Sandhya Jain | Vijayavaani | 27 August 2008
http://www.vijayvaani.com/article_27au2.htm
In a virtual replay of the post-Godhra riots of 2002, the secular and foreign media has worked overtime to delink the ugly, provocative murder of 80-year-old Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four disciples on Krishna Janmastami day with the violence that subsequently rocked some districts in Orissa. This is simply not on.
Swami Laxmanananda was actively involved in the protection of tribal dharma from aggressive Christian evangelists in the state's tribal belt since 1966. He was killed in his crowded ashram at Jalespata, Kandhmal district, while performing Janmastami prayers. The murder came close on the heels of a letter warning he would suffer for preventing Hindus from converting to Christianity; in fact, his efforts had caused thousands of tribals to return to the Hindu fold, to the chagrin of the missionaries.
As the Swami had been previously attacked on 25 December 2007 for the same reason, he personally lodged a complaint with the police and enclosed the threatening letter along with the FIR. He sought police protection, but fell to the determination of his assailants before it could arrive. A gang of 20 to 25 goons barged into his ashram around 9.35 pm, lobbed a hand-grenade at the gathering of devotees, and fired indiscriminately with sophisticated weapons, killing Swami Laxmanananda and four ashram inmates, including Mata Bhaktimayee, on the spot.
Initially, the administration suggested that the killers could be Maoists, identifying a group known as the People's Liberation Revolutionary Group. But Hindu leaders vigorously refuted this, accusing Christian groups of sponsoring the attack, especially as the district witnessed fierce Christian violence against Hindus last Christmas. A BJP state leader Suresh Pujari said Swami Laxmanananda had no enmity with the Red rebels, and was only opposed to religious conversion taking place in various parts of Orissa. He alleged that those opposed to the saint's anti-conversion activities had killed him.
However, it may be pertinent to note that most Maoist activists in the district are also recent converts to Christianity. Security forces are said to have seized 20 guns from 47 Maoists arrested in connection with the burning of villages inhabited by Hindus. In this respect, the murder of Swami Laxmanananda may be said to closely resemble the murder of Swami Shanti Kali ji Maharaj in Tripura in August 2000; he too was shot in his own ashram by gun-wielding goons after several dire warnings for anti-conversion activities in the state's tribal belt. Subsequently, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Sarkar admitted the involvement of the Baptist church with the insurgency in the state.
It is surely pertinent that Orissa police arrested one Pradesh Kumar Das, an employee of the aggressive Christian organisation, World Vision, from Khadagpur, while trying to escape from the district at Buguda. Two other neo-converts, Vikram Digal and William Digal were arrested from the house of Lal Digal, a local militant Christian, from Nuasahi at Gunjibadi, Nuagaan. They admitted having joined a group of 28 other assailants. Orissa has also seen an influx of rich American Baptists, for obvious reasons.
In a television debate on the violence that followed the Ashram murders, Biju Janata Dal MP Tathagata Satpathy asserted that regardless of the actual efficacy of an anti-conversion ban, there could be little doubt that there was an urgent need for anti-conversion legislation as aggressive evangelization was seriously harming the social fabric of the state.
Violence broke out in the state as public sentiments ran high when the body of Swami Laxmanananda reached Chakapada in Kandhamal district for last rites; some shops and vehicles were torched though Home Secretary Tarunkanti Mishra said the bandh called by the Sangh Parivar was "total and by and large peaceful."
It is true that two persons, including one woman, were burnt to death when unidentified persons torched an orphanage run by a Christian organisation at Phutpali in Bargarh district. The twenty children at the orphanage were unhurt. One Rasananda Pradhan was also burnt to death when his house was set ablaze at Rupa village in Kandhamal district. Nearly a dozen churches were attacked in Khurda, Bargarh, Sundergarh, Sambalpur, Koraput, Boudh, Mayurbhanj, Jagatsinghpur and Kandhamal districts and Bhubhaneswar.
Yet the secular media, particularly the electronic media, has highlighted the violence of the post-Ashram murders as though it were a suo moto, unprovoked assault by the Hindu community, particularly the agitating VHP cadres, completely glossing over the original sin. Media has sought to diminish Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati by calling him a 'VHP leader' opposed to conversions – as though that vindicates his murder! In contrast, a woman who died in the subsequent violence was erroneously and repeatedly identified as a 'nun' and projected as a victim of religious persecution.
The truth is otherwise. It is those working overtime – with foreign funds and foreign missionaries – to annihilate the native faith of this country who are aggressors and cultural iconoclasts; this point needs to be understood by all concerned. In the specific context of Orissa, there is need to revisit the sensational murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines in January 1999, and honestly assess the tribal anguish that led to that sad denouement. One of the reasons why there has been no sober voice on the Staines murder is the tragic fact that his two minor sons died with him; but now that we are nearly a decade away from that event, we need to give the tribal agony due respect. A blanket ban on missionaries operating in tribal areas could go far to assuage tribal feelings. Indeed, the recognition that missionaries may have gone too far in provoking the increasingly affirmative Hindu community forced some Christian groups to condemn the murder of Swami Laxmanananda by evangelist religious fanatics.
No doubt the Judicial Commission set up by the Orissa Government under Justice Basudev Panigrahi will bring out the truth about the previous December 2007 violence in which Swami Laxmanananda was attacked; he escaped four attempts on his life before falling to the last attack. The Commission's findings will also throw light on the events that resulted in his eventual murder.
Initial reports suggest that Swami Laxmanananda was also active in the movement against illegal beef trading, and was demanding a high level probe into an alleged illegal beef trading racket in Kandhamal. The multi-faceted Swami devoted considerable energy to the socio-economic development of local people in remote areas of Orissa. He opened several social service institutions including schools and hostels for tribal boys and girls, with free education and hostel facilities. This cut at the roots of the evangelists and created much ill-will towards him.
A major reason for the heightened tensions in Kandhamal over the past few months was due to the fact that the important Kandha (Kondh) tribe was extremely vigilant about protecting its religion and culture. The second local group, the Scheduled Caste Panas, have mostly converted to Christianity.
As a result of conversion, the Panas lost the reservation benefits due to SCs under the constitution. Guided by the missionaries, they began to agitate for Scheduled Tribe status on the specious plea that they also spoke Kui, the mother tongue of the Kondhs, which is also the principal language of the district. This agitation created deep apprehensions in the minds of the Hindu STs and SCs, that converts would grab their reservation benefits. Their fears deepened when the UPA-appointed Justice Ranganath Mishra Commission recommended extension of all reservation facilities to converts among the Dalits, which would include the Panas in Orissa.
Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati took this simmering discontent head-on, calling for an open debate on conversions, which were at the root of the unrest in tribal-dominated areas. He asserted: "I have told the National Human Rights team that conversion and foreign funding to NGOs were the reasons behind communal riots in Kandhamal." He asked the NHRC to probe the fake caste (Scheduled Tribe) certificates fraudulently obtained by non-tribals and take appropriate action against them.
Now that this valiant warrior for Hindu civilisation and India 's foundational ethos has been struck down, the State and Central Government owe it to the nation to scrutinize the flow of foreign funds to Christian missionaries and make public the manner of their utilization. There must also be a complete ban on the foreign funding of faiths not indigenous to this soil.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
'Donations, goatskin sale funded SIMI'
Rakesh K Singh | DailyPioneer
Zakat (donation) by devotees and the money collected from the sale of goatskin offered at mosques during the celebration of Bakr-Eid are major sources of terror funding for the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India.
The confessional statements of SIMI chief Safdar Nagori and a senior commander of the outfit, Aamil Parvaz, have revealed that the outfit responsible for several terror blasts across the country also received significant contributions from its former members based in the Gulf.
The money received from the Gulf has particularly been used by former ansars (full-time members) of SIMI, mainly for meeting litigation expenses, top SIMI commander Aamil Parwaz told interrogators while providing details about the finances of the outfit.
Parwaz also told the officials that the funds were also used by the Shaheen Force, a front of SIMI, to attract children into its fold with a view to catching them young for terror activities. The children and relatives of SIMI members were "activated" for the Shaheen Force which, in turn, would bring their friends into the fold of the front. Religious books and sweets were distributed among the members of the front. "Besides, Quranic teachings were also recited on occasions," Parwaz told the interrogators and claimed that the front was inactivated after the ban on SIMI.
The revelation came during the interrogation of Parwaz by the Madhya Pradesh police earlier this year. Parwaz is currently under the custody of Gujarat police for interrogation into the Ahmedabad serial blasts.
During his interrogation by the MP police and intelligence sleuths, Nagori revealed that collection of funds prior to the ban on the outfit was done in a "normal" manner. After the ban, however, the outfit members collected donations from other members and sympathisers at the local level. After deducting the expenses for local activities, the remaining amount was sent to the treasurer of the outfit.
Parwaz, 34, also told the interrogators that SIMI finances were also strengthened by donations from well-off members of the community, including from Manzoor of Pakeeza Collections of Indore, owners of Mayur Hospital and Balwas Hotel of Bhopal. Other influential community members who knowingly contributed to SIMI included Hazi Israr, Abdul Rais and the owners of Madhumilan Talkies of Indore.
In his confessional statement, Parwaz also told the investigators that these community members contributed despite the knowledge that SIMI was a banned outfit under the law.
The interrogation report of Parwaz, classified as top secret, also reveals the mobile telephone numbers used by the top SIMI commanders. While Parwaz largely operated from his cellular phone (number 9755121736), Safdar Nagori used number 9907788584 and Kamruddin operated through his connection (number 9907788564). The input is expected to be analysed by the Gujarat police to further unravel the perpetrators behind the Ahmedabad serial blasts, which had killed over 50 persons and left more than 100 injured.
Parwaz, an accused under the National Security Act, also revealed that services of ex-Armyman Rasid Khan were also used for furthering the cause of the outfit.
Zakat (donation) by devotees and the money collected from the sale of goatskin offered at mosques during the celebration of Bakr-Eid are major sources of terror funding for the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India.
The confessional statements of SIMI chief Safdar Nagori and a senior commander of the outfit, Aamil Parvaz, have revealed that the outfit responsible for several terror blasts across the country also received significant contributions from its former members based in the Gulf.
