19/01/90: When Kashmiri Pandits fled Islamic terror

First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller on German intellectuals who failed to stand up to Nazi terror. Applies to our intellectuals too who have spectacularly failed to raise their voice against Islamic terror.


'Be One With Us, Run, or Die...'

Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab, a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for Jammu & Kashmir's secession from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.

In the following days, there is near chaos in the Kashmir Valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference Government abdicating all responsibilities of the state. Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting anti-India slogans.

Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions; inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits of mosques, using public address systems meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.

Walls are plastered with posters and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with Kalashnikovs force people to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.

Shops, business establishments and homes of Kashmiri Pandits, the original inhabitants of the Kashmir Valley with a recorded cultural and civilisational history dating back 5,000 years, are marked out. Notices are pasted on doors of Pandit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death and worse. Some are more lucid: "Be one with us, run, or die!"

'Asi Gachchi Pakistan, Batao Roas te Batanev San...'

Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Jagmohan arrives to take charge as Governor of Jammu & Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling Government has all but ceased to exist and has gone into hiding, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent effect.

Throughout the day, Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked men, firing from their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering Pandits who, by then, have locked themselves in their homes.

As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played the whole night from mosques: "Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna hai" (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar); "Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa" (What do we want here? Rule of Islam); "Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san" (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).

In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered ever since the brutal murder of Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, by the JKLF in Srinagar on September 14, 1989. Soon after that, Justice N K Ganju of the Srinagar High Court was shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their eyes gouged out, and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped and then beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and sliced into bits and pieces at a sawmill.

In villages and towns across Kashmir Valley, terrorist hit lists have been floating about. All the names are of Kashmiri Pandits. With no Government worth its name, the administration having collapsed and disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen, despondency sets in. As the night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency gives way to desperation.

And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the Valley take a painful decision: To flee their homeland to save their lives from rabid jihadis. Thus takes place a 20th century Exodus.

Pandits don't live here anymore, the Valley has been cleansed of Hindus...


Srinagar, January 19, 2012. There are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in Kashmir Valley; they don't live here anymore. You can find them in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. At least 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits who fled their home and hearth in 1990 have been reduced to living the lives of refugees in their own country; many have since migrated to foreign shores.

Of those who remain in India, two-thirds are camping in Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and in other cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of their rich heritage, now live in grovelling poverty, dependent on Government dole and charity. In these 22 years, an entire generation of exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up, without seeing the land from where their parents fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic terrorism, a land they dare not return to, although that land still remains a part of their country.

A large number of them are suffering from a variety of stress and depression related diseases. A group of doctors who surveyed the mental and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps, found high incidence of 'economic distress, stress induced diabetes, partial lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.' Statistics reflect high death rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.

And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but wiped out from public memory.
An entire people have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors and left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed Indian state shamelessly panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists who claim they are the final arbiters of Jammu & Kashmir's destiny. A part of India's cultural heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India's civilisational history has been erased.

Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority India, and had the victims been Muslims, we would have described it as 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide.' We would have made films with horror-inducing titles. We would have filed cases in the Supreme Court of India. Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in reporting the smallest detail.

But, this tragedy has occurred in Muslim majority Kashmir valley, and the victims are all Hindus, that too Pandits. What has been lost is part of India's Hindu culture, what has been erased is integral to India's Hindu civilisation.

Therefore, the Government makes bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits have "migrated on their own" and their "displacement (is) self-imposed"; the National Human Rights Commission, after a perfunctory inquiry, refuses to concede that what has happened is 'genocide' or 'ethnic cleansing,' though facts add up to no less than that, never mind that at least 300,000 lives have been destroyed.

And, our jholawallah brigade of secular activists rudely turn up their noses to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror, stinks.

Today, on January 19, the 22nd anniversary of the forced flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at India's wretched history of secular politics and consider the terrible price the nation has paid at the altar of appeasement because the Indian state has, and continues to, toe the line of least resistance.

(This is a slightly modified/updated version of the first of a two-part essay that appeared on Rediff.com on January 19, 2005.)

False gods of secularism

Just so that amnesia can't be pretended!

"It is the Congress that has engineered most of the riots... Rajiv Gandhi failed to protect Harijans and Muslims… Geographical boundaries of the country were jeopardised by the Congress and Rajiv Gandhi...”

On reading such harsh accusation, such pitiless pillorying of the Congress and its supreme leader, the last direct descendent of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to sit on the masnad of Delhi, the image that comes to mind is that of an irascible foot soldier of the BJP or a malevolent journalist doing what foot soldiers and malevolent journalists do best: Shoot from the hip.

