When a news agency like Tehelka uses “Free.Fair” in its description of itself, I cannot but help myself to a wry smile since Fox TV, a barely disguised propaganda machine for the Republican Party in the US, also calls itself “Fair and Balanced”. And we all know what a joke that it is.
Recently, Tehelka, whose political leanings are no secret, did yet another sting operation with the aim being to expose the “hopelessly one-sided perpetration of violence on hapless Muslims” in India in general and Gujarat in particular— noble aims that we know are the holy grail of people who want to portray “genocide of Muslims” as India’s favorite national sport.
Once you move past the self-generated hyperbole of the “most important investigation of our time” and the “one of the finest in the history of Indian journalism” of Tehelka’s editors and actually wade through the text, you have to ask yourself—“What is so path-breakingly new here?Sure there is some new information, some faces behind the names but what is it about this sting operation that is…well so….unprecedented?”
Let’s take a minute or two to try to answer that.
For starters there is the investigation into what happened at Godhra—that being the flashpoint that started the conflagration. In 2002, just after the Gujarat riots Shabnam Hashmi of Sahmat came to my university in Long Island, New York to educate Americans on the plight of Muslims in India with the focus being on the recent Gujarat riots. One of the claims she made, with the help of something she called evidence, was that it was the Sangh Parivaar which started the Godhra fire themselves: a fact that she brought home to the audience by repeating “Reichstag fire” a couple of hundred times to make the “obvious” association (other ways she made associations was using a succession of images—one of Hitler and then one of Advani, one of Nazi stormtroopers and then one of RSS men parading in shorts and lathis). I was hoping when I read the headline “Godhra–the Diabolic Lie” in Tehelka that I would ultimately be told, with proof, that 9/11 was a controlled explosion.
Sorry wrong conspiracy.
Anyhow, even here the good people at Tehelka come up with a proof of a much weaker proposition than Ms. Hashmi’s: that watered-down version of events being that that the Godhra riots were caused by a disorganized band of Muslim hawkers and not caused by the Muslim political leadership as the Gujarat government claim (Mob fury, not terror). As an aside, it is interesting how the people at Tehelka label communal violence by Muslims (read the para below where an army man is asked for his religion and then attacked to convince yourself that this is not an out-of-control mob beating the shit out of everyone in sight but selectively attacking members of a certain religion) as “mob fury” and that done by Hindus as “terror”.
The boys were shouting, “Maaro… maaro.” I told the boys I was an army man. They asked for proof. I pulled out my warrant from my pocket. One boy, after seeing my warrant,told the others I was an army man and nobody should beat me. The other boys then asked for my name. The said boy read out my name, upon which the other boys said I was a Hindu and one of them hit me with an iron rod on my head. My head started bleeding and I felt dizzy.
But let’s move on.
The supporting train of logic, though compelling, still requires the acceptance of certain axioms: 1) people make statements implicating their own people under torture and under fear but then when they withdraw their testimony in the same communal atmosphere, the fear of retaliation that prompted them to make those supposedly coerced statements has vanished mysteriously, 2) Kar Sevaks give coached, identical statements that contradict each other and 3) that there are some petrol-pump employees, who even 5 years after the riots, still live under “constant police vigil“.
Now, we come to the second claim: that being that they have unmasked the Gujarat butchers and the master butcher— Narendra Modi. In support of this claim is video evidence—footage of certain riot-masters proudly declaring their roles in the massacre, touching upon the police inaction all around and claiming they had the blessings of Narendra Modi for their supposedly noble deeds. No where do they say that Modi actually planned the riots or roamed the streets saying “Faster Pussycat Kill Kill” like two Congressi gentlemen, never punished, who were seen by many to have done precisely that during the 84 Sikh riots. [If they had said that Modi was indeed doing an HKL Bhagat, then yes that would be a sensational sting.]
If we are to accept the truth of their statements (which we have no reason not to) two things are proven—-1) these bastards deserve a painful death 2) Modi provided moral support to the rioters and expressed happiness at what they had done.
At the cost of repeating myself, did we learn anything new here?
Let me explain.
By and large, there are two kind of people who are reading the Tehelka report.
One class of people are Modi’s supporters. None of them will ever claim that Modi was an innocent man who tried his best to protect Muslims after Godhra. Instead they will say that they love Modi precisely because he did not and by withdrawing state support for Muslims “taught those people a lesson /restored Gujarati pride”. For these people this report does nothing —except that it may remind them of Modi’s Hindutva credentials once again, in case they forgot in the shadow of Om Shanti Om’s impending release.
The other class are people (and I am among those) who oppose him. We have never been in doubt of Modi’s tacit support for rioters, the BJP administration’s protection of murders and rapists (the evidence from multiple agencies in 2002 itself is too pervasive to believe anything else) and we have always considered the fact that Modi was never put on trial for motivated criminal negligence is a blot on the Indian political system.
The thing is that for both these kinds of people, there is very little in the expose that they did not know already. Which is why I am surprised at all the hype and hoopla in the MSM and in the blogosphere about it’s earth-shaking significance. [Remember that this evidence is not admissible in a court of law because of which one cannot even say that these “confessions” will put people behind bars]
When Kapil Dev was unmasked as the mastermind behind the betting operations in a similar sting, yes that was *new* information. When Shakti Kapoor was revealed to be a lecherous casting couchsurfer, was anyone really surprised?
So what then is the significance of the sting operation? First and foremost, it is a political instrument created to polarize opinion in pre-election Gujarat by bringing to the front-burner an issue that no-one can remain neutral about. Secondly it is an expression of the political biases of the news organization concerned which in turn serves as fodder for a larger body of self-flagellators who, looking at foreign shores, play the “minorities-under-attack in India” card. ( As an aside, one of Tehelka’s pet issues is Brahminical dominance of lower castes. However in Gujarat when lower caste Hindus were often the perpetrators of violence, the idealogues at Tehelka were faced with a conundrum of sympathy. They solve the riddle with a “saffron organizations used lower caste Hindus for carrying out anti-Muslim attacks” putting the blame on their hated constituency for “using” the lower castes as if they had no minds of their own.)
If Tarun Tejpal was reading this and if I had any influence, he would be calling a press conference once again saying “Do not shoot the messenger” and running it on the Tehelka ticker and making some more news. The problem, dear Mr.Tejpal, is that the messenger, in this particular case, is so obviously guided by a certain ideology (despite claiming to be neutral) and so desirous of creating sensation and self-serving hot air at certain sensitive times using a hot-button issue that can cost lives if sufficiently stirred up, that it becomes a little difficult to not ascribe motives or not find agendas.
Which brings us to the message.
Not that it needed a sting operation to be relevant, but Narendra Modi and his being a factor in the political landscape of 2007 is a matter of grave concern for right-thinking Indian citizens. That a Chief Minister, who abdicated his responsibility of protecting all citizens and facilitated the creation of an environment of communal violence, is still not behind bars sharing a jail cell with his disciples is a failure of Indian civil society to dispense justice. It infuriates me to hear Modi apologists talk about his sterling powers of administration and his supposedly clean image as a justification for being a mass murderer. Just as it sends smoke through my ears when I encounter campaigns of propaganda that repeat ad-nauseum the canard that minorities are the victims of “one-sided violence” in India , in the process totally denying the regular terrorist violence unleashed on the country by Islamic Jihadists.
However by letting Modi and his associates walk free and not making them answer for their crimes, the silent majority that just wants to get along with their lives have allowed the motivated few to paint all of us with the same Nazi/saffron colors.If we ask moderate Muslims to distance themselves from radical Islamists, then it is contingent on us to clearly denounce, with one voice, the politics of hate that Modi espouses.
But we have not done that.
By not dealing a stinging blow” to the Gujarat butchers, we have ourselves contributed to keeping open a festering wound that, over the years, has been cynically exploited by scumbags from both sides—to create fear, to get votes, to stir up trouble and even to justify further terrorist attacks from Jihadists as an expression of anguish against the miscarriage of justice in Gujarat.
In concluding, what makes any discussion of Gujarat so painful is that there are no “heroes” anywhere— at one end you have a bunch of killers who consider themselves as modern day Rana Prataps and at the other you have a group of publicity-hounding opportunists (who also would like you to believe that they are selfless crusaders) seeking to gain political and often pecuniary advantage (the so-called “shocked and anguished Indians” who were touring the US right after the Gujarat massacres promoting “peace and nonviolence” in front of “focus groups” and “Congressional committees” were certainly doing that) out of a man-made tragedy.
The Greatbong Blog & Podcast 
The only thing important with this “sting” is the timing. Another hapless attempt by the CONgress to get Modi out of power. Not that Modi is any bettre. Same shit new day for politics!!
Whatever happened, it has left the dirtiest scars on the face of India. What is more shocking that many opportunists are trying to make the most of these gory incidents by playing their cards –the way they want. The only solution to stop this intolerable nuisance or so called violence is to take some strict action against all those who have done this. Though, if we go by Indian court system…there is a little hope, but their fate would definitely be decided by the common man. And, people of this great country should understand that they are not mere pawns, which can be used by anyone. It will take time, but India is all set to become a mature country, which can not be befooled by a bunch of fantics, opportunists, or bloody manipulators.
Another well written article. I agree with you wholeheartedly on principle; but even though Tehelka displays an obvious bias – the facts in this case are plain for all to see. Yes, their timing is highly suspect. Yes, their patrons and obvious backers are highly suspect. Yes, their one-dimensional attack on Modi and the Sangh Parivaar in general is suspect. But, in this case – if what they have presented is true (and as you said, there is no reason to believe otherwise), even if its cleverly edited to sensationalize – it does not take anything away from the underlying truth. I have to give a nod of approval to Tehelka (albeit reluctantly), for doing this. Because unless these facts are brought back up again and again, and sensationalized, murderers such as Modi will continue to occupy the throne and sweep their horrific sins under the rug. I am appalled at how quiet this issue has been over the past 5 years. In a country where news media and people are increasingly attracted more towards Shahrukh Khan’s newly built six-pack than mass murders, a constant barrage of sensationalism may be the only way to keep the spotlight on important issues – I only wish it were done for reporting th truth and upholding the high ideals of independent journalism, but I guess that’s too much to ask.
Until the moderate Muslims begin to strongly condemn and distance themselves from the radicalists, Modi and his ilk are necessary to maintain the balance.
At the end of the day, if his actions(or the lack of them) prevented a few more trains being torched in the last 5 years, that is for the better good.
One can always expect Tehelka to come up with something like this before any major election. Not surprisingly, it’s the BJP that is always on the receiving end, which is quite right. I wait to see a sting done on a major Congressi leader.
Modi’s loss in the coming elections is a near certainty, but that does not mean that he will be behind the bars. As you said, if he had to be punished, it should have happened long ago. I will not be surprised to see him happily retire on a govt. pension after the elections…and make occasional appearances as the protector of Hinduism at BJP rallies. Modi is a shame on India and the investigations into the riots a big bad political joke.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, and each act has to be considered in the context it was executed in.
Was the killing of Jews by Nazi Germany evil ? Yes
Can it be even remotely justified? No, hapless Jews did not pose any threat to Germany.
Was the murder of 50,000 Germans (Hamburg) and 30,000 Germans (Dresden) in senseless, non-strategic Allied bombings evil? Of course it was.
Can it remotely be justified? In the mass insanity of WWII, this incident was a mere footnote. It did not occupy center stage.
Was the murder of 5 million Indians in starvation deaths in 1942 evil? Bet your bottom dinar.
Was it justified? Even when it achieved its strategic aim (sic) of destroying the backbone of Bengalis so completely, that they would never, ever be able to raise their heads in rebellion again? Even when, in the horror of Europe’s conflagration, who would care about the plight of dirty brown men?
It would be hypocritical, dishonest and wretched to view the response to the Godhra train burning of 50 Hindus, including women and children, by divorcing the context, which is :
– Hindus have been at the receiving end of relentless, horrific Islamic brutality for 1,200 years
– Millions of hapless have been slaughtered in each and every century. 20th century included.
– The Godhra incident was the final straw. Forget about the camel’s back, the entire levee now broke loose.
Modi’s job is to maintain law and order in the state. He has failed in that. His crime is omission.
Gandhi’s (the Duratma one’s) continuous, forced emasculation of Hindus in every attack on them, actively caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them. Gandhi is a bigger criminal than Modi.
One thing has arisen out of this sorry Tehelka joke. I previously had sympathy, in fact a lot of it, for hapless Muslims killed in Godhra. My logic was that innocents have suffered for the crime of terrorists who burnt the innocent Hindu children in Godhra.
Tehelka is now trying to prove they weren’t terrorists at all !! In fact, they were common and ordinary Muslims engaging in a killing spree of Hindus. So were Hindu nationalists right all along? Is this is the real character of Muslims? Not terrorists, but the aam Salim, Farukh and Faathima on the street? A deep rooted hatred of Hindus so vitriolic, that at the slightest instance it spills over in to burning Hindu children alive?
Suddenly the Godhra response does not appear as horrible as it once did.
Thanks Tehelka.
WHY TEHELKA IS A CRIMINAL
I had requested Shaan to get the info. Alas, for some people, the zeal for getting facts is far less potent than the urge to hurl oppobrium and flee under a cloak of assumed righteousness.
Anyway. I will have to do the honours, it seems.
March 11, 2001 : VICTORY IS SET-UP FOR INDIA – INDIA’S POSITION ON KASHMIR TO BE ACCEPTED
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010312/main1.htm
Islamabad : UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has ruled out implementation of the UN resolution on Kashmir or a separate UN Human Rights Commission for Kashmir, saying a lasting solution to the problem lay in the implementation of the Lahore declaration.
March 12, 2001 : CRIMINALS IN INDIA SNATCH VICTORY AWAY – TEHELKA EXPOSURE
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1218746.stm
Of course, this must be another conspiracy theory !!
What about your blog sir? Do you think that just because you wrote a few fine words for and against that you have avoided the same sensationalism as the sting operation? You wrote this post secure in the knowledge that the next day it would explode with comments. Our dear friend Checkmate is already spouting Hitler-isms about the “balance”.
It wont be long before this page is flooded with quasi-jihadis, the defenders of Hinduism, the “wah wah great post greatbong” sycophants and ofcoure the peacelovers – who wish that everyone forgets every thing without anyone getting any justice.
The riots were a disgrace. However, reading your post, it appears you slavishly cater to the mass market’s need for “opinion”:
1. You went looking for a “start” to the riot, inevitably that side will get the “blame”.
2. Spouting the same rubbish about Indian “moderates” who should know better – India’s moderates do not hold an ounce of political power nor do they have the balls/men/muscle to stop the nutcases (circumcsised or otherwise). India is a country run by thugs, elected by the use of dumber thugs.
3. Instead of taking a hopeless view that millions of impoverished and uneducated people will inevitably find reasons to kill each other (over caste, religion, morality, nationality), you feed your readers drivel about how “we” can all take charge of the situation. I’m sure you could have stopped the riot, by appealing to the “communal love that has existed between Hindus and Muslims for thousands of years”. As practice, try stopping the racism that will fill every stadium when Pakistan tours India in a few days.
Please stick to writing about movies, cricket and literature. You are a superb writer on these subjects, and you stay in touch on the internet.
Your tenuous grasp on some aspects of reality indicates you do not get out of the house much.
Unless there is polarization, people can’t relate to things. Just think of a simple thing like a movie people either ‘love’ or ‘hate’. Our entire thought ferment is based on the premise of taking sides. That’s precisely why people who ‘think’ are a problem.
For you Gujarat has no heroes; but for the majority either Modi is the hero or the publicity lovers are the heroes. Always easier to take a stand than sit and come up with your own ideas, and the result is both sides hate you. That’s why my favorite character from mythology is Trishanku, the felloe still stuck between heaven and hell.
Hi,
Very well articulated. However just after the Godhra riots, wasn’t Modi reelected by a resounding victory ? Isn’t that shameful from a democracy point of view. His victory does mean that the people of Gujarat are in sync with him. How do we explain his victory ? The fact is even under educated class there is latent religious distrust and that was seen through the ballot as well. We have congress pandering to the minority and the BJP pandering to the hindutva ideology. The only savior I hope is economic prosperity that will keep people busy with their own lives rather than running around burning stuff up.
I cannot agree more..and I also realise..that you write such posts much too rarely..
A question worth asking is – do you think we really need to take the high road to get a murderer like Modi out? I would say hit him high and hit him low..but get him out..somehow..you cant preach fair play when it comes to Modi..
Sure Tehelka is underhanded and their motives are suspect..and I am sorry to bring up the Hitler angle again..Hitler would never have happened if the sane Germans (incl. the jews) (Hindenburg..or sections of the press) of his time had hit him lower than they did..while they still could without being put in jail and shot in the head.
I dont really know if this is what you meant it to be…but your post..though ending on a anti Modi note…leaves a reader feeling more about tehelka than modi… is that the right way to go?
@ Akhil:
“Modi’s loss in the coming elections is a near certainty, but that does not mean that he will be behind…”
Rishi’s response:
Lets not jump the gun so fast my friend. Remember 2002 and the do-or-die campaign of people like Teesta Setalvad, PD John, Shabnam Hashmi….and the Vaghela histrionics.
Actually, the Tehelka ‘sting’ will help remind the Hindus of Gujrat, the blatant double standards of the pseudo-secularist media, and further help Modi.
You have to understand, its not Modi alone that people in Gujrat support. The entire population has seen a Hindu-tva resurgence, thanks to some good grassroot work done by VHP. It is very similar to the type of effort, the early day-Communists put on in Bengal, creating a grassroot cadre base.
During 2002, I used to volunteer as a teacher for young NRI teenagers attending VHP camps in the US. After the virulent campaign by Shabnam Hashmi and her likes, before the 2002 elections, the attendance at the camps actually increased manyfold, especially with Gujrati kids.
After this Tehelka sting, I look forward to meeting more young people this year.
As hhbb said… Thanks Tehelka
@Gourav: While not as alarming perhaps as mass murder, but the blatant use of main stream media, that claims to be independent, to further political agendas is indeed disquieting.
@Kushal: True. The solution has to be legal.
@Srikanth: Thank you.
@Checkmate: Maintain what balance? Do you really think that Gujarat has led to less violence in India? Do you really think that punishing entire communities is an effective way for dispensing any form of justice?
@Akhil: I won’t be surprised to see him back as CM before long and maybe who knows even get into the national cabinet someday.
@Hara Hara Bom Bom: During the 30s, Germans were fed this lie (Protocols of Zion etc) that the Jews are *not* innocent and intend to take over what was theirs. I disagree respectfully with your entire comment—violence and rape have no context. When that man took the foetus and balanced it on his sword, I doubt he was thinking of a history that has not affected personally him in any way. Of course you can say that it did not need to affect him personally, he simply did that because he felt for all Hindu-dom but ask yourself this: has any of the Gujarat rioters ever done anything positive for even Hindus? No they have not which is why I don’t buy the logic.
Here’s the short of it. How can you endorse the same behavior in Hindus that you so condemn in Muslims? Not that we have any of them around here, but ask a Jihadi apologist and he will write pages on why Muslims have been persecuted by Hindus , a fact that justifies their every act of Jihad. Cant we agree to condemn, unequivocally, all acts of unprovoked violence? (Yes I know “unprovoked”—Muslims killing Hindus in Signal Falia cannot justify Hindus killing Muslims in Vadadora, just as the destruction of the Babri Masjid cannot justify a bomb being placed on a crowded platform in Mumbai)
@Anthony:
Sensationalism? No sir. First of all, did you see me calling this post “the greatest post ever in Indian blog history” or the “blogpost that changed everything?” No. Not to sound too proud but I can write a post about Mithunda/review a movie and make comments explode as fast as this, with half of the effort that it took me to construct the above argument. And , most importantly I also wouldn’t have to defend my intentions in the comment space like I am having to do now not to mention the comments themselves would be more fun to read and in turn comment upon. So dont kid yourself.
I write what I feel needs to be written, not what people expect to hear from me. You are free of course not to believe that.
However when I see you say “India’s moderates do not hold an ounce of political power” I do not know whether to take this in the “Gunda” spirit of “that’s so lame it’s positively genius.” or to marvel at your ignorance. Maybe in your hurry to “get out” (which is something I supposedly do not do) you forgot to read the newspapers or inform yourself otherwise of what actually goes on in Indian politics and in the media. Not a problem.
“India is a country run by thugs, elected by the use of dumber thugs.”
True. We should take lessons from Sri Lanka.
“I’m sure you could have stopped the riot, by appealing to the “communal love that has existed between Hindus and Muslims for thousands of years”.”
No. I could not. Do you find me claiming that anywhere? I simply ask for the “law” to take its proper course.
Now I can also turn around and say that maybe its you who needs to keep yourself confined to commenting on my movie posts as then you would not reveal your own ignorance about the influence of “Indian moderates” on public opinion and trivialities like energy security, foreign affairs and nuclear policy. But then if I said that I would have to put up with the boo-hoo cries of “GB is intolerant of criticism” wouldn’t I?
@Aditi: Only the Sith deal in absolutes—old Star Wars proverb. I agree with you: people are not used to shades of grey.
@Key: Thank you. Yes it was shameful from the point of view of democracy. However the Indian electorate seldom votes on matters of issue: caste and religion are the determining factors.
