The controversy surrounding Babri mosque and the imminent court verdict has begun to tell on the nerves of the people. It has also churned up a fear psychosis and a social upheaval, not to speak of any political undercurrent.
Among the most sensitive towns in Mahrashtra state is Malegaon. Many a Muslim family in the surrounding villages has begun to migrate to the city. Some of them also come to the city and sleep at night and then go back to their farms or villages for work. They entrust their material goods to their neighbours of different faiths. Whatever they cannot carry they leave. Whatever is valuable and easy to carry they carry with them.
A strange migration is seen of the tribal Bheel community. There are families of the tribal people working in the farms owned by Muslims just outside the town. As the verdict date comes nearer and fear psychosis grips the commonalty, the tribal people leave the farms before sunset. They walk a couple of miles to places which they think safer. Generally they stay with their fellow tribal people on hillocks or by the side of the commons of the villages nearby. In the morning they return to their place of work on the farms where they have their regular quarters.
One such temporary abode is the group of hillocks in Swand gaon and Daregaon area. A family of seven or eight would shuffle between the farm on the periphery of the town and the backwater settlement of the tribal people. They move with their animals. Their goats walk with them as they lead them to the beaten track through the rural lands spotted with village dust path, banks of rivers or canals. A boy of three carries a lamb of just less than a week old in his tiny arms. He is unable to make out why this forced shuffle between the places. Many of them have heard the name Babri first time and do not know the dispute.
It is amazing to see that the tribal people do not leave their dogs even behind them. But their dogs have to negotiate the distance with the hostile farmers’ dogs who bark themselves hoarse asserting their territorial claims.
The Muslim landlords do not mind this temporary migration enforced on their tribal servants by the courts throwing the ball into each other’s courtyard.
But do the litigants know how far has their litigation affected the commonalty and produced such ‘revolutionary’ change?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Extremism can again mar national unity over Babri
The sorry state of affairs involving Babri mosque was on account of extremism. To grab power the BJP which came in existence in 1980 chose extremism in their agenda and revived the movement for Ram temple at Ayodhya. This residual tendency was the result of the hardcore element of the erstwhile Jan Sangh reasserting their allegiance to RSS and not making any amends with their coalition experience of the late 70s.
The most extremist among hosts of the leaders was the Pakistan born LK Advani whose rathyatra from Somnath to Ayodhya was the bloodiest aspect of the extremists and their havoc. Since then a change of sorts is visible. It could be seen in Advani’s visit to Somnath on September 25, 2010. He cut a sorry figure shorn of the mammoth crowd and loud sloganeering of the earlier days. Extremism has been depleted if not totally vanished from the scene.
There is no Nawab of Awadh among the BJP/Congress who can stop the situation getting worse by establishing truth and going according to it strictly. Wajid Ali Shah did that in the matter of Hanumngarhi cluster of temples in 1855 when the commission he had set up found that no mosque existed there. The Babri mosque is a different story as the Muslims had prayed there ill late night Isha namaz on December 22, 1949. In the midnight Hindus installed a statue of Ram in the mosque and they started praying there despite PM Nehru and CM Pant of UP asking the collector to stop it. The collector did not do their bidding; he even acquired the waqf property around the mosque and prevented the Muslims from reaching the mosque. He was subsequently elected to Parliament as a Jan Sangh candidate.
It is true that Nehru and Pant were not extremists but they failed to enforce what the nawab did so well. And he was moderate. The extremists on December 6, 1992 finally demolished the mosque. Advani and his associates celebrated their extremist action by patting each other, congratulating each other and sharing sweets for their deeds
This gave birth to extremism of the other sort, terrorism. It was one thing to have communal clashes over certain issues but using bombs to kill deliberately according to conspiracy is the hall mark of this extremist reaction to perceived and real wrong done.
True it is in a sense that the Supreme Court in deferring the judgment day wants the people to think over and the parties to the title dispute to calculate the consequences. But the chance of pausing for sanity was snatched away long back when the extremist adherents of the temple made it clear that “There could be no place for another mosque in Ayodhya even outside the disputed place.” (BJP blames it on judicial delay. The Hindu, September 25, 2010.)
The most extremist among hosts of the leaders was the Pakistan born LK Advani whose rathyatra from Somnath to Ayodhya was the bloodiest aspect of the extremists and their havoc. Since then a change of sorts is visible. It could be seen in Advani’s visit to Somnath on September 25, 2010. He cut a sorry figure shorn of the mammoth crowd and loud sloganeering of the earlier days. Extremism has been depleted if not totally vanished from the scene.
