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Godhra, 'secular' 'progressives' and politics

As usual, during the bloodbath in Gujarat, the Nehruvian Stalinists in the English-language media showed their cowardice and bigotry by blaming the Hindus for all sorts of real and imagined faults. It never strikes them that the non-Hindus of India could possibly be anything other than victims oppressed by "cruel, medieval, casteist Hindus:" never mind that such Hindus exist largely in their hyperactive imaginations.

The Nehruvians twisted themselves into pretzel-logic in their eagerness to justify the unjustifiable: the carnage that was set off by the usual suspects, that is, Muslims with links either to Pakistani subversives or to the Congress party. The difference between the two groups is vanishingly small when it comes to pressing forward Muslim demands. Consider some implicated as suspects in the Godhra incident according to BJP sources, as reported by The Indian Express of March 5:

• Mehmud Hussain Kalota, convener of the Congress district minority cell and president of the Godhra municipality
  
• Salim Abdul Ghaffar Sheikh, president of the Panchmahal Youth Congress
  
• Abdul Rehman Abdul Majid Ghantia, a known Congress worker
  
• Farroukh Bhana, secretary of the district Congress committee
  
• Haji Bilal, a known Congress worker

Yet, the grave provocation of Muslims deliberately burning alive Hindu women and children did not lead to a communal conflagaration in India in general. Can you imagine what would have happened if, say, black rioters had torched a trainload of white commuters in New York City? The entire country would have been in flames. Or, more to the point, if a bunch of Muslims had set fire to a Greyhound bus in Los Angeles? I can guarantee this: every Muslim in the country would have been rounded up and sent to a concentration camp (probably Guantanamo Bay these days), just like the Americans did to the Japanese during World War II.

Yet, nothing like this happened in India. Things were more or less normal. So here are some headlines we did not see in the 'secular' 'progressive' English media of India, and which we, indeed, will never see:

• In the midst of the communal disturbances in Gujarat, thousands of Muslim office-goers in Tamil Nadu went about their normal lives
  
• West Bengal's many Islamic madrassas functioned without hindrance
  
• In Hyderabad, no Hindus attacked Muslims even in Hindu-dominated areas
  
• Thousands of Muslim mosques all over India, outside Gujarat, were unharmed and untouched by violence
  
• 120 million Muslims all over the country went to work, prayed, went to the movies, ate at restaurants without being molested by Hindus

And why is it that this was possible in India? Can you imagine the situation in reverse in Pakistan? That is, if a Hindu mob massacred 58 unarmed Muslim pilgrims, would the life of a single Hindu in Pakistan (of the handful that apparently live there, a rapidly decreasing number as their women are kidnapped and converted to Islam regularly) be in the least bit safe? In 1992, after the Ayodhya incidents, most Hindus in Pakistan were forced to take on Christian names like John and Joseph just to be allowed to live.

Do note that, according to India Today magazine, the Muslim mob came equipped with crowbars to pry open the closed shutters of the S-6 coach, a reserved women's coach, which is also in keeping with known modus operandi, to cause maximum offense (I had not heard about the abduction of young women until I read Varsha's piece. I wonder where they are now.) Not to mention Molotov cocktails, quantities of kerosene, containers of acid, country-made bombs and so forth.

I am sure rediff.com's own Dilip D'Souza, whose heart bleeds constantly for anybody who is not a Hindu, would consider the train attack an excellent example of peaceful democratic dissent. I am looking forward to Anand Patwardhan making a movie about Hindu violence in Gujarat, while coyly omitting to mention the burning alive of Hindu pilgrims. Muslims massacring Hindus -- ah, but that is just business as usual: wink, wink, nudge, nudge, "boys will be boys."

It is because of Hindu tolerance that the conflagration in Gujarat did not extend to the rest of India. It behooves the English media -- so quick to denounce Hindus in such harsh and unfair terms -- to remember this. Pakistan made a big show -- eyes firmly on such friendly media as the UK's Guardian newspaper and The New York Times -- of "protecting" Hindu temples in Karachi during the Gujarat troubles. Why don't the Marxists ever wonder why it was not necessary to "protect" mosques in India? Or why there is a Rs 350 crore Haj subsidy when no Muslim country gives such largesse?

The problem in India is not the Muslims or Christians, it is the brown sahibs, Marxists and fellow-travelers in the media and the self-proclaimed 'intelligentsia.' These are the self-aggrandising monsters, spawned by the Jawaharlal Nehru University and sustained by shameless cronyism, who have hijacked the discourse in India to Orwellian Stalinist levels of bizarreness: war is peace. Murder is love. Pilgrims are terrorists. Terrorists who murder pilgrims are poor, oppressed, misunderstood, downtrodden minorities.

There is a concept of 'dhimmitude:' an extension of the Stockholm syndrome where a hostage develops an unreasoning attachment to the captors, much like what happened to Patty Hearst some years ago. See Bat Ye'or's book at www.dhimmi.org or Sohail Ahmad Banglori's article. This afflicts some section of India's soi-distant 'intellectuals'. They are in thrall to the Islamic idea of superiority, and they accept Islamic prejudice that non-Muslims have no rights, and that they live at the whim and sufferance of the Muslims. Many of India's 'secular' 'progressives' suffer from self-imposed dhimmitude.

