A Quisling too many

Among the many reasons why we study history, one is the wisdom we are supposed to gain, so that errors committed in the past do not get repeated.

This belief seems little grounded on facts when we see people indulging in those precise behaviors which facilitated occurrences of tragedies in the yore.

At one level, we have a situation where profligate governance and red tapism has brought the country back to the economic brink of 1991. Then, as we see now, the leadership was engaged in platitudes and character assassination of political opponents rather than on governance, all while being deeply committed the failed & discredited socialist model of economy.

While the economic ills plaguing the nation are certainly debilitating, concerted policy and decision making can still salvage the situation. What is more serious and will certainly have a much longer terms implication are political acts, at times committed by the righteous but most of the time, guided by those intending to serve narrow self interest.
 

Our Nation has had more than its fair share of quislings. If the Nation saw Ambhi helping the Greeks over 2400 years back, a more devastating help was offered by Jaichand of Kannuaj in the second millennium. If Chittor was laid to dust by the covert helping of Raghav Chetan to Alauddin, Ranthambhore was sacked not by the Sultan, but by the mechanisms of Bhoj Deva. And anyway, it was Shah Waliullah, who had invited the Emir of Afghanistan to restore India to its pristine Islamic glory! If one were to think that such seditious acts were limited to people looking for personal political glory, one would be mistaken. KM Munshi chronicles in his work, Jai Somnath, the travails of Shivrashi, an ordained Shaivaite priest, who guided Mahmud Ghazni to the weak defences to the temple city, helping him wreak devastation on the Hindu psyche. Shivrashi was not guided by personal glory. He believed that the head priest and the king had lost moral authority to officiate and hence wanted them removed to restore Dharma!

Sadly for our Nation, the long, very long list of people who helped invaders and bloodthirsty maniacs is still getting added to. At a more organizational level, first we had the Communists and now the Maoists who look to USSR/China as the model state and wish to turn India into a vassal again. We have continued to have organized groups of separatists operating from foreign sanctuaries, seeking to help destroy India with foreign help. To cap it all, we have always had motley individuals; self declared one-person nations, who in their insatiable hunger for attention, go around making incredulous claims against the Indian people.

What has changed over the last few years is that sustained Institutional support to such individuals/institutions is now being offered by the Indian state itself. The spectacle of ‘activists’ holding seminars and conferences on foreign lands, holding seminars in India but getting people with pronounced anti India/anti Hindu leanings to harangue on their pet hates and petitioning foreign bodies with a long list of imagined grievances, is to put it mildly, dangerous. What can the attempt to get foreign judicial bodies intervene in Indian issues be called, if not seditious? Unless legal credulity is stretched to the extremes, how can acts committed by foreign individuals, in foreign lands and on foreign people be tried in some other country?

There are groups which are trying to get indictments against sundry Sikh politicians and of course, the pet hate of the so called liberal sects of India in the UK, USA and Canada. Just imagine a situation where some court does proclaim some Indian leader a proclaimed offender and issues warrants for his/her arrests? Will police of that Nation land up in India (with permission of the Indian Government) or will that Nation conduct an Abbottabad like expedition. In case the said Nation desist from taking up such ambitious acts, will it proceed to issue a red corner Interpol notices against the ‘offender’?

For those who would be ecstatic with glee at such an event befalling their pet ogre, let that glee be tempered with the awareness that at the receiving end, may not be their hates alone. Only a couple of years back, a US Court upheld the rights of Narain Kataria and a few others to continue their libelous and distasteful campaign against Sonia Gandhi in the USA. What if some people file a case in some court, either in USA or UK or even in Nepal or Mauritius against some worthies on grounds of massive corruption or on restriction of right to practice and propagate their Hindu religion? If this sounds fanciful, what about a scenario where some Mirpuri files a case against the Indian Defence established on some ground of Human Rights violation in Kashmir. While some ‘liberals’ may find such event warming cockles of their hearts, will the Indian establishment respond with equal glee?

How will that impact India? Extension of legal jurisdiction to India would automatically mean that India is not Sovereign Nation. Without much ado, our Nation would have lost a short lived independence and come back under foreign yoke.

