Whatever is happening in Mumbai is sad as well as shocking. If you can be attacked and bullied like this in your own country where are you safe then? The recent violence against north Indians in Mumbai is nothing unique; it mostly happens against communities and now it is happening against people belonging to a different region. This whole mess was started by Bala Saheb Thakarey a few decades ago and this political minion called Raj Thackery is trying to re-ignite the old hatred against non-Maharashtrians. This happens when unjust, misguided political issues are not suppressed with brute legal force.
Many years ago immediately after the independence Sardar Vallabhai Patel consolidated various wayward states and helped build a unified India. Ever since then every Indian is free to go anywhere for the purpose of living and occupation and it is one of the fundamental rights given by our constitution. If a few Maharashtrians don’t like people from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh or for that matter Punjab coming to Mumbai and settling down there, well too bad; nothing can stop them as long as Mumbai doesn’t become a part of some other country.
I read on the Internet that the entire Mumbai film industry was wallowing in financial doldrums and it was only Amitabh Bachchan who gave hits after hits and secured the jobs of so many technicians and other workers belonging to Maharastra. What has Raj Thackeray done for Maharastra except for instigating people to commit violence and destruction? His political career in Shiv Sena took a nosedive when he allegedly got involved in a political murder. So what has he done for the betterment of Maharashtra in general and Mumbai in particular? Whatever Mumbai is today it owes everything to people from all the states.
Actually, migration happens everywhere. People move from city to city, state to state, and even country to country to seek better prospects. He says that the states from where the migrants are coming should develop enough so that the migration is reduced. Whereas it is true that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar must develop, migration to other cities and states is a natural phenomena. There are certain commercial activities that only happen in Mumbai. For instance, if a person wants to work in movies, he or she will have to go to Mumbai because the film industry is there. All major companies have set up their offices in Mumbai and when they hire people from other states those people have to come to Mumbai. So it has got nothing to do with just development; there are many other factors involved. It’s like, there are many Maharashtrians who go to the USA and other countries.
How should Raj Thackeray be treated, we were discussing this at home and Alka rightly said that he shouldn’t be arrested because then he will needlessly become a “martyr” and this will give him political advantage. Rather he should be allowed to become obscure. Violence, of course should be controlled but it should be tackled as a law and order problem and not a political problem. Calling it a political problem will needlessly make the issue important.
Personally I would suggest that the people being targeted should get together and put up a joint front. Running and cowering will get them nowhere and it will only embolden the goons. Instead they should fight back. This will not result in more violence; the threat of retaliation often maintains peace. Communities are only targeted when they seem vulnerable. You won’t find Raj Thackeray coming to Delhi or Lucknow and giving inflammatory speeches against north Indians because he knows that there people will beat the shit out of him.
Apparently the people in Uttar Pradesh are retaliating in a very novel way; they check all the trains coming from Maharastra and when they find Maharashtrian passengers in the trains they garland them, hug them and offer them sweets.
Technorati Tags: mumbai violence, raj thakeray
I generally don’t use such expressions on my blog but this is a clear case of mutual ass-licking. First NDTV declares Manmohan Singh the leader of the year and then sycophant journalists like Rajdeep Sardesia, Barkha Dutt and Vinod Dua are conferred Padma Sri, one of the highest civilian awards in India. It is anybody’s guess why these three journalists got the award.
At home we were discussing if such biased people keep on getting such awards then what credibility do such awards carry? Actually these kinds of awards fetch many privileges to the awardees, for instance getting their books published, obtaining lucrative government contracts, getting highly sought-after assignments abroad, and of course, in this twisted case, lots of publicity to the news channels they belong to.
Last year I read Arun Shourie’s “Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud” in which very laboriously he has explained, taking examples from various texts and other sources, how these “respected” journalists, historians and scholars keep promoting each other’s works and causes and keep getting rewarded in shady manners and then keep getting cushy jobs and assignments and this cycle goes on and on and on. The only difference now is that common people can articulate their thoughts using blogs and other communication means. So at least there is a certain section that can see the truth and talk about it and I think this is an extremely positive development, and this is a reason why conventional journalists dislike new-age media, especially the kind of media that empowers practically everybody to communicate and exchange ideas.
