After Arrest of ‘SIMI Operative’, NIA May Reopen Gandhi Maidan, Bodh Gaya Blast Cases.

Source – thewire.in

New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) may reopen the serial blast cases in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan and Bodh Gaya serial blast cases after alleged SIMI operative Azharuddin was arrested at the Hyderabad airport on Friday night, according to a report in the Times of India.

Azharuddin, who is also known as ‘Chemical Ali’, is an accused in the 2013 Bodh Gaya and Patna bomb blasts and had been on the run since December 2013 after the Chhattisgarh police’s anti-terrorist squad busted a SIMI sleeper module and arrested 17 operatives.

Police claimed that Azharuddin or Azhar went to Saudi Arabia on a fake passport after hiding in Hyderabad for some time. A police official told TOI that Azhar had come back from Saudi Arabia to meet his family, which had shifted to Hyderabad, when he was arrested at the airport on October 11.

“Acting on a specific input, he was arrested by a joint team of Chhattisgarh Police and its Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) wing from Hyderabad airport on Friday after he landed (in a flight) from Saudi Arabia,” Raipur SSP Arif Sheikh said.

Azhar has been charged under sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), Arms Act and Explosive Substances Act. A sedition case has also been registered against him.

Speaking to TOI, Sheikh said that the police had seized Azhar’s passport boarding pass, two driving licences and a voter ID card. “We expect his interrogation to reveal crucial links in the terror network and their operations. Azhar will be produced in [a] local court for transit remand,” the SSP said.

Police officials also said that Azhar, who was regularly in touch with SIMI operatives, had been involved in raising funds for banned terror outfits and brainwashing recruits. He is also accused of providing shelter and support to terrorists who organised the Bodh Gaya and Patna blasts.

A senior police official said that Azharuddin may have provided logistics to bombers in both the blasts. “His interrogation will make things clearer,” he said, speaking to TOI. While the trial in the Gandhi Maidan blast case is underway, all the five convicts in the 2013 Bodh Gaya serial blasts were sentenced to life imprisonment by an NIA court in June 2018.

In July 2013, ten bombs exploded around the Mahabodhi temple complex in Bodh Gaya and injured five persons. Later in October 2013, bombs exploded in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan, just before the then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi was scheduled to arrive for a public rally.

The suspects involved in the blasts allegedly took refuge in Raipur with Azhar’s aid. Sheikh, the Raipur SSP, told TOI that Azhar sheltered the bombers of both blasts. “We have taken him on two days’ remand for interrogation. [The] NIA and Intelligence Bureau (IB) sleuths were also interrogating him,” he said.

While 17 operatives linked to SIMI were arrested in December 2013 – of which Umer Siddiqui and Azharuddin Qureshi were later convicted in the Bodh Gaya case – Azhar managed to flee.

After Arrest of ‘SIMI Operative’, NIA May Reopen Gandhi Maidan, Bodh Gaya Blast Cases

Source: thewire.in

New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) may reopen the serial blast cases in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan and Bodh Gaya serial blast cases after alleged SIMI operative Azharuddin was arrested at the Hyderabad airport on Friday night, according to a report in the Times of India.

Azharuddin, who is also known as ‘Chemical Ali’, is an accused in the 2013 Bodh Gaya and Patna bomb blasts and had been on the run since December 2013 after the Chhattisgarh police’s anti-terrorist squad busted a SIMI sleeper module and arrested 17 operatives.

Police claimed that Azharuddin or Azhar went to Saudi Arabia on a fake passport after hiding in Hyderabad for some time. A police official told TOI that Azhar had come back from Saudi Arabia to meet his family, which had shifted to Hyderabad, when he was arrested at the airport on October 11.

“Acting on a specific input, he was arrested by a joint team of Chhattisgarh Police and its Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) wing from Hyderabad airport on Friday after he landed (in a flight) from Saudi Arabia,” Raipur SSP Arif Sheikh said.

Azhar has been charged under sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), Arms Act and Explosive Substances Act. A sedition case has also been registered against him.

Speaking to TOI, Sheikh said that the police had seized Azhar’s passport boarding pass, two driving licences and a voter ID card. “We expect his interrogation to reveal crucial links in the terror network and their operations. Azhar will be produced in [a] local court for transit remand,” the SSP said.

