New Delhi, Dec 29 (IANS) With a court in the Russian city of Tomsk dismissing a ‘ban the Gita’ case Wednesday, the Indian government Thursday said its views that the prosecutors had not read up the original Bhagavad Gita text have been vindicated by the verdict.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, just ahead of the Lok Sabha adjourning sine die at the end of its winter session, informed the house that the state prosecutors’ case in Tomsk was based on ‘some erroneous conclusions’ from a Russian translation of the Hindus’ holy scripture.
‘Yesterday (wednesday), I received information from the Foreign Secretary that the higher court, in which the case was being heard, have rejected the petition and clearly demonstrated that even those who filed the petition and made comments, did not go through the original text of the language,’ Mukherjee said.
Mukherjee, who is Leader of House in the Lok Sabha, said the state prosecutors had ‘depended on the translation of somebody’ and based their arguments on ‘some erroneous conclusions’ from the translated work.
Referring to the uproar in the house on the ‘ban Gita’ move in the Siberian city district court, he said External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna had in his earlier statement before the house noted that the case was ‘absurd’ and his observations were vindicated by the Russian court’s verdict.
India had dubbed the Tomsk court judgment, rejecting the state prosecutors’ plea to ban the Bhagavad Gita and brand it as ‘extremist’ literature, as a ‘sensible resolution of a sensitive issue’ and that India was happy to ‘put this episode behind us.’
The case had been going on in the Tomsk city court since June and an IANS report on it earlier this month when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in Moscow for the summit meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had caused a political storm in India.
A day ahead of the court verdict, Krishna met Russian Ambassador to India Alexander Kadakin and sought a resolution of the controversy.
