By Balbir K Punj
A good part of Gujarat’s population of voters has cast its vote. Pollsters have already enlightened us, howsoever perfectly or perfunctorily, on how they have voted. Whoever wins, it is certain that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi would for long be the talking point and grist to the country’s large pseudo-secular mill. The Chief Minister’s remarks on hanging the mastermind behind the attack on the Parliament House, Afzal Guru, and killing of a dubious wheeler-dealer, Sohrabuddin Sheikh, have given them enough to pillory him, making it all look as if the entire election were Modi versus the rest.
There need not be any justification for a Chief Minister who claims that he would like to hang someone whom the Supreme Court has already sentenced to death but whose sentence the Union Government is wary of executing. Nor does bringing the alleged extra-judicial killing of another person with a long criminal record into the public discourse during an election merit a profound analysis. Such poll-time rhetoric reflects only what many Governments overtly or covertly are doing. Across the country, how many ‘encounter killings’ of dacoits and tricky criminals are in fact extra-judicial is anybody’s guess.
One of the most notorious of such incidents is traced to the police under former Congress Chief Minister of Kerala K Karunakaran, who, during the Emergency, killed engineering student Rajan on the pretext that he was a Naxalite. It took many years and a patient campaign by the boy’s father to nail down Mr Karunakaran who then had to resign. But no Congress leader ever expressed even a semblance of regret for the crime.
During the Congress regime in Madhya Pradesh in the late 1960s, the then Maharaja of Bastar, Pravir Chandra Bhanj-Deo, was openly shot at and killed for his alleged participation in a silly revolt against the state. Nobody resigned or expressed regret for the incident though it was public knowledge that the former Maharaja was a thorn in the neck of Congress leaders in the State and had been in and out of prison under preventive detention several times. Back then, the human rights lobby had not set up its shops yet. So, the extra-judicial killing under the Congress regime was not mourned.
The "merchants of death" charge, which UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi levelled against Mr Modi, is even more ricocheting. The entire 19-months’ period of Emergency saw many citizens with whom the Congress was uncomfortable being jailed, tortured and even killed in the course of interrogation or otherwise. Had the election of 1977 not intervened, the tandav would have continued. The Congress never said sorry for its excesses during Emergency.
The 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom was justified by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as, "When a giant tree falls, the earth below shakes." The Maoists are running amok in central and eastern India and the death toll caused by them is mounting. Has the Congress president ever showed the courage to call them "merchants of death"? How could she afford to when the Left is keeping her party in power?
Chief Minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has admitted that his party cadre had launched the armed attack that killed several people in Nandigram. The Congress did not call him "merchant of death".
As for the post-Godhra riot, condemnation came from the BJP’s topmost leaders. Interestingly, a section of the former leaders of the BJP, who figured prominently in the 2002 riot, have come out in support of the Congress in this election. Why did the Congress not tell them to get off its train?
Irrespective of the Gujarat election results, the fundamental problems in national security will not go away. The recent spate of terrorist attacks affected the length and breadth of the country — Mumbai, Malegaon, Ajmer, Hyderabad, Lucknow and so on. Despite Muslims being targeted and killed in many of these cases, leaders from the community have not united to ensure that the merchants of terror do not find safe havens in Muslim localities. Instead, they, aided by the so-called secularists, encourage religious extremism. L’affaire Taslima Nasreen is one such telling incident where the Congress chose to play footsie with the extremists.
The Communists in West Bengal have simply pampered Muslim extremists instead of combating them. In the cases ranging from Shah Bano to Ms Nasreen, should the Congress do some retrospection, it would find itself guilty of helping Muslim extremism. In fact, the party has fanned a sense of permanent ‘grievance’ in that community.
In Muslim-majority (51 per cent) Malaysia, the question is not one of discrimination against the Tamils among the three ethnic groups in Malaysia: Malays, Chinese and Tamil. It is a question of the Muslim majority imposing its will on the minority Hindus, razing their temples saying that they were built illegally while refusing permission to build any new Hindu places of worship legally, of declaring people as Muslims even when they have not converted to Islam and forcibly separating Hindu wives from their Muslim husbands.
Malaysia, which was once a liberal democracy, is steadily treading the path of Islam and becoming authoritarian. The Hindus in that country have been marginalised; their share in the national wealth is reducing and job opportunities shrinking under the bhumiputra (Malays only) policy. As most Malays are Muslims, it is easy to package this ‘Muslims only’ policy as ‘Malays only’ policy, hiding Islamic extremism under the nationalist veneer.
Why is Malaysia different from Singapore, which is secular in every respect, though the latter’s populace too is as varied, consisting of Chinese, Tamils and Malays? Is it not because an Islamic country is intolerant of other religions? Is it not the same story in Bangladesh? This analysis works for Kashmir as well, from where the Hindu population has been driven out.
In the Christian majority US, the legislatures have welcomed Hindu scriptures being recited in-House. In the UK, the Prime Minister attended a function held on the occasion of Diwali and Prince Charles publicly stated that he would like to be crowned when his time comes in all major religious rites of his people, though technically he is the Defender of the (Christian) faith.
But in India, not even a single Muslim leader has spoken for the Malay Hindus. Why blame Mr Modi alone for his election-time rhetoric?
Source : dailypioneer.com