Political faultlines run deep in the most advanced of democracies. The visceral hatred of the Democrats against George Bush did not result in senior Democrats berating Bush in foreign lands, condemning him in Op-Eds in foreign publications, even as exalted as the Times of India or pontificating on NDTV/IBN Live on why Bush was evil personified.

For all the pretence of a disdain for the West, our people still fall over each other to gain acceptance as a ‘progressive’ in the western sense. While the so called liberal otherwise sees the USA is as an emblem of the worst model of a capitalist and hegemonic state, a singular act of this country denying visa to their pet hate, makes the ‘liberal’ become a ‘visa-denial-thumper’.

Just what were those 65 MPs (incidentally 64 as MA Jinnah has signed both as a Lok Sabha and a Rajya Sabha member) trying to achieve? A curtain raiser to their lurking request to ‘righteous’ Nations to march into India, if horrors of horrors, their pet hate does becomes the Prime Minister of India?

The Road Much Travelled

It is not very often that communal riots, particularly which see the number of dead running into single digits, get raised in the parliament. At the same time, it is also not often that a local skirmish in a single village sparks off chain events in nine adjoining districts of the region. While it is sad that Jammu had to yet again undergo the cataclysm of riots, the only very thin silver lining in this otherwise dark cloud is a hitherto unseen appreciation of the fact that communal fault-lines in Jammu are strong enough to tear the region asunder.

For a very long time, the general public have been made to believe by the Government and the media that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is a non sectarian land and that a common thread of Kashmiriyat, seeded and nurtured by generations of Sufism, had made those citizens truly secular. So far as the secessionist movement is concerned, it has been painted as the result of disillusionment of the youth, a feeling which was completely independent of the religious identity of people demanding azadi.

If the contemptuous assertions that the Kashmiri Pandit migrated en masse of his free will and in connivance with the evil Jagmohan were not enough, we have been fed stories on how the Amarnath Yatra and the Kheer Bhavani fairs are supported by the local Muslims, the economic benefits being purely an irrelevant afterthought.

While the above tales were probably meant to control Hindu retaliation elsewhere, the general belief in the rarefield public decision making offices, which is supposed to be aware of ground realities, that the entire secessionist movement was restricted to the Kashmir Valley alone and that the general population of Jammu and Ladakh were absolutely pro-India, belies credulity.

This commentator may be accused of generalizing stray observations and presenting it as applicable for the entire region. However, when that generalization is seemingly proved by sequential events and evidence to the contrary seems absent, the hypothesis stands validated. Those interested in more details may refer to the post ‘Oh Kashmir’

It was only a few weeks back that Ramban was hit by skirmishes, instigated by a local Imam maliciously claiming that a copy of the Quran had been desecrated. The initial disturbances were only a precursor to riotous mobs chanting Azadi slogans taking over the town. Now, we have the spectacle of Azadi demanding mobs taking over Kishtwar and other Muslim majority areas of Jammu.

The reality was and still remains that other than the two and a half undivided districts of the Jammu region and the Leh district of Ladakh, the rest of the state of Jammu & Kashmir identifies itself as a body united in its desire for Azadi. This independence is not independence for political ends. Few even in J&K are unaware that residents of Pakistani occupied portions of the State have received a much worse deal compared to them. Hence, the demand for azadi is merely the yearning to fulfill the unfinished agenda of partition, which is securing a land of the pure, made even more pristine by the absence of those who do not follow the doctrine of the ‘pure’.

Communal riots in J&K are not a new phenomenon. The 1931 skirmish which resulted in cold blooded killing of 31 Muslims by the Dogra troops resulted in an uprising which immediately morphed into large scale attacks on Hindu lives and properties across all regions of the State. In 1947-48, it was not the Pakistani troops and Tribal invaders alone who targeted the Hindu population across areas which are called POK today. Perhaps only a few care to remember that not only did the towns of Mirpur, Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Skardu have large Hindu populations, the countryside, right upto Gilgit had significant pockets of Hindu presence. Just a few weeks of mayhem and the entire POK was cleansed of non-Muslim presence.

