THE SOCIAL BLOG

Its soon going to be six years since the Gujarat carnage took place in our ‘Democracy’. The actions we have seen so far have not been surprising. The Chief Minister gets re-elected, none of the people who arranged the attack on the muslims have been prosecuted yet and off late, the Court yells at one person who has been instrumental in getting justice to the victims of the carnage.

Let me begin by re-counting some of the incidents to most of my readers. The Tehelka issue on the Gujarat riots have been quite helpful in helping most of us re-visit the events. For people like Babu Bajrangi, the magazine is his worst nightmare. Surely it should be so when he is caught in the sting operation which giving an account of the Naroda Patiya massacre.

“Kauser Bano, was nine months pregnant that day. Her belly was torn apart and her foetus wrenched out, held aloft on the tip of a sword, then dashed to the ground and flung into the fire. Bajrangi recounts how he ripped apart “ek who pregnant b******d sala”; how he showed the Muslims the meaning of wrath – ‘if you harm us, we can respond- we’re no khichadi kadhi lot”

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Then there’s also 22 year old Sufiya Bano who was raped and burnt in front of her father and when the father and three sons went to save her, the sons were killed and the father beard was cut off.

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Naroda is an open area with a large pit that is actually a cul de sac – a slope leads into it from one side but the other side is a sheer rise that cannot be scaled. Several muslims had sheltered there; the mob surrounded the pit, poured fuel into it and set it afire. Around 200 people have said to have died in it.

Without going further in recounting these horrid tales, it must be stated that the action taken against those who were involved(hindus) in these crimes is as good as nil. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has denied bail to each of the 84 accused (muslims) of the burning of the Sabarmati express and all of them have been in jail for the past six years.

This is the irony of the Indian governance system. We are told that we are a democracy where everyone’s rights would be protected and there shall be no arbitrariness involved but on the other hand, communalism has penetrated so deep within us, that it is evident in the everyday actions of our Government. Most of the muslims in Ahmedabad still live in ghettos with inadequate facilities of water and electricity while Modi and his compatriots manage to come to power on the pedestal of “Gujarat Shining”.

Now when most of these issues are highlighted by Teesta Setalvad in an article, she gets a highly critical reaction from the Court. Well the article highlighted the fact that the Supreme Court had not done enough to deliver justice to the victims of the Gujarat riots and in fact was delaying the hearing time and again and not giving it much importance. This in a country where the Court has held that “Justice delayed is at par with Justice denied”. She also raised the following questions;

• · Can no questions be asked about the systems in operation in the Supreme Court of India?
• · Which matters get automatic priority and which do not?
• · Which matters suffer because of the delays and interim orders of the Supreme Court?
• · Is there no prioritization of cases where issues of personal liberty, denial of basic fundamental rights, mass crimes and impunity to the rich and powerful is concerned?
  If we can ask no questions, we will receive no answers.
• · The time has come to question the basic accountability procedures of the highest court in the land.
  Has the Supreme Court of India lost its soul and is it turning a blind eye to cases related to fundamental rights violations?
• · If so, where then do we turn?

In reply, when the Court was to hear the case on the 16^th of this month, the Court was apparently fuming over the article and went to the extent of asking the lawyers whether they had any association with Teesta and if so, that they wouldn’t be hearing the petition. Well, quite juvenile I must say in a land where free speech is a highly cherished ideal.

So while the we enter the Sixth year since the riots took place, a lot of questions are raised about the efficiency of the administration in maintaining order and securing justice to the victims. In addition to this, it is disheartening to point out that even still we don’t have a law dealing with mass crimes in India and the Communal Violence Bill has not yet been passed. Like I said earlier, the irony of Indian democracy.

(See articles in the hyperlinks provided in the text)

Arun Gandhi’s post on “Jewish Domination” seems to have drawn quite of lot of flak lately. Why he even had to resign for the very institute in the name of his Grandfather that he had founded. On resigning from the MK Gandhi institute of non-violence at the University of Rochester NY, he wrote,

An yes, the Comments have’nt been too appreciative of the post too. David Sternlight writes,

I am older than Mr. Gandhi and still remember the time when Indians ran around the world with their holier-than-thou attitude sanctimoniously preaching against nuclear weapons. Then they got their own bomb.

I see that nothing has changed.