In another diabolical development our Prime Minister declared that the families of jihadis who are killed by the Indian armed forces will receive compensation from the government. Read this satire recently published in The Pioneer. This is like telling them: kill our army men and if they kill you back we will compensate your families. In another right-thinking society such a Prime Minister would have been arrested for abetting terrorism and his or her party would have never been able to form another government. But alas! This is India, the land of million tragedies. And then they wonder why the Indian Army is short of 12,000 officers. Who would like to fight for the government that compensates people who are out to kill them? This is so bizarre.
Andher nagri by the way means a completely chaotic state of affairs where nothing logical happens.
Technorati Tags: barkha dutt, rajdeep sardesai, vinod dua, padam sri
A few days ago I had written that the BJP should dump Narendra Modi for greater national interests. Even at that time I knew that if anybody could win elections for BJP in Gujarat it would be Modi, knowing the communal passions that move the social machinery in the state. Narendra Modi is again going to be Gujarat’s CM. It’s surely a triumph for the BJP but it is a sad commentary on the state of democracy. Sad because considering the kind of political situation we have in the country Modi is the best choice and sad because Modi gets to be the best choice.
In Gujarat you can clearly see the anti-blind-secular wave that has hit the country due to lopsided reporting done by channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN and news portals like Tehelka and all those rubbish newspapers. In fact some are claiming — correctly to a great extent — that Narendra Modi won this time because of the Tehelka exposé on Gujarat riots and Sonia Gandhi recently calling him “the merchant of death” and the so-called “secular” channels endorsing such views with copious coverage. This was so predictable. In fact these morons don’t know that their skewed attitude encourages fundamentalism even among the moderate communities. This election outcome should act as a lesson that unless you portray all the communities fairly you cannot subdue the extreme elements in the society. The verdict perhaps is less in favor of Modi and more against the divisive media propaganda.
I know there are many people — rightly — who detest Modi for his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots. But then, in India, there have been practically anti-every-community riots: for instance the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Every community, every religion has borne the brunt of communalism and racialism. 1000s of Hindus have been killed by Islamic terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir. 100s of Hindus were butchered by the Sikh terrorists in Punjab. Similarly, big or small, there have been numerous anti-Hindu riots in various Mulsim-majority areas in India. Then why leave other politicians and religious heads and demonize just Modi?
An anti-riots panel should be constituted and it should have members from all communities, religions and castes, and they should investigate the roles of various parties, politicians and religious heads and pursue the matters through law and politics. For instance politicians like HKL Bhagat and Tytles — both belonging to the Congress party — have been implicated but have never stood a complete trial (Bhagat is dead). Similarly, there are many Muslims, many Sikhs, even Christians, who have instigated riots and perpetrated mass killings; they should all be brought to book, and when they are all brought to book only then people like Modi can be stopped and curtailed. Until that happens, it would be highly hypocritical to go on accusing Modi perpetually.
Some people prefer to compare Narendra Modi with Adolf Hitler and our prime minister recently said that it was the Holocaust that happened in Gujarat in 2002 but I think these people have no sense of history. The blogger in the above-mentioned link says that the demonization of Muslims has been happening for a long time now. If this is happening, it is unfortunate and to a great extent Muslims are to be blamed for that because wherever they are and wherever they are not ruling they have a problem, whether in Asia, in Europe, or elsewhere. They always have one gripe or another, and they always have one reason or another to condone violence, bigotry and backwardness. Modi could be a modern-day Aurangzeb but he is a circumstantial Aurangzeb. Just as the Americans support Bush in his war against terrorism the people of Gujarat have supported Modi for his war against fundamentalism. Both the instances are fraught with ill bodings but people are left with no other choice.
Technorati Tags: narendra modi, modi, Gujarat elections
I haven’t written here for a long time; I want to write but have no idea what to write about so I’ll write about random things that have been happening in the world.
