Pakistan: Goodbye & Good Luck

Source: http://www.newslaundry.com/2013/05/pakistan-goodbye-good-luck/

Human beings cut off ties with one another all the time. This not only prevents a fight-unto-death scenario, it also allows the adversaries to cool off and move on – go their separate ways.

The time has come for India to cut off all diplomatic, economic, cinematic and other ties with Pakistan. In perpetuity. Good luck and goodbye, Pakistan. May you prosper and may your people find peace.

I say this with a degree of conviction and moral certitude that our forefathers, barring perhaps Mahatma Gandhi, would have approved of. Let me explain.

Pakistan has a pathological hatred of India and the idea of India.

It was a nation created because of it. The creators of Pakistan abhorred India’s plurality. They disbelieved the assertion of many – including Gandhi – that Hindus and Muslims can stay as brothers. They doubted India’s assertion of secularism. No, they said, a time will come when our people will be under the boot of the majority. We want a separate land for our people.

The first speech Mr Jinnah gave in the newly created Pakistan was astonishing in its effrontery. He talked of how he wanted Pakistan to be a secular state! That’s right – you can’t bear to live as one in a secular state, but now that you’ve created your own nation – based solely on a religious conviction and unfounded fear of the majority – you are happy to believe that your newly-turned majority desires nothing else but a secular state where all minorities shall live in peace. Well, we know what came of it, the experiment that was Pakistan.

Pakistan has never been able to reconcile with the fact that an overwhelming majority of Muslims – whom Pakistan’s founders were supposedly fighting for in the first place – decided to stay back in India. This is a thorn that pricks Pakistan daily and will continue to do so.

Those who doubt the sincerity of Indian Muslims and forever taunt them and address them as “they”, forget this simplest of facts. A huge piece of land was created especially for them – “Come all ye brothers, to our promised land where you will never live under fear of the majority” – and then, when the time came, these very people, the Indian Muslims, ignored the call. Can anything else be more telling of the idea of India?

Pakistan has a pathological hatred of India because millions of Muslims decided to stay back.

The hatred became acute when Pakistan broke into two, of its own internal stress. A nation that was based on religion could not keep itself together to even celebrate its silver jubilee.

All history – right from the time of Herodotus – is contemporary when you factor in the fact that we read, assess and describe a few thousand years on a timeline of 13.8 billion years. What monumental folly! No wonder we cannot trust history and we fail to learn from it.

The cutting off of economic ties will not hurt India. It may hurt Pakistan, but if they believe it won’t then so be it. Our bilateral trade is minuscule compared to our trade with other countries.

It is, however, the cutting off of ALL ties, meaning people-to-people mostly, that divides opinion in our country, to the extent that we begin to label people as hawks and doves. We somehow believe it is not morally right.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For all the unimaginable work that Bapu did for us, and the path he showed us, there were some blunders he committed that went on to condition us. The Mahatma, we must understand, had an unrivalled moral compass, more so if you notice the decades he was active in – Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini were his contemporaries.

I believe he was wrong in demanding that India pay Pakistan a chunk of money we owed them Rs 55 crore ($ 78.5 million today) even though it was certain that Pakistan would use it against India, in buying arms and expanding its skirmishes and not-so-contained battles over Kashmir. In any case, the two nations were at war when Gandhi demanded we make this payment.

The only man who stood up to Gandhi was Sardar Patel. I don’t know how to say this, and pardon my ignorance of history, but I am yet to find a blunder that Patel committed in all the years that he served India’s cause. I love Bapu and I like Nehru, but it is inescapable that the two made some astonishing mistakes. If anyone can list a single blunder of Patel, I’d be the wiser.

Those who say he was a right-wing fanatic know nothing! Patel exhibited the goodness of Gandhi but crucially, he did not let it – like Nehru did every time – cloud his exemplary realpolitik wisdom. In essence, Patel was an incredible student of history. People forget how close he was to Bapu – many a time Bapu told him to keep Nehru in check for he worried Nehru was getting too close to the Communists.

Patel was forthright in his objection to handing Pakistan the money. He went to Gandhi and told him so in as many words. But what can anyone do if the man he loves and admires decides to go on a fast-unto-death over the issue? What does a son do when the father blackmails? The awful dilemma of Patel – realpolitik versus Gandhi’s moral compass – is described in many books (Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer comes to mind immediately). But the most objective description is in Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his struggle with India. What does one do when the person you love asks something from you that you don’t want to give? In the end Patel backed out.

That was the first occasion when Pakistanis knew Indians are emotional people, that their every judgment from thereon would be clouded by emotion and the desire to feel good about taking the high moral ground.

We have suffered ever since at the hands of Pakistan. Not a day has passed when it hasn’t desired the destruction of India. Those who are old enough to remember the 1980s would recall how, when Pakistan was clearly fomenting trouble in Punjab, we gushed at Zia-ul-Haq’s arrival at the Jaipur test match. Even though we saw Pakistan’s intentions we wanted to embrace her, we wanted to take the high moral ground. This continued all through the 90s and continues to this day. The release of the Kandahar terrorists and their rapturous welcome in the streets of Pakistan; the 26/11 massacre; the LOC beheadings; the murder of Sarabjit…nothing will stir us into cutting all ties with Pakistan. Why? Because we think it’s not ethical and moral to do so.

But this is where we are so wrong!

India was one of the few countries which were unequivocal in cutting all relations with the apartheid South Africa. Those who say sports and politics shouldn’t be mixed forget that for decades we as Indians didn’t want anything to do with South Africa. It was even written in our passports, for crying out loud! Can any right-thinking person say that it was wrong on our part to do so?

Those who say that the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are like us, good people, nice friendly people – why do they forget that the same held true for a large number of white south Africans, too? Were Nadine Gordimer and Dr Christiaan Barnard racist? But nations don’t behave like how their well-meaning people would like them to behave.

Apartheid continued for 50 years. The South African economy, based on diamonds, and gold, and mining and agro products, was one of the largest in the world during the time of apartheid, so much so that those who call themselves the upholders of morality and ethics now – the Western world – continued to trade with South Africa until as late as 1989!

But we were steadfast. And I am proud of that, proud that we can look Mandela and Tutu and Biko (if he was alive) in the eyes and say we stood with you, brothers, we were there right beside you.

We could have benefited a great deal from trading with the apartheid regime but we stood up for principles. Not all white South Africans were racist pigs. But despite that we wanted nothing to do with South Africa.

Why can’t we realise that the situation with Pakistan is exactly the same? Come what may, no matter how many Pakistanis think well of India, the pathological hatred that was the basis of their nation’s creation will make sure that Pakistan will use any opportunity to humiliate India, to bring her down, to break her.

I have nothing personal against Pakistanis. The majority of them are fine people and I have many of them as friends. But this is about our people, their continued suffering. It is time we took a stand, like we did against the apartheid South Africa despite losing out on economic trade and other ties.

We must cut all ties with Pakistan and be in no hurry to resume them until we are certain that the leopard has changed its spots. We must not worry about Pakistanis not being able to come and play cricket here. Did we lament when Gavaskar and Chandra and Amarnath couldn’t play with the South Africans? On the contrary, we were proud of them. Not so the case with the few West Indians who went on a rebel tour to South Africa in the 80s. They are derided to this day in the West Indies for selling out.

No, it’s much more than sports or Bollywood or literary contacts. It’s about two brothers realising reconciliation is impossible if one of them fails to confront the truth.

Pakistan, we wish you luck. Goodbye

Your’s Sincerely
Diljit C Shah
N. Gopaldas & Co.,
36, Chinnakadai Street.,P.O. Box 328,
Tiruchirapalli – 620 002. India
email: diljitshah@yahoo.co.in

Price for Surrendering in India

Claims, Counter-Claims

• Syed Liaqat Shah was arrested from the Sanauli checkpost on the India-Nepal border on March 20 by the Delhi police
• They say he was a Hizbul Mujahideen man, on his way to Delhi as part of a ‘Holi terror plot’
• The Jammu and Kashmir police refutes this. They say Liaqat was a former militant on his way to his Kashmir home from PoK. According to them, he was a beneficiary of the state’s rehabilitaion policy for former militants.
• The Centre has asked the National Investigation Agency to probe and resolve the dispute
• It has now been decided to deploy J&K police, along with the Sashastra Seema Bal, on the Indo-Nepal border to streamline the surrender of ex-militants

Withering words. “I won’t think twice if the government allows us to return to Pakistan,” says Akhtar-un-Nisa, the second wife of Syed Liaqat Shah who was arrested by the Delhi police as a “conspirator of a terror plot” to launch fidayeen attacks in the capital on Holi.

Akhtar, 47, is the best person to hear the story from: “We were among the 10 people returning from Pakistan to India via Nepal. Seven people were received by their relatives, no one came to receive us. They (special cell of the Delhi police) arrested us near the Indo-Nepal border and took us to Gorakhpur. They didn’t recover any objectionable item from us. We pleaded that we were going to Kash­mir under the rehabilitation policy ann­ounced by the Jammu and Kashmir government for militants who want to surrender, but they didn’t listen to us. I was later released in New Delhi.”

It’s become a full-blown controversy  that ref­uses to die down. Even in the face of criticism, the Delhi police is sticking to its claim that Liaqat is a Hizbul Muj­ah­ideen operative. The Jammu and Kash­mir police is firm in its position that he was a PoK-based ex-militant on his way to Kas­hmir for state-sponsored rehabilitation. At the very least, the affair exposes the lack of com­munication between the police of the two states, especially on the issue of sur­render and rehabilitation.

The J&K government has reason to be upset. It says its rehabilitation policy—which has the overt backing of the Union home ministry—has attracted over 1,000 applications, and has enabled 241 former militants to return to J&K from Pakistan in the past two years. One source of this  row is the route of return. Ex-militants are officially all­owed to return through four entry poi­nts—Poonch-Rawalakote, Uri-Muz­affarabad, Wagah (Punjab) and the igi airport, Delhi. However, none of the former militants, including Liaqat, chose to travel through these designated routes. They preferred the Nepal route—ostensibly because Pakistan (for obvious reasons) created hurdles in the policy’s implementation. The J&K government reluctantly allowed this for the sake of its pet policy. Of the men who have returned to start on a clean slate, including 113 who have brought their families along, several arrived in India via Kathmandu, after flying there on Pakistani passports.

Akhtar says she had travelled to Pak­istan on a valid passport in 2001 after her first husband died in an encounter with the army in 1995. Her physically chall­enged teenage daughter, Jabeena, who accompanied her to Pakistan and back, was from her first marriage. “In 2006, I married Liaqat, who ran a grocery shop at Muzaffarabad (capital of PoK)…he had abandoned militancy long back. We wanted to return to our roots to lead a happy life, but the Delhi police has played spoilsport. Now I won’t think again if they allow us to return,” a visibly shaken and disappointed Akhtar says.