Think again, but it is unlikely that you will be able to guess the identity of the person who tore into the Congress so mercilessly while participating in a debate on the ‘Situation in the Country’ in the Lok Sabha on December 29, 1989. The immediate backdrop to this debate was the series of communal riots in Congress-ruled Bihar -- Hazaribagh, Darbhanga, and the horrendous bloodletting in Bhagalpur during the twilight days of Rajiv Gandhi's Government in the autumn of that year.

The official death count in Bhagalpur was 1,891, with thousands scarred for the rest of their lives. In Logain village, an entire Muslim mohalla was wiped out: The bodies of 120 Muslim men, women and children were dumped in a shallow pond; when the stench became unbearable, the rotting corpses were fished out, buried in a field and planted over with cauliflower saplings. It was a ‘good’ harvest that year.

In Chanderi, another Muslim mohalla, 61 people were massacred. Mallika, a 14-year-old girl, tried to flee the mob that had killed her parents and relatives. She stumbled and fell; the mob chopped off her legs and left her to bleed to death in a hyacinth covered pond. An Army officer found her the next day, drawn by her pitiful sobs, and Mallika survived to live a traumatic life.

But we digress. From December 18 to 29, the newly-elected Lok Sabha, with Prime Minister VP Singh and the Janata Dal occupying the Treasury benches and Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress sitting on the Opposition benches, witnessed a spirited debate over the customary address by the President. Either by design or by default, the President had failed to mention the riots in Bhagalpur.

Congress MPs seized on this omission to berate the Government, alleging that the riots were not mentioned to spare embarrassment to its ally, the BJP, which was accused of fomenting the violence in Bhagalpur and elsewhere. As the debate became increasingly accusatory and the tone and tenor of the attack on the BJP sharpened, the Janata Dal MP from Chapra waded in to battle the Congress.

Responding to the allegation that BJP and VHP activists had ‘provoked’ the violence, he said, “I would like to tell you that there are two groups of Muslims in Bhagalpur, ie, Ansaris and Sallans, who had started riots in the city. A bomb was thrown on the SP (of) Bhagalpur and 11 police personnel were injured. They had thrown that bomb on the occasion of Ram Shila Pujan but these people have not been yet rounded up.”

That MP was Lalu Prasad Yadav, who years later went on to become Minister for Railways in the UPA1 Government and an ardent supporter of 'Madam Soniaji.' He would be the first to jump to her defence in the Lok Sabha and still fondly hopes that she will one day reopen the door that Rahul Gandhi has firmly shut on his face.

But we digress again. On December 29, 1989, Lalu Prasad Yadav was relentless in his assault on the Congress, more so on Rajiv Gandhi, and took vicarious pleasure by slyly mentioning Sonia Gandhi by name now and then, in total disregard of House rules which prohibit the naming of any person who is not present. “It is the Congress party which (has) engineered most of the riots, particularly in Bihar,” he thundered to the thumping of tables. “We shall expose their role in inciting communal riots,” he promised on behalf of the Government.

Listing the failures of the previous regime, he said, “Rajiv Gandhi failed to fulfil the promises which he made in regard to the development, unity and security of the country and protection of the Harijans and Muslims. This resulted in creating a gloomy situation in the country...” And, hence, the people voted (in 1989) for change.

“Change had become necessary because the responsibility of protecting the geographical boundaries of the country (sic)... was jeopardised by the Congress and Rajiv Gandhi,” Lalu Prasad Yadav explained, adding with a rhetorical flourish, “If we fail to safeguard the unity, integrity and the principle of secularism of our country, we cannot save the country from disintegration...”

And then came the full assault.

“Satyendra Narain Sinha became Chief Minister of Bihar, he failed to quell the riots in Hazaribagh... the procession of Ram Navami had passed off peacefully in front of the Jama Masjid of Hazaribagh. No Muslim had opposed the procession,” Lalu Prasad Yadav said, recalling the sequence of event, “Ram shila procession and Ram Navami procession passed off from there, but neither there was any riot nor anybody raised provocative slogans on that day. But later on an incident took place in Hazaribagh which triggered off disturbances in the entire State.”
So who or what was to blame? Read on.

“Rajiv Gandhi, accompanied by his wife Sonia Gandhi, went to participate in the Vaishali festival. They had put on bulletproof vests... Rajiv Gandhi told Sonia Gandhi that he himself would drive the jeep to see the celebrations,” Lalu Prasad Yadav explained with dramatic flourish, before coming to the consequences of that drive from Patna to Vaishali by the former Prime Minister and his wife.