Police officials also said that Azhar, who was regularly in touch with SIMI operatives, had been involved in raising funds for banned terror outfits and brainwashing recruits. He is also accused of providing shelter and support to terrorists who organised the Bodh Gaya and Patna blasts.

A senior police official said that Azharuddin may have provided logistics to bombers in both the blasts. “His interrogation will make things clearer,” he said, speaking to TOI. While the trial in the Gandhi Maidan blast case is underway, all the five convicts in the 2013 Bodh Gaya serial blasts were sentenced to life imprisonment by an NIA court in June 2018.

In July 2013, ten bombs exploded around the Mahabodhi temple complex in Bodh Gaya and injured five persons. Later in October 2013, bombs exploded in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan, just before the then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi was scheduled to arrive for a public rally.

The suspects involved in the blasts allegedly took refuge in Raipur with Azhar’s aid. Sheikh, the Raipur SSP, told TOI that Azhar sheltered the bombers of both blasts. “We have taken him on two days’ remand for interrogation. [The] NIA and Intelligence Bureau (IB) sleuths were also interrogating him,” he said.

While 17 operatives linked to SIMI were arrested in December 2013 – of which Umer Siddiqui and Azharuddin Qureshi were later convicted in the Bodh Gaya case – Azhar managed to flee.

Bodh Gaya to be developed into a world-class tourist destination

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Tourism in Bihar is set to get a massive boost as Bodh Gaya is soon going to get developed as one of the 16 iconic destinations in India. According to reports, Bihar Chief Minister was presented a detailed plan regarding this by the tourism department of Bihar.

One of the most important places for the followers of Buddhism, it was in Bodh Gaya where Lord Buddha attained enlightenment. The Chief Minister was informed that the tourism department is now planning world-class accommodation for tourists, who come here from across the world. The Chief Minister, in turn, asked the committee to make the development plan after visiting the spot. The government is also building a Mahabodhi Cultural Centre here at Gaya, which would seat about 2000 people. Also, a standard guest house is being built for travellers. Several other facilities are being put in place at Bodh Gaya for guests coming to the holy place.

According to the CM’s statement, “The state government is also working on a plan to link Bodh Gaya, Rajgir and Vaishali, all the three important places where Lord Buddha visited and stayed. We are also working to provide all facilities to Buddhist monks and tourists visiting Bodh Gaya from other places.”

Bodh Gaya, a UNESCO World Heritage Site is also home to the tree under which Buddha got enlightenment; it also has the holy Mahabodhi Temple. Additionally, there are other important temples as well.

Jamaat man wanted in Bodh Gaya blast held

Source: telegraphindia.com

Calcutta police’s special task force arrested a suspected Bengal-based Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh leader from Chennai on Tuesday.

Asadullah Sheikh, alias Raja, 35, is wanted in the Bodh Gaya blast that was carried out last year during the Dalai Lama’s visit there, an officer of the special task force said.

Asadullah, originally from the Bhatar area in East Burdwan, was living in a rented house at Nilangarai in Chennai. “He was involved in the Bodh Gaya blast in 2018 and had been on the run since then. We arrested him based on a specific tip-off about his current address,” the officer said.

A court in Alamdur, Chennai, on Tuesday gave cops his transit remand for three days.

During questioning, Asadullah apparently told the sleuths that his superiors in JMB asked him to contact other operatives of the outfit in Chennai and spread their area of influence.

Last week, a special task force team had arrested another alleged JMB member, Mohammed Abul Kashem, alias Kashem, 22, from Canal East Road in north Calcutta.

Kashem was remanded in police custody till September 16.

Shortly before his arrest, the special task force had picked up a suspected top JMB operative, Ejaz Ahmad, from Bihar’s Gaya.

An officer in Lalbazar said the special task force had “successfully nabbed the entire gang of JMB operatives” from Bengal who were behind the Bodh Gaya blast.

“There are a few more who were part of the JMB team that carried out the blast. Some of them are already on our radar,” a special task force officer said.

Bodh Gaya to be Developed as Next Tourist Destination: Bihar CM Nitish Kumar

Source: india.com

New Delhi: Amongst the 16 tourist destinations in the country, Bihar government’s tourism department has prepared an elaborate plan to develop Bodh Gaya as one of the iconic travel destinations.