The J&K government and the state police have confirmed that Liaqat was slated for the rehabilitation policy meant for ex-militants in Pakistan who had ren­ounced violence and wanted to ret­urn home. Liaquat’s first wife, Ameena Bano, submitted the required documents on Feb­ruary 5, 2011, in the deputy commissioner’s office in Kupwara, the town nea­­rest to Liaqat’s village, Dardpora, in north Kashmir. As the Kupwara police had no criminal case against Liaqat, it approved the application and forwarded it to the CID and other departments. Lia­­qat’s family duly informed the police about his probable date of return after he left Pakistan with his family.

“When the state government announ­ced that militants who had crossed the LoC will be allowed to return, we urged him to return along with his second wife and step-daughter,” says Ameena, who lives with her two sons. “My brother never participated in any militant activity in Kashmir,” says Liaqat’s brother, Syed Kar­amat Shah. “He was coming here to sur­render, and we were jubilant that he was returning after 18 years.”

The J&K government fears that Liaqat’s arrest might be a “big setback” to its sho­wpiece rehabilitation policy. “Other Kashmiris who want to come back to their homes under it will be discouraged,” says chief minister Omar Abd­ullah. Already there are reports that 15 former militants, all of them from Dar­d­pora, have second thoughts about ret­urning to the Valley after seeing what  Lia­qat is going through. “This includes two of Liaqat’s relatives. They have decided to reconsider their decision,” says local MLA Abdul Haq Khan.

Meanwhile, the Delhi police has bec­ome a figure of ridicule in the milita­ncy-hardened Kashmir valley—its credibility barely there after taking Liaqat (who is in his early 50s) for a ‘dreaded fidayeen’. Among those who picked holes in the Delhi police story is CM Omar Abd­ullah himself. “I have yet to see a fidayeen who returned holding the hands of his wife and daughter. Had he been a fidayeen, he would have grenades and guns in his hands,” Omar told the assembly in one of his rare broadsides against New Delhi.

Expectedly, the media in the Valley too has been rather scathing in its censure. A Kashmir Times editorial titled Fiction of Holi-terror plot had this to say, “The incident again highlights the misuse of authority and abuse of power by men in uniform, an obvious bid to win promotions and gallantry awa­rds or for someone’s political convenience.” A journalist wrote on Facebook: “My 12-year-old cousin on Liaqat’s arr­est: ‘This old man can’t handle a pis­tol, how would he have carried out a fidayeen attack?’”  Alluding to the Delhi police linking Liaqat to the recovery of arms and ammunition from a city guest house, he added: “Certainly, when India wants to implicate Kash­miris, guns grow even on trees”.

Mehbooba Mufti, president of the PDP, agrees. “Liaqat Shah’s arrest in Delhi indicates that the old industry of falsely implicating Kashmiri youth for sake of rewards and medals is thriving. Kashmiri youth have become a fodder for Con­gress-BJP electoral politics.”

In the past, around twelve Kashmiris, all arrested by the Delhi police on terror charges, had been declared innocent by the courts. Tragically, for the accused the clean chit came late; they had had to spend the prime of their life in prison.

No wonder everyone’s hoping for caution, maturity and restraint from New Delhi. A storm of protests in Kashmir—on the street and in the assembly—has forced the Union home ministry to ask the National Inve­stigation Agency to get to the bottom of the Liaqat affair, and check the circumstances of his arrest and the veracity  of the Delhi and J&K police’s opposing claims. Greater crises have blown over Kashmir. But they often have their origins in smaller bunglings.

Narendra Modi Should be Behind Bars Rather Than Ruling a State

From Hermitude To Holography

This excerpt from a forthcoming ‘authorised-turned-unauthorised’ biography of the BJP’s man of the season, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

If there is any phase of Narendra Modi’s life about which there are no definitive accounts, it is from teenage to adulthood.  Existing literature on Modi’s life that has been endorsed or authorised by him is full of glaring contradictions; personal accounts of childhood friends, teachers, immediate kin and acquaintances contain different stories. The years from 1967 to 1971 in  Modi’s life are somewhat “mysterious”, and despite my pointed questions, he chose not to shed any light on it—save one, a confirmation that the out point in his life had been 1967 and the return point was in 1971. Modi told me: “A lot of people ask me, but I do not want to say anything about that period because at some point in my life I would like to write about this period—what I did, where all did I go…. But it started in 1967 and there were variations about the periods when I was away (from home)—at times I was away for about 15 months, then I stayed away for six months and then even lesser—and I came back. I kept coming and going….”

Modi told me that he continued with an annual ritual that he termed “meet myself programme”. When I asked him what he meant by this, he said that he spent time only with himself and went away to remote places without informing anyone about his whereabouts. “I used to go away during Diwali. When people celebrated, I would be somewhere away in a remote place, far away from any person—all by myself. I went alone, and only went to places where I would not find another human being—places like a jungle or some barren or abandoned place. I carried only a little to eat—some snacks to last for three to five days—I just chose a place where I could get water to drink. I carried only a little food—only the bare necessities—so that I did not feel that I had not eaten anything.” I asked Modi about the kind of places he used for his getaways: “Any kind—completely unknown places that I did not know. I never decided my address and did not tell anyone where I was going.” Naturally, I was curious because this was a potential headline-making story: ‘Modi disappears, aides clueless, but assure supporters of his safety’.  I asked him when was the last time he went to meet himself and where was the venue? “That was in 1995-96, I was still in Gujarat (meaning that he had not yet been shunted out from the state unit of the BJP.) I went to the Gir forest and stayed where there were no humans. I went around and found an old temple where I could sleep, where no one could disturb me. No one came.” Perplexing though, it was getting interesting and I could not resist myself. What did he do? “I did nothing. That is what I did—nothing. Just think.” And then came my final question—what about now? “Now it is not in my destiny (naseeb nahi raha.) I do not know why people debate loneliness so much­—I actually enjoy loneliness. People debate outside a lot—that Modi is a loner—I am not a loner in any way. But yes, I do not enjoy too much of a crowd.”

Halfway into my first interview with Modi, I gingerly approached the question which I feared may put an end to the writing of this book. I had played this scene in my mind’s eye several times and owed it to myself to ask the most forbidden question in the context of the man: there were two clear chapters in his political career—pre-Godhra and post-Godhra. Did he agree? He reacted predictably, by now set in his reactions whenever probed on such matters, and insulating himself deftly, cut me short and informed me with more than a hint of gruffness: “All this is available—you would be able to get the complete record. The SIT in its report has documented all this minute-to-minute—everything is available on the net…. And since it is authentic and has been done under the supervision of the Supreme Court, then you should go by that version only—why take my version? Then you may consult the Nanavati Commission report on Godhra.”

My hunch was right on both counts. First, in the way he skirted the issue, and second, in his referring to what was already part of judicial records. Not one to give up, I also asked around. Several sources corroborated my sense on this: Modi did not want to provide any fresh information which could be used against him in courts and also arm his detractors with more ammunition. The two voluminous reports that Modi mentioned have agreed with the claim of Modi and his political clan: that the attack on the Sabarmati Express on the morning of February 27, 2002, was not an accidental fire but a coordinated attack and that Modi was not guilty of any allegations levelled against him either by relatives of those who died in the post-Godhra violence or by groups of “concerned citizens”. One person I spoke to said Modi’s stonewalling tactics owed to the fact that he did not wish anyone a peep into his psyche at that time and also did not wish to add anything which may be used as evidence against him and his associates in any of the several pending legal cases.

For more than a decade since 2002, Modi’s public image has been shaped by two contrasting viewpoints. The first one is one based on belief, hearsay statements and oral assertions of people claiming to be eyewitnesses to events.The second is based on opinions and findings chiselled by inquiry committees and commissions that have reached their conclusions after relatively underplaying information and affirmations not backed by direct evidence. Both opinions have backers who have first taken an ideologically driven position and then gone on to use facts while buttressing their opinion. While the first opinion has led to extreme assessments of Modi being likened to a fascist or a mass murderer, the other school considers that painting Modi’s image in that hue is part of pseudo-secular propaganda and that he is actually a paragon of virtue and dedication.

***

I asked him about the boundaries of existence his political clan has enforced on non-Hindus and the need for them to accept Hindu ideas and ideals as their own. Modi replied: “Yes, that was the basic argument (in the course of the Ayodhya agitation, that Muslims also must accept Lord Ram as the symbol of national identity), the main philosophy—that he also was a mahapurush (great man) of this country. And that everyone in this country should believe in this—those who led this agitation campaigned for this.” At this point of the interview, it becomes evident that Modi strongly believes that if minorities wished to coexist and feel safe in the state governed by him, it was mandatory for them to abide by the beliefs and value systems of the majority community.

Meanwhile, I prodded on as Modi was opening up, and this was my best chance to get to the core of Modi’s understanding of Hindutva and I asked him: “India has a composite culture. There is tremendous social diversity. How do you look at inter-community relationships and the relationship of different social and religious groups with the State?”

Modi did not answer my question explicitly but said: “People can have different forms of puja and rituals can also be different—but that does not mean that the country, the traditions of the land can become different. Look at it this way—who is a Hindu? Those who believe in God are called Hindus and even those who do not believe in God. People also consider those who believe in idol worship as Hindus and even those who campaign against idol worship. Those who deify nature are termed Hindus and those who do not do so are also called Hindus. The truth is that Hindus do not have any real concern with the manner and processes of paying obeisance to God. Hindus have no problems if someone performs the namaz or goes to a church and reads the Bible to reach God. Hindus have no problem with this. We have no problems with the religious practices of people. We have no problems if anyone wants to retain religious identity—but the country, the traditions.”

Modi’s first hurdle after he became chief minister in 2001 was to find a safe seat and become member of the state assembly within the mandatory six-month period. But this was not easy for two reasons: Modi had never contested any election in his political career, and secondly, with the BJP traversing a rough terrain, finding a safe seat was difficult. As we have seen, Modi did not have a political home. He had been mostly Ahmedabad-based since joining the RSS in the early 1970s and ideally wanted to contest from a city seat—where he would personally know party workers—vacated by a party colleague. But an easy entry to the state assembly proved difficult for Modi because Haren Pandya, whose seat Modi wanted, did not oblige.

If such provocation was not enough, Pandya courted further trouble in the aftermath of the 2002 riots when he appeared before the Concerned Citizens Tribunal headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Krishna Iyer in May 2002. The deposition was made on an understanding that he would not be named. However, Modi’s intelligence wing, which an unnamed source says was fine-tuned after he became chief minister because Modi had been inspired by “Shivaji’s spy network” and wanted to develop an intelligence web like that, kept track of Pandya’s movements. Even his mobile phone was tapped—media reports claimed—as a result of which Modi got to know about Pandya’s deposition in almost real-time in May 2002.