The more informed amongst us, particularly of the liberal variety, justifiably condemn the disgraceful conduct of Dogra troops when they, by their inaction, became party to massacre of Muslims in some Hindu majority areas of Jammu. However, what many forget is that overall; the conduct of the Muslim Police in Jammu was all the more reprehensible as it was an active participant in the massacre of Hindus, particularly in areas of mixed population. Unlike what many would now like us to believe, the mayhem in Indian areas of Jammu were plain communal riots in which there were a large number of casualties from both the communities.

The events of 1947-48 were not isolated in nature. Riots have recurred with nauseating frequency in the districts of Ramban, Doda and Kishtwar. True, the casualties were never as high as those in many other parts of the country but unlike those riots, the design behind communal unrest in J&K has always been more sinister. On a very statistical level, the absence of a large number of dead does not necessarily denote that the riots were minor, particularly when the number of dead is juxtaposed against the small populations of these districts. The Kashmiri Pandit community too faced around a thousand direct killings in the last few years leading to their forced exodus. The relatively small number against the supposed much larger number of Muslim casualties are sought to be presented as proofs that the terrorist movement in J&K is non-sectarian in nature. However, this half truth cleverly glosses over the fact that the thousand odd dead belonged to a small minority of some three lakhs, who overall comprised only some five percent of the Valley’s population. In effect it meant that almost each extended family was directly impacted by the terrorist activity – in form of a dead cousin, uncle, nephew or in-laws.

The forced exile of Kashmiri Pandits was not an overnight event. Disempowered and discriminated against by the rulers, target of frequent riots, the targeted brutal public killings of 1989, threat letters and public warnings from mosques, the Kashmiri Hindu took recourse to the only option he had. He left, perhaps never to return, the land of his forefathers with only his life and barest of necessities as his possessions. The residual Hindu community, holed up in villages continued to be the target of both the terrorists and the locals alike and today, barely three thousand Hindus survive, if it can be called such, in the Valley.

In this land of the pure, Anantnag and Verinag of 1986 are history and will never be repeated. After all, one needs an adversary to riot against. Still, the Valley is not tranquil. Each summer, the Valley denizens manage to find some issue to rally around and vent their hatred for India. Be it Shopian, Amarnath Land Transfer, Summer of 2010, hanging of Afzal Guru or simply alleged army high-handedness, each demonstration becomes the excuse for vandalizing of a few more temples and beating up of the residual Hindus and migrant labour population in the Valley.

Some amongst us might remember that the in the immediate afterglow of success of their ethnic cleansing strategy in Kashmir, the terrorists had tried to replicate the same formulae of targeted killings and public warnings in the undivided Doda district of Jammu. A series of massacres, specifically targeting the minority Hindu community, raised the specter of yet another forced exodus in the State. Fortunately for the country, at helm was a Prime Minister, who believed in securing his countrymen. It was PV Narasimha Rao who was instrumental in creating the Village Defence Committees, which managed to secure the Doda district against the nefarious designs of the terrorists.

This bulwark against the secessionist movement and indeed the safeguard against yet another forced exile of the Hindu minority is obviously not palatable to the secessionist forces of the State. While the likes of Geelani and Yasin Malik have long called for disbanding of these committees, now the Chief Minister of the State has joined their ranks. That this demand does not arise from some intellectual conviction is starkly obvious when we realize that this worthy does not appear to know that February in a non-leap year has only 28 days! Be it the demand for revocation of the AFSPA or the pre-1953 autonomy for the state, there appears little difference in between the political and secessionist belief systems in the Valley. With a Central Government indifferent to their plight, it will not be long before the hapless Hindu minority of the Muslim majority districts of Jammu gets overwhelmed and is forced to share the fate of their co-religionists from across the Pir Panjal.

