When Hindus abandon Hindus under attack...

Humiliated and fearful of the organised fury of the Muslim mob, Hindus don't celebrate Durga Puja this year in Deganga.

(Photo shows desecrated Kali Mandir in Deganga)

There was a time, not that many decades ago, when Hindu grief in one part of the country would not go unnoticed in its other parts. And so it was that Hindus across north and central India, as it existed before the demise of British colonial rule a year later, observed a ‘black’ Diwali in the autumn of 1946 to commiserate with their co-religionists of Noakhali in Bengal. The infamous Noakhali riots, which erupted on October 10 even before the last corpse had been removed from the bustees of Calcutta which had burned for days following Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s call for ‘Direct Action’ on August 16, witnessed what Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was to later describe as a call to Hindus to leave or perish in the “flames of fanaticism”. If Direct Action Day led to the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’, the “organised fury of the Muslim mob” — as an enraged member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly rudely but pithily put it — was unsparing in Noakhali. Hindu homes were set on fire, Hindu women were raped and girls abducted, Hindu men were murdered. It was this unrestrained butchery and the Hindu grief in its wake that moved a million Hindu hearts in central and north India and the diyas remained unlit that Diwali.

Six-and-a-half decades later, Hindus, it would seem, are no longer moved by the plight of Hindus. The pseudo-secularism aggressively peddled by political parties of all shades — even the BJP has begun to subscribe to the bunkum made fashionable by the Left-liberal intelligentsia in the hope of ridding itself of its ‘communal’ (read Hindu) tag — and the divisive politics of caste identity have made Hindus inure to the plight and sorrow of fellow Hindus. Nothing else explains the indifference of Hindus towards their hapless co-religionists in Deganga who, after suffering the “organised fury of the Muslim mob”, led by Trinamool Congress MP Haji Nurul Islam, have been virtually abandoned by both community and state to their fate. Starting September 6, Haji Nurul Islam and his thugs, who met with resistance when they tried to demolish the main Durga Mandap that has existed for long, ran riot in Deganga block of West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, a short distance from Calcutta. Hindu homes were ransacked, Hindu shops were set on fire, Hindu temples were desecrated. All this happened while the district administration and the police twiddled their thumbs. In West Bengal, the Marxists are loath to take on the mullahs; for the Trinamool Congress, the mullahs are powerful allies in Ms Mamata Banerjee’s quest for power at any price.

Humiliated and simmering with rage, abandoned and forsaken by their own in West Bengal and elsewhere, the grieving Hindus of Deganga decided not to celebrate Durga Puja, the most important festival in the Bengali Hindu calendar, this year. The Durga Mandaps in Deganga wore a deserted look, the joyous sound of dhaak, the traditional drum, was not heard, and an overwhelming sense of mourning prevailed. Fear played spoil sport, too: If the September riots were any indication, Muslim belligerence was not to be taken lightly. Meanwhile, in a demonstration of crude triumphalism, Haji Nurul Islam and his goons, with the full support and blessings of the Trinamool Congress, have built and inaugurated a new mosque right in the middle of Deganga market. The high-volume and high-pitched azaan is more a taunt to the Hindus than a call to prayers for the faithful.

The ghetto now rules Deganga. The Hindus, reduced to an awful minority by Muslim ‘settlers’ who entered West Bengal illegally and settled in Deganga as ‘citizens’ after being provided with ration cards by the local committee of the CPI(M) that facilitated the inclusion of their names in the voters list, can only grieve over their persecution today. Ironically, the Hindus voted en bloc for the Left, as did the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants-turned-Indian citizens. Then the demography changed radically; the pampered minority became the oppressive majority. That coincided with the waning of the Left Front and the waxing of the Trinamool Congress which, mindful of numbers, chose Muslims over Hindus in Deganga and strengthened its hold by patronising the likes of Haji Nurul Islam. When Ms Mamata Banerjee went around ‘inaugurating’ Durga Puja at various pandals in Hindu majority constituencies of Kolkata this year, she did not spare a thought for the Hindus of Deganga; she need not have because their votes do not matter. That’s the power of demographic change, forced and natural.

Nor does the Left Front, especially the CPI(M), care about the Hindus of Deganga. The Marxists believe survival depends not on alienating the mullahs but pandering to them. Hence the recently announced communal quota; hence, too, the West Bengal Government shamelessly looking the other way as students of a tax-payer funded Islamic ‘university’ — really an over-glorified madarsa — in Kolkata force their women teachers to wear the burqa on campus. Then there is the media which has blacked out the plight of Hindus in Deganga, striking an ideological posture with which we are all too familiar. But it is not Left-liberalism that has kept Deganga out of the columns of newspapers and prime time bulletins of 24x7 news channels: It is the fear of incurring the wrath of both Ms Mamata Banerjee and her Marxist foes. The tragedy that has befallen the Hindus of Deganga is similar to the stuff that once made Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’ a popular inclusion in Sunday papers.

Postscript: I have received the following e-mail from Hindu Samhati, the only organisation which has been trying to draw the attention of media and authorities to the fear that reigns in Deganga, admittedly without any success so far:

“Minor Hindu girl abducted by Muslim youth in Deganga in broad daylight on October 1.

Victim — Sangita Mandal; age 17 years, four months. Class 12 student. Daughter of Sukumar Mandal. Address: Village Purba Changdana, PS Deganga.

Kidnapper — Naharul Islam; age 22. Son of Abdul Rahim. Address: Village Doharia.

Sangita was abducted in a Maruti Omni van at Ambika Nagar in front of Polytechnic College.”

In a similar case of abduction and forced nikah when the mother of the minor girl appealed for justice to a division bench of Calcutta High Court earlier this year, the honourable judges of secular India’s secular justice system had cited sharia’h to legitimise the ‘marriage’, insisting that the age of the girl was inconsequential. We live in depressing times.

[This appears as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on October 17, 2010.]

BJP after its defeat: Hand-wringing is not introspection

Comment

I came across this story in the Times of India a couple of days ago:

MUMBAI: A section of Muslims is lobbying for the induction of former Minister of Minority Affairs, AR Antulay, into the Union Cabinet. Octogenarian Antulay lost the Lok Sabha election from Raigad to the Shiv Sena's Anant Geete... Antulay was the lone Muslim MP from Maharashtra in the 14th Lok Sabha. With his defeat, there is no Muslim representative from the State in the 15th Lok Sabha and many Muslims feel that his induction into the Cabinet and his subsequent nomination to Parliament through the Rajya Sabha would help reduce discontent in the community... A delegation of Muslims ... is leaving for Delhi soon to meet Congress president Sonia Gandhi... "He is respected among Muslims and if he is made a Minister again, the Congress can ensure Muslim support in the Assembly polls which are a few months away,'' said Sami Khatib, president, Anjuman-e-Islam.

Three points need to be noted.