@Sujan: Thanks. As to my intentions—it was never to make people sympathetic for Modi. Not at all. I think I have made it clear, multiple times, that Modi is a criminal and Tehelka is an opportunist publicity-hound: I am sure the two adjectives are not equivalent in terms of their negative connotation. The post pulls no punches in my condemnation of Modi—Tehelka comes into the picture only to show that the sting-operators have agendas of their own and that really there are no “hero”es here.
@Rishi Khujur: Hashmi was execrable—the bile she unleashed at people who had nothing to do with the riots like Vajpayee (he was compared to Hitler or Mussolini which one I dont remember) was open pandering to the people who were hosting her.
Anthony – I really dont want to be squabbling with you on somebody else’s blog….yet I want to make a few things clear.
I am neither a fascist nor a believer in any form of organised religion or politics as you insinuated. I am merely a cynical and yet deluded libertarian and my only belief pertains to economic prosperity being the true remover of inequality.
The author’s tone put me off as much at it did you, it was a clumsy attempt to pander to a sycophantic readership. There has never been a scope for a Centrist political party in India, the nature of our political fabric making it impossible. And yet Greatbong refused to acknowledge that fact and resorted to the exact same tripe that he accused the “shocked and anguished Indians” of indulging in at his university.
I do believe though that the Muslims are a drain on the country from an economic standpoint ( wonder if any valid research has been done on that). However that does not condone anybody murdering them as happened in Gujarat. My statement about balance only implies that fear is the only deterrent sometimes for maintaining peace and order. If that sounds like a Hitler-ism to you, so be it.
how long are we going to shy away from the fact that we are basically a violent society?
whether Delhi of 84 or Bhagalpur of 89 or Nellie of 83 or Bhiwandi of 81 or Bengal and Punjab of 48.
the problem is we are not ready to accept we are a violent society inherently. violence is in our DNA.
how many on this forum seriously feel that if modi was not the CM of Gujarat and some xyz , even a muslim was a CM of gujarat, the result would have been any different? if your answer is yes, you are fooling yourself.
i bet the result would have been the exact same. i’d go further and say it would have been far worse if someone else was the CM.
what happened in gujarat was shameful but so are a whole lot of things that happened before and after gujarat.
here are the simple facts
1. 57 people were roasted alive.
2. Godhra station is surrounded by muslim slums
3. the bogie is not self combustible and these people were not on suicide mission
4. only external forces could have made them burn like this
5. it’s very convenient for secularists to say that RSS was behind this heinous crime. Ya right, and Bush was behind 9/11 and British and CIA were actually behind the Jew genocide so that they could have an excuse to get back to hitler. there’s no limit to this kind of talk
6.gujarat was riots and not one sided killings. Delhi was Genocide. If you look objectively without the exaggerated figures of Hindustan Times and the Hindu you’d know what i mean
7. why is rajiv gandhi (“when a tree shakes the earth vibrates”) anyway better?
8. why is indira gandhi who has more political blood on her hand better?
9.how are communists and lalus of the world any better?
10. people of gujarat who were on the ground and saw things first hand gave modi a resounding victory. are all gujaratis so in-human? are rajdeep sardesais and barkha dutts, the holier-than-thou reporters so unbaised?
11.modi has been hounded since past 5 years? how many times was rajiv gandhi questioned on dehli? if ever he was?
12. stop talking about modi if you don’t consider rajiv gandhi at any fault. you have already lost your moral right after supporting gandhi.
13. there have been more convictions in gujarat in 5 years than the total number of convictions of 84,89,83,81 put together.
there are only two types of people who r discussing modi. 1] who have prejudged him on the basis of media and 2] who have specific agenda against him like testical setalvad and prafool bidi..
there’s no point of arguing coz most of you have already made up your minds either way…
@ Arnab
You will be surprised to know that the “secular” clap-trap that was touring the world comparing Modi with Hitler, was funded by the Christian Evangelists.
Right before the 2002 elections, Kaleem Khawaja of Association of Indian Muslims (AIM)and PD John (a pastor with the Seventh day adventist church-turned-“Gandhian” secularist, who seems to somehow have the money to run a posh NGO office near Connecticut Ave. in Downtown DC) met with selected leaders of “secular” groups like ASHA and AID and asked for their support help them kill the ‘threat’ of Hindu revivalists in Gujrat.
Thereafter began a long drawn campaign by this combine to “expose” Modi, beginning with regular trips by the so-called eminent social workers like Hashmi.
The goal was simple. Kill Hindu-revivalism in the US and VHP will be starved for funds in Gujrat. The Gujrati NRI is supposedly the VHP bankroller.
@ Arnab
and its the same PD John who flanked, Sonia Gandhi during her visit to Chicago in 2002, lobbied for cancellation of Modi’s visa during is planned US visit (the US didnt do it for the Gujrat riots) and shows up at Christian evangelist fundraisers….
Arnab, while I myself am not a great fan of Modi and knowing well that I am making a fallacy, dont you think every politician/administrator in India should be behind the bars if you apply the above rule?
@Kaunteya: A violent society? I would hardly say so. As a country that comprises majority of Hindus, I would say historically we have not been violent enough against foreign aggressors. We have blamed our fate and soldiered on. As to Rajiv Gandhi I agree with you. His statements of “ground shaking” were as provocative and the involvement of Congress workers who became ministers was as dastardly. However I fail to see how that makes Modi any better.
@Rishi: Really shocking. Or perhaps not. This “blame Hindus for everything” conspiracy, well funded by you-know-who, is beyond denial. I really feel bad for AID and ASHA since they have some very well-meaning desi students who volunteer in good faith to make a difference and then these organizations channel funds for “walks to Pakistan” and other Pandey boondoggles. The doublespeak that stops funding for Hindu charitable organizations while letting Islamic and Christian ones continue unabated is hypocrisy of the first order.
@Sriram: Thanks for the wikipedia funda. Did not know that. I would argue that while all politicians play the religious card to some extent, Modi takes it to a level beyond. Its one thing to try and fail, another thing to do nothing and bicker and quite another to make statements that convey the message, without much room for believing otherwise, that we the government are giving you a free pass for two days to indulge in “righteous anger”.
Nice post GB. The question is really whether this sting will bring enough info to put Modi (and those people on camera, Babu Bajrangi and so forth) behind bars. If it does, well and good. If not, the thing is again so much piss in a thunderstorm
I quote myself from Reddit:
http://politics.reddit.com/info/5z95q/comments/c02bqeq
The great Indian media is set to surpass the western ones in reporting news too late, too sensationalist, too yellow at the same time conveniently ignoring to report or ask even pointed questions at the right time (think Bihar’s cops dragging some petty thief, think Rizwanur).
Narendra Modi is a shame to India, more so for Hindus as he did what he wanted to do in Hinduism’s name.
@ Aravind
What did Narendra Modi do in the name of Hinduism?
Way to go Rishi K…
Lobbying for international condemnation of a horrific reprisal killing spree, which was state condoned (we can argue if it was “mob fury” or “communal” violence till the 12th Imam comes down in a red Porsche with alloy wheels, but that’s besides the point) is an attempt to kill “Hindu revivalism”…what next? The reintroduction of Sati is an attempt to bring out the inner glow of the pure Hindu woman?!
It’s really pathetic to see, seemingly, reasonable people condone the most violently fatal crimes, against innocents, as some form of atavistic justice for both, real and imagined, atrocities against their community in the ancient past. More pathetic when you look at the state of Islam, and the Muslims today, and realize that they are backward, in India and internationally, on all socio-cultural and economic yardsticks.
@greatbong – u said,
###His statements of “ground shaking” were as provocative and the involvement of Congress workers who became ministers was as dastardly. However I fail to see how that makes Modi any better.###
actually my problem is how does it make modi any worse?
why is rajiv gandhi a hero and modi a nero?
@ Puresh
Huhhh…when did I say that what the Hindu mobs did in retaliation for Godhra and others acts of violence initiated by followers of Islam, right?
And Sati…where does that come from? what are you smoking mate?
Purush wrote:
“…both, real and imagined, atrocities against their (hindus) community in the ancient past”.
Rishi’s response:
Hmmm…real and imagined…ancient past…I guess in your language that includes TODAY???
Purush wrote:
More pathetic when you look at the state of Islam, and the Muslims today, and realize that they are backward, in India and internationally, on all socio-cultural and economic yardsticks.
Rishi’s response.
Read the Quran…believe in it and follow it literally…you will be equally backward on all socio-cultural and economic yardsticks, inspite of sitting on 70% of the worlds’ petroleum resources and generating revenues from it.
Try applying its principles to a Hindu (Kafir in Islamic terms), like me….and unlike many other Hindus, the response will be swift ,decisive and effective.
Excellent post ! Mirrors all of my thoughts on the issue.
Nicely Written Arnab.
I was not really surprised bcoz of this Tehelka issue..
I was actually waiting for what modi can come up with this time.
He has done nothing in his 5 yrs reign besides making some NRIs to invest money in gujarat.
So he really needed a push to get elected once again.
And this is it..
He is the only person who can get some benefit by re-invoking this massacre. you know how he was elected after the riots.. he is really trying very hard to get the same result.
Remember right after the Tehelka sting he held one ‘Sabha’ somewhere and some 50-60 bikes were burnt right after that. And immediately he responded that this is done by his rivals and he will give new bikes to every one whose is burned ?
Doesnt that bring any questions to mind. As how he knew by standing there and addressing everybody that his rivals are burning bikes outside and he need to give his people bikes back ???
That is really strange.. but i really sense that this time also modi will be elected again. No doubt abt that.. you know what as we friends regularly comment.. ” Even if a Dog is given ticket in Gujarat as a BJP leader, he will win ” . This is seriously between friends 🙂
@ Rishi Khujur :
Pls stick to the topic. I cant understand why you always have to bring Quran in your comments.
@ Tarzan
Dont you think it is relevent to what happened in Godhra?
Have you ever heard of the Tablighi Jamaat?
Well put. As to Anthony, I did not understand what your whole point was. It seems to be you who is trying to get a bit of attention on somebody else’s blogspace, blabbering when you have nothing coherent to speak of.
F Anthony’s I Indian politics has been solely guided by the Indian moderates over the years which is why we have laboured through Nehruvian socialism, Indi-Chini bhai-bhai, Gujralism and other assorted forms of political debauchery.
GB, I would disagree with you on Modi. I see Modi a bit differently, mostly as a monster born out of a natural reaction to the free run that large sections of Muslims have had ever since Nehru slapped on a rose to his gown and Gandhi told us to turn the other cheek. A nation can only take so much before it explodes. Modi is evil no doubt, but a necessary evil.
This is a waste of time.
Tehelka seeks relevance and validation after being forgotten after their sting operations on uniform. Possibly, they also seek funding. Now is a good time as always. Because Indians prefer to live in the past. Bofors still haunts us years after proving their utility in Kargil. No one talks about strengthening and cleaning up the tender and procurement processes, all they do is allege or deny the Bofors ‘kaand’.
People who can see through their fallacies don’t vote in enough numbers. But suckers and havenots do, in large numbers. So, there goes the future…
Very rarely, when our collective conscience wakes up, it chooses to focus on our below-par performance in ODIs & World Cups. It’s a shame really, our invertebrate journalists fellate politicians and prefer serving trivial “news-tainment”. Even Jon Stewart asks tougher questions. I still fondly remember Anderson Cooper kicking the politicians in their balls after the Katrina disaster. sigh…
And allow me to digress. Are you implying Kapil was an accomplice in the match-fixing thing?
Anthony-
“What about your blog sir? Do you think that just because you wrote a few fine words for and against that you have avoided the same sensationalism as the sting operation? You wrote this post secure in the knowledge that the next day it would explode with comments. Our dear friend Checkmate is already spouting Hitler-isms about the “balance”.
It wont be long before this page is flooded with quasi-jihadis, the defenders of Hinduism, the “wah wah great post greatbong” sycophants and ofcoure the peacelovers – who wish that everyone forgets every thing without anyone getting any justice.”
Admit it that you are a person with extremely low self esteem and you need validation at every stage to agree or disagree with yourself, let alone others. Your biggest fear- you wont see too many “GB why don’t you like politically correct sentences like some of other pseudo-secular bloggers”, but you will see a lot of well argued points which support the view that runs contrary to your predilections. That, Anthony, is your biggest fear. Its like wildfire to you and hence you see GB as an arsonist.
Clearly, the views on this page wont help your paranoia or self-esteem. So why not refrain from reading comments?
I agree with Rohan on Modi. A portfolio carries minimum risk if its well diversified. In the context of India, we have minority appeasing champion parties like CPM and Congress who turn a blind eye to blatant truths. Modi in this context is like a stock which is -vely correlated to the above things. This was a necessary deterrant or risk minimizer and hence as Rohan says, Modi is a “necessary evil”, and he would continue to be so in my book till his ways are reactionary and not initiating. Weird as it may seem, this the best way to filter out unsystematic risk. Systematic risk is a different thing altogether and can only be achieved through empowering the masses with education.
Wow…applying portfolio theory to matters of life and death. That’s one I never thought I’d see. Markowitz probably didn’t either.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. My main point was a quibble with the idea that jihadi attacks are ignored by the “secularists” and the international media, while violence perpetrated by Hindus is overhyped. Jihadi violence seems to make it to the headlines on a pretty regular basis, to say the least. It’s also different from the VHP and Bajrang Dal band of mass murder in that the jihadis seem to relish bombing other Muslims as much as anyone else. See all the attacks in Pakistan, on the Mecca masjid, Malegaon prayer ground, Ajmer Sharif. Either that, or those attacks in India at least were not perpetrated by jihadis at all — who knows? The culprits have never been found.
I don’t think anyone can argue with the point that the jihadi attacks are largely supported and funded by foreign outfits. India sadly has seen enough terrorism from all communities (Khalistanis, Naxalites, Bodos, LTTE….) to make the difference quite clear. Whereas the Hindu groups kill people from their own country, just because they can, or because they think these others are not “Indian enough.” This is not to imply that Indian Muslims have not carried out horrific mob violence themselves sometimes. They have. And there is no excuse for it. But the numbers show, that since Independence, they have clearly been slaughtered more than they have slaughtered anyone else. Hindus killing Muslims is the strong and numerous butchering the weak and few. That is why Shabnam Hashmi et al are so angry. Being outnumbered and attacked is a very scary situation to be in.
@yourfan
What brand of jihad are u preaching here ..@ss hole!!
“A necessary evil” “Risk Minimizer”, ..what the f*** ???
No, you cannot term slaughter of 1000 (probably 2000) Indians who happened to be Muslims … as a necessary evil in any context ..!!
how wud u feel .. if some lowlife rednecks raped ur sister and wife/girfriend ..in front of ur old dad and ur kid son.. and then cut her up ..piece by piece before setting the leftovers on fire ..coz they thought harming a brown family will somehow teach all jihadist in America a lesson .. I am sure you would still agree with other conservative wall street types …” Yeah of of course ..we need events like these to minimize risk in our portfolio …more brown blood plz..”
just think about how in-sensitive your comments are before you let ur ass talk abt .. risk minimizing and stocks !!! go thank god that ur family is safe ..
And oh, btw ..I am a Hindu from Gujarat, and I am ashamed of that fact when I read your comments and see similar attitude here..
GB: The guilty for the 1984 riots have still not been brought to book. I sometimes wonder if the criminal justice system had been more effective during 1984 riots, this itself would have served as a strong deterrent. Maybe the rioters during 2002 just knew that they would go scot free because of the “system”.
Even though your writing is good, it will be better to edit it properly. I find lots of punctuation and tautological errors in your posts.
Keep in mind that online writing is all about Keeping it Short and Simple (KISS).
“violence is in our DNA.” I don’t agree. A good majority of the violence incidents in our society is inspired by vested political interests aided and abetted by the politician-criminal-business nexus. Most of these attacks are pre-planned and when the state turns its head away to such incidents, the question is who will protect the innocent and the poor?
In India, the victims of most of the violent attacks belong to the poorer sections of the society. This means that the perpetrators of violence are sure that there will not be any strong backlash. Violence originates not from the upmarket residential areas, but from slums and streets where criminals or the mob are told to wait for any impending emergency.
What the Sangh Parivar has been doing in North India, is a total disgrace to Hindus all over India. Unfortunately, the biggest supporters of Sangh Parivar are in the US, with their flawed reading of Indian history. The BJP has shown that it is not and it cannot become the alternative to Congress. It has failed in that mission.
True. No heroes out there. But then, why not settle for the next best thing? Sure we know that the sting is a prime example of political opportunism but if this leads to a more concrete case and additional evidence against Modi, while also providing the voters of Gujurat stronger reasons to stop him from another term, why not? We cannot find heroes amidst this madness, but surely we can settle for the lesser evil right?
Of course, it really depends on who is the lesser evil in your eyes: A man who allows and supports mass murder, as you admitted, or a group of opportunists who seek to bring him down, even if it is only to gain power.
Gb,
Though written well,I beg to differ..
HHBB and Rishi are on the dot..
Even the Honorable Minister for Defence Mr.AK Antony has once mentioned that ‘Everybody talks about Minority Rights,But dont forget that the Majority has rights as well’!
This when he was the Chief Minister of Kerala and when He was sharing Power with the Muslim League..
He was persuaded to deny that statement which he did not do and ultimately lost his Chair..
What about earlier Congress Governments who intiated Communal Riots just to Change Chief Ministers.I remember the meerut riots as an example when i was in the 5th grade or so..
How many Bomb Blasts have gone by and nobody is behind bars now…
then why should Modi Be put behind bars.
the chief architect of the Coimbatore Bomb blasts which killed 70 people gets a life Sentence…
Is this some kind of a Joke??
I shall put out my neck and say..We need more Modis!!!!!!!!!
For these people this report does nothing —except that it may remind them of Modi’s Hindutva credentials once again, in case they forgot in the shadow of Om Shanti Om’s impending release.
Good one boss
@ Rishi and greatbong:
The reason I feel Modi is not going to win this time around is that the political situation is very different this time. This expose might help revive post-Godhra memories, but this is no where near what happened during the election 5 years back. Not to forget the infighting in Gujarat BJP. And why has Modi refused to use the so called ‘honour of Gujarat’ trumpet this time? What explains him walking out of the interview with Karan Thapar as soon as questions regarding Godhra came up?
This sting is just going to help Modi. The rebels as well as the VHP were accusing Modi of being Anti Hindutva. A large number of sadhus are actually campaigning against him. This will just help improve his image. It will remind his loyal followers of his ‘glorious’ past.
India’s moderates have apparently had influence over Energy Security, Foriegn Policy and Nuclear Policy, hehe:
1. India has no Energy Security. China has beat ONGC to every major oil exploration contact besides the allocation from the Sri Lankan government recently.
2. What foriegn policy? What international issue does India ever get involved in? India was silent on Burma, is apathetic to Sri Lanka and no progress has been made on peace with Pakistan. India has no opinion or influence on the Iran issue, no input on how to deal with Islamic extremism. Instead it is building pipelines with the former, and burying its head in sand on the latter.
3. Nuclear Policy? A nation of one billion ppl requires permission from the U.S to acquire civilian nuclear technology, receives it, then spurns it to pander to Communists
As for your cheap shot on Sri Lanka, if you intend to evaluate India against the violent mess that is my beloved island, then you have resorted to the cheap retorts used by high-schoolers “dude you suck, well you suck more”.
To the people who did not understand my point, or thought I was spewing vitriol to improve my self-esteem:
1. My point is: blogs, moderates, educated people, academics, political scientists do not matter in India. India is run for the masses, by the masses. The masses, India shining notwithstanding, are poor Hindus and Muslims, who despise each other. Until India’s economic growth is shared with the masses, they will continue to have nothing better to do than kill each other at random intervals.
2. Seriously, how many people do you think read greatbong’s blog (great as it is)? I use only my first name and did not ask for any acknowledgement of genius. All I wanted was for greatbong to explain how his post was different from the “stings” and “exposes” that keep popping up once a year on this issue. The Gujrat riot will remain fodder for the media, whenever they run out of Indian cricket victories or bollywood love affairs.
Please open your eyes. South Asia’s politics are in the hands of thugs and criminals. Mr. Modi atleast has the decency to be a decent manager of Gujrat’s economics.
“If we ask moderate Muslims to distance themselves from radical Islamists, then it is contingent on us to clearly denounce, with one voice, the politics of hate that Modi espouses.”
Hmmmmm something to think about …
Agreed that Tehelka may be biased and the attempt might be to evoke “sensationalism” and perhaps sale of more copies.
But i do feel Tehelka has done more good than bad by bringing this “evidence” to people’s attention. Otherwise … despite so many years of Godhra … nothing .. nothing much has happened.
Agreed that their idea and execution is flawed and publicity seeking … but they do raise the issue which deserves attention… although it couldve been definitly less sensational.
Yes sadly, there are NO heroes here…
@Anthony GB doesn’t write to “evoke” any reaction and expect to be bombarded with comments. He had a POV which he very effectivlty has put accross, no matter how much i disagree.
It is HIS blog and he can feel free to write what he desires. He’s better off than you and I telling him what to write what not to write.
Agreed that you and I cannot go and run and save indian politics or clean it up …
Your point #1 #2 “blogs, moderates, educated people, academics, political scientists do not matter in India” – yes they do …may be not now as much .. but they will in the near future… yes india is for the masses and run by the masses… But blogs and moderates try to bridge the gap that exists between the Urban-wheres-my-pepsi-indian and the rural-no-rains-this-summer-farmer.
