After the carnage: the predatory 'intelligentsia'

[Guest guest]

>Author: Rajeev Srinivasan >Publication: Rediff >May 13, 2002 >URL:

http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/may/13rajeev.htm > >The events in Gujarat

recently have been extremely deplorable. Nobody covered themselves with glory.

The murders in Godhra were an outrage, a crime against humanity. The riots that

followed were also a crime against humanity. The perpetrators should be found,

tried and punished forthwith. And the State failed miserably in its duty and

responsibility of protecting its citizens and of dealing with the criminals. >

>But the self-proclaimed 'intelligentsia' has been equally at fault: it has

attempted to mislead the public with its biased and one-sided perorations. >

>The gullible public has been misled: I have seen several people suggest that

they are 'ashamed to be Hindu' or 'ashamed to be Indian'. This is ridiculous:

if you are ashamed to be a Hindu because of what happened in Godhra and

Gujarat, then you were not a Hindu to begin with. For, otherwise you would be

sharing the pain of Hindu pilgrims being burnt alive. Do not blame the religion

for your own frailty, lack of self-confidence. In contrast, not a single Muslim

(including famous bleeding heart Shabana Azmi) said he/she was 'ashamed to be a

Muslim' because of 9/11 or Godhra. All they said was that the attacks were

un-Islamic. Okay, so Gujarat's riots are un-Hindu, the rioters are not Hindus,

thank you very much, we can all rest easy now. > >There is an interesting

situation in the Indian media: whenever a single Hindu does anything obnoxious,

it is supposed to show how horrible Hinduism is. On the other hand, if any

Christian or Muslim anywhere does a single good thing, it is celebrated as

proving the goodness of the religion. Why? Aren't these just individual acts? >

>Those who are 'ashamed to be Hindu' should consider formally converting to the

religion of their choice, be it Marxism, Christianity or Islam. Those who are

'ashamed to be Indian' should consider emigrating. Really, nobody made you

India's ambassador or anointed representative: you should feel free to seek

citizenship in China, Saudi Arabia or America, for instance. > >The proximate

cause of the Godhra incident, according to the 'intelligentsia', is the effort

in Ayodhya to revive the Ram temple. And the proximate cause of the ensuing

riots in Gujarat, according to the 'intelligentsia', is the alleged nature of

the so-called Hindu fundamentalists, a term that is, in passing, an oxymoron:

the fundamentals of Hinduism are tolerance and plurality, so a 'Hindu

fundamentalist' is a contradiction in terms. > >On the contrary, a very good

case can be made that there are several layers of causes: the proximate cause,

the preponderant cause, and the root cause. > >The proximate cause is general

Hindu frustration. > >The preponderant cause is endemic Islamic fundamentalism,

the deleterious results of which we see everywhere in the world: fuelled by

intolerant petro-dollar Wah'abism from Saudi Arabia, Muslims have turned

violently intolerant against both minorities and majorities everywhere. > >The

root cause in India is the decision circa 1947 by the Nehruvian Stalinists to

impose apartheid against Hindus, by oppressing them in every conceivable way: >

>· by looting Hindu temples through control of their finances (and only theirs;

while providing largesse for others); wealthy churches and mosques get huge

amounts of foreign money for conversion purposes, but this is not even audited;