Taslima Nasreen
I’ve been reading the small news snippets for many days that the central government is making an all-out effort to make life hell for the author whose misfortune is that she has decided to take refuge in India. I wonder why she is still here when she can get shelter in some other, more liberal and democratic country. First she was thrown out by the West Bengal government and now the central government is putting pressure on her to keep a very low profile if she wants to remain in the country. She has been in a virtual house arrest — she cannot go anywhere, nobody can visit her, she cannot call anybody, and nobody can call her. Of course she has contacted every newspaper and TV news channel to pour out her heart and our external affairs minister was looking really upset when he talked to the reporters regarding how she is not heeding to the government’s advisory.
What stumps every freethinking person in the country is how the complete government machinery can be cowed down by a handful of fundamentalists? If nothing else then to just prove a point she should have been provided full security and she should have been allowed to move unrestricted. Why should the fundamentalists decide how a person should live in our country? It is utterly shameful for a country as big as India. We want to have the independence of possessing the nuclear warheads but we cannot ensure safety of a single person; isn’t it ironic?
IT people in Bangalore
A few months ago the people in Bangalore had a big problem with the poor street dogs and now they have a problem with the people working in the IT industry. The last week’s issue of the Outlook magazine talks about how the Bangaloreans hate the way the outsiders are sullying the original culture of the city. I think they should be left alone and all the other people and dogs should move out of the city. For all you know it could turn out to be a matter of life and death. Is it some city in India or Saudi Arabia/Iraq?
Shooting in Gurgaon
Recently two teenagers shot dead their classmate in a Gudgaon school. They were both I think 14-year-old and the main culprit had stolen his father’s revolver who in turn had been given the revolver by a neighbor who in turn, I think, had obtained the weapon illegally. I’m sure a lot has been written about the gun culture arriving in India and the teenagers emulating their American counterparts. Just like in America, the problem is not with the guns, it is with the society, the screwed up societal fabric that we are weaving. The father of the boy had himself taught him how to use the firearm. Violence is constantly glamorized and justified in the media especially in films and on television. I recently realized how immune we have grown to violence around us when they showed a Sri Lankan woman entering an office and blowing herself up. I wasn’t shocked for even a second. Perhaps I have seen too much blood and gore on TV. But yes in many cases the availability of the weapon makes a big difference; the unfortunate boy would have been alive had the other boy had no access to the gun.
In this particular case the other problem was the bully culture; it is said that the dead boy used to bully the boys who shot him. I think bullying should be taken very seriously both by the school authorities and the parents and the children should be taught how to handle bullies without resorting to catastrophic means because by the end of the day you want a reformed bully and not a dead bully.
The recent movie we watched
A couple of weeks ago we watched “Om Shanti Om”. It is a movie you wouldn’t want to spend your money on, I mean it is not dull but it is not a well-made movie considering who all have acted in it. Deepika Padukone is a stunner as long as she doesn’t act and Shahrukh Khan looks stupid throughout the movie. They have tried to make fun of the stars of the 70s era but they have only succeeded in making a pathetic show of themselves. The script is drab, the acting is boring, and even the direction is immature.
This reminds me — a few days ago I was watching a Rajendra Kumar song and was just wondering how old those actors used to look: he always looked like a hero in his 30s and he often acted like one and that made him look graceful. Watch “Sangam” to know what I mean; the two male heroes and the heroine all look so mature. These days our heroes cross their 40s and still act like demented teenagers. But I would quickly like to add here that actors nowadays are far better than their older counterparts as far as the acting skills go.
My reading
For many months — yes, now it takes not days, not weeks, but months — I have been reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, an exceptional 19th-century French author. It is a big book, I mean, you can easily fit three novels in the amount of paper and text the book has used. In fact, while reading it I switched to another book “The Inheritance of Loss” by Anita Desai, and for a change I read the book almost in a single day. I wonder why “The Inheritance of Loss” got the Booker — it is nowhere near the other Booker books that I have read for instance, “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy and “The Midnight’s Children” by Salam Rushdie. Maybe they didn’t have a better writer this time.
Coming back to “The Count of Monte Cristo”: it’s basically a revenge saga, and I’m not reading it because I’m in love with the protagonist and the plot. I’m simply reading it because the author has written it exceptionally well and with lots of detail. He has turned his protagonist, the Count of Monte Cristo into a preternatural genius who falls into a mammoth fortune by chance. Okay, not completely by chance but still it sounds quite tedious sometimes. The plot moves very fast and the person who has written the introduction has rightly called Dumas the John Grisham of that time.
