations—namely, the Hindu Janajagruti Samity and the Sanatan Sanstha—would be discussed, debated and condemned for a long time to come. The sheepish manner in which the authorities capitulated before the ‘threats’ issued by these self-proclaimed defenders of Hinduism evoked widespread condemnation.

The Times of India in its editorial (November 27, 2008) commented:

Husain is, by general acknowledgement, one of India’s greatest artists... There is no reason why the organisers should be cowed down by a fundamentalist group and hold back the screening... Surely, the Goa Government has the resources to ensure that unruly activists do not disrupt film screenings. The permanent venue of the IFFI (International Film Festival of India) must be a place that cherishes liberal values and the artist’s right to freedom of expression. It can’t be held hostage by radical elements who are enemies of art and culture.

Perhaps very few people even know that the aforementioned film, which was ‘..[p]art of a larger bouquet on illustrious artists, writers and poets like Raja Ravi Varma, Amrita Shergil, Picasso, Rabindranath Tagore, Mohammed Iqbal and Mirza Ghalib’, had won many international awards. Definitely this had no effect on the members and sympathisers of these supremacist organisations. It is no coincidence that out of 1250 cases pending before various police stations across the country against M.F. Husain, 900 have been filed in Goa alone, where the concerned organisation(s) are known to have a wider network.

Protesting against the capitulation of the powers-that-be before the likes of the Hindu Janajagruti Samity, a memorandum, signed by leading artists and cultural workers of the country underlined another sinister fact about these organisations. It said:

The Hindu Janajagruti Samity and its affiliated organisation, the Sanatan Sanstha, are, as you would know, under investigation by police and intelligence agencies for their possible complicity in a number of terrorist actions in the country. Indeed, the option of declaring them