Others among them are Judases, seduced by thirty silver coins from the Chinese. There is a famous newspaper in India, which would not survive for two months without infusions of capital: for it has no readers. I suspect it has no more than a thousand readers, mostly on the JNU campus. But it continues publishing, often mouthing unedited garbage verbatim from China's Xinhua propaganda agency, sometimes giving it the bylines of its own stringers. And it claims moral superiority.

I suspect this is another form of China's well-thought-through infiltration and encirclement of India, at low cost to itself. Intellectual colonisation of an Indian 'elite.' It is intriguing that some of India's 'leaders' and 'intellectuals' fly off to China frequently: it would be extremely interesting to correlate these trips with unusual political happenings in India like governments being toppled.

And they accuse Hindus of 'violating the law' in Ayodhya. They may have heard of a certain gentleman, one M K Gandhi, who violated a law banning the making of salt by individuals. He invented a certain concept of 'non-violent non-co-operation' where you peacefully object to a law that you do not agree with. This is quite similar to what was going in Ayodhya in early March: there was no violence, and people were courting arrest.

I tell you, I have had it with all these morally superior people: the 'secular' 'progressives' who pontificate at length get on my nerves. They need the injunction: "Why dost thou see the mote in thy brother's eye, but not the beam in thine own?"

Given the fact that Muslim Congress party 'leaders' are the prime suspects in planning the pre-meditated and organised attack on the Sabarmati Express it is highly likely that there was a large element of political calculation in the barbaric attack. Here is a scenario, based on conventional wisdom, that I think is worth considering:

• The BJP has been humbled in mid-term assembly elections especially in Uttar Pradesh, and also in Punjab and Uttaranchal which it used to rule. Perhaps this means the trusted Hindu vote-bank of the BJP is deserting it in droves, as they are tired of its unresponsiveness to its needs
  
• The Congress is suddenly in power in as many as 13 states. The BJP has only one major state, Gujarat, under its control. So what better than to topple the BJP government of Gujarat through violence? This reminds me of the time when, in 1956, an unholy alliance of Christians and casteist Hindus fomented violence and toppled the E M S Namboodiripad government in Kerala -- the first step down that slippery road to the unprincipled use of Article 356. And note this was done by none other than that paragon of democracy, Jawaharlal Nehru, on the advice of his daughter.
  
• Why not take this one step further and attempt to make life so difficult for the BJP that they will be forced to step down at the Centre? This will make it possible for the Italian from Torino, Madame Gandhi the Younger, to become prime minister, as has been ordained in the Gospel According to Nehru: it is apparent that non-Nehru-dynasty rule in India is an unfortunate aberration. The ruling class, i e the Nehru dynasty (their humble origins as ferrymen and policemen forgotten) need to take its rightful place in Indian politics once again.
  
• If there is a general election, the Congress, with its new-found strength as reflected in the assembly elections, will win an absolute majority in Parliament.

Unfortunately, this scenario is debatable. Consider the following alternative scenario:

• The BJP lost the elections in UP etc. not because they are too Hindu, but because they aren't Hindu enough. It is now apparent to a lot of Hindus that the BJP are only marginally more sympathetic to their cause than the Congress is. The BJP merely recognised the Hindu vote-bank and used it for their meteoric rise to power.
  
• A recent issue of India Today had a cover story on the Ayodhya issue. They made the surprising discovery that at least according to their polls, the emotive issue of the building a Ram temple there is important to a plurality of Hindus if not a majority, despite what the JNU-coffee-house would-be urban guerillas think. Thus, it can be concluded that there is simmering resentment against the BJP for not having followed upon its election promises to take the temple forward.
  
• The Hindu vote-bank that the BJP had managed to construct got dissipated in UP, primarily due to adroit politics by Mayawati who ran a more-Hindu-than-thou campaign, cobbling together a coalition of 'forward' and 'backward' Hindus (I used these terms for want of better, cogent terms, not as value judgments)
  
• However, the same Hindu vote-bank recognises that at the national level, it makes no sense to bring back the Congress raj, with its attendant Marxist parasites. Even at its worst, the BJP is still better for Hindus than the Congress is. Therefore, it is likely that a new general election will not improve the Congress' position
  
• Sonia Gandhi and her progeny have not embarrassed themselves publicly lately primarily because they have not been in the spotlight. Once there is a brutal election campaign, people will focus on their incompetence, and the fact that none of them has lifted a finger to do anything for this country, other than live in regal splendour that is beyond the wildest dreams of the Maino family, humble builder and follower of Mussolini that Sonia's father was. I wonder what Sonia's horoscope looks like: surely, to be this lucky she must have an incredible fate line.

In addition, there is real and palpable Hindu anger over the Godhra incident, and in particular the reaction to it and the ensuing mass violence. Everyone recognises that the majority of the Hindus and Muslims who were killed in the days of terror were innocent bystanders. No sane individual could condone their killings: because they are people like you and me, people just going about their business, who were, to use the Americans' infelicitous phrase, "collateral damage."