There is no Nawab of Awadh among the BJP/Congress who can stop the situation getting worse by establishing truth and going according to it strictly. Wajid Ali Shah did that in the matter of Hanumngarhi cluster of temples in 1855 when the commission he had set up found that no mosque existed there. The Babri mosque is a different story as the Muslims had prayed there ill late night Isha namaz on December 22, 1949. In the midnight Hindus installed a statue of Ram in the mosque and they started praying there despite PM Nehru and CM Pant of UP asking the collector to stop it. The collector did not do their bidding; he even acquired the waqf property around the mosque and prevented the Muslims from reaching the mosque. He was subsequently elected to Parliament as a Jan Sangh candidate.
It is true that Nehru and Pant were not extremists but they failed to enforce what the nawab did so well. And he was moderate. The extremists on December 6, 1992 finally demolished the mosque. Advani and his associates celebrated their extremist action by patting each other, congratulating each other and sharing sweets for their deeds
This gave birth to extremism of the other sort, terrorism. It was one thing to have communal clashes over certain issues but using bombs to kill deliberately according to conspiracy is the hall mark of this extremist reaction to perceived and real wrong done.
True it is in a sense that the Supreme Court in deferring the judgment day wants the people to think over and the parties to the title dispute to calculate the consequences. But the chance of pausing for sanity was snatched away long back when the extremist adherents of the temple made it clear that “There could be no place for another mosque in Ayodhya even outside the disputed place.” (BJP blames it on judicial delay. The Hindu, September 25, 2010.)
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Space for peaceful protest in Kashmir valley
People of the Kashmir valley have been coerced to remain inside their narrow houses and shut for long hours of curfew. No sooner does the curfew end than some protest begins bringing life to a standstill. It was this tedium of every day existence that made the Eid day protest and marches on Saturday 11, 2010 as a historic day. “It’s suffocating, It’s collective punishment. Every Kashmiri is being forced to stay inside.” This is what Sajjid Iqbal told New York Times (September 14, 2010 )
Their pent up frustration, anger and anguish at the mounting toll of the youths had thrown up a necessity for the leaders to address the people. India is no stranger to such gatherings and marches. The rathyatra of LK Advani passing through many states before the Babri mosque was destroyed had a bloody trail of communal violence resulting in bloodshed in most places. Barring Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayamsing Yadav, Chief Ministers and even the Prime Minister twiddled their thumbs as the security forces either looked the other way or members of the forces also took part in the juggernaut. This was happening in the mainland when the militancy in JK was on the rise. Therefore there is no need to apply double standard to compare any event of the earlier days or to the present turbulence in the Kashmir valley, either.
This time there is a sea change in the valley. The youths have taken over the protests, they are the ones who go before the soldiers who have their guns drawn and aimed at them with fingers in a reflex situation of pressing the trigger as the scene is too violent and bloody. There is an action packed drama going on in the streets that calls for a different response than the reloading of the smoking guns.
The most remarkable thing is to ponder why so many thousands of tons of stone s thrown at the security forces (who also paid them back in the same measure) did not convince the government in New Delhi for speedy solution or easing of the situation. The government postponed the the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) meeting from Saturday to Monday, then to Tuesday and then again to Wednesday and now after the all party delegation meets everyone in Kashmir valley and Jammu. There is also evidence that even the Home Minister Chidambrum was not seized of the situation in the streets of the valley for he called it fake protest. This is what he said on Thursday when the videos of naked men paraded by the security forces and brutally assaulted by them before the local women went on the air.
The government started narrowing the space or even closed whatever space was available before. The government locked down all the fights to and out of the valley. The air flights were most necessary for the media people to reach the valley and report what was transpiring there. Why was the government so jittery about it? India is the largest democracy in the world and the freedom of the press is a vital pillar of our democracy.
There is another way of closing the space for peaceful protest. The government can counterbalance the intensity of the protest in the valley by welcoming the people of Jammu to register their response to the kind of move the government would make in the valley. This may remind you the counterbalancing the revocation of the land grant to the amaranth pilgrims in 2008 by letting the ferocious protest in Jammu to continue. The present unrest in the valley is valley specific. It is neither national specific nor even state specific.
The specificity of the valley in regard to space is best seen in two incidents of recent time. The man who threw his shoe at the chief minister became a hero of the people in the valley. Many thousands marched to his village and garlanded and congratulated him for his daring act. The second incident is of the Eid day. Firdous Ahmed Hajjam had climbed over the clock tower at Lal chowk and raised the Islamic flag on Saturday. Again many thousands of people went to his village and congratulated him for his daring act. So the space for peaceful protest is narrowing as well as enlarging depending on the situation on the ground.
