Burhanpur: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, in an apparent reference to religious conversions, said on Sunday that missionaries take advantage of situations wherein people feel that the society is not with them.
He was addressing an event here, where he dedicated to the people the samadhi of Govindnath Maharaj.
“We don’t see our own people. We don’t go to them and ask them. But some missionary from thousands of miles away comes and lives there, eats their food, speaks their language and then converts them,” Bhagwat said.
Over the course of 100 years, people came to India to change everything, he said.
They have been working here for centuries but failed to gain anything as our roots remained strong thanks to the efforts of our ancestors, Bhagwat said.
“Efforts are made to uproot them. So, the society should understand that deceit. We have to strengthen the faith,” he said.
Deceptive people raise some questions about religion to waver the faith, he said, adding, “Our society never faced such people earlier so people get sceptical…We have to remove this weakness.”
Bhagwat said, “Even after this, our society doesn’t waver. But people change when they lose faith and feel that the society is not with them.”
The RSS chief said that an entire village in Madhya Pradesh became “sanatani” 150 years after they locals got converted to Christianity as they got help from Kalyan Ashram (an RSS-backed voluntary organisation).
“We don’t need to go abroad to spread our faith as ‘sanatan dharma’ doesn’t believe in such practices. We need to remove the deviation and distortion of the Bharatiya traditions and faith here (in India) and strengthen the roots of our ‘dharma’,” he said.
Bhagwat also addressed a Dharma Sabha and visited Gurdwara Badi Sangat to pay obeisance.
After visiting the gurdwara, he said that Guru Granth Sahib is a source of inspiration for the Hindus.
On Monday, Bhagwat is scheduled to inaugurate the office building of Dr Hedgewar Memorial Committee at Saraswati Nagar and also address the Sangh volunteers in Burhanpur.
Burhanpur: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat, in an apparent reference to religious conversions, said on Sunday that missionaries take advantage of situations wherein people feel that the society is not with them.
He was addressing an event here, where he dedicated to the people the samadhi of Govindnath Maharaj.
“We don’t see our own people. We don’t go to them and ask them. But some missionary from thousands of miles away comes and lives there, eats their food, speaks their language and then converts them,” Bhagwat said.
Over the course of 100 years, people came to India to change everything, he said.
They have been working here for centuries but failed to gain anything as our roots remained strong thanks to the efforts of our ancestors, Bhagwat said.
“Efforts are made to uproot them. So, the society should understand that deceit. We have to strengthen the faith,” he said.
Deceptive people raise some questions about religion to waver the faith, he said, adding, “Our society never faced such people earlier so people get sceptical…We have to remove this weakness.”
Bhagwat said, “Even after this, our society doesn’t waver. But people change when they lose faith and feel that the society is not with them.”
The RSS chief said that an entire village in Madhya Pradesh became “sanatani” 150 years after they locals got converted to Christianity as they got help from Kalyan Ashram (an RSS-backed voluntary organisation).
“We don’t need to go abroad to spread our faith as ‘sanatan dharma’ doesn’t believe in such practices. We need to remove the deviation and distortion of the Bharatiya traditions and faith here (in India) and strengthen the roots of our ‘dharma’,” he said.
Bhagwat also addressed a Dharma Sabha and visited Gurdwara Badi Sangat to pay obeisance.
After visiting the gurdwara, he said that Guru Granth Sahib is a source of inspiration for the Hindus.
On Monday, Bhagwat is scheduled to inaugurate the office building of Dr Hedgewar Memorial Committee at Saraswati Nagar and also address the Sangh volunteers in Burhanpur.
But the political fervor among progressive Democrats for compulsory affordable housing attached to tax incentives for conversions could dampen developers’ interest in the costly overhauls. And it’s not clear any of the policy initiatives on the table will yield conversions on a broad enough scale to turn underpopulated downtowns into bustling residential neighborhoods. As major cities from Chicago to San Francisco to Washington also look to the overhauls, they remain expensive and logistically difficult to pursue.
“I don’t think there’s going to be as much as people think there will be, unless there were a lot of incentives for people to get there,” said Marty Burger, chief executive officer at Silverstein Properties in New York, which is pursuing some office-to-residential projects.
Three years into the pandemic, it’s become clear that remote work is not a temporary phenomenon. Just over half of Manhattan office workers are back at their desks on an average weekday, according to a recent survey of employers conducted by the Partnership for New York City, a business group.
Another recent study found hybrid work is costing Manhattan at least $12.4 billion in economic activity per year as office employees spend less money at lunch and coffee spots near their workplaces. While Manhattan office buildings — some of the most valuable real estate in the world — haven’t yet seen a significant sustained drop in valuations, long-term vacancies could be reflected in property assessments in the coming years, with potentially dire consequences for the city’s tax base. The city derives roughly 50 percent of its tax revenue from real estate.
Mayor Eric Adams has pointed to Lower Manhattan — which saw a wave of office buildings converted into apartments in the 1990s and early 2000s — as a template that could be replicated in Midtown, which has been harder hit by Covid-19 due to its reliance on the office crowd. But a range of factors limit the extent to which that success could be repeated.