Another commentator writes,

 Now i think that was uncalled for. In my own personal take on this, the only mistake that Mr. Gandhi has done is that he has used his words in a very poor manner that has driven him to become a victim of high handed, powerful jewish forces. There is nothing wrong in that article and the idea that he seems to bring out is really justified. What happened to a race 60 years ago is being repeated by them upon others at present. I don’t think mass crimes can be justified in the name of security. I’m pretty sure the Grandfather would’nt have approved of the present Jewish power struggle and the blood line seems to have its connection here.

The post that he wrote is displayed below.

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The recent events in Gujarat are tattering to an Indian’s heart. It’s not just the Tehelka tapes that have come out in the open; the banning of TV news channels in Gujarat, disgusting comments by the Press and politicians are all a consequence of it which further saddens me.

Mirza in an wonderful read pens down the responses,

BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar said “This sting has rendered Tehelka as the investigative wing of the Congress”. BJP leader Rajiv Pratap Rudy said “Definitely the sting operation and its content are suspect, because we are aware for sometime that there are detractors against Modi in Gujarat and there is the Congress party, which has lost all ground in the state.” They talk about everything but not about the inhuman brutality. Vir Sanghvi wrote very aptly regarding this in 2002 “I was not surprised when the political establishment scrambled to look for conspiracies: the CIA was behind it, the ISI sponsored Tehelka…My point then, as now, was simple enough: let us first deal with the revelations and then worry about Tarun’s so-called backers.”

Today Chandan Mitra, the editor of the 143 year old newspaper Pioneer and a BJP supported Rajya Sabha MP, invoked the third and the fifth point; Modi has won various elections and why do you take out dead issues now. This is the editor of one of the oldest national newspapers of India! In which moral system and when was justice decided by the street? If someone wins elections does it exonerate them? Mr. Mitra, is the state of journalism going down to this level in India? And since when did we start forgetting about injustices on the pretext of moving ahead? Should we have said the same to the Sikhs who were hounded in 1984? Should we have said the same to the utterly vulnerable Jews who were brutalized and killed in millions by the Nazis? That it will be all decided in the court of law and forget about it in the social aspect.

When I myself went to Ahmedabad last december, I was shocked to learn about and see the ghettoization of the Muslims; rich and the poor in the officially put ‘world class city’. But the other issue was, whoever I met (hindus only), were sort of equating Modi to Gabriel as a messenger of god.

And what about free speech? The governments decision to ban all the TV channels that showed the news clip is now a rider to the free speech clause in the Constitution. Hah! gone are the days when Article 19 1(a) was the ultimate sword for the press. If my readers are interested, I’d request you to read Express Newspapers v. Union of India; an amazing case that exposed the link between Gov action and free speech in 1985 and the Delhi riots. (A related article here)

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India completed 60 years of its independence day before yesterday. Ironically, I did not feel even a bit patriotic and proud of it. The State of ours today is in shambles; impunity and violence are rampant. Machinery existent to protect and regulate the use of sovereign power seem to be fading away. Kashmir and Nagaland still burn. Hindus and Muslims still fight. The poor are still poor and we still have a distaste for the caste system. I dont feel proud of this Country. 

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Once in a while, I read the NewYorker online edition to be aware of US sattires and activities. This time however, I saw this article by Pankaj Mishra on the New yorker talking about the legacy of the Indian Partition.

The article starts with an anecdote which is an interesting read;

Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” Large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs caught on the wrong side of the border. In the next few months, some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. But on that night in mid-August the bloodbath—and the fuller consequences of hasty imperial retreat—still lay in the future, and the Mountbattens probably felt they had earned their evening’s entertainment.

Pankaj then proceeds to talk about how we Indians made our tryst with destiny and sought to set India free. But that, he argues, was not for the secular India but for protecting the interests of a 400 million hindus and not caring about the Muslims who stayed back in India. The article also talks about Nehru and Jinnah’s policies and actions during the brief period of finalising the partition. The idea of the article seems to be to give a brief of the partition history of India by citing incidents relevant in this regard.

Below are certain excerpts from the article;

But sectarian riots in Punjab and Bengal dimmed hopes for a quick and dignified British withdrawal, and boded ill for India’s assumption of power. Not surprisingly, there were some notable absences at the Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi on August 15th. Gandhi, denouncing freedom from imperial rule as a “wooden loaf,” had remained in Calcutta, trying, with the force of his moral authority, to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. His great rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had fought bitterly for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, was in Karachi, trying to hold together the precarious nation-state of Pakistan.

