HPI<\/p>\n
NEW DELHI, INDIA September 8th, 2008 [by Rajiv Malik, HPI correspondent]: A public memorial was held September 7 in Orissa in honor of Hindu saint Swami Lakshamanananda Saraswati, whose brutal murder has shocked the nation. Swami Ji had served for four decades, walking miles through the most difficult terrain of Orissa’s tribal belt and teaching Vedas to women and girls. <\/p>\n
Shri Praveen Bhai Togadia, General Secretary of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, noted that Swami Ji had devoted his whole life to uplifting the downtrodden and needy scheduled-tribe and scheduled-caste people in the remote interior of Orissa. He lamented, “No one could imagine that a Hindu saint of 84 years who used to walk with the support of stick, could be murdered in such a gruesome manner. Not only Swami Ji was brutally murdered, even the sadhvi who assisted him in running a gurukul for the girls was attacked and killed by the perpetrators of these crimes.” <\/p>\n
Exhorting the Orissa government to immediately arrest and punish the murderers, Shri Togadia said that although Christian missionaries and institutions have been credited with doing a lot of social work, Hindu organizations like RSS and Vishwa Hindu Parishad are also running over one lakh social service projects all over India. Pointing out that illegal conversions are being performed in India, against the letter and spirit of the Indian constitution, he said that Swami’s selfless work, which has won the tribals’ hearts, was intolerable to the Christians and they are known to have attacked him a number of times. <\/p>\n
Swami Sarvananda, Siva Temple, Jhandewalan, New Delhi, gave a forceful speech, saying, “The time has come that the saints’ community is feeling threatened and unsafe. If the government cannot provide us safety and security, our saints will have to think about training our own people and deploying them for this purpose. Every prominent saint will have a small group of trained in house soldiers who will defend and save his life by all possible means. If the situation does not change, we have no other alternative left but to pursue this idea.”<\/p>\n
HPI NEW DELHI, INDIA September 8th, 2008 [by Rajiv Malik, HPI correspondent]: A public memorial was held September 7 in,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7868","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}