I have never been to Gujrat and do not intend to …. but that doesnt prevent me from talking about it does it. GB is doing whatever is his in capacity ..i.e write a post about what he felt … agreed it may not even help the issue .. but somehwere .. he has mirrored what many of us feel … and might discuss… Sitting and simply talking about movies/literature/culture and turning a blind eye will not help will it ?
All the journalists have painted a picture of Gujarat as if it is some sort of a primitive man-eat-man place. Lets face it: Gujarat has surpassed Maharashtra as the most developed state in the country. The way it has attracted industrialists from all parts of the world is a lesson for other CMs. Modi has transformed the lives of ordinary Gujarat citizens for the better. The latest example is how when even Maharshtra government refused land to IIT Bombay, Gujarat provided IITB land to open an extension centre there.
Yes he has skeletons in the cupboard. But which politician doesn’t. Frankly I would prefer a corrupt but pro-reformist and bold PV Narsimharav to honest but no-gooder Manmohan Singh. Similarly I would prefer a communal Modi to secular Yechury. The conditions of Muslims in Gujarat is much much better than condition of Muslims in West Bengal(Sachar Commitee Report).
@Pretzel- Thanks for your comment. I could not help laughing my ass off. In the midst of your bout of touchiness, you made some arguments which I am conveniently gonna use in my rejoinder.
1> Look at your use of the word-Jihad. Taken out of one context and used in another. This is the first of many instances of your ‘color blindedness’.
2> Try to envisage a scenario you described where radical Islamists are doing the same thing to your wife/gf. The difference in the 2 cases would probably be that there would not be any trace left- everything would be made into a delicious biryani the day after. But clearly you cannot see that scenario. And obviously rednecks did that thing to Daniel Perl a few years back, right? And I know that you will come back and say about the loss of lives in the war and bla bla….in short take reference from arbitrary situations which have nothing to do with Gujrat or India. But the key thing to be noted is the kind of torture that you talk about has been taken from another familiar context and subtly juxtaposed here. Salman Rushdie would agree with me. He almost had his head cut off!
3> By the way, the fact that you are so ultra ashamed is not a surprise. Many years ago another great man a felt similar kind of shame. He in fact advised the Jews to voluntarily offer themselves to be butchered by the Nazis! Luckily, the Jews had better sense of judgment.
4> Under a religiously unbiased government, there is no need for any appeasement or deterrence. But Congress and CPM are not religiously neutral parties. This is a hard mf ing fact that your ‘color blindedness’ will never let you see. These parties are pro-muslim! This skews the balance completely. The facts tell a story. Border infiltration, turning a blind eye to terrorist activities etc etc.
5> Everybody knows that retaliation is not the answer. My heart goes out to innocent muslims killed. But I still believe that there is no direct proof that Modi had masterminded every move of the aftermath. I believe that it was mostly fueled by the inherent vitriol of the Hindus in Gujrat. Lets face it, most Hindus of your state are really anti muslim, say compared to a Hindu from Madhya Pradesh. There are historical reasons for it. What Modi did was seem unapologetic about what happened. Maybe he failed to exercise restraint as much he should have. Maybe he even took steps which abetted the crisis. But there is no proof of anything. Only rumors abound.
What I liked about him was his stoicism about refusing to attenuate the initial act of violence at the cost of amplification of the latter events. Rajdeep sardesai, Sugarika Ghosh, people like you and several other pseudo liberals and pseudo secular people thus took it upon themselves to perform that duty. After Babri Masjid, many temples were brought down. Here though, The initial act was the only crime. SIMI can exist, Hindu pligrims may be killed at Amarnath, but how dare you do that to Babri masjid! Here though a slight rearrangement was necessary. Muslims burnt that train. But how dare you show dissent!
6> By the way, I am sure you are the kind who will hang Modi or Thackeray but will pooh pooh about Afzal. The one thing I agree with Arnab completely,is about not thinking twice about punishing proven terrorists. You pseuo seculars will condone ‘certain’ acts, while using Tehelka to create facts, either for your own benefit or removing -vely correlated voices. Because Modi’s views are opposite to Sonia, Yechury, Mayawati, Mulayam, laloo etc etc.
7> If my derision for minority mollycoddling parties and its financial analogy is despicable to you, I will say that the other side of the picture that you paint is 1000 times more apocalyptic. To get that picture, you should read Rishi Khujur’s comments on some of the previous posts. But I am sure your ‘color blindedness’ would again be an impediment.
A bit harsh on Tehelka, I thought. Whatever their motives and agendas, one can’t deny that this investigation has laid bare on camera things which were only speculated till now. We all suspected that Sangh parivar had a hand in that pogrom, but suspicion is different from one of the killers himself admitting as much on camera. Ever since I read about that killing of foetus five years back, I used to wonder whether we will ever know the name of the rakshas who did that. Thanks to Tehelka, we now know who did it (and scarily enough, he looks like a normal human being). It is one thing to speculate that government isn’t really interested in bringing the guilty to book and another to have the Advocate General of the state talking on camera about saving the perpetrators of the crime.
As another commentor said, if this expose makes the people of Gujarat think even for a second before voting for Modi or for that matter makes all those industrialists singing praises of Modi pause for a second, I think it would have been worth it. But even without that, I think Tehelka should be commended just for capturing on record the depths to which humans can go. Sort of like those jihad documentaries.
Fantastic Post- As balanced as they come. Felt really sick as I read through the ‘Free.Fair’ reports on the mass killing and the absolute braggadocio is admitting their acts. It is even more scary to read some comments that go
” The Godhra incident was the final straw.”
“Gandhi is a bigger criminal than Modi.”
“After this Tehelka sting, I look forward to meeting more young people this year.”
But thinking about the Godhra train incident and its related back lashes, the biggest issue for most of us is that the criminal negligence of Modi was not “corrected”- If he was castigated and forced to resign or if presidents rule was imposed, there wouldn’t be such a hue and cry about what happened. Which then brings me to point out the contradiction among my secular brothers. How come people like Abdul Naseer Madhani, get a pardon thanks to secular parties like the DMK in TN and the CPI and the Congress in Kerala? Simple- DMK is anti-brahmin and hence anti-hindu, and they will do anything to please the minority vote banks- even release a convicted terrorist (proven to have links with Pakistan’s ISI). The CPI and the Congress in Kerala wanted to break the stranglehold of the Muslim League. So they plugged a young and “passionate” Madani, unceremoniously dropped him when he was arrested and now take all the credit for his release. To each his own right?
I usually don’t comment on comments but, for the love of god, I simply can’t understand what Anthony’s problem is. Looks to me like he wants you to take sides.
So Ph. D is not exactly a course in philosophy? 😀
I really liked this post and I’m wondering what ticked most readers off? When I watched the “Sting of the century” on TV, I was appalled at first. But then, as the circus progressed, I was actually relieved about one thing, and that makes me proud to be an Indian:
*The Gujarat Riots were not a knee-jerk reaction to the Godhra incident*
It was a planned and well-coordinated activity by some fundamentalists, sure. But it was not the general sentiment towards Muslims by the Indian majority. The ‘expose’ proves that we are a rational people, that a majority (and a huge majority at that) of us will not strap on bombs and kill innocents just because they were inspired by someone huddled in a desert somewhere in Pakistan with his B@ll$ in his mouth.
Where our media failed again is to project this image of India. But then, there are no buyers for that! Who will want to watch a nation of browns displaying extreme restraint and maturity? They would rather watch a ‘conspiracy theory’ about genocide! Like you rightly said, the polls are coming, and the polarity of the vote-bank has to be established.
I was appalled that there were no emergency cabinet meetings to figure out what to do with these butchers or how to ensure that the sentiments of the people are in check. But hey… this is no election crisis… just another day, with the same shit!
@ Anthony: I do not expect you to understand this great country in this lifetime. What you get to see in your fancy TVs and Glittering magazines is not even a speck of dust! When we talk about Hindus and Moslems and Christians and Sikhs and Buddhists and…, we are not talking about others… We are talking about our own brothers and sisters. To an outsider, a domestic discord may look trivial and amusing. But to those at home, it is distressing.
I hope you never have to experience it to understand it.
@ modi losing the elections:
the only reason Modi will lose is because the Gujarat BJP is a heavily divided house and Rajnath Singh is President. nobody really cares about the riots.
@ we are a violent country and on riots generally:
post-independence there is now wide-spread acceptance in political discourse that violence is legitimate and justified as form of protest. especially, when it comes to religious issues. [the latest example, the pelting of a Dalit candidate by the hindu right with chappals during the JNU elections for his comments on Ram]
the first person in modern India to realize the vast political benefits of religious rioting was Jinnah- through Direct Action Day. His successful instigation of Hindus led to the creation of Pakistan.[ if anyone cares about stuff like this, please read India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha for a really well written and unbiased view on India’s recent history].
given the fact that no riots have taken place even after terrorists have specifically targeted places of worship goes to show how Indians are waking up to the reality of riots. so one after one last riot teaching Christians (sikhs and muslims being done already) a lesson, we should be able to mothball this concept forever.
@ GB : “During the 30s, Germans were fed this lie (Protocols of Zion etc) that the Jews are *not* innocent and intend to take over what was theirs”.
GB, sorry, I humbly disagree with you. The anti-semitism of Europe (Christian & Nazi) is based on 2 millenia of sheer propaganda without a shred of proof.
The caution against Islam is based on 2 millenia of pure truth without an iota of propaganda.
@ GB – “violence and rape have no context”.
When the Russians entered Berlin in 1945, they let loose an orgy of violence and rape. This was symptomatic of all captured German cities. Of course this cannot be condoned, yet Russian leaders, some as honorable as the great Zhukov & Chuikov, never even attempted to halt this predictable spree.
Violence and rape can never be condoned, yet they do have a context. In an ideal world they shouldn’t, yet Hindus have hardly faced an idealistic foe for the last 1,500 years.
@GB “When that man took the foetus and balanced it on his sword, I doubt he was thinking of a history that has not affected personally him in any way”.
It is simplistic to reduce the entire Gujarat response to one pic-bite. The 700 Muslims killed in Gujarat were not foetuses balanced on swords.
I’d be grateful for reliable statistics of how many foetuses were ripped apart. I am sure there were some incidents of this despicable, gruesome, and gallows-worthy act by Hindus.
But I also think that the ant-Hindu media in India is exploiting the stray incidents of ‘heart pulled out while still beating’ as an emotional trick. After else, in the post WTC mass-murder scenario, all their bleats against Hinduism seem to be falling on deaf global ears. The world has woken up to the terror posed by the “religion of love” and “religion of peace”. Thus the panic-stricken desperation of Hindu-haters in upping the shrill rhetoric.
@ GB “Of course you can say that it did not need to affect him (the foetus- ipping Hindu) personally, he simply did that because he felt for all Hindu-dom”
I will never say that. I classify it as horrific evil. My contentions are far more modest :-
– When a community realises there is no one there to help them, after a reign after reign of terror, they will not prevent extremities perpetrated by members of their own community. In fact, they may tacitly be glad of it. This is a normative statement, not a positive one.
– The Gujarat backlash is like a drop in the ocean to what Hindus have had to face in the last millennia. In the last few decades for that matter. 3 MILLION BANGLADESHIS WERE MURDERED IN 1971, MOST OF THEM HINDU (put in bold ot highlight the fact, niot because I am screaming 🙂 )
@Gb : “Here’s the short of it. How can you endorse the same behavior in Hindus that you so condemn in Muslims? Not that we have any of them around here, but ask a Jihadi apologist and he will write pages on why Muslims have been persecuted by Hindus , a fact that justifies their every act of Jihad”.
There is a marked distinction here. The jehadi lies trough his teeth 24 hours of the day. Even when he is asleep. The Hindu contention is fact.
The Christians reeled off Semitic crimes. They were all lies.
The Jews highlighted Christian persecution. They were facts.
@GB “Cant we agree to condemn, unequivocally, all acts of unprovoked violence? (Yes I know “unprovoked”—Muslims killing Hindus in Signal Falia cannot justify Hindus killing Muslims in Vadadora)”.
I condemn it, unequivocally. As I do the thousands of other incidents where Muslims have had a free reign in massacring Hindus unopposed. My position is at complete odds with the pseudo-secular stance of blaming the Hindus alone, the enveloping bloodthirsty contextual saga of 1,000 years, or even 25 years, completely forgotten.
I despise both Bomber Harris and Eichmann. But not equally. And I would like to see Eichmann hanged first before baying for Bomber Harris’ blood. Tehelka and its ilk are claiming :
1. Hang Bomber Harris
2. Eichmann? He was a man of peace.
3. Holocaust? What Holocaust.? Hang Bomber Harris.
@ Rohan “I would disagree with you on Modi…Modi is evil no doubt, but a necessary evil”.
The term evil is contextual. Bomber Harris murdered 80,000 civilians in Hamburg & Dresden. In the context of the far bigger evils of WWII, it is ‘incidental’, a footnote.
In the context of the Hindu genocide, easily running in to many millions in the Bangladesh conflict alone, the Gujarat response is a blip.
@ Sourdough Pretzel “ow wud u feel .. if some lowlife rednecks raped ur sister and wife/girfriend ..in front of ur old dad and ur kid son.. and then cut her up ..piece by piece before setting the leftovers on fire ..”
I would feel just like the millions of Hindu sufferers who have been butchered and persecuted throughout the ages.
I would have felt like the hundreds of thousands of Hindus hacked to death in Bangladesh in 1970-71.
I would have felt like the completely innocent 57 peaceful travelers being burnt alive with children in Godhra just because they belonged to a hated faith.
@ Anthony “My point is: blogs, moderates, educated people, academics, political scientists do not matter in India. India is run for the masses, by the masses. The masses, India shining notwithstanding, are poor Hindus and Muslims, who despise each other. Until India’s economic growth is shared with the masses, they will continue to have nothing better to do than kill each other at random intervals.”
So, sharing of wealth is at the heart of the problem. Please go to the UK to see how the wealth is shared among poorer members of society. 85% of Somalian families are on state benefit, 65% of ). And observe how fanaticism is spreading like wildfire.
It has little to do with economics. Far more to do with psychological indoctrination by a particular faith in creating and nurturing hate for the ‘other’. Unless that source of hate can be resolved at source, all other measure, economic, social, educational etc will fall flat on their faces. Sachar is welcome to try.
@ kartik krishnan ““If we ask moderate Muslims to distance themselves from radical Islamists, then it is contingent on us to clearly denounce, with one voice, the politics of hate that Modi espouses.”
Unless Muslims actually practise that, and as long as Hindus continue to be tyrannized, Hindus retain the prerogative to remain suspicious because of 1,500 years of evidence, and hold their sense of moral outrage in deferral.
@ kartik krishnan “But i do feel Tehelka has done more good than bad by bringing this “evidence” to people’s attention. Otherwise … despite so many years of Godhra … nothing .. nothing much has happened”.
Yes, like the good they did in demolishing the vast strategic advantage UN was conferring to India vis-à-vis Kashmir on their last screaming accusation. In China, the whole lot would have been buried alive. See my earlier comment.
WTF Wgiven the fact that no riots have taken place even after terrorists have specifically targeted places of worship goes to show how Indians are waking up to the reality of riots. so one after one last riot teaching Christians (sikhs and muslims being done already) a lesson, we should be able to mothball this concept forever”.
This just proves that Hindus are peaceful at heart. But they have, and are continuing to be, pushed too far. Far too far.
————————
And our Marxist-Communist-Naxal comrades? Have they come out in open condemnation, even a mild one, against the massacre of 10,000 INNOCENTS IN Tiannamen Square?
Ah. What 10,000? What Tiannamen square? Hang the Modi criminal, the most evil man in history.
“But there is no proof that Modi actually instigated people to commit violence. So what? “Tui jol kahs ni, to tor baap kheyeche” said the fox before devouring the lamb he accused of muddying his waters.
Couldn’t be more agree with hara hara bom bom …somehow my earlier comment hasn’t been published…lost somewhere
@Akasuna: Thanks
@Aravind: Hmm
@Kaunteya: I didnt say Rajiv Gandhi was a hero did I?
@Bongopondit: Thanks
@Tarzan: ‘He has done nothing in his 5 yrs reign besides making some NRIs to invest money in gujarat.”
Some may say that’s a lot based on the prosperity it has got them. Governance is Modi’s strong point and so let’s not doubt his power there.
@Rohan: A necessary evil? Do you seriously think that Modi’s supposed “necessary evil” helped matters any? Do you think he scared Muslims from not raising their heads or do you think he created a whole generation of Gujarat orphans who are ripe to be absorbed into the terrorist fold?
@Mukul: Yes I am implying that. Because the evidence on the tapes of Tehelka was pretty conclusive as far as I remember—Indian cricketers, in the knowledge that they were not speaking on record, implicating Kapil.
@yourfan2: Hmm.
@Wafa:
“My main point was a quibble with the idea that jihadi attacks are ignored by the “secularists” and the international media, while violence perpetrated by Hindus is overhyped”
Actually they are ignored by the secularists. You would never see Sahmat and their ilk going round the US, with documentaries about the radicalization of Islam, the growth of organizations like SIMI and the pan-Islamic culture of terrorism. As a matter of fact, every crime committed by Muslims (whether it be Godhra or the Parliament attack) is sought to be passed as violence done by Hindus/the government to defame Muslims. Lets have a string on Madhani by a fair and free media body and we will talk.
@SriniP: Could not agree with you more.
@Sourdough Pretzel: “Tautological errors” Where?
@Raj: Unfortunately, the biggest supporters of Sangh Parivar are in the US, with their flawed reading of Indian history.
The point being?
@Lalbadshah: “if this leads to a more concrete case and additional evidence against Modi, while also providing the voters of Gujurat stronger reasons to stop him from another term, why not?”
It does not provide any additional evidence against Modi. Not one scrap. Read the transcripts to be convinced —the people “stung” talk in vague philosophical terms of the emotional support provided by Modi.
@Kailas: Would disagree.
@100rabh: Thanks
@Akhil: Hmm
@Indiaholic: Hmm
@Anthony: 1. The nuclear deal was about energy security. It was not India requiring permission from US to acquire nuclear technology, it is India buying the nuclear technology from US or getting it from the nuclear suppliers group.
2. Indian foreign policy from the time of Nehru and his NAM (which no matter what one may think of today was once, with Nasser and Tito in its ranks, a powerful force in the world), the leaning towards Russia, the foreign policy debacles against China and Pakistan—-they all have been unduly influenced by the so-called “moderates”. India also had through russia a significant effect in Afghanistan during Najib’s time.
“As for your cheap shot on Sri Lanka, if you intend to evaluate India against the violent mess that is my beloved island, then you have resorted to the cheap retorts used by high-schoolers “dude you suck, well you suck more”
Aaah…now you are resorting to waah waah boo booos..ooh he abused me….
Here’s the deal. When you say “India is a country run by thugs, elected by the use of dumber thugs” about my country (note no use of sensationalist adjectives like “my beloved” ), do give me the right to retort without getting all sentimental about your beloveds. Please?
Noone here has any illusion about the readership of blogs in general and this blog in particular. The objective of a blog is to simply express myself–nothing more nothing less. And I do so without hidden agendas, without financial backings by certain entities and with an express intent to present both sides of the case, as best as I can (needless to say I have my biases too).
@Kartik: Indeed.
@Vaibhav: Whatever you say is true but let me disagree by saying that for those people who lost their lives or their families (and they may be a minuscule portion of the total population), Modi’s “transformation of lives” might hold a bit of unintentional irony.
“Frankly I would prefer a corrupt but pro-reformist and bold PV Narsimharav to honest but no-gooder Manmohan Singh”.
Agree. But not a communal person because a communal person takes lives. A corrupt person simply takes money, a money he recoups through his administrative prowess. While economically I am sure Gujarati Muslims are better off than Bengali Muslims (because Gujarat in general is economically better off than Bengal), dont you think that security of life and limb should also be a factor ?
@Mohan:
“A bit harsh on Tehelka, I thought.”
Ah well. The price one pays for being neutral. Here are a slew of comments saying how harsh I am being on Modi and there is you saying I am being harsh on Tehelka.
@///slash\
“If he was castigated and forced to resign or if presidents rule was imposed, there wouldn’t be such a hue and cry about what happened”
Agree.
And totally valid point about Abdul Naseer Madhani…
@Sriram: No of course not.
@TheWalker: Perhaps what ticked off people were the tautological errors.
@Hara Hara Bom Bom: The supposed imminent take-over by Zionists is what prompted the pogrom. The Jews had always been hated but not to that level.That was my point.
“When a community realises there is no one there to help them, after a reign after reign of terror, they will not prevent extremities perpetrated by members of their own community.”
Are you saying Gujarati Hindus in 2002 were under a reign of terror? Do you also realize that the line I quoted above is what every Kashmiri terrorist/politician says justifying the violence in Kashmir and what they export to other parts of the country. Every community feels, sometimes justifiably and sometimes not so, that there is noone to help them. The solution is not to go and kill other innocent people.
The foetus is important. Because when you try to justify communal violence as a reaction against oppressors, the image of the foetus becomes a potent one. Why? Cause it is impossible for someone to have been oppressed by a foetus. He can claim that a five year old Muslim boy hurled a bottle at him calling him a bloody Hindu. But not a foetus. And yet and yet a foetus is balanced on the edge of a sword !
If you feel someone is oppressing you, rise against that person—not someone who looks like him or carries the same surname.
I am sorry I just dont get this.