“An announcement was made in regard to their security... Full security force was required all along the 60 km route from Patna to the place of celebrations. Wireless message was sent to the DM of Hazaribagh, wireless message was sent to the Collector also to send all the forces to Vaishali as Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi were coming to attend the celebrations,” he recounted, “Forces were picked up from Hazaribagh and sent to Vaishali. After three days riots took place between Hindus and Muslims. But no security forces were there to control the situation.”

And what about Darbhanga?

“They (the Congress) have spared no effort to put Bhagalpur, BJP, RSS and Janata Dal to disrepute,” Lalu Prasad Yadav said, charging the Congress, whose MPs were by then on their feet, with criminal subterfuge, “One thousand workers belonging to the Congress were called to Bahera (an Assembly constituency in Darbhanga) by Maithili Brahmins (a snide reference to Jagannath Mishra and what was then the Congress's core constituency in Bihar) and were asked to wear caps bearing slogans ‘Garv say kaho hum Hindu hain’ and ‘Radhe Shyam Baba ki Jai’.”

After a pause, he added with a condescending flourish, “You try to understand the actual position in Bhagalpur... Shiv Chander Jha, who was the Speaker, was deadly against Bhagwat Jha Azad (another Congress leader). It was due to them and a few of their men that these riots... (interruptions)... they were behind these riots.”

Researching communal violence in India can be a dreary and depressing experience. But it also has its illuminating moments. Reading the records of the debate in the Lok Sabha on December 29, 1989, was one such moment when the true face of ‘secular’ politics in India leapt out with venomous fangs exposed.

But all this, and much more, will not dissuade those who worship false gods of secularism.

(A related essay, Communal truth, secular lies, deals with Congress and its role in the Nellie massacre, the Meerut riots and the Maliana killings.)

[This is adapted from my article originally published by Rediff in 2005.]

Time for Hindus to leave or perish?

Is it time again for Hindus to leave or perish ‘in the flames of fanaticism’? If yes, where will they flee to? Isn’t India their land too?
(A Kali Mandir desecrated by rioting Muslims in Deganga.)

In 1946 there was no ‘Right-wing media’ and ‘Left-liberal media’ in Bengal (or, for that matter, in India as it existed then). There were newspapers and journals that were clubbed together as the “Hindu Press” because they did not blindly echo the Muslim League’s raucous demand that all of Bengal must go to (East) Pakistan, and there was the “League Press” comprising dailies, weeklies and monthly magazines, of which there was a surfeit those days, all of them virulently anti-Hindu and hence pro-Pakistan — with the notable exception of The Statesman which was then edited by Ian Stephens who was pro-Pakistan and hence anti-Hindu.

Curiously, newspapers and journals opposed to the League’s politics, policies and programmes were labelled as “Hindu Press” by Bengal’s blatantly communal Government led by the Muslim League and headed by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy as well as the Province’s British administrators who were never quite comfortable with the “Hindoo baboo” although he had proved to be an invaluable ally in first setting up and then managing the colonial enterprise after the sepoy mutiny of 1857 which left the Mussalman out in the cold, to be tolerated but not to be trusted. Newspapers like The Star of India, which wielded considerable influence among Muslims, and The Statesman, whose columns were brazenly used by Ian Stephens to try and sway official policy and public opinion in favour of Pakistan, were just referred to as the “League Press”, as were Urdu and Bengali rags that openly called for murder and worse if Hindus stood in the way of their ‘homeland’ — or the “land of the pure” as the name selected by the League, which was to become the core of separatist propaganda, promised its supporters.

Six decades later, newspapers and news channels that, as a matter of editorial policy, intentionally gloss over Muslim communalism which is no less sinister and debilitating for our national life as was the fanatical hatred towards Hindus preached and practised by the Muslim League, are strangely referred to as the “secular media”. Measured by the same yardstick, the “League Press” was the “secular media” of 1946, although Ian Stephens would have protested at the suggestion, not least because he would have considered it antithetical to Muslim interests which were then represented by the politics of Muslim separatism about which there was nothing secular.