The State tourism department on Monday held talks with Chief Minister Nitish Kumar while showcasing a detailed presentation on the action plan to promote tourism and the developmental vision for accommodating tourists in the district.


As per a Times of India report, the CM subsequently addressed a meeting with the tourism department at ‘Sankalp’ hall in his residence in Patna and recounted that the government was already taking concrete steps to promote tourism in Bodh Gaya.

The government is setting up a Mahabodhi Culture Centre with an auditorium to accommodate up to 2000 people as a part of the tourism goal. He also directed the tourism department to fix a date to visit Bodh Gaya for a better understanding of the vision.

Further, the CM said that the state government was also working on a plan to link Bodh Gaya, Rajgir and Vaishali, the three important places where Lord Buddha visited and stayed. “We are also working to provide all facilities to Buddhist monks and tourists visiting Bodh Gaya from other places,” he added.

CM Kumar has also asked the tourism officials to work on promoting agroforestry produces as a part of the marketing strategy as well as educate farmers on promoting crop cycle.

The Principal Secretary of tourism department Deepak Kumar Singh earlier informed that a total of 846.83 lakh saplings have been planted in the state from 2012 to 2019.

Two suspected JMB operatives arrested from Bengal’s Malda district

Source: hindustantimes.com

The Special Task Force (STF) of Kolkata Police on Tuesday morning arrested two suspected operatives of the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) Bangladesh from an area near Shamsi police station of Bengal’s Malda district. The two nabbed were identified as Abdul Bari (28) and Nijamuddin Khan (28).

According to the police, Bari and Khan were looking after the recruitment and training of the newly recruited JMB members under the instructions of Salahuddin Salahein and Ejaz Ahmed, two top leaders of the outfit.

Officers described Bari and Khan as “two main organisers of the newly detected JMB’s Uttar Dinajpur module”. Both are residents of Bengal’s North Dinajpur district.

Just one day ago, STF authorities said they arrested a suspected JMB member Abul Kashem alias Kashem, who hailed from Durmut village under Mangalkot police station in Burdwan district. He was arrested from the Canal East Road in Kolkata.

STF officers said information about Abdul Bari and Nijamuddin Khan were given out by Kashem.

Bari and Khan were booked under IPC Sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 121 (waging war against the govt of India), 122 (collecting arms etc with intention of waging war against the govt of India), 123 (concealing with intent to facilitate design to wage war), 124A( sedition), 125 (waging war against the govt of any Asiatic power in alliance with the govt of India).

A week ago the STF arrested Ejaz Ahmed, a top JMB operative, from Gaya in Bihar in connection with the Bodh Gaya explosion during the visit of the Dalai Lama. Salahein, a Bangladeshi national, who is presently leading JMB’s pro-Al Qaeda faction, is believed to be based in India since 2014.

Bari and Khan went into hiding after the arrest of Ejaz Ahmed, said STF.

After questioning the arrested JMB operatives, the STF officers have come to know that senior operatives of the JMB were planning to meet in Kolkata shortly to finalise their strategy before escaping to somewhere in South India.

“We have seized some incriminating articles and mobile phones from the possession of Bari and Khan,” said a statement.

Only last week, 19 of the 31 people arrested in connection with the Khagragarh blast were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment ranging from six years to 10 years after they pleaded guilty in a special National Investigation Agency court in Kolkata. They were all linked with the JMB.

Walking the Path of the Buddha in a Neglected Corner of India

Source: newyorker.com

Buddhism was born under a giant fig tree, which, today, grows at the center of the remote and unbeautiful town of Bodh Gaya, in India’s destitute northeastern state of Bihar. The tree is about three crooked blocks from the Be Happy Café and a few minutes’ walk from a used book store where a middle-aged Krishna devotee from Iowa, named James, works, reselling old paperbacks by Hesse and Murakami.

The sacred Bodhi Tree is surrounded by a wall and guarded by police. (Islamic extremists bombed the site in 2013.) At dawn, before pilgrims begin their daily perambulations around the tree’s massive trunk, local children forage under its sprawling canopy—some branches are propped up by iron columns—to gather fallen leaves. Pressed inside clear plastic, the leaves are sold to visitors from Bhutan, Myanmar, and Manhattan, and to outposts of Buddhism around the world. The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, a reputed prince from what is now Nepal, is said to have achieved nirvana while meditating under the tree, in the fifth century B.C. The Awakened One purportedly spent seven weeks under under the Bodhi Tree after achieving liberation from the wheel of suffering that binds humankind to selfhood, aging, disease, and death. So Deepak Anand told me.