The money received from the Gulf has particularly been used by former ansars (full-time members) of SIMI, mainly for meeting litigation expenses, top SIMI commander Aamil Parwaz told interrogators while providing details about the finances of the outfit.
Parwaz also told the officials that the funds were also used by the Shaheen Force, a front of SIMI, to attract children into its fold with a view to catching them young for terror activities. The children and relatives of SIMI members were "activated" for the Shaheen Force which, in turn, would bring their friends into the fold of the front. Religious books and sweets were distributed among the members of the front. "Besides, Quranic teachings were also recited on occasions," Parwaz told the interrogators and claimed that the front was inactivated after the ban on SIMI.
The revelation came during the interrogation of Parwaz by the Madhya Pradesh police earlier this year. Parwaz is currently under the custody of Gujarat police for interrogation into the Ahmedabad serial blasts.
During his interrogation by the MP police and intelligence sleuths, Nagori revealed that collection of funds prior to the ban on the outfit was done in a "normal" manner. After the ban, however, the outfit members collected donations from other members and sympathisers at the local level. After deducting the expenses for local activities, the remaining amount was sent to the treasurer of the outfit.
Parwaz, 34, also told the interrogators that SIMI finances were also strengthened by donations from well-off members of the community, including from Manzoor of Pakeeza Collections of Indore, owners of Mayur Hospital and Balwas Hotel of Bhopal. Other influential community members who knowingly contributed to SIMI included Hazi Israr, Abdul Rais and the owners of Madhumilan Talkies of Indore.
In his confessional statement, Parwaz also told the investigators that these community members contributed despite the knowledge that SIMI was a banned outfit under the law.
The interrogation report of Parwaz, classified as top secret, also reveals the mobile telephone numbers used by the top SIMI commanders. While Parwaz largely operated from his cellular phone (number 9755121736), Safdar Nagori used number 9907788584 and Kamruddin operated through his connection (number 9907788564). The input is expected to be analysed by the Gujarat police to further unravel the perpetrators behind the Ahmedabad serial blasts, which had killed over 50 persons and left more than 100 injured.
Parwaz, an accused under the National Security Act, also revealed that services of ex-Armyman Rasid Khan were also used for furthering the cause of the outfit.
The intellectual scene in Post-independence India
S. Gurumurthy | IIT Chennai A speech of S. Gurumurthy given to IIT Chennai
... Defeat and anger go together. Abuse and defeat go together. So, it is in this norm and with this understanding of what an intellectual debate means, I would like to place before you some of my thoughts today. Some of may find it provocative. I am confident that the audience is competent enough to absorb this and think rather than get into the mood which all of us have got used to in the last 30-40 years abuse.
Let us look at the academic side. Whether it is a P.C. Ray who wrote on Indian Chemistry in 1905 or Sir C.V. Raman who wrote about mridangam, tabala, and violin, and saw the physics in it (this was in 1913); whether it was R.C. Majumdar or Radhakumud Mukherjee who saw greatness in the Indian civilization; trying to bring up points, instances, historical evidence to mirror the greatness of India to the defeated Indian race, they were all building the Indian mind brick by brick.
Sri Aurobindo spoke of Sanatana Dharma as the nationalism of India. He didn't rank it as a philosophy. He brought it down to the level of emotional consciousness. Swami Vivekananda spoke of spiritual nationalism; it was the same Swami who spoke of Universal brotherhood. For them philosophy was not removed from the ground reality. The nation was at the core of their philosophy. Swami Vivekananda was called the "patriot monk".
Mahatma Gandhi spoke of Rama Rajya. Bankim Chandra wrote Bande Maataram. The song, the slogans in it, the mantra in it made hundreds of people kiss the gallows smilingly and many others went to jail. It transformed the life of the people. This was the intellectual scene, this was the content. This is what powered the intellectual as well as the mass movement in India. This was the core of India, the soul of the Indian freedom movement.
The symptoms: India immediately after Independence
Imagine what happened in 1947 and after, India was able to intellectually lead not only Indians but also the whole world because of the intellectual assertion that the freedom movement brought about. Let us look at post Independence India. The persons who led post-Independence India were also trained in the same freedom movement. They went to jail, but they were not rooted in the intellectual content of the Freedom movement!
The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was in jail for 7 years. He was a great intellectual, purely in the sense of his capacity to reason, understand, read, and expound a thought. He told Galbrieth once, "I would be regarded as the last English Prime Minister of India." See the intellectual capability of the man, the enormously competent mind.
But intellectualism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has to be rooted in something concrete. Swami Vivekananda's universal brotherhood was rooted in India's greatness as a civilization. The concept of "Vasudaiva Kutumbakam" cannot exist without a living form, a population which believes in it and believes in itself. You need to have a society which believes in it.
That is why India could invite the Jews who were butchered, raped, all over the world. In 107 out of 108 countries, this race was butchered. At least they had the courtesy and the gratitude to publish a book. The Israeli government published a book that out of 108 countries that we sought refuge, the only civilization, the only country, the only people, the only ideology that gave us refuge was the Indian civilization. They published a book, which most Indians are unaware of.
And we invited the Muslims. The refugee Muslims first landed in Kutch. And they are called the Kutchy Memons even today but not the Memons who bomb Mumbai. But the Memons who lived with us.
In the year 1917, many of you might be aware, a case went to the Prey Council, equivalent to the Supreme Court now. The Kutchy Memons went and told the Prey Council that we are Muslims for namesake, but we follow only the Hindu law. Please don't impose the Shariat on us. The Prey Council ruled that they are Muslims but the only sacred book they have is called "Dasaavathaara", it is not Koran. In fact they knew no language other than the Kutchy language.
And in the "Dasaavathaara", nine avatharas were common between Hindus and Kutchy Memons. We call the tenth avathaara "Kalki" and they call him "Ali". The Prey Council ruled that the Shariyat law is not applicable to them. The All India Muslim League took up the case, went to the British and told them that this finding is dangerous to Islam and requested them to pass a law which will overrule this judgment. The British government passed a law in 1923 which was called the "The Kutchy Memons Act" declaring, "If a Kutchy Memon wants to follow the Shariat, allow him to do so". It doesn't mean a Muslim must follow the Shariat. Between 1923-1937, before the All India Shariat Act was passed not a single Kutchy Memon filed an affidavit with the plea that he wants to follow the Shariaat. That was the integration prevalent in India. In 1937, when the All India Shariat Act was passed, the preamble to the act mentioned that this was being passed by a demand made by the AIML leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Today, the Shariat has become a part of Muslim consciousness.
The purpose behind making you aware of this background is that 99% of the people who speak about the constitutional rights of the minorities or the distinctiveness of Muslim life are unaware of the facts. Till the year 1980, in Cooch Behar district, the Shariat law was not applicable. In 32 instances between 1923 and 1947 by legislation, the Shariyat law was not applicable to the Muslims. This is the extent of the intellectual gap in India.
Secularism: A Reversal and perversion of the Indian mind.
And now, coming to what is the position today. Everything that drove the freedom movement - everything that constituted the soul of the freedom movement, whether it is the Ram rajya of Gandhiji or Sanaatana Dharma of Sri Aurobindo or the spiritual patriotism of Vivekananda or the soul stirring Vande Maataram song, came to be regarded not only as unsecular but as sectarian, communal and even as something harmful to the country.
Thus, there was a reversal, a perversion of the Indian mind. How did it occur? Today, the intellectualism of India means to denigrate India. There are mobile citizens and there are non- citizens deriding India. Go to the Indian Airlines counter you will find people deriding India. Go to a post office they will deride India. Go to a railway station, they will deride India. It is the English educated Indian's privilege to deride India. When I was talking to postal employees in the GPO, Chennai (a majority of them were women). I told them the basic facts about the post office. I said it is one of the most efficient postal systems in the world, one of the cheapest in the world, one of the most delivery perfect postal systems in the world. For one rupee, you are able to transport information from one end of the country to the other.
And you have a postman, no where in the world this happens the postman goes to the illiterate mother and reads out the letter, he is asked to sit there and shares a cup of coffee and comes away. Money orders are delivered to the last rupee. It is an amazing system, one of the largest postal systems linking one of the most populous nations, one of the most complicated nations with so many languages.
Somebody writes the address in Tamil and it gets delivered in Patna! It gets delivered to Jawaan at warfront! When I completed my speech many of the women were wiping their tears. I asked why are you crying I have only praised you. They said, "Sir, this is the first time we've been praised, otherwise we've only been abused!"
You know how many people use the railways in India? A million people and that is equivalent to the population of Australia! And we have only abuses for them! Have we any idea of what this country is? India has been compared with Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. You can walk across many of these countries in one night (laughs)! The best politicians, intellectuals, sociologists in India have compared us with them because, we have never understood what we are and unless you do that, you can never relate us with others.
Demonising India: Projecting a negative image.
This enormous intellectual failure, to the extent of being intellectually bankrupt, did not occur overnight, it was no accident. There is a history behind this enormous erosion. And I told you about these mobile citizens, what they have done to us. Every country has problems. There is no country without any problem. Are you aware of what is one of the most pressing problems in America today? It is incurable according to the American sociologists; even American economists have begun to agree with them. American politicians are shaken, one third of the pregnant women are school going children. And mothers mix the anti-pregnancy pill in the food without daughter's knowledge everyday.
But this is not the image of America. The image of America is a technologically advanced country etc. etc. Ours is the only country where the mobile citizens of India have transformed the problems of India into the image of India -its identity is inherently related with its problems.
Go to any country and the same negative stereotype is echoed that India is suffering from poverty and malnutrition. India has no drinking water. Indian women are burnt. If they are married, they are burnt, if they are widows, they are burnt. See the image that has been built about this country. Who did this? The English educated Indian.
