From Christina Palmer
NEW DELHI-While the Mughal Emperor Akbar’s name still irks extremist Hindus across India because he was a Muslim but married a Hindu Princess Jodha Bai and lived a happy married life with her, centuries later, now an Indian Hindu extremist organisation has launched a court petition to stop two lions named after a Hindu deity and a 16th-century Muslim emperor from sharing a zoo enclosure.
According to details, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a globally notorious Hindu extremist outfit, went to court in the state of West Bengal after reports a lioness named Sita had been put with a lion called Akbar.
Akbar was a Mughal emperor who extended Muslim rule over much of the Indian subcontinent, a time Hindu nationalist groups consider to have been a period of slavery.
“Sita cannot stay with the Mughal emperor Akbar,” the VHP official Anup Mondal said on Sunday, suggesting it would offend religious sentiments in the Hindu-majority country. “Such an act amounts to blasphemy and is a direct assault on the religious belief of all Hindus,” the VHP said , after having lodged a plea on Friday calling for a name change.
Critics say religious intolerance has been growing in the world’s most populous country since the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, came to power in 2014. General elections, likely to be held in April, are expected to secure Modi a third term in power.
Mondal said the lion called Akbar had previously been named after the Hindu deity Rama when he was in the neighbouring state of Tripura, which is controlled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party.
But the lion’s name was changed when he was brought to West Bengal, which is controlled by the opposition Trinamool Congress party. The VHP petition calls for a ban on using religious names for animals in zoos.
A West Bengal forest department official, Dipak Kumar Mandal, said “the lion and the lioness are now kept separately”.
However people say that while Princess Jodha Bai and her family who were a Maharaja family had absolutely no issue with marrying Muslim Emperor Akbar and in fact the couple is remembered as a wonderful husband and wife in the history, why would a lioness with a Hindu name be feeling bothered living in close proximity with a Lion, having Muslim name Akbar?, ridiculing the VHP madness, people are heard saying that VHP guys still believe that it is Akbar who is making hey all the way in India for centuries, starting from Jodha Bai to Lioness Sita today.