First, Antulay, who as a Cabinet Minister in the previous Government headed by Manmohan Singh had contested the televised version of 26/11 and insisted that Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare and two of his senior colleagues were not felled by terrorist bullets during the siege of Mumbai (thus lending credence to the desi Islamist fiction that it was a plot by Hindus and Zionists to blame Pakistan) could not swing the Muslim and 'secular' Hindu votes. He was defeated by the Shiv Sena's candidate.

Second, Muslims of Maharashtra are loath to accept the verdict of a democratic election since their man has lost and a Hindu has won. So, they want the Congress to get him in somehow or the other. If it doesn't, the Congress can discount Muslim support during the Assembly election later this year. I am not surprised Antulay is 'respected' by those Muslims who are not-so-subtly blackmailing the Congress.

[I read an interesting analysis of the 2009 election from the Muslim perspective:
"The 15th Lok Sabha that would be formally constituted any moment in the ensuing week will have a meager 28 Muslim MPs, far less than needed if compared with the percentage of their population, 13.4 per cent according to the 2001 Census..." The full analysis can be read at www.sahilonline.org.]

Third, for all its 'moderation', 'secularism', 'centrist politics' and 'appeal to the masses', the Congress couldn't squeeze in a Muslim winner from Maharashtra. So much for the hogwash that the BJP should learn from the Congress on how to carry all sections along.

It has been pointed out that the BJP's candidate (a VHP swami) in Hardwar (Uttarakhand) lost miserably, as did another VHP activist who was given the BJP's ticket for North-East Delhi constituency; the BJP candidate was trounced in Kandhamal (Orissa).

What has not been highlighted is the BJP's victory in Malegaon (Maharashtra) which has a huge Muslim population (said to be 50 per cent). There was much expectation that the Congress would wrest this seat from the BJP, courtesy the ATS's dubious case against Lt Col Prasad Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur that they, along with nine other 'Hindu terrorists', plotted and executed the September 29, 2008 motorcycle bombing at Malegaon in which six Muslims were killed.

It is not surprising that this minor detail should have been ignored both by 'secular' media and those in the BJP who are wringing their hands for not sacking Varun Gandhi for his intemperate comments which, they believe, contributed to the party's defeat in the polls.

Of course, such claims amount to nothing but bunkum, and are aimed at deflecting attention from the main reasons why the BJP foundered (or should it be floundered?) so horribly. Till now there are no indications of any honest introspection by the BJP or an attempt to do a proper analysis. Everybody's covering up for everybody, which makes sense: Maintain the status quo so that nobody's affected.

BJP president Rajnath Singh at least has had the courage to state publicly that there were "certain flaws in the working and decisions of our party". Other notables have merely said, "The mandate is for us to sit in the Opposition... we will behave like a responsible Opposition." We would have been in the dark without such profound observations.

Here are some random causative factors that contributed to the BJP's humiliating defeat in Election 2009:

1. BJP lacks credibility. Voters don't trust the BJP, or what its present leaders have to say. For instance, when the BJP talks of terrorism, its record in office tells a different story. LK Advani trying to distance himself from the Kandahar episode has had a recoil effect. Or, when it talks of Bofors, a valid question is raised: What did the party do to fix the scamsters when it was in power? As for the BJP's tall talk on corruption, ah, well, let it be.
2. BJP lacks moral authority. It's not enough to preach. You should be seen to be practising rectitude.
3. BJP is neither fish nor flesh. Desperate to be endorsed by the 'secular' media, the English-speaking commentariat and the social elite of Delhi and Mumbai, the BJP has transmogrified itself into a 'B' team of the Congress. If the choice is between the Congress and its cut-price version, voters will naturally opt for the former.

Frankly, it all boils down to the BJP's 'IQ' -- Integrity Quotient.

The BJP, especially those who selflessly support the party and fly its flag, today reminds me of Sisyphus.

Deoband fatwa Website goes offline

Kanchan Gupta / Note / May 13, 2009.

In my post of Tuesday, April 07, 2009, headlined 'Taliban in India: They are already here!', I had reproduced some of the fatwas listed at Darul Uloom Deoband's fatwa Website, wwww.darulifta-deoband.org, designed and maintained by a Muslim living in the US -- or so the site claimed. The Darul Ifta Deoband site was hyperlinked to Darul Uloom Deoband's official Website www.darululoom-deoband.com. Madarsas which are inspired by Darul Uloom Deoband, and are known as 'Deobandi madarsas', are the most prolific breeders of Taliban in Pakistan.
I have just received an e-mail alerting me that the Darul Ifta Deoband Website cannot be accessed. I tried to access it, but the browser kept on returning a 'not found' message.
It is possible that the site has been shut down for routine maintenance. But it is also possible that Darul Uloom Deoband has decided not to place its fatwas in the public domain, lest others get to know of what it has to say about women's 'place' in society, the 'duties' of a good Muslim, the 'importance' of covering a woman in a burqa before letting her step out, if at all, of her home, and other such theological issues of great importance.
Just in case the latter is true, I have decided to paste below a statement from the main Darul Uloom Deoband Website, before it 'disappears', denying that the great centre of Islamic learning ever issued a fatwa against cow slaughter. It may be recalled that 'secular' media and their patrons in India's political establishment had gone to town claiming that Darul Uloom Deoband had issued a fatwa against cow slaughter. Here goes the Darul Uloom Deoband statement:

News (Darul Uloom - Deoband)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darul Uloom Denies the Fatwa About Cow Slaughter Published in Newspapers


Darul Uloom Deoband: 26/04/1429 H

Mufti Habibur Rahman Sahib, the head of Darul-Ifta Darul Uloom Deoband, has refused explicitly the so-called fatwa published in newspapers explaining that he had issued no such kind of Fatwa which pronounced slaughtering cow, selling and eating its meat as haram.
The Mufti Sahib declared the news published in Dainik Jagran on 26 April 2008 as baseless and false.
Making it clear, he said that a person from Muzuffarnagar (UP) had asked over the phone weather the act of those slaughtering cow secretly and eating it was Islamically lawful or unlawful. He replied him over the phone saying: "In the light of the shari'ah, eating meat of cow is permissible but people of the States where cow slaughter is banned should avoid it as slaughtering cow and eating its meat stealthily is unsuitable and wrong."
He said that the mediapersons should have rightly understood the context of my reply but they instead misinterpreted it and blamed that slaughtering cow and selling its meat was haram. They overlooked the legal prohibition to which I referred.
Actually, it is the habit of the media persons not to present news in its original context but they add to it ifs and buts on their own. This mentality of them is reflected here as well. I request them to present the news in a right way and also mention the legal prohibitions according to which it is absolutely wrong to violate the law; slaughtering cow and selling its meat is legally unlawful.

Issued by:

Office of Mohtamim

Darul Uloom Deoband.

