Introspecting Aloud

The tentacles of communalism is not restricted merely to Gujrat, Orissa and Karnataka. Religious violence and blackmail, this time from a section of the Muslim population came up again in Kolkata.

In November 2007, a certain section of Muslim population rioted in Kolkata against granting of visa to Tasleema Nasreen, who they claimed has insulted Islam by asking for greater rights for women. The state government, instead of showing a spine, succumbed to the blackmail and sent Tasleema packing to Jaipur. As usual, the government claimed that they had to do this to ensure law and order. However, the bottomline of what happened was that the city was blackmailed by violence and instead of doing the right thing, the government chose the politically safer option. Thus ensuring that a precedent was set in which no Kolkata based author critical of religion, especially Islam, can ever hope to find themselves safe in the city.

This is 2009, and instead of taking a chance to redeem itself, the same Kolkata government has shown it’s spineless self again. When the Statesman merely re-published this brilliant article by Johann Hari, a section of the muslim population started a riot once again, and yet again, the government instead of defending the people being attacked – the editor of Statesman, instead arrested him and charged him under section 295A of the Indian Penal Code which forbids “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings”.

If you read the article, you will find out that the article actually talks about all religions and how each of them are playing a part in undermining the institution of United Nations in following their goals of all resisting all attempts to reform or self-criticize.

If you read the article you might find a particular passage about the prophet having sex with a nine year old as perhaps unnecessary or being too unjustly specific. I did too. This was one of the text which was protested against. However, you should realise how topical this particular fact is, as just last month (January 2009), top clerics in Saudi Arabia approved marriage of girls as young as 10-12 years, for no other reason other than the fact that the prophet had done the same.

However, as Johann wrote in his response to the riots, he was uniformly harsh on all religions – Islam, Judaism, Christianity. Islam got a bit more attention simply for the fact that its proponents were much more active than others in subverting the UN charter.

The bottom line is, the Kolkata government got one more chance to show that it represented a modern country which while remaining secular by constitution but deeply religious within, is progressive enough to not just make safe but encourage literary space to reform and take the country forward. A Kolkata which once was a city of literature, is now a city where only sanitized political and religious discussions can take place. Which is just a shame for a city I like so much.

Nirmukta reports about a meeting held on 20th February by like minded citizens of Mangalore ( as well people across Karnataka) protesting against the recent events of moral policing, the compliant state administration, and the current unsafe social environment in the city.

I had somehow missed one of the many reported incidents from Mangalore mentioned in the post.

They had the temerity to stop a bus carrying students of a college which had boys and girls from various communities going on an educational tour from their college. This was despite of the parents of the girls telling them that the girls were going with their permission. This incident had taken place bang in front of the Police Head quarters with the police standing as mute spectators. The same bus had to go on the next morning with two police escorts at the front and back. One can imagine the state of affairs if adult students of a college going on an official tour with the permission of their parents have to have a police escort!

As expected, an attempt was made to prevent this meeting. One of the speakers was threatened  thus.

These groups had tried a number of methods to stop this meeting including, threatening an elderly lady, Mrs. Lalitha Nayak an Ex-Minister of Karnataka with rape if she attended it. This was highlighted by her in her address. She was not angry but only lamented the state of affairs in which young men of the age of her grandsons made such threats. She also wondered as to what culture they were protecting with threats of that sort!

Interestingly the mayor of Mangalore got quite a few barbs for his recent filing of FIR against Renuka Chowdhury. The author of the Nirmukta post is Narendra Nayak, who also happens to be the president of the federation of Indian Rationalist Associations which he was representing at the meeting. Remarking about the mayor FIR, he reminded the mayor how the term Talibanisation of Mangalore was mentioned by him, a citizen of Mangalore, way before Renuka and how the publication which printed his views was prosecuted for the views.

The attitude of the Mayor of Mangalore City was also heavily criticized. He had filed a criminal case against a minister of the   central govt., Ms. Renuka Choudhary, for making a statement that Mangalore had been talibanised. He was reminded that, six months before she had made the statement, an article under the heading Talibanis of Dakshina Kannada had been published in September, 2008 in a local eveninger- Karavali Ale. The Mayor was challenged to dare to prosecute the author of the same- Narendra Nayak, the President of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations. In my speech, I told the Mayor that it was my opinion about what was happening in the city and that I had more of a right to make that statement being a native of the same city and having been born much before him (the mayor). The story of the hounding of the owner of Karavali Ale is another saga of the fight of a determined man to preserve the freedom of press and expression in a democracy. Mr. Seetaram was hounded by the police, arrested and taken in handcuffs as if he was a dangerous criminal. He was finally released after a habeas corpus petition was filed in the Karnataka High court.