Last winter, I met Anand not in the Be Happy Café but at one of its competitors, the Tibet Om Cafe. The menu offered a staple comfort food of Western spiritual seekers in Asia: banana pancakes. Anand, who was forty-five, didn’t eat. He was tall, pin-thin, had a shaved head, and was so intense and talkative that he ordered a cup of tea but forgot to drink it. Anand is a self-taught cultural geographer. For the past twelve years, he has analyzed historical texts and used G.P.S. technology to chart what he says are the pathways walked by the Buddha as he spread his philosophy of mindfulness across northern India, about twenty-four hundred years ago. Anand hopes to promote this spiritual legacy by reviving a network of “Buddha trails” for pilgrims and tourists to walk in Bihar, the cradle of the world’s fourth-largest religion. Yet Buddhism largely vanished from the region centuries ago, eclipsed by Hinduism and Islam. Today, farmers plow up stone effigies without realizing that the sculptures are antique representations of the sage. “People long ago tore down the stupas and built their homes using the old bricks and stones,” Anand said, referring to Buddhist monuments that once dotted the Ganges River plains. “They simply didn’t know.”

To test his ideas, Anand suggested we hike from the Tree of Enlightenment, in Bodh Gaya, to the ruins of the Nalanda university—an important center of Buddhist learning, which was razed by Turkic invaders in the twelfth century. The four-day trek effectively spans Buddhism’s rise and fall in the subcontinent—many scholars believe the university’s destruction contributed to the religion’s decline. No one in recent times, Anand assured me, had retraced the Buddha’s footsteps along the fifty-mile route.

The Buddha’s only concession to hiking kit was a begging bowl. He sometimes strode through the villages of Bihar with a large crowd of followers in tow. Our own walking party numbered four: the Bangalore-based journalist Bhavita Bhatia carried a Free Tibet flag in her rucksack; Siddharth Agarwal, a river conservationist from Kolkata, lugged a leaden hardback copy of “Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River”; I packed the electronics needed to transmit stories from the trail. Only Anand practiced Buddhist non-attachment. All he brought was a light sweater. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said, when we caught up with him on the trail, after he repeatedly surged ahead. “I’m a high-energy person.”

In the Buddha’s day, northern India’s religious landscape was in a time of spiritual crisis and social upheaval. Disillusioned, rudderless, Siddhartha renounced his gilded life—a childhood with thirty-two nursemaids, a kingdom with seasonal palaces and private gardens, and his princess wife and their child—to join other ascetics meditating in forests along the Neranjara River.

Today, plastic trash spangles the river’s sandy banks. Miles of rice fields steam where giant trees once threw blue shadows. “British records reported a leopard at the train station as late as the nineteen-thirties,” Anand said, wistfully. “It’s all gone.”

A carload of sightseeing Malaysian monks stopped to ask us directions. They ended up debating Anand about the location of Ratnagiri Rock, the site sometimes identified as the place where Siddhartha finally abandoned the hermit life, broke his fast with a bowl of gruel, and invented a “middle way” to transcendence that rejects both extreme sensuality and extreme austerity. Anand informed the monks that he had geotagged the exact coördinates of Siddhartha’s epiphany. The monks smiled in polite silence. “There are so many sects in Buddhism,” Anand said. “It’s impossible to convince them all.” We walked on. We passed the mountain cave where Siddhartha was said to have mortified himself for six years, by some accounts sleeping on a bed of spikes. And, after that pilgrimage stop, Bihar became just Bihar.

Chronically listed as one of India’s poorest states, Bihar isn’t usually associated with spiritual revival. Its news cycle instead tallies droughts, floods, fatal encephalitis outbreaks, and the violent aftershocks of a failed Maoist insurgency.