But we digress. The polarisation of the media, pitting the “Hindu Press” against the “League Press”, became starkly noticeable before, during and after the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ of August 1946. A month before that ghastly blood-letting on the streets of Calcutta by mobs owing allegiance to and instigated by the Muslim League, the self-appointed ‘sole spokesman’ of India’s Muslims, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had dropped all pretensions of being a moderate constitutionalist: He had rejected both the Constituent Assembly and the British offer to transfer power to an interim Government in which the Muslim League would be a partner of the Congress. It was either Pakistan or ‘Direct Action’, he threatened; the Muslims, he declared at a Press conference, were ready to “launch a struggle (for which they) have chalked a plan”. Asked what he meant by ‘Direct Action’, an incandescent Jinnah, who never relished answering questions, caustically replied, “Go to the Congress and ask them their plans. When they take you into their confidence I will take you into mine. Why do you expect me alone to sit with folded hands? I also am going to make trouble.”

It is tempting to wonder whether Jinnah had any idea of the ‘trouble’ that he threatened to make on ‘Direct Action Day’, August 16, 1946. If he knew that the League’s rage boys would run riot across Calcutta and mercilessly butcher men, women and children, he did nothing to prevent it. And, if Jinnah was repulsed by the gruesome sight of corpses piling up faster than they could be removed by a paralysed city administration, he never expressed his regret nor did he castigate Suhrawardy, who sat in the police control room during the killings to ensure the police did nothing to stop the ‘direct action’. Records of the time are not entirely reliable. The “League Press” played down, if not entirely glossed over, the murder and mayhem let loose by Muslim League activists; the “Hindu Press” was accused of inflating the numbers of those killed and injured. The official inquiry report would put to shame white-wash jobs done by latter day official inquiries, for instance the one into the 1984 genocide of Sikhs in Delhi. Subsequent literature places the death toll at anything between 5,000 and 10,000. We will never really know the truth.

The story, however, does not end with the harrowing days and nights of August 1946 when vultures descended in large numbers on the roads, streets and gullies of Calcutta, feasting on corpses rotting in the sweltering post-monsoon heat. In a sense, ‘Direct Action Day’ was a curtain-raiser, the prelude to another ghastly massacre. The minority Hindu community of Ramganj in Noakhali district had no inkling of the “organised fury of the Muslim mob” that was unleashed on October 10, 1946. Within days, nearly all of Noakhali was engulfed by communal violence — Hindus were slaughtered like so many sheep; those who tried to flee were waylaid and killed. The “Hindu Press” reported thousands lost their lives; the “League Press” incredibly not only downplayed the violence but insisted there was no loss of lives. Ashok Gupta (no relative of mine and a Gandhian to boot) who accompanied Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on his Noakhali sojourn prepared a report on the riot in which he recorded tales of Hindus being killed, forced to embrace Islam, and Hindu women being abducted or coerced into marrying Muslims. Such details are missing in official records which merely mention that the riots led to the loss of 200 lives.

The New York Times, reporting on Noakhali, published an AP despatch from New Delhi: “Mohandas K Gandhi, who has been attempting to insure communal peace in the Bengal and Bihar areas, said religious strife in the troubled Noakhali section of Bengal seemed to call for Hindus to leave or perish ‘in the flames of fanaticism’... He released telegrams from Congress workers in Noakhali, which is predominantly Moslem, in which they described attempts to burn Hindus alive.”

Sixty-four years later, areas of West Bengal which have witnessed a tectonic shift in their demographic profile due to unrestrained illegal immigration from Bangladesh, are slowly turning into volatile ‘Noakhalis’. Last week we had a glimpse of the communal belligerence that is building up when the minority Hindus in Deganga faced the “organised fury of the Muslim mob” led by Haji Nurul Islam, a Trinamool Congress MP. Is it time again for Hindus to leave or perish ‘in the flames of fanaticism’? If yes, where will they flee to? Isn’t India their land too?

[This appeared as my column Coffee Break in The Pioneer.]