Their pent up frustration, anger and anguish at the mounting toll of the youths had thrown up a necessity for the leaders to address the people. India is no stranger to such gatherings and marches. The rathyatra of LK Advani passing through many states before the Babri mosque was destroyed had a bloody trail of communal violence resulting in bloodshed in most places. Barring Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayamsing Yadav, Chief Ministers and even the Prime Minister twiddled their thumbs as the security forces either looked the other way or members of the forces also took part in the juggernaut. This was happening in the mainland when the militancy in JK was on the rise. Therefore there is no need to apply double standard to compare any event of the earlier days or to the present turbulence in the Kashmir valley, either.
This time there is a sea change in the valley. The youths have taken over the protests, they are the ones who go before the soldiers who have their guns drawn and aimed at them with fingers in a reflex situation of pressing the trigger as the scene is too violent and bloody. There is an action packed drama going on in the streets that calls for a different response than the reloading of the smoking guns.
The most remarkable thing is to ponder why so many thousands of tons of stone s thrown at the security forces (who also paid them back in the same measure) did not convince the government in New Delhi for speedy solution or easing of the situation. The government postponed the the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) meeting from Saturday to Monday, then to Tuesday and then again to Wednesday and now after the all party delegation meets everyone in Kashmir valley and Jammu. There is also evidence that even the Home Minister Chidambrum was not seized of the situation in the streets of the valley for he called it fake protest. This is what he said on Thursday when the videos of naked men paraded by the security forces and brutally assaulted by them before the local women went on the air.
The government started narrowing the space or even closed whatever space was available before. The government locked down all the fights to and out of the valley. The air flights were most necessary for the media people to reach the valley and report what was transpiring there. Why was the government so jittery about it? India is the largest democracy in the world and the freedom of the press is a vital pillar of our democracy.
There is another way of closing the space for peaceful protest. The government can counterbalance the intensity of the protest in the valley by welcoming the people of Jammu to register their response to the kind of move the government would make in the valley. This may remind you the counterbalancing the revocation of the land grant to the amaranth pilgrims in 2008 by letting the ferocious protest in Jammu to continue. The present unrest in the valley is valley specific. It is neither national specific nor even state specific.
The specificity of the valley in regard to space is best seen in two incidents of recent time. The man who threw his shoe at the chief minister became a hero of the people in the valley. Many thousands marched to his village and garlanded and congratulated him for his daring act. The second incident is of the Eid day. Firdous Ahmed Hajjam had climbed over the clock tower at Lal chowk and raised the Islamic flag on Saturday. Again many thousands of people went to his village and congratulated him for his daring act. So the space for peaceful protest is narrowing as well as enlarging depending on the situation on the ground.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Kashmir stasis: religion
Dispassionate and disinterested view on Kashmir is not easy to have even for a self effacing person. Even Justin Hardy in the end of her new book In the Valley of Mist says that the situation is so desperate that people like her would give a helping hand even when they overhear the local people remarking about the foreigner as a non believer. She has worked there longer and knows better than many others, particularly the ones who are well ensconced in the comforts of the five star hotels. Stone pelting has not killed any police man but the police have killed nearly eighty five people overwhelmingly young ones. Stories are galore of brutality including the security forces attacking ambulance carrying civilians injured in police retaliation. This intense hatred is very disturbing and is not area specific: Coimbatore riots 1998 where Hindus stopped ambulance and killed the injured Muslims who were carried to hospital. In 1986 anti-reservation violence in Gujarat the extremists turned it anti Muslim and threw Muslim patients from higher stories of the hospital building to their death on the concrete below.
Ram Jethmalani is a committed right wing politician like LK Advani. The senior lawyer and a former law minister says that Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s hatred of Indians is on account of his religious conviction. He has dubbed him as “intentional abettor of murder”. The stone pelters are supported by the people “in the pay of Pakistan of whom Geelani is the leader.” He should be incarcerated in a jail far away from Kashmir. “Jeelani is just a Hindu hater by his religious conviction who does not know the real Islam of the Prophet of the majesty of its core teaching (Free Press Journal, September 3, 2010)
Religion is going to play a much larger role than anything else. The meeting at the house of LK advani on Sunday September 12 night assumes significance. Advani can keep his silence over Jharkhand but not on Kashmir where the people agitating for freedom happen to be Muslims. BJP’s demand not to dilute the AFSPA is their old policy of opposing what they generally call appeasement of minority Muslim. Jethmalani calls Jeelani mortal enemy of Kashmir. The Kashmiri Muslims as well as the Muslims in the rest of India have had their mortal enemies and the recent history is replete with them and their deeds.