Clinton was shaken, because he might have thought that this person might be approaching him for some favour. I will relate my experience when I went to the Carter Centre in 1993. They were talking about dispute resolution and all that. I went there to meet somebody, if not Carter, somebody else at least. His Deputy, a lady, was very hesitant to receive me. "Mr. Gurumurthy", she said, "Mr. Carter is not around, anyway, I can spare seven-eight minutes for you." I said three or four minutes of your time would do. Even before I could start, she said, "Mr.Gurumurthy, we don't have funds, we will not be able to help" (laughter from the audience). I replied, "Let us assume you have a hundred billion dollars, how much will you give me? One billion? One million?" She kept quiet, I said: "I don't need your money. I came here to discuss whether community living is an answer to disputes. I have come to discuss this because you have suggested electoral means to resolve problems in communities which have no damn idea of what an election is; whether community living is an answer because you don't what that means. She sat and discussed this with me for two hours. This is the image we have projected that anybody, who comes from India, comes to beg. Ordinary Indians did not create this impression; educated Indians created it. This is the work of civil servants, NGOs. Christian missionaries during the freedom movement created this. Indians are filthy, rotten, dirty and unhealthy, advertising abroad these are the people who need to be saved. We have to Christianise them, enlighten them, and give us money. I can understand that because it is their business. But what did we do after 1947?
We repeated the same mistakes. We projected India as a country of unending problems. As I said, every country has problems. Only in India, problems become identities. How many dowry deaths take place in India in a year? Yet, India is projected as a country burning its own daughter-in-laws. And we also talk about it. Every damn newspaper will be writing about it. We believe in self-deprecation. And this goes on in the guise of intellectualism in India. And one woman, she attempted to take a film of the widows. I wrote an article, asking her to go to Lijjat Paapad. A widow brought me up. Millions of widows have worked to bring up their children. It is a nation, which believes in Tapasya. You may not believe in it but you are an exception. Compare Deepa Mehta"s attitude with Sarada Maa's who was the wife, who became a widow after Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's passing away. She went to the very same place where Deepa Mehta went and saw the widows. Sarada Maa said, "These widows are so pure, they are an illustration and an example to me." Deepa Mehta saw them as prostitutes. The widows have already been hurt once. Why are you sprinkling salt on their wounds?
I am very sorry to speak about this, but I have to, this audience is enlightened enough to understand me. Indian women are sexually unsatisfied and so they are becoming lesbians? This is one bloody story against us, about us. This is the image of Indian men and women, and this film is in English. Catherine Mayo wrote a book and Mahatma Gandhi said about it, "I have no time to read this filth. But I am under a compulsion, under pressure because this has been published abroad. The image of India has been rubbished and I have to counter it." With this introduction, he wrote about the book and said that this woman is a gutter inspector (laughs).
The intellectualism in India is gutter inspection- people are of this kind etc. Understand the level of erosion.
Indian Politics: Weaknesses and Pitfalls
Let us look at the post independence scenario from the macro level. We installed a system of governance and it postulated all the important goals for the Indian society and polity, which was gulped by the Indian academia, by the Indian intellectuals. We will have a classless society through socialism. We will have a casteless society through equality. We will have a faithless society through secularism. We will have a modern society devoid of tradition.
Instead of politics restructuring caste, caste has restructured politics today. Political parties are talking only in terms of castes. Has any Indian intellectual come to terms with caste? You must understand caste if you want to handle the Indian society. You cannot say that I want to have a very different kind of society. You have to handle the Indian sentiment, the Indian tradition and Indian beliefs. You can't clone a society of your choice in India. Social engineering has failed everywhere; the masters of social engineering have given up the Communists - whether it is sociologists or economists you have to accept a society as it is. You can only increase the momentum of evolution in the society; you can't forcibly bring about a revolution today. But, Indian leaders and intellectuals, till today, keep abusing caste. They don't know how to handle the caste. Let me narrate to you how a community in Karaikudi handled this issue. The Chettiyar community assembled top businessmen, professionals from all over the world for 3 days to discuss their culinary act, how to construct houses, what languages they use, what old adages and stories their grand parents used to tell, what clothes they used to wear; not one word of politics, mind you. This was not even published in the newspapers. Intellectuals were not even aware of it. So, caste is a very important instrument in India, you may not like it. Unfortunately, every intellectual leads a caste life inside, but outside he is casteless! He is cloning an approach outside. There is no intellectual honesty at all.
And what happened in the case of secularism? In India, any one who is not a Hindu is per se secular. In the year 1947, just 10 years had passed after the Muslim League demanded and got the country partitioned, the leader who voted for the resolution for the partition of India was Quazi Millath Ismail, (who was leading the same Muslim League on the Indian side), the Congress certified that the Muslim League in Kerala is secular and hence it can associate with them. The Muslim League outside Kerala is communal with the same president! Three hundred and fifty crores are spent today for the Haj pilgrims out of the funds of secular India every year. No one can raise an objection. At least I can understand why politicians don't want to do that because they want the Muslim votes. But what about the intelligentsia. What about newspaper editors and journalists? And academicians? None of them speak out. The reason is that we have produced a state dependent intellectualism in India. We don't produce Nakkeerans anymore, our intellectualism is a derivative of the State and the State is a derivative of the polity. And in turn the polity is a derivative of the mind of Macaulay and Marx.
The Indian education system: A Legacy of Macaulay.
This Macaulayian system of education is a poison injected into our system. At least I had the opportunity of schooling in Tamil and hence could withstand the corruption that this English education brings with it. This corruption begins the moment the child steps out of the house. He is told to converse in English at home. This did not happen even in pre-Independence India, even when Macaulay wrote that notorious note sitting in Ooty. How many of you know Macaulay's formulation? Just those two or three sentences at least which form the crux - "We require an education system in India which will produce a class of interpreters, who will be Indian in colour and Englishmen in taste, opinions and morals."
This is the education system, which we have been continuing with, which was earlier conceived to produce clerks for the British Empire. If you have to differ from an English educated person you have to differ only through the English language. If you have to abuse somebody, even that has to be done in English! If you abuse the Anglicised Indian, he will not find fault with the blame but with the grammar in your language! This is the extent to which a foreign language has possessed us. But, we must master English, that is needed, but why do we have to become slaves of the English language? We must use that language as a tool, but why do we consider it as a status symbol? This is the influence of Macaulay.
If you want to understand the Macaulay/Marxist mix in India, you have to go a little back to see how Marxism grew out of the Christian civilisation. I recommend that you read the Nov 27, 1999 edition of the Newsweek, which describes how the Christian idea of the end of time called the "apocalypse", influenced the entire history, art, music, prognosis, sociology, economics, and the entire attitude of the Christian civilisation towards the non-Christian civilizations.
A Christian scholar who describes how Communism grew out of Christianity has written it. In 1624, Anna Baptists, a group of Christians who believed in the basic tenets of Christianity seized power in a particular place, banned private property and use of any book other than the Bible. When Marxism came up later through the exposition of Das Capital, the Marxists began expounding their doctrine as an extension of Christianity.
The thesis, antithesis and synthesis of making Christianity acceptable to the age of enlightenment was the Hegelian way demanded rationalisation of Christianity in the days of the Protestant movement. Hegel began with a disagreement, then started interacting with Christianity and ultimately ended up accepting Christianity. You can see the same phenomenon with Marxist postulates- "capitalism is my enemy, we have to deal with capitalism" and finally "we have to find a synthesis with capitalism".
In the two articles on British rule in India and the East India Company- history and results written by Marx, quoted in the New York daily "Karl Marx does grant though somewhat in a grudging manner that "materially, India was fairly industrious and prosperous even before the onset of the British rule. He said that India was an exporting country till 1830 and started importing because it had opened its trade to the British." Many of you may not be aware that the kings in India had no right to over the lands, which came under the jurisdiction of panchayats. Whether it was Emperor Ashoka or Bhagavan Sri Ramachandra, the rule was the same. It was changed only during the British rule under the Ryotwari system. Even the Mughals could not change it. It was also found that family communities were based on domestic industry, with the peculiar combination of hand-spinning, hand- weaving, agriculture etc. which gave them a supporting power.
The misery inflicted by the British on Hindusthan is of an entirely different kind and infinitely more intense than what it had to suffer before civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines all these did not go deeper than the surface. But, England broke the entire framework of Hindusthan, the symptoms of reconstitution are yet to emerge clearly. This loss of the Old World without the emergence of a new order imparts a particular melancholy to the present misery of Hindus and Hindusthan. Marx goes on to say that the British interference destroyed the union between agriculture and the manufacturing industry. Suddenly he remarks that the English interference dissolved this semi barbarian, semi-civilised community.
He concedes that they were prosperous, that they organised their affairs well, they have a measure of independence, they have a democracy at the lowest level, all this has been conceded. Then, how does he classify us as "semi-barbarian and semi-civilised communities"? He notes that India's social condition remained unaltered since remote antiquity. This is important, for him revolution is the core, the soul and centre of the society. This society never had a revolution; hence it cannot be modern! There is an underlying assumption, which considers revolution as a pre- requisite for being modern. Hence, he feels that the destruction wrought by the British is the inevitable revolution needed for the development of the Indian society. England had vested interests, violent interests in bringing about this "revolution". But, the question in focus is whether mankind can fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state? Whatever might have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about a revolution, whatever bitterness the spectacle of crumbling of an ancient world may evoke, from the point of history, we have to exclaim - should this torture torment us?
Since it brings us great pleasure, were not the rule of Taimur, souls delivered without measure? It is a creative destruction in the cause of revolution according to him. If you see Indian Communism which was expounded by a man called Rajane Palme Dutt. Has anyone heard of his name? (Two persons from the audience raised their hands). Two. He was born of a white woman and an Indian father in England. He was in charge of Indian Communism for 25 years. He never came to India though. In his book, "India Today", he laid down the framework, the policy for Indian Communists, what must be done, what is the kind of revolution needed in India, the development model etc. In those days, even good photographs of India were not available, yet this man spoke about India sitting in London. He came to India for the first time in 1946, ten years after he wrote this book and realised that he had to revise it. He stayed for 30 days! A visitor to India was the father of Indian Communism! And from that day till date, the Indian Communist has never been with India. Not only that, they took over the Indian mind in the post- independence period. It is these Marxist/Macaulayist intellectuals who will certify whether somebody is modern or traditional, backward or secular or communal, progressive or regressive. They were running an Open Air University issuing certificates every day through the press. They have branded me as a communal man.