Muslim rage against America

This isn’t about India’s interest!
Strolling along a flagstoned Byzantine lane in the Arab quarter of the walled city of Jerusalem near the Temple Mount — the Al Aqsa mosque is an imposition of later vintage — I spotted a bowl containing pieces of exquisite coral in the window of a Bedouin jewellery shop. The man behind the counter was obviously an Arab, one of the many who live and work in Israel and are far better off than the Palestinians in Gaza Strip and West Bank, although they are loath to admit it. I greeted the man in halting street Arabic and inquired about the coral. A smile broke out on his face and he asked, “Indian?”
In Egypt, the question would have been, “Indian or Pakistani?” Since Pakistanis do not visit Israel, the second option did not arise. I answered in the affirmative and tried to steer the conversation to the price of the coral, but he would not have any of it. He issued rapid-fire instructions to his assistant, asking him to get mint tea, which arrived within minutes. Meanwhile, he launched into a harangue on how India had dumped Muslims both at home and abroad to “befriend the Zionists and the Americans”.
For evidence he cited the India-US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement and Israel’s supply of military hardware to India. His knowledge of the twists and turns of the nuclear deal, the rejection of it by India’s Muslims and the Left’s ideological opposition to New Delhi forging a strategic relationship with Washington, DC, was truly amazing.
Asked about the source of his information, he said, “Arab newspapers from Misr (Egypt) and Saudi Arabia”. Apparently, local Arab sheets published in the Palestinian Authority areas had been reproducing commentary and opinion articles from newspapers published from Cairo and Riyadh. As for Indian Muslims feeling agitated about India moving closer to the US, the Internet, he said, was an excellent source of information.
The shaai was good, but the coral was far too expensive for me — I had a feeling he had raised the price after sensing my unease over his diatribe and at times abusive references to how “Hindus are conspiring with Jews and Christians against Muslims”. So we parted company after the customary round of kissing; I promised I would return for the coral, perhaps he knew I wouldn’t.
But the halt at this Arab jewellery shop was not entirely wasted: It had provided me with an insight into the ‘ummah web’ — how Muslims separated by borders, land and sea remain connected, feeding on each other’s anger and fuelling each other’s rage with the help of conspiracy theories and imagined grievances. Much of the rage is directed at the West; most of the anger is aimed at the US. As for the Zionists, if the ummah had its way, insha’allah, Israel would cease to exist.
Months later, at an international conference on radical Islam, in which most of the participants were Muslim scholars and theologians, this perception of the ummah’s worldview was strengthened as participants stopped short of chanting “Death to America!” while caustically rebuking both the Congress and the BJP for taking India closer to the US and Israel. A participant from India, by no means a fanatic mullah with hennaed beard and skullcap, asserted that if the Government went ahead with formalising the nuclear deal with the US, it would be as good as “ignoring the sentiments of 150 million Muslims at home” and “enraging Muslims abroad”.
There is nothing startlingly new about such aggressive assertion of ‘Muslim sentiments’, which are invariably pegged to imagined grievances and inflamed by perceived notions of Christians and Jews — and, in India’s case, Hindus — conspiring against the ummah. From Indonesia to Turkey, via the sand castles of Islamic states in between, the targets of Muslim ire are the same; the intensity of rage ebbs and flows depending on events as they happen and as they are seen to happen.
So, cartoons that allegedly lampoon Mohammed published in a Dutch newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, of which nobody had ever heard before, become the cause of angry street protests and threats of murder and mayhem one day; on another, jaundiced reports of torture at Guantanamo Bay, whose details pale in comparison to the horrors inflicted by the Taliban, result in violent outrage. At Friday sermons, the two disparate issues are slyly merged into one: Islam is under assault; the ummah is endangered; and, America is to blame.
It would be erroneous to trace the Muslim rage that we see to post-9/11 American policy and the war on terror being waged by President George W Bush. It is true that Muslims view the Taliban’s loss of power, which Mullah Omar and his band of Deobandi fanatics wielded ruthlessly and which saw the sickening debasement of women and girls, as a blow against the ummah and their faith. It is equally true that Muslims grieve over the fall and death of Saddam Hussein, who turned to god after decades of Ba’athist atrocities that included mass slaughter and terrible torture.
Yet, Muslim displeasure with America is not merely on account of the discontinuation of the shocking spectacle of shari’ah being enforced in its purest, most pristine form in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein getting his just desserts. It predates 9/11. Mr Zafarul-Islam Khan, editor of Milli Gazette, published from Delhi, traces the “roots of Muslim anger at the US and West to long before the illegal and unjust current imperialist crusade in Afghanistan under the guise of fighting terrorism”.
The ‘roots’, according to him, lie in “normalisation of relations with Israel”, “US role in condoning Serbian aggression in Bosnia” and “economic attrition of the Muslim world resources”. The list of imagined grievances is too long to be reproduced here, but it does highlight two points: First, Muslim concerns — for instance, in India — transcend local realities and are essentially pan-Islamic issues that agitate the entire ummah; second, even if there were no India-US nuclear deal, India’s Muslims, as also their co-religionists elsewhere, would have been equally angry with America and Mr Bush; they would have still gathered in frighteningly huge numbers in Delhi and rioted in Lucknow to protest against his visit to India.
Seen in this context, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member MK Pandhe was merely stating the fact when he warned the Samajwadi Party of a Muslim backlash if it supported the nuclear deal and joined forces with the Congress to push it through. The Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind’s protest against the CPI(M)’s “attempt to communalise the issue” and the claim by other Muslim organisations, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami, that Muslims are opposed to the nuclear deal because they believe it is “not in the national interest”, need not be taken seriously.
Unless we must believe that the Arab shopkeeper in old Jerusalem who chided me for New Delhi’s increasing proximity to Washington, DC and Tel Aviv shares the ‘concern’ of Indian Muslims for India’s national interest. If this is absurd, as surely it is, so is the Jamaatis’ concern for India’s national interest, which, thankfully, has not yet been supplanted by the ummah’s interest.

(The Pioneer, leading article, Edit Page, June 28, 200g)

(c) CMYK Printech Ltd.

Islamofascism: Muslims in denial mode

Hyderabad bombing: Killed by Islamists but Muslims won't admit it!