I haven’t been reading much newspaper these days because after getting up I’m always in a hurry to do my vocal music practice and after that I start working.
If the BJP is blamed for being communal then Narendra Modi justifies all the disapprobation. He’s a man the party should have gotten rid of after the Gujarat riots. Just as Sonia Gandhi and her cohorts represent whatever is wrong with the country, he represents whatever is wrong with the BJP; in one way or the other he will cause the party’s downfall.
In his recent speech he doesn’t even pretend to be representing a civilized democracy, and he is rightly being compared to Idi Amin and “Baby doc”. The BJP moronically blames Sonia Gandhi for Modi’s utterances at the rally where he justifies the encounter killing of Sohrabuddin who was blamed for having weapons with him. Later on two police officers were sacked and arrested for organizing the fake encounter. This is what makes it sound like a rogue state of affairs:
“Sonia Gandhi spoke of terrorism. But she has no right to talk of this. Till today, those who attacked Parliament haven’t been sent to the gallows. Congress in Gujarat is raising its voice on the Sohrabuddin issue. But, it should explain to the people what should be done to a man who stored illegal arms and ammunition. You tell me, what should have been done to Sohrabuddin?”
The rally echoed with shouts of “Kill him, kill him.” Modi responded with: “Well, that is it. Do I have to take Sonia Gandhi’s permission to do this?”
Doesn’t this sound like some place in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan?
I have no sympathy for the likes of Sohrabuddin but you cannot flaunt a state-sponsored murder, justified or not justified. You don’t openly encourage expressions like “Kill him, kill him”.
People like Modi thrive on fear psychosis. It is somewhat same as the way George W. Bush exploits the fear of the Americans of Islamic terrorists to carry out his political and mercantile agendas. Terrorism is a criminal problem, it is a law and order problem, but it is certainly not a communal problem as Modi makes out to be. You attach unnecessary importance to terrorism by painting it in a communal color. To counter terrorism if you have to resort to unlawful tactics such as killing people in fake encounters and instigating riots against the suspected communities, it means your ability to carry out the law has deteriorated. Everybody who lives in our country is an Indian and deserves all the protection an Indian is provided by the Constitution. It doesn’t matter to which community or religion you belong. Similarly protecting people of the state is the fundamental duty of the Chief Minister no matter what community he or she has to protect; he or she cannot just go on mouthing excuses.
As I wrote in one of my previous posts, in order to become a responsible and respected political party the BJP will have to get rid of Narendra Modi before he causes an irreversible damage to the party and to the country.
Just watched Arundhati Roy’s interview in the Devil’s Advocate and she makes Karan Thapar look like a clueless teenager. It’s amazing to see the man giving silly arguments in defense of Buddhadeb for orchestrating the ouster of the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata. How does he sustain his job? Karan’s point of view is that the poor chief minister had no choice left, that in order to prevent many people from losing their lives he had to send her away and withdraw the security given to her.
Arundhati rightly says that it doesn’t require rocket science to understand that the West Bengal government raked up the entire Taslima Nasreen issue just to divert attention from the Nandigram atrocities; the controversial book for which the alleged protests happened has been in the bestsellers list for the past four years in Kolkata and there have been no large-scale protests in the state. Then why all of a sudden there is so much chest beating against the book or whatever she has been writing?
I think it is a matter of shame for the State government to send a writer away just because it cannot control the rioting mobs. Don’t they feel embarrassed that they had to cite this reason in order to send her away? Precisely for this reason, no matter how much praise Narender Modi gets from the right wing writers and intellectuals, I strongly dislike him: that dude is a walking failure; instead of feeling proud of his “achievements” he should be totally depressed and he should be a liability for the BJP instead of an asset, no matter how many elections he can win for the party. If you cannot control riots then you have no business calling yourself the Chief Minister of the state. If you cannot control the law and order situation then why do you have the law and order machinery in your hand — give the control to someone who has the guts to control the mobs. The more excuses you give the sillier you sound. So it is highly moronic of the CPI(M) to say that they had to send Taslima away in order to contain the deteriorating law and order situation in the state. A capable government would both provide unbreakable security to the threatened person and contain the elements trying to incite violence.