Not only should the Village Defence Committees not be disbanded, for the very simple reason that the secessionist movement is still on, it is imperative that the artificial state of Jammu & Kashmir, an agglomeration of disparate people and geographical entities, brought together only by the expansionist zeal of the Dogra Kings, be restored to its natural boundaries. Not only will a trifurcation of the State on geographical lines secure the Hindu and Buddhist minorities of Jammu and Ladakh, drawing of new borders and a new political establishment will ensure that secessionist sympathies in the new states are crushed comprehensively.

It is likely that any move to trifurcate the state will face resistance from the secessionists as the dominant view in those circles seem to center around allowing only the heavily Hindu majority districts of Udhampur, Reasi and Kathua to separate from the State. The National Conference, it its controversial report on Regional Autonomy, which suspiciously mirrored the recommendations of the ISI backed Kashmir Study Group, has sought division of the Jammu & Ladakh regions on communal lines. The Muslim majority districts of Jammu and Ladakh have been positioned as the Pir Panjal & Chenab and the Kargil divisions respectively.  Such arguments cannot be accepted as none of the Indian States with mixed majorities saw such granular partition. Had that been the case, Thar Parkar and Umerkote districts of Sindh and Chittagong from East Bengal would have been ceded to India. The trifurcation of J&K has to be on geographical lines alone, to protect the land and its people from an otherwise certain descent into chaos. The need of the hour is not some high sounding politically correct pontification but firm actions to secure large sections of our Nation from its adversaries.

A Legend of Ganga

The River Ganga is exalted as someone who provides salvation to even those who are utterly unfit. The Padma Puran tells us that while sons may abandon their parents, wives their husbands and friends, their dearest friends, the Ganga abandons no one. A legend associated with Pandit Jagannatha stands as a testimony to this all embracing nature of the River.

Jagannatha, a Brahmin from the 17^th century was declared an outcaste on account of his love affair with a Muslim woman. So, the Pandit went to Varanasi to try and restore his status as a Brahmin. However, shunned by all and devoid of all hope of acceptance, Jagannatha sat atop the Panchganga Ghat alongwith his beloved and composed an ode to the River Goddess. Poetically, his composition had 53 verses to correspond to the 52 steps of the Ghat and the stepping ground

The poetry begins

You were sent for the salvation of the world by Shiva, Lord of Lords….

It continues

I come to you as a child to his mother

I come as an orphan to you, moist with love

I come without refuge to you, giver of sacred rest

I come a fallen man to you, uplifter of all

I come undone by disease to you, the perfect physician

I come, my heart, dry with thirst, to you, ocean of sweet nectar

Do with me whatever you will

It concludes

Take us into your embrace for ever for Moksha sublime bliss for ever

The legend says that as Pandit Jagannath composed his 53 verses of Ganga Lahari, the river rose step by step. At the penultimate hymn, the waters touched the feet of the poet and his beloved and at the last verse, purified them, embraced them, and carried them away.

The River is the Mother who loves and claims the child who has been rejected even by the outcastes, criticized even by the madmen and rejected by the other tirthas. There are plenty who care for the good, but who cares for the Sinner except for the one who has only Love in her heart.

The entire Ganga Lahri can be accessed here

Adopted from: India, A sacred Geography by Diana L Eck

The Tragedy of Devbhoomi

For someone who was fortunate to have had safe darshan at the four holy sites only weeks earlier, the tragedy of Uttarkhand seems a little bit more personal. The scenes of devastation unfolding on TV screens and gut wrenching tales of survivors make the eight days spent on criss-crossing Devbhoomi seem so surreal now. 

It is heartwarming that though the Central Government has refused to declare this tragedy a National Disaster, the common citizens of our Nation have displayed no such hesitation and are coming together to help the victims. At the same time, the near absence of the ‘local’ factor in the prevailing discourse raises disturbing questions. Very certainly, the presence of pilgrims from across the country made the tragedy seem closer to people from other states. Surely, each one of us prayed for the safe evacuation of hapless pilgrims stuck without food and water at various stretches of the pilgrimage route and cheered boisterously as the television beamed images of the Indian Army evacuating the victims heroically.

