Why is a practice (however repugnant) by a private religious group being discussed as discrimination. A voluntary act, not forced by authority, or coerced is not a discrimination.
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group.
Some of the people on this forum have nothing to contribute, except "shouting in public". What a person wants to do as long as it is legal should be up to that person alone. Otherwise it is an infringement of religious freedom. The same people who wailing now against Brhamins will cry if the administration clamps down on some religious practice.
After reading the post by these brahmin bashers and brahmin apologists, i have come to the conclusion is they are misguided. They think out of ignorance that Brahmins wrote the laws. As Mr. Sangom pointed out this action was not mandated by Brahmins:
shri prasad1,
I find this thread was started by you with the ambivalent title"Discrimination - can it be stopped?" but you made yourself clear in the following words:—
Can we eliminate or should we even try to eliminate discrimination? I do not think it is possible.
The discrimination outlawed by the country and some other birth based discrimination should be stopped.
The society should change through education and economics.
In US social discrimination goes on, forced integration is very difficult. The middle class runs from poor neighborhood. Even in Football teams the black players and white players do not integrate.
But you see in our democratic set up and our Constitution we have ceded to the govt. and the lawmakers, the power to make laws for the best progress of the society, and at least the hindus failed to withhold their religion from govt. control.
In the circumstances any ritual, practice or custom which does not synchronize with current era aesthetics, beliefs of the majority, etc., can be viewed as obnoxious by the authorities, if they are so convinced and can ban such practices here in India at least if that pertains to the hindu section of the population.
For example if the same ritual was taking place in some Xian church, or Muslim mosque, nothing could have been done by govt. authorities and/or legislators because the minority religions have shrewdly kept their religion out of reach of govt.
Brahmins come into the picture in this because, as I have pointed out to Shri sarang, this is happening only in the separate dining hall for brahmins (they go by poonal mostly for admitting into this hall, when it comes to the large number of pilgrims from various places) and not in the general dining hall for all people. It is true that we have no evidence to show that brahmins mandated this custom in the kukke subrahmanya temple, unless some new evidence to the contrary comes up in the future. But the available evidence is that it all starts perhaps from a Mahabharata story of a golden mongoose or the story of samba. (But I do not find any reference to any rolling-on-brahmins'-leftover-plantains in Mahabharata or Bhagavata or Harivamsa.)
There can still be a doubt as to why brahmins should be blamed for this ritual because they have not written that doing so in kukke temple will cure leprosy or anything like that. But my opinion is that 500 years back, when this custom reportedly commenced in this kukke temple, without brahmins' tacit support and/or connivance, no Dalit would have been able to enter the brahmins' dining hall in the temple. Hence it may not be very far from truth if we come to the possibility of the brahmins making the particular dalit caste to perform some essential work (decorating the temple car with cane in the place of ropes) and then rewarding them with such self-debasing ritual. Of course, over the years all gullible seections have come to make manouti or vENDutal for various matters and then they perform this in compliance with that.
So, as HappyHindu rightly observed, could not the brahmins have prevented this?
But the present culprit seems to me to be the K'taka religious endowments minister v.s.acharya himself; he has resurrected this evil from its grave and he deserves to be condemned by all right-thinking hindus.
Learned scholars like Sarang, Subbudu, and Brahin have pointed out that Rulers were not Brahmins. The rulers framed the law to suit their needs.
Rulers may the be Muslim, British, Turk, Greeks, Chola, or others and were not Brahmins. These rulers wrote the laws of the day. If brahmins used the situation to profit, that is the nature of the beast. Smart person uses all loopholes for their benefit. Just as in today's politics smart people (not Brahmin) are using caste to gain power and wealth.
I wonder why such elementary facts eludes these frequent poster with single purpose of putting down India, Indians, Hindu, etc.
prasad, smartness alone is not sufficient to invent such obnoxious acts and induce people to do it; power is more important and where power is there smartness is not absolutely necessary. Rituals such as these, right from the golden mongoose story to Samban, s/o Lord Krishna, sexually enjoying his father's many wives - and Krishna, the father, being projected as the Supreme God incarnate, are all machinations of sick and depraved minds. And since only brahmins could incorporate these absurdities into scriptures in those early days, brahmins must be prepared to at least bow their heads...in shame! I do.