As usual when Karan Thapar talked about all the artists and writers whose freedom of expression has been curtailed by the protesting mobs he only mentioned those artists and writers who have been targeted by the so-called “Hindu fundamentalists”; there was, intentionally of course, no mention of writers and artists who have been threatened by Muslim fundamentalists.
It doesn’t actually matter who is threatened and by whom but freedom of expression should be a fundamental right and it should be protected by the state by all means because when people are afraid to express themselves just because there could be retaliatory actions the society ceases to grow intellectually. If you don’t like something written or painted, well too bad, you can’t just go and bash up the person and destroy his or her creations and if you do you should get the maximum punishment available in the country. If you have a problem with the creation you can either create something contrary or take some legal action.
Sadly and tragically our successive governments always give in to the pressure of the mob whether it is the Gujarat riots, or the 1984 riots, or the banning of “The Satanic Verses” or the exile of M. F. Hussein or the violent protests in Vadodara. Our lazy governments, whether at the Centre or in the States, are always either going for the easier option or doing something that satisfies their political agendas.
I like what Arundhati says somewhere in the interview when Karan Thapar asks her whether it was right that Taslima removed the “objectionable” parts from what she had written, “What choice does she have? She is under the protection of the mafia, the mob.” By the mafia, the mob, she meant the government.
Technorati Tags: taslima nasreen, west bengal, arundhati roy, nandigram
I just remember reading a few days ago that Ministry of Civil Aviation and Bureau of Civil Aviation Security recently refused to exempt the service chiefs from security checks at the airports, stating that this would encourage other officers and bureaucrats from other departments to ask for the same privilege. So this means our three chiefs from Air Force, Navy and Army are frisked at the airports whereas Priyanka Gandhi and Robert Vadra are not. This means these chief marshals and commanders and generals who are supposed to protect the country are not trusted but a common businessman is, just because of his political connections.
The problem is not whether the chiefs of the services are frisked and Robert Vadra is not, the problem is with the attitude and with the logic of the whole thing. I mean in whose hands is the country safer: all those VVIPs who are exempted from security checkups (frisking) at the airports or the military chiefs who make sure that we can sleep peacefully, totally secure? This is really absurd and I think it is also an insult of every common person who respects the country’s armed forces. Would you trust the VIIPs who are perpetually hiding behind their security commandos or the military chiefs who would tackle the attackers and the terrorists head on? To add insult to the injury there are many bureaucrats who are exempted from security checks at the airports in India even when their ranks are lower than the military chiefs.
This is a very serious issue and the people who are responsible for such an outrageous decision should be taken to task. I think if our military chiefs cannot be trusted then nobody should be trusted. In fact if the security risk is so high then as a general rule everybody, and this means everybody, should be subjected to security checks no matter what his or her rank in the government or politics is.
(With due respect to the dogs of course) I just read that Taslima Nasreen has been sent to Rajasthan by the West Bengal government because the Muslims over there want her expelled from the country. It’s shameful to be in a country where the law cannot protect people, whether in Delhi, or in Gujarat, or in Nandigram and Kolkata regarding Talima Nasreen. While other developed countries invite writers and provide them protection not only from minorities but also from whole countries our country is so pusillanimous that it has to chase the threatened person away instead of punishing and persecuting those who threaten. It is an extremely scary case scenario and it paints a really grim picture of the country’s future.
In another news I read about the imminent ouster of Dr. Venugopal as AIIMS director. A bill has been passed in the parliament with the instigation of the health minister (with the help of the Left, but of course) that is going to pave the path of Dr. Venugopal’s removal. Ever since the health Minister has joined his office he has just pursued against is personal vendettas and has them nothing positive for the world-class institution; in fact he has, with his bellicose and stupid attitude, managed to sully the image of the hospital. This is a sad state of affairs.
