Sajjan_Thug

1 hour ago, shastarSingh said:

This old well has been preserved in the largest Gurdwara near my farm called Nanakpuri Gurdwara Sahib.

@GurjantGnostic

@dalsingh101

@Soulfinder

Should not our Gurdwara Sahibs be preserving old things and heritage?

Waheguru Ji

Do you have any pictures of this Gurdwara?

Also, do you have any other gurdwaras near you and any pictures of them?

Muslim Students Harass Hindu Classmates in UK; Force Them to Convert to Islam: Report

By IANS On 4/19/23

Hindu students in the UK are targets of bullying and racial discrimination in classrooms with Muslim pupils telling them to change their religion to make their lives easier, according to a London-based think tank.

The Telegraph reported quoting a study by the Henry Jackson Society that Muslim pupils called for Hindus to convert or face "threats of hell for disbelievers" using terms such as "kaffir".

Half of Hindu parents surveyed reported that their child had experienced anti-Hindu hate in schools, while less than 1 per cent of schools surveyed reported any anti-Hindu related incidents in the last five years.

Numerous Instances
The survey, covering 988 Hindu parents and more than 1,000 schools around the country, found that there were "numerous instances of derogatory references made towards Hindus, such as mocking their vegetarianism and belittling their deities, which were also made by Islamist extremists rallying against the Hindu community in Leicester.

"In one instance, a female Hindu pupil had beef thrown at her, and a male student was reported to have to change East London schools three times on account of anti-Hindu bullying. Eight physical assaults were detailed," the study said.

In one example a child "was harassed and told that if they convert to Islam, their life will become so much easier" and another was told: "You aren't going to survive very long... If you want to go to paradise, you'll have to come to Islam... Hindus are the herbivores at the bottom of the food chain, we will eat you up."

Another parent said children were told to watch videos of an Islamic preacher and to "convert because Hinduism makes no sense", The Telegraph reported.

According to the think tank, religious education was "fostering discrimination" against Hindus with inappropriate references to the Indian caste system and misconceptions over the worship of deities which students felt made "a mockery of them".

It was found that only 15 per cent of parents surveyed believed schools adequately address anti-Hindu related incidents.

Ben Everitt, Conservative MP for Milton Keynes, told The Telegraph that the findings were "damning" and called for urgent improvements to religious education.

"The findings in this report are damning and shed light on the varying themes and forms which anti-Hindu discrimination materialises in the classroom," he said.

Source: https://www.ibtimes.sg/muslim-students-harass-hindu-classmates-uk-forces-them-convert-islam-report-69911

India archive reveals extent of ‘colonial loot’ in royal jewellery collection

File from India Office archive details how priceless items were extracted from colony as trophies of conquest

by David Pegg and Manisha Ganguly

Thu 6 Apr 2023

Charles’s 70th birthday with a display of his favourite pieces from the royal collection, Britain’s official trove of items connected to the monarchy. “The prince had a very, very strong hand in the selection,” the senior curator said.

Among the sculptures, paintings and other exhibits was a long gold girdle inlaid with 19 large emeralds once used by an Indian maharajah to decorate his horses. It was a curious choice to put into the exhibition in light of the violent means by which it had come into the hands of the royal family.

Emerald girdle of Maharaja Sher Singh, c 1840. Photograph: Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

As part of its Cost of the crown series, the Guardian has uncovered a remarkable 46-page file in the archives of the India Office, the government department that was responsible for Britain’s rule over the Indian subcontinent. It details an investigation, apparently commissioned by Queen Mary, the grandmother of Elizabeth II, into the imperial origins of her jewels.

The report, from 1912, explains how priceless pieces, including Charles’s emerald belt, were extracted from India as trophies of conquest and later given to Queen Victoria. The items described are now owned by the monarch as property of the British crown.

Plundered stones

To fully understand the context behind the jewels, and their place in India’s history, it was necessary to visit the archives.

A journal records a tour in 1837 of the Punjab area in north India by the society diarist Fanny Eden and her brother George, the governor general of the British Raj at the time. They visited Ranjit Singh, the maharajah in Lahore, who had signed a “treaty of friendship” with the British six years earlier.

The half-blind Singh wore few if any precious stones, Eden wrote in her journal, but his entourage was positively drowning in them. So plentiful were the maharajah’s gems that “he puts his very finest jewels on his horses, and the splendour of their harness and housings surpasses anything you can imagine,” she wrote. Eden later confided in her journal: “If ever we are allowed to plunder this kingdom, I shall go straight to their stables.”