Labels: Tools for stultifying important debates
Labels substituted debate in India. Simply a label - communal, that is enough. Four or five editorials will appear preaching that Gurumurthy is communal and the matter must end there. No one would even discuss what communalism is! Religious fundamentalism, RSS/Bajrang Dal fundamentalism! Anyone, who exposes the Hindu cause in India is a fundamentalist! We have seen this term being used so casually and superfluously and incessantly by politicians and newspapers. Has anyone bothered to understand the meaning of religious fundamentalism going beyond these slogans?
Secularism is an intra-Christian phenomenon. It has no application outside Christianity at all. Secularism resolved the fight between two powerful persons, the King and the Archbishop who were loyal to the same faith, to the same prophet, to the same book and to the same Church. It is not a multi-religious virtue.
A multi-religious idea, a multi-religious living, a multi-religious culture, a multi-religious fabric or a multi-religious structure was unknown outside India. There was usually only one faith and no place for any other, not even for a variation of the same faith. Fifty six thousand Bahais were butchered in one hour in Tehran! They believed in the same Koran, in the same Muhammad, the only difference was that they said that Muhammad might come in another form again. That was their only fault and they were all butchered.
But we have no such problem. We can play with God, we can abuse God, and we can beat God!
If I say that monotheistic religions have had a violent history, and the reply will be "you are communal." But this is exactly the same conclusion that a study in Chicago revealed, probably, the only study on fundamentalism conducted by anybody so far. This fundamentalism project brought out five volumes each volume about eight hundred to nine hundred pages. The conclusion they have reached is that, "Fundamentalism is a virtue of Abrahamic religions. It is not applicable to eastern faiths at all.
What about the Indian intellectuals? Day in and day out, they keep abusing us as fundamentalists, communalists, that we are anti-secular and it is being gulped down by everyone including those from the IITs and IIMs, lawyers and police officials, journalists and politicians. Look at this intellectual bankruptcy.
We need a mental revolution, an inner revolution; we need to get rooted in our own soul. There is a missing element in India today and it is this. That element has to be restored otherwise Indian intellectualism will only be a carbon copy of Western intellectualism. We are borrowing not only their language and idiom but also we trying to copy the very soul of the West.
So, all that we need to do is (it is impossible to share the entire depth of the subject in one evening's lecture programme. I have only tried out point out in an incoherent way, how a completely fresh mindset has to be evolved. And unless it evolves, the Indian mind, which leads India, will be in a perpetual state of confusion ordinary people are perfectly all right.
Consider for example how thirty years before there was a question whether Tamil Nadu will be a part of India or not. The Dravidian parties have taken over the mind of Tamil Nadu. It had virtually ceased to be a part of India. And their attack was aimed at Hinduism. The moment you attack Hinduism you attack India. This is a fact. Neither politicians nor intellectuals nor academicians realised this. But, the ordinary people did. Just three religious movements- the Ayyappa movement, the Kavadi movement and the Melmaruvatthur Adi Para Sakti movement- have finished the Dravidian ideology to a very great extent. It is only the outer shell of Dravidianism that remains today. Tamil Nadu has been brought back successfully by Ayyappa, Muruga and Para Sakti, not by the Congress or the BJP or any other political party.
How many people have intellectually assessed the depth and the reach, the deep influence of religion over the people? A paradigm shift in a study of India would be an intellectual approach to this subject. Or consider for example its influence on economics. Many of you by now would have studied economics in some detail. Take a look at the society in India and compare the figures for public expenditure for private purposes, which is called the social security system in the West. 30% of the GDP in America is spent for social security, 48% in England, 49% in France, 56% in Germany and 67% in Sweden. This private expenditure is nothing but what you and I do by taking care of parents, our wives and children, brothers and sisters and grandparents, widowed sisters and distant relatives. This expenditure is met by the society in India. And there is no law in India that people should do this. We consider it as our dharma. A person went to a court and demanded a divorce from his father and mother. The American court granted it saying that the only relationship that exists between two persons of America is their citizenship. The law in America recognises no other relationship ... In the year 1978, an interesting incident occurred in Manhattan. There was a power failure for six hours. Manhattan is in the heart of New York where you find the UN building, the World Trade Centre and the head quarters of many multinational companies. One third of the world's health is concentrated in Manhattan. Within six hours, hundreds of people were killed, robbed and assaulted. We don't need electricity to behave in a civilised manner. How many intellectuals in India have ever articulated from such a sympathetic approach? We have only tarnished the image of this country. We must be ashamed of this.
Conclusion
I shall conclude my speech with this example. When Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in search of a new light. He used to get five rupees from a friend and four persons used to live on this. A cup of tea was one of the luxuries they used to have everyday in the morning, on the Pondicherry beach.
Sri Aurobindo used to always look at a mystic called Kullachamy (Subramanya Bharati has written a poem about him). He used to behave like a madman, wandering here and there, throwing stones ... One, day he came near Sri Aurobindo, lifted his cup of tea and emptied it in front of him. Then he showed the empty cup to him, placed it on the table and went away. Sri Aurobindo's friends were angry and wanted to chase him. Sri Aurobindo stopped them and said, "This is the kind of instruction I had been expecting from him. He wants me to empty my mind and start thinking afresh."
... Defeat and anger go together. Abuse and defeat go together. So, it is in this norm and with this understanding of what an intellectual debate means, I would like to place before you some of my thoughts today. Some of may find it provocative. I am confident that the audience is competent enough to absorb this and think rather than get into the mood which all of us have got used to in the last 30-40 years abuse.
Background: India before Independence
Let us see the pre-independence background, the intellectual content of India. See the kind of personalities who led the Indian mind Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhiji, Tilak- giants in their own way. Most of them were involved in politics, active politics, day-to-day politics, handling men, walking on the road, addressing meetings, solving problems between their followers. And, meeting the challenges posed by the enemy, the conspiracies hatched against them. They were handling everything, yet, they were maintaining an intellectual supremacy, and an originality which history has recorded.
Let us look at the academic side. Whether it is a P.C. Ray who wrote on Indian Chemistry in 1905 or Sir C.V. Raman who wrote about mridangam, tabala, and violin, and saw the physics in it (this was in 1913); whether it was R.C. Majumdar or Radhakumud Mukherjee who saw greatness in the Indian civilization; trying to bring up points, instances, historical evidence to mirror the greatness of India to the defeated Indian race, they were all building the Indian mind brick by brick.
Sri Aurobindo spoke of Sanatana Dharma as the nationalism of India. He didn't rank it as a philosophy. He brought it down to the level of emotional consciousness. Swami Vivekananda spoke of spiritual nationalism; it was the same Swami who spoke of Universal brotherhood. For them philosophy was not removed from the ground reality. The nation was at the core of their philosophy. Swami Vivekananda was called the "patriot monk".
Mahatma Gandhi spoke of Rama Rajya. Bankim Chandra wrote Bande Maataram. The song, the slogans in it, the mantra in it made hundreds of people kiss the gallows smilingly and many others went to jail. It transformed the life of the people. This was the intellectual scene, this was the content. This is what powered the intellectual as well as the mass movement in India. This was the core of India, the soul of the Indian freedom movement.
The symptoms: India immediately after Independence
Imagine what happened in 1947 and after, India was able to intellectually lead not only Indians but also the whole world because of the intellectual assertion that the freedom movement brought about. Let us look at post Independence India. The persons who led post-Independence India were also trained in the same freedom movement. They went to jail, but they were not rooted in the intellectual content of the Freedom movement!
The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was in jail for 7 years. He was a great intellectual, purely in the sense of his capacity to reason, understand, read, and expound a thought. He told Galbrieth once, "I would be regarded as the last English Prime Minister of India." See the intellectual capability of the man, the enormously competent mind.
But intellectualism doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has to be rooted in something concrete. Swami Vivekananda's universal brotherhood was rooted in India's greatness as a civilization. The concept of "Vasudaiva Kutumbakam" cannot exist without a living form, a population which believes in it and believes in itself. You need to have a society which believes in it.
That is why India could invite the Jews who were butchered, raped, all over the world. In 107 out of 108 countries, this race was butchered. At least they had the courtesy and the gratitude to publish a book. The Israeli government published a book that out of 108 countries that we sought refuge, the only civilization, the only country, the only people, the only ideology that gave us refuge was the Indian civilization. They published a book, which most Indians are unaware of.
And we invited the Muslims. The refugee Muslims first landed in Kutch. And they are called the Kutchy Memons even today but not the Memons who bomb Mumbai. But the Memons who lived with us.
In the year 1917, many of you might be aware, a case went to the Prey Council, equivalent to the Supreme Court now. The Kutchy Memons went and told the Prey Council that we are Muslims for namesake, but we follow only the Hindu law. Please don't impose the Shariat on us. The Prey Council ruled that they are Muslims but the only sacred book they have is called "Dasaavathaara", it is not Koran. In fact they knew no language other than the Kutchy language.
And in the "Dasaavathaara", nine avatharas were common between Hindus and Kutchy Memons. We call the tenth avathaara "Kalki" and they call him "Ali". The Prey Council ruled that the Shariyat law is not applicable to them. The All India Muslim League took up the case, went to the British and told them that this finding is dangerous to Islam and requested them to pass a law which will overrule this judgment. The British government passed a law in 1923 which was called the "The Kutchy Memons Act" declaring, "If a Kutchy Memon wants to follow the Shariat, allow him to do so". It doesn't mean a Muslim must follow the Shariat. Between 1923-1937, before the All India Shariat Act was passed not a single Kutchy Memon filed an affidavit with the plea that he wants to follow the Shariaat. That was the integration prevalent in India. In 1937, when the All India Shariat Act was passed, the preamble to the act mentioned that this was being passed by a demand made by the AIML leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Today, the Shariat has become a part of Muslim consciousness.
The purpose behind making you aware of this background is that 99% of the people who speak about the constitutional rights of the minorities or the distinctiveness of Muslim life are unaware of the facts. Till the year 1980, in Cooch Behar district, the Shariat law was not applicable. In 32 instances between 1923 and 1947 by legislation, the Shariyat law was not applicable to the Muslims. This is the extent of the intellectual gap in India.