Modi, however, was not satisfied at easing Pandya out of his government. In assembly elections, held in November-December 2002, the friend-turned-foe was not nominated by the party even after the intervention of stalwarts such as Advani and Vajpayee. The media reported gleefully that in order to avoid being pressurised into nominating Pandya, Modi checked into a hospital and stopped taking phone calls from New Delhi. After this, Pandya receded from the limelight and lived a quiet life till March 26,  2003, when everything was over for him. On that dreadful morning, an unknown assassin’s gun silenced Pandya when he was returning from a morning walk in the sprawling Law Garden, a public park in Ahmedabad.

The Haren Pandya murder case became the first of the several high-profile non-2002-riots court cases in Gujarat that cast a shadow over Modi’s regime. In police parlance, the Pandya murder case was termed a cut-out murder,  where the chain from the conspirator or instigator to the eventual victim is impossible to establish. A police contact explained it like this: “A wants to murder Z and instructs B to execute the order. B tells C who does not know that A is the instigator. Instructions are passed in this manner from C to D and then to E and it goes down all the way. The final contract killer does not know where the order originated from. If investigations turns nasty, then all A has to do is to make any of the people in the chain a cut-out—take him out by beginning another chain.”

Dr Peter Hammond Says that Muslims are Bad News

Adapted from Dr. Peter Hammond’s book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat

Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components.

The religious component is a beard for all of the other components.

Islamisation begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their religious privileges.

When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the other components tend to creep in as well..

Here’s how it works:

As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens.

This is the case in:

United States              Muslim 0.6 %
Australia                      Muslim 1.5%
Canada                        Muslim 1.9%
China                           Muslim 1.8%
Italy                             Muslim 1.5%
Norway                       Muslim 1.8%

At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytise from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs.

This is happening in:

Denmark                     Muslim 2%
Germany                     Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom         Muslim 2.7%
Spain                           Muslim 4%
Thailand                      Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population.

For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves, along with threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:

France                                     Muslim 8%
Philippines                               5%
Sweden                       Muslim 5%
Switzerland                 Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands          Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago     Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris, we are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam, and results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam , with opposition to Prophet Mohammed’s cartoons and films about Islam. Such tensions are seen daily, particularly in Muslim sections in:

Guyana                        Muslim 10%
India                            Muslim 13.4%
Israel                           Muslim 16%
Kenya                          Muslim 10%
Russia                          Muslim 15%

After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, such as in:

Ethiopia                       Muslim 32.8%

At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare, such as in:

Bosnia                         Muslim 40%
Chad                           Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon                      Muslim 59.7%

From 60%, nations experience unfettered persecution of non-believers of all other religions (including non-conforming Muslims), sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia law as a weapon, and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels, such as in:

Albania                        Muslim 70%
Malaysia                      Muslim 60.4%
Qatar                           Muslim 77.5%
Sudan                          Muslim 70%

After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some state-run ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, such as has been experienced and in some ways is on-going in:

Bangladesh                 Muslim 83%
Egypt                          Muslim 90%
Gaza                            Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia                    Muslim 86.1%
Iran                              Muslim 98%
Iraq                              Muslim 97%
Jordan                         Muslim 92%
Morocco                      Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan                       Muslim 97%
Palestine                      Muslim 99%
Syria                            Muslim 90%
Tajikistan                     Muslim 90%
Turkey                         Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates Muslim 96%

100% will usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’ – the Islamic House of Peace.. Here there’s supposed to be peace, because everybody is a Muslim, the Madrasses are the only schools, and the Koran is the only word, such as in:

Afghanistan                Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia               Muslim 100%
Somalia                       Muslim 100%
Yemen                         Muslim 100%

Unfortunately, peace is never achieved, as in these 100% states the most radical Muslims intimidate and spew hatred, and satisfy their blood lust by killing less radical Muslims, for a variety of reasons.

‘Before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; the tribe against the world, and all of us against the infidels.

It is important to understand that in some countries, with well under 100% Muslim populations, such as France, the minority Muslim populations live in ghettos, within which they are 100% Muslim, and within which they live by Sharia law. The national police do not even enter these ghettos. There are no national courts, nor schools, nor non-Muslim religious facilities. In
such situations, Muslims do not integrate into the community at large. The children attend madrasses. They learn only the Koran. To even associate with an infidel is a crime punishable with death.

Therefore, in some areas of certain nations, Muslim Imams and extremists exercise more power than the national average would indicate.

Today’s 1.5 billion Muslims make up 22% of the world’s population. But their birth rates dwarf the birth rates of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and all other believers. Muslims will exceed 50% of the world’s population by the end of this century.

Markandey Katju: Pakistan is a Fake & Artificial Country’

‘I do not believe that there are two nations, there is only one nation, that is India, and Pakistan is part of India. Pakistan was created in pursuance of the wicked British policy of divide and rule and the bogus Two Nation Theory’

Retired Justice Markandey Katju’s remarks about Pakistan generated lot of publicity for him which probably he desired all along.

His correspondence with former Pakistani foreign secretary Shamsad Ahmed, reproduced below, provide the necessary background into his views about Pakistan and his article published in the Pakistani newspaper articulates his thoughts on the future ahead for the two countries.

Correspondence with Mr Shamshad Ahmed and Editor of ‘The Nation’:

1. Email to Editor of The Nation

Dear Sir,

I am a retired judge of the Supreme Court of India and, presently, am the Chairman of the Press Council of India. I understand that you are the publisher/editor of the newspaper The Nation. I read online an article in your esteemed newspaper entitled “May You Live Long, Katju!” by Mr Shamshad Ahmed, former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan, criticising my views expressed in a speech given by me some time back in a function in New Delhi.

In that speech, I said that Pakistan is a fake and artificial country created by the British and their agents in pursuance of the wicked British policy of divide and rule and the bogus Two Nation Theory (i.e. Hindus and Muslims are two nations). In reality, there is no such thing as Pakistan; there is Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP, all of which are really part of India.

The purpose of partitioning the country and creating Pakistan was to make Hindus and Muslims keep fighting with each other even after the British withdraw from the subcontinent so that India (of which I regard Pakistan as a part) may remain weak.

When I meet my Pakistani friends, we talk in Hindustani and we feel no different from each other.

In my opinion, India and Pakistan will reunite in the next 20 years or so under a strong secular modern minded government, which will not tolerate religious extremism, whether Hindu or Muslim, and crush it with an iron hand.

I would like to send you my rejoinder to Mr Shamshad Ahmed’s article, if you are willing to publish it. I know it may require courage to publish my article, but the time has come when the truth must be told to people.

Regards,
Justice Katju

2. Email to Mr Shamshad Ahmed (former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan) :

Dear Mr Shamshad Ahmed,

I read your article in TheNation (February 26th issue) on my views about Pakistan being a fake and artificial nation created by the British on the basis of the bogus Two Nation Theory in pursuance of their wicked policy of divide and rule.

I would like to write and get published my rejoinder. In my opinion, India and Pakistan are really one nation temporarily divided, but which is bound to reunite in the next 20 years or so under a strong, secular modern minded government, which does not tolerate religious extremism and bigotry, whether Hindu or Muslim, and crushes it with an iron hand. 

Regards,

Justice Katju

3. Mr Shamshad Ahmed’s Reply:

Dear Justice Katju,

I just saw your message.

Let me tell you, difference of outlook on nationhood aside, I am one of your admirers. I was telling this to Shahid Malik, who is a good friend of mine.

In my view, you will serve your ’cause’ well by focusing more on bringing the two countries closer on their outstanding issues. On my part, like several of my Indian counterparts, I remain engaged with them on Track Two for reducing India-Pakistan tensions and helping them resolve their outstanding problems. I am proud of co-authoring the ‘Composite Dialogue’ with my Indian counterpart Salman Haider in June 1997, a process that in my view must continue purposefully to bring the two estranged countries together.

I am not sure if The Nation will publish your article. The media freedom is only a farce, not only in our countries, but also in West’s champions of free press.

I have been sending articles critical of American global policies and overbearing power-based agenda to Western newspapers. None was accepted. Even The New York Times and Washington Post are allergic to anyone else writing against American policies. More than anyone else, you know better the reality of ‘free media’ today. With more and more corporate conglomerates owning the news outlets, the media is becoming a commercial enterprise. They print what sells. This is the story all around.

I am not sure any newspaper in Pakistan will print anything questioning Pakistan’s raison d’etre. But you may try.

Do let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

My best regards and good wishes to you.
Shamshad

4. Email to Mr Shamshad Ahmed:

Dear Shamshad Sahib,

There is no question of bringing two countries together when there is, in fact, a single country, India.

Pakistan is a fake country, artificially created by the British in pursuance of their nefarious policy of divide and rule and the bogus Two Nation Theory. Pakistan is, in fact, a part of India, and we will be reunited, maybe in 20 years or so, under a strong, secular, modern minded government, which does not tolerate religious extremism, whether Hindu or Muslim, and crushes it with an iron hand.

Your ‘Quaid’ was just a British agent, who was shamelessly furthering the wicked British divide and rule policy. The whole game of the British was that even after they withdraw from India (and Pakistan is part of India), our country should remain weak, for which it was necessary to divide us on religious lines and make us keep fighting with each other. It is time someone spoke the truth and, perhaps, it is for me to bell the cat.

When I meet my Pakistani friends, we speak in Hindustani, we look like each other and feel no difference between ourselves.

We were befooled by the Britishers into thinking that we are each others’ enemies, but how much longer must we remain befooled? I do not care whether my article (which I am working on) is published or not, but I will not deviate from what I believe is the truth. In Sanskrit, there is a saying: “Satyamev Jayate”, which means “ultimately truth wins”.

Regards,
Justice Katju

5. And finally, on Saturday, 2 March 2013, The Nation published Justice Katju’s article titled:

The truth about Pakistan

“Dekho mujhe jo deeda-e-ibrat nigah ho,
Meri suno jo gosh-e-naseehat niyosh hai.”

— Mirza Ghalib

According to reports, Pakistani cities— Karachi, Quetta, Peshawar, etc – are rapidly becoming killing fields, with bomb blasts and gun firing a regular occurrence, and ethnic violence between Sunnis and Shias, and persecution of minorities escalating. Nobody knows that when he steps out into the streets of these cities whether or not he will return alive. A beautiful metropolitan city like Karachi is becoming, if it has not already become, a Jurassic Park.