In any case, I think I have made my point and we shall have to agree to disagree.
Totally support your view point, every moment I see some excerpt about Gujarat riots in BBC or some western media I feel ashamed at myself for all that has happened. People like Modi don’t deserve the political position that they enjoy today and neither does Tehelka deserve any credit for their so called sting operation
I said this somewhere else, and I say it again on your blog: Forget Modi or anyone else. Nobody could have stopped the carnage after Godhra in Gujarat. Any attempt to do it would have resulted in years of violence between the two communities in Gujarat, with more people killed on either side of religion.
S
Modi is going to loose elections and the “sickular” brigade is going to jump in celebrations for years to come… as a victory of secularism over communal ism. (Although they would not agree that last time their “secularism” lost)
history is against modi as no one who worked for development has managed to win elections.
These are some of the things in which Modi brought about change by his personal hard work
1] the girl child school drop out rate dropped from 49% to 3% in 5 years in Gujarat. modi would personally go to villages and take his IAS officers and teams during summer vacations to live in villages, unlike some CMs who would rush to cooler Eurpoean nations to get more “FDIs”
2] He requested the Judiciary in Gujarat to work just half an hour more every day. In Gujarat the pending number of cases reduced drastically in 5 years (in millions). (Someone who knows how big this problem in india really is will appreciate this)
3] Within 1000 days of coming to power, Modi initiated a program to establish power in all villages of Guj. As a result while neighbouring Maharashtra reels under tremendous power problem where even cities and towns have power cuts, there is surplus power in Guj and 18000 villages have 24×7 power supply
4] Saurashtra region had a dismal record of droughts. 7 out 10 yrs would be drought affected. Modi initiated a water conservation scheme and (apart from taking an aggressive step on Naramada dam) now last 3-4 years villages in Saurashtra are actually enjoying a drought free period
This all won’t be reported in the mainstream media. You will have to go to Gujarat and personally see the change.
But he will still loose. And i hope he looses. Coz India does not deserve him. We deserve a lalu and a karunanidhi. we deserve a lame duck MMS and we deserve a useless family monarchy to rule us. B’coz , ya right, we are “sickulars”. The same sickular brigade that considers Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi as national heroes; 81,83,84,89 notwithstanding, will ALWAYS rule us. We need the Brown Sahibs and Gandhis – that’s what we deserve, We lesser mortals….
“As a country that comprises majority of Hindus,”
Helloooo, India is not a Hindu majority state. When you forcibly calculate dalits as Hindus your numbers will swell. Count only the Hindus and you are a minority. Why do you think Hindu domination never happened in India? Dalits, Xians, Muslims, Sikhs, Triabl non hindus etc together are the majority. So stop basking in your majority status.
A dalit.
Dear great bong…the blogosphere seems to be excited about the Tehelka sting, but you have proved that there is nothing new…majority on the one side and you proved them stupid and ignorant…once again you might win the best blog [or whatever], something like the one which you’ve showcased under ‘awards’ on your blog…my hearty congratulations in advance…
dear bong..like most people who’ve been criticising Tehelka, you are also ignorant of it’s work…nobody has done more on 84 riots than Tehelka..it never chased headlines and always tried to dig up issues which are away from the focus of the media…it’s sad that it doesn’t sell much and people don’t get to know unless it is as big as westend or gujarat…people only know it as tehelka.com [u, ofcourse, are slightly better informed]. Iam attaching all links, so now u can have a look and see what they thought about HKL Bhagat and co…See what they had to say about Manu Sharma of Jessica lall fame, son of a congress MP…read the editorials…everybody has their own political leanings..do you think mr tejpal is superhuman? Vinod Mehta loves to publish mails which call him sonia’s chamcha etc..and there is india today which distributes modi government’s CD…one doesn’t get to see any exclusive interviews by congress leaders for that matter…if they are doing so much for congress, why is congress not generous with interviews and exclusives, like it is with outlook…for many months wasn’t there a rumour that Tehelka is on the verge of closure. The bottom line is, everybody seems to know a lot about Tehelka, but nobody clearly does…
have a look at the following links…
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main14.asp?filename=ts100805the_ambushing_CS.asp
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main13.asp?filename=Ne082005we_the_bloody.asp
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main20.asp?filename=Ne100706killers_of_CS.asp
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main31.asp?filename=Ne070707bharats_CS.asp
The point you raised about self-serving groups projecting “minorities under attack” slogan to the West is very pertinent. Not only has it painted a pseudo-secular picture of us in the West but, also has hinted at tacit complicity of an entire nation sitting in denial of mass human rights violation in Gujrat. What aggravates the problem is the Judiciary and ‘N’ number of commissions set up to investigate the riots, its causes and culprits. The very realization that the perpetrators run free in Gujrat is both disturbing and intimidating.
@ hhbb:
I find it astounding that for someone who is always ready to quote the million year bloody history of Islam is so quick to ignore the fact that Christians were heavily persecuted by Jews in their initial years and more importantly, they killed Jesus Christ, for er.. christ’s sake!
so if we are to believe that Mahmud of Ahmadabad, 2007, is the same as Mahmud of Gazni, whenever he came to India, then surely, antisemitism has credible historical basis, especially given the almost apartheid state the Jews are running in Israel?
the fact is propaganda is propaganda, whether it is directed against Jews or Muslims. and almost always the precursor of pogroms.
Muslims are not a quarter of the spiteful people they are made out to be anymore than Jews are.
as regards your oft cited bangladesh massacre.. i would have said that there was a difference between India and theocracies. but after godhra there is none. and it seems now there is enough justification for Muslims there to retaliate against hindus.
the best part is that us psuedo-secularists are going to beat hindu right wingers on the head with this till eternity.
DESI MS grad works for facebook and drives a Jaguar
I am a dalit too…even vaishnavs, shavias, shaktas are not Hindus too.
heck try hard and you will see…nobody is a Hindu….
but someohow we all are Hindus…if we do not beleive in Christ as the son of God or Mohammad as his only prophet.
@ hhbb:
if you are so interested in the hindu rights (pun intended) movement you could do well to take a page out of Gandhi’s book on moral superiority (a man it seems you dislike intensely). and hindus lost that forever in Gujarat.
you guys, RSS, VHP, Tabligi-Jamaat, Muslim Brotherhood, Christain Evangalists, Aryan Nation, are all the same. all you want is bloodshed and violence to prove your ‘manhood’. be careful, women have already taken over Liberia..
@ modi was a great administrator:
this is the greatest ideological failing of the BJP and why the India Shining Campaign failed.
Economic justice without social justice means nothing to the people of india. nobody will accept any group, muslims included, to be relegated to second class citizenship.
anyways, if modi loses, it will be because the BJP worked against him. otherwise there is no reason why he shouldnt win again.
WTF wrote:
so if we are to believe that Mahmud of Ahmadabad, 2007, is the same as Mahmud of Gazni, whenever he came to India, then surely, antisemitism has credible historical basis, especially given the almost apartheid state the Jews are running in Israel?
Rishi’s response:
Look at the constitution of Israel and its civic structure. Look at the rights that Muslims have in Israeli society.
Compare that with the rights given to Jews (..or for that matter Hindus or people like Desi MS Grad works for facebook and drives a Porshe) in any Islamic country (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Kuwait..pick your choice).
Then tell me who is the culprit.
Mahmud of Ghazni and a Mahmud (from the Ahmedabad of 2007) are no different from each other….if they both believe that you and me are Kafirs and deserve to die for it, and if they are willing to act upon it.
To all:
The biggest culprit in Gujrat, responsible for Godhra and the subsequent riots, is the TABLIGHI JAMAAT.
Also responsible was the inability of the administrative machinery (including Narendra Modi’s) to counter them by using constitutional means.
Successive governments from as early as 1960s allowed the Tablighi Jamaat to educate the followers of Islam about its true message. According to the CBI (not considered Hindutva), most of the Ghanchi Muslim community and two of the main leaders in the Godhra carnage were from Tablighi Jamaat. Later BJP leader and Gujrat home minister Haren Pandya was murdered under the guidance of Maulana Sufian Patangia from the Waliullah Madrassah.
Visit any Muslim ‘Basti’ in Gujrat and you would have seen the control that TJ wielded over vast swathes of “sovereign Indian territory”. And this was not from today but from 1960s.
After working with different Sangh groups, I have realised that the rise of Hindutva in Gujrat has the been the direct result of the inability of the administrative and the political parties (including BJP) to contain Islamization.
Way before the BJP came to power, a visit to Godhra or Kalupura (Ahmedabad), or just a participation in the annual Jagannath Yatra, would have given you a exact pre-monition of what was to come. How a 10% Muslim minority can terrorise entire neighborhoods, is nothing new for many millions in India who live the so called “old” parts of major cities.
When a Hindu starts realizing that 99% of the riots are instigated by followers of Islam (even when they are just 10% of the population)and that inspite of his/her daughter being the victim of a acid attack, he will not be heard because he is not a Abdul or a Hamid, he will look for a person like me to carry his voice.
Be fair, use the same standard of judgement for everyone, and you will be surpised to see who all end up at the gallows before Modi does, or for that matter I do.
“”
Even though your writing is good, it will be better to edit it properly. I find lots of punctuation and tautological errors in your posts.
Keep in mind that online writing is all about Keeping it Short and Simple (KISS).
“”
This was written by some fake sourdough .. I (The Real Sourdough Pretzel) did not write it (you can probably make sure by looking up the IP, not that I care..) ..I in-fact do not think there are any tautological errors with your post …
@yourfan2
Well ..what you say is not Jihad then what else do you call it .. you talk about minimizing risks in the context of spilling blood of innocent Indians .. you justify it as a necessary evil ..what more reasons do you need !!
The kind of despicable torture I mentioned happened on a frequent basis in my hometown of Ahmedabad .. go watch the videos or read tehelka’s transcripts .. I am sure you think ..its a Congress Conspiracy ..and these were actors auditioning for a TV Series .. sure !! Sure a former MP being slaughtered in front of his family and then his daughters being stripped, raped, chopped up and thrown to the family pyre is all a fair game to you.. minimize the damm risk .. right ??
I never condoned the terrorist attacks by the Jihadists in India or elsewhere ..anybody who kills innocent people anywhere (including Afzal his co-horts, Khalid Shiek, Dawood Ibrahim, those AI Bombers in Canada, those Naxals who kill people on semi-daily basis, those Ulfa guerrilas, etc) ..needs a bullet in his head, period.
My Dad and my younger Bro served in 1 and 9 Para and took part in Op Bluestar and Kargil Mop-up respectively .. where unfortunately they both lost some of their best mates fighting terrorist scum (my Dad lost half of his unit that night) ..so Dont you dare question my patriotism, I stand by with them and I am proud and will be forever for what they did. When they fought terrorists along with their mates many of them were Sikh and a few Muslims..they did not think for a second .. that how do they trust their mates in combat, will they falter and not kill us instead .. No, they went as brothers and fought together ..
What “Direct Proof” will satisfy you and others?? You think you will see Modi crying his eyes out and asking for forgiveness .. you want Togadia to come say “Sorry, my Muslim brothers ..” come on man, you think we have had direct proof of anything in this country ??
I dont thinking Modi and his co-horts will ever be brought to justice .. and I dont expect anything to happen in this judicial system .. thats the way it is ..
I agree without a doubt in my head that there is a lot of hate in my home town and state, but hate for hate is not the solution .. it has never worked for anybody !! If Muslims tortured Hindus 100s of years ago .. our response now should not be to vie for their blood or be ok with their Mass Murder and term it as “Necessary Evil” ..
I find it hard to believe that we had Pro-Muslim governments .. !! I find that laughable ..In what ways were they Anti-Hindu, or Anti-Sikh or Anti-Christian..??
I am not a congress supporter or sympathizer either .. I like Manmohan’s economic policies .. but hate his soft ass attitude towards terrorists like Naxals, Ulfa and others .. and same goes for other leaders of different parties , I dont feel like voting for any one party, I like some policies from one, and dislike others .. and I think you would tend to think that as well ..
@Rishi
I know what you are talking about .. I have volunteered in the Juhapura for 2 years ..and I agree there is definite hate amongst many of the residents .. I have seen Pak Flags on so many doors, and one of the reason as you say is the Jamaat, but they are no better than Togadia’s group in Paldi, each vying for other’s blood ..
My concern is .. we did not do enough to protect innocent men, women and children .. many of the people I knew are gone forever .. I have not seen them again .. maybe they are safe in different town in a different city..
Sourdough pretzel wrote:
I dont thinking Modi and his co-horts will ever be brought to justice ..
Rishi’s response:
Yeah Modi should be brought to justice for being negligent in his administrative duties, but then again, the standard of judgegement that any impartial judicial system will use, will put almost every political leader in India in jail….beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru all the way to Manmohan.
Also, using the same standard of judgement that will be used to arrest all these Bajrang Dal leaders and Sangh ‘goons’, the Koran will have to be banned first, as ‘inflammatory literature’.
As Sangh ‘goon’, I am all for it.
Sourdough Pretzel wrote:
I find it hard to believe that we had Pro-Muslim governments .. !! I find that laughable ..In what ways were they Anti-Hindu…
Rishi’s response:
Wow…where do you want me to begin.
No -Uniform Civil Code…Shah Bano…Haj Subsidy….state sponsored Ijtemas….
@ sourdough pretzel.
Thanks for agreeing with me. Yeah..you are right Juhapura and Bapunagar….man…and they were in ‘secular’ India..what a joke.
@ WTF : “Christians were heavily persecuted by Jews in their initial years”
Please provide historical reference of anti-Christian pogroims in Israel. Or in any Sephardic or Askhenazy region for that matter.
“more importantly, they killed Jesus Christ, for er.. christ’s sake!”
Actually, the Romans killed him. (I like your pun 🙂 )
“especially given the almost apartheid state the Jews are running in Israel?”
The aparthed state Israel is ‘forced’ to run in this manner precisely because they are like a tiny pin floating is an ocean of fervent, rabid fanatic states keen to obliterate them at the drop of a hat.
“Muslims are not a quarter of the spiteful people they are made out to be anymore than Jews are”.
Too right! They are a lot more than that !! 🙂 [that’s a joke]
Muslim hate against Hindus and resultant Hindu distrust if Muslims are miles apart.
The former blindly believes in its religious duty to wipe us off the face of the earth. And they have amply proved many a time their zeal to do so.
The latter is a sad but inevitable resultant safeguard against the former. The Hindu motto is “Ayam nijo, param iti, ganona laghuchaitasam. Udaar charitanaam tu, Vasudhaive kutumbakam”. Translates as “This is mine, that is yours, are calculations of lower consciousness. For ye, whose very character is liberalism, the world is your family”
Alas, a bloodthirsty 1,500 years, unabated even today, is preventing us from exercising our liberalism.
Hindu antipathy will evaporate the very day anti-Hindu jihadiocides halt. People are looking at the wrong place to fix the problem.
@ Sourdough Pretzel : “My concern is .. we did not do enough to protect innocent men, women and children .. many of the people I knew are gone forever .. I have not seen them again”
Sourdough, you are absolutely right. None of us are gleeful of what happen. It breaks my heart to think of :
(a) The 57 Hindus burnt alive for no reason at all
(b) The resultant Hindu fury that killed 700 innocent Muslims
(c) The concommitant Muslim butchery that murdered 200 Hindus.
However, unless the ‘religion of peace’ sheds its brutal and barbaric medieval hatred for Hindus, such tragedies will not cease.
You cannot expect one party to consistently fight dirty, and the other to adopt Gandhian stoicism. Sooner or later, the victims will pay the perpetrators back in their own coin.
The USA incinerated 100s of thousands in atom bombs. The Soviets massacred millions of innocent Germans. Yet axis crimes are correctly held in far greater abhorrance. Not only because of numbers, but because they started the terror. They should be prepared for the consequences.
One very interesting thing for me from this Tehexpose, is the fact that the burning of Hindus was done by Muslim mobs at the spur of the moment, completely uninstigated by any terrorist rhetoric or leaders. Is this the unmasking of the real face of the community? That they hate Hindus so intensely that they will throng in thousands to burn Hindu children alive at the drop of a hat?
Hindus should take note of this.
@Rishi
No-uniform civil code and Shah Bano .. Yes they are a shame in our constitution …but how are .. anti-hindu ??
I am not 100% sure about Haj Subsidies .. yes you can say “why dont I get discounts to travel to Amarnath or Jagannath Puri ..” but I dont have a firm opinion on that .. I think subsidy should be based on your economic standing .. not on your religion ..MHO …
@ rishi khujur:
10% of the population terrorized the rest? the only recourse left was to riot?
i’m extremely sorry for your pathetic justifications for a state sponsored genocide. im sure pakistanis and bangladeshis did better when they were wiping hindus out. as i have already pointed out, rioting against Muslims only strengthens Jinnah’s hands even in his grave.
i am more than aware of the intellectual atmosphere of brainwashing/opposition to dissent that is happening in Gujarat (if a person opposes the Narmada Dam proposing check dams as more environmentally viable he is branded as a traitor). Not to mention how artists and writers are being persecuted in the state.
and if you think that romans killed jesus christ please go research the role of pontius pilate and how the the orders to kill jesus as a heretic were passed..please look up ‘persecution of early Christians by jews’ on wikipedia otherwise you will hit neo-nazi websites (which for you should be inspirational reading).
the tolerance of hinduism was on full display in gujarat for the whole world to see just as it was in 1984 in Delhi. like i said, we have lost the moral authority to distinguish ourselves from blood thirsty religions.
please feel free to quote from koran to at anytime to contradict this. and pat yourself on the back for restoring hindu pride.
@ WTF
First of all…when a 10% minority(followers of Islam) starts the riots and causes 30% of the casualty, YOU DONT CALL IT A STATE SPONSORED GENOCIDE. But semantics aside, it didnt need Gujrat riots to streghten anybody hand in any grave. I think you missed the post I wrote about Tablighi Jamaat and its control over Muslimsin Gujrat since the 60s.
lol…I was waiting when you would be bringing in artistic freedom and Narmada. Though both are totally unrelated, the transcend Gujrat and political discourse.
Hey..i give a damn about who killed Jesus Christ…so dont direct that answer to me.
Your moral authority to distinguish yourself from bloodthirsy religions (as you admit), does not help if you yourself dont survive to wield and propagate that authroity.
Go to Noakhali and Lyallpur and see how many Hindus are surviving and exercising their moral authority as suggested by the Father of the Nation.
WTF wrote:
please feel free to quote from koran to at anytime to contradict this. and pat yourself on the back for restoring hindu pride.
Rishi’s response
Well when you cannot respond…you aske me to pat myself on the back..comon come and do it yourself.
) Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4536199.stm
According to the official report on the Gujarat 2002 riots published by the Indian Government and declared on record by the Junior Home Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal in the Indian parliament: “790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed, 223 more people reported missing and another 2,500 injured.”
Since 25% to 30% of the dead civilians were Hindus who were massacred by Muslims (who constitute just 10% of the population), then Gujarat-2002 can be termed a genocide OF the Hindus BY the Muslims.
2) Looking at the “interviews” made in the Tehelka sting, it makes me sad to see that an increasing number of Hindus are realizing that the only way to deal with Islamic violence is to retaliate in the same fashion. After 13 centuries of surviving Islamic Jihad, some of the surviving Hindus have begun to respond in a similar vein – often mirroring the Quranic edicts of burning, killing and raping non-Muslims.
It is my observation that the revengeful Hindu mobs in Gujarat have learnt in text-book style how to reciprocate Jihadi attacks in the same way :
– impaling a Hindu foetus and newborn babies was displayed amply at Lala Moosa in Punjab(Source: http://voi.org/books/mla/ )
– burning Hindus alive en masse was taught well at Godhra;
– gang-raping Hindu women in the thousands was perfected at Noakhali in East Bengal (Source: ttp://www.bengalvoice.org/uproot_menu.htm )
– slicing Hindu women into half with a chain saw in a wood-mill starting with their genitals and slowly moving upwards to their heads was perfected in Srinagar (Read more about the nurse Sarla Bhatt’s fate in: http://www.kashmir-information.com/pastpresent/chapter19.html )
The Hindus learn quickly, it seems sadly. Some Hindus seem to have realized that the “Golden Rule” works both ways- “Do onto others what they do unto you”. When you respond to the other’s barbaric attack on your women and children by giving them a taste of their own medicine, the “other” will feel the same pain that he inflicted on you.
Not a civilized response at all.
3) In terms of scale, the Gujarat-wide retaliation for the Godhra barbecue was quite muted when you compare the death toll of Hindus running in the hundreds of thousands, the numbers of Hindu refugees running in the millions from Bangladesh and Kashmir. Interestingly, there is no media interest in either genocides nor any worldwide interest in hearing the heartrending stories of the refugees huddled in abysmal conditions at Sealdah and Misriwala.
Interestingly, if the “peaceful” Kashmir Hindus or the Bangladeshi Hindus had adopted the same “tit-for-tat” Quranic tactics against their “Ongoing Silent Genocide”, the world might have taken notice of them and highlighted their plight prominently in the media. But since these cultured people refused to be uncultured or believe in the survival of the fittest, they will quietly vanish into the night, without a whimper.