Secularism: A Reversal and perversion of the Indian mind.
And now, coming to what is the position today. Everything that drove the freedom movement - everything that constituted the soul of the freedom movement, whether it is the Ram rajya of Gandhiji or Sanaatana Dharma of Sri Aurobindo or the spiritual patriotism of Vivekananda or the soul stirring Vande Maataram song, came to be regarded not only as unsecular but as sectarian, communal and even as something harmful to the country.
Thus, there was a reversal, a perversion of the Indian mind. How did it occur? Today, the intellectualism of India means to denigrate India. There are mobile citizens and there are non- citizens deriding India. Go to the Indian Airlines counter you will find people deriding India. Go to a post office they will deride India. Go to a railway station, they will deride India. It is the English educated Indian's privilege to deride India. When I was talking to postal employees in the GPO, Chennai (a majority of them were women). I told them the basic facts about the post office. I said it is one of the most efficient postal systems in the world, one of the cheapest in the world, one of the most delivery perfect postal systems in the world. For one rupee, you are able to transport information from one end of the country to the other.
And you have a postman, no where in the world this happens the postman goes to the illiterate mother and reads out the letter, he is asked to sit there and shares a cup of coffee and comes away. Money orders are delivered to the last rupee. It is an amazing system, one of the largest postal systems linking one of the most populous nations, one of the most complicated nations with so many languages.
Somebody writes the address in Tamil and it gets delivered in Patna! It gets delivered to Jawaan at warfront! When I completed my speech many of the women were wiping their tears. I asked why are you crying I have only praised you. They said, "Sir, this is the first time we've been praised, otherwise we've only been abused!"
You know how many people use the railways in India? A million people and that is equivalent to the population of Australia! And we have only abuses for them! Have we any idea of what this country is? India has been compared with Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. You can walk across many of these countries in one night (laughs)! The best politicians, intellectuals, sociologists in India have compared us with them because, we have never understood what we are and unless you do that, you can never relate us with others.
Demonising India: Projecting a negative image.
This enormous intellectual failure, to the extent of being intellectually bankrupt, did not occur overnight, it was no accident. There is a history behind this enormous erosion. And I told you about these mobile citizens, what they have done to us. Every country has problems. There is no country without any problem. Are you aware of what is one of the most pressing problems in America today? It is incurable according to the American sociologists; even American economists have begun to agree with them. American politicians are shaken, one third of the pregnant women are school going children. And mothers mix the anti-pregnancy pill in the food without daughter's knowledge everyday.
But this is not the image of America. The image of America is a technologically advanced country etc. etc. Ours is the only country where the mobile citizens of India have transformed the problems of India into the image of India -its identity is inherently related with its problems.
Go to any country and the same negative stereotype is echoed that India is suffering from poverty and malnutrition. India has no drinking water. Indian women are burnt. If they are married, they are burnt, if they are widows, they are burnt. See the image that has been built about this country. Who did this? The English educated Indian.
And one Kaluraam Meena (have you ever heard of him? Asks the audience to raise their hands if they have), only a small fraction of this large audience has heard of him. When Clinton came to India, he went to a village called Nayla where the villagers interacted with him. And one of the panchayat board members asked him, "Sir, I am told that in the West, all of you believe that this country is a rotten country, a backward country, a poor, hungry country. Do you also think like that?"
Clinton was shaken, because he might have thought that this person might be approaching him for some favour. I will relate my experience when I went to the Carter Centre in 1993. They were talking about dispute resolution and all that. I went there to meet somebody, if not Carter, somebody else at least. His Deputy, a lady, was very hesitant to receive me. "Mr. Gurumurthy", she said, "Mr. Carter is not around, anyway, I can spare seven-eight minutes for you." I said three or four minutes of your time would do. Even before I could start, she said, "Mr.Gurumurthy, we don't have funds, we will not be able to help" (laughter from the audience). I replied, "Let us assume you have a hundred billion dollars, how much will you give me? One billion? One million?" She kept quiet, I said: "I don't need your money. I came here to discuss whether community living is an answer to disputes. I have come to discuss this because you have suggested electoral means to resolve problems in communities which have no damn idea of what an election is; whether community living is an answer because you don't what that means. She sat and discussed this with me for two hours. This is the image we have projected that anybody, who comes from India, comes to beg. Ordinary Indians did not create this impression; educated Indians created it. This is the work of civil servants, NGOs. Christian missionaries during the freedom movement created this. Indians are filthy, rotten, dirty and unhealthy, advertising abroad these are the people who need to be saved. We have to Christianise them, enlighten them, and give us money. I can understand that because it is their business. But what did we do after 1947?
We repeated the same mistakes. We projected India as a country of unending problems. As I said, every country has problems. Only in India, problems become identities. How many dowry deaths take place in India in a year? Yet, India is projected as a country burning its own daughter-in-laws. And we also talk about it. Every damn newspaper will be writing about it. We believe in self-deprecation. And this goes on in the guise of intellectualism in India. And one woman, she attempted to take a film of the widows. I wrote an article, asking her to go to Lijjat Paapad. A widow brought me up. Millions of widows have worked to bring up their children. It is a nation, which believes in Tapasya. You may not believe in it but you are an exception. Compare Deepa Mehta"s attitude with Sarada Maa's who was the wife, who became a widow after Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa's passing away. She went to the very same place where Deepa Mehta went and saw the widows. Sarada Maa said, "These widows are so pure, they are an illustration and an example to me." Deepa Mehta saw them as prostitutes. The widows have already been hurt once. Why are you sprinkling salt on their wounds?
I am very sorry to speak about this, but I have to, this audience is enlightened enough to understand me. Indian women are sexually unsatisfied and so they are becoming lesbians? This is one bloody story against us, about us. This is the image of Indian men and women, and this film is in English. Catherine Mayo wrote a book and Mahatma Gandhi said about it, "I have no time to read this filth. But I am under a compulsion, under pressure because this has been published abroad. The image of India has been rubbished and I have to counter it." With this introduction, he wrote about the book and said that this woman is a gutter inspector (laughs).
The intellectualism in India is gutter inspection- people are of this kind etc. Understand the level of erosion.
Indian Politics: Weaknesses and Pitfalls
Let us look at the post independence scenario from the macro level. We installed a system of governance and it postulated all the important goals for the Indian society and polity, which was gulped by the Indian academia, by the Indian intellectuals. We will have a classless society through socialism. We will have a casteless society through equality. We will have a faithless society through secularism. We will have a modern society devoid of tradition.
Instead of politics restructuring caste, caste has restructured politics today. Political parties are talking only in terms of castes. Has any Indian intellectual come to terms with caste? You must understand caste if you want to handle the Indian society. You cannot say that I want to have a very different kind of society. You have to handle the Indian sentiment, the Indian tradition and Indian beliefs. You can't clone a society of your choice in India. Social engineering has failed everywhere; the masters of social engineering have given up the Communists - whether it is sociologists or economists you have to accept a society as it is. You can only increase the momentum of evolution in the society; you can't forcibly bring about a revolution today. But, Indian leaders and intellectuals, till today, keep abusing caste. They don't know how to handle the caste. Let me narrate to you how a community in Karaikudi handled this issue. The Chettiyar community assembled top businessmen, professionals from all over the world for 3 days to discuss their culinary act, how to construct houses, what languages they use, what old adages and stories their grand parents used to tell, what clothes they used to wear; not one word of politics, mind you. This was not even published in the newspapers. Intellectuals were not even aware of it. So, caste is a very important instrument in India, you may not like it. Unfortunately, every intellectual leads a caste life inside, but outside he is casteless! He is cloning an approach outside. There is no intellectual honesty at all.
And what happened in the case of secularism? In India, any one who is not a Hindu is per se secular. In the year 1947, just 10 years had passed after the Muslim League demanded and got the country partitioned, the leader who voted for the resolution for the partition of India was Quazi Millath Ismail, (who was leading the same Muslim League on the Indian side), the Congress certified that the Muslim League in Kerala is secular and hence it can associate with them. The Muslim League outside Kerala is communal with the same president! Three hundred and fifty crores are spent today for the Haj pilgrims out of the funds of secular India every year. No one can raise an objection. At least I can understand why politicians don't want to do that because they want the Muslim votes. But what about the intelligentsia. What about newspaper editors and journalists? And academicians? None of them speak out. The reason is that we have produced a state dependent intellectualism in India. We don't produce Nakkeerans anymore, our intellectualism is a derivative of the State and the State is a derivative of the polity. And in turn the polity is a derivative of the mind of Macaulay and Marx.
The Indian education system: A Legacy of Macaulay.
This Macaulayian system of education is a poison injected into our system. At least I had the opportunity of schooling in Tamil and hence could withstand the corruption that this English education brings with it. This corruption begins the moment the child steps out of the house. He is told to converse in English at home. This did not happen even in pre-Independence India, even when Macaulay wrote that notorious note sitting in Ooty. How many of you know Macaulay's formulation? Just those two or three sentences at least which form the crux - "We require an education system in India which will produce a class of interpreters, who will be Indian in colour and Englishmen in taste, opinions and morals."
This is the education system, which we have been continuing with, which was earlier conceived to produce clerks for the British Empire. If you have to differ from an English educated person you have to differ only through the English language. If you have to abuse somebody, even that has to be done in English! If you abuse the Anglicised Indian, he will not find fault with the blame but with the grammar in your language! This is the extent to which a foreign language has possessed us. But, we must master English, that is needed, but why do we have to become slaves of the English language? We must use that language as a tool, but why do we consider it as a status symbol? This is the influence of Macaulay.
If you want to understand the Macaulay/Marxist mix in India, you have to go a little back to see how Marxism grew out of the Christian civilisation. I recommend that you read the Nov 27, 1999 edition of the Newsweek, which describes how the Christian idea of the end of time called the "apocalypse", influenced the entire history, art, music, prognosis, sociology, economics, and the entire attitude of the Christian civilisation towards the non-Christian civilizations.