Mr Shamshad Ahmed, in his article, entitled “May You Live Long, Katju!”, published in The Nation on February 26, 2013, has said that the present situation in Pakistan is due to “a failure of governance, not of the nationhood.” I respectfully beg to differ.

In my opinion, the present violent strifes and disturbances in Pakistan are the logical and inevitable result of creating a theocratic state in this subcontinent and, hence, the only solution is the reunification of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh under a strong, secular, modern minded government, which does not tolerate religious extremism and bigotry, whether Hindu or Muslim, and crushes it with an iron hand.

To explain my point, I have to delve into history. As explained in my article, “What is India”, in my blog: justicekatju.blogspot.in (as well as in the video on the website: kgfindia.com), India (in which I include Pakistan) is broadly a country of immigrants like North America. The ancestors of 92 to 93 percent people living today in our subcontinent were not the original inhabitants here, but came from outside, mainly from the northwest (the original inhabitants being the pre-Dravidian tribals). People migrate from uncomfortable areas to comfortable areas, and India was a paradise for agriculture, with level land, fertile soil, plenty of water for irrigation, etc. It is for this reason that India has so much diversity— so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups, etc because each group of immigrants brought their own language, religion and customs.

Hence, the only policy that can work in our subcontinent is secularism and equal respect to all communities and sects. This was the policy of the great Emperor Akbar, whom I regard (along with Ashoka) as the greatest ruler the world has ever seen. At a time when the Europeans were massacring each other in the name of religion (Catholics massacring Protestants and vice versa), Akbar, who was far ahead of his times, declared his policy of Suleh-e-Kul, i.e. universal toleration of all religions, and it is because of this policy that the Mughal Empire lasted so long. It was Emperor Akbar who laid the foundation on which the Indian nation is still standing, his policy being continued by Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues who gave India a secular constitution.

Up to 1857, there were no communal problems in India; all communal riots and animosity began after 1857. No doubt even before 1857, there were differences between Hindus and Muslims, the Hindus going to temples and the Muslims going to mosques, but there was no animosity. In fact, the Hindus and Muslims used to help each other; Hindus used to participate in Eid celebrations, and Muslims in Holi and Diwali. The Muslim rulers like the Mughals, Nawab of Awadh and Murshidabad, Tipu Sultan, etc were totally secular; they organised Ramlilas, participated in Holi, Diwali, etc. Ghalib’s affectionate letters to his Hindu friends like Munshi Shiv Naraln Aram, Har Gopal Tofta, etc attest to the affection between Hindus and Muslims at that time

In 1857, the ‘Great Mutiny’ broke out in which the Hindus and Muslims jointly fought against the British. This shocked the British government so much that after suppressing the Mutiny, they decided to start the policy of divide and rule (see online “History in the Service of Imperialism” by B.N. Pande). All communal riots began after 1857, artificially engineered by the British authorities. The British collector would secretly call the Hindu Pandit, pay him money, and tell him to speak against Muslims, and similarly he would secretly call the Maulvi, pay him money, and tell him to speak against Hindus. This communal poison was injected into our body politic year after year and decade after decade.

In 1909, the ‘Minto-Morley Reforms’ introduced separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims. The idea was propagated that Hindi is the language of Hindus, while Urdu of Muslims (although Urdu was the common language of all educated people, whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh up to 1947). All this vicious propaganda resulted in the partition of 1947, which created a fake, artificial theocratic nation called Pakistan.

Nation states arose in Europe around the 15th century because of the rise of modern industry. Modern industry, unlike feudal handicraft industry, requires a big market for its goods and a large area from where it can get raw materials.

The creation of a state based on religion destroys the very basis of a nation, because it cuts off industries from markets and raw materials. British imperialism created India as a big administrative unit. The British policy was to prohibit the growth of heavy industry in India; otherwise, the Indian industry, with its cheap labour, would have become a powerful rival to British industry.

When the British left India, they divided us so that we may remain backward and weak, and not emerge as a modern powerful industrial state (for which we have all the potential). This was the real reason for creating Pakistan.

I submit that Pakistan was doomed from its very inception; firstly, because there is such tremendous diversity in our subcontinent that only secularism can work here and secondly, because a modern nation cannot be based on religion (because this will cut it off from its markets and raw materials).
Mr Shamshad Ahmed has written in an email to me that I should try to bring the two countries closer, instead of challenging the very raison d’etre of Pakistan. I replied that I do not believe that there are two nations, there is only one nation, that is India, and Pakistan is part of India. Pakistan was created in pursuance of the wicked British policy of divide and rule and the bogus Two Nation Theory, whose whole aim was to make Hindus and Muslims fight with each other. I am confident that with time people, both in India and Pakistan, will realise the truth in what I am saying, and India and Pakistan will reunite under a strong, secular government that deals with religious extremism, whether Hindu or Muslim, with an iron hand.

Secularism does not mean that one cannot practice his religion. It means that religion is a private affair, unconnected with the state that will have no religion.

When I meet my Pakistani friends (and I have lots of them), we speak in Hindustani, we look like each other, and feel no difference between ourselves. We were befooled by the Britishers into thinking that we are enemies, but how much longer must we remain befooled? How much longer must blood flow in religious violence in Quetta, Karachi, Gujarat, etc.

Mr Shamshad Ahmed wrote in his email to me that he doubted whether any Pakistani newspaper would publish my article challenging the very existence of Pakistan. I replied that I did not care whether it would be published or not, but I will not deviate from what I believe is the truth. In Sanskrit, there is a saying, “Satyamev Jayate”, which means “truth ultimately triumphs”. And as Nietzsche said in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “What matter about thyself, Zarathustra! Say thy word and break into pieces!”

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All text courtesy Justice Katju’s blog Satyam Bruyat

Stereo Type Muslim Roles in Indian Movies

Vishwaroop kickstarts like a comic book. The ditsy slapstick routine in the midst of gory villainy in NY tells you: don’t take this seriously. But only for a brief while. As the scene shifts to bleak Afghan landscapes and Al Qaeda training grounds, the stereotype “Islamic terrorist” emb­edded in our collective consciousness post-9/11 gets reinfor­ced onscreen—the bru­tality, ort­h­odoxy, obduracy, it’s all there. It’s a cruel world where “zubaan koi bhi ho, boli jehadi hi honi chahiye”. Severed limbs, lifeless bodies, spurting blood—you wonder why you are seeing these killing fields images all over again, in yet another film. Meanwhile, our hero Tau­fik finds Buddha-like enlightenment. He is the one good Muslim taking on the many rogues from his community to save New York from the “dirty bomb” even as the rather daft FBI agents ask him, “Jeez man, who are you?” He is the one good Muslim who “redeems” the many who have gone astray.

Cut to Hansal Mehta’s Shahid. Based on the life of activist-lawyer Shahid Azmi, who was allegedly killed for defending Mumbai bombing accused Fahim Ansari, this too begins with protracted seq­uen­ces of Shahid in jehadi camps. But unlike Vishwaroop, it settles down to focus on the dilemmas of a lower middle-class Muslim family. No demonising, exoticising or romanticising. “My atte­mpt was to humanise,” says Mehta. After a few devastating episodes—riots, jeh­a­di camps, jail—Shahid prefers the path of the law, fighting for the accused in court, to going on Taufik-like revenge mode. The gentle Shahid stands on the fringes, and Vishwa­roopshows how the heavy-handed, sweeping Muslim stereotypes dominate our mainstream cinema.

Now one way to rationalise this is by brushing the criticism aside. After all, this is the way we tell our stories. So for every cliched Muslim, we also have flat Christians—Sandras from Bandra, the good Catholic priest. What’s more, it’s endemic to popular cinema the world over. “Ethnic groups, communities get exaggerated eve­rywhere,” says Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAs, University of London. Witness the unidimensional Chinese or Hispanic in Hollywood. But our filmic Muslim stereotype hasn’t stayed static. You had the historicals and Muslim socials of the ’50s and the ’60s—the refined nawabs, eloquent shayars, elegant tawa­ifs of Mere Mehboob, Chaudhavin Ka Chaand, Mehboob ki Mehndi, Pakeezah.

Then there was the small, significant role. Pran’s loyal Pathan in Zanjeer, A.K. Hangal’s good-hearted Rahim Chacha in Sholay, Mazhar Khan’s trusted informer in Shaan. A token gesture, an ethnic flavour, an integrative desire. The last was significant in Amar Akbar Anthony, says Ravikant, associate fellow, CSDS. “Saibaba became the secular, neutral space where they came together.” Even into the mid-’80s, the integration motif was being underlined in Coolie, where Amitabh Bachchan wears a Billa No. 786.

It was the gradual movement from the Haji Mastan phase (symbolically, gangsterism with the honour code intact) to the Dawood Ibra­him phenomenon, its brash mafiahood bleeding into modern jehadism—with the rest of Indian politics blanked out—that proved decisive. Bolly­wood got a suc­cession of new Muslim villains: Lotia Pathan in Tez­aab, Majid Khan in Angaar, the new-age, cold-as-steel drug-dealing Rashid in Sarkar, the hyper-inflated Rauf Lala in Agneepath. “These cliches have reflected changing mindset and perceptions,” says Hansal.

Of late, the Muslim stories have come uniformly laced with violence. The sha­dowy  terror of Pankaj Kapur in Roja was the first foray into Kas­hmir. With the Kar­gil war, “Pakistan became an absent presence,” says Ravikant. In fact, by Gadar, quite the present presence.

Post-9/11, it’s been all about global Isl­a­mist terror. “The word terrorist has been misused and become exclusively attac­hed to Muslims,” says Shohini Ghosh, of Jamia Millia Islamia. Interestingly, there are hardly any narratives of “Hindu terror”, but for perhaps a Govind Nihalani’sDrohkaal. “Good Muslims proving their loyalty has been a running theme in our cinema. It’s now reached a critical point,” says Ravikant. An offshoot of this: films like Chak De India and My Name Is Khan, secular, modern Muslims again having to prove their allegiance to country. It’s the “terror narratives that don’t understand terrorism” that Shohini finds “complica­ted”. “No one denies the rise in Isl­amist terror, but our films look at it from the standpoint of the terror attack, not what went into its making,” she says.