But why has our concern not extended to the residents of these lands – the ponywallah who made the trek at Kedarnath possible, the pitthoo from Nepal who carried the infirm on his back and those dandies who transported people in maximum comfort. Why is there little attention to fate of those dhabawallahs, those hotel staff who lined up the roads and those residents of those villages which dotted the mountainside? The pilgrims lost a lot and many will probably remain scarred for life. But that should not have, in any way, eclipsed sufferings of the Uttarakhandi from public images. Many villagers lost everything – their material possessions and even more tragically, their bread-earners who got swept away by those swirling masses of angry waters, mud and rocks. The pilgrims did not deserve to suffer and neither did the local residents deserve to get pushed to corners of our consciousness. What is the update on those thousands of local residents present at Gaurikund, Rambara and Kedarnath. What about those present in Pithoragarh, at Gangotri, at Badrinath and those numerous other villages and towns which dot the devastated landscape? They seem to figure neither in the list of the dead nor the list of rescued. Surely, they couldn’t have vanished overnight!

As with any tragedy, questions on ‘could this have been averted’ started reverberating soon after the devastation had stuck. At one end, we have the rulers claiming that the devastation could not have been averted and at the other, the group of environmentalists pinning the blame on unplanned ‘development’. Sadly, lack of sensitivity seems to bind both these stands – the rulers stand indicating brazen disregard for common sense and the environmentalists ‘I told you so’ stance being a little too smug to be palatable.

And yes, it is true that motor cars clog the highways and leave behind a trail of empty chips packs, pet bottles and general refuse. However, it is truer that any attempt to clamp down the number of pilgrims the way many environmentalists are suggesting, will not impact those who dirty the hills. The well off will still come – for their share of darshan and if nothing else, for fun. What it will certainly impact is that multitude from all parts of the country which saves for years for the yatra, that which performs arduous trek on foot simply because it cannot afford a pony and sleeps in buses for it cannot afford hotels.

While it may not be possible to prevent natural calamities, it is certainly possible to plan for mitigation and even more critically, adhere to norms which will minimize casualties. One does not need to be an engineer to realize that structures constructed on pillars and platforms reclaimed from mountainsides and overhanging river banks are fragile and prone to collapsing. Likewise, any person concluding that the cumulative impact of kilometers of tunneling across mountains could lead to loosening of rocks and soil would only be someone with common sense and not an Einstein. Certainly, human activity has contributed to the disaster. It was not many months back that flash floods had hit Uttarkashi or when cloudburst had damaged Rudraprayag. The damage was high then and has multiplied exponentially now. Sadly again, no lessons will be learnt. Across the country, the burgeoning growth of cities and towns has made them sitting ducks for disaster. Our own capital city has seen court sanctioned encroachment of the Yamuna floodplains while Rajarhat has come up choking the water outlets of Kolkata. Who will be to blame if God forbid, these cities get flooded as a result of a deluge?

That said, the story of Uttarakhand cannot be dismissed as a tragedy compounded by human greed. The region is desperately poor and the images of young kids hauling fodder over long distances and running dangerously after speeding cars asking for 1 rupee are nothing if not a testimony to the financial state of the people. Concern for environment pales into insignificance if the trade off is a decent human existence. The Char Dham Yatra presented the only opportunity for many locals to make their earnings for the year. The burgeoning of hotels, rest houses, dhabas only indicate existence of demand and where demand exists, the human brain devises ingenious means to meet it. Add personal need to human ingenuity and you have a situation where people will find ways to disregard governmental norms.

It is more than likely that the current tragedy of Uttarakhand is being seen as a god-send by those who blast mountains, dam rivers back to back and create rickety buildings on fragile mountain scopes. After all, a relief and rehabilitation effort in India presents immense opportunity of both rent-seeking and legal business profits. Is it any wonder that Indians love a good calamity?

Giving credit where none is due!

Tucked in corners of some newspapers today was a small news item. ‘Ram Navami not celebrated in Ayodhya’. The small reports explain that owing to a 19 year Supreme Court order, which prohibited religious activity in the 67 acres plot adjoining the Ram Janmabhoomi Temple, the District Administration prohibited observance of the festivities this occasion. Strange are the ways of our rulers. A court ruling had supposedly been violated 18 times in the last 18 years, starting from 1994 when the passions over the temple restoration on one hand and belligerent secularism on the other were still high. Yet, the state administration under Mulayam Singh Yadav allowed celebration of Ram Navami at Janmabhoomi and the age old tradition continued without a break.