A Christian scholar who describes how Communism grew out of Christianity has written it. In 1624, Anna Baptists, a group of Christians who believed in the basic tenets of Christianity seized power in a particular place, banned private property and use of any book other than the Bible. When Marxism came up later through the exposition of Das Capital, the Marxists began expounding their doctrine as an extension of Christianity.
The thesis, antithesis and synthesis of making Christianity acceptable to the age of enlightenment was the Hegelian way demanded rationalisation of Christianity in the days of the Protestant movement. Hegel began with a disagreement, then started interacting with Christianity and ultimately ended up accepting Christianity. You can see the same phenomenon with Marxist postulates- "capitalism is my enemy, we have to deal with capitalism" and finally "we have to find a synthesis with capitalism".
Marx on India
In fact in the year 1857, Marx wrote about India, " India was a prosperous civilisation. It had a very high standard of living. Their productivity was higher. India was an economic giant." It was so. If you look at the statistics in 1820, India's share of world production was 19%, and England's share was 9%, please note that Britain was deep into the industrial revolution at that time. 18% of the world trade was in Indian hands at that time whereas 8% was the figure for Britain and 1% for US. When 80% of the American population was engaged in agriculture, India had 60% of the population engaged in non-agricultural occupations. This is supposed to be an index of development. All these statistics can be found in Paul S. Kennedy's "Rise and Fall of Great Powers". So, Marx says, "This was a great civilisation which had produced prosperous communities." A prosperity which went deep into the villages. In the early stages, when the East India Company came to Murshidabad, an unknown name in Bengal today the Britishers were awe struck with its prosperity and wrote that it was more prosperous than London. This is no more disputed anyway, even by Indian intellectuals. Marx acknowledges the fact that this was a prosperous country and also had equality but unfortunately, he says for 2000 years the society did not change nor did it allow any revolutionary forces to enter! In his worldview human beings cannot progress without a revolution!
In the two articles on British rule in India and the East India Company- history and results written by Marx, quoted in the New York daily "Karl Marx does grant though somewhat in a grudging manner that "materially, India was fairly industrious and prosperous even before the onset of the British rule. He said that India was an exporting country till 1830 and started importing because it had opened its trade to the British." Many of you may not be aware that the kings in India had no right to over the lands, which came under the jurisdiction of panchayats. Whether it was Emperor Ashoka or Bhagavan Sri Ramachandra, the rule was the same. It was changed only during the British rule under the Ryotwari system. Even the Mughals could not change it. It was also found that family communities were based on domestic industry, with the peculiar combination of hand-spinning, hand- weaving, agriculture etc. which gave them a supporting power.
The misery inflicted by the British on Hindusthan is of an entirely different kind and infinitely more intense than what it had to suffer before civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines all these did not go deeper than the surface. But, England broke the entire framework of Hindusthan, the symptoms of reconstitution are yet to emerge clearly. This loss of the Old World without the emergence of a new order imparts a particular melancholy to the present misery of Hindus and Hindusthan. Marx goes on to say that the British interference destroyed the union between agriculture and the manufacturing industry. Suddenly he remarks that the English interference dissolved this semi barbarian, semi-civilised community.
He concedes that they were prosperous, that they organised their affairs well, they have a measure of independence, they have a democracy at the lowest level, all this has been conceded. Then, how does he classify us as "semi-barbarian and semi-civilised communities"? He notes that India's social condition remained unaltered since remote antiquity. This is important, for him revolution is the core, the soul and centre of the society. This society never had a revolution; hence it cannot be modern! There is an underlying assumption, which considers revolution as a pre- requisite for being modern. Hence, he feels that the destruction wrought by the British is the inevitable revolution needed for the development of the Indian society. England had vested interests, violent interests in bringing about this "revolution". But, the question in focus is whether mankind can fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state? Whatever might have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about a revolution, whatever bitterness the spectacle of crumbling of an ancient world may evoke, from the point of history, we have to exclaim - should this torture torment us?
Since it brings us great pleasure, were not the rule of Taimur, souls delivered without measure? It is a creative destruction in the cause of revolution according to him. If you see Indian Communism which was expounded by a man called Rajane Palme Dutt. Has anyone heard of his name? (Two persons from the audience raised their hands). Two. He was born of a white woman and an Indian father in England. He was in charge of Indian Communism for 25 years. He never came to India though. In his book, "India Today", he laid down the framework, the policy for Indian Communists, what must be done, what is the kind of revolution needed in India, the development model etc. In those days, even good photographs of India were not available, yet this man spoke about India sitting in London. He came to India for the first time in 1946, ten years after he wrote this book and realised that he had to revise it. He stayed for 30 days! A visitor to India was the father of Indian Communism! And from that day till date, the Indian Communist has never been with India. Not only that, they took over the Indian mind in the post- independence period. It is these Marxist/Macaulayist intellectuals who will certify whether somebody is modern or traditional, backward or secular or communal, progressive or regressive. They were running an Open Air University issuing certificates every day through the press. They have branded me as a communal man.
Labels: Tools for stultifying important debates
Labels substituted debate in India. Simply a label - communal, that is enough. Four or five editorials will appear preaching that Gurumurthy is communal and the matter must end there. No one would even discuss what communalism is! Religious fundamentalism, RSS/Bajrang Dal fundamentalism! Anyone, who exposes the Hindu cause in India is a fundamentalist! We have seen this term being used so casually and superfluously and incessantly by politicians and newspapers. Has anyone bothered to understand the meaning of religious fundamentalism going beyond these slogans?
Secularism is an intra-Christian phenomenon. It has no application outside Christianity at all. Secularism resolved the fight between two powerful persons, the King and the Archbishop who were loyal to the same faith, to the same prophet, to the same book and to the same Church. It is not a multi-religious virtue.
A multi-religious idea, a multi-religious living, a multi-religious culture, a multi-religious fabric or a multi-religious structure was unknown outside India. There was usually only one faith and no place for any other, not even for a variation of the same faith. Fifty six thousand Bahais were butchered in one hour in Tehran! They believed in the same Koran, in the same Muhammad, the only difference was that they said that Muhammad might come in another form again. That was their only fault and they were all butchered.
But we have no such problem. We can play with God, we can abuse God, and we can beat God!
If I say that monotheistic religions have had a violent history, and the reply will be "you are communal." But this is exactly the same conclusion that a study in Chicago revealed, probably, the only study on fundamentalism conducted by anybody so far. This fundamentalism project brought out five volumes each volume about eight hundred to nine hundred pages. The conclusion they have reached is that, "Fundamentalism is a virtue of Abrahamic religions. It is not applicable to eastern faiths at all.
What about the Indian intellectuals? Day in and day out, they keep abusing us as fundamentalists, communalists, that we are anti-secular and it is being gulped down by everyone including those from the IITs and IIMs, lawyers and police officials, journalists and politicians. Look at this intellectual bankruptcy.
An inner revolution: The much needed change
We need a mental revolution, an inner revolution; we need to get rooted in our own soul. There is a missing element in India today and it is this. That element has to be restored otherwise Indian intellectualism will only be a carbon copy of Western intellectualism. We are borrowing not only their language and idiom but also we trying to copy the very soul of the West.
So, all that we need to do is (it is impossible to share the entire depth of the subject in one evening's lecture programme. I have only tried out point out in an incoherent way, how a completely fresh mindset has to be evolved. And unless it evolves, the Indian mind, which leads India, will be in a perpetual state of confusion ordinary people are perfectly all right.
Consider for example how thirty years before there was a question whether Tamil Nadu will be a part of India or not. The Dravidian parties have taken over the mind of Tamil Nadu. It had virtually ceased to be a part of India. And their attack was aimed at Hinduism. The moment you attack Hinduism you attack India. This is a fact. Neither politicians nor intellectuals nor academicians realised this. But, the ordinary people did. Just three religious movements- the Ayyappa movement, the Kavadi movement and the Melmaruvatthur Adi Para Sakti movement- have finished the Dravidian ideology to a very great extent. It is only the outer shell of Dravidianism that remains today. Tamil Nadu has been brought back successfully by Ayyappa, Muruga and Para Sakti, not by the Congress or the BJP or any other political party.
How many people have intellectually assessed the depth and the reach, the deep influence of religion over the people? A paradigm shift in a study of India would be an intellectual approach to this subject. Or consider for example its influence on economics. Many of you by now would have studied economics in some detail. Take a look at the society in India and compare the figures for public expenditure for private purposes, which is called the social security system in the West. 30% of the GDP in America is spent for social security, 48% in England, 49% in France, 56% in Germany and 67% in Sweden. This private expenditure is nothing but what you and I do by taking care of parents, our wives and children, brothers and sisters and grandparents, widowed sisters and distant relatives. This expenditure is met by the society in India. And there is no law in India that people should do this. We consider it as our dharma. A person went to a court and demanded a divorce from his father and mother. The American court granted it saying that the only relationship that exists between two persons of America is their citizenship. The law in America recognises no other relationship ... In the year 1978, an interesting incident occurred in Manhattan. There was a power failure for six hours. Manhattan is in the heart of New York where you find the UN building, the World Trade Centre and the head quarters of many multinational companies. One third of the world's health is concentrated in Manhattan. Within six hours, hundreds of people were killed, robbed and assaulted. We don't need electricity to behave in a civilised manner. How many intellectuals in India have ever articulated from such a sympathetic approach? We have only tarnished the image of this country. We must be ashamed of this.
Conclusion
I shall conclude my speech with this example. When Sri Aurobindo came to Pondicherry in search of a new light. He used to get five rupees from a friend and four persons used to live on this. A cup of tea was one of the luxuries they used to have everyday in the morning, on the Pondicherry beach.
Sri Aurobindo used to always look at a mystic called Kullachamy (Subramanya Bharati has written a poem about him). He used to behave like a madman, wandering here and there, throwing stones ... One, day he came near Sri Aurobindo, lifted his cup of tea and emptied it in front of him. Then he showed the empty cup to him, placed it on the table and went away. Sri Aurobindo's friends were angry and wanted to chase him. Sri Aurobindo stopped them and said, "This is the kind of instruction I had been expecting from him. He wants me to empty my mind and start thinking afresh."
