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| Monday, May 08, 2006 |
| 'Leftie' Outlook has Madhu Kishwar rubbishing Medha Patkar |
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Is this really happening? I am sure a right wing blogger would be confused by this. Isn't Outlook all for communism, socialism, environmentalism and in essence anti-national? Perhaps, they decided that publishing something against the NBA's campaign would get them favours from Narendra Modi? Perhaps, Vinod Mehta is a closet khakiwalla?
So, please, bloggers, don't be confused. It is all a trick to obfuscate and confuse. Don't get taken in.
You can read the full article by Madhu Kishwar in Outlook here: Obstruction as ideology.
Your minds will get further clouded when the same issue of Outlook has a story on the Vadodara riots. It claims that the dargah demolished predates even the city of Vadodara (impossible!), that demolishing a pre-1947 religious structure is against the Places of Worship (special provisions act) of 1991 (when has that stopped us?) and that the temples demolished before the dargah were recent structures (A recent temple is equal to ten 200 year old dargahs) and more such nonsense. Please re-emphasize these points further in your blogs, I beg you.
I know bloggers are not mainstream media - but still I have to mention this site sandeepweb. Such an amazing naivete about our country, I have never seen before. I quote: "One harmless, well-meaning governmental move to ramp up the infrastructure has steadily matured into a grave political battle fought with the secular media as an important ally." Read more of the NRI patriot's writings here.
Harmless governmental move? Come on, all we wanted was a little better traffic movement in Vibrant Gujarat! Such childlike innocence! In a state where every action by the government is looked upon with suspicion by Muslims, and vice versa, there are NO well meaning governmental moves. Or well-meaning moves by Muslims. Everything is a threat, a muscle-flexing - by one or the other of the two parties.
Pioneer is another newspaper that wallows such angelic ideas. Its editor Chandan mitra's closeness to the BJP helped it become so. The right wing says that Muslims are irresponsible or worse, and then pretends that they are not so when it wants to demolish something. Any demolition has enormous significance in India now - and without taking the other party into confidence (Take Muslims into confidence - ha!), you can't govern. Pretending that Muslims should be reasonable - despite what you did to them, and they have done to you - is asking for trouble. In Modi's Gujarat, nothing is as simple as a minor governance issue.
B Mathew |
posted by a correspondent @ 5:21 AM  |
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| 7 Comments: |
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Thank you for inviting us to blog the Loutlook piece on Baroda riots. But we only watch The Indian Express; and we think it beneath our dignity to blog a publication as low-life-y as Loutlook, with a former soft-porn-peddler for an editor. So you have to make do with our detailed comment here.
The Loutlook story begins with a reference to a similar leveling of another darga in Ahmedabad during the infamous riots of 2002 Actually, it begins with a profound, sublime, apt, near-customary reciting of couplet that no doubt tells us that the writer is no ordinary hack, but a shayari-lover who knows his subject thoroughly.
(try this, by the way, to know where the shayari-lover looked for inspiration:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22My+heart+split+asunder+by+the+dagger+of+separation%22&btnG=Search)
"On February 28, '02, Vali Gujarati's tomb in Ahmedabad was razed to the ground by Hindu mobs. Overnight, it vanished and a road was paved on the spot where it once stood"
Imagine this. The Hindu mobs had plenty to choose from. At the very least, they could loot Muslim shops. If they wanted more thrills, they could slit open the bellies of pregnant Muslim women and pull the foetuses out. Or, as Arundhati Roy vividly imagined, they could have a lot of good-natured fun carving the Hindu symbol 'om' on the foreheads of Muslim women with a butcher's knife. If they got bored, gangrape coould have been a welcome distraction. They could have done any of this fun stuff. But guess what do they actually do? They pick a few axes and spades and go to work on a decrepit structure and make a perfect job of demolishing it. Get this right: in the midst of all that mayhem, the mob's priority is to destroy this little grave of a long-dead Sufi poet whose poor heart was in any case filled with thorns.
So all right, we have no problem stretching our credulity a bit. We learn that a road ws paved on the spot *immediately*. Guess who did it? The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. Guess which political party was ruling the AMC then? Secular-liberal Congress. Guess who did NOT ask this secular-liberal-run municipal body to re-erect the structure that it paved a road on? Guess who did NOT ask this for the several months afterwards the riots during which the municipal body continued to be run by the friendly secular-liberal Congress, when the darga could be happily rebuilt at the Congress mayor's bidding? Secularists and liberals.
So why doesn't our Loutlook fellow, who starts his Baroda darga piece with a reference to the Ahmedabad darga, doesn't give his readers this crucial piece of information: that regardless of who demolished that darga, it was a Congress-run civic administration that slyly used the opportunity to pave a road on it?
That's what's called 'suppressio veri, suggestio falsi'.
The Loutlook article begins by prejudicing readers' minds with a half-lie; and contiues to prejudice them with full-blown lies.
The "pre-1947 structure" fig leaf: Any law is to be interpreted within the context of its spirit. The 1991 Places of Worship Act was enacted at a time when VHP was claiming ownership of 3000 mosques, saying they were erected over demolished temples. The Act was meant to thwart the VHP. Even more specifically, the Act was meant to prevent a repeat of Babri Masjid vis-a-vis Mathura and Varanasi mosques, where evidence is clear as crystal for any fool who cared to look that these mosques were built on destroyed temples.
The 1991 law was not meant to put an end to urban renewal. It was meant to put an end to dispute over ownership of former temple sites. Do you expect Loutlook to tell this to its readers? Or that pre-1947 temples were demolished in Tamilnadu -- without trouble -- to widen roads?
http://dinamalar.com/2005feb17/imp1.asp
Do you expect the Loutlook reporter to have done his homework and discover that the demolition notice was served not on April 28th, but on 26th?
Or that, on that very day, a similar notice was served on a temple too?
Or that, by 30th April, the temple complied with the demolition order, and voluntarily removed the encroachments, but that the dargawallas continued to be defiant?
http://cities.expressindia.com/archivefullstory.php?newsid=180344&creation_date=2006-05-01
"According to advocate Moin Rafi, the community had agreed to reduce the width of the dargah. But even as negotiations were on, the structure was demolished and the city went up in flames."
Are we being a little naive here to expect that Loutlook will give its readers the other side of the story, that the mayor and city commissioner say that they demolished only after the negotiating party refused to budge from the no-demolition position? That it refused to accept land elsewhere in lieu of the darga?
We are not surprised that you regard us as riling against "pseudo-secularism" ( a word we never use), when you yourself are so blind to the blatant one-sidedness, manipulation, and just plain opinionatedness centered on conspiracy theories that marks this Loutlook story.
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