Andalusian,
The correct website URL for your point on “gang-raping Hindu women in the thousands was perfected at Noakhali in East Bengal” is actually:
http://www.bengalvoice.org/uproot_menu.htm
Hujur
basic point: there is no difference between hindus and muslims. both will kill each other if the state is prepared to look the other way.
im sorry rishi but all your great distinctions on the basis of studying the koran and islamic history are complete rubbish.
hate to quote marx but this kind of stuff just proves that man needs religion like a fish needs a bicycle. it makes you question the connection between spiritualism and religion as identity.
and sorry.. the comment about jesus was directed at hhbb. im an expert at directing my comments at the wrong person. sorry again.
clarification:
For all your truck about Hindu tolerance, we got a glimpse in Gujarat had India chosen to be Hindu theocracy. the term i like is Hindu Pakistan. As a hindu, the RSS and VHP will speak for me over my dead body.
gb: Just because others incorrectly accuse you of being harsh on Modi, it doesn’t mean you are not harsh on Tehelka.
@ rishi khujur
“But somehow we are all hindus”
Aryan chauvinism at its best!!! Sorry dude I rather believe in Christ as son of God than the Aryan foreigner Ram and his foreign religion.
Well said greatbong! Tehelka in my view is nothing more than a glorified tabloid. I have never been much impressed by the magazine’s claim towards fair and courageous journalism.
Well , if Tarun Tejpal had any sense , he would not have named his magazine Tehelka . The name itself sprouts sensastionalism, so you can’t accept more from the publication.
@Dravidian
pls change your moniker (that sounds as if you represent all South Indians). As a dravidian I did not like it.
‘guess you are a little slow on the uptake to comprehend what rishi khujur is trying to say. Hinduism is different from any other religion in the sense that its more of a collection of rituals, practices and beliefs. That is what common between an urban Hindu and a tribal.
Thanks for reading this, you may now continue believing in the son of god, who for you is not a foreigner but Ram is.
@ Dravidian
for more clarity, read a “Hindu” as any native of India who does not practice a structured religion like Islam, Christianity or Buddhism
@Pretzel-
“Well ..what you say is not Jihad then what else do you call it .. you talk about minimizing risks in the context of spilling blood of innocent Indians .. you justify it as a necessary evil ..what more reasons do you need !”
Did I ever say ‘spilling blood’? I was saying that parties like Congress who indirectly aid and abet terrorism by turning a blind eye to burgeoning terrorist organizations, by mollycoddling Muslims because of vote banks, and parties like CPM who are encouraging illegal immigration and thereby abetting terrorist infiltration, are putting a majority of people in this country at ‘risk’. In the absence of a true religion neutral party at the center, it is therefore necessary for the CM of a state to send a message to the Muslims of his state- “I wont mollycoddle you. If you try any bullshit in this state, then don’t expect a Sonia Gandhi like treatment.” This is precisely where he is ‘negative correlated’ to the Congress and the Left. Now you are saying that he took this to an extreme and was personally responsible for each and every violent retaliatory killings. I am saying to you that had a different CM been at power, the result would not have been much different. So negatively correlated doesn’t mean violent killings, it means no special favor or mollycoddling for Muslims. This means no indirect abetting of infiltration, indoctrination, proliferation of terrorist camps and madrasas and other instruments of hate. So it does minimize the ‘risk’ I had talked about. My belief in this theory has been strengthened by the fact that there are no out of the blue instances of Hindu inflicted hate killings of Muslims, barring instances of retaliation.
You yourself acknowledge that there is a lot of latent hatred in Gujrat. Do you think that if Modi was not at power, these would have remained bottled after Godhara? Also let me tell you that this anti muslim thing you saw amongst Gujrati Hindus was more of a defense mechanism.
As HHBB said, “Hindu antipathy will evaporate the very day anti-Hindu jihadiocides halt. People are looking at the wrong place to fix the problem.”
And Rishi has already answered your “justice to Modi” and “pro- Muslim” party questions.
“I am not a congress supporter or sympathizer either .. I like Manmohan’s economic policies .. but hate his soft ass attitude towards terrorists like Naxals, Ulfa and others .. and same goes for other leaders of different parties , I dont feel like voting for any one party, I like some policies from one, and dislike others .. and I think you would tend to think that as well ..”
Yes, but I would still vote rather than not. Even some people of US have a conundrum when choosing between the 2 parties. If you support the fiscal policies of the one party, you cannot support other types of policies, say on religion or environment. Voting at some level is eventually based on local politics and personal benefits and beliefs.
Also astonishing is the effort of certain commentators to quote 1 /2 instances and saying -“There is no religion of hate. Everybody has hit back at some time or other. So there is no point in saying that this religion breeds hatred towards non-believers etc”. Well well well…but what about frequency and the impetus? An impetus which dishs out violence to non-believers is starkly different from impetus resulting from self-defence and retaliation.
Rishi’s comment, “Mahmud of Ghazni and a Mahmud (from the Ahmedabad of 2007) are no different from each other….if they both believe that you and me are Kafirs and deserve to die for it, and if they are willing to act upon it”, is a very deep observation.
Dear Arnab,
I would have to disagree with you as far as the importance of the sting operation on the post Godhra riots. We all know that Narendra Modi tacitly supported the rioters at the time. But sometimes, knowledge of an issue is not good enough. We all know that our politcians are corrupt or that there is global warming or we are all going to die but what the hell do we care? If these Tehelka tapes are proved to be genuine and if the confessions of the alleged rioters are found to be voluntary, then it is admissible in a court of law as evidence. An application for the consideration of these tapes have already been made. Let us atleast wait for the Court’s perusal of the same before we dismiss this whole sting as a gimick.
Whether Tehelka is CIA (Congress Investigative Agency), as the BJP claims, whether they were paid off by some political party, whether the timing was right or not or whether this is sensationalism at its best are secondary issues in this case. Which media organisation is not governed by extraneous concerns today? What is important is that whether the perpetrators of such gruesome violence, Hindus or Muslims will be punished? You might call Tehelka sensational etc but you cannot dismiss the fact that it is probably India’s only mainstream public interest magazine and God knows, it has paid it’s dues for caring!
@ yourfan2:
“I am saying to you that had a different CM been at power, the result would not have been much different.”
what are you smoking? please email me the number of your dealer.
Excellent writing GB. Please post this to Tehelka site.
Dravidian wrote:
Aryan chauvinism at its best!!! Sorry dude I rather believe in Christ as son of God than the Aryan foreigner Ram and his foreign religion.
rishi’s response:
I know you already believe in a Middle eastern gentleman as the son of God and consider Ram a foreigner.
Fine with that…to each our own. But do not bull***t using names like Dravidian and Dalit.
WTF wrote:
basic point: there is no difference between hindus and muslims. both will kill each other if the state is prepared to look the other way.
Rishi’s response:
Wrong sir…and we have discussed the discrepancy of this generalization from you many times before in Arnab’s earlier articles. Please refer to our previous conversations.
WTF wrote:
As a hindu, the RSS and VHP will speak for me over my dead body.
Rishi’s resonse:
🙂 As a person from the VHP/RSS I can say we will be the last to speak over your dead body…god forbid that ever happens. Take a chill pill….save your passion for doing something positive.
@Rishi: oops incase you forgot, we Dravids/Dalits have a voice now and we are raising it. It hurts huh? Too bad. It wont take you long to get over your high Aryan horse. We will pull you down anyways. Ram setu was the first blow. More cometh Aryaputra :p
dravidian
🙂
am all with u
@ Har Har Bom Bom
Was reading your comment from Nov 2, 2:12 pm.
Interesting comment of the cause/effect issues.
Chuikov (Stalingrad), Zukhov (Berlin)…Eichmann vs Harris…man…. you put the entire WW2 Europe on the table.
Sometimes, I wonder what Mahatma Gandhi would have done when faced with Paulose’s army in his own home.
It is unfortunate that humanity stares down such a scourge in Islam, that you have to invoke some of the most painful and horrific events of the past century (battle of Stalingrad), to drive home the concise message of India’s past millenium.
In today’s world, with short attention spans, some foreigners not even knowing which part of the globe India is, some of them unable to perceive the gravity of the violence perpetuated against sections of people, what can a person with at least a little bit of boldness to tell the world of these crimes do? If it is our own brothers or sisters that have been butchered and above all if you are not able to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice, then what else can people like Shabnam Hashmi do other than try to hit below the belt (even below the spot where Modi hit), what can she do other than to create associations to hitler or to highlight the persecution of Jews. There’s no difference between a person who died in the holocaust and a close relative who was a victim in these kind of engineered riots, because ultimately the individuals just suffered and died and are forever lost to their families. And for these families, the association is obvious and not created to make hype about it and to put in a PowerPoint presentation. They just see it as nazis swooping upon their mothers and sisters and being gassed (by gas cylinders in this case) and they just convey it to those people who are ready to listen to them. It’s like a horror movie that you saw yesterday and today’s death of close person due to an accident getting juxtaposed in your dream. Anyways I cannot find any difference between Nazi Storm troopers and RSS Men. The only reason people cannot fathom the similarity is just because they have not yet seen RSS men getting a leader like hitler. In future, if Modi or Karunanidhi becomes the PM and his men are in absolute control, will they men not behave like nazis? Or does everyone need to wait and see it to believe it and by then nothing could be done.
EMC3
Let us look fairly at Islam and RSS
Compare both with Nazis….honestly.
You will find that Islam is much closer to Nazism than RSS can ever be.
And as for Shabnam Hashmi comparing everyone to Hitler (Modi, Vajpayee advani ..etc etc)…they do it because thats what their sponsors (like PD John) tell them to do.
In the West, for doing propaganda, the best way to defame someone is to call them ‘Nazis’. Since most Westerners are suspicious of Islam itself in the first place (and rightfully so), the best way to defame Hindu revivalism is to compare it with the N word and you are sure to grab western attention.
I invite you to a detailed comparitive analysis between the Nazi ideology, Islam and Hindutva. Let do a Doodh ka doodh and pani ka pani 🙂
Of course Islam is much closer to Nazism than RSS can be and I am not disputing it. What i am telling is that those people who are directly affected by such violence will not be ranking which ideology is the worst or try to see where Hindutva stands compared to Islam. And when they see all their peaceful candle light protests or an article in the papers doesn’t make any impact because of the earlier mentioned reasons such as people having no time to stop and see what’s happening to others, what else can they do other than trying to somehow desperately highlight their plight? For instance, let’s swap Hashmi to a muslim girl whose entire family was wiped out and no PD John for her. If she in her shock and despair compare Vajpayee to hitler, do you empathize with her or do you think about how close is Vajpayee’s ideology to hitler’s? Or is it the fact that “there was someone like PD John to fund” someone like Hashmi who wants to convey to the world and let it be known what really happened in this country of ours that is worrying you? Or is it the fear that some Christians are trying to suppress the revival of Hinduism? Instead the focus should have been only on the ultimate outcome of all this, that is the violence and untold misery that was caused to the people. It is irrelevant if some one had supported, funded or has hidden agenda. The truth is that crime happened and it has to be told in such a way that people should notice. And the tools used such as associations to hitler is not something that was far or entirely opposite to the truth of what happened. She had quoted only Modi, Advani and Vajpayee and we all know that all of them were involved in one way or the other in this pogrom (unlike what Arnab told about Vajpayee that he had nothing to do with the riots. He was the PM then who had the power and ultimate responsibility to stop that flagrant breakdown of law and order. He initially expressed his solidarity for what the VHP and RSS had done and did not visit Gujarat for more than a month after Godhra and when he visited, he first visited Godhra expressing his solidarity with the Hindus. Does he need to be among the rioters and at the time of the riots to prove that he was also involved?).
EMC 3 wrote
Of course Islam is much closer to Nazism than RSS can be and I am not disputing it.
Rishi’s response:
THANKS for that honest response.
EMC 3 wrote:
What i am telling is that those people who are directly affected by such violence will not be ranking which ideology is the worst or try to see where Hindutva stands compared to Islam.
Rishi’s response:
You are wrong dear EMC3.
Nearly 70% of the Muslims of Gujrat consider the ideology of Islam supreme and consider Hindu Kafirs worthy of death or conversion. The resultant of this belief could be seen in the Godhra , where the average Muslim civilian could embark on a orgy of murder…. uninstigated.
Yes, of course, when the same Salima or Tabassum was at the recieving end of a revengeful Hindu’s sword, she was not thinking of the same things…. but then again, nor was Eva Braun when she a few hundred yards from the advancing Russians, and she was biting that cyanide capsule.
EMC3 wrote:
And when they see all their peaceful candle light protests or an article in the papers doesn’t make any impact because of the earlier mentioned reasons such as people having no time to stop and see what’s happening to others, what else can they do other than trying to somehow desperately highlight their plight?
Rishi’s response:
Trust me I understand the feeling.
Its the same feeling I get when I see people like you howling for the 5 thousand Muslims refugees of Ahmedabad living in camps for 5 months, BUT REFUSING TO SPARE A MINUTES EFFORT FOR THE 5 HUNDRED thousand KASHMIRI HINDUS living in refugee camps for 15 years.
Trust me I understand the feeling.
Its the same feeling that I get when I see people like you howling for those dozen lives of Gulbarga society, but refusing to spare a dime for the 1/2 a million Hindus of Bangladesh who are kicked out of their homes every year.
And trust me….it makes me sad and more resolved…way more than people like Shabnam Hashmi and their rich sponsors.
EMC 3 wrote:
Or is it the fact that “there was someone like PD John to fund” someone like Hashmi who wants to convey to the world and let it be known what really happened in this country of ours that is worrying you?
Rishi’s response:
Oh it worries me a lot my friend. It worries me a a lot because of the fact that Shabnam Hashmi and her likes have more support in the pseudo-secular country of India than anywhere else in the world and still they traverse the world using Evangelist money doing… you know what.
By using the same logic that you used, you should have no problem if tomorrow Shabnam Hashmi travels to Islamabad and asks Musharraf to send his jihadis to kill Hindutva people. As a extension of the same logic you should also not have a problem in me ordering consignments of automatic rifles, so that the so called ‘pogroms’ can actually be called “progroms’ the next time it happens.
EMC 3 wrote:
The truth is that crime happened and it has to be told in such a way that people should notice.And the tools used such as associations to hitler is not something that was far or entirely opposite to the truth of what happened.
Rishi’s response:
Yes, every human life lost is a loss and every one killed in a riot is loss to India . But if truth has to be told IT HAS TO BE TOLD IN ITS ENTIRITY.
If you want to honestly talk about similarity to Hitler, begin by FIRST admitting the role of Islam (which you later admit anyway..thankfully) in turning places like Gomptipur, Bapunagar, Kalupur and Juhapura in mini-Jihadistans from past past many decades.
If you want to honestly talk of Modi, Advani and Vajpayee and prove them guilty by distant association, THEN talk about how the entire Muslim socio-political consciousness of India is way more guilty by the same standard of association.
If you are really honest in looking at the issue, and spent the time to understand the issues involved, you would have been baying for the blood of Tabhlighi Jamaat and not the VHP.
But you and people like you didnt do that, since the 1960s. In those few weeks in Gujrat, the Hindus decided to borrow a leaf or 2 from the tree of Islam and gave them a taste of their own flavor.
If you wanna change things, cut the tree, not the leaves. Do what you need to do to bring ‘justuce’ to the Muslims in Gujrat. Write to me and I can help you do the same for the Hindus of Bangladesh.
rishi_khujur@rediffmail.com
Ok theres a lot of discussion on Gujrat. I would like to bring attention to another tinderbox waiting to explode, our very own WEST BENGAL.
In the past 30 odd years millions of muslim Bangladeshis have occupied Indian territory illegaly on our side of the border and changed the demographics. This deadly infiltration continues to this day.
I know people who are actively working against it at the grassroots level. This is literally a death match being fought at every level between Bengali Hindus and the muslim infiltrators each and every day.
If anyone wants to help, email me at:
shourideb12@yahoo.com
or call me on 61 – 402925756
Help can be in terms of getting a website prepared to focus on this problem, helping with contacts, financial help, direct volunteer kind etc….up to u
Hey Shourideb:
Sent you a email.
it makes such lovely reading..
educated people justifying riot, rape and murder on the basis of retributive justice. that too for events across the border.
i suppose we should make an amendment to the CrPC and allow honour killings next and probably dispense with the presumption of innocence from the Constitution. heck! let’s just declare its the medieval age all over gain!
this is a low point of public discourse if there ever has been one.
for all the muslims in india who want to kill kafirs and kafirs who want to return the favour with interest let me just tell you that we too are waiting for you with our weapons, the rule of now and then law, due sometime soon process, our heavily biased media, jail ki kadi hawa and the hangman’s noose. don’t worry you will get a fair trial. especially if you have political contacts. doesnt work half the time but on the off chance, it does, you’re going to find yourself in serious trouble- kanoon ke haath lambe hote hai!
and dear mister khujur,
the guruji, mr. gowalkar openly professed that there was lesson for hindus to learn from nazis about taking a stand on how two cultures or languages cannot be the basis for one country (supporting hindi and hinduism). he later withdrew this praise of nazis and supported the creation of isreal but he stuck to his guns on the one culture/religion/language theory though.
the reduction of any public debate to a comparison to nazis and hitler is internationally recognized as the poorest form of logic so much so that it now constitutes a logical fallacy. so dont worry about it too much.
so let me just say the imposition of sinhala tore sri lanka apart just the way the the impositon of urdu played a major part in tearing bangladesh away from west pakistan. on the other hand, india is going great guns without any imposition of religion or language. in fact, many would say its survived balkanization (especially in the south) because of that.
mr. gowalkar was proved to be the idiot he was. i take the liberty of saying this considering the man whose murder he bears responsibility for, mr. gandhi, has received high praise in this comment thread.
yeah yeah.. i know.. the RSS had nothing to do with it.
p.s. you wont find Islam going on about Aryan pride. genocide.. oh yes!
p.p.s i have read your distinctions between Islam and the VHP/RSS with great interest. uh… just a thought..in case i haven’t said it before.. all you guys are the SAME!
@ wtf
as expected, you diversify into Hindi and Aryan…
and as for your comment, “you’re going to find yourself in serious trouble- kanoon ke haath lambe hote hai”
I wish the long hands catch up with Afzal some day…
GB,
An excellent post! Very ‘honestly’ written.
These days it has become very difficult to have a different opinion on the issues related to minorities – whether it’s US or India. Anybody not taking side of minority, even if it’s, in fact, a correct and just stance, becomes an easy target.
It’s really a courageous post!
There is no reason to exonerate Modi, and judicial process should continue on him. But, there is no doubt in my mind that this sting is directed to influence Gujarat elections.
As they aired this story on CNN-IBN, I could not stop writing about this whole set-up. I wrote a small piece on it, but it was not as elaborate and well researched and explained as this one.
http://thefirstpuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/they-want-gujrat-by-hook-or-by-crook.html
@Rishi:
“Its the same feeling I get when I see people like you howling for the 5 thousand Muslims refugees of Ahmedabad living in camps for 5 months, BUT REFUSING TO SPARE A MINUTES EFFORT FOR THE 5 HUNDRED thousand KASHMIRI HINDUS living in refugee camps for 15 years.”
You have already pre-assumed that i am a Muslim and also assumed that I cry howl “only” when the Muslims suffer !!
I think i need to explain (otherwise most of them nowadays assume one thing or the other and then all their discussions are focussed from this presumption)..—To tell you the truth i can only see the horrors and the trauma that the mothers will be undergoing when their daughters are raped and cut into pieces in front of them. I don’t see them as Hindu mothers and Muslim mothers. I see the death of Rizwan, Jessica Lall, Bhopal gas tragedy, Uphaar theatre deaths, Iraq, vietnam, cambodia, russia school and farmers suicide as same. If writing to you to bring justice to muslims in Gujarat helps in bringing justice to the Hindus in Bangladesh, then that is also a good thing for me. Atleast it helped another set of human beings in misery. But i also have second thoughts in writing to you because in working with a polarised person, i may have to turn my face from the actions/inaction that you may take when it comes to muslims. Probably, this is what could have happened to Vajpayee. His visions were contrary to the set of polarised persons that he was working with and ultimately he also had to take part in their barbaric actions.
@ rishi:
you can be dismissive about my point about linguistic diversity but it underscores how the ideologue of one-culture is failing internationally to keep nation states together.
and once the point about language stands, religion is not very far off.
last time i checked, afzal guru was convicted and sentenced to death. also, if i am not mistaken there is nothing illegal about a person convicted to death asking the President for clemency on humanitarian grounds. the last guy to be executed in west bengal, dhanonjoy, a rapist who brutally raped and killed (breaking several bones of the girl) applied for clemency.
it just seems to me that someone fucked up big time by letting a plane get hijacked and then capitulated letting india’s most dangerous terrorist out of jail who later planned the parliamentary attack. i could ask if this what you mean being tough on terror is but i really have a very poor opinion of your ability to answer questions without a pro-hindu bias.
EMC3 wrote:
You have already pre-assumed that i am a Muslim and also assumed that I cry howl “only” when the Muslims suffer !!
Rishi’s response:
No where did I claim that you are a Muslim. Yes I did claim that you response to suffering is communal and baised in favor of victims who follow Islam, based on one of you previous responses to me.
As I have said before, all suffering is despicable, but if you think thank Bhopal tragedy and Gujrat riots are one and the same, then I am sorry to say, that your response will not be more than the ‘candle light vigils’ than you felt were so inadequate.
And yes, do show the neutrality by helping out the Hindus in Bangladesh.