That is my appeal to you.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Appeasement is never good for a nation
Lalit Koul | 06 August 2008
Lalit Koul is the President, Indo-American Kashmir Forum, a US-based advocacy group. He can be reached at editor@kashmirherald.com
10,000 forest trees are chopped down to build the Mughal road in Kashmir. No one makes a noise.
Acres of land in the Kashmir valley are given to install mobile phone towers. No one screams.
Acres and acres of land in the Kashmir valley are allotted to lay sewage and drinking water pipes. No one objects.
But when 40 hectares of uninhabitable land is handed over to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board to provide better facilities to the Amarnath Yatra [Images] pilgrims, all hell breaks loose.
Why? Because the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board caters to Hindu pilgrims who want to visit the Amarnath shrine in the valley of Kashmir. It is as simple as that.
Politically correct politicians, policy-makers and administrators might try to tell you that it is not about religion, but the fact of the matter is that it is all about religion. It is a design by communal forces within the valley to completely Islamicise the valley by removing every symbol of Hinduism and other faiths from the valley.
Today, these communal forces are preventing the setting up of facilities for the yatra, tomorrow they will even go to the extent of banning the yatra altogether.
The land transfer fiasco has already consumed the Ghulam [Images] Nabi Azad-led Congress government and is on its way to now adversely damage the state's economy. The fear psychosis has already resulted in a sharp decline of tourists to the valley. Counter-strikes and bandhs announced by the pro-land-transfer parties within the Jammu province have paralysed the life in that part of the state as well.
So far it has been a win-lose situation in favour of communal forces in the valley.
Let us take a hard look at the arguments presented by the locals who opposed the transfer of land:
1. The allotment would have adversely affected the environment around the area. One wonders where these tree-hugging environmentalists were when the same government allowed the felling of 10,000 forest trees to build the 89 km-long Mughal road.
40 hectares of land that was going to be used to provide temporary shelters and night-time facilities to pilgrims was in fact going to help in proper maintenance of the current day waste that actually pollutes the environment. But who can argue with senseless politicians who instigate people to come out on the streets?
2. The allotment is the government's ploy to settle Hindus from outside the state to change the demographics of the valley. Look, who is talking! One has to only go back 18 years in the history and check who changed the demographics of the valley.
Islamic terrorists changed the demographics of the valley by ethnically cleansing Kashmiri Hindus from the valley. I wonder where these we-do-not-want-to-change-demographics-folks were when Kashmiri Hindus were slaughtered and the valley's demographics were altered.
One would like to ask a few questions: a. Is 40 hectares of land enough to settle so many Hindus that it would change the demographics of the valley?
b. By putting this argument of demographic change, are the valley's Muslims implying that Hindus are not welcome in the valley anymore? And I do not mean the Hindus from outside Kashmir. I mean the Hindus from the state of Jammu & Kashmir itself.
What if the Hindus, who hold the state subject certificate of J&K state and are legally allowed to purchase land in any part of the state want to purchase land in the area around the Holy Amarnath? Are the valley's Muslims saying that those Hindus cannot buy the land there and settle down? Is that what they are implying? Are they trying to protect the environment by preventing the Hindus from settling in the valley?
Another argument Kashmiri Muslims present is that the land cannot be allotted to the Shrine Board because Article 370 does not allow anyone outside of J&K to own land. Their argument is that since the J&K governor is the chairman of the board and he is an outsider, this transfer of land is illegal.
How dumb does one have to be to understand that the land is transferred to the Shrine Board which is an institution based in the state of J&K and created by the J&K government. The land is not transferred to the chairman or the CEO of the board per se.
Having touched upon the outlandish arguments of those who oppose the allotment of land, let us look at some facts and the real story:
It was during the first three years of the Mufti Mohammad Sayeed-Ghulam Nabi Azad coalition government that the original proposal of land transfer was initiated and cleared. It was under Mufti Sayeed's leadership that his forest minister Qazi Mohammad Afzal and law minister Muzzafar Hussain Baig originally cleared the proposal. It just so happened that due to red tape, the proposal was finally approved by the cabinet when Azad had taken over as chief minister during the second three-year part of the six-year term.
The same PDP led by Mufti Sayeed was originally okay with this proposal. But as soon as the PDP smelt that terrorist outfits like the Hizbul Mujahideen [Images] were not in favour of the allotment of land and realised that it could become a polarising issue to whip up sentiments to garner votes in the upcoming assembly election, it backtracked.
Since it is an election year, the National Conference and other smaller political parties would not let the PDP cash in on this opportunity alone. They jumped into the fray and whipped up sentiments by fooling the local Kashmiri Muslims. And that leaves the Congress. How could the Congress not try to cash in on this polarising issue in an election year?
Azad did not waste any time and revoked his cabinet's decision to appease the Kashmiri Muslim vote bank. He did not just stop there. In addition to revoking his own order, he also effectively disbanded the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board. Now that is some level of appeasement! That is the real story behind the story.
It is an issue created by Mufti Sayeed to polarise the vote banks. It is his design of playing politics with the religious sentiments of lakhs of Hindus from all over the country.
Now that we know the real story behind the story, how about the Hindu pilgrims who want to visit the shrine and what about their fundamental rights to practice their religion with complete security, dignity and honour?
Isn't it a shame that Hindus living in India, where 80 per cent of population is Hindu, cannot freely visit the shrine and expect better facilities? It is only in India that the majority community has to make all the sacrifices in favour of minorities because our politicians believe in appeasing Muslims at the cost of Hindus.
National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on a television debate on this issue asked why there is a need for land and new facilities when the pilgrimage has been going on for many years.
Does Omar Abdullah mean to say that there is no need to improve the facilities provided during the treacherous pilgrimage? Is he implying that if the yatris were okay for so many hundred years, then why change and improve the facilities?
I have never heard him say such things with regards to the Haj pilgrimage. Every year Muslims from Kashmir and the rest of the country want better facilities and subsidies for Haj pilgrims. But when it comes to providing better facilities to Shri Amarnath pilgrims, it becomes a sore point for Kashmiri Muslims and their leaders.
Heavy rains, snowstorms, landslides and hostile environment took away 256 lives during the yatra in 1996. And Omar Abdullah has the audacity to promote the status quo!
Some of you might argue that it was not the valley's Muslims, but the political parties and terrorists who opposed the land transfer order and forced people to come out on the streets.
I can buy that argument, but that does not absolve the valley's people from their responsibility? They cannot always support these fundamentalist forces and then at the same time claim innocence.
They did the same in 1989 and in the early 1990s when they either stood as mute spectators or as vocal supporters while Kashmiri Hindus were ethnically cleansed. As a good citizen, it is incumbent upon them to raise their voice against these dreaded forces and stop this madness.
If they sincerely believe in peace, then they need to stand up and reject these terrorist outfits and their masters. Conversely, if they don't, then they are as much party to the madness as the principals and thus need to be held accountable.
Appeasement policies are never good for a nation, particularly for a nation like India that is so diverse in ethnicity and culture. Whether it is amending the Constitution during the Shah Bano case, releasing terrorists during the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping case, freeing dreaded terrorists during the IC-814 hijacking or continuing the temporary Constitutional provision of Article 370, all such policies will one day result in the nation's doom.
It is incumbent upon the leaders of the nation as well as the citizenry to be on guard and not allow such appeasement policies to take effect in a nation that is based on the concept of secularism, democracy and fairness to one and all.
Lalit Koul is the President, Indo-American Kashmir Forum, a US-based advocacy group. He can be reached at editor@kashmirherald.com
10,000 forest trees are chopped down to build the Mughal road in Kashmir. No one makes a noise.
Acres of land in the Kashmir valley are given to install mobile phone towers. No one screams.
Acres and acres of land in the Kashmir valley are allotted to lay sewage and drinking water pipes. No one objects.
But when 40 hectares of uninhabitable land is handed over to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board to provide better facilities to the Amarnath Yatra [Images] pilgrims, all hell breaks loose.
Why? Because the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board caters to Hindu pilgrims who want to visit the Amarnath shrine in the valley of Kashmir. It is as simple as that.
Politically correct politicians, policy-makers and administrators might try to tell you that it is not about religion, but the fact of the matter is that it is all about religion. It is a design by communal forces within the valley to completely Islamicise the valley by removing every symbol of Hinduism and other faiths from the valley.
Today, these communal forces are preventing the setting up of facilities for the yatra, tomorrow they will even go to the extent of banning the yatra altogether.
The land transfer fiasco has already consumed the Ghulam [Images] Nabi Azad-led Congress government and is on its way to now adversely damage the state's economy. The fear psychosis has already resulted in a sharp decline of tourists to the valley. Counter-strikes and bandhs announced by the pro-land-transfer parties within the Jammu province have paralysed the life in that part of the state as well.
So far it has been a win-lose situation in favour of communal forces in the valley.
Let us take a hard look at the arguments presented by the locals who opposed the transfer of land:
1. The allotment would have adversely affected the environment around the area. One wonders where these tree-hugging environmentalists were when the same government allowed the felling of 10,000 forest trees to build the 89 km-long Mughal road.
40 hectares of land that was going to be used to provide temporary shelters and night-time facilities to pilgrims was in fact going to help in proper maintenance of the current day waste that actually pollutes the environment. But who can argue with senseless politicians who instigate people to come out on the streets?
2. The allotment is the government's ploy to settle Hindus from outside the state to change the demographics of the valley. Look, who is talking! One has to only go back 18 years in the history and check who changed the demographics of the valley.
Islamic terrorists changed the demographics of the valley by ethnically cleansing Kashmiri Hindus from the valley. I wonder where these we-do-not-want-to-change-demographics-folks were when Kashmiri Hindus were slaughtered and the valley's demographics were altered.
One would like to ask a few questions: a. Is 40 hectares of land enough to settle so many Hindus that it would change the demographics of the valley?
b. By putting this argument of demographic change, are the valley's Muslims implying that Hindus are not welcome in the valley anymore? And I do not mean the Hindus from outside Kashmir. I mean the Hindus from the state of Jammu & Kashmir itself.