Islam’s enemy within
At a recent conference on radical Islam, attended by scholars from India and South-East Asian countries, it was irritating to hear professors from Jamia Millia Islamia repeating the canard about the 9/11 terrorist attacks being an elaborate conspiracy hatched by the Christians (of America) and the Jews (of Israel) to “defame Islam” and use the globally televised images of the imploding twin towers as justification for the US-led “war against Muslims”. The first time I heard this astonishing fiction was in Cairo where I had arrived soon after the terrifying attack, led by an Egyptian, Mohammed Atta, on the World Trade Center, one of the symbols of American power. The war in Iraq had not yet begun but the Taliban hoodlums, including Mullah Omar, were fleeing Afghanistan to save their lives. The fall of a ‘model Islamic state’ and the walloping the ‘soldiers of god’ were receiving from the invading kafirs had greatly distressed my friends in the Muslim Brotherhood who had wrongly believed that the flattening of the twin towers would signal the liberation of Cairo, not Kabul. Instead, they were shocked to see a tsunami of anger striking Arab shores. Rather than accept the 9/11 attacks had proved to be counter-productive, they chose the path of denial. Whispered allegations, anonymous e-mail and stories buried in the inside pages of Arabic newspapers began to do the rounds, spreading the patently false claim that the attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon had been planned and executed by the Americans and the Israelis. To substantiate this absurd claim, there were further absurd claims — Jews did not report for work on that fateful day, only the Mossad could have carried out an operation of this scale, the CIA had ensured the hijackers would not be frisked, etc. I found the assertions mildly repugnant and largely amusing, attributing the fiction to the street Arab’s lack of access to facts.
Seven years later, when I hear that absurd claim being repeated, that too by those who should know better, I don’t feel amused, but irritated. And so it happened at the conference on radical Islam when a professor of Jamia Millia Islamia questioned the authenticity of events as they unfolded on September 11, 2001, two of his colleagues nodding their heads vigorously in approval. My irritation gave way to anger when he went on to suggest that analyses of video images of the hijacked aircraft being flown into the twin towers showed they were “studio-generated”. Only someone who has undergone lobotomy would say something so stupid in public. But more than being silly, there’s a sinister purpose to such comments and they should not be attributed to a lobotomised brain; Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil would vouch for this. A lie repeated again and again, as Paul Joseph Goebbels proved through word and deed, tends to be believed by the masses. Islamofascists, both at home and abroad, who peddle the myth that ‘Islam is the solution’ and thus see nothing wrong with the ghastly crimes committed in the name of Islam, would naturally take to Goebbelsian propaganda tactics like a duck takes to water. Fiction propagated slyly at conferences and seminars, mentioned between the lines in newspaper articles, and slipped into Friday sermons by mullahs after the jumma namaaz, acquires a certain legitimacy and is soon perceived as fact.
We have seen this happen on more than one occasion. When Hindus were forced to flee their ancestral homes in the Kashmir Valley by killer squads of Islamists who indulged in rapacious depredations and revelled in the slaughter of innocent men, women and children, an insidious campaign was launched, pinning the blame on Mr Jagmohan, then Governor of Jammu & Kashmir: He was accused of telling the Hindus to flee the Valley. Strangely, this fiction was believed by the secular intelligentsia which, in any event, is desperate to clutch at straws to absolve Islamic fanatics of their crimes and eager to paint Islamist marauders in the most glowing of colours. Similar tactics were — and continue to be — used in the wake of the slaughter of kar sevaks in Godhra and to tar Hindus by blaming them for the violence that followed. After the bombing of commuter trains in Mumbai, killing 187 people, it was blatantly suggested by our homegrown Islamists that the massacre was the handiwork of either “Government agencies” or “Hindu organisations”.
They are now using the same tactics in their response to the jihadi attack on Jaipur on May 14, in which at least 80 people were killed and many more maimed. The Hindustan Express, a Delhi-based Urdu newspaper, pontificated in an editorial comment on May 16, “Apart from elements like Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Al Qaeda or HuJI (who may possibly be involved in these explosions) why should we not think also of those international powers and agencies who are known to the Government for their discomfort towards Indo-Pak peace?” Why not, indeed! The Jamaat-e-Islami’s biweekly journal, Daawat, was nauseatingly sly in its comments on May 19, “The truth cannot be out without changing the formula for the probe into the bomb blasts. Instead of going through the formality of a probe and connecting the links, we will have to see which group of people gets political benefit out of such incidents.” The only group that stands to benefit from the bloodbath in Jaipur, the Jamaat-e-Islami, whose mullahs pretend to be as innocent as Goldilocks, needs to be told, comprises those who subscribe to the slogan, “Islam is the solution.”
These are the people who are at ease with explosives being strapped to an eight-year-old girl and the button on the remote control being pushed as she reaches out to take a chocolate from a soldier (not an American) in Iraq. They are untouched and unmoved by the sight of the blood of innocent victims, as was spilled on the streets of Jaipur, of their perverse ideology. They are fully aware of their criminal misdeeds, but they want us to believe they are not to blame. And if you dare point a finger at radical Islam and its army of Islamofascists, they will accuse you of indulging in Islamophobia.
It’s time we called their bluff. The only other option is to subjugate ourselves to those who know no mercy and meekly accept Islam as the solution.

Coffee Break / Sunday Pioneer / May 25, 2008

Mullah raj in Marxist Bengal

Surrendering to thugocracy
Kanchan Gupta

In recent days there have been two riots in two cities in two countries with two starkly dissimilar responses. Muslim mobs ran riot in Kolkata on November 21, ostensibly to protest against Marxist violence in the villages of Nandigram in which their co-religionists were targeted. But the thugs who swarmed the streets of central Kolkata, armed with swords, Molotov cocktails and assorted weapons, had an insidious agenda: To drive dissident Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen out of the city. The 'progressive', 'democratic', 'liberal' and so-called people's Government of West Bengal, headed by a charlatan and dominated by the CPI(M), used the fig leaf of 'Muslim discontent' to force Ms Nasreen to leave Kolkata, choosing to mollycoddle radical Islamists rather than stand up to their outrageous hooliganism in the hope that Muslims will make common cause with Marxists when elections are held.
Twenty-one years ago the CPI(M) had accused Rajiv Gandhi of abjectly surrendering to fundamentalists and using the Congress's brute majority in Parliament to subvert the Supreme Court's landmark judgement in the Shah Bano case by pushing through a particularly obnoxious law known as Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, stripping indigent women thrown out of their marital home the right to justice guaranteed by the Constitution of India. Today, the CPI(M) stands accused of pandering to bigotry that recalls the violent demonstrations following the Supreme Court's judgement favouring Shah Bano.
The other riot took place in Villiers-le-Bel, north of Paris, part of the infamous banlieues where Muslim immigrants, most of them illegal residents, from northern Africa live in appalling ghettos and seek inspiration from fire-breathing mullahs. This time the rioting was far worse than that of November 2005: Not only were cars set on fire, policemen were attacked by young men armed with guns. This was a first of its kind, prompting otherwise politically correct news agencies to report that the police were locked in a combat with "urban guerrillas".
The banlieues have been in ferment ever since President Nicolas Sarkozy, after winning this summer's election, set a target for authorities to deport 25,000 illegal immigrants, irrespective of their nationality or religion, by the end of the year. In 2005, Mr Sarkozy, as Minister for Interior Affairs, had taken a tough line and cracked down on the rioters with an iron fist. He has scoffed at lib-left criticism that his policy "threatens values in a nation that prides itself on being a cradle of human rights and a land of asylum". We get to hear a similar refrain every time an attempt is made to identify illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in our country. But while our Government promptly retreats (the BJP was no better than the Congress during the years it was in power at the Centre) in the face of hostility, Mr Sarkozy's Government has refused to budge from its stated policy. "I want numbers," Mr Sarkozy has been quoted by the BBC as telling Mr Brice Hortefeux, head of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development, which he set up after taking office in May. "This is a campaign commitment. The French expect (action) on this." Compare this resolve with our political parties dumping their campaign commitments in the nearest dustbin after winning an election, substituting them with crass populism.
If Mr Sarkozy had nothing but contempt for the rioters in 2005, this time he has been scathing in his indictment of those who took to the streets. While giving a pep talk to policemen in Paris, he brushed aside pseudo-sociological bunkum and bogus multi-culturalism. "What happened in Villiers-le-Bel has nothing to do with a social crisis. It has everything to do with a thugocracy," Mr Sarkozy said. In 2005, Mr Sarkozy had described the rioters as "racaille", or scum. "I reject any form of other-worldly naivety that wants to see a victim of society in anyone who breaks the law, a social problem in any riot," he said, adding, "The response to the riots isn't yet more money on the backs of the taxpayers. The response to the riots is to arrest the rioters."
Would our politicians, especially those in power, ever dare be even remotely as tough as Mr Sarkozy? That's a silly question. Because in this great 'democracy' of ours, violence is the language of negotiation for those who reject the supremacy of the Constitution of India and Government, denuded of authority, believes toeing the line of least resistance is the best policy. Hence, even before push comes to shove, Government crumbles in the most shameful manner.
But we are not alone in witnessing the state turn into a jellybean when confronted by radical Islamism and its attendant perversities. Look at the timid response of the British Government to the plight of one of its citizens, Ms Gillian Gibbons, who has been jailed for 'blasphemy' in Sudan. Her crime: She had asked children in her class to find a name for their teddy bear and they came up with 'Mohammed' because they had been taught by their parents that it was the "most loved name" and they loved their teddy, too. The parents screamed murder and soon Ms Gibbons was in the custody of the upholders of shari'ah.
Everybody, including Sudan's envoy to the Queen's court, agreed that it was a silly accusation, that Ms Gibbons was at best guilty of letting innocent children have their way, and that no great harm had been done. To prove that trials in Khartoum's shari'ah court are fair, Ms Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in prison, instead of being whipped in a public square or sentenced to death.
On Friday, a leading cleric, Sheikh Abdul Jalil Karuri, gave a fiery sermon during noon prayers at Khartoum's Martyr's Mosque, accusing Ms Gibbons of "deliberately naming her class's teddy bear Mohammed with the intention of insulting Islam". Soon, thousands of people, waving swords, were marching through Khartoum, demanding Ms Gibbons be shot. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Boris Johnson has lamented Britain's limp response: "There was a time when Britain would have sent a gunboat to rescue her. There was a time when MPs would have been holding furious debates on the matter, and bandying phrases such as 'civis Britannicus sum'. In the old days there would have been a démarche from Britain to Sudan, warning that His Majesty's Government would not suffer a hair on her head to be disturbed."
At least Johnson has the comfort of history. We don't even have that.