A very nicely articulated analysis, by Seema Goswami, of the problems of the TV media, especially in the coverage of the recent Mumbai attacks. Also a good comparison between the print and TV media.

What is under attack here is the constant contamination of the news by the views of those who disseminate it on television. As the cliché goes, comment may be free but facts are sacred. And when it comes to the news space, they need to be kept apart. The problem with TV is that there is a constant blurring of the lines so that one never quite knows where the news ends and the views begin.

God knows the print media has its own problems and it often gets things wrong. But where it scores is that the dividing line between opinion and fact is always very clear. Opinion belongs on the edit and op-ed page — and in the feature and style sections. The news appears on all the other pages, uncontaminated by the views of those reporting it.

Somewhere down the line, the lawyers of our country (just like most other professions) have forgotten that they form an essential pillar of India’s democratic structure, where their services are required, and not merely solicited. I don’t consider it too much different from the defense forces, where if you are called for duty on behalf of the country, you are required to serve regardless of how unjust you find the cause of the war.

As I have mentioned before, many Indians, in a misplaced sense of patriotism, ironically do the most un-patriotic of actions – attacking the very foundations of what we claim makes India different from other countries – a modern, democratic and free country.

There are many ways to react to what these 10 young men did in Mumbai, but acting like a blood-thirsty lynch mob should not be one of them. That is what we think people are in those “other countries”, right? The ones, where your limbs are chopped off for trivial reasons? So how are we being different by summarily sending off this lone caught boy to the gallows without even a modicum of justice?

Jethmalani puts it quite well :

The measure of any civilisation is the way society treats those whom it hates.

So what kind of civilization do we stand for? If our country’s founding fathers have made legal defense a fundamental right (Jethmalani has mentioned the specifics in his article), it only shows that they had a much grander vision of the Indian civilization than what Shiv Sena and their ilk can dream of.

It is actually quite easy to make out when a position is wrong . As soon as you see that you are agreeing on a position with Shiv Sena, a red light should flash in your head. After all, this is a “sena” or army, which only believes in fighting with people from its own city rather than the actual aggressors in their city.

(via Communalism Watch)

The media and the blogosphere is filled with anger and vitriol. Perhaps, we Indians are too close to the scene of tragedy and are mostly incapable of seeing the large ramifications of what just happened in Mumbai. In this volatile time, perhaps some of the best analysis of the situation can be depicted by observers who are sufficiently detached from the incident and are therefore not as affected with the emotions running in this country.

BBC has this brilliant analysis by Paul Cornish, who theorises about whether this is a new chapter of terrorism – “the age of celebrity terrorism”.

Quite apart from the scores murdered and the hundreds injured, what the Mumbai terrorists really wanted was an exaggerated – and preferably extreme – reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion.

In these terms, the attackers received as much attention as they could possibly have hoped for, and the Mumbai outrage can only be described as a very significant terrorist success.

Nothing too new there. The media frenzy about blame game, the war mongering by sections of the society. We all are reacting very predictably.

But wait, here is the part of the article which is interesting.

The character of modern terrorism is widely understood to have been shaped by a mid-19th-Century idea known as the “propaganda of the deed” – a strategy for political change in which the message or cause is contained within, and expressed by the violent act.

In a novel twist, the Mumbai terrorists might have embarked on propaganda of the deed
without the propaganda, in the confident expectation that the rationalisation for the
attack – the narrative – would be provided by politicians, the media and terrorism analysts.

If so, then Mumbai could represent something rather different in the history of
terrorism, and possibly something far more disturbing even than global jihad.

Perhaps we have come to the point where casually self-radicalised, sociopathic
individuals can form a loose organisation, acquire sufficient weapons and
equipment for a few thousand dollars, make a basic plan of action and indulge
in a violent expression of their generalised disaffection and anomie.

These individuals indulge in terrorism simply because they can, while
their audience concocts a rationale on their behalf.

Welcome to the age of celebrity terrorism.

Read the complete article for a more detailed explanation behind the theory.