Former governor of JK Jagmohan’s role in the induced migration of the Pundits of the valley by opening state largess to them is well known. Now he is calling for harsher crackdowns on the protestors. Thanks to these he is the distinguished guest at the RSS meetings. Cultural nationalism has the hardrock bottom of religion. Unfortunately the Kashmiri Muslims do not make a part of it.
It is but natural the vitiated communal atmosphere in the country cannot brooke anything. Jagmohan thunders “Don’t turn back the clock in JK.” The centre has spent 95 000 crore on Kashmir since when he was governor in 1989-90 to 2009-2010. (AA September 7 & 8 2010) BJP the political configuration of the Hindu right is very calculative: “whole nation is anxiously watching as to which vision prevails in the CCS meeting on Monday.” (Sack Omar, but don’t dilute AFSPA:BJP to PM, Express News Service September 13)Now the CCS is scheduled to meet on Wednesday. The Hindu right does not want to either spend such huge amounts on Kashmir under Article 370 or have any political solution. What do you have still left, then?
Sanity. Moderation. Yes these are with some people. Prakash Karat sounds quite holistic in his approach to Kashmir. He met the PM on Sept 4,2010 and asked him to remove the Disturbed Area Act from the urban areas so that Armed Special Power Act would also go. The last act had made the security forces use excessive power that led to the death of more than sixty youths. He also made sure that the bed rock for any solution will have to be maximum autonomy recognizing the identity of the people and the special status of the state. Reviving economy and a political dialogue is necessary. Removing bunkers and reducing security forces will also help ease the situation. (Karat urges PM to hold talks on J&K sans precondition TNN, Sep 5, 2010)
Ram Jethmalani is a committed right wing politician like LK Advani. The senior lawyer and a former law minister says that Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s hatred of Indians is on account of his religious conviction. He has dubbed him as “intentional abettor of murder”. The stone pelters are supported by the people “in the pay of Pakistan of whom Geelani is the leader.” He should be incarcerated in a jail far away from Kashmir. “Jeelani is just a Hindu hater by his religious conviction who does not know the real Islam of the Prophet of the majesty of its core teaching (Free Press Journal, September 3, 2010)
Religion is going to play a much larger role than anything else. The meeting at the house of LK advani on Sunday September 12 night assumes significance. Advani can keep his silence over Jharkhand but not on Kashmir where the people agitating for freedom happen to be Muslims. BJP’s demand not to dilute the AFSPA is their old policy of opposing what they generally call appeasement of minority Muslim. Jethmalani calls Jeelani mortal enemy of Kashmir. The Kashmiri Muslims as well as the Muslims in the rest of India have had their mortal enemies and the recent history is replete with them and their deeds.
Former governor of JK Jagmohan’s role in the induced migration of the Pundits of the valley by opening state largess to them is well known. Now he is calling for harsher crackdowns on the protestors. Thanks to these he is the distinguished guest at the RSS meetings. Cultural nationalism has the hardrock bottom of religion. Unfortunately the Kashmiri Muslims do not make a part of it.
It is but natural the vitiated communal atmosphere in the country cannot brooke anything. Jagmohan thunders “Don’t turn back the clock in JK.” The centre has spent 95 000 crore on Kashmir since when he was governor in 1989-90 to 2009-2010. (AA September 7 & 8 2010) BJP the political configuration of the Hindu right is very calculative: “whole nation is anxiously watching as to which vision prevails in the CCS meeting on Monday.” (Sack Omar, but don’t dilute AFSPA:BJP to PM, Express News Service September 13)Now the CCS is scheduled to meet on Wednesday. The Hindu right does not want to either spend such huge amounts on Kashmir under Article 370 or have any political solution. What do you have still left, then?
Sanity. Moderation. Yes these are with some people. Prakash Karat sounds quite holistic in his approach to Kashmir. He met the PM on Sept 4,2010 and asked him to remove the Disturbed Area Act from the urban areas so that Armed Special Power Act would also go. The last act had made the security forces use excessive power that led to the death of more than sixty youths. He also made sure that the bed rock for any solution will have to be maximum autonomy recognizing the identity of the people and the special status of the state. Reviving economy and a political dialogue is necessary. Removing bunkers and reducing security forces will also help ease the situation. (Karat urges PM to hold talks on J&K sans precondition TNN, Sep 5, 2010)
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Human Rights Watch and the Intifada in Kashmir
There is a groundswell in the resentment of the ordinary Kashmiri against the Indian security forces. The Shaikh Abdullah family misled them twice. The last time it was Dr Farooq Abdullah who espoused the minimum agreed agenda of the NDA government dominated by Hindutva party, BJP. The National Conference was a part of it. The pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat 2002 shocked the Kashmiris tremendously but what shocked them more was how Farooq and his son did not react to events in Gujarat as strongly, immediately and categorically as they should have representing the popular sentiment of the people of Kashmir valley in particular.