A moot point to be noted here is that the celebrations used to be observed in the areas adjoining the mosque, primarily near the Ram Chabootra and the offerings made at Sita Ki Rasoi, areas which were not a part of the disputed land and had been in possession and worship of Hindus for centuries. It was these among the many properties gradually acquired by the VHP led Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas and later taken over by the Government. That the then ruling of Supreme Court in clubbing this land with the core temple for matters of litigation was curious without doubt, it seems curiouser that an annual event which had been performed for ages and even after the reclamation of the temple was prohibited all of a sudden.

This act follows the UP Government’s stoppage of the longest running Ramlila at Ayodhya by that most simple of means, simply depriving it of funds. Very certainly, the twin acts, the first much more serious than the other are neither isolated nor innocuous. The SP Government, buffeted by a belligerent Muslim community demanding a greater pound of flesh for their support and accusations of being inept in handling of communal riots (which incidentally had much more Hindu casualties), what better way to signal to the bellicose Muslim that it stands with it shoulder to shoulder in its wars. After all, wasn’t it the SP (then Janata Dal) which ordered the cold blooded massacre of unarmed Kar Sevaks on two separate occasions in 1990?

However, this is the SP, an offshoot of that cabal of former socialists who jettisoned their socialist legacies to embrace an electorally rewarding but highly toxic philosophy of blatant minority appeasement. So successful have they been that the original fountainhead of this philosophy, the Congress (I), with able guidance from its foreign born supremo was forced to join this race of competitive appeasement of only one segment of our Nation.

But, what about our communal parties and lunatic groups aka the BJP and the VHP? The former hijacked a movement launched by the latter to reap electoral benefits while the latter lost control of a mass mobilization which could actually have yielded results. The BJP is known by various monikers - the Indian Ku Ku Klux clan, the Hindu Supremacist party, the Far Right Party of India and so on. The VHP has lesser luck and is nowadays simply described a group of lumpen elements, those Hindu fundamentalists who only engage in moral policing. Hardly has a squeak been uttered on the new developments by those who had taken up cudgels on behalf of Rama not so long ago, in the process promising to apply balm to our damaged psyche.

While the label of a Hindu party has stuck to the BJP, what exactly is Hindu about the BJP? Post the agenda on Ram Temple liberation, what has the central leadership of the BJP done in the last two decades which would justify its reputation or notoriety? The last elections which were fought on the matters revolving around the Hindutva agenda were the assembly polls of 1993 and to a small extent in the Maharashtra assembly polls of 1995.  The 5 General Elections in between 1996 and 2009 had only one conspicuous aspect on Hindutva – its absence! True, at the grass-roots, the average BJP worker believes in the agenda which attracted him/her to the party in the first place and still, hoping against hope, dreams of a day when the Nation will deal with its people on equal terms. But that is only the average worker! Since 1995, BJP’s central leadership has steadily moved away from what they proclaimed and has used every available soap (even Jinnah Brand) to scrub themselves clean of the stain of past ‘sins’. If they do manage to come close to power, another soap, proselytizer family scion Jagan Mohan Reddy, will be used remove some more old stains. 

Then we have our flavor of the season, Narendra Modi – the Hindu Hriday Samrat! One will be excused if he gets an impression that our mainstream media is desperately short of people who are discerning, those who can observe and analyse and then report. It is true that Narendra Modi appealed to the Hindu hurt in 2002 elections, which followed the riots triggered by the ghastly burning of innocent men, women and children by marauding Muslim mobs at Godhra.  