Twelve years later, Singh’s youngest son and heir, Duleep, was forced to sign over the Punjab to the conquering forces of the British East India Company. As part of the conquest, the company did indeed plunder the horses’ emeralds, as well as Singh’s most precious stone, the legendary Koh-i-noor diamond.

Today, the Koh-i-noor sits in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, on display at the Tower of London, and it has become an emblem of Britain’s tortured relationship with its imperial history.

Anita Anand, a journalist and historian who co-wrote a book titled Koh-i-noor on the diamond, said it was “a beautiful and cold reminder of British supremacy during the Raj”, the period between 1858 and 1947 when India was ruled by the crown.

“Its facets reflect the fate of a boy king who was separated from his mother,” Anand said. The stone too was “taken far away from his home, recut and diminished”. Anand said: “That is not how India sees itself today.”

Buckingham Palace is plainly aware of the sensitivities surrounding looted artefacts. After the Indian government let it be known that for Camilla, the Queen Consort, to wear the Koh-i-noor at Charles’s coronation would elicit “painful memories of the colonial past”, the palace announced she would swap it for a less contentious diamond.

But, as was discovered by Queen Mary, the Koh-i-noor was not the only gem taken from Singh’s treasury to have found its way to the British monarchy

Royal with a pearl necklace
Among the jewels identified in the document found by the Guardian is a “short necklace of four very large spinel rubies”, the largest of which is a 325.5-carat spinel that later came to be identified as the Timur ruby.

Its famous name is erroneous: research by the academic Susan Stronge in 1996 concluded it was probably never owned by Timur, a Mongol conquerer. And it is a spinel, a red stone similar to, but chemically distinct from, a ruby.

Elizabeth II was shown handling it in the 1969 BBC documentary Royal Family, and was clearly acquainted with the myths surrounding it. “The history, of course, is very fascinating. It belonged to so many kings of Persia and Mughal emperors, until Queen Victoria was sent it from India,” she observed.

The queen was never pictured wearing the item. However, she may have worn another of the Lahore treasures, identified in the India Office report as “a pearl necklace consisting of 224 large pearls”.

In her 1987 study of royal jewellery, Leslie Field described “one of the Queen Mother’s most impressive two-row pearl necklaces … made from 222 pearls with a clasp of two magnificent rubies surrounded by diamonds that had originally belonged to the ruler of the Punjab” – almost certainly a reference to the same necklace.

In 2012, Elizabeth II attended a gala festival at the Royal Opera House in London to celebrate her diamond jubilee. Photographs showed her wearing a multi-string pearl necklace with a ruby clasp.

Were these Ranjit Singh’s pearls? There was speculation they may have been, though Buckingham Palace was unable to confirm either way.

Queen Mary’s interest appears to have been prompted by curiosity about the origin of some of her pearls rather than any moral concern about the manner in which they were obtained. But a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said slavery and colonialism were matters that “his Majesty takes profoundly seriously”.

Shashi Tharoor, formerly an undersecretary at the United Nations, and currently an MP in India, said: “We have finally entered an era where colonial loot and pillage is being recognised for what it really was, rather than being dressed up as the incidental spoils of some noble ‘civilising mission’.

“As we are seeing increasingly, the return of stolen property is always a good thing. Generations to come will wonder why it took civilised nations so long to do the right thing.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/06/indian-archive-reveals-extent-of-colonial-loot-in-royal-jewellery-collection

Vatican rejects doctrine that fueled centuries of colonialism

By NICOLE WINFIELD
March 30, 2023

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Thursday responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property laws today.

A Vatican statement said the papal bulls, or decrees, “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.

The statement, from the Vatican’s development and education offices, marked a historic recognition of the Vatican’s own complicity in colonial-era abuses committed by European powers. It was issued under history’s first Latin American pontiff, who was hospitalized Thursday with a respiratory infection, exactly one year after Francis met at the Vatican with Indigenous leaders from Canada who raised the issue.

On Thursday, these Indigenous leaders welcomed the statement as a first good step, even though it didn’t address the rescinding of the bulls themselves and continued to take distance from acknowledging actual Vatican culpability in abuses. The statement said the papal documents had been “manipulated” for political purposes by competing colonial powers “to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesial authorities.”

It said it was right to “recognize these errors,” acknowledge the terrible effects of colonial-era assimilation policies on Indigenous peoples and ask for their forgiveness.