But the genocide in Gujarat came too close to the 9/11 in America and so the NDA’s toeing George Bush’s line crowded out the kind of concern the world and particularly the west shows to the gross violation of human rights. Even Britain did not react as firmly as it would do. The Prime Minister of the time, AB Vajpayee went even further and remarked in the Goa conclave of his BJP party that the Muslims do not live in peace with their neighbours and it is their violent nature that is responsible. However, when the Commissioner of UNO Human Rights Commission wanted to visit Gujarat the Prime Minister sent Justice Verma of NHRC and the Attorney General Soli Sorabji to prevent her visit and request her not to go public about Gujarat. The British High Commission also recorded that the mass murder of Muslim was carefully planned and even if the Sabarmati train was not burnt the extremists of Hindutva would have found out another alibi to attack the Muslims. What the British High Commission recorded did not translate into any kind of condemnation or raising the issue of the human rights violation in India because PM Tony Blair ala Vajpayee had jumped on the bandwagon of the Bush government in their misconceived war on terror which turned out to be a war on the Muslims.
The Kashmiris were very much disturbed by all these. In the present worsening situation in the valley they are outraged by among other things, genocidal tendency of the security forces, gang rapes of the Kashmiri women and the humiliation of the Kashmiri men in the presence of their women. This last is having a disastrous effect on them because they feel that what the security forces did in Gujarat they are doing the same in the valley.
Many Americans are now waking up to the stark truth that under George Bush the war on terror was in fact war on Islam, witness what President Obama is saying currently and what George Soros has been saying. Soros wants to make Human Rights Watch a global organization with an overwhelming concern for South Asia. This is a belated recognition that India did get the kind of attention because of the twisted perception of Bush administration when it came to human rights violation in the country.
The unfolding scenario in the valley is truly horrifying. The Kashmiri men are paraded naked in full view of their woman. The security forces beat them mercilessly and goad their private parts with batons and then hit them in the crotch. Many a time the victims have their hands tied behind and are stark naked and thus unable to even a reflex protection gesture of their private parts or head or any other parts of the body. This kind of genderised humiliation is calculated to show that they are impotent before the security forces that have also subdued their women to watch their helplessness.
The death toll of the boys has gone to 70 with no end in sight. Why only the young boys some of them even as tender as 8 years old are picked out and shot at? Is it not an attempt to debilitate the next generation of the Kahmiris?
What NDA government did under Vajpayee is being repeated today with the home minister Chidambrum expressing doubt that the victims caught on cell phone camera are genuine because 'people seen in it have not spoken up'. First the government tried to erase the videos of naked parades of torture and humiliation and then the denial!
The cumulative effect is that the loud protest of the people is rising in a crescendo and the word that stands out loudest in the melee is freedom, azadi! In 22 years of protest it was a watershed when even on Eid for the first time the sound of azadi rings the air in the valley from the Eidgah to the Lalchowk. It is time to ponder why the hawk Yasin Mallik and the dove Umar Farooq Mirwaiz come together in determination.
Can the Human Rights Watch hear the shouts?
But the genocide in Gujarat came too close to the 9/11 in America and so the NDA’s toeing George Bush’s line crowded out the kind of concern the world and particularly the west shows to the gross violation of human rights. Even Britain did not react as firmly as it would do. The Prime Minister of the time, AB Vajpayee went even further and remarked in the Goa conclave of his BJP party that the Muslims do not live in peace with their neighbours and it is their violent nature that is responsible. However, when the Commissioner of UNO Human Rights Commission wanted to visit Gujarat the Prime Minister sent Justice Verma of NHRC and the Attorney General Soli Sorabji to prevent her visit and request her not to go public about Gujarat. The British High Commission also recorded that the mass murder of Muslim was carefully planned and even if the Sabarmati train was not burnt the extremists of Hindutva would have found out another alibi to attack the Muslims. What the British High Commission recorded did not translate into any kind of condemnation or raising the issue of the human rights violation in India because PM Tony Blair ala Vajpayee had jumped on the bandwagon of the Bush government in their misconceived war on terror which turned out to be a war on the Muslims.
The Kashmiris were very much disturbed by all these. In the present worsening situation in the valley they are outraged by among other things, genocidal tendency of the security forces, gang rapes of the Kashmiri women and the humiliation of the Kashmiri men in the presence of their women. This last is having a disastrous effect on them because they feel that what the security forces did in Gujarat they are doing the same in the valley.