Old films too have explored interesting layers within the cliches. Dhool Ka Phool had a Muslim bringing up an ‘illegitim­ate’ Hindu child (it had the classic song, “Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega, insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega”.) In Dharmputra, the theme was reversed with a Hindu family bringing up a Muslim child. Author-filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir says story-telling works best when Muslim identity is not an issue. “When it becomes the issue, the stereotype gets more acute,” she says. So Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal works because the young hero just happened to be a Muslim who wanted to be a cricketer. “I liked how the intelligence officer in Kahaani was a Muslim,” she says. For Rachel Dwyer, Zindagi Milegi Na Dobara was interesting in the way Farhan Akh­tar’s character wore his Muslim identity lightly. Parallel cinema offers many exa­m­ples—Garam Hawa, Naseem, Saleem Langde Pe Mat Ro, Black Friday or even the recent Gangs of Wasseypur. However, the most interesting of these has been a forgotten but landmark V. Shantaram film, Padosi. The 1941 film about Hindu-Muslim neighbours who squabble but eventually come together pre-empted the Partition and feels relevant even today. But for now, there doesn’t seem to be any let up in the terrorism sagas.

 

Anti Muslim Riots in Dhule, Maharashtra

By Teesta Setalvad

On January 9, 2013, Dr Vipul Bafna of Sahas Critical Care Centre in Dhule, north Maharashtra, received a strange request from Inspector Kohli of the local Azadnagar police station. He wanted Dr Bafna to surrender the bullets removed from the shooting victims brought to the hospital after the recent riots. The good doctor politely declined, demanding a proper medico-legal procedure, including witnesses and forensic experts, to ensure that the evidence is not tampered with.

Ironically, Kohli, one of the policemen accused of indiscriminate firing, made the request just three days after the shooting. At least 10 other policemen were also involved in the incident which left six Muslims dead and 36 people critically injured, all from the Machibazaar locality. On the ground, we found bullet marks at some 10 spots in the bazaar, all aimed at small businesses of the minority community—Aslam Egg Stall, Star Fish Centre, Mohammed Kalim Mohammed Shahbaz Jalebiwala, Haroon Rashid Abdul Aziz Bakriwala and the entrance of the beef market itself. It begs the question: why were so many shots fired here and why did the police specifically target these small establishments?

Another request for the evidence came from the local crime branch two days later, on January 11, which again Dr Bafna firmly declined. Nine of the 11 bullets now lie in sealed plastic packets in his office locker at the hospital. They will be crucial evidence in the judicial inquiry into the police firing on January 6.

A short walk from the terror-struck locality, Sahas hospital, located on an 80-feet road—the self-demarcated ‘border’ between the Muslim Machipura and the Hindu localities of Dhule just behind—was a natural choice for the desperate victims. No one was turned away here. Vipul and his wife, Dr Madhuri, along with other staff members, worked for 40 hours at a stretch to save some of the victims. But even as the first one was arriving in the ER at 5.30 pm, Dr Bafna was getting calls from some in the majority community exhorting him not to admit the injured (the advice leaned on the idea that Muslim mobs would gather and become a threat to the hospital). “I told them nothing would stop me from doing my duty. We worked as a team, the ICU under Dr Ashwini Bhasin provided trauma care and, once stable, we undertook the vital (read life-saving) surgeries. We needed some 90 bottles of blood in the first hours,” says Dr Bafna.

Khalid and Chand, two of the survivors, will have to live with a leg amputated due to the gangrene that had set in. Chand recovers now in a Pune hospital, but Khalid is still admitted in Sahas. Treatment for all the injured, including ongoing care, will be free at Sahas. Dr Madhuri showed me photos from some of the operations—liver ruptures, pelvic wounds, a bullet in the upper cheek which narrowly missed the eye. What hit home in all this was that the narrative of numbers around the Dhule violence would have been radically different if the hospital response had not been what it was. Many more Muslims would have lost their lives that day.

The violence in Dhule is not just about the three brutal communal riots (2008, ’10 and ’13) from the last 6-7 years. Behind the facade is the growing animosity fuelled by the political classes and their accomplices in the illegal drugs, oil pilferage and other mafias. Unemployment is rampant, and a ghettoisation that fuels violence and a separateness of the mind is a lived reality. In 2008, property worth crores was gutted,  but little justice came by way of the townspeople. This time around, vociferous demands for a judicial inquiry (made nationally) forced the state into action. But this is not a problem of Dhule alone. Dhule, Maharashtra and India also have to deal with the fact that behind these selective killings is the consistent allegations of bias in the functioning of our police. It’s another reality we seek to deny. After the 1992-93 Bombay riots, ACP, state intelligence, V.N. Deshmukh had told the Srikrishna Commission of the dangerous levels of communalisation in the Bombay and Maharashtra police. Other senior policemen—be it ex-BSF chief K.F. Rustomjee, former Punjab DIG Padma Rosha or Vibhuti Narain Rai of the UP cadre—have all been upfront in their concerns. Yet nothing in our recruitment procedures equips the man or woman joining the force with the requisite constitutional values of equality and non-discrimination and screens them for caste or communal bias. Communal bias, especially the institutionalised kind, remains the dark underbelly of our system, a cancer eating away which we are loath to confront.

Meanwhile, speculation around the powers of divine justice is rife once again in Dhule after the death of Inspector Kohli’s writer, K. Wagh, a rather sudden death two days ago. Was it a heart attack or suicide brought on by the stress and guilt from the interrogations into police misconduct?

 

Shahrukh Khan in Deep Shit After Writing in an Indian Weekly

I am a Khan. The name itself conjures multiple images in my mind too: a strapping man riding a horse, his reckless hair flowing from beneath a turban tied firm around his head. His ruggedly handsome face marked by weathered lines and a distinctly large nose.

A stereotyped extremist; no dance, no drink, no cigarette tipping off his lips, no monogamy, no blasphemy; a fair, silent face beguiling a violent fury smouldering within. A streak that could even make him blow himself up in his God’s name.

Then there is the image of me being shoved into a backroom of a vast American airport named after an American president (another parallel image: of the president being assassinated by a man named Lee, not a Muslim thankfully, nor Chinese as some might imagine! I urgently shove the image of the room out of my head).

Some stripping, frisking and many questions later, I am given an explanation (of sorts): “Your name pops up on our system, we are sorry”. “So am I,” I think to myself, “Now can I have my underwear back please?”

Then, there is the image I most see, the one of me in my own country: being acclaimed as a megastar, adored and glorified, my fans mobbing me with love and apparent adulation.

I am a Khan.

I could say I fit into each of these images: I could be a strapping six feet something—ok something minus, about three inches at least, though I don’t know much about horse-riding. A horse once galloped off with me flapping helplessly on it and I have had a “no horse-riding” clause embedded in my contracts ever since.

I am extremely muscular between my ears, I am often told by my kids, and I used to be fair too, but now I have a perpetual tan or, as I like to call it, an ‘olive hue’—though deep in the recesses of my armpits I can still find the remains of a fairer day. I am handsome under the right kind of light and I really do have a “distinctly large” nose. It announces my arrival in fact, peeking through the doorway just before I make my megastar entrance. But my nose notwithstanding, my name means nothing to me unless I contextualise it.

Stereotyping and contextualising is the way of the world we live in: a world in which definition has become central to security. We take comfort in defining phenomena, objects and people—with a limited amount of knowledge and along known parameters. The predictability that naturally arises from these definitions makes us feel secure within our own limitations.

We create little image boxes of our own. One such box has begun to draw its lid tighter and tighter at present. It is the box that contains an image of my religion in millions of minds.

I encounter this tightening of definition every time moderation is required to be publicly expressed by the Muslim community in my country. Whenever there is an act of violence in the name of Islam, I am called upon to air my views on it and dispel the notion that by virtue of being a Muslim, I condone such senseless brutality. I am one of the voices chosen to represent my community in order to prevent other communities from reacting to all of us as if we were somehow colluding with or responsible for the crimes committed in the name of a religion that we experience entirely differently from the perpetrators of these crimes.

I sometimes become the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong and unpatriotic about Muslims in India. There have been occasions when I have been accused of bearing allegiance to our neighbouring nation rather than my own country—this even though I am an Indian whose father fought for the freedom of India. Rallies have been held where leaders have exhorted me to leave my home and return to what they refer to as my “original homeland”.

Of course, I politely decline each time, citing such pressing reasons as sanitation works at my house preventing me from taking the good shower that’s needed before undertaking such an extensive journey. I don’t know how long this excuse will hold though.

I gave my son and daughter names that could pass for generic (pan-Indian and pan-religious) ones: Aryan and Suhana. The Khan has been bequeathed by me so they can’t really escape it. I pronounce it from my epiglottis when asked by Muslims and throw the Aryan as evidence of their race when non-Muslims enquire. I imagine this will prevent my offspring from receiving unwarranted eviction orders and random fatwas in the future. It will also keep my two children completely confused. Sometimes, they ask me what religion they belong to and, like a good Hindi movie hero, I roll my eyes up to the sky and declare philosophically, “You are an Indian first and your religion is humanity”, or sing them an old Hindi film ditty, “Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega—insaan ki aulaad hai insaan banega” set to Gangnam Style.

None of this informs them with any clarity, it just confounds them some more and makes them deeply wary of their father.

In the land of the freed, where I have been invited on several occasions to be honoured, I have bumped into ideas that put me in a particular context. I have had my fair share of airport delays for instance.

I became so sick of being mistaken for some crazed terrorist who coincidentally carries the same last name as mine that I made a film, subtly titled ‘My name is Khan (and I am not a terrorist)’ to prove a point. Ironically, I was interrogated at the airport for hours about my last name when I was going to present the film in America for the first time.

I wonder, at times, whether the same treatment is given to everyone whose last name just happens to be McVeigh (as in infamous Oklahoma city bomber Timothy McVeigh)?

I don’t intend to hurt any sentiments, but truth be told, the aggressor and taker of life follows his or her own mind. It has nothing to do with a name, a place or his/her religion. It is a mind that has its own discipline, its own distinction of right from wrong and its own set of ideologies. In fact, one might say it has its own “religion”. This religion has nothing to do with the ones that have existed for centuries and been taught in mosques or churches. The call of the azaan or the words of the Pope have no bearing on this person’s soul. His soul is driven by the devil. I, for one, refuse to be contextualised by the ignorance of his ilk.

I am a Khan.

I am neither six-feet-tall nor particularly handsome (I am modest though) nor am I a Muslim who looks down on other religions. I have been taught my religion by my six-foot-tall, handsome Pathan ‘Papa’ from Peshawar, where his proud family and mine still resides. He was a member of the non-violent Pathan movement called Khudai Khidmatgaar and a follower of both Gandhiji and Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, who was also known as the Frontier Gandhi.

My first learning of Islam from him was to respect women and children and to uphold the dignity of every human being. I learnt that the property and decency of others, their points of view, their beliefs, their philosophies and their religions were due as much respect as my own and ought to be accepted with an open mind. I learnt to believe in the power and benevolence of Allah, and to be gentle and kind to my fellow human beings, to give of myself to those less privileged than me and to live a life full of happiness, joy, laughter and fun without impinging on anybody else’s freedom to live in the same way.