Following Anand, we plodded through abandoned sand mines. We stepped over railroad tracks. Inert villages slipped by, hollowed out by urban migration. In granaries, families hand-cranked large mechanical fans to generate a breeze for threshing their harvest. The Biharis, though, are ritually kind. They offer a cup of well water, a spot of shade, a narcotic betel nut to chew on the way. A day’s walk from the global tourist bubble of Bodh Gaya, where lamas broadcast meditation tips on YouTube, the world grows so insular that young village boys, peering up at me, exclaimed, “Look at that face! Have you ever seen a face like that?”

“What our people and the government don’t realize,” Anand told us, in frustration, “is that they are living on top of a global treasure—inside a living museum.”

Anand isn’t Buddhist. He was a Hindu by birth and is an empiricist by nature. Mostly, he is a proud Bihari.

The middle-class son of a military father and a housewife mother, Anand studied engineering and hoped to become a fighter pilot. But his curiosity kept drawing him to the mounds of Nalanda. The grassy hillocks are rubble from the powerful Magadha empire, whose kings funded the world’s first Buddhist monasteries, more than two millennia ago. Anand began poring through early travellers’ accounts of his homeland’s largely forgotten past. His hero is Xuanzang, an adventurous Chinese monk who travelled to India, in the seventh century, to study the roots of Buddhism. Working as a pilgrimage interpreter and cultural consultant, Anand became an unlikely Buddhologist. An entry on his blog, announcing his purported discovery of Ratnagiri Rock, and citing a fifth-century Chinese monk named Faxian, contains paragraphs like this:

Anand has compiled hundreds of such waypoints in his Buddha-trail database. He is a keen admirer of his predecessors, the nineteenth-century British archeologists whose excavations proved that Buddhism was a South Asian idea. (Earlier scholars had maintained, based on curly-headed statues, that the Buddha was Ethiopian.) “The British were colonizers,” Anand said, “but they gave India the Buddha.”

“And they took everything they found away to London,” Agarwal, the river conservationist, said.

When we walked into a village called Lohjara, every household seemed to wave at Anand. He was hailed for pressuring the local police into investigating the theft of the village’s stone Buddha. The weathered statue, contemplating eternity in the lotus position, had been sitting in a local field for generations. In 2014, art thieves hefted the heavy sculpture into a car trunk and made off into the night. Two years later, acting on a tip, officers raided a nearby warehouse and found the Buddha packed for export. “We felt very bad those two years,” Rattan Pandey, a village elder, recalled. “We protested to the authorities to recover it immediately. We even blocked the roads.”

The restored Buddha was anchored with steel hoops beneath a village tree. The statue’s face was hacked off centuries ago, possibly by a Turkic soldier. Pandey worshipped the figure as Nakti Shiva, or Noseless Shiva, a mutilated version of the Hindu god.

We climbed the Jethian valley, plucking tart berries from jujube trees. According to the explorer-monk Xuanzan, a local man had tried to measure the Buddha’s height when he visited the place, but gauging the immense soul by any earthly means had proved impossible. In frustration, the skeptic had thrown down his bamboo yardstick—which sprouted to green life. Canebrakes still feathered Jethian’s high ravines. There were also faded village posters advertising Anand’s first effort at resuscitating the sacred landscapes of Bihar—a pilgrim’s walk organized with a charity from California.

A remote mountain road patrolled by rhesus monkeys led us to Rajgir, the former capital of the Magadha empire. The area was a bewildering Venn diagram of India’s singular spiritual history: Jain caves, Hindu temples, Muslim shrines, Ashokan stupas. Anand was well-known here, too. At Vulture’s Peak, a shrine where the Buddha taught his Heart Sutra—“Form is only emptiness, emptiness only form”—a crowd of touts, stevedores, rickshaw drivers, and cold-drink venders ringed Anand. They complained about being bullied by a pilgrimage mafia. He advised them to unionize.

On day four, we limped into Nalanda under clouds the color of polished lead. Anand showed us around. At its peak, Nalanda, in central Bihar, was the largest center of Buddhist learning in the world. It housed as many as ten thousand student monks. They argued about Buddhist doctrine and studied cosmology, astronomy, and art. Scores of villages nearby were dedicated to feeding resident scholars. Nalanda’s graduates helped carry Buddhism to Tibet and points along the Silk Road. “They used big mirrors to reflect light onto the Buddha statues inside temples,” Anand said, highlighting the monastic center’s architectural wonders.