December 2, 2007.

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Marxists pander to Muslim fundamentalists

CPM engineered Muslim rage
Taslima thrown out to get Nandigram off the radar
Kanchan Gupta
Jamiat-i-Ulama Hind leader Sidiqullah Chowdhury at a protest rally in Kolkata
Was the recent violence witnessed in some parts of central Kolkata, leading to dissident Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen's forced eviction from the city, genuine Muslim anger or manufactured rage? Did the CPI(M) have a hand in organising the rioting? Who has gained the most after mobs took to the streets?
For possible answers, we need to step back and take a look at the sequence of events beginning with the CPI(M)'s smash-and-grab of Nandigram.
When the Marxists let loose a reign of terror in the villages of Nandigram in end-October, ratcheting it up in the first week of November, to recapture territory they had lost to the Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee protesting acquisition of farmland for an Indonesian SEZ, they had not bargained for extensive and sustained negative publicity in media.
The CPI(M)'s Nandigram takeover strategy was based on the doctrine of shock and awe, that is, rapid dominance through the use of overwhelming force. Marxist cadre were deployed to block entry to Nandigram and newspersons were chased away. It was hoped that this would prevent media from putting out details.
In the event, the media coverage of Nandigram was beyond anything the CPI(M) could have imagined and hugely damaging for the party. Newspapers and channels across the country picked up the story, as did foreign agencies. The fact that most of the victims of the Marxist mayhem were Muslims painted the CPI(M) in lurid colours.
With Muslim organisations, till now favourably disposed towards the CPI(M), beginning to voice their protest -- Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind said "Muslims in West Bengal are worse off than in Gujarat" - Marxist leaders, yet to recover from being pilloried over police harassment of Rizwanur Rehman and his death in mysterious circumstances, found themselves scampering for cover.
Seeking to capitalise on Nandigram, Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind called a three-hour shutdown in central Kolkata on November 15. There was moderate response to the call, disrupting Kolkata's usually chaotic traffic, but there was no violence.
The next day, Pashchim Banga Milli Ittehad Parishad, comprising 12 Muslim organisations, including Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, Milli Council, Indian National League, Jamiat-e-Islami Hind and All-India Minority Forum, called a four-hour shutdown. Once again, apart from fiery speeches, the protest was unremarkable. Traffic was stalled at Esplanade, Park Circus, AJC Bose Road and Kidderpore. Not that traffic moves smoothly in these areas otherwise.
Suddenly, the All-India Minority Forum, led by Idris Ali, former head of the local Congress minority cell and a serial 'public interest' litigant in Kolkata High Court, called a three-hour shutdown on November 21 to protest against "Marxist atrocities on Muslims in Nandigram" and demand the "expulsion of Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata".
On the day of the shutdown, mobs emerged from Muslim-dominated areas, many of them in CPI(M) leader and West Bengal Assembly Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim's constituency, Entally, and went berserk, torching vehicles and attacking policemen. Within no time, news channels across the country were broadcasting live footage of the violence.
The footage showed mobs on the rampage and Kolkata Police personnel on the retreat. In one particular shot, a policeman was seen loading a teargas shell and then not firing it as a mob, waving swords and chanting slogans, advanced menacingly.
At none of the places that witnessed violence was the mob larger than 100 hooligans. If the police had wanted to, they could have chased away the mobs. But they didn't. It was almost as if they had been instructed not to act.
Surprisingly, the State Government, which later claimed to have been taken by surprise, promptly called in the Army and imposed curfew. This, too, made headlines as the Army's help had not been sought in West Bengal for the past 15 years although there had been worse incidents of violence.
In sharp contrast to the prompt deployment of the Army in Kolkata, the Left Front Government had refused to deploy CRPF personnel in Nandigram. When CRPF personnel were finally allowed in days after the Marxists had taken over Nandigram, they were not given the power to enforce law and order.
It took less than an hour for the Army to clear out the violence-hit streets and restore order. By early evening, calm had returned and life in Kolkata was back to normal, barring the dusk-to-dawn curfew in a few areas. Briefing newspersons on the violence, CPI(M) politburo member and State party secretary Biman Bose said if Nasreen "should leave Kolkata if her stay disturbs the peace".
What he did not explain was the ease with which mobs had been mobilised by an unheard of organisation and the listless behaviour of the State police. Neither Idris Ali nor his All-India Minority Forum could have organised the crowds. The Forum had already participated in the protest organised by Pashchim Banga Milli Ittehad Parishad and there was no reason for Ali to call a separate shutdown.
Those who track the CPI(M)'s dirty tricks department believe that Ali may have been "encouraged" to call a shutdown and highlight the "Muslim demand" for Nasreen's expulsion from Kolkata. He may have been the proverbial cat's paw. Apart from him, four men may have played a crucial role in securing for the CPI(M) an escape route from the Nandigram mess: Aslam alias Pappu, Ruhul Amin, Sultan Ahmed and Iqbal Ahmed. Aslam, a resident of Alimuddin Street, where the CPI(M)'s State headquarters are located, is a "property dealer" known for his links with the CPI(M). Amin lives in Topsia, has CPI(M) links and a dubious profile. Sultan, a resident of Ripon Street who has switched loyalties from the Congress to the Trinamool, is "open to persuasion if the price is right". His brother Ibal has done a reverse switch though his services are "not strictly restricted to the Congress". On November 21, mob fury was seen in the Ripon Street and Topsia areas, apart from Park Circus.
By the morning of November 22, media focus had shifted from Nandigram to the rioting. That day Nasreen was put on a flight to Jaipur and since then, newspapers and 24x7 channels, especially in West Bengal, have front-paged and prime-timed stories about the CPI(M) "giving in to Muslim demands". Nobody is talking about the CPI(M)'s "atrocities on Muslims in Nandigram" anymore.
Yesterday's 'persecutor' has become today's 'appeaser'.





