34% seats uncontested in Bengal : remember!

Hi folks, I know I was not supposed to be blogging today. But I am at an airport, with nothing else to do … and sort of sleep deprived. So, I thought … what the heck … let’s get writing! You see how much it has become a habit?

During my journey, I took time out to reflect. Not on the big headlines of the day or the week; just in general. And it kept coming back to me: what should have been the news of the year or even the news of the decade?

The fact that India is the world’s largest democracy that finds itself powerless to hold a real election in one of our most populated provinces.

You can say that democracy is more than just elections; but you cannot deny that the starting point for democracy is elections. Without elections, the body of democracy has no life blood and no heartbeat. We can survive without a limb or two or even four, but can we survive without blood and a heartbeat?

What happened in Bengal during Panchayat polls should have been the single biggest news of the whole year. As many as 34% seats where the terror of ruling party goons was such that nobody dared to put up a candidate. Just think about that and shudder. Think about what the smalltime party cadres are going through in Bengal.

Imagine being in a small village in Bengal. Everyone knows everyone else. There is no anonymity that the big city life affords. Everyone knows who you talk to and what you do. There is practically no way to hide your political party sympathies. Imagine being known in your neighborhood as a dissenter against the TMC regime.

Political parties have literally lakhs of workers. Compare it to the number of elected positions on offer and you have a picture of how hard it is to get a party ticket for anything… even gram sabha head. We rarely appreciate how hard party workers fight for a ticket. Competition is fierce, factionalism is brutal … then your dream comes true and the party offers you a small ticket to fight a small election. But you know that the opposition party ticket is effectively a death sentence … so you throw away your dream and you don’t go to file your nomination. Imagine how that feels.

This is not the story of one village or one candidate in Bengal. This is the story of thousands of villages. One third of the entire state. 34% of seats simply go uncontested.

Should you risk your life and file a nomination, there are armed goons waiting outside the polling booth on election day to chop you to pieces. Remember that everyone in the small village knows who you and your supporters are. If you are seen trying to vote on polling day, you will be sliced into a hundred pieces. So you stay home, terrified.

On the day of counting, the mayhem is no less. At this booth or that, the counting in progress shows that TMC candidate is slipping. Immediately, Mamata’s goons burst into the counting center and start stamping fake votes right in front of everybody. The TV cameras are looking directly at them, the videos and images go viral and the goons know very well that they would go viral.

But they are not the least bit scared, caught live on camera stamping fake votes. Because they know that their magical secular shield will protect them. The police is under their govt and the “opinion making classes” are fully on their side. And moreover, they probably want those videos to go viral and strike terror into the heart of every last remaining dissenter. It will save them some effort the next time elections are held.

And even when the elections are over, the violence does not end. An ISIS style execution of a BJP worker takes place. The BJP makes some noise. Just to emphasize that they don’t give a damn, the ruling party’s goons hang another BJP worker within days.

I am too young to have lived in the times of the great purges in Russia, China and Cambodia and too young to remember much of Laloo’s jungle raj. What is happening in Bengal today is the worst crime against democracy I have seen in my life.

I guess I just kept rambling on. But when I stop and think, for me there is no bigger issue in India today than millions of Bengalis living under dictatorship. I better stop now. I am tired.

PS: No blog tomorrow when I will be *really* tired, I guess 🙂 Back on Sunday. 

Yogi is right : We have to ask for SC/ST quotas in minority institutions

There are some fruit that are hanging so low that I have been wondering for the longest time why the BJP is not picking them up???

About two years ago, some low level RSS functionaries, primarily from ABVP had asked the question : why don’t minority institutions provided quotas for SC/ST and OBC students as stipulated for all other kinds of institutions. This idea came up when the Rohith Vemula case was still in the headlines and there were some rumors that the ABVP would throw its weight behind a full scale movement on this issue. But nothing happened ultimately.

Earlier this week, this issue was raised again, by a person no less than the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. While Yogi has asked a bold and very important question, I am disappointed with the lack of a follow through. This one statement can do little, unless it is backed up by concrete steps taken by the administration to see that minority institutions are brought to book.

Of course, we are talking here only about minority institutions that are supported by public money, such as Aligarh Muslim U, Jamia Millia and possibly St. Stephens and Xaviers, etc. I say ‘possibly’ because I am not aware of the exact legal status of the latter two, but I remember reading somewhere that over 95% of their funding comes from the taxpayer.

There are two reasons that the BJP should commit itself fully to this issue:

First, it is the right thing to do.  Govt institutions are supposed to have quotas. I support reservation myself (for a limited period, say 30 more years); you may not. But we can all agree that quotas are the law in India. The law as it is written. And everyone should have to follow it. If you think that the law in India should allow religion based waivers, you are in the wrong country, my friend. Go to Pakistan. You will find over there all the barbaric theocratic laws that you love.