But the manicured ruins felt comatose. Bhatia, the journalist, unfurled her colorful Tibetan pennant—the only touch of color on Nalanda’s barren squares.

How Buddhism ghosted away from its Indian source, between seven and nine centuries ago, remains one of the great mysteries in the history of religion. The Hindu nationalists now in power in New Delhi take an official stance: they insist that Muslim hordes from Central Asia—first Turkic invaders and later the Mughals—wiped out the pacifist Buddhists at sword-point. The general who razed Nalanda, Bakhtiyar Khalji, couldn’t even read the millions of Buddhist manuscripts he torched. But other scholars, Anand included, believe the reality is more complex. For centuries, Buddhism’s influence was waning in India. The monasteries created a brain drain, sapping innovation. The monks grew isolated from the people. Hinduism and Islam attracted more followers. It was as if Buddhism evanesced the same way that its master teacher did. The Buddha reputedly died, at age eighty, near what is today Kushinagar, in Uttar Pradesh. His ashes were taken from the scene of his life and scattered far across the Buddhist world.

According to some scriptures, the Buddha spent a week “walking a long way up and down in joy and ease” after attaining enlightenment. Our own little walking party sputtered to an end at the Nalanda bus stop. Bhatia left for Sikkim. Anand returned to his base, at Bodh Gaya. Only Agarwal and I slogged on—toward the Brahmaputra River. A dense ground fog hugged the fields, making navigation difficult. We stumbled along sodden canal trails. Crows appeared and vanished in the white. Anand had asked, before we parted, for endurance-walking advice. I’d forgotten to tell him that, on any long walk, he will get lost. And that being a little lost isn’t bad. It helps you stay awake. And being found is overrated.

Now, Mukhyamantri Tirath Yatra Yojana to cover 7 more destinations

Source: millenniumpost.in

NEW DELHI: The Delhi Cabinet in its meeting on Tuesday, chaired by the Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal approved seven new destinations for Mukhyamantri Tirath Yatra Yojana. “In addition to the already functional five routes approved by the council of ministers earlier, the following seven routes are to be added to this scheme: Rameshwaram- Madurai, Tirupati, Dwarkadhish, Jagannath Puri-Konark-Bhubaneshwar, Shirdi, Ujjain and Bodh Gaya,” noted a statement from the government.

It has also been decided that in the existing Ajmer-Pushkar tour, Haldi Ghati destination will be added. “In addition to Three Tier AC Train, AC accommodation may also be provided wherever possible. Further, wherever yatris are required to be transported through buses, the same may be by 2X2 AC coaches wherever possible,” noted the statement.

The statement added that apart from the area MLA, any of the ministers in the Delhi Government and chairman, Tirth Yatra Vikas Samiti, Delhi government, may issue such a certificate irrespective of the constituency in which the applicant resides.

Earlier, the cabinet approved the Revenue Department’s proposal to begin the scheme titled Mukhyamantri Tirth Yatra Yojana to enable 1,100 senior citizens from each Assembly Constituency per year to undertake free pilgrimages, the expenses for which will be borne by the government. It is proposed that a total of 77,000 pilgrims will be able to avail this facility every year. In case applicants won’t be able to undertake the pilgrimage, he/she has to provide intimation upto seven days before the travel date. Otherwise, he/she shall not be eligible to apply under this scheme again.

All application forms are available online and shall be filed online either through Office of Divisional Commissioner or office of respective MLA or office of Tirth Yatra Committee. The selection of pilgrims will be done through draw of lots and respective area MLA will have to certify the residents as belonging to Delhi. All other modalities will be specified in the final notification. “This son of yours will send you on at least one tirth yatra in your lifetime. Your government has done a lot of development work over the last four-and-a-half years, but sending our senior citizens on a tirth yatra is one of the closest things to my heart,” said Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal while launching the scheme earlier this month.