Many Americans are now waking up to the stark truth that under George Bush the war on terror was in fact war on Islam, witness what President Obama is saying currently and what George Soros has been saying. Soros wants to make Human Rights Watch a global organization with an overwhelming concern for South Asia. This is a belated recognition that India did get the kind of attention because of the twisted perception of Bush administration when it came to human rights violation in the country.
The unfolding scenario in the valley is truly horrifying. The Kashmiri men are paraded naked in full view of their woman. The security forces beat them mercilessly and goad their private parts with batons and then hit them in the crotch. Many a time the victims have their hands tied behind and are stark naked and thus unable to even a reflex protection gesture of their private parts or head or any other parts of the body. This kind of genderised humiliation is calculated to show that they are impotent before the security forces that have also subdued their women to watch their helplessness.
The death toll of the boys has gone to 70 with no end in sight. Why only the young boys some of them even as tender as 8 years old are picked out and shot at? Is it not an attempt to debilitate the next generation of the Kahmiris?
What NDA government did under Vajpayee is being repeated today with the home minister Chidambrum expressing doubt that the victims caught on cell phone camera are genuine because 'people seen in it have not spoken up'. First the government tried to erase the videos of naked parades of torture and humiliation and then the denial!
The cumulative effect is that the loud protest of the people is rising in a crescendo and the word that stands out loudest in the melee is freedom, azadi! In 22 years of protest it was a watershed when even on Eid for the first time the sound of azadi rings the air in the valley from the Eidgah to the Lalchowk. It is time to ponder why the hawk Yasin Mallik and the dove Umar Farooq Mirwaiz come together in determination.
Can the Human Rights Watch hear the shouts?
Thursday, September 2, 2010
David Rubabuddin versus Goliath Narendra Modi
Rubabuddin’s taking on Modi is like David taking on Goliath. It was his filing a case in the fake encounter case of his brother Sohrabuddin and his habeas corpus on his sister in law Kauserbi that opened the Pandora’s box for the chief minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi. His brother and sister in law were murdered by the police close to the chief minister and his MoS for Home Amit Shah. The chief minister knew all these because he made it an issue in 2007 election justifying what was done to Sohrabuddin. For that he earned the distinction of sort in the sobriquet bestowed on him as the maut ke saudager or merchant of death by no other than the president of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi.
Strangely enough the law and order in the state is a puppet show of the chief minister. He plays it with impunity because the communalized atmosphere in Gujarat is such that it has not dawned upon the people there yet that India has a judiciary that has stood test of time despite occasional aberrations.
In the latest salvo against the chief minister Rubabuddin has petitioned the Supreme Court that on August 25 2010 the chief minister used the word supari (contract) which Congress party has given to CBI against him. Ordinarily it would mean that the Congress party has contracted the agency to finish off Modi. It could be physical liquidation or political undoing. But the charge stands that the agency is accused of accepting bribe. It also shows that the bona fide of the agency is very doubtful in character. His allegations against the agency are an insult of the SC at whose behest the agency is conducting investigation. He is indulging in terribly shocking slandering and it shows how low the chief minister has slid down in moral turpitude. In any other country he would have been booked as a criminal. We have still time to see if he is criminally charged and prosecuted. Such is his temerity that he mocks the agency to arrest him as he is there and not running away or hiding.(His ministers, like Amit Shah, and police officers, like deputy commissioner of police Narendra Amin, and a proclaimed offender involved in gang rape and mass murder, Babu Bajrandi, did just that. What is worse they could do what they did because of the patronage of the CM himself!) How long can the people of India be silent spectators of the kind of tamasha going on in Gujarat for so long?
What with saffron tinted public prosecutors playing havoc with the prosecution system in the state since March 2002 and delaying tactics of Modi government meant for denying justice, if the SC does not act firmly it would give out a wrong signal to the bereaved that they have no hope of justice in India and it would entitle them to take their cases to UNO through optional protocol provided in the UN charters. That would/should not be an insult to the country given the gimmicks that Modi is playing with the image of the country in the rest of the world. Moreover India ratified in 1959 the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide but has not instituted laws in this regard. The world including many in India knows that 2002 systematic murder, mayhem, arson, loot and boycott was genocide of Muslims. In fact Citizens for Justice and Peace is now appealing to international community to intervene recognizing the urgent need for monitoring and intervention of the ongoing process of justice.
Modi is never tired of bragging that he would prefer harsher laws to tackle terrorism while he is practicing what amounts to terrorism!