December 2, 2007





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Muslims riot in Marxist Kolkata

A plague on all their houses
Kanchan Gupta

For all his bravado, Mr Idris Ali, who heads a little-known Muslim organisation that operates under the name of ‘All-India Minorities Forum’, panicked when he saw his followers run riot in those parts of central Kolkata where there’s dancing in the streets every time Pakistan wins a cricket match against India. Hence his sly attempt to distance himself from the rioters who set upon innocent people, torched cars and police vehicles, attacked school buses and held petrified children hostage in their schools till the Army was called in on Wednesday late afternoon.
“They (Marxist cadre) have infiltrated our ranks and sparked the violence. We wanted to protest peacefully, but the Marxists are trying to discredit us,” he told newspersons on Wednesday evening, obviously hoping to be spared the punishment that he justly deserves but is eager to escape. To paint himself and his murderous mobs as innocent victims of ‘state repression’, he claimed that “the disturbances broke out after the police, without reason, arrested 200 protesters owing allegiance to the AIMF and Furfurasharif Muzaddedia Anath Foundation at Park Circus”.
Without reason? Mr Ali’s foot soldiers were armed with swords and an assortment of weapons, including Molotov cocktails, which they used generously to terrorise people and attack the police. The high casualties reported by Kolkata Police — two Deputy Commissioners were among those grievously injured — and the widespread destruction of public and private property bear witness to the ferocity of those whom Mr Ali has sought to defend. But he is not alone in being indulgent; the anchor of a Delhi-based 24x7 news channel described the rampaging mobs as “civil society in ferment”. So much for media integrity.
The issue, however, is not Mr Ali’s too-clever-by-half defence of his criminal deed. Thankfully, the marauders were forced to back off before lives were lost; but the ‘peace’ that has been enforced with the help of the Army and night curfew is at best tenuous: Only the naïve and those who subscribe to Communist calumny will believe that Wednesday’s communal violence was an aberration and that Kolkata is back to being a ‘city of joy’. Nor should we get distracted by the suggestion that Kolkata’s Muslims are up in arms against the CPI(M)’s thuggery in Nandigram where many of the victims are their co-religionists.
Indeed, it is doubtful whether Mr Ali is truly concerned about the plight of the maimed, the raped and the homeless of Nandigram. Had this not been the case, he would have mobilised political opposition to the CPI(M)’s atrocities in Nandigram and elsewhere. After all, Mr Ali, apart from being the chief of All-India Minorities Forum, is also a Congress leader, or at least is known for being close to certain individuals in the party who have defended his action.
By seeking to convert Nandigram’s mind-numbing tale of human misery into a ‘Muslim issue’, he has tried to add to the list of the community’s imagined grievances. For, the CPI(M)’s ‘Harmad Vahini’ was, and remains, indiscriminate while letting loose its reign of terror in Nandigram. Among the thousands of villagers who have lost their near and dear ones, or have been forced to flee their home and hearth and take shelter in ‘refugee camps’, are a large number of Hindus. Two men whose names have become synonymous with pillage, murder and rape in Nandigram, and who led the CPI(M)’s bloody campaign, are Shahjahan Laskar and Selim Laskar.
The real objective of Mr Ali and his friends — Maulana Toha Siddiqui of Furfurasharif Muzaddedia Anath Foundation, Mr Roshan Ali of Qaumi Awaz Welfare Society and leading lights of Milli Ittehad Parishad — who organised Wednesday’s violent shutdown was to inflame Muslim passion by raising the bogey of Muslim sentiments being hurt by the Left Front Government. Hence the attempt to convert the atrocities in Nandigram into atrocities on Muslims; hence, also, the demand that the visa given to Bangladeshi dissident writer Taslima Nasreen, who has been living in Kolkata for the past couple of years, should be cancelled.
In fact, the second underscores the real purpose behind Wednesday’s violence: Of taking the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen’s shameful attack on Ms Nasreen in Hyderabad to its logical conclusion. Mr Ali and his friends allege that Ms Nasreen has “abused Islam and denigrated the Prophet”, and hence must not be provided with refuge from those who want to kill her, as ordained by Shari’ah, for ‘blasphemy’. If their reference is to Lajja, whose publication led to her first clash with Islamists, then it is rather late in the day. If they are referring to Dwikhondito, then we can only presume that neither Mr Ali nor his ilk has any regard for the law of the land which, they believe, does not apply to India’s Muslims.
Here we must digress to understand why the CPI(M) is as guilty as those who ran amok in Kolkata on Wednesday. Ms Nasreen’s autobiographical book, Dwikhondito, was banned by the West Bengal Government on November 28, 2003, soon after its publication. The initiative to proscribe the book because “it contains very derogatory and provocative references that go against the grain of the tenets of Islam and of Islamic beliefs” was taken by West Bengal’s ‘intellectual’ Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at the behest of fellow travellers, many of them Bengali writers who take perverse pleasure in denigrating Hindus and Hinduism. One of them, Mr Sunil Gangopadhyay, has waxed eloquent in Thursday’s Anandabazar Patrika on how India is “not a theocracy and we cannot accept fatwas”. He did not display such tolerance while pushing for the ban on Dwikhondito.
The ban was declared illegal by the Calcutta High Court on September 22, 2005. Since then, Ms Nasreen has neither said nor written anything that can be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘derogatory’ of Islam. Two years later, Mr Ali has raised the issue of Ms Nasreen and her controversial book, skilfully avoiding any reference to the court order, taking a cue from the MIM and using Nandigram as a cover.
This is calculated mischief — as calculated as the mass hysteria that was unleashed by bogus propaganda on the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, allegedly lampooning Mohammed, or the equally bogus breast-beating over the execution of Iraq’s former dictator, Saddam Hussein. On those occasions, the CPI(M) was vocal in its support of the ‘Muslim cause’ and rallied its forces behind a convoluted worldview that has now come to haunt West Bengal.
Wednesday’s communal violence in Kolkata is only the beginning. Having sown the proverbial dragon’s teeth, the CPI(M) must now prepare to harvest its poison yield. The first signs of West Bengal’s Marxist Government cravenly giving in to Muslim violence are already visible. Even before calm was restored in the riot-hit areas of Kolkata, CPI(M) Polit Bureau member and Left Front chairman Biman Bose sought to placate Mr Ali and his goons by offering to expel Ms Nasreen from West Bengal “to maintain peace”. On Thursday, Ms Nasreen was flown out of Kolkata to Jaipur. Her visa expires on February 17 next year. It is entirely possible that the Marxists will now force their obliging friends in the UPA Government to either not extend Ms Nasreen’s visa any further or cancel it right away.
But this is unlikely to serve any purpose in containing ‘Muslim anger’ and preventing incidents similar to what was witnessed on Wednesday. For, Mr Ali and his friends will come up with other grievances that have nothing to do with the genuine problems of India’s Muslims. Make no mistake of that.