I have felt the love of millions of Indians for the last 20 years regardless of the fact that my community is a minority within the population of India. I have been showered with love across national and cultural boundaries, from Suriname to Japan and Saudi Arabia to Germany, places where they don’t even understand my language. They appreciate what I do for them as an entertainer—that’s all. My life has led me to understand and imbibe that love is a pure exchange, untempered by definition and unfettered by the narrowness of limiting ideas. If each one of us allowed ourselves the freedom to accept and return love in its purity, we would need no image boxes to hold up the walls of our security.

I believe that I have been blessed with the opportunity to experience the magnitude of such a love, but I also know that ultimately its scale is irrelevant. In our own small ways, simply as human beings, we can appreciate each other for how we touch our lives and not how our different religions or last names define us.

Beneath the guise of my superstardom, I am an ordinary man. My Islamic stock does not conflict with that of my Hindu wife’s. The only disagreements I have with Gauri concern the colour of the walls in our living room and not about the locations of the walls demarcating temples from mosques in India.

We have a daughter who pirouettes in a leotard and choreographs her own ballets. She sings western songs that confound my sensibilities and aspires to be an actress. She also insists on covering her head when in a Muslim nation that practises this really beautiful and much misunderstood tenet of Islam.

Our son’s linear features proclaim his Pathan pedigree although he carries his own, rather gentle mutation of the warrior gene. He spends all day either pushing people aside at rugby, kicking some butt at Tae Kwon Do or eliminating unknown faces behind anonymous online gaming handles around the world with The Call of Duty video game. And yet, he firmly admonishes me for getting into a minor scuffle at the cricket stadium in Mumbai last year because some bigot made unsavoury remarks about me being a Khan.

The four of us make up a motley representation of the extraordinary acceptance and validation that love can foster when exchanged within the exquisiteness of things that are otherwise defined as ordinary.

For I believe, our religion is an extremely personal choice, not a public proclamation of who we are. It’s as personal as the spectacles of my father who passed away some 20 years ago. Spectacles that I hold onto as my most prized and personal possession of his memories, teachings and of being a proud Pathan. I have never compared those with my friends, who have similar possessions of their parents or grandparents. I have never said my father’s spectacles are better than your mother’s saree. So why should we have this comparison in the matter of religion, which is as personal and prized a belief as the memories of your elders. Why should not the love we share be the last word in defining us instead of the last name? It doesn’t take a superstar to be able to give love, it just takes a heart and as far as I know, there isn’t a force on this earth that can deprive anyone of theirs.

I am a Khan, and that’s what it has meant being one, despite the stereotype images that surround me. To be a Khan has been to be loved and to have loved back—that and the promise that virgins wait for me somewhere on the other side.

The above article in the Indian weekly Outlook led to immense controversy in India and Shahrukh Khan himself had to issue the following statement to the media over his controversial article which he had written in Outlook magazine.

According to me, all our lives we are defined by three identities.

Two of which are fortunately acquired by birth and are a matter of unconditional love and acceptance.

The first identity is acquired by where one is born. Our Motherland. That defines us. So foremost all of us here like me are proud Indians.

Second the family name and upbringing that our parents give us. Mine is Khan, like some of us here. I am very proud of my parents, like all of us are here. I love them unconditionally.

The third is the profession we choose that defines us. By some quirk of fate I am a celebrity… a public figure in the fields of art and media. Like most of us are here today.

As I said being an Indian and my parents’ child is an unconditional accepted truth of my life and I am very proud of both.

The third… being a public figure makes me open to any kind of questioning, adjectives good and bad and or sometimes makes me an object of controversy as people use my name and statements to attach any positive or negative sentiment to it. I accept all the above because this is the life I chose and will stand by it. I am what I am, because of the love and admiration that comes with being who I am in my profession… so I thank everyone for making me the star I am.

Now to address this whole issue, with regards to my Article, that has taken an unwarranted twist. I do not even understand the basis of this controversy.

Ironically the article I wrote (yes its written by me) was actually meant to reiterate that on some occasions my being an Indian Muslim film star is misused by bigots and narrow minded people who have misplaced religious ideologies for small gains…. and ironically the same has happened through this article… once again.

The reason for this primarily is…. I think some of the people have not even read it and are reacting to comments of people, who in turn have also not read it. So I implore you all to first read it.

Second if you read it, nowhere does the article state or imply directly or indirectly that I feel unsafe…. troubled or disturbed in India.

It does not even vaguely say that I am ungrateful for the love that I have received in a career spanning 20 years. On the contrary the article only says that in spite of bigoted thoughts of some of the people that surround us…. I am untouched by skepticism because of the love I have received by my countrymen and women.

I will paraphrase the beginning and the end of the article to clarify and substantiate my stand.

“Then, there is the image I most see, the one of me in my own country: being acclaimed as a megastar, adored and glorified, my fans mobbing me with love and apparent adulation.

So I am a Khan, but no stereotyped image is factored into my idea of who I am. Instead, the living of my life has enabled me to be deeply touched by the love of millions of Indians. I have felt this love for the last 20 years regardless of the fact that my community is a minority within the population of India. I have been showered with love across national and cultural boundaries, they appreciate what I do for them as an entertainer – that’s all. My life has led me to understand and imbibe that love is a pure exchange, untempered by definition and unfettered by the narrowness of limiting ideas.

Sometimes, they ask me what religion they belong to and, like a good Hindi movie hero, I roll my eyes up to the sky and declare philosophically, “you are an Indian first and your religion is Humanity”, or sing them an old Hindi film ditty, “tu hindu banega na musalmaan banega – insaan ki aulaad hai insaan banega” set to Gangnam style.

Why should not the love we share be the last word in defining us instead of the last name? It doesn’t take a superstar to be able to give love, it just takes a heart and as far as i know, there isn’t a force on this earth that can deprive anyone of theirs.

I am a Khan, and that’s what it has meant being one, despite the stereotype images that surround me. To be a Khan has been to be loved and love back….”

Please I implore everyone here to read the article and convey through your respective mediums of communications, all the good things that it expresses to youngsters and my fellow Indians. It is a heartfelt and extremely important aspect of my life, an appreciation of love that all of you have bestowed upon me and also a point of view from my being a father of two young children

I would like to tell all those who are offering me unsolicited advice that we in India are extremely safe and happy. We have an amazing democratic, free and secular way of life. In the environs that we live here in my country India, we have no safety issues regarding life or material. As a matter of fact it is irksome for me to clarify this non-existent issue. With respect I would like to say to anyone who is interpreting my views and offering advice regarding them, please read what I have written first.

Also some of the views that I have been made to read are just an extension of soft targeting celebs and creating an atmosphere of emotional outbursts and divisiveness based on religion…in the minds of some. I implore everyone to understand, that my article is against exactly this kind of giving in to propaganda and aggressiveness. Lets not be misled by tools which use religion as an anchor for unrest and a policy of divide and rule.

I would also like to add here, that my profession as an actor makes me, liked beyond the borders of my nation and culture. The hugs and love that I am showered upon by Nationalities all around the world, make me safe all over the globe, and my safety has genuinely never been a matter of concern to me… and so it should not be a matter of concern to anyone else either.

We are all educated and patriotic people. We do not have to prove that time and again because of divisive politics of a few.

My own family and friends, are like a mini India…where all religions, professions and a few wrongs included, all are treated with tolerance and understanding and regard for each other. I only sell love…love that I have got from millions of Indians and non Indians….and stand indebted to my audience in my country and around the world. It is sad that I have to say it to prove it, in my country, which my father fought for, during the Independence struggle.

That’s my piece and having said all this…I would like to request all of you present here….that henceforth ask me questions regarding….my next movie. The songs that I have recorded. The release date of my film. The heroines cast in it. The Toiffa awards in Vancouver, because I am an actor and maybe I should just stick to stuff that all of you expect me to have a viewpoint on. The rest of it…maybe I don’t have the right kind of media atmosphere to comment on. So I will refrain from it.

And please if you can…put all I have said on your channels, or mediums of communication, in the exact same light as I have said it and meant it in. 24 hrs of unrequired controversy is more than enough for all of us I assume. So do not sensationalize and hence trivialize matters of national interest and religion any further and drag a movie actor in the middle of it all…and let me get back to doing what I do best…. making movies.

Ten Shades of Indian Secularism

Time to ponder over the issues

1 ) In India, with 80% Hindu population, and the only homeland of Hindus in the world, the birthdays of great sons of the soil, Shri Ram and Shri Krishna, are not compulsory central government  holidays, while the birthday of Saudi Arabia born prophet Mohammad and both the birth and crucifixion day of Bethlehem born Jesus, are compulsory holidays throughout India.

This seems in sync with the secular hypothesis that Ram and Krishna are imaginary comic characters while Prophet Mohammad and Jesus are actual historical characters.

There are only two Hindu holidays out of compulsory 14, in contrast with four Muslim ones.

2) The Constitution of India enables the government to take control of Hindu temples and trusts and appoint its nominees in their controlling body and even control its funds.

The government does not have this privilege for the mosques or churches. The government cannot interfere in the functioning of the mosques, Madarsas and any minority institutions even if they receive government aid, which is taxpayers’ money.

The minority institutions are not bound to comply with the Right to Education Act either.

3) India does not have uniform civil code.

Indian Muslim males are legally allowed to have up to four wives at a time, and can divorce them by saying ‘Talaaq’ thrice, in compliance with Sharia.

Hindus and Christians have to follow proper court procedures to file for divorce.

The women right activists who organise ‘slut-walks’ to celebrate their ‘rights’ and advocate girls visiting pubs, do not speak on this matter.

Shah Bano case stands as a glaring example of how secularism is a constitutionally prescribed drug meant only for Hindus, not for minorities.

4) Prayagraj, one of the holiest pilgrimages of Hindus, is called Allahabad. Kashi, Ayodhya and Mathura, each of these three holy sites has been desecrated and yet not fully restored.

The signboards of Aurangzeb road in Delhi stand as the testimony to India’s slavery that Indian secularism celebrates so profusely.

In 2007, over 100,000 Indian Muslims paid homage to Aurangzeb’s tomb on his 300th anniversary, that’s when Aurangzeb is known to be the perpetrator of the largest Hindu genocide ever.

Aurangzeb had even got Guru Teg Bahadur beheaded in his court for his refusal to convert to Islam.

5) An instance of Indian secularism is the 1978 directive to NCERT which instructs it to erase all medieval history which paints a picture of clash between native Hindus and invading Muslims in that era. Consequently, we have a chapter each from Akbar to Aurangzeb, but Shivaji and Maharana Pratap are squeezed into a paragraph each in history books.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, discredited Aryan invasion theory is still taught in Indian schools.

