{"id":142,"date":"2021-05-15T19:26:21","date_gmt":"2021-05-15T19:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/?p=142"},"modified":"2021-05-20T19:43:13","modified_gmt":"2021-05-20T19:43:13","slug":"russian-hindus-prohibited-from-celebrating-maha-shivratri-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2021\/05\/15\/russian-hindus-prohibited-from-celebrating-maha-shivratri-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian Hindus Prohibited from Celebrating Maha Shivratri Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/bitterwinter.org\/russian-hindus-prohibited-from-celebrating-maha-shivratri-festival\/\">source<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/source\"><br><\/a>RUSSIA, May 7, 2021 (Bitter Winter): A prosecutor in Udmurtia, Central Russia, claims that organizing the Maha Shivratri festival, the \u201cgreat night of Shiva\u201d celebration for Hindus, and advertising the event on social media is a form of \u201cillegal missionary activity\u201d forbidden by Russia\u2019s anti-proselytization law. A woman, Ekaterina Kalinkina, who teaches yoga and Vedic astrology to a small group of followers, was charged in Udmurtia and faces a fine of US$673. She posted on VKontakte that the incident \u201cmakes me think about the future,\u201d and she is considering three options. First, \u201cI\u2019m going underground, continuing to do pujas, but will not inform people about them via the Internet. <br><br>Second, Kalinkina wrote, she may \u201ckeep it up to 3 more times (in most countries, the minimum number of precedents necessary to be granted political asylum because of religious persecution), and then I emigrate.\u201d Third, she may try to \u201cfind two more indestructible and strong-willed people with residence permit in Udmurtia, and together we go to register Sanatana Dharma, a religious group, which aims to perform traditional Indian religious rites, traditional sacred texts (mantras and hymns) and spread information about traditional Indian Deities.\u201d Precedents are not encouraging, as the move by the prosecutors against Kalinkina\u2019s group is clearly part of a wider crackdown in Russia against all forms of religion perceived as \u201ccompeting\u201d with the Russian Orthodox Church.<br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>source RUSSIA, May 7, 2021 (Bitter Winter): A prosecutor in Udmurtia, Central Russia, claims that organizing the Maha Shivratri festival,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}