But that was 2002. By 2004, Narendra Modi had decided that he had no further use of those emotions which led him to power and not only were the Hindu grass root organizations steadily squeezed and made defunct Modi sidelined all those who had pronounced Hindutva sympathies; Gujarat is probably the only state where such a large number of people have been convicted for participation in communal rights. Strangely, or perhaps not so much, even though the riots had over 30% Hindu casualty with over 40,000 Hindus taking refuge in relief camps, except for the Godhra train burning accused, hardly any Muslim rioter figures in the list of convicts. Does it indicate that only Hindus rioted and that the Hindus dead, either got killed by other Hindus or committed suicide, only to give a bad name to the hapless Muslims of Gujarat? But, selective justice is a proven way of endearing oneself to the bully. An appeal for death penalty to Mayaben Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi is only another step towards that journey of finding acceptance where he is shunned. Modi’s drive against roadside encroachments swallowed temples, but stopped when Muslims rioted at Vadodara. Certainly not an act of a fanatic Hindutvavadi! Why is the media then hell bent to anointing him with honorifics he clearly has not striven for?

What exactly had Narendra Modi done in the last decade to justify the title of Hindu Hriday Samrat? True, he has achieved a lot and will at least provide a solid alternate to this utterly corrupt and inept UPA Leadership. People may or should vote for Modi (or whosoever the NDA Prime Ministerial Candidate is), if for nothing else, simply to punish the Congress for what it has gifted us!

But, the point under discussion – Is the BJP a Hindu party or is Narendra Modi’s moniker of Hindu Hriday Samrat justified. Sadly or otherwise, the answer is an emphatic no. These are people who have been working hard to obliterate their old links and claims to fame (or infamy). So, why credit them with emotions they don’t possess? It is then, perhaps poetic justice that all their efforts have not yet succeeded in winning a seat on the high table of secularism (as it is practiced in India).

Show me the man...and I will show you the Law

A group of people commit murder and mayhem. A friend of theirs knows of the plans and helps them to safekeep the arms and ammunition meant for this act and in the process treats himself to some of the grenades and an assault rifle. Another person, a woman, handles these arms before they finally reach this fiend.

The slaughter done, the henchmen move away to safer lands while this friend remains their friend.  Unfortunately, the police sniff out the perpetrators and this friend too gets implicated, arrested and jailed. Only, this friend happened to be a Bollywood star, son of successful Bollywood stars who transitioned as successful politicians. So, not very long after his incarceration, he gets bail while most of the others apprehended for either committing, abetting or having knowledge of this carnage deservedly continue to serve time in prison.

Curiously, while all the other accused including the woman handler were convicted under TADA, this son of destiny was convicted only under Arms Act, which ensured that the punishment handed out to him would be lesser in quantum. Then, the highest court of this land reduced quantum of his punishment to the bare minimum prescribed under law! But worse was to come – his Bollywood fraternity striking up a powerful chorus in his support; politicians falling over each other to hand out good character certificates for him and an ex Supreme Court judge, now more famous than he ever was, pleading for clemency on grounds of his playing a role in some movie on Mahatma Gandhi! It probably escaped this ex-distinguished gent that this same accused had played a criminal in many of his movies. Does that mean that he be punished for those celluloid crimes?

Sympathising with a person is one thing but trying to unduly influence public policy is a different ballgame altogether. In the instant case, a pardon to this criminal will mean that each and every convict be pardoned for each of them has spent many more years in prison and have undergone as much, if not more of mental agony in the twenty year long conviction process. Even more seriously, this pardon would mean that there would be very few crimes which would demand punishment. For, on the scales of justice, few crimes committed by individuals would equal the act of a war unleashed on unsuspecting civilians, destroying lives of those who died and those who survived. Why should a roadside rowdy or a bootlegger then be punished when his crimes pale into insignificance when compared to this carnage?

The saving grace of this nauseating spectacle of the elite and the ruling classes conspiring to help out of their own is the visible lack of public support for this ill-advised drive. For a Nation prone to deifying celluloid heroes and vapid sportsmen, it is remarkable that not only are there no processions of fans demanding pardon, online discussion forums and comment boards across the web display a rare unanimity of opinion in wanting the sentence to be executed.

Public opinion is notoriously fickle but for now, it seems to be the only bet which may prevent the elite from playing with the law yet again.

For details of Sanjay Dutt’s role in the blasts, read here