“Midtown is a different building stock than lower Manhattan, so the success of lower Manhattan can’t be directly translated here,” said Vishaan Chakrabarti, who led the Manhattan division of the Department of City Planning under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and now runs an architecture firm.
He noted Midtown office buildings are more likely to have structural features that complicate residential conversions, like large floor plans that make it difficult to break up buildings into individual apartments with sufficient windows. Buildings in Lower Manhattan that were converted in the last wave were largely older office properties — generally from the 1920s or earlier — that had operable windows, so a conversion wouldn’t require a complete facade replacement the way buildings from the 1960s, or onward, would.
“You can often tie that to the rise and efficiency of air conditioning, when you didn’t have to have operable windows,” said Eleanor Gorski, president and CEO of the Chicago Architecture Center and a former planning official for the city, which is pursuing a plan along the LaSalle Street corridor, a commercial thoroughfare in Chicago’s central business district. “But now turning them into residential, that’s the challenge.”
Silverstein evaluated some 2,500 office buildings in Manhattan below 96th street and found 323 were suitable for conversion based on a range of criteria. Indeed, the calculations can vary widely from property to property.
“What people may not realize is that with the office buildings, there’s so many individual building features that factor into cost,” said Basha Gerhards, senior vice president of planning at the Real Estate Board of New York. She cited the physical layout issues, but also when existing leases run out — which, in office buildings, can span ten years or more — and financial factors, like how much debt a building has and what the ownership structure is like.
The current economic environment, with high interest rates and inflation, doesn’t make the calculation any easier.
The Chicago plan, unveiled under Mayor Lori Lightfoot, seeks to create 1,000 new residential units along the LaSalle corridor, 30 percent of them affordable.
As Chicago looks to a specific office thoroughfare, officials in New York have taken a less targeted approach.
Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed legislation in her executive budget to remove zoning and building regulations that can make it harder to convert office properties into residential. She also proposed an incentive program that would offer developers a 19-year property-tax exemption if they set aside 20 percent of the residential units for low- and middle-income households.
Dan Garodnick, chair of New York’s Department of City Planning, has been careful to note the measure would simply remove barriers to conversions and incentivize affordable housing, though it will be up to the private sector how much they take advantage of the opportunity.
“While we are enabling, or what we propose to do is enable 136 million square feet to be eligible, we do not believe that 136 million square feet will take us up on the opportunity,” he said at a City Council hearing earlier this year. City officials have said 136 million square feet is roughly the amount of office space in the entire city of Philadelphia.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed introduced legislation last month to remove certain city requirements that can limit office-to-housing conversions. That comes as a bill before the California legislature seeks to make approvals for such conversions automatic, and offer grants to developers who pursue office-to-residential projects with a 10 percent affordable housing set-aside.
Mayor Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C., meanwhile, set an ambitious goal earlier this year of increasing the population of the city’s downtown from 25,000 to 40,000 over five years, alongside a program that would give office owners a 20-year tax break if they converted to housing and set aside at least 15 percent of homes for low- and middle-income households.
In New York, a tax break known as 421-g was established in 1995 to help facilitate conversions in Lower Manhattan. That program, which did not require any affordable housing in exchange, generated nearly 13,000 new apartments at a cost of $1.2 billion, or $92,000 per unit, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.
Some experts argue there’s a benefit — particularly for the future financial health of Midtown — to a more direct approach, with government offering more generous incentives to actively encourage widespread conversions.
“If it’s limited to [the governor’s proposal] I don’t think much is going to happen on this, I don’t think people understand how much surgery these buildings are going to require,” Chakrabarti said. “The question for government becomes, what’s the public good that comes from these conversions, why should we incentive them so much beyond affordable housing, and I think there’s a stronger argument for that in Midtown than people are realizing.”
Other experts say it would be a mistake to allow widespread conversions to high-cost housing without including affordable housing. Vicki Been, New York’s top housing official under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, co-wrote a recent op-ed arguing any regulatory changes to make way for office conversions should require a portion of every building be set aside for income-restricted housing, rather than just offering a tax incentive for affordable units.
“If New York passes a law that will end up producing thousands of luxury apartments that only the wealthiest can afford, and resulting in zero permanently affordable homes for hard-working regular New Yorkers, then what will we have done?” Been and her co-authors wrote in Gotham Gazette.
Meanwhile, several city and state lawmakers believe the affordable housing requirements in the proposed tax break — that 20 percent of a building be affordable — would be insufficient. State Assemblymember Deborah Glick introduced an alternative to Hochul’s proposal that would lift certain state restrictions limiting conversions, but require 40 percent of new units be set aside as affordable housing.
Multiple developers cited a need for deeper incentives than what’s on the table in New York.
“I think it’s a mistake to tie it to affordable [housing],” Scott Rechler, CEO of the development firm RXR, said of a potential tax incentive for conversions. “I think addressing the tax incentive and broadening what is in those incentives would be valuable.”