The statement was a response to decades of Indigenous demands for the Vatican to formally rescind the papal bulls that provided the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms the religious backing to expand their territories in Africa and the Americas for the sake of spreading Christianity.

Those decrees underpin the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a legal concept coined in a 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision that has come to be understood as meaning that ownership and sovereignty over land passed to Europeans because they “discovered” it.

It was cited as recently as a 2005 Supreme Court decision involving the Oneida Indian Nation written by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

During Pope Francis’ 2022 visit to Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous peoples for the residential school system that forcibly removed Native children from their homes, he was met with demands for a formal repudiation of the papal bulls.

Two Indigenous women unfurled a banner at the altar of the National Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré on July 29 that read: “Rescind the Doctrine” in bright red and black letters.

Before that, Michelle Schenandoah of the Oneida Nation had called for the Vatican to rescind the papal bulls when she delivered the closing remarks of the First Nations delegation that met with Francis during a weeklong visit last year by Native groups from Canada. On Thursday, she called the Vatican statement “another step in the right direction,” but noted that it didn’t mention the rescinding of the bulls themselves.

“I think what this does is it really puts the responsibility on nation states such as the United States, to look at its use of the Doctrine of Discovery,” she said in a interview from Syracuse, New York, where she is a professor of Indigenous law at Syracuse University’s College of Law. “This goes beyond land. It really has created generation upon generation of genocidal policies directed towards Indigenous peoples. And I think that it’s time for these governments to take full accountability for their actions.”

In the statement, the Vatican said: “The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery.’”

Phil Fontaine, a former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada who was also part of the First Nations delegation that met with Francis at the Vatican, said the statement was “wonderful,” resolved an outstanding issue and now puts the matter to civil authorities to revise property laws that cite the doctrine.

“The church has done one thing, as it said it would do, for the Holy Father. Now the ball is in the court of governments, the United States and in Canada, but particularly in the United States where the doctrine is embedded in the law,” he told The Associated Press.

The Vatican offered no evidence that the three papal bulls (Dum Diversas in 1452, Romanus Pontifex in 1455 and Inter Caetera in 1493) had themselves been formally abrogated, rescinded or rejected, as Vatican officials have often said. But it cited a subsequent bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, that reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and were not to be enslaved.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit whose office co-authored the statement, stressed that the original bulls had long ago been abrogated and that the use of the term “doctrine” — which in this case is a legal term, not a religious one — had led to centuries of confusion about the church’s role.

The original bulls, he said, “are being treated as if they were teaching, magisterial or doctrinal documents, and they are an ad hoc political move. And I think to solemnly repudiate an ad hoc political move is to generate more confusion than clarity.”

He stressed that the statement wasn’t just about setting the historical record straight, but “to discover, identify, analyze and try to overcome what we can only call the enduring effects of colonialism today.”

It was significant that the repudiation of the “Doctrine of Discovery” came during the pontificate of history’s first Latin American pope. Even before the Canadian trip, the Argentine pope had apologized to Native peoples in Bolivia in 2015 for the crimes of the colonial-era conquest of the Americas.

Felix Hoehn, a property and administrative law professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said the Vatican statement would have no legal bearing on land claims in Canada today, but would have symbolic value.

“The most that any papal repudiation of the doctrine (or the bulls, for that matter) can do in relation to Canadian law is to apply pressure on the Supreme Court of Canada to renounce the doctrine as part of Canadian law,” he said.

Beyond that, though, is the hope that the statement could show that the Catholic Church wants to be an ally with Indigenous peoples as they fight for their human rights and their land, and to protect it, said the Rev. David McCallum, an American Jesuit who has worked with Indigenous peoples in the Syracuse area and was consulted during the drafting of the statement.

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Vatican rejects doctrine that fueled centuries of colonialism
By NICOLE WINFIELD
March 30, 2023
FILE - Pope Francis arrives for a pilgrimage at the Lac Saint Anne, Canada, on July 26, 2022. The Vatican on Thursday, March 30, 2023, responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property law today. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, File)
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VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Thursday responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the theories backed by 15th-century “papal bulls” that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property laws today.

A Vatican statement said the papal bulls, or decrees, “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.

The statement, from the Vatican’s development and education offices, marked a historic recognition of the Vatican’s own complicity in colonial-era abuses committed by European powers. It was issued under history’s first Latin American pontiff, who was hospitalized Thursday with a respiratory infection, exactly one year after Francis met at the Vatican with Indigenous leaders from Canada who raised the issue.