November 23, 2007.

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Murder in Communist Bengal

CPM proves it’s a party of fascists
Kanchan Gupta

Real face of Buddhadeb: A rally to protest CPM atrocities in Nandigram

Bengalis have this fascination for bhadralok Marxists, which is really a contradiction in terms but has stood the CPI(M) in good stead in West Bengal. As Deputy Chief Minister in the fumbling, bumbling United Front Governments, Mr Jyoti Basu presided over the lumpenisation of West Bengal politics and began the process of destroying West Bengal’s industrial infrastructure, which in the 1960s was not to be scoffed at. He made gherao into an instrument of state policy and lawlessness the hallmark of Marxist politics. When harried industrialists petitioned the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court and the judge sought an explanation, Mr Basu deployed thousands of his party’s hoodlum brigade to gherao the court. The Chief Justice saw merit in the dictum that discretion is the better part of valour.
As Chief Minister after the Left Front came to power in 1977, Mr Basu vigorously pursued his reckless agenda, denuding West Bengal of whatever little remained of its once thriving industry, while making it a point to holiday in London every year, ostensibly to seduce investors. From the Marichjhanpi massacre to the Bantala gangrape, his tenure as Chief Minister was one long saga of atrocities committed by either Marxist goons or the police, which he had swiftly converted into an extension counter of the CPI(M). Yet, people were easily persuaded to vote for him and the CPI(M)-led Left Front, election after election, because whatever his faults, he was a “bhadralok”. Never mind the fact that behind the spotless dhuti-panjabi façade lurked an evil man with a malevolent mind, a modern day Mephistopheles who derived perverse pleasure from West Bengal’s impoverishment.
His successor, Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, was seen and feted as a “bhadralok” twice over. His lineage was impeccable — graduate of Presidency College, nephew of Sukanto Bhattacharjee whose darkly haunting poetry is replete with metaphors of human bondage and struggle against hunger and poverty, translator of Russian poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, poet and playwright of sorts at one with Kolkata’s intellectuals for whom Nandan is their second home, high on Marxist dialectics and suitably preachy. Bengalis could not have asked for more. What added to his appeal is Bhattacharjee’s ‘reformist’ zeal. He borrowed Nike’s slogan and came up with his (in retrospect, rather corny) one-liner: “Do it now.” Buddhijeebis, who have amazing power to influence opinion in West Bengal, overnight became ‘Buddhajeebis’ and wore their new identity on their sleeves. Mr Basu would let his mask slip once in a while and indulge in crudity; Mr Bhattacharjee, who claims to be a fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, would never do that.
But all this must now belong to the past. Mr Bhattacharjee’s bhadralok image has taken a severe beating and today he stands exposed as a charlatan who doesn’t deserve the office he holds. For all his pretensions of being a man of culture and integrity, he is no less Mephistophelean than Mr Basu. If imitation is the best form of flattery, Mr Bhattacharjee has proved himself an accomplished flatterer by aping his party general secretary, Mr Prakash Karat, in justifying murder, rape and pillage by Marxist criminals. There is not even the faintest hint of regret that Nandigram should have become the leitmotif of the CPI(M)’s unrestrained thuggery. There is no belated acceptance of moral responsibility, leave alone assertion of authority, even at this stage when his friends have begun spitting at him. The Pioneer was not exaggerating when it suggested to its readers that for a lesson in fascism, they should read Mr Bhattacharjee’s shocking comments at a Press conference where he praised his party’s black shirts and poured scorn and ridicule on the hapless victims of their crimes. Among the victims, it needs to be noted, are a Muslim woman and her two teenaged daughters who were gangraped by the Marxist marauders. The two girls are missing; for all we know, they may have been killed or are being held captive to satiate the animal desires of those about whom Mr Karat and Mr Bhattacharjee speak so admiringly.
Compare this with the CPI(M)’s clamorous and vile protest against the alleged custodial killing of a wanted criminal and his moll in Gujarat. Recall also how 24x7 television channels, notably those headquartered in Delhi, went berserk, trying to pin the guilt of that alleged crime on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Contrast the timid, almost cowardly, media response to Mr Bhattacharjee’s appalling comments and Mr Karat’s chilling defence of the Marxist killers and rapists who have let loose a reign of terror and whose victims are largely Muslims, to the epithets and worse hurled by our newspapers and 24x7 channels at Mr Modi who has at no stage justified the 2002 violence in Gujarat or the alleged custodial killing of a mafia don and his moll. Is it because there is an ‘ideological’ affinity between the fascists of AK Gopalan Bhawan and mediapersons? Or is it because Mr Modi is a soft target and, unlike Mr Karat or Mr Bhattacharjee, whose storm troopers have been intimidating journalists and threatening dire consequences if they report the truth, will not retaliate? Or are there ‘linkages’ that influence our media, more so 24x7 channels, to black out Marxist crimes and invent scurrilous stories to demean others? If our media bravehearts wish to shame and shun Mr Modi, it’s their choice. But must they so shamelessly admire those who prescribe “Dum Dum dawai” — thuggery of the sort witnessed in Nandigram — as Ms Brinda Karat did at a rally in Kolkata? And support Mr Sitaram Yechury who has the temerity to insist that Nandigram can’t be discussed in Parliament because law and order is a State subject?
Mr Bhattacharjee has no doubt sold his soul to the likes of Indonesia’s Salem Group and, closer home, Ambuja Cement and ‘industrialists’ who were no more than small time Burrabazar traders till the CPI(M) came to power and facilitated their rags-to-riches journey. Mr Karat genuflects at Stalin’s altar and listens to the Internationale to relax, so we shouldn’t expect him to be touched by the plight of those maimed, killed and raped by his cadre. But what about mediapersons who tirelessly preach moral and ethical rectitude to others from their high perch in ‘national’ newspapers and ‘national’ news channels? By not admonishing those responsible for the ghastly events in Nandigram, they have legitimised the indefensible and paved the path for similar crimes elsewhere. Amen.