About Jamia Millia and Aligarh Muslim U there can be no doubt. These are fully public central universities. There is no justification on earth for their continued minority status anyway. For AMU especially, the Supreme Court and Allahabad High Court have made it completely clear time and again in the last 70 years that the minority tag is unconstitutional and needs to go. The Govt of India has made a mockery of the rule of law by appealing the same decision over and over again in infinite loop. Even Modi sarkar has only withdrawn the appeal in the court … we are yet to see the day when AMU officially loses its minority tag.

As such, placing a quota system in public funded minority institutions would be a first step towards bringing these institutions within the ambit of law. Aligarh needs to get the message : you operate on sovereign Indian territory. You got to follow our laws.

If you want to follow the laws of Pakistan, where Islam officially takes precedence over other faiths, then go to Pakistan. This is not a knee jerk comment; it’s just a simple logical thing. If you refuse to follow Indian laws in India, you should either be in jail or you should leave our sovereign territory. I’d say the same to any Hindu or any Indian of any other community or any foreigner. Follow our laws when on our soil … or go to jail … or leave.

Secondly, it is the most politically beneficial thing to do from a BJP point of view. For far too long,  so called secular parties have been ruling the roost in this country on what I call an “M+ X” basis. Here, “X” stands for one specific Hindu caste that makes up around 15-20% of the population in a local area.

The soft underbelly of this cynical M+X politics is that these politicians leave no stone unturned to appease Muslims  at the cost of all Hindus, including Hindus of their own caste. They know that they will enjoy the emotional, lifelong support of their own caste no matter what. Add that to the M vote and you have a winner on your hands.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than the mistreatment of Dalits under the so called “pro-social justice” parties. Because of their similar economic situation, no community faces as much aggression from the goondagardi of ‘secular forces’ as Dalits and Tribals.

The BJP worker who was hanged from a tree in Bengal was a Mahato, a tribal. He was not from one of the castes that make up Kolkata’s secular bhadralok (typically all high caste Brahmins). The price for dissent is being paid by the poorest communities in the tribal belt of Bengal.

Have you ever been to Purulia and Midnapore areas? I have. I have seen little kids literally fall at my feet begging for rice; it is a common “trick” there to pull on the heartstrings of anyone who looks like he might be able to give some alms.  Can you imagine how desperate people have to be to teach their 4-5 year old children such “tricks”?  The level of poverty in those districts of Bengal will make you want to cry.

Here is my most recent exchange with a rickshaw puller in rural Bengal (this is not in Purulia, this is barely half an hour outside Kolkata)

Me : I have to go to ….  place. Can you take me?

Rickshaw puller : Ummm … maybe. But I must warn you, it will cost you a LOT of money.

Me: (warily) Okay, how much?

Rickshaw puller: (thinks for a while) Twenty Rupees. 

These are the communities that are paying the price of dissent. Where *twenty rupees* is a LOT of money.

I digressed. Anyway…

It is time to hold the secular parties accountable, to push them to clarify their stand. If they are truly in favor of social justice, they should have no problem accepting quotas in minority institutions.

But my guess is the secular parties are going to have a problem with quotas in minority institutions. For far too long, these parties have been passing off their Muslim appeasement policy as a commitment to social justice. This is the one issue that can make the lie come apart: They have to take a stand; reveal their cards; they have to show us how much of their politics is social justice and how much is minority appeasement.

All that remains is for BJP to pull the lever and let the curtain drop. My guess is that the aristocrats of secularism/social justice will be found to have no pants on…

PS: I am ready to fly back home to India 🙂 I probably will not be able to blog for the next two days. See you then! 

‘Undeclared Emergency’ is a joke: Clowns who talk of it must be called out

The other day it was June 25, yet another anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. What did we witness in intellectual circles to mark this somber occasion? Did we see reflection and remembrance, a renewed condemnation of those who did this terrible deed and tributes paid to those who fought for our nation’s democracy at its darkest hour?

Of course not. Instead, we had a circus, a flood of articles and sermons from “intellectuals” talking about how things in India today are nearly as dark as the days of the Emergency. A lot of these articles were written sitting in living rooms of million dollar mansions in Delhi’s most upscale neighborhoods, accusing the present government of crushing “dissent”. If any of these clowns managed to see the irony of the situation, they surely did not show it.

Their most favorite term; the so called ‘undeclared Emergency’. A term that is paradoxical and meaningless on the face of it, like a ‘square circle’ or ‘neutral patrakar’.

I do not wish to engage directly with the arguments of these clowns, especially because they haven’t presented any.  As Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them’.

And just as Jefferson prescribed,  ‘Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions‘.