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Trains carrying nothing but corpses through a desolate countryside became the totemic image of the savagery of partition. British soldiers confined to their barracks, ordered by Mountbatten to save only British lives, may prove to be the most enduring image of imperial retreat. With this act of moral dereliction, the British Empire finally disowned its noble sense of mission. As Paul Scott put it in “The Raj Quartet,” the epic of imperial exhaustion and disillusion, India in 1947 was where the empire’s high idea of itself collapsed and “the British came to the end of themselves as they were.”

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. The millions of Muslims who chose to stay in India never ceased to be hostages to Hindu extremists. As recently as 2002, Hindu nationalists massacred more than two thousand Muslims in the state of Gujarat. The dispute over Kashmir, the biggest unfinished business of partition, committed countries with mostly poor and illiterate populations to a nuclear arms race and nourished extremists in both countries: Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, Hindu nationalists in India. It also damaged India’s fragile democracy—Indian soldiers and policemen in Kashmir routinely execute and torture Pakistan-backed Muslim insurgents—and helped cement the military’s extra-constitutional influence over Pakistan’s inherently weaker state. Tens of thousands have died in Kashmir in the past decade and a half, and since 1947 sectarian conflicts in India and Pakistan have killed thousands more.

 

Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. At least one group—Bengali Muslims—succeeded in establishing their own nation-state (Bangladesh), though only after suffering another round of ethnic cleansing, this time by fellow-Muslims. Other minorities demanding political autonomy—Nagas, Sikhs, Kashmiris, Baluchis—were quelled, often with greater brutality than the British had ever used against their subjects.

 

Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain’s “enemies,” “Hindustan,” against “Britain’s friends,” the Muslims. Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades. 

 

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 We still suffer from the stains left by the partition of India. Communal clashes and Kashmir and the direct causes of it.

Its only been a month since I wrote the article on the Vadodara art attack case. Wounds inflicted by the not-so-stray instance upon the liberal and secular sentiments of our society have still not healed completely. What has turned out to be the cynosure of all interested eyes now, is the attack on noted littérateur Taslima Nasrin. Ms. Nasrin was attending a meeting organized by the Press Club of Hyderabad to release the Telugu translation of her latest book, Shodh, when she was ‘roughed up’ by certain members present in the audience. The contents of her speech were allegedly inflammatory to Islamic sentiments, which in turn provoked an attack from three MLAs belonging to the fundamentalist Majlis-e-Ittehadul Musalmeen (MIM) party. After taking the law into their own hands, quite ironically, MIM later decided to file a case against Taslima under S.153(a) of the IPC for hurting religious sentiments of the Muslim community.

This incident inevitably brings us to the issue of rapidly eroding liberal values in the Indian society today. The question of tolerance has always been ensconced in the larger, more volatile cover of “religious” or “moral” sentiments. What we have been witnessing over the past few years is the utter lack of concern or regard for human rights vis-a-vis such moral policing. The Constitution of India provides for certain fundamental rights, sacrosanct in nature; rights which cannot be compromised in a liberal democracy. Yet, once society is faced with communalist notions of such religious and moral sentiments, it is always the expression of sectarian will that prevails. Its high time that we realize the importance of rights in the public realm; what is inflammatory cannot be contingent on the opinion of a select few, who invariably turn out to be disposed towards extremist ideologies. One cannot, in any circumstance, ignore the rule of law in a democratic polity.

The moment we are cowed down with the ‘all-important’ question as to whether Taslima Nasrin did actually hurt the sentiments of a certain community, we’re fighting a lost battle. It is important to understand that the debate as to who’s right or wrong is only secondary; rather, we should oppose all expression of fundamentalist views and action that that encourages intolerance and violence in society. To reiterate, moral policing disrupts the functioning of an already established constitutional machinery, completely ignoring the rule of law; thereby throwing human rights to the winds.Whether casualties surface in the form of Chandramohans or Taslima Nasrins is quite irrelevant; the larger picture cannot be ignored. Humanist tendencies are unfortunately on the wane; it takes sensitized and informed public opinion to fight divisive and fundamentalist forces.

I’d like to conclude, quoting Taslima’s very own lines from her declaration during the UNESCO General Conference in 1999,

“Fundamentalism is an ideology that diverts people from the path of natural development of consciousness and undermines their personal rights. Fundamentalists do not believe in liberty of personal choice or plurality of thought.They cannot be countered without a relentless and uncompromising fight. The struggle should be both theoretical and tactical. Democracy and secularism should be applied in practice and not remain a mere play of words.”