What if the Hindus, who hold the state subject certificate of J&K state and are legally allowed to purchase land in any part of the state want to purchase land in the area around the Holy Amarnath? Are the valley's Muslims saying that those Hindus cannot buy the land there and settle down? Is that what they are implying? Are they trying to protect the environment by preventing the Hindus from settling in the valley?
Another argument Kashmiri Muslims present is that the land cannot be allotted to the Shrine Board because Article 370 does not allow anyone outside of J&K to own land. Their argument is that since the J&K governor is the chairman of the board and he is an outsider, this transfer of land is illegal.
How dumb does one have to be to understand that the land is transferred to the Shrine Board which is an institution based in the state of J&K and created by the J&K government. The land is not transferred to the chairman or the CEO of the board per se.
Having touched upon the outlandish arguments of those who oppose the allotment of land, let us look at some facts and the real story:
It was during the first three years of the Mufti Mohammad Sayeed-Ghulam Nabi Azad coalition government that the original proposal of land transfer was initiated and cleared. It was under Mufti Sayeed's leadership that his forest minister Qazi Mohammad Afzal and law minister Muzzafar Hussain Baig originally cleared the proposal. It just so happened that due to red tape, the proposal was finally approved by the cabinet when Azad had taken over as chief minister during the second three-year part of the six-year term.
The same PDP led by Mufti Sayeed was originally okay with this proposal. But as soon as the PDP smelt that terrorist outfits like the Hizbul Mujahideen [Images] were not in favour of the allotment of land and realised that it could become a polarising issue to whip up sentiments to garner votes in the upcoming assembly election, it backtracked.
Since it is an election year, the National Conference and other smaller political parties would not let the PDP cash in on this opportunity alone. They jumped into the fray and whipped up sentiments by fooling the local Kashmiri Muslims. And that leaves the Congress. How could the Congress not try to cash in on this polarising issue in an election year?
Azad did not waste any time and revoked his cabinet's decision to appease the Kashmiri Muslim vote bank. He did not just stop there. In addition to revoking his own order, he also effectively disbanded the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board. Now that is some level of appeasement! That is the real story behind the story.
It is an issue created by Mufti Sayeed to polarise the vote banks. It is his design of playing politics with the religious sentiments of lakhs of Hindus from all over the country.
Now that we know the real story behind the story, how about the Hindu pilgrims who want to visit the shrine and what about their fundamental rights to practice their religion with complete security, dignity and honour?
Isn't it a shame that Hindus living in India, where 80 per cent of population is Hindu, cannot freely visit the shrine and expect better facilities? It is only in India that the majority community has to make all the sacrifices in favour of minorities because our politicians believe in appeasing Muslims at the cost of Hindus.
National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on a television debate on this issue asked why there is a need for land and new facilities when the pilgrimage has been going on for many years.
Does Omar Abdullah mean to say that there is no need to improve the facilities provided during the treacherous pilgrimage? Is he implying that if the yatris were okay for so many hundred years, then why change and improve the facilities?
I have never heard him say such things with regards to the Haj pilgrimage. Every year Muslims from Kashmir and the rest of the country want better facilities and subsidies for Haj pilgrims. But when it comes to providing better facilities to Shri Amarnath pilgrims, it becomes a sore point for Kashmiri Muslims and their leaders.
Heavy rains, snowstorms, landslides and hostile environment took away 256 lives during the yatra in 1996. And Omar Abdullah has the audacity to promote the status quo!
Some of you might argue that it was not the valley's Muslims, but the political parties and terrorists who opposed the land transfer order and forced people to come out on the streets.
I can buy that argument, but that does not absolve the valley's people from their responsibility? They cannot always support these fundamentalist forces and then at the same time claim innocence.
They did the same in 1989 and in the early 1990s when they either stood as mute spectators or as vocal supporters while Kashmiri Hindus were ethnically cleansed. As a good citizen, it is incumbent upon them to raise their voice against these dreaded forces and stop this madness.
If they sincerely believe in peace, then they need to stand up and reject these terrorist outfits and their masters. Conversely, if they don't, then they are as much party to the madness as the principals and thus need to be held accountable.
Appeasement policies are never good for a nation, particularly for a nation like India that is so diverse in ethnicity and culture. Whether it is amending the Constitution during the Shah Bano case, releasing terrorists during the Rubaiya Sayeed kidnapping case, freeing dreaded terrorists during the IC-814 hijacking or continuing the temporary Constitutional provision of Article 370, all such policies will one day result in the nation's doom.
It is incumbent upon the leaders of the nation as well as the citizenry to be on guard and not allow such appeasement policies to take effect in a nation that is based on the concept of secularism, democracy and fairness to one and all.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Internal insecurity
Shekhar Gupta | Indian Express | 02 August 2008
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/343687._.html
For nearly five years now the world media had been celebrating India's rise. From the state of its stock market to its demographic advantage, from the strength and depth of its democracy to the vast reservoir of talent that flourished in its diversity, it was as if the world could see nothing wrong with India. There are now signs that some of that is changing.
And no, it is not just because of those thousand-rupee bundles displayed in the Lok Sabha. It is because of something much more serious, in fact a failure so serious it could, by itself, lose the UPA the next election. These four and half years are the worst in India's history of fighting terrorism. Surely somebody in the UPA will bring out statistics to show that overall deaths were more in some other regime's five years. But this is not just about numbers. It is a spectacular four and a half years of mayhem when not one terrorist has been caught, not one major case solved. Even by the modest standards that Shivraj Patil's home ministry may have set for itself, this is a spectacularly disastrous record.
The world press, if anything, has been late in catching this. Last week, Somini Sengupta of The New York Times quoted a stunning fact from a report of the Washington-based National Counter-Terrorism Centre. It said, between January 2004 and March 2007, India had lost 3,674 lives to terrorism, second only to Iraq. And we can't even claim that this is happening because some imperialist occupation army is running amok here. In fact that number, by now, must have crossed 5,000. If this notion spreads globally, it would do more to damage India's image as an oasis of democratic stability, pacifism and economic growth than any twists in its politics, or even a half-decade reform holiday.
So far the UPA government has had one standard response: compare this with the record under the NDA: Kandahar hijack, Parliament attack, Akshardham. But there is a short use-by date on these arguments. You cannot take them into your next election campaign. Soon enough, the memory of those incidents would have faded, been replaced by new ones: Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kabul, Mumbai trains, Samjhauta Express and so on. And then the unchecked Naxalite attacks.
Most amazing is the sense of cool with which this government, particularly its home ministry, has responded to these losses. While they can pretend that Naxalite strikes are some sinister happenings in places that are out of sight, out of mind, somebody — most likely the voter — will soon remind them that, while those managing internal security may not care for the lives of policemen in faraway states, never in the history of insurgencies have we suffered casualties like these. In fact, if you go over our five-decade history of insurgencies, the 38 lives lost in the Naxalite attack on the police boat were perhaps the second-largest loss of life by security forces in a day in internal security operations after only the army's casualties on the night of Operation Bluestar. It is rare for security forces to suffer double-digit casualties in insurgencies. Even during the Kargil conflict it was a rare day's fighting on which the army lost so many lives, against an entrenched foreign army. The two most striking things here have been the equanimity — frankly, cynical and sometimes sanctimonious indifference — with which this security establishment has treated it.
The talk of Naxalism in a week when two of our most important cities saw serial-bombings and a third had 23 unexploded bombs recovered, is not a digression. It underlines the unmoving, thick-skinned, incompetent and pusillanimous response to terror from this government. What is worse, it is even politically loaded. And while, ultimately, the UPA may be made to pay for it electorally, too many lives are being lost meanwhile, and too much damage is being done to India's image. The government cannot ride out an entire five years claiming that their predecessors' record was worse.
Soon enough people will also start reminding them that the NDA's six years coincided with a state of near-war with Pakistan, when ISI support to terror in India was unabashed and comprehensive and when an active proxy war was on in Kashmir. It is the four years of relative peace with Pakistan that make the UPA's failure even more striking.
Over the past year or so we have all got focussed on what we saw as the communalisation of our foreign policy: don't vote against Iran at the IAEA because our own Shias would get upset, don't sign the nuclear deal with Bush as that will irritate all our own Muslims, conduct your relations with Israel by stealth for the same reason, even stop the two missile development projects with them, no matter how badly your armies may need them. Last week we saw the prime minister fight back on this, and successfully too. But can he do the same with internal security?
The odds are steeper because that issue was communalised first. It began with the last election campaign and the composition of this alliance. There may have been a sound case against POTA because it was misused, but both in public discourse and political action its repeal was made to look like a favour to the Muslims. Then, the same "communalised" politics interfered in police investigations following the serial blasts in Mumbai trains and Hyderabad. Ask senior police officers there — even Congress chief ministers if they'd dare to speak the truth — and they will tell you how they pulled away in fright, under pressure from the Centre for targeting and upsetting Muslims (voters) in their investigations. This proceeded neatly alongside the utterly communalised discourse on the Afzal Guru hanging issue. Each time this government and its intellectual storm-troopers proffered the minority argument in support of this soft policy, it emboldened the terrorists. They figured they were dealing with a political leadership which had already committed a self-goal by equating counter-terror with Muslim alienation and which had, in the process, totally demoralised its intelligence agencies and police forces. And if it is not guilty of communalising our internal security policy, how does it explain sitting on special anti-terror laws in all BJP-run states when exactly similar ones have been passed for the Congress states? Now you can say special laws are good or bad, but they must be equally so for all citizens in all states. If these laws are good, or necessary, then citizens in BJP-run states have as much need — and right — to get their protection as those in the Congress states. Unless the message is: you want protection, you better vote for us. You vote for others, you are on your own.
It is not going to work. It is morally wrong and politically suicidal. Protecting the citizens' life is the first responsibility of any government. Surely no government can ensure no terror attack would ever happen. But it has to be seen to be trying, fighting, and being even-handed. This government fails on all three counts so far, no matter how nicely ironed its chief-spokesman's bandh-galas, how neatly combed his hair. If the prime minister does not fix this in time, his party will be asked really tough questions in the next election.
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