So I am going to do just that. I will explain to you what these clowns are doing by quoting an exchange from the classic American sitcom Seinfeld.

 

In this scene, the lead character Jerry Seinfeld arrives at a car rental outlet to discover that the agent does not have the car that he had reserved well in advance. Here is how Jerry handles the situation:

Jerry: I don’t understand. I made a reservation. Do you have my reservation?

Rental Car Agent: Yes, we do. Unfortunately, we ran out of cars.

Jerry: But the reservation keeps the car here. That’s why you have the reservation.

Rental Car Agent: I know why we have reservations.

Jerry: I don’t think you do. If you did, I’d have a car….  See, you know how to *take* the reservation, you just don’t know how to *hold* the reservation. And that’s really the most important part of the reservation: the holding. Anybody can just take them.

And that folks, is what is wrong with the idea of ‘undeclared Emergency’. The most important part of the Emergency is to actually declare it, to put Opposition leaders in jail, “preventive arrests” of dissenters and censorship of the press.  You know, like this:

Without that, there’s no Emergency.

The clowns who talk about ‘undeclared Emergency’ do not live under an Emergency. If they did, they would be in jail.

Don’t touch their ACs : Cut down on your Diwali crackers instead

Ms. Nidhi Razdan is angry. The Executive Editor of NDTV has just had it with India’s big bad government shoving its decisions down her throat.

The government is considering making it mandatory for manufacturers to make 24 C the default setting on all their air conditioners. A default setting, you know, like a mobile phone. Or as someone on Twitter pointed out, like taps are kept turned off by default. The nanny state isn’t stopping you from changing the settings on your AC, any more than it is stopping you from turning on the tap in your house.

And why is the government doing this? Because Air Conditioners freaking wreak havoc on the environment. Air Conditioners use refrigerants … their manufacturing requires HFCs (Hydro Fluoro Carbons). These are among the worst greenhouse gases, with the ability to warm the planet at thousands of times the pace of carbon dioxide. In fact, they are so bad for the environment that representatives from nearly 200 countries met specially in Vienna to come up with a global accord to put a lid on these things.

Yes, yes … we know Nidhi Razdan gets it. Air Conditioners are terrible for the environment and you got to keep the ice caps from melting, the polar bears from disappearing and the sea level from rising and swallowing up the planet. She is the executive editor of NDTV. Wouldn’t she know?

But you see, an air conditioner is something that Nidhi probably uses. She is likely part of the small fraction of Indians who can afford them. Isn’t there a better way to save the planet? Something that does not inconvenience the aristocracy?

Today the aristocrats are being made to press an extra button or two on their air conditioners. Only god knows what bigger sacrifices they will be asked to make tomorrow. This must be the beginning of fascism!

Surely there is a better way. A way to save the environment on the backs of hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians instead of executive editors at NDTV.

Found it!

Caught red handed! These terrorists who were gathering ammunition to destroy the air that everyone (including aristocratic TV anchors) have to breathe in. Just look at their faces. See the pure evil.

Throw these people in jail. Don’t you dare touch Nidhi’s air conditioner.

Remember the 3 infants, aged between 6 and 14 months, who approached the Supreme Court against Diwali crackers in 2015? Unconfirmed sources are telling me that the children  might approach the court again, this time demanding “Azaadi” for Executive Editors of news channels to use their air conditioners as much as possible. And you must necessarily fall for emotional blackmail when people file petitions in the name of children.

So, please support Executive Editors of English news channels who need to have their AC working at full blast. If not, you are not just evil, you also hate children. Shame on you!

The Emergency and how it matters which history we remember

The most profound words from Orwell’s 1984 : Who controls the past controls the future.

Today is June 25, or what I like to call “Dynasty Day.” The day on which Indira Gandhi bared her fangs and tried to swallow our nascent democracy.

Yes, the danger has passed. I can say with reasonable confidence that the Dynasty will not dare to make such an attempt again. Democracy has been baked into our genes. But it is always worth remembering the Emergency, in order to remember what the Nehru-Gandhis wanted to do to our country.

What else is there to remember about the Emergency? In my view, the most important thing along with remembering who resisted the Emergency is remembering who did NOT resist the Emergency: India’s elite.

Caught up with Communist rhetoric and assured that Indira’s hand would always feed them fell, India’s elite were quite happy to let our democracy go to the dogs. Some liked to travel abroad, snobbishly telling the world that the Emergency was actually for the upliftment of the poor, for speedy poverty reduction by a “strong” government. “Their bread is more important than my freedom,” as they would say… It is quite another matter that these elite were not particularly interested in freedom at all, because they had been assured a lifelong supply of bread from Indira Gandhi.

By telling Indians and the world that the emergency was about poverty reduction, the elite planned to steal our freedom.