The history books do not cover the Mahabharata despite a plethora of archaeological evidence available to conclusively establish its historicity.

6) The Archaeological Survey of India in its annual report of 1924-25 published a long list of Hindu temples demolished during Islamic rule.

Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie and others have published a book after conducting research and they have given a 64 page long district-wise list of Islamic monuments which were constructed by demolishing Hindu temples.

This list, in the book, “Hindu temples – what happened to them”, includes around 2000+ temples and gives in most cases, the year of construction of those structures also.

Even in Kashmir, hundreds of temples, small and large have been desecrated over during the exodus of Hindus in early 90s.

This, however, is a non-issue in larger secular polity. It’s continued unabated in whichever time or space, Hindus have become weak.

7) From Ram Mandir to Ram Setu and to Bhagvad Geeta, all have been dragged into Indian courts.

India is the only country in the world where the faith of 100 Crore people is humiliated.

It’d be silly to look for parallels where in a Muslim majority country, Quran or the prophet, or in a Christian majority country, Bible or the Christ, could be dragged into a court of law.

In India, the central government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court suggesting that Ram never existed. In the same country, Christian missionaries openly preach about Hindus’ false and ‘characterless’ gods, and so do Islamic missionaries like Zakir Naik, but the tag of ‘hate-monger’ has been attributed to Hindu right wing by secular luminaries in media and otherwise.

8) There are numerous government schemes which are run exclusively for the benefit of minorities at the expense of taxpayer money, despite an apparent prohibition to the same in the constitution.

Pashchim Bengal government paying monthly stipend to all the Imams of all the mosques in the state is a glaring example of this.

The same is not extended to Hindu Pujaris.

The Haj subsidy, against which the Supreme Court finally ordered, which had been running since Independence even when no other country, not even Pakistan offers it, is another example.

9) The pious human right activists, known for their love for Jihadi terrorists, those who have been running justiceforafzalguru.org for years now, have not spoken for the inhumane treatment meted out to Sadhvi Pragya, and Swami Aseemanand.

Their love for those displaced in Gujarat riots, their sympathy on Crores of Bangladeshi infiltrators and their disgusting silence and aversion on lakhs of Kashmiri Hindu refugees and Pakistani Hindu refugees is another jewel of the muddled waters of Indian secularism.

10) The practice of Saraswati Vandana has been discontinued from almost all government events with the rise of secular fanaticism.

The TV series Chanakya of 90′s was asked to remove Saffron flags from it; it’s being indispensable to the picturaization of Chanakya’s Akhand Bharat notwithstanding.

Doordarshan’s ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ had also been removed before being brought back.

Off late, even the practice of lighting a lamp has been criticised as ‘unislamic’.

Litigation was filed in Gujarat High Court for inaugurating a room by breaking a coconut for its being a Hindu (not secular).

A case was lodged in Chennai High Court to prohibit the employees celebrating festivals in office space.

The beast of secular fanaticism has gone wilder over the years, and if not us, posterity will have to bear the brunt of our callous ignorance.

Source: IBTL

We’re becoming 2nd class citizens in our own country.

The likes of Digvijay Singh having the gumption of saying that the riots in Assam were because of ‘Hindu infiltrators’.

Not one word of protest on the racial riots there,

Why? Because it’s a Congress ruled state!

Afzal Guru Hanging: A Perfect Day For Democracy

by Arundhati Roy

What are the political consequences of the secret and sudden hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament attack, going to be? Does anybody know? The memo, in callous bureaucratese, with every name insultingly misspelt, sent by the Superintendent of Central Jail No. 3, Tihar, New Delhi, to “Mrs Tabassum w/o Sh Afjal Guru” reads:

“The mercy petition of Sh Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been rejected by Hon’ble President of India. Hence the execution of Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been fixed for 09/02/2013 at 8 am in Central Jail No-3.

This is for your information and for further necessary action.”

The mailing of the memo was deliberately timed to get to Tabassum only after the execution, denying her one last legal chanc­e—the right to challenge the rejection of the mercy petition. Both Afzal and his family, separately, had that right. Both were thwarted. Even though it is mandat­ory in law, the memo to Tabassum ascribed no reason for the president’s rejection of the mercy petition. If no reason is given, on what basis do you appeal? All the other prisoners on death row in India have been given that last chance.

Since Tabassum was not allowed to meet her husband before he was hanged, since her son was not allowed to get a few last words of advice from his father, since she was not given his body to bury, and since there can be no funeral, what “further necessary action” does the jail manual prescribe? Anger? Wild, irreparable grief? Unquestioning acc­eptance? Complete integration?

After the hanging, there have been unseemly celebrations. The bereaved wives of the people who were killed in the attack on Parliament were displayed on TV, with M.S. Bitta, chairman of the All-India Anti-Terrorist Front, and his ferocious moustaches playing the CEO of their sad little company. Will anybody tell them that the men who shot their husbands were killed at the same time, in the same place? And that those who planned the attack will never be brought to justice because we still don’t know who they are.

Meanwhile, Kashmir is under curfew, once again. Its people have been locked down like cattle in a pen, once again. They have defied curfew, once again. Three people have already been killed in three days and fifteen more grievou­sly injured. Newspapers have been shut down, but anybody who trawls the internet will see that this time the rage of young Kashmiris is not defiant and exuberant like it was during the mass uprisings in the summers of 2008, 2009 and 2010­—even though 180 people lost their lives on those occasions. This time the anger is cold and corrosive. Unforgiving. Is there any reason why it shouldn’t be?

For more than 20 years, Kashmiris have endured a military occupation. The tens of thousands who lost their lives were killed in prisons, in torture centres, and in ‘encounters’, genuine as well as fake. What sets the execution of Afzal Guru apart is that it has given the young, who have never had any first-hand experience of democracy, a ringside seat to watch the full majesty of Indian democracy at work. They have watched the wheels turning, they have seen all its hoary institutions, the government, police, courts, political parties and yes, the media, collude to hang a man, a Kashmiri, who they do not believe received a fair trial. With good reason.

He went virtually unrepresented in the lower court during the most crucial part of the trial. The court-appointed lawyer never visited him in prison, and actually admitted incriminating evidence against his own client.  (The Supreme Court deliberated on that matter and decided it was okay.) In short, his guilt was by no means established beyond reasonable doubt. They have watched the government pull him out of the death row queue and execute him out of turn. What direction, what form will their new cold, corrosive anger take? Will it lead them to the blessed liberation they so yearn for and have sacrificed a whole generation for, or will it lead to yet another cycle of cataclysmic violence, of being beaten down, and then having ‘normalcy’ imposed on them under soldiers’ boots?

All of us who live in the region know that 2014 is going to be a watershed year. There will be elections in Pakistan, in India and in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. We know that when the US withdraws its troops from Afghanistan, the chaos from an already seriously destabilised Pakistan will spill into Kashmir, as it has done before. By executing Afzal Guru in the way that it did, the government of India has taken a decision to fuel that process of destabilisation, to actually invite it in. (As it did before, by rigging the 1987 elections in Kashmir.) After three consecutive years of mass protests in the Valley ended in 2010, the government invested a great deal in restoring its version of ‘norma­lcy’ (happy tourists, voting Kashmiris). The question is, why was it willing to reverse all its own efforts? Leaving aside issues of the legality, the morality and the venality of executing Afzal Guru in the way that it did, and looking at it just politically, tactically, it is a dangerous and irresponsible thing to have done. But it was done. Clearly, and knowingly. Why?

I used the word ‘irresponsible’ advisedly. Look what happened the last time around.

In 2001, within a week of the Parliament attack (and a few days after Afzal Guru’s arrest), the government recalled its ambassador from Pakistan and dispatched half a million troops to the border. On what basis was that done? The only thing the public was told is that while Afzal Guru was in the custody of the Delhi Police Special Cell, he had admitted to being a member of the Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). The Supreme Court set aside that ‘confession’ extracted in police custody as inadmissible in law. Does what is inadmissible in law become admissible in war?

In its final judgement on the case, apart from the now famous statements about “satisfying collective conscience” and having no direct evidence, the Supreme Court also said there was “no evidence that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group or organisation”. So what justified that military aggression, that loss of soldiers’ lives, that massive haemorrhaging of public money and the real risk of nuclear war? (Remember foreign embassies issued travel advisories and evacuated their staff?) Was there some intelligence that preceded the Parliament attack and the arrest of Afzal Guru that we had not been told about? If so, how could the attack be allowed to happen? And if the intelligence was accurate, and infallible enough to justify such dangerous military posturing, don’t people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir have the right to know what it was? Why was that evidence not produced in court to establish Afzal Guru’s guilt?

In the endless debates around the Parliament attack case, on this, perhaps the most crucial issue of all, there has been dead silence from all quarters—leftists, rightists, Hindutva-ists, secularists, nationalists, seditionists, cynics, critics. Why?

Maybe the JeM did mastermind the attack. Praveen Swami, perhaps the Indian media’s best known expert on ‘terrorism’, who seems to have enviable sources in the Indian police and intelligence agencies, has recently cited the 2003 testimony of former ISI chief Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi, and the 2004 book by Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani scholar, holding the JeM responsible for the Parliament attack. (It’s touching, this belief in the veracity of the testimony of the chief of an organisation whose mandate it is to destabilise India.) It still doesn’t explain what evidence there was in 2001, when the army mobilisation took place.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept that the JeM carried out the attack. Maybe the ISI was involved too. We needn’t pretend that the government of Pakistan is innocent of carrying out covert activity over Kashmir. (Just as the government of India does in Balochistan and parts of Pakistan. Remember the Indian army trained the Mukti Bahini in East Pakistan in the 1970s, and six different Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE, in the 1980s.)

It’s a filthy scenario all around. What would a war with Pakistan have achieved then, and what will it achieve now? (Apart from a massive loss of life. And fattening the bank accounts of some arms dealers.) Indian hawks routinely suggest the only way to “root out the problem” is “hot pursuit” and the “taking out” of “terrorist camps” in Pakistan. Really? It would be interesting to research how many of the aggressive strategic experts and defence analysts on our TV screens have an interest in the defence and weapons industry. They don’t even need war. They just need a war-like climate in which military spending remains on an upward graph. This idea of hot pursuit is even stupider and more pathetic than it sounds. What would they bomb? A few individuals? Their barracks and food supplies? Or their ideology? Look how the US government’s “hot pursuit” has ended in Afghanistan. And look how a “security grid” of half-a-million soldiers has not been able to subdue the unarmed, civilian population of Kashmir. And India is going to cross international borders to bomb a country—with nuclear arms—that is rapidly devolving into chaos? India’s professional war-mongers derive a great deal of satisfaction by sneering at what they see as the disintegration of Pakistan. Anyone with a rudimentary, working knowledge of history and geography would know that the breakdown of Pakistan (into a gangland of crazed, nihilistic, religious zealots) is absolutely no reason for anyone to rejoice.

