The Trinamool Congress has strongly refuted Central Government’s contention that it had not come in the way of Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s proposed Chicago visit where she was reportedly invited by the Vivekananda Vedanta Society to attend the 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s historic speech at the Parliament of World Religions.
Rejecting the argument of a senior Foreign Ministry official that his Department had “not received any request for clearance regarding the visit of Ms Mamata Banerjee to Chicago for any event” and that “the reports about the denial of permission are therefore not true,” Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien said that the Chief Minister’s visit was spiked by the saffron brigade as they wanted the programme at American city to be held under the banner of Global Hindu Congress and addressed by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat.
“It is common knowledge that BJP-RSS wanted only one major programme to be held in Chicago … under the banner of World Hindu Congress … and attended by Mohan Bhagwat. To ensure this happened intense pressure was mounted on the Vivekananda Vedanta Mission in Chicago,” O’Brien said echoing what the Chief Minister herself told during a speech at Ramakrishna Mission, Belur Math.
Banerjee had said delivering a lecture on 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago speech, “I wanted to go to Chicago. But I could not go there because there was a conspiracy hatched by some unholy clique (read the BJP-RSS) that conspired against me and created pressurized the Ramakrishna Mission so that I can be stopped from joining the Chicago conference,” and went on the add that the same “clique” was trying to take control of the Ramakrishna Mission order as they had done to the Vivekananda Rock at Kanyakumari which was earlier managed by the Mission.
Incidentally the Hindu Monk from India had drawn a huge and long applause 125 years ago at the Chicago summit when he departed from the usual practice of addressing the audience as “ladies and gentlemen” and called them “brothers and sisters’ of America” to begin his speech. It was for the first time that Hinduism was presented before the world not as religious or sectarian dogma but a universal philosophy and a way of life.
A “pained” Chief Minister told the Belur Math audience that “Hinduism is not an imported dogma peddled by handful people these days but a religion that has emerged from the Indian soil. It is a great religion which preaches tolerance. My analysis of Hinduism will depend upon what Ramakrishna Paramahansa and his disciple Swami Vivekananda preached and not what some fundamentalists go bandying about.”