communal politics flourishing in UP Harsh Mander

[prasad1]

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‘There is nothing, nothing which can persuade us to return to our villages. They burned and looted our homes: We could barely save our lives, as we desperately ran with our children in our arms and just the clothes we were wearing. What is there for us to return to?’ Words I heard over and over again in a harrowing journey through the districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, exactly a year after a storm of hate overnight tore this peaceful countryside apart.


As I travelled from village to village, everywhere one bore witness to a social landscape ravaged by communal hate — just a year old, but already settled like the crusted burdens of generations. An old man said sadly, “No one has come this full year to call us back, neither the village elders, nor people we grew up and worked with.” “No village cricket team was complete without a Muslim lad or two,” said another. “And now they don’t care if we live or die”. “Look at this camp in which we live now,” said a third, pointing to leaking, soiled plastic sheets stretched over bamboo sticks affording each family a few square feet of minimal shelter, surrounded by black cesspools and mosquitoes. “We know we can die here as well. But at least here we are assured that our loved ones will bury us. Not like our village where our people were killed and burned.”


Contrary to claims of the state government that all camps are emptied, we found over 10,000 women, men and children still living in camps in around 25 villages.


Even in the immediate months after the conflagration, state support was restricted to food supplies or a few blankets in many camps, and only after national outrage following the death of many children in the winter cold, occasional visits by medical teams. Now even this has become a distant memory. Charitable organisations, mainly faith-based Muslim associations, have also closed their offices. Compassion also wearies. The unhappy people — fugitives from the hate which pervades the villages of their birth — are left to fend for themselves. They have just survived the monsoon showers, and are gearing up to endure another long winter.
?Gujarat model? of communal politics flourishing in UP - Hindustan Times

I am sure some here feel that they deserve it as they are not Hindus. To me they seem like Indians..........

 

[biswa]

Umm, the BJP is not in power in UP is it? How come Akhilesh Yadav is not condemned for human rights violations? Since we blame Modi for the sin of omission in Gujarat, why is UP CM and the SP trying to be innocent bystanders with the entire state machinery at their disposal?

 

[கால பைரவன்]

Umm, the BJP is not in power in UP is it? How come Akhilesh Yadav is not condemned for human rights violations? Since we blame Modi for the sin of omission in Gujarat, why is UP CM and the SP trying to be innocent bystanders with the entire state machinery at their disposal?

You are too harsh. Yadav, unlike BJP, is secular. Isn't that enough?

 

[sarang]

The title given by tavleen singh in her sunday article is a good substitute for secularist. It is SLH = self loathing hindu. Hindu secularists abuse and criticize only hindus. Muslim, christian and left secularists too love non hindus and abuse only hindus. So the secular hindus are nothing but self loathing hindus.

 

[krish44]

even kashmir , which is facing severe floods, is not getting the same positive response to donations from all indians

the open love of kashmiris for a neighbouring country and their support for militant groups has hardened our attitude towards them bordering on callousness.

about uttarakhand all felt bad . but kashmir is on a different footing it appears

 

[sarang]

Religious differences are there, but India is no communal tinderbox

From a newspaper article by Amish is the best selling author of shiva trilogy. Some excerpts:

“I was surprised by a question put forth by a concerned American: “Do you think there might have been some positive outcomes of European colonial rule in India, what with its mission of ‘a white man’s burden’, such as keeping Hindus and Muslims from annihilating each other?”

"When confronted by my confounded look, the man asked: “But aren’t religious holocausts quite common in post-Independence India?”

“He reads Western press reports on India, written by clueless Western journalists — clueless because most of them haven’t bothered to learn an Indian language or live outside the bubble of anglicised-elite enclaves in India.

They frequently portray India as a communal tinderbox. These Western journalists garner their opinions with help from our elite English-language media, where secular as well as religious extremists have traditionally held a disproportionately loud voice: The former because they are insiders in this group and the latter because our English-language media loves a controversial copy.

Many of these secular-extremist journalists write searing articles on the massive religious violence in India. Words like ‘genocide’, ‘holocaust’ and ‘pogrom’ are bandied about freely.

We have had nearly 60 religious riots (incidents where more than five people have been killed) in India since the mid-1960s leading to a total death toll of over 13,000 (Source: Outlook).

A holocaust is what Adolf Hitler carried out in Germany (six million deaths in the 1940s), what Winston Churchill consciously precipitated in pre-Independence eastern-India (1.5 to 4 million deaths in the 1940s), the Partition riots (1 million deaths) or what Pakistan did in Bangladesh (1 to 3 million deaths in the 1970s) or what is happening in Syria right now (191,000 deaths and counting).

The Native American population was approximately 10 million in North America when Columbus famously landed. It was ultimately reduced to less than a million by the time the genocide stopped. Once again, without belittling the suffering of the victims of Indian religious riots, we need to be careful with the words we use.

Admittedly on an unrelated issue, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, in 2010 alone, there were over 30,000 gun-related deaths in the United States.

That single year’s gun-related death toll in the US is more than twice the total number of deaths in all the religious riots in India cumulatively in the last 50 years.

But I seriously don’t think India is going to sink into a morass of religious violence. While some of our myriad communities may not be in perfect harmony with each other, we’ve learnt to co-exist, by and large, without resorting to mass violence.