The US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistan’s official role as America’s junior partner in the war on terror, makes that region a much-reported place. The rest of the world is at least aware of the dangers unfolding there. Less understood, and harder to read, is the perilous wind that’s picking up speed in the world’s favourite new superpower. The Indian economy is in considerable trouble. The aggressive, acquisitive ambition that economic liberalisation unleashed in the newly created middle class is quickly turning into an equally aggressive frustration. The aircraft they were sitting in has begun to stall just after takeoff. Exhilaration is turning to panic.

The general election is due in 2014. Even without an exit poll I can tell you what the results will be. Though it may not be obvious to the naked eye, once again we will have a Congress-BJP coalition. (Two parties, each with a mass murder of thousands of people belonging to minority communities under their belts.) The CPI(M) will give support from outside, even though it hasn’t been asked to. Oh, and it will be a strong state. (On the hanging front, the gloves are already off. Could the next in line be Balwant Singh Rajoana, on death row for the assassination of Punjab’s chief minister Beant Singh? His execution could revive Khalistani sentiment in Punjab and put the Akali Dal on the mat. Perfect old-style Congress politics.)

But that old-style politics is in some difficulty. In the last few turbulent months, it is not just the image of major political parties, but politics itself, the idea of politics as we know it, that has taken a battering. Again and again, whether it’s corruption, rising prices, or rape and the rising violence against women, the new middle class is at the barricades. They can be water-cannoned or lathicharged, but can’t be shot or impriso­ned in their thousands, in the way the poor can, the way Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, Kashmiris, Nagas and Manipuris can—and have been. The old political parties know that if there is not to be a complete meltdown, this aggression has to be headed off, redirected. They know that they must work together to bring politics back to what it used to be. What better way than a communal conflagration? (How else can the secular play at being secular and the communal be communal?) Maybe even a little war, so that we can play Hawks & Doves all over again.

What better solution than to aim a kick at that tried and trusted old political football—Kashmir? The hanging of Afzal Guru, its brazenness and its timing, is deliberate. It has brought politics and anger back onto Kashmir’s streets.

India hopes to manage it with the usual combination of brute force and poisonous, Machiavellian manipulation, des­igned to pit people against one another. The war in Kashmir is presented to the world as a battle between an inclusive, secular democracy and radical Islamists. What then should we make of the fact that Mufti Bashiruddin, the so-called Grand Mufti of Kashmir (a completely phantom post)—who has made most abominable hate speeches and issued fatwa after fatwa, intended to present Kashmir as a demonic, monolithic, Wahabi society—is actually a government-anointed cleric? Kids on Facebook will be arrested, never him. What should we make of the fact that the Indian government looks away while money from Saudi Arabia (that most steadfast partner of the US) is pouring into Kashmir’s madrassas? How different is this from what the CIA did in Afghanistan all those years ago? That whole, sorry business is what created Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It has decimated Afghanistan and Pakistan. What sort of incubus will this unleash?

The trouble is that the old political football may not be all that easy to control any more. And it’s radioactive. Maybe it is not a coincidence that a few days ago Pakistan tested a short-range battlefield nuclear missile to protect itself against threats from “evolving scenarios”. Two weeks ago, the Kashmir police published “survival tips” for nuclear war. Apart from advising people to build toilet-equipped bombproof basements large enough to house their entire families for two weeks, it said: “During a nuclear attack, motorists should dive out of their cars toward the blast to save themselves from being crushed by their soon-to-be tumbling vehicles.” And to “expect some initial disorientation as the blast wave may blow down and carry away many prominent and familiar features”.

Prominent and familiar features may already have been blown down. Perhaps we should all jump out of our soon-to-be-tumbling vehicles.

Spring announced itself in Delhi. The sun was out, and the Law took its Course. Just before breakfast, Afzal Guru, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament Attack was secretly hanged, and his body was interred in Tihar Jail. Was he buried next to Maqbool Butt? (The other Kashmiri who was hanged in Tihar in 1984. Kashmiris will mark that anniversary tomorrow.) Afzal’s wife and son were not informed. “The Authorities intimated the family through Speed Post and Registered Post,” the Home Secretary told the press, “the Director General of J&K Police has been told to check whether they got it or not.” No big deal, they’re only the family of a Kashmiri terrorist.

In a moment of rare unity the Nation, or at least its major political parties, the Congress, the BJP and the CPM came together as one (barring a few squabbles about ‘delay’ and ‘timing’) to celebrate the triumph of the Rule of Law. The Conscience of the Nation, which broadcasts live from TV studios these days, unleashed its collective intellect on us — the usual cocktail of papal passion and a delicate grip on facts. Even though the man was dead and gone, like cowards that hunt in packs, they seemed to need each other to keep their courage up. Perhaps because deep inside themselves they know that they all colluded to do something terribly wrong.

What are the facts?

On the 13th of December 2001 five armed men drove through the gates of the Parliament House in a white Ambassador fitted out with an Improvised Explosive Device. When they were challenged they jumped out of the car and opened fire. They killed eight security personnel and a gardener. In the gun battle that followed, all five attackers were killed. In one of the many versions of confessions he made in police custody, Afzal Guru identified the men as Mohammed, Rana, Raja, Hamza and Haider. That’s all we know about them even today. L.K. Advani, the then Home Minister, said they ‘looked like Pakistanis.’ (He should know what Pakistanis look like right? Being a Sindhi himself.) Based only on Afzal’s confession (which the Supreme Court subsequently set aside citing ‘lapses’ and ‘violations of procedural safeguards’) the Government of India recalled its Ambassador from Pakistan and mobilised half a million soldiers to the Pakistan border. There was talk of nuclear war. Foreign embassies issued Travel Advisories and evacuated their staff from Delhi. The standoff lasted for months and cost India thousands of crores.

On the 14th of December 2001 the Delhi Police Special Cell claimed it had cracked the case. On the 15th of December it arrested the ‘master mind’ Professor S.A.R Geelani in Delhi and Showkat Guru and Afzal Guru in a fruit market in Srinagar. Subsequently they arrested Afsan Guru, Showkat’s wife. The media enthusiastically disseminated the Special Cell’s version. These were some of the headlines: ‘DU Lecturer was Terror Plan Hub’, ‘Varsity Don Guided Fidayeen’, ‘Don Lectured on Terror in Free Time.’ Zee TV broadcast a ‘docudrama’ called December 13th , a recreation that claimed to be the ‘Truth Based on the Police Charge Sheet.’ (If the police version is the truth, then why have courts?) Then Prime Minister Vajpayee and L.K. Advani publicly appreciated the film. The Supreme Court refused to stay the screening saying that the media would not influence judges. The film was broadcast only a few days before the fast track court sentenced Afzal, Showkat and Geelani to death. Subsequently the High Court acquitted the ‘mastermind’, Professor S.A.R Geelani, and Afsan Guru. The Supreme Court upheld the acquittal. But in its 5th August 2005 judgment it gave Mohammed Afzal three life sentences and a double death sentence.

Contrary to the lies that have been put about by some senior journalists who would have known better, Afzal Guru was not one of “the terrorists who stormed Parliament House on December 13th 2001” nor was he among those who “opened fire on security personnel, apparently killing three of the six who died.” (That was the BJP Rajya Sabha MP, Chandan Mitra, in The Pioneer, October 7th 2006). Even the police charge sheet does not accuse him of that. The Supreme Court judgment says the evidence is circumstantial: “As is the case with most conspiracies, there is and could be no direct evidence amounting to criminal conspiracy.” But then it goes on to say: “The incident, which resulted in heavy casualties had shaken the entire nation, and the collective conscience of society will only be satisfied if capital punishment is awarded to the offender.”

Who crafted our collective conscience on the Parliament Attack case? Could it have been the facts we gleaned from the papers? The films we saw on TV?

There are those who will argue that the very fact that the courts acquitted S.A.R Geelani and convicted Afzal proves that the trial was free and fair. Was it?

The trial in the fast-track court began in May 2002. The world was still convulsed by post 9/11 frenzy. The US government was gloating prematurely over its ‘victory’ in Afghanistan. The Gujarat pogrom was ongoing. And in the Parliament Attack case, the Law was indeed taking its own course. At the most crucial stage of a criminal case, when evidence is presented, when witnesses are cross-examined, when the foundations of the argument are laid — in the High Court and the Supreme Court you can only argue points of law, you cannot introduce new evidence — Afzal Guru, locked in a high security solitary cell, had no lawyer. The court-appointed junior lawyer did not visit his client even once in jail, he did not summon any witnesses in Afzal’s defence and did not cross examine the prosecution witnesses. The judge expressed his inability to do anything about the situation.

Even still, from the word go, the case fell apart. A few examples out of many:

How did the police get to Afzal? They said that S.A.R Geelani led them to him. But the court records show that the message to arrest Afzal went out before they picked up Geelani. The High Court called this a ‘material contradiction’ but left it at that.

The two most incriminating pieces of evidence against Afzal were a cellphone and a laptop confiscated at the time of arrest. The Arrest Memos were signed by Bismillah, Geelani’s brother, in Delhi. The Seizure Memos were signed by two men of the J&K Police, one of them an old tormentor from Afzal’s past as a surrendered ‘militant’. The computer and cellphone were not sealed, as evidence is required to be. During the trial it emerged that the hard disc of the laptop had been accessed after the arrest. It only contained the fake home ministry passes and the fake identity cards that the terrorists used to access Parliament. And a Zee TV video clip of Parliament House. So according to the police, Afzal had deleted all the information except the most incriminating bits, and he was speeding off to hand it over to Ghazi Baba, who the charge sheet described as the Chief of Operations.

A witness for the prosecution, Kamal Kishore, identified Afzal and told the court he had sold him the crucial SIM card that connected all the accused in the case to each other on the 4th of December 2001. But the prosecution’s own call records showed that the SIM was actually operational from November 6th 2001.

It goes on and on, this pile up of lies and fabricated evidence. The courts note them, but for their pains the police get no more than a gentle rap on their knuckles. Nothing more.

Then there’s the back story. Like most surrendered militants Afzal was easy meat in Kashmir — a victim of torture, blackmail, extortion. In the larger scheme of things he was a nobody. Anyone who was really interested in solving the mystery of the Parliament Attack would have followed the dense trail of evidence that was on offer. No one did, thereby ensuring that the real authors of conspiracy will remain unidentified and uninvestigated.

But now that Afzal Guru has been hanged, I hope our collective conscience has been satisfied. Or is our cup of blood still only half full?