We still don’t have all the details of this attack to prove any of this. The only details that we have are premature and contantly revised and denied press revelations by the administration. But even if a bit of the theory of the article is true, we are in for really disturbing times. And it is even more unsettling to know about this possibility and watch the media and the government take the country inexorably to where the terrorists want it to be.

I am not sure whether this is because of the subliminal mass indoctrination done by certain sections of the political class of this country, but I seriously disagree with the notion that Mumbai happened because India is “soft on terror”. If being “hard on terror” is like behaving like Israel or USA, then I am sorry, but we have the wrong role models.

Wouldn’t it be more correct to call India incompetent in handling terror? It might sound similar but there is a big difference in our approach to the problem if we look at it differently. After all most citizens are convinced that our political leadership is incompetent, the bureaucracy is incompetent, the police and intelligence is incompetent. Wouldn’t a mass incompetency of our entire political-police setup of the country have the same result when faced with such acts of terrorism?

Why turn incidents like the Mumbai attacks a juvenile question of virility? That doesn’t sound like a mature country!

Why not grow up and just demand better and principled administrators of this country from now on?

Question yourself. Why do we have only three pathetic major political parties in India? One, the Congress, which has no idea what it stands for and just prefers to “go with the flow”. Two, the BJP who would rather make the entire country go in flames to achieve their 80 year old thinly disguised agenda of turning India into a Hindu equivalent of Pakistan. And three, the BSP who shamelessly exploits the image of a great man(Ambedkar) and has a leader who acts like a medieval queen.

Have you ever thought why we haven’t had a single political leader since Nehru (that also in his early days), who we have unquestionably admired and respected?

Anger is justifiably the first response to what happened in Mumbai. But decisions taken in anger has rarely ever provided the best response.

Why am I not seeing a single discussion, whether in the media or in the web, where people have sat down calmly and thought “why did these terrorists do this? What was their agenda?” After all these terrorists are not murderous psychopaths who kill because they like to kill. These are highly ideologically motivated people, and their leadership always have an agenda for every act that they do. They practice a form of politics in which the instruments are not speeches, lies and horse-trading like our politicians. Rather their instruments are acts of terror. But their aims are similar to politicians – to achieve a political goal.

Political and security idiots from around the country are dismissing the whole act as merely “an act of destabilizing the country”. While that might be true, it seems to me a dangerous over-simplification. Dangerous, because it is making the rest of India to stop thinking. They think they have got their answer to “why” and then keep raising the familiar ruckus of blaming the political class.

Over the next few days, we would probably see the real reason of this attack come out in the open. Some say that it is already coming out in the open. As reports emerge of Pakistan considering moving a large part of its troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border in anticipation of a belligerent Indian response like after our parliament attack, the consequent results should be clear. The LeT and other terrorist leadership which organized the Mumbai attack were getting a lot of  heat from the combined US-Pakistani operations in Afghanistan border recently. The Indo-Pak escalations will take this heat off and help them consolidate their grip in that region.

This theory might be proven wrong with information that we get in the coming days and months, but if this is the real agenda, then by irrational response to the Mumbai attack, we would only prove ourselves to be mere puppets in the hand of terrorists.

For those eager to put labels on our country, being such a puppet would be a much better reason to call ourselves a soft state. I still prefer the term incompetent state though, even though idiot might be a better choice if it had not been so inflammatory.

So the call I would like to make out to my country men, is to first defeat the terrorist’s agenda (the real one, not the one which the political idiots have been mouthing), and then go ahead to discuss how to fix the country so as to prevent it from being so vulnerable and so easily manipulated.

Nice analysis by Time.

About the background of the attackers:

What we should be certain of, though, is that the Mumbai attackers were combat trained. You do not sustain a military assault for three days, taking only combat naps, unless you know what you are doing. You have to have been shot at before. You cannot be intimidated by flash-bang grenades, or commandos fast-roping down the side of a building. And it is almost certain that the planners of the attack understood that the only way to get into India with the amount of weapons and explosives used in the attacks was by sea — the risk of smuggling them in over land was too great.

About lessons learnt from the attack:

There are two lessons we should be taking away from Mumbai. The first is that all large cities are vulnerable to attack. Even if it doubled the size of its police force, there is no way New York City could could ever protect its hotels, schools or other public buildings from attacks of this type, short of turning them into fortresses. There is no way for the NYPD to prevent a car bombing on Wall Street, sending the stock market into an even worse plunge, or a single suicide bomber from blowing himself up in the subway. Plans are available on the Internet for making bombs like these with ingredients available in hardware stores.