This holy land of VARANASI

Source: thehansindia.com

Sarnath considered one of the most important sites in the Buddhist Circuit makes the holy city of Varanasi an important pilgrimage centre for Buddhist pilgrims from Asia as well as tourists from all over the world. Located 10kms north east of Varanasi with its name derived from the Sanskrit word “Saranganatha” (Lord of the Deer) was the deer park where Buddha gave his first sermon and where deer roamed around without fear. There are several guides waiting at the entrance of this site to tell visitors about its history, legend and spiritual importance. Just as in Bodh Gaya, a number of countries which have Buddhism as a major religion like Japan, Thailand, Tibet, Sri Lanka and Myanmar have built temples and monasteries in Sarnath and these reflect their architectural styles our guide Ajay Tripathi informs us. This place typically presents an overview of Buddhist architecture. As we were familiar with these styles from Bodh Gaya we were more interested in seeing the viharas, stupas and the archaeological museum which houses the famous Ashokan lion capital.

Seven weeks after he attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, Buddha is said to have traveled to Sarnath also known as Mrigadava, Rishipatana and Isapattana which in Pali meant a place where Holy men resided. It was here that the sangha or community of enlightened persons was formed after Buddha enlightened five persons with his teachings of Dharma. The sermon that Buddha gave to these five monks was his first sermon known as “Dhammachakkappavattana Suta” and we got to see the ruins of this stupa known as “Dhamek Stupa” Another important structure here where Buddha is supposed to have spent his first rainy season is the “Mulagandhakuti Vihara”. This was the main temple which had the famous Ashoka pillar in front and the well-known statue of Buddha in the “Dhramachakra Pravartana Mudra” was discovered in its vicinity. It is a long walk as we pass through the ruins of stupas and viharas that related to Buddhas stay here and his various teachings. There is lush green grass and trees all around and there are benches where tourists can sit for a while before they resume their walk.

The Sarnath Archaeological museum is indeed a veritable treasure house with various works of great historical importance preserved with care. It is one of the oldest site museums of the Archaeological Survey if Indi (ASI) and was built in 1910 by John Marshall, the then director general of Archaeology in India. Built entirely in sandstone it is designed like a vihara with a central hall and galleries that are like monastic cells housing historically important finings and several Buddhist antiquities. More than 6, 800 excavations were conducted at Sarnath leading to the discovery of rare antiquities our guide tells us. We walk past a rich collection of sculptures, edifices, parts of ruined structures, and stone carved images of Buddha and Bodhisattva.

The famous Ashokan lion capital here is said to have miraculously survived a 45-foot height drop to the ground from the top of the pillar. It became the national symbol and the national symbol on the Indian flag. A sculpture of four Asiatic lions standing back to back on an elaborate base carved out of a single block of polished sandstone, it was placed by the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka on top of the pillar he built at Sarnath in 250BCE. The four lions are said to symbolise the ‘four noble truths’ of Buddhism. We take more than an hour to see the well preserved artifacts that take us through the life and times of Buddha and his preaching of Dharma. Walking through the galleries one feels a strange peace that is almost meditative.

In the ruins and well preserved statues and findings from the site lies the essence of Buddha. Saranath is a worthwhile trip that brings alive the mystique of Budhha and the peace and love that pervade his teachings. It is both a spiritual sojourn and a historical overview and is a site worth visiting.

A school charges waste instead of fees in Bodh Gaya

Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

For students of Padampani School, it is praiseworthy to be a part of a great initiative to keep the environment clean. Total credit goes to the school authorities, who encourage students to pick up wastes on the way to school and dump it at the dustbin kept at the entrance gate of the school. The school considers those wastes as school fees.

The school was jointly started by a Korean activist and a group of people from Bodh Gaya. Soon after it gained popularity, many social organisations started lending their support to the school. Manoj Samdarshi, the founder of Padampani School, said, “The school was started with a motive to educate poor kids of the nearby villages and to keep the areas around Mahabodhi Temple clean. A Korean social activist, Shin Geong Hawa, helped us a lot. Besides, we also get funds from other social organisations. The school is running well, and we have provided suitable infrastructure to the students.”

Currently, the classes starts from standard 1 to standard 8. However, constructions works are going on and soon it will get affiliated to the Bihar Board. Deepak Kumar, vice-principal of the school, said, “By now, over 250 students have got enrolled at our school and the number will only increase with the time. We provide all the basic facilities, including mid-day meals. Students also get to learn various co-curricular activities, including yoga and meditation from experts. We also encourage students to plant more trees. With the help of our students, we have planted more than 200 trees in and around the school premises. Students also learn more about environment preservation through workshops, which we organise frequently.”