Strangely enough the law and order in the state is a puppet show of the chief minister. He plays it with impunity because the communalized atmosphere in Gujarat is such that it has not dawned upon the people there yet that India has a judiciary that has stood test of time despite occasional aberrations.
In the latest salvo against the chief minister Rubabuddin has petitioned the Supreme Court that on August 25 2010 the chief minister used the word supari (contract) which Congress party has given to CBI against him. Ordinarily it would mean that the Congress party has contracted the agency to finish off Modi. It could be physical liquidation or political undoing. But the charge stands that the agency is accused of accepting bribe. It also shows that the bona fide of the agency is very doubtful in character. His allegations against the agency are an insult of the SC at whose behest the agency is conducting investigation. He is indulging in terribly shocking slandering and it shows how low the chief minister has slid down in moral turpitude. In any other country he would have been booked as a criminal. We have still time to see if he is criminally charged and prosecuted. Such is his temerity that he mocks the agency to arrest him as he is there and not running away or hiding.(His ministers, like Amit Shah, and police officers, like deputy commissioner of police Narendra Amin, and a proclaimed offender involved in gang rape and mass murder, Babu Bajrandi, did just that. What is worse they could do what they did because of the patronage of the CM himself!) How long can the people of India be silent spectators of the kind of tamasha going on in Gujarat for so long?
What with saffron tinted public prosecutors playing havoc with the prosecution system in the state since March 2002 and delaying tactics of Modi government meant for denying justice, if the SC does not act firmly it would give out a wrong signal to the bereaved that they have no hope of justice in India and it would entitle them to take their cases to UNO through optional protocol provided in the UN charters. That would/should not be an insult to the country given the gimmicks that Modi is playing with the image of the country in the rest of the world. Moreover India ratified in 1959 the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide but has not instituted laws in this regard. The world including many in India knows that 2002 systematic murder, mayhem, arson, loot and boycott was genocide of Muslims. In fact Citizens for Justice and Peace is now appealing to international community to intervene recognizing the urgent need for monitoring and intervention of the ongoing process of justice.
Modi is never tired of bragging that he would prefer harsher laws to tackle terrorism while he is practicing what amounts to terrorism!
Monday, August 30, 2010
“This son of Gujarat” owes an explanation to India
The ongoing investigation into Sohrabuddin Shaikh murder by the police of the Gujarat state is throwing up enough hints of the kind of Gujarat its chief minister Narendra Modi has created. It has been fully implicit in mass murders of Muslims in 2002 and since then in fake encounters of targeted Muslims falsely accused as terrorists. Modi has suborned and subverted judiciary system and the police. This has become a day light affair so ingrained that either the people of the state are bought over by him or simply dread to utter a word against him.
Calling himself as “This son of Gujarat” he generalizes his third person singular into first person plural “we Gujaratis are all set to fight the Delhi sultanate single-handedly.” Have the rest of the people of India lost all morality to let him and his Gujaratis only to fight the rot that has entered into the public life? Do the people of India not see that he himself is the master creator of the outlawry in his state? Moreover, how can he appropriate upon himself the right to speak for all the Gujaratis when we have a democracy in which differences of opinion is bound to be there and is a healthy sign? Can he deign (dare?) to represent the feelings of Malika Sarabhai, to give just an instance?
Modi is having a running battle with the CBI when that top investigative agency is busy inquiring into gravest charges leveled against his police and bureaucracy and. what is more, against him. He is still presiding over this kind of dispensation when he should have long back accepted the moral responsibility and resigned.
Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Modi personally supervised much of the goings on in Gujarat through proxy. (Where are the records of fifteen phone calls he made? What did he say to Ehsan Jafri when the old Member of Parliament asked him to save life of the people who sought refuge in his house?) Gordhan Zadaphia and Amit Shah carried out what he wanted. When the CBI asked Geetha Johari about Shah she maintained strict silence. This incommunicado of hers is remarkable in a grilling session of questioning that lasted nine hours! Why is she so much afraid of turning a witness in the Sohrabuddin case? Does she fear that she would risk her life like Narendra Amin who feared the same in the high security Sabarmati jail? Who has created this atmosphere of fear in the state where let alone ordinary citizens but the very highest police officers fear to turn witness? Whose shadow is stalking them that they fear to look at the person himself in the face?
Rumour mongering in the street can lead to riots but rumour mongering in the corridors of power spells doom. "There is not one day when I have not heard rumors that the CBI is about to arrest me. I am here, I am going nowhere." Read carefully all his recent speeches. The constant refrain is terrorism balanced by development in Gujarat as if he is hinting that you condone one if you want the other. Or what else is it?