Credit goes to the teeming hundreds of millions of Indians who saw right through the trick. Remember that this was 1975…the scale and depth of poverty in India would quite simply be unimaginable. As such, the elite thought that the poor would fall for anything that carried with it the promise of two meals a day.

But the elite were wrong. As poor and hungry as the people were, they realized that something very precious was being stolen from them. This is a level of political maturity that had no parallel in the world at the time and likely never will. From the 50s to the 70s, dozens of third world countries fell into the hands of dictators and never saw the light of democracy again for decades. It is this kind of global success that led Indira Gandhi to try in India what Stalin and Mao had done in their countries.

She underestimated the people of this nation. The rest is history.

I must note here with some amusement the inversion of circumstances between 1975-77 and 2014-2018. Back in the time of the Emergency, the ordinary Indian was crying out for justice while the elite made merry. I remember an article of Karan Thapar fondly recalling how they would eat brunch at the PM’s table in 1976 and casually go for a movie at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

During Modi rule, this paradigm has been inverted. While the average Indian is leading his life calmly, it is the elite … the class to which Karan Thapar belongs … that is crying hoarse about “undeclared Emergency.” I leave it up to you to decide whether this class is crying over a loss of freedom or crying over a loss of bread.

Now on to the second part of the title of this post. About how it matters which parts of history we remember. 

We all know that the Emergency will just be a footnote in today’s media, if it is mentioned at all. In fact, you might even see some articles actually praising Indira Gandhi for having the “grace” to hold an election in 1977. They forget that every dictator … from Hitler to Musharraf … has held a referendum of this kind. And the tragedy of history is that the dictator inevitably wins. That is why India stands out as a shining star … Indira Gandhi lost.

For an event of such extreme gravity, it is stunning how little we talk about the Emergency today. Compare to other great democracies, such as America. The Americans bring up their children to know as much about the Civil War as possible. But because our school curriculum and media discourse is mostly controlled by those who live on crumbs from the Dynasty’s table, we hear so little about the Emergency.

In fact, in 2015, Scroll interviewed  “Professor” D L Seth, a so called academic, on the subject of the Emergency. In this, the “professor” argued that RSS/BJP had nothing to complain about during the Emergency. The reason? They were only thrown in jail, not tortured.

These are the same publications that cannot stop talking about the obstacles to free speech created by Twitter trolls.

Because secular intellectuals could not work out a way of justifying the Emergency, they did the next best thing. They wiped it out of public memory.

Examples of this nature abound. I recall having a FB debate back in 2013 (I no longer do those) in my heavily left wing college alumni group. Those were the days when Modi was beginning to hit the deck… and the temperature on FB was very very high. Soon enough, somebody pulled out the old smear of “But RSS supported Hitler.”

I decided to strike back, reminding people of how Communists were military allies of Hitler for the first two years of World War 2. To my absolute astonishment, a massive percentage of grown adults, educated at one of India’s finest institutions, had never heard of it!

Bizarrely, I was accused of lying about Hitler ever being a military ally of the Soviet Union. When I started putting out the Wikipedia links to the Soviet invasion of Poland in coordination with the Nazis, the photos of joint victory parades of Nazis and Soviets, Nazi generals making merry with Communist comrades, links to the Katyn massacre, it caused quite a flutter. One person apologized to me. Others went into an angry silence.

I dare anyone to try this experiment. Try asking otherwise well informed people you know if they are aware that Communists and Nazis were allies in WW2. Why is this so little known? Because the left wingers who control academia did an amazing job of scrubbing inconvenient facts out of history.

Here’s another. Ask people if they know that Mussolini paid the Catholic Church a cool $39 million in return for the Pope endorsing his Fascist Party…

Chances are they know about the one time Golwalkar said something about Nazis… but not this.

Why 60 year old Mira Maheshwari had to flee from Pakistan to India

“My daughter was abducted and forced to convert to Islam. We tried to find her, and also approached court for the same, but we could not find her. Some other people took over the possession of our shop and home, and hence we decided to leave Pakistan.”

Words from Mira Maheshwari, who fled from Pakistan 10 years ago. Imagine the barbarism of the nation from that forced a woman who is at 60 years of age to pack up and leave for a new life across the border.

We will probably never know what ultimately became of Mira Maheshwari’s daughter. She is probably lost forever among those who follow the religion of peace in the land of the pure. We know that the torment of these children of Bharat will never make the UN take notice; we know that their crying will never make the cover of TIME Magazine.

But I can give you a bit of good news. Mira Maheshwari is one of 90 Pakistani Hindus who formally received Indian citizenship at a ceremony in Ahmedabad yesterday. Roughly 70 years after Partition, India’s daughter, now 70 years old herself, has been embraced by the land of Bharat.