Or rather one country-centric. The e-mail services of Hotmail and Yahoo have been stopped in Iran and this means you cannot use these e-mail services even if you have got nothing to do with nuclear or Islamic politics. Of course one may argue that very often you have to pay for living in a specific region or a particular country; but that is not the argument. It’s really stupid that just because America does not agree with Iran’s nuclear policy the citizens of Iran cannot use Hotmail and Yahoo (not that they are greatly e-mail services but they are quite prevalent). This means if one day the American government has some differences with the Indian government all the Hotmail and Yahoo users won’t be able to access their e-mail and I think that is pretty shady.
I think the Internet is too America-centric and the other countries should develop ways to access the Internet in case the American government decides to block those countries. Regarding e-mail, it is better to use either a private domain or you should take regular backups and also have an alternative ready.
I understand that international restrictions and embargoes are meant to force the citizens to speak up against the policies of their respective governments but only those people suffer who have got nothing to do with the problem — the real troublemakers are anyway not affected because they can easily avail alternative means.
Swapna Das Gupta in his Sunday column in The Pioneer says that both Hindus and Muslims have moved on in Gujarat and the post-Godhra riots should not be raked up again and again; he was writing in the wake of the recent Tehelka sting operation in which some of the VHP and other Hindu organizations’ people (the villainous Babu Bajrangi, for instance) have proudly claimed how they butchered people, burned people, ripped open pregnant women’s bellies and did all sorts of things that only the carnivores do in the wild.
The problem with the right-wing media in India is that it is always trying to sweep things under the carpet. Why can’t they accept that whatever happened in Gujarat was inhumanly terrible and somewhere the blame lies with Narendra Modi and his henchmen? Just because he is improving the economy of the state doesn’t mean that his crimes should be ignored; it doesn’t mean that the country should move on. If we started moving on, then every five or ten-year-old crime will be pardoned. Going with this logic why should Sunjay Dutt then be sent to jail? No, neither Hindus nor Muslims of Gujarat should move on until the perpetrators are punished. We will move on when the guilty are punished.
The response from the BJP has been so predictable: they immediately said that it was an election stunt to malign the party’s image. Why can’t they ever say that whatever is being exposed, provided it is substantiated, is highly deplorable and the guilty should be punished? Are they so desperate that in order to win an election they can even tolerate a psychopath in their party?
The right wing media and the BJP shouldn’t cry foul whenever such things happen and instead, do some introspection. If the guilty politicians, from the BJP and other parties, are punished the parties are not going to lose; you don’t lose elections because you are ridding you party of criminals, you lose elections because you don’t do the things you promise during your election campaign. It is such a simple thing. So by ditching Modi the BJP may lose in Gujarat but it will end up enhancing its national and international image. You can never become a trustable political force if you spread hatred and messages of intolerance towards different communities.
Whether one is a Hindu or a Muslim first of all, he or she is the citizen of the country and hence is entitled to the right to life and protection. Whenever riots take place there is no excuse for them; you simply cannot say that the public anger was so overwhelming against a particular community that the riots could not be contained immediately. OK, I have a bias here because I have gone through the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 and I very well know that how state-sponsored riots take place (at that time it was the Congress that staged the pogrom) and how quickly they can be brought under control if the government wishes to. So this is all bunkum that the Godhra train burning incident caused great anger and that gave rise to an uncontrollable backlash. The right-wing columnists seem so illogical when they give such arguments in favor of the Modi government. And in any case if a government cannot control the law and order situation it should resign on moral grounds no matter who is to blame.
Of course the latest Tehelka expose could be Congress-sponsored (Tehelka never does a sting against the Congress) still whatever is there in the tapes should be scrutinized and analyzed by every right-thinking person of the country. Whether you like or hate Muslims for whatever reason, do we need such demons in a society, leading us and formulating laws for us? Can you in your right mind ever think of Modi becoming the prime minister of the country? It’s not about the string operation; it is about being a right or wrong, and not for someone else, but for you. After all you have to think what sort of ideology you leave to your kids.
As a side note, I don’t remember which one, but a blog suggested that India desperately needs some right-wing TV news channels. I think, yes, we do need them, considering all the Congress and communist pimp channels we have like the NDTV and CNN-IBN, etc.
Technorati Tags: tehelka, gujarat riots, modi
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