>· by declaring open season for conversion, which is clearly violence against

Hindus because only they are victimised and are never the proselytisers; >· by

discriminating against them by only allowing non-Hindus to run educational

institutions (thus preparing the way for generations of Hindus to be

brainwashed and alienated); >· by delegitimising and destroying Sanskrit and

Indological studies; >· by creating and assiduously cultivating a negative

Marxist interpretation of Hinduism and making it the state-supported official

view; >· by continuously insulting Hindu tradition by labelling it primitive

and superstitious, whereas it is highly rational and scientific; >· by negating

Hindu history itself and brushing under the carpet massive Islamic and Christian

damage done to it; >· by ignoring all human rights violations against Hindus; >·

by propagating as State ideology something called 'secularism', which in essence

means oppression of Hindus. > >In effect, there is jaziya, or a Muslim religious

tax, on Hindus. The status of Hindus today is roughly what prevailed under the

Muslim tyrant Aurangzeb. In 50 years, Jawaharlal Nehru's policies have also

created an entire cadre of people who are intellectually colonised, who have

built up their careers on Marxist dogma that has been proven utterly wrong

everywhere in the world. These children of Marx and Macaulay have nothing but

contempt for Hindus. > >I would like to ask all those petitioning the Human

Rights Commission and the Commission on Minorities about 50,000 Muslim refugees

in Gujarat, and ask those august bodies themselves, what about the damage done

to Hindus in Jammu &; Kashmir? Every day, we hear of a few Hindus murdered

there, and they are clearly minorities in J&K.; Why aren't the commissions

visiting Rajouri and Doda or the refugee camps in Delhi where 700,000 Kashmiri

Pandits have lived in pitiful conditions for an entire decade? I will tell you

why: Hindu suffering doesn't matter. > >The attitude of the 'intelligentsia'

can only be explained by assuming that Hindu lives are less valuable than

Muslim lives. This, in fact, mirrors what the Saudis believe (see The Wall

Street Journal, April 9, 2002), and therefore buttresses the charge of

dhimmitude against the Indian 'secular' 'progressives'. In Saudi Arabia, there

is the concept of blood money. If a person has been killed or caused to die by

another, the latter has to pay blood money or compensation, as follows: > >·

100,000 dirhams if the victim is a Muslim man >· 50,000 dirhams if a Muslim

woman >· 50,000 dirhams if a Christian man >· 25,000 dirhams if a Christian

woman >· 6,666 dirhams if a Hindu man >· 3,333 dirhams if a Hindu woman > >That

is, a Muslim man's life is worth 33 times that of a Hindu woman. This is clearly

the view of the Indian 'intelligentsia' as well; for they have made 33,000 times

as much noise over the death of even a Muslim rioter in Gujarat as over the

torching of a Hindu pilgrim woman in Godhra. > >I find this discriminatory

valuation of human life deeply offensive to the core. But this is the fact in

the Indian media; I wrote about this in a column The value of a human life. The

life of each human life should be valued at exactly the same. Why is the life of

some Australian missionary considered so much more valuable than the lives of

the Hindu priest and Buddhist priest murdered in Bangladesh last week? Have you

even heard of this in the Indian media? Of course not! > >All this has led to a

perception among some sections of Hindus that they have no rights, and that

therefore they have no responsibility to, or stake in, civil society. They have

begun to perceive what amounts to a gross conspiracy against them, perpetuated

by the State and the chatterati. They have a grievance. Gujarat is the result.