Take a moment to look at those shining faces. Observe how they beam with pride, joy and relief at being Bharatiya. These are the real faces of “Azaadi”.

I dare one of those snobbish academic or media elites to try convincing one of these people that there should be “Bharat ke tukde”.

Guess what? Bharat has been broken into pieces before and it was a nightmare. Ask these people. They had to live this nightmare all their lives until this very moment.

Look at their faces again. Don’t they look just like our friends, our neighbors and our family? They look just like us who sometimes end up taking their Indian identity for granted.  But look at those shining faces and you will know how blessed we are and how proud we should be of being Indian.

In a Dec 2016 notification, the Govt of India decided to speed up the process of giving citizenship to persecuted minorities (Hindus, Sikhs, etc) from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Accordingly, local district collectors were given the power to issue certificates of citizenship instead of clogging the system all the way up to Delhi. Since then, the office in Ahmedabad has given citizenship to 320 Pakistanis (now Indians! Yay!) and another 200 or so applications are pending.

We on social media are angry all the time. We argue over everything. After all, India is this big crazy place that is buzzing with a billion plus voices. A billion plus dreams and aspirations jostling for space. We disagree all the time. Sometimes we end up hating each other. In the midst of this, sometimes we forget how lucky we are to be born in this land of Bharat.

We kids get too busy with our daily lives and we end up forgetting about our mother. We end up taking her for granted. But she is always there for us and always will be.

Bharat Mata ki Jai! Let’s say it for her sometimes.

US has left the UN Human Rights Council and India should too

This pie chart says it all:

Between 2012 and 2015, the UN passed a total of 97 resolutions condemning a specific country. Out of these 97 resolutions, as many as 83 resolutions condemned Israel, or a staggering 86%.

That statistic alone is enough to give you an idea of the depravity of what has been happening at the United Nations.

However someone may feel about the Israel-Palestine conflict, all rational people should be able to agree that Israel is not carrying out 86% of all the human rights violations in the world. This is a witch hunt against one country.

A few days ago, the UN found the time to criticize America for enforcing a zero tolerance policy towards illegal immigration through their southern border. And of course, the UN Human Rights Council took the time to kick India, the world’s largest democracy, in the teeth with a report about “human rights violations in Kashmir.”

What absolute garbage! Show us one country within 2000 miles of India where they have more freedom than in India. Show us one country in the neighborhood of Israel where people have more freedom than they have in the Jewish state.

In fact, show me an Arab country where Arabs have more freedom than the 1 million Arabs who live in Israel. You know what? Arabs who live in Israel don’t have to get their hands and feet cut off under Sharia law. Yes, women can vote. No, women are not required to walk around in black tents. Yes, women can go out alone, even at night and f*ck whoever they want. There’s no public flogging for a woman being out in public on her own.

Yeah, tell me again what a hell Israel is for human rights.

Just FYI, did you know that Nazi flags are not banned in Israel? Compare to the  Muslim world which is usually out on the streets demanding that this cartoonist or that reporter be hanged for drawing this or that… Israel’s Arab neighbors and most of the Muslim world are at least 100 years behind the point where they can even begin to appreciate the principle of freedom of expression.

The Americans have had enough.  The Americans are going out of the UN Human Rights Council. And India should go too, by which I mean India should boycott the Council and ban any UNHCR associated person or organization from our sovereign territory.

(Side note: India is presently not a member of the UN Human Rights Council. India has just finished two successive three year terms on the council, from 2012-2017. The US has pulled out before its current term expires in 2019.)

It’s time for India to say a permanent NO to the Human Rights mafia at the UN. Would you believe that the current commissioner of the UN Human Rights Council is one Prince Zeid? Why ‘Prince’? Because this scumbag happens to be a member of the royal family of Jordan.

That’s right. The Commissioner of UNHCR is part of the ruling establishment of an Islamic theocracy. What lectures on democracy and human rights are we supposed to get from this guy? Does his bloody country even know what an election is? Now, we Indians are deeply non-interventionist; we have no interest in teaching democracy to his barbaric country. He and his ruling family can live in their monarchy and hold on to their stone age culture; we couldn’t care less. But how can these people lecture to us?

But this is what the UN has become. A forum where the world’s dictatorships gather to teach the democracies about what freedom means.

I should put on record that I have no hostility towards the concept of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a great and noble idea, a step forward for human civilization.

That is very different from what “Human Rights” has become today:  a boondoggle. Rather than subtly exerting moral pressure on barbaric regimes to transition towards representative democracy, the human rights lobby has become a tool in the hands of dictatorships to beat the civilized world with.

And aiding and abetting this axis of barbarians is a class of NGO parasites, so called “special rapporteurs” and crap like that. They go swinging around the world on other people’s money, flaunting their diplomatic immunity, partying with the aristocracy in every country and then showing up when the weather is good in Geneva or Paris or New York to pretend like they are doing something for destitute folks among us.