“at one end you have a bunch of killers who consider themselves as modern day Rana Prataps and at the other you have a group of publicity-hounding opportunists (who also would like you to believe that they are selfless crusaders) seeking to gain political and often pecuniary advantage”
If this is your summary – the choice should be rather obvious. Give me the opportunists any time who I can face and live through the experience – if only to write a blog about it later.
Gujarat riots, everyone agrees, was a blot on a peaceful, civilized nation like ours. People killing each other is not something anyone can justify. The perpetrators have to be punished. But when you point fingers at someone you have to get your facts right. For example, when you look at some of the points made by ‘secular’ media against Modi, they seem to be correct in indicting him. But on verification, these ‘facts’ appear to be blatant lies.
Please read the following to get your facts right.
http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2007/11/exposing-communists-and-fifth.html
Here are the March 1st, 2nd 2002 editions of The Hindu that is referenced there.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/03/01/stories/2002030103030100.htm
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/03/02/stories/2002030203050100.htm
About Hindu casualties in the riots
http://indiaview.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/the-myth-and-truth-of-godhra/
I have posted a few other links in my following post:
http://guruwrites.blogspot.com/2007/11/lesser-known-truths.html
@Rishi Khujur:
I had avoided commenting on this thread for obvious reasons, but I have to say that you give the definite impression that either you were there in Gujarat participating in the murders with relish, or you would have dearly loved to be.
And on top of that I get the distinct feeling you will take that first paragraph as a compliment.
ha ha..every party in india has somethng shameful to hide..but the electrol system of India is such that those things are fast forgotten..I am yet to know any state in India putting 1000 rupees in fixed deposit for 21 years against a newly born girl child in BPL family irrespective of caste and religion..gujrat has done that..well that is smart isn’t it..who bothers about tehlka..cheers.
@ Shan
You are free to jump to any conclusion. Its on expected lines.
Would have enjoyed debating with you nevertheless, had you written some cooments.
I was not in Gujrat, but many people I know were.
Hindu Hater shan rears *******[edited out due to profanity]
??? why invectives…cousin debika.
@ Shan
welcome back…
“When Shakti Kapoor was revealed to be a lecherous casting couchsurfer, was anyone really surprised?”
The objective of this sting was to bring out evidence, not to entertain us like a thriller flick.
Agreed that this evidence is not acceptable in the court of law, so what exactly is a journalist supposed to do ? You have your blogs, they have their stings.
While on this topic, maybe you can read through this post by Sandeep. I think it raises quite a few pertinent points. Any answers Messrs Shan, WTF, etc. Hope you do. Else everything you said is just bought off mainstream media without thinking.
http://www.sandeepweb.com/2007/11/05/none-to-mourn-dead-hindus/#more-973
@ kannan:
quoting your cited article and its basic premise:
“The fact that no riot or incident of mass violence can occur in a vacuum”
having worked extremely closely in the 1984 anti-sikh riots i can tell you one thing.. the fact is that in India no riot or incident of mass violence takes place without the active support of state administrations.
the fact that the police were under orders to do nothing is evident from the fact that hindus who called up for help when attacked by muslims were ignored.
when anyone supports political causes on the the basis of religious identity you are voting stupidly.
excuse me if that is a view “bought of mainstream media without thinking” or “anti-hindu”.
Thanks for the answer, WTF
So basically the 1992 Riots in Mumbai had the “active support of state administration”? Or was it Shiv Sena, which was not itn power which did it?
1984 has active support of the Central Government? Gujrat 2002 had the active support of the State Government?The figures for those and the break up of the same might answer this
How many Sikhs died in 1984 due to a) Police firing B)pure riots
How many others (it was not a hindu v/s sikh riot) died in 1984 due to a) police firing b) Pure riots
And I might need some help on this
“the fact that the police were under orders to do nothing is evident from the fact that hindus who called up for help when attacked by muslims were ignored”
So Hindus were attacked by Muslims? They called up the police for help and the administration just stood by watching? Am i correct in understanding your statement above? What it means is the police were under orders by the Government to do nothing no matter if it was hindus or muslims calling for help. Which means the religious identity of the person being killed did not matter. Which probably means it was criminal neglect of the Gujrat Government which lead to Hindus and Muslims being killed. No group was supported actively. Sorry am getting in to circular loop here. Please help me out. Did the government let the muslims to die at the hands of the HIndus or did they just ppl die irrespective of anything.
Also one more point which you might like to look at.
The army is called in on 28th Feb 2002, the next day itself. So was the army incompetent to let the blood flow the way it did?
I am not defending Modi. I am asking for the same standard of judgement. If Modi was wrong, so were the COngress Governments in power in 1992 and 1984 (Not Shiv Sena in 1992 in that case).
Hope you can help me sort out my confusion here.
@Kannan:
Your basic problem is that you automatically assume that everyone who holds a position that does not align with your is binary i.e. if they oppose Modi, they must be supporting the Congress. But I am not surprised because “with us or against us”, as made famous by another rightwinger George Bush, is a common position taken by most fundamentalists, especially of the religious kind.
Modi is obviously guilty of aiding, abetting, and condoning murder. If you can’t see the obvious, there is nothing more to say. But does this mean that Tytler, Bhagat etc. are innocent? Of course not. They might be equally guilty, and if technology were as advanced then as it is now, there might have been sting operations against them as well. That that would have served then right. In any case, they don’t deserve to be roaming the streets free men. But because they happen to be free, should be spare other subsequent rioters as well? Or Modi for that matter, and perpetuate the unfairness. Of course not. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Nothing can justify murder of innocents. Not history of oppression, not history of loot and pillage, not reverse discrimination. Nothing. Is that so difficult to understand?
Please realize that MOST rational people (and I exclude the one-sided apologists-for-terror like Mulayam Singh and Arundhati Roy) would rather that ALL fundamentalists were gone from the face of the earth. That would include belligerent Imams, vicious Maoists/Naxalites, and murderous Modi supporters.
That’s all.
Thanks Shan for the answer and the polemic.
I am still a bit confused. (Obviously I am not rational being an assumed rightwinger et all, but a little help from you would definitely help me out, I am sure)
This is the question
“The army is called in on 28th Feb 2002, the next day itself. So was the army incompetent to let the blood flow the way it did?”
Question 2: ” How did 259 Hindus die?” The fact that 259 hindus died was actually admitted by Tehelka no less. If 259 Hindus indeed died, how did they die? Killed by police? in which case it means the police did something to curb the riots.. err or was it that muslims killed too and they pillaged too and if you read the article from the Hindu linked in the post by Sandeep, they infact were the agressors on 1st March 2002.
So can we please have a rational Logical conclusion. Maybe my binary mind does not permit to get one, but surely you can help me out here. (And could we spared the line ” Even life is too many”. Everyone agress on that. but can we have a logical rational conlusion out of this.
Oh btw, i dont consider you a commie, or a congress sympathiser. I did not indugle in any name calling. Thanks. All I asked for was same standard of justice. I just hope that when narendra modi is put behind bars after he is proved complicit or guilty, we also find a way to actually make a similar statement about Rajiv Gandhi, Sharad Pawar and SudhakarRao Naik. We do something like remove atleast the Schemes that are being bandied about in the name of Rajiv Gandhi, or the bridges/roads that are built in his name. Rename the Rajiv Gandhi foundation etc. You know two wrongs dont make it a right. But it is always better to have two rights. Everyone would be at peace.
Please help in drawing out the right conclusions.
Thanks in advance.
@Kannan: “I just hope that when narendra modi is put behind bars after he is proved complicit or guilty, we also find a way to actually make a similar statement about Rajiv Gandhi, Sharad Pawar and SudhakarRao Naik.”
Mate – yu know as well as I do that Narendra Modi will not be put behind bars. Either he will be relelected and prove that the electorate in Gujarat cares a fig for the lives of the murdered, or he will be replaced by someone no different from him (either in his party or elsewhere, but the type of character will be the same).
Call Rajiv Gandhi, Sharad Pawar and SudhakarRao Naik murderers? By the same standard, they are. We also know that their crimes will go unpunished (though RG probably paid the price for one of his more arrogant decisions).
But that history has never punished the powerful is no reason why we shouldn’t try again. In Gujarat, or in Bangladesh (where the targeted population is Hindu). Someday we will know a murderer as a murderer. Someday we shall succeed. And then it will not matter if the name is Modi, or Khan or whatever.
A lot of what I wanted to say has been said above by Kanteya. Let me add that being a Gujarati why it doesn’t bother me that Modi is the leader and why I shall vote for him again.
He has done a lot of good work in last 5 years. Are his hands dirty? Yes. Whose hands are not dirty? Vaghela was active participant in 1992 riots. Bharat Solanki was actively helping his father during riots in 1980s. Are So, if a Gujarati gets to choose between two rioters, he will of course select the one who also does something good rather than building assets for himself. Without knowing politics, you comment that a ‘right thinking’ Indian should be full of shame to see Modi in CM’s chair and not behind bar.
Since you claim to be a right thinking person, wondering if you are full of shame to see a murderers like Shibu Soren and Taslimmuddin in MMS’ cabinet. If you are full of shame to see Buddhadeb as CM even after his police force killed innocents in Nandigram. If you are full of shame for Maharashtra government effectively killing farmers in Vidarbha by ‘not trying’ to disburse the aid that belongs to them. If you are full of shame to see MMS making Tytler a minister in the cabinet. If you are full of shame to see Kashmiri pandits being out of their native land for so long.
And you know, you might say that you never did say that you are not full of shame for all of the above. But the fact is that you never did say that you are. That makes you a hypocrite.
Regards.
@MP
“And you know, you might say that you never did say that you are not full of shame for all of the above. But the fact is that you never did say that you are. That makes you a hypocrite.”
He dint say anything about the other events because the blog is title “stin(k)ging modi”
Not saying something doesn’t mean that you can automatically assume anything that comes to your mind.
Limitless reams have been dedicated by the pseudo-sec industry over Golwarkar’s (G) ‘admiration’ of Hitler. However, is this justified?
Please review my 4 points below, & correct as necessary. If I am corrected, I will be the wiser and admit G was a rabid anti-Semite. However, if others fail to refute my points in spite of trying, we should stop repeating this lie about G.
1. Is G’s para really anti-semitic ?
2. Are there any other comments by G that support his conjured anti-semitic image?
3.Were people aware of Hitler’s true intentions when he first arose? If so, can Britain be called a stooge of Hitler as Churchill arched backwards to praise Hitler?
4. Can USA be called Hitler’s chamchaa, when their head of state Roosevelt has been accused of rabid anti-semitism?
5. FOR WTF : Comment on Pilate & Jesus
1. IS G’s PARA ACTUALLY ANTI-SEMITIC ?
=============================================
The oft quoted para is ” To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging .. the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”
Is this anti-semitic? To me it appears anti-German. It appears as a caution against allowing fanatic cultures like Germany & extremist Islam to proliferate under a cloak of Chamberlainesque & Gandhian liberalism. Such efforts are not only futile and self-defeating, they are suicidal.
G. was right. With root differences between Hinduism and Islam, India is a fractured state, not an assimilated whole. Interestingly, are there any countries where Islam co-exists with large numbers of other faiths, that exists as an assimilated whole? Sudan? Nigeria? Yugoslavia? Thailand? Phillipines? Russia (Chechnya)? China (Xinjiang?)? Hmm?
2. ARE THERE ANY OTHER COMMENTS BY G. THAT SUPPORT HIS CONJURED ANTI-SEMITIC IMAGE
=============================================
Is there any other statement by G, in his extensive writings, that unambiguously prove his anti-semitic stance? Or his admiration for Nazism after it’s true picture was exposed?
3.. CHRUCHILL’S PRAISE FOR NAZIS & HITLER
========================================
G was living thousands of miles away from Europe, & it was difficult for him to gauge the true horror of Nazism. One person who was sitting far closer, our British friend Mr Churchill, actually bent over 90 degrees in praise of Nazism. He would have bent over more, but hurt his back. Let us study 3 statements by him :
UNFETTERED PRAISE FOR MUSSOLINI
Churchill was highly impressed by Mussolini’s ‘gentle and simple bearing’, finding only the choicest praise for fascism in his 20 Jan 1927 speech in ROME :
“I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. … If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
I WILL, HOWEVER, SAY A WORD ON AN INTERNATIONAL ASPECT OF FASCISM. EXTERNALLY, YOUR MOVEMENT HAS RENDERED SERVICE TO THE WHOLE WORLD. … (Italy) has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. “
Hmm. Churchill said “International Fascism has rendered service to the whole world.
There are numerous other sources of direct support for the Axis by British powers. If you wish, tell me, & I will elaborate, like Britain’s explicit support for Japan against China (as Japan was an imperialistic power like Britain), or the massive loans sanctioned by Britain to Germany (one was for £100 million) , or even increasing arms exports to Germany. Lord Beaverbrook wrote in the 31 Oct 1938 edition of Daily Express “We certainly credit Hitler with honesty and sincerity. We believe in his purpose stated over and over again …”.
Lloyd George, the es British PM claimed in the Daily Express (17 Sep 1936) “It is not the Germany of the first decade that followed the war- broken, dejected and bowed down with a sense of apprehension and impotence. It is now full of hope and confidence, and of a renewed sense of … One man has accomplished this miracle. He is a born leader of men. A magnetic and dynamic … “. He also called Hitler the “greatest living German”.
CHURCHILL’S UNFETTERED PRAISE FOR HITLER
Coming back to Churchill, who wrote in Great Contemporaries (1939), “”The Story of that Struggle cannot be read without admiration for the courage, the perseverance, the vital force which enabled (Hitler) to … overcome, all authorities or resistance which barred his path…I HAVE ALWAYS SAID THAT IF GREAT BRITAIN WERE DEFEATED IN WAR, I HOPED WE SHOULD FIND A HITLER TO LEAD US BACK TO OUR RIGHTFUL POSITION AMONG THE NATIONS. (he also said this in the London Times, 7 Nov 1938)
Incidentally, it was Churchill who began the bombing terror campaign on cities. Early in the war, he approved the Lindemann Plan of terror-bombing ‘civilians’ as a matter of policy. He lied to Parliament, insisting civilian German casualties were accidents of bombs aimed at military targets. He even brazenly disclaimed any part in destroying Dresden, stating “the Americans did it.” The truth was only revealed long after.
And in the face of this horror, all pseudo-secs have been offering is a few ambiguous statements by Golwarkar.
4.. CHRUCHILL’S PRAISE FOR NAZIS & HITLER
========================================
The Casablanca Conference records (Jan 43) reveal the depth of anti-semitism Roosevelt was steeped in, and why he did nothing to end the anti-refugee policy of USA even after horrors of the holocaust were evident.. At Casablanca, Roosevelt was sympathizing with the Nazi stance, proposing to Generals Noguès and Giraud that the French government in North Africa should discriminate against Jews of French North Africa (just as Hitler had done in pre-war Germany), by limiting the number of Jews engaged in professions.
He said . . . “limiting the number of Jews in the professions would eliminate THE SPECIFIC AND UNDERSTANDABLE COMPLAINTS WHICH THE GERMANS BORE TOWARD THE JEWS IN GERMANY,
I would be exrtremely glad of corrections. In the absence of any, Iam forced to conclude that G’s comments, ambiguous at best, misinformed at worst, are a drop in a tea-cup compared to the unbridled love for Hitler displayed by Chruchill, or the real face of anti-semitism displayed by Roosevelt. Compared to them, G is like ‘Christ’.
I do think that branding G as anti-semite is nothing short of rubbish
5. WTF : PILATE & HITLER
========================================
Hi WTF,
I am amazed you are attributing so much historical reliability on the gospels. The Gospels are nothing short of a dreary harangue against Jews. They are an obvious attempt of weaning converts away from Judaism in to the welcome arms of the Chirstian cult, not unlike the way Cjristians have been denigrating Hindus for the last 600 years.
The following quotes appear in the internet. I have not verified them, but remember reading similar disgusting things when I read the Bible :
Jesus said to the Jews: “You belong to your father, the devil and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.” (John 8:44)
John’s Gospel is obsessed with “the Jews, at least 50% of which are blatantly antisemitic. The Jews are portrayed as persecutors of Jesus (5:16). They disapprove of him (6:41); are blind to his teaching (7:31); claim that he has a demon (8:52)
According to John’s Gospel, the Jews are satanic (8:44).
As John goes out of his way to vilify Jews, should we be surprised if his involvement of Jews in the death of Jesus is historical distortion? After all, John introduces the two Jewish trials of Jesus (18:13 and 24), in contrast to the single Jewish trial in the other Gospels. The Jews are unfairly portrayed as the moving force behind the crucifixion (18:35) – Pilate is portrayed as an incompetent administrator who is manipulated by the Jews (19:12-13), even speaking against the Jews in Jesus’s defense (18:38). The Jews are directly implicated in the crucifixion of Jesus (19:16; 21 and 31).
John thus lays the foundation for the later Christian accusation of Jewish villainy. The culmination is the holocaust.
Thanks Christianity.
Darn. I wrote the above quickly on word, copied in to the blog site, was editing it, and boom, hit the send button in error before finishing to edit.
The paras are not laid out well. There is repetition which I was shearing. There are a few blatant errors as well (50% of the statements ‘on Jews’ in John’s gospel are anti-semitic).
Sincere apologies to all for mistake. One should not type comments on blogsites late at night!!
Darn
@ Dravidian,
I fully respect your non-Hindu-ness. As a non Hindu, you are therefore also a non-follower of the Hindu caste system and so should not claim benefits of reservations. You cannot have it both ways my friend. Trust me, being a majority has been a bane on hindu society, so we will welcome our minority status with open arms!
@Rishi Khajur,
Since Dalits are not Hindus (I guess ST’s and OBC’s would like to be non hindus as well), that means Hindus are a minority in India. YIpEEE yah!! Now we can claim all minority benefits! Free trips to Amarnath and Mansorovar.. you name it! Let us notify the minority commision in India right now and use Dravidian’s testimony to ensure the addition of Hindus as a minority faith.
H2B2 on G, Churchill Roosevelt =
Nice points but long 2 deep read.
C was very nasty evil man. Didnt know he praised Nazi so much. Was it coz he h8td commies more? Also do u have link of C targeting German civilian in bombing?
R is diff al2gethr. Strong oponent of Nazi. Spoke for freedom of whole world in Atlantic charter. U cant say he was anti-Ju.
Also G was head of extreme org RSS that killed Gandi. U say Gandi was bad 4 India, but he was man of peace, no reason for RRS 2 kill him. U cant compare R with G.
In Bible u say John anti-Ju. But other gospels not so anti-Ju, so u cant claim new testament is fully anti-Ju.
@ kannan:
“Which probably means it was criminal neglect of the Gujrat Government which lead to Hindus and Muslims being killed. No group was supported actively..”
in Nandigram, the police has played a blatantly partisan role the cadre of the CPI(M) went in to teach the opposers of the CPI(M) a lesson.
similarly, in Gujarat, the police were told to do nothing so that the cadre of the BJP could carry out retaliations.
today on NDTV, i saw a report that showed deep dissatisfaction with Modi from families of those who led the riots because they have no means of income as their men were either shot by the police or lie in jails. modi was unable to protect them from the legal consequences of their acts.
in short, they felt used.
in case, you are still confused, let me just say this again- riots are political tools to polarize vote banks. again, let me cite the example of Jinnah, who blatantly instigated riots to make a case for Pakistan.
when hindus are made idiots of in this manner by their so called leaders excuse me for raising my voice.
and please read the Sri Krishna Commission report if you think the Bombay riots took place without active support from the city administration. the police have been indicted themselves for taking part in the riots.
and guess what, the BJP and Shiv Sena came to power in the next elections.
@ kannan:
the website which sandeep cites as the source of the ex-DGP article is most interesting, don’t you think? 🙂
the charge against modi is that the deployment of the army was delayed. so he asked for army help but kept the army in the barracks or just to Ahmedabad.
in the end, modi passed orders to shoot hindus he himself sent out to riot in the first place.
so typical of a politician.
@ hhbb:
i dont know whether you misunderstood my point or were again showcasing your knowledge for our benefit.
i never called Gowalkar an anti-semite (stating specifically that he supported the creation of Israel). i did however cite his misconceived faith in the imposition of one culture to unite a country.
since you raise the rather bloody nature of the bible, i would like you and mr. khujur to consider how this reflects on dutch christains or belgian christains. i hope you understand what im getting at..
Helllo WTF. Thanks for answering.
So Modi used his cadres and they dont like that. Of course.No one likes being used. I believe it would tell on this election. So till that time, I would say your hypothesis of cadres being used, would need real verification.
Regarding Sri Kirshna Comission,well, if the police helped the rioters, then who controlled the police? Not the state government? Who brought in the army so late? Not the state government?
Narendra Modi delalyed the deployment? Err… 27th Feb- Train burns, 28 th Feb- Army is called for, 1st March – Flag marches start. delay. Err. I still fail to see the elephant in the room then.
Thanks Sayon for answering- So it is agreed then, Rajiv Gandhi, Sharad Pawar et all are scoundrels.Hmm..lets then actually do something which would tarnish their name forever. Hope you agree on that.
@ WTF :
I responded to your points above in Potato Highly Defective. I think Kannan is raising some vital points & I don’ want to divert the thrust of this thread away from those.