The 'intelligentsia' who readily accept that Muslims, or Palestinians, or

blacks in the US, have legitimate grievances, will not accept that Hindus may

have legitimate grievances too. > >As the Nehruvians have sown, we reap in

Gujarat today. > >As the Nehruvians sowed in Punjab, we reaped during the

troubles there. It is worth remembering, now that Baisakhi and Jallianwallah

Bagh Day have just come and gone, that the same ugly combination of State and

media succeeded in converting the most patriotic of Indians, the Sikhs (a

section of them, to be precise) into enemies of the nation. See my earlier

column, Remember Jallianwallah Bagh! Incidentally, I would like to request that

the International Court of Justice be moved to bring charges of war crimes

against the British queen for Jallianwallah Bagh. > >I received several hundred

emails about a previous column Godhra, 'secular' 'progressives' and politics,

most of it positive; but a number of people took exception to my suggestion

that the Americans would take a very dim view of violence by minorities. I said

that if a bunch of Muslims torched a Greyhound bus, they would round up and

incarcerate all Muslims in the US in concentration camps. > >My correspondents

disagreed, suggesting that Muslims killed a lot of people on 9/11, Black

Thursday, and that despite this, Americans did not retaliate in general against

Muslims. Ah, but they are wrong. The situations aren't entirely comparable. 9/11

was not an attack on Americans by Americans, it was clearly perpetrated by

'others:' foreigners, Arabs, Muslims. Whereas in Godhra it was Indian citizens

murdering Indian citizens. > >And some ordinary Americans did take revenge on

Muslims and others like Sikhs who they thought were Muslims. It is true that

this was not widespread, but that was because they had full confidence in the

ability of the American State to take revenge. They did not have to resort to

acts of individual violence as there would assuredly be revenge. And there was.

Can you say the same in India? Is there any chance whatsoever that the

perpetrators of Godhra will ever be identified and caught? Absolutely none! >

>And surely my correspondents must be kidding when they say that Americans did

not retaliate. What do you call the 10,000 reportedly killed in Afghanistan by

the American-led force? Estimates vary all over the place from 5,000 to 50,000

civilians killed in the brief but bitter Afghan 'War against Terrorism'. What

was (is?) going on there is State-sponsored retaliation, overwhelming and

punitive force directed by the American state against foreigners, Afghans,

Muslims, civilians. > >It so happens that the US government will not attack

Arabs because of other compulsions, namely, oil; so they went ahead and

massacred whichever Muslims were easy prey. And they did so with such good

propaganda that the world applauds them. Nobody weeps for the innocent

bystanders who perished in the thousands in Afghanistan. So Muslims killed

3,000 in the US, the US killed 10,000 Muslims. This is not retaliation? A kill

ratio of 1:3? And they are planning to kill more Muslims in Iraq (not to

mention the 500,000 children already murdered there in a decade of sanctions.)

> >Retaliation is an ugly thing. No one can justify the torching of 58 Hindu

pilgrims at Godhra by a Muslim mob; and no one can justify the riots that

ensued in retaliation. This is something most sane people would agree on. The

suffering of innocents, on both sides of the religious divide, is a blot on

civilization. It is also true that the State of Gujarat has appeared to be

helpless at best, and predatory at worst. > >But there are several points I

would like to raise. One is the endemic and brutal unfairness in the media. The

media should have a simple criterion: are innocent Indians getting hurt? If so,

the media should raise its powerful voice against it. The media should be

colour-blind as they say in the US, or religion-blind as the case should be in

India. When Hindus are systematically massacred in Jammu &; Kashmir or

ethnically cleansed in Tripura, when Sikhs are butchered in Delhi, when Muslims

are killed in Gujarat, there should be equal vehemence on the part of the media.

They should not discriminate. > >But they do. They are diabolically one-sided.

When I wrote my columns Blaming the Hindu victim, and "Godhra, 'secular'

'progressives' and politics", I simply followed a tactic made infamous by the

'secular' 'progressives' in the media: being one-sided and downplaying the

fears and concerns of the other side. For instance, in literally thousands of

articles and opinion pieces published by them, they say, "Godhra was

deplorable", dismiss the horror with that, and then go on to write thousands of

words about what happened in the ensuing riots. This is certainly lip service. >

>The 'secular' 'progressives' always mouth meaningless platitudes when there is

aggression against Hindus. Then why isn't it perfectly legitimate for me, in

reverse, to weep for Hindus, and to downplay aggression against Muslims? And I

am one of only a pathetic handful of columnists who worry about Hindus at all.