So why does this class of human rights parasites work for the dictatorships and not the democracies? The reason is quite simple. Imagine if one of these NGO types went to an Islamic country and tried to talk about human rights there. Would they risk it?

Of course not! The barbarians there would drive a stake through the a$$es of human rights mafia and have them crucified in the town square in no time.

So what do these parasites do? They hunt for soft targets. How about India? Oh good… there’s no death penalty for blasphemy in India. Ditto in Israel. Look at that First Amendment in the US Constitution, guaranteeing free speech to all! Bingo! These are the places they go looking for “human rights violations.” Free countries provide the perfect safe environment for these parasites to multiply.

The result of this is effectively a penalty on free countries for being free. The despots get away with everything because they completely refuse any form of positive change. This does not just apply to the UN, this is about an attitude that runs through the entire global liberal ecosystem. Thrash the democracies and milk their conscience to the fullest. Shut up about the real despots, especially the Muslim ones.

The simplest example of this could be seen in the worldwide reaction to the travel ban instituted by Donald Trump during his first few days in office. All the worthies weighed in to point out what a shame it is to deny entry to citizens of 6-7 Muslim majority countries for 90 days. None of these same worthies have ever said anything about the fact that 16 Muslim majority countries have permanently banned entry to all Israelis for decades now.

Because the Muslim countries won’t listen to anybody. So they get a waiver from everything.

By the way, when I was researching this post, I came across the following fact which blew my mind. In 1948, there were as many as 80,000 Jews in Egypt. Do you know how many Jews are left in Egypt today?

100,000?

Perhaps it has come down to 50,000 or even 20,000.

NO! It’s down to SIX! Just 6 individuals.

You wont hear the UN Human Rights Council speak up about that any time soon. They are already overworked scanning through Israel’s alleged atrocities. By the way, there are 1.6 million Arabs living in Israel today, forming 20% of the population. And the coalition of Arab parties has 13 seats in Israel’s 120 member Parliament (Knesset), not too far behind the ruling Likud Party which has 30 seats.

I suppose His Royal Majesty Prince Zeid, the present UN Human Rights Commissioner,  does not even know what a Parliament is. After all, he was appointed a prince by god himself.

The UN is an organization with a bloated ego, an organization that collects tributes from all and is accountable to none. President Trump’s desire to cut the UN to size has opened up a fantastic opportunity for democratic countries the world over. Yes, the barbaric regimes may have seized control of the levers of power at the UN, but they will eventually realize that ultimately they need the free world to sit at the table alongside them and give them legitimacy. The world’s oldest democracy has already left. It is time for the world’s largest democracy to follow and to lead to the others by example.

 

 

 

 

Why Sushma Swaraj should apologize to passport officer Vikas Mishra

With the PMO handling most of the good work of the government on the diplomatic front, it is easy to see why Sushma Swaraj would be a much frustrated person. As long as she had appointed herself Minister of Visa/Passport affairs on Twitter, there was no real reason to complain. The diplomatic work has been going fine without her anyway… and ordinary folks were getting some help on the side. No real losers here, I guess.

But today the frustrated minister finally got a chance to show her power … by transferring a lowly passport officer from Lucknow to Gorakhpur. His crime?

Asking a Muslim woman for documents.

Let’s see. A woman with a Hindu name goes to the passport office and presents a nikahnaama with a Muslim name on it. No proof that she is the same person as mentioned on the nikahnaama. The Passport Officer puts her application on hold.

What the hell! What else was he supposed to do?

Now, I understand that this is not the version that the Minister heard. Which is actually worse, because it means that she punished someone without so much as hearing his side of the case.

From the reports in the media, it appears that the passport office has been made to apologize to the woman and her passport has been issued. Documents be damned!

On this blog I am often angry about a lot of things. But I must tell you that today’s events feel like an outright kick in the teeth. It is as if a label of “second class citizen” has been printed out from the Government of India and stuck on the face of hundreds of millions of common Hindus like me.

Because common folk like me have been humiliated and harassed at the hands of government officers all our lives. Just the other day, you should have heard the manager at my local SBI scream at me because I asked him to sign on the official bank statement that I was paying one hundred rupees for. When I hear this Muslim woman’s story, I think of my 70 year old father, who was tortured for a month by the passport office that insisted his old passport was “damaged” because a bit of lamination had come off … they wouldn’t renew his passport.

Growing up in India, you learn to ignore being ill treated by government servants. You learn to prostrate yourselves before them and cater to every one of their irrational demands. For the vast majority of Indians who are dependent on everything from govt schools to govt hospitals to govt rations, life is an unending succession of bending before one sarkari officer after another.