On Thursday, these Indigenous leaders welcomed the statement as a first good step, even though it didn’t address the rescinding of the bulls themselves and continued to take distance from acknowledging actual Vatican culpability in abuses. The statement said the papal documents had been “manipulated” for political purposes by competing colonial powers “to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesial authorities.”

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It said it was right to “recognize these errors,” acknowledge the terrible effects of colonial-era assimilation policies on Indigenous peoples and ask for their forgiveness.

The statement was a response to decades of Indigenous demands for the Vatican to formally rescind the papal bulls that provided the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms the religious backing to expand their territories in Africa and the Americas for the sake of spreading Christianity.

Those decrees underpin the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a legal concept coined in a 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision that has come to be understood as meaning that ownership and sovereignty over land passed to Europeans because they “discovered” it.

It was cited as recently as a 2005 Supreme Court decision involving the Oneida Indian Nation written by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

During Pope Francis’ 2022 visit to Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous peoples for the residential school system that forcibly removed Native children from their homes, he was met with demands for a formal repudiation of the papal bulls.

Two Indigenous women unfurled a banner at the altar of the National Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré on July 29 that read: “Rescind the Doctrine” in bright red and black letters.

Before that, Michelle Schenandoah of the Oneida Nation had called for the Vatican to rescind the papal bulls when she delivered the closing remarks of the First Nations delegation that met with Francis during a weeklong visit last year by Native groups from Canada. On Thursday, she called the Vatican statement “another step in the right direction,” but noted that it didn’t mention the rescinding of the bulls themselves.

“I think what this does is it really puts the responsibility on nation states such as the United States, to look at its use of the Doctrine of Discovery,” she said in a interview from Syracuse, New York, where she is a professor of Indigenous law at Syracuse University’s College of Law. “This goes beyond land. It really has created generation upon generation of genocidal policies directed towards Indigenous peoples. And I think that it’s time for these governments to take full accountability for their actions.”

In the statement, the Vatican said: “The Catholic Church therefore repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery.’”

Phil Fontaine, a former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada who was also part of the First Nations delegation that met with Francis at the Vatican, said the statement was “wonderful,” resolved an outstanding issue and now puts the matter to civil authorities to revise property laws that cite the doctrine.

“The church has done one thing, as it said it would do, for the Holy Father. Now the ball is in the court of governments, the United States and in Canada, but particularly in the United States where the doctrine is embedded in the law,” he told The Associated Press.

The Vatican offered no evidence that the three papal bulls (Dum Diversas in 1452, Romanus Pontifex in 1455 and Inter Caetera in 1493) had themselves been formally abrogated, rescinded or rejected, as Vatican officials have often said. But it cited a subsequent bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, that reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and were not to be enslaved.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit whose office co-authored the statement, stressed that the original bulls had long ago been abrogated and that the use of the term “doctrine” — which in this case is a legal term, not a religious one — had led to centuries of confusion about the church’s role.

The original bulls, he said, “are being treated as if they were teaching, magisterial or doctrinal documents, and they are an ad hoc political move. And I think to solemnly repudiate an ad hoc political move is to generate more confusion than clarity.”

He stressed that the statement wasn’t just about setting the historical record straight, but “to discover, identify, analyze and try to overcome what we can only call the enduring effects of colonialism today.”

It was significant that the repudiation of the “Doctrine of Discovery” came during the pontificate of history’s first Latin American pope. Even before the Canadian trip, the Argentine pope had apologized to Native peoples in Bolivia in 2015 for the crimes of the colonial-era conquest of the Americas.

Felix Hoehn, a property and administrative law professor at the University of Saskatchewan, said the Vatican statement would have no legal bearing on land claims in Canada today, but would have symbolic value.

“The most that any papal repudiation of the doctrine (or the bulls, for that matter) can do in relation to Canadian law is to apply pressure on the Supreme Court of Canada to renounce the doctrine as part of Canadian law,” he said.

Beyond that, though, is the hope that the statement could show that the Catholic Church wants to be an ally with Indigenous peoples as they fight for their human rights and their land, and to protect it, said the Rev. David McCallum, an American Jesuit who has worked with Indigenous peoples in the Syracuse area and was consulted during the drafting of the statement.

“So now for the church to not only acknowledge the damage, but also to repudiate the whole mindset of cultural superiority, of racial superiority to, in a sense, renounce that whole way of thinking and say that forever forward the church wants to be an active ally in protecting Indigenous human rights along with all human rights, I think it’s a big statement,” he said.

___

Rob Gillies contributed to this report from Toronto.