I noticed that a few 'secularists' got quite angry with what I said. Can you --

and you know who you are -- see how one-sided your own cherished values are? Do

you realize that you have been brainwashed by the prevailing orthodoxy into

accepting gross discrimination? > >This brainwashing comes across in a series

of exhibits I would like to present to you, mostly related to the burning of

the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, and one relating to the ensuing riots in

Gujarat. I must thank reader Kaleem (a propagandist for Islam) for bringing

several of these to my attention. Others too keep sending these to me as if

they proved something. In fact, they prove gullibility on the part of the

senders. You have been conned, folks, by the unscrupulous media. Even though

Varsha Bhosle exposed some of these as fabrications some time ago, new ones

have come up, and clearly a lot of people still swear by them as the gospel

truth. Stop being so gullible, will you? Think! > >In the following, you can

see the chain of quotations: how a fabrication from one source is repeated ad

nauseam until it becomes the 'truth.' Truly Goebbelsian: say a simple thing

again and again until it becomes the truth -- "truth by repeated assertion".

Reminds me of the Upanishadic story of dogs forming a circle biting each

other's tails. > >Arun Shourie recounts the tale of how the leftist chatterati

do the same thing often. There was a story of how Aurangzeb allegedly

demolished the Kashi Viswanath temple in Benares "on the request of a Hindu

Rajput queen". A number of 'eminent historians' asserted this, each quoting

another of their tribe, each quote making the story appear more and more solid.

The indefatigable Shourie finally located the source: a grey eminence who said

he had heard about an old Muslim man who had a parchment which proved this;

said grey eminence never saw the document and then the old man died! Pure

hearsay, but the story had become an accepted 'truth' meanwhile. > >Consider

the following exhibits: > >Exhibit A: Rajeel Sheikh's report on the Islamic

site, ummahnews.org, dated March 2 >Exhibit B: The anonymous email purportedly

based on a report by Anil Soni, a journalist, undated and unsigned >Exhibit C:

Peter Popham's report in The Independent of the UK >Exhibit D: Rajiv

Chandrasekharan's report in The Washington Post >Exhibit E: Harsh Mander's

article in The Hindustan Times and elsewhere > >Exhibit A is from a site meant

to rally the Muslim faithful. Here are a few excerpts about what allegedly

happened in the Godhra railway station: > >The kar sevaks started a quarrel

with this stallholder too. While beating him and pulling his beard they are

reported to have repeatedly shouted the slogan: "Mandir Ka Nirmaann Karo, Babur

Ki Aulad ko Baahar Karo" (Start the construction of the temple, throw out the

sons of Babar). > >Hearing the chaos, the stallholder's 16-year-old daughter

came to intervene. She pleaded with the kar sevaks to stop beating her father

and leave him alone. The kar sevaks then carried off the young girl to the

train and locked her inside one of the reserved compartments (S-6). > >As the

train started to move out of Godhra with the elderly man banging on the

compartment doors, two stall vendors jumped onto the last bogey of the moving

train and pulled the emergency stop chain to halt the train. The train came to

a standstill about one kilometre away from the railway station. > >Having been

written for a site that specialises in Islamic sob stories, it, not

surprisingly, provides a tale of Islamic victimhood. It relates a story

(uncorroborated by anyone else) that the torching of the train happened because

a Muslim vendor's daughter had been abducted by Hindus and forced into coach S-6

of the train. > >There are some gaping holes in this story, which make it,

literally, incredible. Why on earth would Muslims set fire to the coach where

the alleged Muslim girl was? Why on earth would the Hindu men take the

purported girl to a coach where their own womenfolk were sitting? And how come

there was a mob of 2,000 Muslims ready and waiting with weapons and kerosene

and petrol at 7 in the morning, anticipating this eventuality? > >In any case,

it also gives the impression that if a Muslim girl had in fact been abducted,

that was sufficient provocation to burn alive 59 Hindu women and children.

Isn't this a little excessive? But according to the 'intelligentsia', it was

fully justified: these were Hindu activists, including Hindu activist babies

and Hindu activist ten-year-olds and Hindu activist women. Obviously, because

of their ties to Ayodhya, or so went the media logic articulated in many

columns, they invited the justified wrath of the Muslims. They only have

themselves to blame, these dangerous Hindu activist babies and women and

children. >To be continued tomorrow > >

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