The second reminder we should take from Mumbai is that the longer the wars go on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more combat-experienced men there will be available to planners of terror attacks. And we should count on the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan going global — there is no reason they could not blend into the waves of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean from Northern Africa to Europe every day.

Very well written story at Salon about the similarity between the Bush and Indian response to terrorism.

Any decent, civilized person watching scenes in Mumbai of extremists shooting indiscriminate machine gun fire and launching grenades into civilians crowds — deliberately slaughtering innocent people by the dozens — is going to feel disgust, fury, and a desire for vengeance against the perpetrators, regardless of what precipitated it.  The temptation is great even among the most rational to empower authority to do anything and everything — without limits — to punish those responsible and prevent repeat occurrences.  That’s a natural, even understandable, response.  And it’s the response that the attackers hope to provoke.

It’s that temptation to which most Americans — and our leading media institutions — succumbed in the wake of 9/11, and it’s exactly the reaction that’s most self-destructive.

As Salon quotes Dilip Padgaonkar from a Washington Post article:

… the Indian Government — in response to prior terrorist attacks — has been employing tactics all-too-familiar to Americans:  ”terrorism suspects have been picked up at random and denied legal rights”; “allegations of torture by police are routine”; “suspects have been held for years as their court cases have dragged on. Convictions have been few and far between”; Muslims and Hindus are subjected to vastly disparate treatment; and much of the most consequential actions take place in secrecy, shielded from public view, debate or accountability.As Padgaonkar details, many of these measures, particularly in the wake of new terrorist attacks, are emotionally satisfying, yet they do little other than exacerbate the problem, spawn further extremism and resentment, and massively increase the likelihood of further and more reckless attacks — thereby fueling this cycle endlessly — all while degrading the very institutions and values that are ostensibly being defended.

We will no longer remain passive. We should stand up against terrorism once and for all.

Enough is enough

I say no to getting used to terrorism.

Too many similar resolutions being made by people all around. And my take is that they are all the wrong ones.

This incident of unimaginable proportions came about because of our acceptance of medicority everywhere in our country. We are ok with mediocre politicians, mediocre bureaucrats, mediocre sportspeople, mediocre (rather pathetic) standard of education, mediocre(rather pathetic) police and intelligence. The whole country is just a huge celebration of mediocrity. Questioning mediocrity on the other hand is considered the act of a traitor.

If a person dies he is a martyr and automatically a hero (like this time). No matter if there is a possibility of incompetency which could have caused the death. Just mere questioning of the circumstances of death can get you lynched. That is the mediocre level of pitiful mediocre nationalism that things have come down to.

Instead of terrorism, why can’t we instead say no to “mediocrity”? Why can’t we stop being passive about the sheer incompetency of the government in every sphere – not just terrorism which is but the flavor of the day? Why don’t we ever say “enough is enough. I am tired of being passive about the pitiful state of roads and drainage every year”? Why don’t we ever say “I am tired of parochialism and irrelevant issues raised by politicians”. Why don’t we get angry about the state of our education? Every years, lakhs pass out of schools and colleges, after having spent years studying in a terribly lacking system. But so few of them, resolve that “enough is enough. this is not how school/college should be. it can be better”.

Security/anti-terrorism measures don’t exist in a vacuum. How can we demand excellence from our police and intelligence, when all around them mediocrity is what defines their environment. Whether it is mediocre politicians, mediocre bureaucrats or a  mediocre and unjust work environment.

None of all these resolutions is going to make a difference to our internal security. If anything, ham handed security experts and politicians will only make life worse for all of us, and we ,being used to our pathetic existence at their hands will just accept our even more humiliating daily lives – the one which involves more symbolic security checks everywhere and effectively no additional increase in our security.

It is clear what we really need to resolve. We should resolve that we should demand excellence from everybody out there – the police, the politician, the bureaucrat … and even each others and oneself! It is only in such an environment where excellence is but a normal expectation, can our security forces be actually effective. Otherwise all these resolutions are a load of …

This sobering video shows, very simply and beautifully, the vast difference between the visible shining India we are a part of, and the much larger part of India that we choose not to see everywhere around us. A must see for everybody to keep our feet firmly on the ground.

(Ref credit: Anuradha Bakshi, Project Why)