Today I learn that there is a way to beat the system. Play the Muslim card and the whole government of India will be at your feet. The fact that this comes from a government run by the allegedly “Hindu” BJP is just gravy! Where does this leave hundreds of millions of common Hindus like me who do not have a Muslim card to play? I am married… but not to a Muslim… is that a crime Minister Madam? Do I have to convert to Islam to be treated like a human being in this country?

The biggest irony here is that this appears to have been one of the few instances when the sarkari officer wasn’t being unreasonable. His point seems to have been entirely legitimate. Is the officer just supposed to accept on faith that the person named on the nikahnaama is same as the person with a completely different name who is asking for the passport?

And why in hell does our government even recognize a nikahnaama as a valid legal document? What is a nikahnaama anyway? Is it issued by some constitutional authority?

What has happened today will have a chilling effect on government departments across the country. They have all got the message : asking a Muslim for any document could mean trouble. We all know whose side the media will take. And now, we know for good measure whose side India’s allegedly Hindu nationalist government will take. So if a Muslim shows up at the office, just stamp their documents without asking a question. Would you rather be transferred to another city?

Do I have to spell out that this is a recipe for disaster? The security threats that stem from this are virtually endless.

As bizarre as it sounds, I have to admit that mainstream media has been more fair than usual in this passport case. While most channels initially ran with the “rising intolerance angle,” as the day passed, the passport officer’s version was given due prominence.

There was also the matter of the eyewitness (or should I say earwitness) who said that if someone was being rude, it was the woman, not the officer.

#लखनऊ – पासपोर्ट ऑफिस में महिला के साथ बदसलूकी के मामले को बताया गलत.@SushmaSwaraj @rpolucknow @tanvianas pic.twitter.com/gwSoP6V8LG

— UttarPradesh.ORG News (@WeUttarPradesh) June 21, 2018

A pleasant surprise coming from the media. Or at the very least, media has been more fair than our Hindu nationalist ruling party.

Sushma Swaraj needs to apologize to Vikas Mishra, the passport officer. This is not just a matter of egos, it is also a matter of keeping up the morale of government departments, assuring them that security concerns override the crap of political correctness. And as for the woman, her passport should be suspended until she can produce the right documents that every other citizen is required to produce.

 

 

Radhika Vemula and the bounced check of Indian secularism

If this tweet from Tehseen Poonawalla is making you blink with disbelief, you are not alone.

What? After screaming from the rooftops that Rohith Vemula’s death is proof of BJP’s prejudice against Dalits, suddenly they say that his caste is not an issue? What prompted this U-turn? Probably this news report, which left the secular brigade smarting with embarrassment.

Of course the money that was promised by the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) didn’t arrive. Because, you see, the Dalit votes that the secular brigade was hoping to harvest in Uttar Pradesh did not arrive either.

If you ask me, Hindus should also take note of which element of the secular brigade offered Radhika Vemula the money. Notice who stands to gain when Hindus are splintered by caste.

When the embarrassing news got picked up all over the place, Radhika Vemula appeared again in “damage control” mode. This time, it was clarified that the check didn’t “bounce,” there was “some error”.

As if on cue, an article has appeared in Firstpost today sermonizing the BJP to let go of this issue instead of using it to expose the secular brigade for the crooks and frauds they are. The argument? Let me give you the exact lines so that you know I am not making this stuff up:

“In a democracy, political parties respond to situations they think will be politically advantageous. Thus, many Opposition parties plunged into the movement to bring Rohith justice. Instead of accusing its political rivals of reaping political mileage from a tragedy, the government should introspect … In the rough and tumble of politics, parties leave no issue untouched — be it a death or dharna — to counter their political rivals. So what’s new about this instance?”

I know this was not intended to be funny, but it is. All parties except the BJP have a right to do what is politically advantageous? So BJP can’t hit back … it is obligated to turn the other cheek? This writing from the Firstpost journalist sounds like the wailing of a ten year old child who is running away in tears from the playground because the other team is winning.

Yes, dear secular brigade, you have walked yourself into a fine mess in this instance. At the moment, what it looks like is that it was all about fake outrage to create a smear against the Modi government. Since that “movement” has failed all its objectives, the agitators are fighting among themselves. And secular journalists are reduced to begging with the BJP to let go of the opportunity to expose the secular brigade for the crooks they are.

But there is one point that must be made. Rohith Vemula deserves justice. He was indeed a victim of a vicious setup that crushed the hopes and dreams of a young mind. This system is doing exactly the same to thousands of others like him.

Who are the people to blame? Let’s find out. First of all, there is a very serious point that cannot be let go. The Jan 31, 2016 report from the ACP of Cyberabad Police still exists.

