It’s sad reading. Dabholkar was clearly a good man.
Dabholkar was hated by fundamentalists. But, being the peaceful, open-hearted and kind man he was, he was adored and loved by the people. Over the years, his popularity in Maharashtra grew and grew – together with public understanding of the importance of the rationalist fight.
Stories like this make me wonder. We can praise the dead and we can talk about the good he had done, but we don’t hear the conversations of the cowards who shot him in the back, and their defenders. I’d like to see what they have to say, because I’m confident that their words would be even more persuasive of the rightness of Dabholkar’s cause.
This is what they’re saying:
You have Dr. Narendra Dabholkar’s website linked in your atheist blogs. http://antisuperstition.org/. THe organization he founded is quite old and well respected.
Dr. Dabholkar himself was a very respected person in Maharashtra state of India. So this was shocking to many people.
I really hope this will be a wakeup call. Someone was killed for acting on the principals of secularism and “scientific temperament” (as Sanal put it) put forth in the Indian Constitution. I hope enough people in India can see the hash that’s been made of its vaunted secularism when this happens. My visits to India have always been amazing (even the ones where I puked a lot), and I’m honestly very scared of what would happen if that country dissolves further into religiously-motivated violence.
He had a message of freedom, knowledge, kindness and gentle but passionate opposition to superstition. All they had to answer it with was hatred and violence