@ kannan:
“27th Feb- Train burns, 28 th Feb- Army is called for, 1st March – Flag marches start. delay. Err. I still fail to see the elephant in the room then.”
your repeated harping on this point seems to suggest that you are under an impression that the army is like a government office which works from 10 to 4, and then shuts down.
three days (minimum by your dates) of anarchy is a lot of time for people armed with electoral rolls and equipment (in short, spontaneous reaction my ass) to wreck havoc. heck, six hours is a long time for an unplanned riot.
in 1947, pathan invaders nearly reached Srinagar in two days. a delay of 20 minutes in deploying the SPG meant that a plane was able to get hijacked to Kandahar from Amritsar. if you think an army needs a whole day to react to riot let me just tell you that they are not BSNL phone repairers.
[its not like narendra modi called up the army and got a call center operative who told him ‘your complaint has been recorded. a customer care representative will contact you in 24 hours. please stay with us. your call is important.’]
this is not counting the fact that the flag march was held in Ahmadabad. that doesn’t mean the army was allowed to to other epicenters of rioting.
Thanks WTF for answering.
As you agree, flag marches happened. ok.. on 1st March 2002. Fact. agreed
But you said “the flag march was held in Ahmadabad. that doesn’t mean the army was allowed to to other epicenters of rioting.” Does this mean the army was not allowed to its job??????
Now this is very very serious. But to ascertain this we dont have any way, do we? Is there any report anywhere to such effect. I only knew that the Army was called for very late. Infact some reports even go to the extent that it was called in a week after the riots started. We know now it is not true. But what you have said means the Army actually was prevented from entering the riot hit areas. I find it quite serious. This definitely needs evidence, do you believe there any reports which I can browse/look through to get this part of the story?
Well if you mean the army is actually ineffective in controlling riots, then probably the calling in of the army does not matter at all and a lesson we should learn is we need to improve the riot controlling methods.
And you mention “three days (minimum by your dates) of anarchy is a lot of time for people armed with electoral rolls and equipment (in short, spontaneous reaction my ass) to wreck havoc. heck, six hours is a long time for an unplanned riot”
Is there any report which says violence started on 27th Feb and not 28th Feb 2002? And the army flag march (ineffective as it maybe) started in the afternoon of 1st March 2002.
So you mean the government planned on 27th and executed the riot (planned) in such a way that people were killed majorly on the first day, ie 28th Feb , itself. Do you have any figures regarding this? I will not get in to the insuniation that electoral rolls were used etc, but then assuming they were, the riots should have been something really really efficient with the bulk of the killings on the first day itself. Do you have any figures/reports etc to support this?
Figures dont say the whole truth. But figures dont lie outright. I am sure if we get the facts and figures absolutely pinned down and correct for these days,we are halfway to justice, arent we?
There is a comission which is investigating this and I am sure there must be plenty of stuff they are working on at the moment. But by making things seem in the media such that only side of the story comes out,we are doing a dis-service to truth. Hope that Satyameva Jayate. I believe the comission would find and nail the culpirts soon enough.
Once the comission results are out, we should judge them in the court of law. Not allow them to fight elections. Same shoud have been done in the 1992 riots case. No one is above the law.
@ kannan:
it is agreed amongst experts that 28th february was the peak of violence in gujarat. (babu bajarangi’s mob, gulbarg society etc)
“the riots should have been something really really efficient with the bulk of the killings on the first day itself”
it seems you are correct though killing continued till may (spontaneous anger continues for three months?)
yet the army arrived on the 1st of march. as i have told you, it does not take the Indian Army one day to deploy. Otherwise we might as well surrender to Pakistan and China right now.
*** telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/03/04/whind04.xml
if this is article is to be believed then the army was ready but not flown in on the 28th allowing AN ENTIRE NIGHT of rioting. then it was not supplied with intelligence, maps or sent to the wrong areas.
for example, best bakery was burned down (whoever did it) on 1st March night in Vadodara.
unfortunately, judicial commissions of inquiry are total eyewash.
according to the u.c.banerjee report the train fire that started the whole thing was accidental!
nanavati did not do anything for the sikhs. he’s not going to do shit for gujarat.
though i agree with you 100%.
Reading about Modi, I was reminded about another leader whom I had loved and respected from 2001-06 but vehemently repent doing that now.
I would like to draw your attention to the perils of the hapless villagers who go to sleep with the sound of bombs and firing of bullets and wake up-i.e. if they are able to sleep at all-with the smell of gun powder,the flowing of blood, procession of dead bodies and the spine-chilling wails of unfortunate people. I am a Calcuttan who is living in Haldia in East Midnapore-the district in which the by-now infamous Nandigram is in-for quite sometime now due to my profession. Thus due to geographical proximity to the troubled spot I get the opportunity to meet a lot of people who hail from that cursed land called Nandigram.
Seeing various reports on the television,newspapers and most importantly getting to hear from the horse’s mouth I believe I’ve become quite abreast of the situation and have been able to decipher where the root of the trouble lies.
Nandigram, as we all know has a long history of protesting against injustice and not giving in to coercion. It may be recalled that the place wher Nandigram is today had resisted the British empire and had set up their own free state-Tamralipta with its own national flag-even when the whole of India was chained by the British rule. One of India’s biggest women freedom fighters, Matangini Hazra-whose large statue can be found in the heart of Calcutta, hails from this place. So, it was nothing new when Haldia CPM MP Lakshman Seth issued a notice under the instructions of Mr.Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, that land in Nandigram will be acquired for setting up a comprehensive ‘Chemical Hub’ over 25,000 acres of land. The villagers were quite naturally perplexed, because most of the people living here were half or uneducated paesants who had no other means of livelihood except for tilling of land which they have been doing for generations….They started protesting the takeover of their farmland and houses(how can houses be left out as they come in the same area) by bringing out processions and guarding their lands in shifts saying they will protect their land till the last drop of blood. On the 6th of January, Benoy Konar, who ironically is the CPM’s farmer wing’s leader roared:” If they(Nandigram people) don’t allow us to make industry there, we’ll make their life HELL”. That he did when on the very next day, firings started from the other side of Tekhali bridge which left 7 people dead, a majority of whom were minority Muslims.A lot of water flowed down the Haldi river,which flows by Nandigram and the farmers became more firm in their resolve not to give away their livelihood and then, came the red letter day March 14, which has become the most infamous day after April 19(the day in which General Dyre opened fire on innocent protesters in Jallianwala Bagh).
On March 14, the police marched in with CPM armed men in tow and opened fire on innocent villagers killing atleast 30 innocent villagers(although the official figure shows a mere 14). Let me tell you even small children were torn apart by policemen and thrown into the tretches dug up by farmland acquisition protesters and after putting sand sacks on them, police drove their Mahindra jeeps over them.
And from then on Buddha has been forced to withdraw his plan of a ‘Chemical hub’(whose name we had never heard till last year) from Nandigram due to national and international pressure.But knowing the egoist he is, he did not take it down well having to eat crow. He thereafter turned a blind eye and withdrew all his police force from that area,when his party men started to take revenge of their CM’s humiliation. A few months went peacefully and people felt everything was gradually coming to normal. But only a few sinister men at Alimuddin street and some of their comrades in Khejuri knew that it was just the lull before the “HELL”storm. It was the time taken by the CPM to accumulate in Khejuri(opposite Nandigram) armed criminals from all across the state and also from neighbouring Bihar and Jharkhand to teach these unarmed, helpless, poor villagers the lesson of their lives. This has started for the 4-5 months and they would be killing 2-3 sometimes 4-5 villagers everyday by firing from long range rifles and even machine guns and burning their homes in the middle of the night, not to mention the not so ocassional pelting of bombs.This has been continuing and has increased rather then decreased. Public speeches by leaders like Brinda Karat asking to give the villagers Dumdum Dawai(the thrashing of their lives) have not helped the cause.
Whatever I have written is just the tip of the iceberg. You should come to Nandigram and see to believe the plight and misery they are in, how thousands of villagers have been rendered homeless and how thousands of women and children heve been rendered shelterless and are living without food. Just spare a moment for them.
Before ending, I would urge the central or state govt. just for humanity’s sake please do something for these people urgently. I know if the state govt would have honestly wanted this violence to have stopped, they could have done it in a day, but I still believe better sense would prevail on those that matter.
O yes, and before ending I must also add that I am no Trinamul or Congress worker or supporter- as anybody raising a voice against the govt is deemed here by the CPM-but an engineer working in a reputed organization.
The truth is that Modi was in ICU when the Gujarat riots took place. He fell sick and subsequently suffered a heart attack when someone used blasphemous words about Md. Ali Jinnah.
So Modi can’t be blamed. Apparently, Aaj Tak that thrives on yellow journalism and the Congress pimp Tarun Tejpal whipped up such a frenzy that we are now almost believing that harlots like the likes of Shabnam Hashmi of Sahmat were never being deflowered, hence, they are still virgins.
Since a certain Jesus-freak faithfully brandished some typical church propaganda unleashed by his neo-colonial masters on the “Aryan” invasion “theory”, I take the liberty of posting this detailed article on the politics of Aryanism and a chillingly similar neo-colonial contruct on Africa (the Tutsi Invasion “Theory”) that led to the genocide of innocents in Rwanda.
Article Source: http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2007/05/aryan-invasion-of-california-global.html
ARYAN INVASION OF CALIFORNIA: GLOBAL BACKGROUND
N.S. Rajaram
Fall of the Third Reich did not put an end to academic race theories that formed the core of its ideology. In various guises, their legacy continues in Western academia as well as in the politics of countries formerly under European rule. While avoiding overtly racial terms, scholars in disciplines like Indo-European Studies continue to uphold scientifically discredited and historically disgraced theories built around the Aryan myth. Some academics have resorted to media campaigns and political lobbying to save their theories and the discipline from natural extinction— a tactic that came to the fore when California education authorities attempted to remove these theories from their school curriculum. The legacy of racism persists in sectarian politics in South India, and most insidiously in Africa where it gave rise to the horrific Hutu-Tutsi clashes in one of the worst genocides in modern history. A singular feature of this neo-racist scholarship is the replacement of anti-Semitism by anti-Hinduism.
Mutated racism
In a remarkable article, “Aryan Mythology As Science And Ideology” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion1999; 67: 327-354) the Swedish scholar Stefan Arvidsson raises the question: “Today it is disputed whether or not the downfall of the Third Reich brought about a sobering among scholars working with ‘Aryan’ religions.” We may rephrase the question: “Did the end of the Nazi regime put an end to race based theories in academia?” An examination of several humanities departments in the West suggests otherwise: following the end of Nazism, academic racism may have undergone a mutation but did not entirely disappear. Ideas central to the Aryan myth resurfaced in various guises under labels like Indology and Indo-European Studies. This is clear from recent political, social and academic episodes in places as far apart as Harvard University and the California State Board of Education.
Two decades after the end of the Nazi regime, racism underwent another mutation as a result of the American Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, Americans were rightly made to feel guilty about their racist past and the indefensible treatment of African Americans. U.S. academia also changed accordingly and any discourse based on racial stereotyping became taboo. Soon this taboo came to be extended to Native Americans, Eskimos and other ethnic groups.
In this climate of seeming liberal enlightenment, one race theory continued to flourish as if nothing had changed. Theories based on the Aryan myth that formed the core of Nazi ideology continued in various guises, as previously noted, in Indology and Indo-European Studies. Though given a linguistic and sometimes a cultural veneer, these racially sourced ideas continue to enjoy academic respectability in such prestigious centers as Harvard and Chicago. Being a European transplant, its historical trajectory was different from the one followed by American racism. Further, unlike the Civil Rights Movement, which had mass support, academic racism remained largely confined to academia. This allowed it to escape public scrutiny for several decades until it clashed with the growing Hindu presence in the United States. Indians, Hindus in particular saw Western Indology and Indo-European Studies as a perversion of their history and religion and a thinly disguised attempt to prejudice the American public, especially the youth, against India and Hinduism to serve their academic interests.1
The fact that Americans of Indian origin are among the most educated group ensured that their objections could not brushed away by “haughty dismissals” as the late historian of science Abraham Seidenberg put it. Nonetheless, scholars tried to use academic prestige as a bludgeon in forestalling debate, by denouncing their adversaries as ignorant chauvinists and bigots unworthy of debate. But increasingly, hard evidence from archaeology, natural history and genetics made it impossible to ignore the objections of their opponents, many of whom (like this author) were scientists. By the turn of the millennium, there was an uneasy stalemate, with science chipping away at the edifice of the Aryan theories with its advocates tenaciously clinging to them and postponing the inevitable. But in November 2005, there came a dramatic denouement, in, of all places, California schools. Academics suddenly found it necessary to leave their ivory towers and fight it out in the open, in full media glare— and under court scrutiny. This is what we may look at next.
Aryans invade California
To summarize the California invasion by ‘Aryan’ academics: Aryans, a mythical race of people which science and the defeat of Nazi Germany had consigned to the fringes of academia and politics found a temporary refuge in the history texts to be used in California schools. Led by the Harvard based linguist Michael Witzel, a motley group of mostly European scholars successfully lobbied the California State Board of Education (CSBE) to save the theory of an ‘Aryan’ invasion of India from being removed from schoolbooks. It was to prove a Pyrrhic victory and a public embarrassment; California education authorities were soon forced to retract Witzel’s ‘expert’ suggestions. They also had to face lawsuits from which they came out badly bruised.
This was the aftermath of an acrimonious editing process in which Witzel, with possible support from the California Education Secretary Alan Bersin, put pressure on California officials to have this scientifically discredited theory included in textbooks. This curious affair raises doubts about the role played by Secretary Bersin who serves also on the board of the Harvard Corporation which employs Witzel. Willingly or unwittingly, Bersin came to be seen as the fulcrum of support for Witzel and his colleagues in their dubious campaign that went on to embarrass both Harvard and the California Department of Education.
While the media covered the story as a case of newfound assertiveness on the part of the Hindus, Witzel and his colleagues claimed they were motivated solely by objectivity and scholarly integrity. According to them it was a case of faith against scholarship. The cloud of controversy though tended to obscure the real story— of a desperate campaign by Witzel and his colleagues to save the Aryan myth, which happens to be central to the academic discipline known as Indo-European Studies. Indo-European is a politically correct euphemism for Aryan. (Another is Caucasian.)
It all began innocently enough, when Grade VI textbooks used in California schools came up for revision in 2005. Some Hindu, Islamic and Jewish groups objected to the way their religions were depicted in some of the textbooks. Hindus objected also to the history portion for including the scientifically discredited, nineteenth century theory of the Aryan invasion of India. California school authorities asked the Hindu groups along with others to suggest suitable changes.
After some discussions, mostly with regard to the format, the California Department of Education (CDE) released a memorandum detailing the changes submitted to the State Board of Education (CSBE) on November 8, 2005. It was at this point that Michael Witzel intervened uninvited. On the very next day, November 9, CSBE President Ruth Green read out a petition submitted by Witzel and co-signed by 46 other scholars claiming to be experts on India, objecting to the edits suggested by the Hindu groups charging they were unscholarly and politically motivated. Changes submitted by Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups were passed without discussion, but Green withheld those submitted by the Hindus. She went a step further and appointed Witzel to a super-committee, to review the changes relating to Hinduism and India. All its members had actively colluded with Witzel in his propaganda and lobbying campaign.
It was a mystery how Witzel, within a day, could get so many signatures from all over the world. Most petitioners were from Europe with nothing at stake in what California schools teach their children. A few (non-Europeans) later retracted. This suggests that Witzel’s move was pre-planned, helped by insiders and not a 24-hour wonder. It was soon apparent that the signatories, including Witzel himself, had not read the changes they were objecting to. He was coy about it when questioned at a public meeting in Harvard, claiming that the subject was sub judice. (This was because of law suits filed against the CSBE’s ‘flawed and illegal’ review procedure.)
The next meeting in January 2006 was held in secret, from which Hindu groups were excluded. Witzel took advantage of the secrecy to reverse many of the changes. While some of it related to Hinduism, it became clear that his real concern was saving the Aryan invasion theory from being axed. Witzel trumpeted the outcome as a victory, but the celebration proved to be premature. The unusual procedure by which it was done and Witzel’s own unscholarly language and rhetoric landed the California Department of Education in several law suits. A judge hearing the case slammed the CSBE for following ‘underground procedures’ using ‘hostile academics’. Witzel too paid a heavy price, being increasingly seen as less a scholar than a propagandist and political lobbyist. His credibility as scholar stood shattered.
Given Education Secretary Bersin’s position at Harvard, Witzel’s immediate appointment to the super-committee with virtual veto power over the contents comes as no surprise. The real question is what Witzel and Bersin hoped to gain by having the disgraced Aryan theories taught in California schools. To see this one needs to recognize the precarious state of the discipline called Indo-European Studies. It is a nineteenth century European creation that has been losing ground to science. Witzel and his European colleagues are among its last holdouts. Both students and funds have been declining in the department where Witzel teaches. As a member of the Board of Overseers of the Harvard Corporation Bersin has responsibility for fund raising.
Ever since Witzel moved to Harvard from Europe (he is German by birth), its Department of Sanskrit and India Studies has been in a state of turmoil. He was forced to step down as department chairman in 1995, following student complaints about his conduct. Enrica Garzilli, whom Witzel had brought in as a faculty member was fired by Harvard as unqualified. She sued the university. Witzel himself threatened to sue a student for asking some questions. Now Hindu parents and groups have sued the State of California for violating their children’s civil rights. Curiously for an academic, legal troubles seem to dog Witzel wherever he goes.
We may never know who initiated Witzel’s California campaign— whether Alan Bersin gave Witzel a chance to redeem himself following his disastrous performance at Harvard, or if Witzel saw an opening to get students and funding with Bersin at the helm of the Department of Education in California. Email traffic surrounding IER (Indo-Eurasian Research), an Internet group co-founded by Witzel, suggests that the idea came from some of its members, possibly one Steve Farmer, Witzel’s closest associate following Enrica Garzilli’s expulsion from Harvard. Farmer lives in California from where he has been reporting on developments in the state.
Problems at Harvard are part of a wider problem in Western academia in the field of Indo-European Studies. Several ‘Indology’ departments—as they are sometimes called—are shutting down across Europe. One of the oldest and most prestigious, at Cambridge University in England, has just closed down. This was followed by the closure of the equally prestigious Berlin Institute of Indology founded way back in 1821. Positions like the one Witzel holds (Wales Professor of Sanskrit) were created during the colonial era to serve as interpreters of India. They have lost their relevance and are disappearing from academia. This is the real story, not teaching Hinduism to California children.
Witzel’s California misadventure appears to have been an attempt to have his version of Indian history and civilization introduced into the school curriculum in the hope that some of them may later be drawn into his department when they graduate. Otherwise, it is hard to see why a senior, tenured professor at Harvard should go to all this trouble, lobbying California school officials to have its Grade VI curriculum changed to reflect his views.
To follow this it is necessary to go beyond personalities and understand the importance of the Aryan myth to Indo-European Studies. The Aryan myth is a European creation. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. The campaign against Hinduism was a red herring to divert attention from the real agenda, which was and remains saving the Aryan myth. Collapse of the Aryan myth means the collapse of Indo-European studies. This is what Witzel and his colleagues are trying to avert. For them it is an existential struggle.
Americans for the most part are unaware of the enormous influence of the Aryan myth on European history and imagination. As previously observed, while the defeat of Nazi Germany put an end to its political influence, it has survived in various guises in Western academia under the umbrella of Indo-European Studies. This was the point raised by scholars like Stefan Arvidsson cited earlier. Central to Indo-European Studies is the belief—it is no more than a belief—that Indian civilization was created by an invading race of ‘Aryans’ from an original homeland somewhere in Eurasia or Europe. This is the Aryan invasion theory dear to Witzel and his European colleagues. According to this theory there was no civilization in India before the Aryan invaders brought it— a view increasingly in conflict with hard evidence from archaeology and natural history.
The politics of Aryanism
Given the Aryans’ importance to their worldview, it is extraordinary that after two hundred years of voluminous outpourings, these scholars are unable to identify them. Originally they were claimed to be a race related to Europeans but science has discredited it. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, scholars avoid overtly racial arguments but the basic idea of an invasion by Europeans bringing civilization to India is retained even if they acknowledge that ancient Indian records know nothing of any such invasion. All we have are dogmatic assertions of their central belief. According to the late Murray Emeneau, a leading figure in Indo-European linguistics: 2
At some time in the second millennium B.C., probably comparatively early in the millennium, a band or bands of speakers of an Indo-European language, later to be called Sanskrit, entered India over the northwest passes. This is our linguistic doctrine which has been held now for more than a century and a half. There seems to be no reason to distrust the arguments for it, in spite of the traditional Hindu ignorance of any such invasion. (Emphasis added.)
This is typical of the field, with arguments closer to theology than to science. Aryans are needed because there can be no Aryan invasion without the Aryans and also no Indo-European Studies. It is a case of the tail wagging the dog.
Scientists had long ago dismissed the idea of the Aryan race. As far back as 1939, Sir Julian Huxley, one of the great biologists of the twentieth century wrote: 3
In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature…. In Germany, the idea of the ‘Aryan race’ received no more scientific support than in England. Nevertheless, it found able and very persistent literary advocates who made it appear very flattering to local vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special conditions. (Emphasis added.)
These ‘special conditions’ were the rise of Nazism in Germany and British imperial interests in India. Its perversion in Germany leading eventually to the Nazi horrors is well known. The fact that the British turned it into a political tool to make their rule acceptable to Indians is not generally known. A recent BBC report acknowledged as much (October 6, 2005): 4
It [Aryan invasion theory] gave a historical precedent to justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years earlier.