For now, owners pursuing conversions should be aware it’s a risk.
“We don’t want people that just think that they can take any building, convert it, and then they’re in the middle of this thing, and now you have a building that was an office building, was trying to be converted, and now it’s nothing,” Burger, of Silverstein, said. “Because then you just have to blow the thing up.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear on February 3 a batch of pleas challenging controversial state laws regulating religious conversions due to interfaith marriages.
A bench comprising Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and justices PS Narasimha and JB Pardiwala noted that a transfer plea was mentioned in the morning.
“We can list it, issue notice and hear it together. The transfer petition will also be numbered by then. The attorney general can also examine. We will hear all on Friday,” the bench said.
During the brief hearing, senior advocate CU Singh, appearing in the court on behalf of NGO “Citizens for Justice and Peace” of activist Teesta Setalwad, submitted that people cannot get married due to these state laws and the situation is very grave.
Attorney General R Venkataramani submitted that these are state legislations that have been challenged before the apex court and the high courts concerned should hear the cases.
The top court had earlier asked the parties challenging the anti-conversion laws of several states to file a common petition seeking a transfer of the cases on the issue from various high courts to the apex court.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had challenged the locus standi of “Citizens for Justice and Peace”, which is one of the petitioners. Mehta had not elaborated on the reasons for questioning the NGO’s locus.
The bench had noted that there were at least five such pleas “before the Allahabad High Court, seven before the Madhya Pradesh High Court, two each before the Gujarat and Jharkhand high courts, three before the Himachal Pradesh High Court, and one each before the Karnataka and Uttarakhand high courts”, and said a common petition for their transfer can be filed.
Besides, two separate petitions have been filed by Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, challenging the interim orders of the respective high courts that stayed certain provisions of the state laws on conversion.
Earlier, a bench headed by Justice M R Shah had said religious conversion is a serious issue that should not be given a political colour.
It had sought the attorney general’s assistance on the plea filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay.
Another bench headed by the CJI had, on January 2, sought to know the status of the cases pending before different high courts challenging controversial state laws regulating religious conversion due to interfaith marriages and said if the cases are similar in nature, it may transfer those to itself.
It had asked “Citizens for Justice and Peace” and the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh to apprise it of the status of the cases challenging the state laws on conversion through marriage.
The apex court had, on January 6, 2021, agreed to examine certain new and controversial laws of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, regulating religious conversions due to interfaith marriages.
The Uttar Pradesh law relates to not only interfaith marriages but all religious conversions and lays down elaborate procedures for anyone who wishes to convert to another religion.
The Uttarakhand law entails a two-year jail term for those found guilty of religious conversion through “force or allurement”. The allurement can be in the form of cash, employment or material benefits.
The plea filed by the NGO has alleged that the legislations violate articles 21 and 25 of the Constitution as those empower the State to suppress an individual’s personal liberty and freedom to practise the religion of his choice.
Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind has also moved the Supreme Court, challenging the anti-conversion laws of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. It has contended that these laws have been enacted to “harass” interfaith couples and implicate them in criminal cases.
The Muslim body, in its PIL filed through advocate Ejaz Maqbool, has said the provisions of all such laws of the five states force people to disclose their faith and consequently, invade their privacy.
Pune: Various Hindutva bodies under the aegis of Sakal Hindu Samaj on Sunday took out a protest march in Maharashtra’s Pune city against “love jihad”, illegal conversions and cow slaughter.
The ‘Hindu Jan Akrosh Morcha’ started at the historical Lal Mahal and culminated at the statue of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj in Deccan area, a distance of about 5 km.
The morcha organisers demanded the death anniversary of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, eldest son of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, be declared as ‘Balidan Din’ (Martyr’s Day).
Sambhaji Maharaj was tortured to death on the orders of Mughal emperor Aurangazeb in 1689.
Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Shivendra Raje Bhosale, his counterpart from Hyderabad, T Raja Singh, and several political leaders joined the rally.
“Cases of love jihad, illegal conversions, cow slaughter etc have increased in the country. I demand the state government, as well as the Centre, bring a law against love Jihad,” Singh said.
“Love jihad” is a term often used by right-wing activists to allege a ploy by Muslim men to lure Hindu women into religious conversion through marriage.
Singh said he is a follower of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj.
“Politicians should stop doing politics over Sambhaji Maharaj. Those who are doing politics on this topic, I ask people to boycott such leaders,” he said without taking any names.
Earlier this month, the BJP held protests across Maharashtra against Opposition leader Ajit Pawar, who belongs to NCP, over his remark on Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj.
Pawar had told the Legislative Assembly that Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj was a “swarajya rakshak” and it is incorrect on part of some people to call him “dharmaveer”.
Shivendra Raje Bhosale, who represents the Satara assembly constituency, said, “Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was the pioneer of the Swarajya movement which also included protecting the religion. So far what we have read in the history is Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj was a dharmaveer”.