Source: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-indigenous-papal-bulls-pope-francis-062e39ce5f7594a81bb80d0417b3f902

1 hour ago, aaronsingh said:

Vjkk vjkf,

recently i’ve been thinking that at the moment there are an abundant of old gurdware in pakistan which are in decay. there’s a lack of sangat to restore them. nishan singh australia has just gone to pakistan and done darshan of these gurdware. and it made me think, why isn’t anyone from abroad doing seva of these gurdware? and how should we go about with doing this seva? is there anybody interested in going to pakistan and staying there doing seva of the gurdware and doing amrit parchar. because if nobody goes, these gurdware will cease to exist

Check this facebook page called 

https://m.facebook.com/100064533286619/

This page might help you out if you want to help.

Waheguru Ji

Remember to subscribe to these offical sampraday channels.  To further the parchar.

It is well known that the majority of the Indian population do not eat meat. This is not altogether because they cannot afford it. Most of them object to it because it involves the taking of life. Back of that objection is the law of karma which has been familiar to Indians for many thousands of years. Sants and their disciples do not eat meat, fish, eggs or any sort of animal food for the same reason. It involves the slaughter of animal life, and that means the assumption of karmic debts. Let us now see how it works out both in theory and in practice. 

In the vegetable there is but one active tattwa or elementary condition of matter. That is jal, which means water. It refers to the liquid state of any substance. In the insect there are two active tattwas,

Agni or fire, and Vayu or air. This refers to the resolving state, or heat. It means a transitional state of matter, and the vayu refers to the gaseous condition of matter. In the birds there are three active tattwas: jal, agni and vayu. In the higher animals there are four active tattwas, prithvi or earth, jal, agni and vayu. But in man, and in man alone, all five tattwas are active. As a matter of fact all five tattwas are in everything in the world, but they are not active. Akash or ether is the last one which is active in man alone. 

Now, the law by which we are to be governed is this: The greater the number of active tattwas that are combined in the living individual, the higher he is in the scale of evolution and also the greater the responsibility involved in killing that individual. Hence, the greater the burden of karma assumed in killing. But since man has to eat something, in order to continue his life here, the ancient sages and Satgurus selected the least harmful substances; that is, those things in the killing and eating of which there is the least karma to be assumed. 

So they decided on vegetables. No animal at all. Of course, there is some karma to be assumed in eating vegetables, as there is life in them too. But in the vegetables there is the lowest form of life, and hence the least karma involved. This is the chief reason why the Sants do not approve of killing and eating animals. 

The second reason is that the eating of animal food interferes with one's spiritual refinement. It drags a person down toward the animal plane. It is a fact that so long as one eats animals, he will be more or less like animals. It is unavoidable that we should become like what we eat, just the same as we become like that of which we constantly think. We must absorb its qualities to some extent. How could it be otherwise? That is but common sense, and I believe most people will agree to it. It may be tested by any one.

A heavy animal diet will always awaken the animal passions and drag one's thoughts down to the animal plane. The same is true of eggs. The reader may test this for himself. Everybody knows that eggs are often used deliberately to stimulate the animal passions. But the disciples of the Sants have, as their chief aim and effort in life, to rise above the animal plane and to unfold their spiritual powers. 

Hence, they must not eat that which will pull them down to the animal level. Another reason is strictly one of sanitation and health. Animal diet is a filthy diet. It fills the body with impurities, the purin group especially, uric acid and other by-products of animal food digestion. All these bring on their train of evils, rheumatism, mental dullness, heaviness and laziness, appendicitis, etc. 

The refuse in the intestinal tract from animal foods develops soluble poisons that are themselves deadly, and if a person goes on manufacturing and absorbing them, he will certainly develop nervous disorders, auto-intoxication with its train of evils, and an early death or an enfeebled, decrepit old age. But the student of the Satgurus wishes to keep his body in as perfect a condition as possible. This is one of the oft repeated commands of the Satguru. 

Then it stands to reason that he must select the purest and least harmful foods available. This means a diet of vegetables, fruits, grains and nuts, and of course, all dairy produce. Students of the Satgurus are strictly enjoined not to indulge in intoxicating drinks. 

This is because, in addition to creating bad karmas, it confounds the intellect, vitiates judgment and almost destroys vivek. Under its influence, one may do things which result in a heavy karmic debt that can only be wiped off in several incarnations besides bringing shame and dishonor here. Both body and mind suffer—the resulting mental slavery being a great impediment the way of spiritual practice.