In the mean time there is the procrastination playing as a thief of time. Geetha Johari is blaming the CBI Additional Director Balwinder Singh who was additional commissioner of police in Hyderabad when she conducted inquiry. Now she is blaming him for shielding Kalimuddin. She says that Kalimuddin was PWG informer of police in Hyderabad. According to her he melted among the Naxalites of the state and so next to impossible to find. Perhaps he never existed but was raised as a ghost to throw a spanner into the investigation process. The third person with Sohrabuddin was after all Tulsiram Prajapati. OP Mathur as chief of CID of the Gujarat state then misdirected her and she says he should now be called to give witness. Mathur blamed her for tampering with the evidence as she was the supervisory officer of the investigation. Both are suggesting that the onus is on the other to prove the facts. Now Mathur has moved into the police academia founded by Modi to mark 60 anniversary of Gujarat state. Perhaps we will have to wait until this chancellor Mathur of the Rakksha Shakti University inducts a PhD course in who misdirected whom in criminal investigation. And, whether there has to be a chain of command at all.
------
Modi hits out at Cong during inauguration spree TNN, Aug 30, 2010
Johri returns favour to Mathur during CBI grilling TNN, Aug 28, 2010
Sohrabuddin case: Geetha Johri accuses CBI of pressurising her. TOI August 28, 2010.
Modi shoots at PM to shout down IE August 29, 2010.
Calling himself as “This son of Gujarat” he generalizes his third person singular into first person plural “we Gujaratis are all set to fight the Delhi sultanate single-handedly.” Have the rest of the people of India lost all morality to let him and his Gujaratis only to fight the rot that has entered into the public life? Do the people of India not see that he himself is the master creator of the outlawry in his state? Moreover, how can he appropriate upon himself the right to speak for all the Gujaratis when we have a democracy in which differences of opinion is bound to be there and is a healthy sign? Can he deign (dare?) to represent the feelings of Malika Sarabhai, to give just an instance?
Modi is having a running battle with the CBI when that top investigative agency is busy inquiring into gravest charges leveled against his police and bureaucracy and. what is more, against him. He is still presiding over this kind of dispensation when he should have long back accepted the moral responsibility and resigned.
Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Modi personally supervised much of the goings on in Gujarat through proxy. (Where are the records of fifteen phone calls he made? What did he say to Ehsan Jafri when the old Member of Parliament asked him to save life of the people who sought refuge in his house?) Gordhan Zadaphia and Amit Shah carried out what he wanted. When the CBI asked Geetha Johari about Shah she maintained strict silence. This incommunicado of hers is remarkable in a grilling session of questioning that lasted nine hours! Why is she so much afraid of turning a witness in the Sohrabuddin case? Does she fear that she would risk her life like Narendra Amin who feared the same in the high security Sabarmati jail? Who has created this atmosphere of fear in the state where let alone ordinary citizens but the very highest police officers fear to turn witness? Whose shadow is stalking them that they fear to look at the person himself in the face?
Rumour mongering in the street can lead to riots but rumour mongering in the corridors of power spells doom. "There is not one day when I have not heard rumors that the CBI is about to arrest me. I am here, I am going nowhere." Read carefully all his recent speeches. The constant refrain is terrorism balanced by development in Gujarat as if he is hinting that you condone one if you want the other. Or what else is it?
In the mean time there is the procrastination playing as a thief of time. Geetha Johari is blaming the CBI Additional Director Balwinder Singh who was additional commissioner of police in Hyderabad when she conducted inquiry. Now she is blaming him for shielding Kalimuddin. She says that Kalimuddin was PWG informer of police in Hyderabad. According to her he melted among the Naxalites of the state and so next to impossible to find. Perhaps he never existed but was raised as a ghost to throw a spanner into the investigation process. The third person with Sohrabuddin was after all Tulsiram Prajapati. OP Mathur as chief of CID of the Gujarat state then misdirected her and she says he should now be called to give witness. Mathur blamed her for tampering with the evidence as she was the supervisory officer of the investigation. Both are suggesting that the onus is on the other to prove the facts. Now Mathur has moved into the police academia founded by Modi to mark 60 anniversary of Gujarat state. Perhaps we will have to wait until this chancellor Mathur of the Rakksha Shakti University inducts a PhD course in who misdirected whom in criminal investigation. And, whether there has to be a chain of command at all.
------
Modi hits out at Cong during inauguration spree TNN, Aug 30, 2010
Johri returns favour to Mathur during CBI grilling TNN, Aug 28, 2010
Sohrabuddin case: Geetha Johri accuses CBI of pressurising her. TOI August 28, 2010.
Modi shoots at PM to shout down IE August 29, 2010.
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