That is to say, the British presented themselves as ‘new and improved Aryans’ that were in India only to complete the work left undone by their ancestors in the hoary past. This is how the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin put it in the House of Commons in 1929: 5
Now, after ages, …the two branches of the great Aryan ancestry have again been brought together by Providence… By establishing British rule in India, God said to the British, “I have brought you and the Indians together after a long separation, …it is your duty to raise them to their own level as quickly as possible …brothers as you are…”
All this makes abundantly clear that theories based on the Aryan myth are modern European creations that have little to do with ancient India. The word Arya appears for the first time in the Rig Veda, India’s oldest text. Its meaning is obscure but seems to refer to members of a settled agricultural community. It later became an honorific and a form of address, something like ‘Gentleman’ in English or ‘Monsieur’ in French. Also, it was nowhere as important in India as it came to be in Europe. In the whole the Rig Veda, in all of its ten books, the word Arya appears only about forty times. In contrast, Hitler’s Mein Kampf uses the term Arya and Aryan many times more. Hitler did not invent it. The idea of Aryans as a superior race was already in the air— in Europe, not India. 6
Indo-Europeans: elusive or non-existent?
To understand Witzel’s California campaign we need to place these Aryan theories in their historical context— as part of some European thinkers’ striving to give themselves an identity based on their history and folklore. In his recent book Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science (2006, University of Chicago) Swedish scholar Stefan Arvidsson tells us:
For over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture. Using ancient texts, medieval records, philological observations, and archaeological remains they have described a world, a religion, and a people older than the Sumerians, with whom all history is said to have begun.
These are the mythical Aryans, now being called Indo-Europeans. After two hundred years of intensive search, they remain elusive, while science has shown them to be non-existent. But Indo-European scholars have not given up on them. Just as they created an Aryan invasion without Aryans they have created Indo-European Studies based on the non-existent Indo-Europeans. As Arvidsson observes:
No objects can definitely be tied to them, nor do we know any ‘Indo-European’ by name. In spite of that, scholars have stubbornly tried to reach back to the ancient ‘Indo-Europeans,’ with the help of bold historical, linguistic, and archaeological reconstructions, in the hopes of finding the foundation of their own culture and religion there.
The only literature we have that goes back to such antiquity is Indian literature. But Europeans of the colonial era could not conceive of an Indian source for their culture. India was taken out of Indo-European Studies, and made the recipient of European thought, culture and even language via the Aryan invasion. In Arvidsson’s words: “The theory about India as the original home of the Indo-Europeans, and the Indians as a kind of model Aryans, lost supporters during the nineteenth century, and other homelands and other model Aryans took their place instead.” (Emphasis added.)
The Aryans (or Indo-Europeans) and their homeland were gradually moved westward until they were made to settle in Eurasia and even Germany. In the hands of German scholars, Aryans and their language became “Indo-Germanische.” It is this worldview, and its academic incarnation calling itself Indo-European Studies that Witzel and his colleagues are fighting to save from extinction.
To summarize, the goal of Indo-European studies is not so much to understand India as it is to “show that there existed a rich ‘German’ mythology that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions.” It is hardly surprising that anti-Semitism was tied up with it. Now anti-Hinduism has now taken its place. This anti-Hinduism too is more cultural than religious, like anti-Semitism in pre-War Europe. Its goal is to detach their mythical Indo-European ancestors from India, just as pre-war Aryan theories sought to erase the Judaic heritage of Christian Europe. This lies at the root of the ‘ideological abuse’ (in Arvidsson’s words) that Indo-European Studies has been guilty of:
There is something in the nature of research about Indo-Europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse— perhaps something related to the fact that for the past two centuries, the majority of scholars who have done research on the Indo-Europeans have considered themselves descendants of this mythical race.
This ‘ideological abuse’ reached its climax in the Nazi regime. The recent California campaign must also be seen in the same light: ideological abuse in the name of scholarship to support a worldview combined with a concern for survival.
For a brief, transient period, advocates of the Aryan myth succeeded in saving their theory from being axed, but in the process they have undermined the credibility of the textbooks and public confidence in the California education system. The wide publicity that their campaign received and the law suits that followed have dealt a severe blow to teacher morale. The real victim in this farcical tragedy is not Hinduism, which will survive the assault, but the children of California who have been used as pawns in the struggle for survival of a discredited academic discipline and its priesthood.
An African tragedy: Tutsi invasion theory
While race theories have led to stereotyping and academic and ideological abuse, they are also guilty of horrendous crimes. The Nazi Holocaust is justly infamous, but not many are aware of their contribution to the more recent Hutu-Tutsi conflicts in Africa. What Indologists could not do in India with their Aryan theories, ethnologists succeeded in doing in Africa with their race-based Tutsi invasion theory— trigger genocide. Here is the story in brief.
When we look at the map of middle Africa, we see two little countries named Rwanda and Burundi, bordering on Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of Congo). Few Indians know the recent history of these unfortunate countries or the cause of the recent catastrophes that engulfed them. As reported in the Western media, these countries are inhabited by two supposedly different ethnic groups, the so-called Hutus and Tutsis. The ethnic composition of these two countries is as follows.
Rwanda: Hutu 84%, Tutsi 15%, Twa (Pygmies) 1%
Burundi: Hutu 85%, Tutsi 14%, Twa 1%
In other words, their compositions hardly differ at all. But according to Western anthropologists, mainly colonial bureaucrats and missionaries, the Tutsi are supposed to be a Hamitic people, a race that was often intermixed with the whiter races of the North, notably from Ethiopia and Egypt, which in their turn were intermixed with some West Asiatic people, mainly the Hittites, by repeated invasions from the North. These people, the Tutsis, are supposed to have arrived from the North and not native to Rwanda. The analogy to the invading Aryans is immediate and striking, but doesn’t stop here.
The majority of Hutus are said to be Bantu, of original African race, which spilled out from the middle of the West African coast of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cote d’Ivorie (Ivory Coast) and the inland countries of Burkina Faso and its neighbors.
In this scenario, which is contradicted by genetic analysis, the Tutsis (like the Aryans) are foreign invaders or migrants in the Rwanda-Burundi region. The Hutus, like the Indian Dravidians, are said to be much older people, but not the original inhabitants. The original inhabitants are said to be the Pygmies (or Twa), who constitute barely 1 percent of the people. The interesting part of the theory is the role assigned to the Tutsi minority. They are made into a superior race of invaders, just like the Aryans, and supposedly constitute the aristocratic elite and the oppressors of the Hutu majority.
According to this theory, the minority Tutsi have subjugated the indigenous, but not too indigenous (compared to the Pygmies) Hutus for centuries and forced them into the inferior position of agriculture. Now the key notion: Hutus and Tutsis are really two completely separate races, with the ‘black’ Hutus forming the oppressed majority, and their relatively fair invaders, the Tutsi, forming the oppressors.
This in essence is the Tutsi invasion theory, the African version of the Aryan invasion theory. The similarities are startling, even to the extent of the Dravidians in India being preceded by earlier inhabitants, the aborigines (the so-called adi-vasis), who have their African counterpart in the Pygmies. So we have the African Pygmy-Hutu-Tutsi sequence corresponding to the Indian aborigines-Dravidian-Aryan scheme.
It is a curious experience to look at the political evolution of this grotesque theory and its monstrous fallout. Until the coming of the Europeans, the Tutsis and the Hutus never saw themselves as different. Nor were they engaged in any racial wars. With the European scramble for Africa, Rwanda-Burundi became part of the short-lived German East Africa. After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, it became part of the Belgian colonies in Africa. This notion of the Tutsi-Hutu racial difference began to be drilled into the natives by colonial administrators, some academics (not unlike present day Indologists) and missionaries known as the Pere Blancs (White Fathers). (There are no Pere Noirs or Black Fathers.) They invented the Tutsi invasion theory and labeled the Hutus as the victims of Tutsi invasion and oppression.
It is worth noting that this period, between the two world wars, was the heyday of race theories in Europe. It seems the notion of superiority due to difference in skin color—imagined in this case—is indelibly ingrained in the European psyche. Its politics has collapsed, not due to any dawn of enlightenment on its proponents but the defeat of Nazi Germany. It has continued however in Western academia as Indo-European Studies and in other guises.
As with the Aryan theories and their various offshoots, this Tutsi-Hutu division has no factual basis. They speak the same language, have a long history of intermarriage and have many cultural characteristics in common. Differences are regional rather than racial, which they were not aware of until the Europeans made it part of their politics and propaganda.
The division if any was occupational. Agriculturists were called Hutu while the cattle owning elite were referred to as Tutsi. The Tutsi, like the Indian Aryans, were supposed to be tall, thin and fair, while the Hutu were described as short, black and squat— just as the Indian Dravidians are said to be. Since the Tutsi today don’t fit this description, scholars claimed that their invading ancestors did. They offered no proof but, being based on no evidence, their claim cannot be disproved either. In fact, it is impossible today to tell the two people apart. They are separate because government records carried over from colonial days say so.
This fictional racial divide was created and made official by colonial bureaucrats during Belgian rule. The Belgian Government forced everyone to carry an identity card showing tribal ethnicity as Hutu or Tutsi. This was used in administration, in providing lands, positions, and otherwise playing power politics based on race. This divisive politics combined with the racial hatred sowed by the Tutsi invasion theory turned Rwanda-Burundi into a powder keg ready to explode.
The explosion came following independence form colonial rule. Repeated violence after independence fueled this hatred driven by this supposed ethnic difference and the concocted history of the Tutsi invasion and oppression. Some 2.5 million people were massacred in this fratricidal horror of wars and genocides. Unscrupulous African leaders, like the self-styled Dravidian politicians of India, exploited this divisive colonial legacy to gain power at the cost of the people. Hutu leaders described the Tutsis as cockroaches, telecasting their tirades on the radio during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis. This led ordinary Hutus to massacre the Tutsis en masse in a bid to annihilate them completely.
So a peaceful, placid nation with a common populace, sharing a common language, culture and history was destroyed by colonialist, racist concoction called the Tutsi invasion theory. It was entirely the handiwork of colonial bureaucrats, missionaries and pseudo-scholars building careers on the discredited notion of race.
It is of course no coincidence that ideas that led to the Holocaust in Europe should have led to genocide in Africa. The disgrace is that they continue to exist in Western academia in various guises, ready to come out of the closet at an opportune moment. This is what was seen during the recent California school curriculum revision.
History lesson: transplanting the poison tree
Why should we learn all this? Because the Tutsi invasion theory has ominous parallels to the Aryan invasion theory and the Aryan myth, which scholars are trying desperately to save using linguistics or, Indo-European Studies or some similar fig-leaf. Sectarian tension and violence, thankfully not on the same horrific scale, was incited between North- and South Indians by self-styled Dravidian parties like the DMK, AIDMK and their many offshoots and incarnations. These are the poisonous legacy of the colonial-missionary racist offspring.
Why did India not go the way of Rwanda-Burundi? Not for lack of trying but because the cultural foundation of Hinduism proved too strong. It defeated the designs of politicians and propagandists masquerading as scholars. It is no coincidence that Rwanda and Burundi had been converted to Christianity, preparing the ground for sectarian conflict. Several church figures, including priests and nuns have been found guilty of complicity in the Tutsi massacres. As in India, Christianity was a colonial tool and missionaries little more than imperial agents.
Their failure in Hindu India is also what is behind the visceral anti-Hinduism of Witzel and his colleagues. It came to the fore during the recent California school controversy. This is enhanced by the fact that Hindu scholars have been at the forefront of exposing their designs and debunking their scholarly claims. An Internet group (IER or Indo-Eurasian Research) co-founded by Witzel has been doing little more than spewing venom at Hindus and their practices, in language and style that bear comparison with Nazi era publications like Julius Streicher’s Der Strummer.
They may have been defeated this time, but there is no room for complacency. The divisive politicians of India and their friends and colleagues in academia can come together to defend the Aryan-Dravidian divide. California last year was an example of such an unholy nexus. 7 Had Witzel and his colleagues succeeded in planting their poison tree in California schools, it would have become fertile ground for demagogues to turn the ethnically diverse California into a powder keg of animosities.
This brand of pseudo-scholarship cannot survive once their Aryan theories end up in the dustbin where they belong. Recognizing this, their advocates no longer engage in debate but resort to name calling. Any opposition to the Aryan theories is denounced as emotional, chauvinistic, and the handiwork of Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists. Like the artificial Aryan-Dravidian divide, the Tutsi-Hutu divide is also denied by respectable scholarship, including Western scholarship. Are we to denounce these—and a million Tutsi victims of the genocide—as the handiwork of these nationalistic chauvinistic Tutsis who deserved their fate?
The Aryan myth—and its advocates—have both been exposed, but it would be a serious error to assume that it has been put to rest. Bad ideas have a way of resurfacing especially when self interest is at stake. Writing about the persistence of superstitions like belief in witches and witchcraft in Europe, Charles Mackay, in his famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds observed (1841):
So deeply rooted are some errors that ages cannot remove them. The poisonous tree that once overshadowed the land might be cut down by the sturdy efforts of sages and philosophers; the sun may shine clearly upon spots where venomous things once nestled in security and shade; but still the entangled roots are stretched beneath the surface, and may be found by those who dig. Another King like James I [a self professed expert on demonology] might make them vegetate again; and more mischievous still, another Pope like Innocent VIII [who initiated the Inquisition against witches] might raise the decaying roots to strength and verdure.
One may add that scholars and academics are no more immune to the lure of obscurantism than medieval popes and kings, especially when their survival is at stake. With their base crumbling in Europe, these purveyors of hate are looking for fresh soil in places like California to plant their poison-bearing trees.
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Sri Pankaj Saksena for valuable information relating to the Tutsi invasion theory and its legacy of horrors.
NOTES
Curiously the very success of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States has helped these European race theories by shielding them from scrutiny. In the U.S., Aryan theories are associated with fringe groups like the Ku Klux Klan, not prestigious institutions like Harvard. It must be added that this is not official Harvard policy but a negative fallout of academic freedom, with a tenured faculty member misusing his position. Still one hopes that Harvard authorities can reign in someone who is increasingly a blot on its liberal image.
Quoted in Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization: History, science and politics by N.S. Rajaram (2006), New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, page 31. The original source (cited in the book) is not easy to access.
Op. cit. p. 127. Some recent claims of a genetic basis for the Aryan invasion are easily refuted. See Sarasvati River… (Op. cit.) for a discussion of the current state of Aryan theories.
Op. cit. p. 128.
Ibid.
It is important to note that Hitler and the Nazis appropriated their ideas and symbols from European mythology, not India. Hitler’s Aryans worshipped Apollo and Odin, not Vedic deities like Indra and Varuna. His Swastika was also European (‘Hakenkreuz’ or hooked cross) not Indian. It was seen in Germany for the first time when General von Luttwitz’s notorious Erhardt Brigade marched into Berlin from Lithuania in support of the abortive Kapp Putsch of 1920. The Erhardt Brigade was one of several freebooting private armies during the years following Germany’s defeat in World War I. They had the covert support of the Wehrmacht (Army headquarters).
Several fringe groups from the Communists to those claiming to represent ‘Christian Dalits’ (an oxymoron) ranged behind Witzel in his campaign. The court dismissed them and their claims.
Just wondering GB, if you would ever spend equal effort to blast Mr. Bhattacharjee for what his government has done in Nandigram. If your head is full of shame about the events in Nandigram over last few days…
And people, what about Buddhadev Bhattacharya?
http://thefirstpuff.blogspot.com/2007/11/indo-us-deal-would-be-signed-by-blood.html
Faux noise and Tehelka being compared and I find it very hard to read the article and further. I will though, but I can’t right now. For people who don’t know, Arnab you are making a very faulty comparison. You are falling into the trap of looking only at party affiliations – a very narrow spectrum- while neglecting to look at the inherently racist, biased and hate filled propaganda spewed day in and day out by the likes of Hannity, O’Liely and those two hate mongering “pundits” Ann Coulter and Malkin. To compare these clowns to Tehelka and Tarun is grossly unfair. Your blog though and I don’t want to delve deeper else the Arnab pujaris residing in the comment section might just blitzkrieg me.
I have come to expect better from this blog.
I completely agree with GB that in India, certain sections of the media are working like Fox News and we need to be very watchful about these sections.
So, guys, closely follow CNN-IBN as elections in Gujarat is very close.
Also, for India-US nuclear deal to pass, Congress would want to use Nandigram as a trade-off with CPI(M). CNN-IBN has already swung into action with many reports about the incident. What is really shameful is when the CPI(M) cadres was actually committing those crimes, there was no such reports. [Please see the links below]
I think Rajdeep Sardesai/CNN-IBN and Tehelka.com are working for Congress.
http://firstpuff.blogspot.com/2007/11/indo-us-deal-would-be-signed-by-blood.html
http://firstpuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/they-want-gujrat-by-hook-or-by-crook.html
@The First Puff:
Actually your assertion says more about your bias than the channel’s. That is because you have not substantiated your allegations. CNN-IBN can argue that they could not report earlier because no journalists were allowed to Nandigram, and as far as I know that is a true assertion.
As far as your Congress supporter accusation, that is old hat actually. Both extreme right and left wingers routinely accuse the various TV channels and press of working for the Congress. It’s become hilarious now. BJP accused Tehelka, Aaj Tak and Headline News of doing the same after the sting. Now you accuse CNN-IBN. Many others accuse Outlook magazine of being a Congress stooge.
Amazing how many news outlets Congress owns. 😀
@ The First Puff : “Also, for India-US nuclear deal to pass, Congress would want to use Nandigram as a trade-off with CPI(M)”.
I fully agree with you. The infinite speed with which the left did a complete volte face is highly suspicious.
It would not be surprising if certain channels in India (& overseas) are in the pay of petro-dollars. The BBC has been caught red-handed on many occasions trying to paint Islam in a far better light (e-mails were found & publicised). Many BBC reporters are find promotion to Al Jazeera after a while. This is not surprising, the mafia in the 1930s had many reporters in their pay. If I remember correctly, Al Capone even murdered an editor (?) in his pay after the police started investigating the editor.
The Tehelka episode is treachory of the most disgusting kind. If this was China, they would be strung up with piano wire. The Tehelka expose was publicised in desperation the very day after a significant international development on Kashmir was about to be made.
On 11 March, Kofi Annan clearly states that the UN position is aligned with India’s, to the sheer horror of Tehelka & BBC Pakistan & other Pakistani terrorists
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2001/20010312/main1.htm
The very next day the Tehelka bombshell is unleashed to completely divert national and international attention.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1218746.stm
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071216/asp/frontpage/story_8674918.asp
Today, Teesta Javed Setalvad was here in Washington DC, (at Hindu taxpayers money) meeting pro-Islamic lobbyists on K Street and Pennsylvania Ave., in an effort to cancel Narendra Modi’s visa again.
Then I saw this news
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/09modi.htm
Wither India, wither.
In the late 1980s, Abdul Latif was the underworld king of Gujarat. Later, he became Dawood Ibrahim’s business manager in the state and was one of criminal dons to make what now seems to be the shameless transition from organized crime to terrorism. Latif was also the suspect in the Mumbai blasts case of 1993; the RDX and other explosive devices for that operation landed, remember, on the Gujarat coast. In November 1997, Latif was killed in an encounter with the Ahmadabad police.
Many of the Latif’s cohorts were put under watch. One of them was his driver, apparently responsible for, in one daring move, hiding a huge cache of weapons meant for terrorist groups. This was part of the consignment that had arrived before Mumbai blasts of 1993. Latif was under surveillance so his driver had hidden the arms in a well in his (the driver’s) native village near Ujjain. The driver eventually faced over 50 cases including some under the National Security Act; He was arrested at various stages, by the Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh police, but avoided conviction. When not facilitating terror networks, he was engaged in extortion rackets in Rajasthan, acting almost certainly on behalf of others. His principals, the police believe, may be linked to terror funding groups. Latif’s driver’s name was Sohrabuddin Sheikh.
Yes, this was the same Sohrabuddin Sheikh for whose encounter Modi was being criticised by the Congress(I) and the Media.
‘A Nationalist is being accused and harassed for having exterminated a Terrorist!’ by the Congress(I) and the Media that calls itself ‘Secular’.
Hi Arnab,
I have been reading your old posts and this post made me search for more information. Following link is a follow-up on the foetus story which seems to have been wrong. Don’t know whether you covered this in your subsequent posts or where the below is also the truth or not. While the carnage by the Hindus in the Godhra aftermath cannot be justified, it does seem from the below link that it was deliberately shown to be more brutal and disgusting (I am not saying killing and raping is not disgusting or brutal – but the foetus thing was beyond words) than it might have been by human rights activitists fighting for the right of the minorities (Muslims). Hope you do read very late comments (late by 4 years) on your posts.
http://www.gujaratriots.com/54/myth-16-a-pregnant-womans-womb-was-ripped-open/
It is a pity that people who support ache din cannot give examples of ache din for average citzens of India.If you go to bank the bank will try to lure you with numerous new schemes saying that ache din will come.even banks running SIPs will advice you to purchase in this dull market.Again Arun jaitley commented on the rise of hitler that day in parliament.Now who has said lies to Indians before the elections. Were they all chunavi jumlas. Even the OROP is being shelved back.This government does not have enough money to finance its projects.Foreigners will not invest unless they see assured returns on money invested.