Hindu anger is not directed at ordinary Muslims, whom Hindus know as neighbours, friends and colleagues; but at those who perpetrated the violence, and at those who, instead of condemning it, bent over backwards to justify it. As a Hindu, I am appalled both at the burning of the train and at the orgy of violence that followed. Innocents were hurt in both, Hindus and Muslims alike. The anger is directed at the perpetrators, and at those who betrayed their journalistic integrity by being utterly biased.

The perpetrators were those that would see India destroyed, fragmented: and this has to be a loose coalition of Pakistan-sympathisers and China-sympathisers, for these are the forces out to damage us. There were elements among the Muslims, the Congress, and the Marxists, I suspect, that were involved in a plot. The objectives were manifold:

1. Create violence in India as a diversionary measure to take the world's spotlight away from Pakistan and its state apparatus for terrorism and to paint India as a land of equal barbarism.

2. Generate an escalating sequence of terror and counter-terror that would provoke a mass slaughter of Muslims. For, the Pakistanis and their surrogates have no love lost of Muslim Indians in general, viewing them as traitors who did not accept the siren song of the great "Land of the Pure." Besides, they want to tell them: "Look, we told you so, we told you the Hindus would slaughter you." The intention was to generate a groundswell of sympathy from Muslims especially from West Asia, to loosen a few purse strings, generate a few more motivated holy warriors, and generally breathe fresh life into their currently flagging jihad against India.

3. Create a massive swing in public opinion away from the BJP and Hindu-oriented groups. The Chinese are quite upset with the BJP for actually daring to test the nuclear weapons, go ahead with weaponisation of the Agni, and allying with the Americans to project Indian power into the Bay of Bengal and the Straits of Malacca.

They have generally succeeded in objective number 1. The Ugly Journalists of India have successfully projected India to be the equivalent of Pakistan. This is libel, but this is what the editors in the US want to hear too: for example, see a hatchet job by Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times.

They did not succeed in objective number 2. It must be a great disappointment to the Pakistanis that Hindus do not react like their own robustly blood-thirsty Muslim selves that go into unending orgies of violence, destroying everything in their paths. No wonder they blames 'vegetarian Hindus' for all sorts of sins. It should be a matter of great pride to Hindus and Indians that at the end of the day we are a civilised people. Yes, there were the desperate acts of revenge, but put yourself in the shoes of a Hindu whose wife has been burnt alive by Muslims, and imagine how compassionate you'd feel towards Muslims -- any Muslims -- in the immediate aftermath. But, by and large, reason prevailed. This is cause for celebration.

They also did not succeed in objective number 3. In fact, the result may well be diametrically the opposite of what they anticipated. I suspect that the BJP and Hindu-oriented parties will now find that Hindu anger and anxiety will translate into greater support for them and their policies, whether or not the BJP is actually interested in Hindu affairs. It may, in fact, be a windfall for the BJP. As Oliver Goldsmith said in Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog:

But soon a wonder came to light,
That showed the rogues they lied:
The man recovered from the bite,
The dog it was that died.

The mad dog analogy may be especially appropriate here in the case of India's Ugly Journalists. Educated as well as they are, morally upright as they claim to be, their judgment has been so clouded by their dhimmitude and their Marxist dogma that they can no longer recognise their own lies. They are secure in the certainty of their utterly wrong convictions. It is time they saw the writing on the wall: they are a liability to the nation.

The contrast between their crocodile tears when one Australian missionary was burnt to death with his children, and their reaction when the coachload of Hindus was burnt alive, has shown them to be intensely hypocritical. Has even one English newspaper published a list of the dead at Godhra, their photographs and biographies? Do we know what motivated them, what they loved, who they were loved by? Do we know their names, even? Their ages? Are they unwept, unhonored, unsung? In contrast, we know in great detail all about the missionary's sainted wife, who goes about 'forgiving' all and sundry anon and anon.

Where was their righteous wrath on February 27th? They only bestirred themselves when Muslims started getting killed in retaliatory riots. Shame on you, rogue journalists! From the Christian scriptures:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

Postscript

I have been startled by the sudden appearance of the word 'medireview' as an apparent synonym for 'medieval'. No, there is no such word, although it is appearing quite regularly: and I thought the historians of the world had gotten together and churned out this new one to keep us non-historians on our toes. It turns out this is a gremlin introduced by a virus-detection program. In order to defang potentially lethal viruses, certain web servers automatically began to replace "expression" with "statement" and "eval" with "review," the latter being less powerful terms in the computer languages viruses are usually written in. Do to an error in boundary-checking, the "eval" in "medieval" was also replaced by "review," thus leading to the neologism "medireview."

A number of people wrote to me questioning my suggestion in an earlier column Religion is like soap-powder that Marxism is a semitic religion. Here is further evidence of the truth of that claim. In Islam, the provision for apostasy is death: that is, if a Muslim converts to another religion, his punishment is death. It turns out that Marxists believe apostates die, too. There are many murders of RSS workers by Marxists in Kerala's Kannur district. Turns out that many of these are apostate Marxists. That is, if you convert out of Marxism, you will be murdered.

Rajeev Srinivasan