November 18, 2007.

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On March 21, 2007, I had written the following article for The Pioneer's opeditorial page, contesting Mr Jyoti Basu's glycering tears for the victims of the police firing in Nandigram on March 14 in which at least 14 villagers were shot dead and scores injured:

Pot calls the kettle black

Kanchan Gupta

When in power, veteran Marxist Jyoti Basu, who presided over West Bengal's decline and death, was as ruthless and callous as Buddhadeb BhattacharjeeEven before West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's critics, both within and outside the CPI(M) and the Left Front it leads, could articulate their opposition to the ghastly atrocities that were committed by the police and Marxist cadre at Nandigram on March 14, one man had set himself to the task of cranking up criticism with remarkable energy and alacrity for his age.
Veteran Marxist and former Chief Minister Jyoti Basu did not lose any time in making public his disagreement with the "anti-people action" of his successor at Writers' Building. And, if stories emanating from Kolkata are to be believed, he promptly contacted leaders of the CPI(M)'s partners in the Left Front, notably those of the RSP and the Forward Bloc, and urged them to lash out at Mr Bhattacharjee.
At an informal meeting among the Left Front partners on March 15 in Kolkata, Mr Basu, having worked himself into a right royal rage, is believed to have pitilessly castigated Mr Bhattacharjee, demanding to know, with all the pomposity that he could command, as to who had ordered the police action. As a sullen Chief Minister decided against converting the meeting into a slanging match, Mr Basu continued with his fulminations: Why did the police resort to firing? Why were protesters shot in their bellies and their heads? In the end, he accused Mr Bhattacharjee of being "arrogant" and "uncaring".
In Delhi, Mr Basu's criticism found resonance in the timid response of the CPI(M)'s tele-friendly leaders, Mr Prakash Karat and Mr Sitaram Yechury. Both let it be known that had Mr Basu been at the helm of affairs in West Bengal, they would have been spared the ignominy of having to justify such barbarity. Almost taking a cue from them, the feisty Trinamool Congress chairperson, Ms Mamata Banerjee, told newspersons that "even a respected person like Jytoibabu has condemned the police firing".
Suddenly, it would seem, Mr Basu has emerged as a better Chief Minister, a more humane administrator and a farsighted leader compared to Mr Bhattacharjee. Many of those who are spitting venom at West Bengal's accidental Chief Minister - had it not been for Promode Dasgupta, Mr Bhattacharjee would have been penning poetry overladen with darkly haunting metaphors much like his uncle Sukanto Bhattacharjee who died at the young age of 21 raging against hunger and poverty or his favourite Russian poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky who committed suicide - it would appear, are yearning for the good old days when Mr Basu held the 'Red Fort'.
The truth, however, is that there are no good old days to recall. If anything, Mr Basu's record in office, first as Deputy Chief Minister in two successive United Front Governments beginning 1967 (for all practical purposes he was the de facto Chief Minister with a hapless Ajoy Mukherjee reduced to indulging in Gandhiana) and later as Chief Minister for nearly a quarter of a century at the head of the Left Front Government which has been in power for three decades now, the "longest elected Communist Government" as party commissars untiringly point out to the naive and the novitiate, is a terrible tale of calculated destruction of a State in the name of ideology.
It was Mr Basu, whose feigned outrage over the police going berserk at the behest of their political masters at Nandigram is now being cited to paint him in bright colours, who actively politicised West Bengal Police. It was he who instructed them, as Deputy Chief Minister during the disastrous UF regime, to play the role of foot soldiers of the CPI(M), first by not acting against party cadre on the rampage, and then by playing an unabashedly partisan role in industrial and agrarian disputes.
The 'humane administrator' and the 'farsighted leader', few would recall today, presided over the destruction and death of industry in West Bengal, denuding the State of its wealth and disinheriting future generations of Bengalis. Within the first seven months of the United Front coming to power, he ensured 43,947 workers were laid off because of strikes and gheraoes and 4,314 rendered unemployed after their factories were shut down. Flight of capital in those initial days of emergent Marxist power amounted to Rs 2,500 million. In 1967, there were 438 'industrial disputes' involving 165,000 workers and resulting in the loss of five million man hours. By 1969, there were 710 'industrial disputes' involving 645,000 workers and a loss of 8.5 million man hours.
That was a taste of things to come in the following decades. By the time Mr Basu demitted office, West Bengal had been reduced to a vast industrial wasteland. The only beneficiaries of the policies and programmes actively promoted by Mr Basu were a clutch of Marwari asset-strippers and promoters who moved in to convert industrial wasteland into housing projects. Mr Basu remains loyal to both; even in retirement he ensures promoters violating environment and other laws have their way while those who feathered their nests thanks to 'industrial disputes' instigated by Marxist trade unionists swear by him and his able tutelage.
Mr Basu is aghast that the blood of innocent men and women should be spilled in so callous a manner by the Government headed by Mr Bhattacharjee. Yet, Mr Basu, while in office, did not brook any criticism of the Marich Jhapi massacre by his police in 1979 when refugees were shot dead in cold blood. Till date, nobody knows for sure how many died in that slaughter for Mr Basu never allowed an independent inquiry. Neither did the man whose heart bleeds so profusely for the lost souls of Nandigram hesitate to justify the butchery of April 30, 1982 when 16 monks and a nun of the Ananda Marg order were beaten to death and then set ablaze in south Kolkata by a mob of Marxist goons. The man who led that murderous lot was known for his proximity to Mr Basu, a fact that the CPI(M) would now hasten to deny. Nor did Mr Basu wince when his police shot dead 13 Congress activists a short distance from Writers' Building on July 21, 1993; on the contrary, he continues to justify that incident.
Mr Bhattacharjee's initial reaction to the horrifying killings of March 14 was no doubt that of a cynical politician not unduly perturbed by the loss of a few lives. His subsequent "regret", which party apparatchiks insist does not amount to an apology, is not becoming of a man with pretentious claims to being a poet and a playwright. But was Mr Basu any more sensitive to the plight of those who suffered at the hands of his party's thugs? Did his heart cry out when women health workers were gang-raped and then two of them murdered by thugs with Marxist affiliation on May 17, 1990 at Bantala on the eastern margins of Kolkata? Or when office-bearers of the Kolkata Police Association patronised by the CPI(M) raped Nehar Banu, a poor pavement dweller, at Phulbagan police station in 1992? If we were to recall his response to such gross abuse of power by party cadre and party-affiliated policemen - "Emon to hoyei thaakey" (Such things happen), much like former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comment, "Stuff happens" - and his sly insinuations that the victims of such barbarity deserved what they got, Mr Basu would neither shine in comparison to Mr Bhattacharjee nor come across as an angel in red.
It's amusing to watch the name-calling in the wake of the violence in Nandigram. It brings to mind an old idiom fallen into disuse, that of the pot calling the kettle black. The Bengali version, popular in north Kolkata, is too risque to be repeated here.