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Comment by sremani | Hacker News Reader

"Gandhi ignored the warrior Gita at his peril: the man who killed him was driven by it. "

Quite a thoughtful assessment.

Don't want to prompt unneccesary debate, but her understanding of Gandhi and his assessment of the Gita is incomplete. Gandhi has written explicitly about (what she calls) the "warrior Gita". Moreover, her demarcation of the "Two Gitas" is something not a lot of people would agree with.

Personally, I've read a lot of commentaries and evaluations of the book, including the orignal, and I've found Gandhi's version to be the most powerful.

Again an false assessment. Nathuram Godse was not driven by Gita to kill Gandhi the way ISIS is driven by Koran to kill people. Nathuram Godse and his co-conspiring brother gave elaborate testimony in court and through a book as to why they killed Gandhi. Neither of them driven by religious ideology to kill Gandhi. They goal was political and tied with protecting interests of Hindu community from Gandhi's fundamentalist non-violence.

Geeta is a fairly open ended book. Prior to Gandhiji, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (a philosopher, mathematician and politician) had written his very popular interpretation of Gita where he essentially calls for an armed rebellian agains the British oppressors.

Wendy is being notorious.

I don't seem to recall ISIS citing the sword verses explicitly? How can you say Godse did not take inspiration from Gita?

The other thing I don't get is that how RSS types of Partition time seem to understand that apparently it's OK for _them_ to differ with Gandhi, but Muslims, because of not joining some Congress monolith, are to be punished for...wait for it...differing with Gandhi (say over Quit India)

tn13 is correct actually. I think he is saying the ISIS arent violent because of Koran but because of their political aspirations (at least the way I parsed it, only th13 can clarify that part).

About the rest, the source of the confusion is Hindutva, a political narrative that champions Hindu supremacy started formally by Savarkar (who snitched like canary to the British, excuse my hashed metaphor) and Hinduism the religion. The Godses were motivated by the former. [I am going to burn some serious karma here, you see Savarkar is a golden hero to the RSS]

I agree with what _you're_ saying, but I think tn13 is saying that they are violent because of the Koran.

Again, agreeing with you wholeheartedly in every bit except the last part. I am just uncomfortable about endorsing / invoking Tilak. That man was a bit cuckoo when it came to things about Hindu supremacy. In his eagerness to show racial purity he frigging claimed Hindus were Aryans originating from the North frigging pole and backed it up with his 'scientific' reasoning. Honest, I kid you not, wish I had something I could cite, but am pretty sure it wont be too hard to Google the right source.

EDIT: Holy crap wikipedia has a page on it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Home_in_the_Vedas

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