If we truly love the idea of India, we should focus on the issue of women’s oppression, rather than attacking religion to assert our liberalism.
Sometimes, it’s better to let the data speak, rather than allowing fantastic prose to hog the limelight. You never know what agenda lies hidden beneath the prose.
Amish is the bestselling author of the Shiva Trilogy.


Religious differences are there, but India is no communal tinderbox - Hindustan Times

 

[sarang]

Such barbs expose the hypocrisy of psec lot. Indian govt, army and people have risen to the occasion and modi's disaster management team has done a splendid job. As elsewher, RSS volunteers were the one of the earliest groups to start relief activities.

First there were reports that rajouri district in jammu was the worst hit, but later nedia attention shifted to srinagar. There was only one flash message a couple of days ago - 750 villages in jammu and about 1000 villages in kashmir were flooded. What is the media time spent on jammu victims. Somebody is quietly working in these places too.

Indians who drove out 1 lakh pundits from their homes and indulged in murder and rape. Has any muslim country offered help then or now? Only a hindu country will help all, as most of the hindus are satvik and do not want to convert.

I am sure some here feel that they deserve it as they are not Hindus. To me they seem like Indians..........

 

[prasad1]

“If a modern Diogenes were to hunt out for Indians with his lantern,” wrote Syed Abdullah Brelvi, editor of the once renowned Bombay Chronicle, “he would be sure to come across fervid Hindus, bigoted Muslims and fanatical souls deeply engrossed with the problem of tirelessly finding out how unjustly their own particular community was being treated, and we would have to ask in sorrow: ‘Where are the Indians!’” Today, this observation is as relevant as it was in 1926. Last week the noted jurist, Fali S. Nariman, reminded us of the diminishing value of tolerance in society. He was the speaker at the annual lecture organised by the National Commission for Minorities in New Delhi.


If one wishes to get an idea of the bitterness animating Hindus and Muslims in Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra, there is no better way than to access the polemical literature, or to scrutinise what is taught to students in schools and colleges. One must not expect in them any comprehensive views of the significance of our composite culture, but they are a startling revelation of the suspicion tinged with hatred for the religious minorities. Yet, there is nothing in the comments of our “secular” leadership that expresses the profound moral distress into which these developments threw Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Sections of the westernised intelligentsia deplore; but the same sections execute a volte face and condone the bellicose speeches of the Togadias and the Avaidyanaths. Such is the level of opportunism that they have become impervious to criticism or argument.

Mr. Rajnath Singh, the Home Minister, does, it is true, shake his head over the religious rhetoric around “Love-jihad,” but the concentrated venom of the Hindutva forces is echoed time and time again. With the romanticised temper of the 100 days of the Modi government over, the anti-Muslim tone is heard throughout; in fact, this constitutes a major strand in the bond by which the Hindutva forces feel united after the triumphant majority to the Lok Sabha. Indeed, there is a school of thought in our country, nowadays, vocal, animated by the consciousness of having a significant message to pass, according to which forced conversions have been an important part of the great Islamic enterprise in the subcontinent. It could not be thwarted then, but it must be stopped under the present “Hindu” dispensation.


If the BJP leadership believes that the past is not worth returning to, it must provide an effective lead in curbing the violent instincts of its storm troopers. Otherwise, it will run into trouble. For our generation, this kind of reasoning has a familiar ring. The BJP has its own prophets who know it as well.


Fortunately, Mr. Nariman sorrowed, but he did not despair in his speech at the National Commission for Minorities in Delhi. I salute his courage. The unshaken ardour of such eminent men and women lends strength to our Republic.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/love-faith-and-conversions/article6413426.ece?homepage=true

 

[sarang]

Psecs tried all their wily tactics before the election but failed miserably. What was tolerated and kept under the carpet in the name of secularism can no longer be hidden whether in india or elsewhere. There was a big rally protesting against the rape and abuse of 1400 girls by pakistani muslims spread over a decade in rotherham UK, but this rally too was conveniently ignored by the media. Yasin malik threw away the aid material given by the indian army in flood ravaged kashmir and ordered the hapless folk not to accept type aid and throw it away. He stole relief boats dare authorities to charge him; he already has several murder charges against him. These pseudo secularists are more dangerous to the unity and diversity of india, and article miners fall in this category.

In a hindi tv channel, the bjp mp who raised the issue of terror schools in madrasa, the anchors a lady and narasimhan (perhaps a pseudo brahmin) asked the mp - why are you doing this and the reply was - 'for the unity of the country'. The two then broke into non stop questioning and abusing his credentials and statement, and did not allow him to say a word. Only statement he managed to say at the end was - you don't want to listen to me, why ask.

It is said knowledge is power, but the psec group is not ready to allow the truth to come out even though it is staring at the face of the nation. Politicians in bihar, bengal, up, bihar, and kerala intentionally downplayed inconvenient truth, but all these have to come out, the brave efforts of seculars not withstanding.

Every state in india has suffered rotherham like incidents, and like british labour party, the incidents were ignored for political benefits. The police chief in rotherham refused to resign when asked because he pointed the finger at the politicians.

An ISIS terrorist was caught in chennai from a housing society he was renting. See the fun; the society has given the details of hundred odd tenants to the police as required by law; only this terrorist's details were not given to the police, 'by mistake'.

So, don't gag any mouth. Let all data come out. The main stream media cannot suppress any longer what is known to the locals.