And it still records that the agitators did not allow the police to enter. Some of the idiots were demanding the arrest of the VC of Hyderabad University and some bigger idiots were even demanding the arrest of Smriti Irani. Some may even have been demanding the end of US imperialism in Guatemala or the restoration of the Soviet Union. Forget that.

But the question that still haunts us to this day is whether Rohith could have been revived? Did Commies sit around, obstructing the police, waiting for Rohith to die so that they could feast on his dead body? We will probably never know. But we need to keep asking.

Bye bye PDP!

Oh thank god! Good riddance.

I guess this decision was made right at the time of the Kathua rape. Going out then would have given the PDP the decisive upper hand and BJP would have been stuck with the label of “kicked out in disgrace for supporting rapists.” Back then, it was better to defuse the situation, do a tactical withdrawal by sacrificing two ministers and waiting for public memory to run its course.

From what I hear, Mehbooba Mufti had absolutely no inkling of what was going to happen. Even on Tuesday morning. I think Firstpost has reported that she was going on with her scheduled business when the reports started pouring in.

Well this was bound to happen. The question is who would go out on a high note, the BJP or the PDP. Thank god that the BJP got to choose the moment.

Okay, first question. Is this a good decision or a bad decision?

Answer is that it’s neither. It’s a tactical decision. When the news of BJP dumping the PDP erupted  yesterday, liberals were jumping up and down saying that the BJP has made this decision not because of some kind of “nationalism,” but because they need a sharper anti-Muslim rhetoric to salvage 2019.

And you know what? They are probably right.

No, correct that. They are absolutely right.

But guess what, liberals? ALL sides in this country have a right to play politics, not just you. Do you seriously believe that anyone is buying your crap about “democracy in danger”? No, everyone knows that it is simply a cover for the shamelessness of a SP+BSP alliance, a CPIM+TMC alliance, a Cong+AAP alliance and so on. And everyone knows that you are still on the hunt for a RJD+JDU alliance,  as well as a Cong+NCP+Sena mahagathbandhan.

Shortly after the BJP withdrew, the Cong refused to support PDP. Why? Are we to believe that the Congress, which has its tongue desperately out for any drop of power from everywhere, refused to support PDP out of “propriety”?

Of course not. The Congress is scared of being seen as supporting any party that carries an “anti-national” taint.

So you play politics. We play politics. It’s that simple.

Okay, so why am I in favor of Modi/BJP if they are “all doing the same thing”?

I am a great fan of pragmatism, of converging of interests. What does the BJP want? As a political party, they want power; they want as much of it as possible. And they really really want to win 2019. For this the BJP is ready to kill terrorists on an industrial scale.

As an average Hindu, what do I want? I want the terrorists in Kashmir crushed without any mercy.

Great! We have a convergence of interests with the BJP here.

Many on the right wing complain, but we have to recognize that the BJP’s dominance of the last four years has successfully moved the needle of discourse by a huge amount. The biggest proof of this was in the Congress staying out of supporting the PDP. This may be the first occasion in my lifetime that I am seeing political parties looking over their shoulder and worrying “What will the Hindus think?”

Who are the true anti-Hindus left in this country? People of the ecosystem, such as this.

I wonder if old Ramu kaka of the Nehru dynasty realizes that his masters are now shy of exactly this kind of rhetoric. Yes, Ramu kaka, your old rules for the household such as “no Hindus in the kitchen” are outdated now. The masters have moved on. The news has not yet reached the servants quarters of 10 Janpath.

The good news is that the J&K police finally has a free hand to kill terrorists. You can also hear the excitement in the tweets of J&K police DGP Shesh Paul Vaid from yesterday.

As Omar Abdullah noted (with some disappointment?) in this tweet, “they” killed 207 terrorists last year. Now take a guess how many terrorists are scheduled to be neutralized this year.

They killed 207 terrorists last year Rajdeep. How much muscular does the policy need to become? https://t.co/lUDR19BIsK

— Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 19, 2018

And of course, don’t forget to note the word “they” in Omar Abdullah’s tweet and don’t forget to think about what it implies.

So please be sure to tell me in the comments section below how many jihadis are going to jannat from Kashmir this year. I feel bad for all those virgins, really … their first and only man is going to be some filthy bearded terrorist, likely with no prior experience with women. In fact, he might not even have seen women outside of those sack like things they make the women wear 🙂

Poor virgins in heaven. What did they do to deserve this?

Of course, let us not forget about the *real* victim from yesterday. Our very own Sad ji of Delhi. In case you don’t know, deprived of media attention by the big news of BJP dumping PDP, he quietly ended his dharna and went back to the sofa in his own bungalow.  As a consolation for his dumb supporters, NDTV put out this painfully stupid tweet …

“Sources” say that “informal” concessions have been made to him. LOL!