Communalism in India -I

Half-truths don't help Muslims
Kanchan Gupta

A Kashmiri Hindu grieves over his children slaughtered by Islamic terrorists

Recently Tehelka released what it claimed to be sensational, never-before details of the post-Godhra violence in Gujarat. These were based on sting operations aimed at trapping those accused of participating in the riots. Little purpose is served by the 'startling revelations' because they do not add to the bulk of what has been alleged for long; the individuals are already facing trial. Three points come to mind after watching television's theatrical presentation of Tehelka's latest 'expose' and reading Friday morning's newspapers.
First, the timing of the 'revelation', which has curiously come within days of the Prime Minister describing the violence as Gujarat's "Holocaust", raises an uncomfortable question: Why did Tehelka wait till a month before Assembly election in Gujarat since it has had the 'information' for some months? Second, the wisdom of resuscitating the ghosts of a communal violence people would rather forget and move on with their lives, more so in Gujarat, defies logic. Third, the ease with which our 'secularists' gloss over other more horrendous killings -- I am not referring to the slaughter of Pandits and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Kashmir Valley -- while insisting that the 2002 violence in Gujarat is the worst India has seen in its 'modern history' is truly astonishing.
Once again we hear the cacophony of 'secularist' clamour insisting that "thousands of Muslims" were killed in Gujarat. Specific details inevitably fall victim to such sweeping statements. So, let me recall for you what Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Sri Prakash Jaiswal, whose credentials as a Congress loyalist are impeccable, told Parliament while replying to a Rajya Sabha MP's question on the 2002 violence in Gujarat. The details provided by Mr Jaiswal in his reply are in total variance to the outrageous claims of the 'secularists' to which we continue to be subjected ever so often, courtesy news channels and newspapers that can no longer distinguish between information and disinformation. Since the Minister's reply provides some interesting facts that deserve to be placed in the public domain, it would be in order to reproduce the salient portions. Lest I be accused of tampering with the Minister's reply, I have decided to quote the excerpts verbatim from a PTI report. You can't get more kosher than that.
The Central Government informed the Rajya Sabha that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Sri Prakash Jaiswal said a total of 223 people were reported missing and 2,548 sustained injuries during the riots in 2002.
He said the Government paid Rs 1.5 lakh to the next of kin of each person killed and Rs 5,000, Rs 15,000, Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for the injured. The amount for the injured was based on the extent of injury, the Minister added.
According to this reply in Parliament, the Minister of State for Home Affairs in the Congress-led UPA Government has pegged the death toll of the 2002 riots at 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus. Yet, these figures are not reflected in the propagandist pronouncements of those who claim to champion the cause of India's Muslims. More often than not we come across claims of 'thousands of Muslims butchered by Hindu fanatics in Narendra Modi's Gujarat.' This is a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam since that terrible day when Hindus travelling by Sabarmati Express were roasted alive after their coach was set ablaze by Muslim fanatics.
It has been repeated the most by India's Marxists who subscribe to the Goebbelsian tactic of repeating a lie till in the popular perception it comes to be identified as the truth. And, it is on the strength of such contrived truth that the Marxists make preposterous claims. For instance, the claim that the communal violence in Gujarat was 'the worst in modern Indian history.' In one grand sweep, our 'secularists' brush aside the far more horrendous riots that have resulted in far more gruesome blood-letting. We do not have to go too far back in 'modern Indian history' to locate some of these riots.
The massacre in Malliana has been conveniently forgotten; brutal memories of the riots in Meerut have been obliterated. The nightlong massacre of Muslims at Nellie in Assam, which witnessed suckling infants being snatched from their mothers' arms and being speared to death, has been erased from the secularists' record of 'modern Indian history.' Stomach-churning details of the Bhagalpur riots -- Muslims were killed, buried in fields and cauliflower and other winter vegetables planted over the rotting cadavers -- no longer feature in the secularists' collective conscience. The anti-Sikh pogrom that followed Mrs Indira Gandhi's assassination is not even talked about any more: More than 4,000 Sikhs were murdered, many of them by placing burning tyres around their necks. Each of these massacres of innocent men, women and children took place when the Congress was in power and did nothing more than twiddle its thumbs as marauders went about their pillaging secure in the belief that they would not be punished.
Yet, the Congress and its 'secular' allies, more so the Marxists, have the gumption to claim that the riots in Gujarat were 'the worst in modern Indian history.' Perhaps they are referring to history after it has been purged of uncomfortable facts by the detox army led by Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh. Crass minorityism comes easily to the Congress and its cheer leaders. That is the reason why propaganda disguised as campaign to promote 'secularism' is deployed with such ease, regardless of the truth. And appeasement of the worst variety is projected as 'secular' policy.
Whose interest is served by such Goebbelsian propaganda? Clearly, neither that of India 's Muslims nor that of our nation. It serves the purpose of vote-bank politics, which has become the bane of our democracy. Worse, it perpetuates hate, polarises communities and divides society. There is more: It provides fodder to those who gain the most from gaping, festering wounds -- bigots, zealots and extremists for whom religion is a convenient cover and imagined grievances justification enough to wreak vengeance by killing innocent men, women and children.
It's a pity and a shame that media has now become an instrument of political manipulation. Instead of empowering people, it has elected to disempower them by peddling half-truths and outright lies.