India In Anguish
BY R.K.MISRA
India today is a sitting duck. Like a
turkey voting for an early Christmas.
Let’s sample a recent day’s national headlines. It no longer
informs. It screams. Hatred in Mumbai. Violence in New Delhi. Fanaticism in
Bengaluru. Punjab on the boil. Protests in Kashmir. Trucker killed in Udhampur
over rumours of cow slaughter. The reference is to the storming of the Cricket Control Board meeting discussing
an Indo-Pak cricket series by the Shiv Sainiks in Mumbai, Hindu Sena workers
smearing black paint on the face of J&K legislator Abdul Rashid for ‘disrespecting’
the cow, in Delhi and BJP activists harassing an Australian couple for sporting
a tattoo of a goddess in Bengaluru. For Rashid this is his second experience of
violence. The first time over he was assaulted within the august Jammu and
Kashmir Assembly by ruling BJP legislators themselves. The Shiv Sainiks have
already done the smearing act with former L.K. Advani aide, Sudheendra
Kulkarni. Re-wind by two days and you have the right honourable BJP chief
minister of Haryana, Manoharlal Khattar graciously decreeing that the muslims ‘could’
live in India but will have to give up eating beef. As if the Indian Constitution
has decreed him the right to decide. However, V.Murlidharan, Kerala BJP chief is ‘magnanimous’. He states that they won’t oppose
beef eating in their state. But then, there is the RSS mouthpiece, Panchjanya which virtually justifies
killing of Mohammed Akhlaq in Dadri over
beef consumption rumours and states that
the holy scriptures, the Vedas, mandate killing of those who slaughter cows. The
RSS promptly disowns it’s organ while the editor parrots the standard line ‘views
are personal’. The hindu Sena chief says he is ex-RSS and the RSS prachar
pramukh, Manmohan Vaidya demurs. ‘Blackened’
Rashid wants to meet the Prime Minister but gets no response.
Elsewhere in Bengaluru, leader of the BJP opposition. K.S. Eshwarappa
pleads helplessness if the questioning lady journalist were to be dragged and
raped. Or so he tells her. In Delhi they have
already accomplished the feat earlier and recently with a girl child as
well. Next door neighbour Haryana’s Faridabad has already set a house ablaze
with two dalit children in revenge attacks by upper castes. In far-off Bihar in the throes of a turmoil-filled
election, the country’s prime minister Narendra Modi and
it’s one time railway minister Lalu Yadav are exchanging filth without
remorse or rancor. All over the country over thirty distinguished authors and poets have returned
their Akademi awards over the killing of
three rationalists by suspected hardline
hindu elements and the uncultured reaction from India’s culture minister Mahesh
Sharma is “let the writers stop writing then we will see”. Offcourse, he has
now been rewarded with a bigger official residence for his shenanigans.
It
finally takes an anguished President Pranab Mukherjee’s critical refrain at the
dismaying drama to make Prime Minister
Narendra Modi speak.”What the President said
is right”, he says mouthing pious platitudes after an overdrawn bout of
selective silence. No response. The President cautions again on the pitfalls of
rising intolerance. This time Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley disapproves
of vandalism.”Streets can’t decide ties with neighbours”, he says even as the
National Commission for Minorities (NCM) member ,after a fact finding visit,
terms the Dadri killing as involving precision
planning. BJP national chief, Amit Shah, has already brushed aside his party
government’s responsibility, terming law
and order a state subject. Was it not so when Modi was the chief minister of
Gujarat and Shah his Home minister. Both blamed the UPA ruled Centre for
everything from rise in vegetable prices to fall in cotton support ones. The
self righteous finance minister of India, Jaitley now sermonizes everyone from
the CAG and the Rajya Sabha to trade, business and even the Supreme Court. He
counsels the constitutional authority, Comptroller and Auditor General of
India (CAG) not to ‘sensationalise’ it’s findings, questions the constitutional
sanctity of the Rajya Sabha, terms
author’s protests as a ‘paper rebellion’ and the Supreme Court verdict
on the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) as the ‘the tyranny of
the un-elected’. He seems to be playing God almighty looking down on his
subjects on earth! One needs to remind him, that though elected to the Rajya Sabha
from Gujarat ,he once represented scamster
Ketan Parekh in 2005 against the interests of
thousands who had lost their all
when the Madhavpura Mercantile Cooperative Bank (MMCB) of Ahmedabad went bust. NDA
fellow traveler Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has already gone on record to state
that BJP motormouths are denting the image of the government eroding it’s net worth.
Phew……..
Seventeen
months in the saddle(May26,2014), riding astride an overwhelming mandate for growth and
development, by the aspiring young, and the
crestfallen old, Modi’s is a
government that has lost it’s way. The
Prime Minister talks decentralization and concentrates power in the PMO
through 28 hand picked and selected
officers from Gujarat. G.C.Murmu is the latest from his CMO days to move over to the Enforcement
Directorate and there should be new developments in the National Herald case
soon. ED head for Gujarat and Maharashtra J.P.Singh was raided by the CBI at
the behest of the PMO. And who were feeling the heat?.The bulk of the hawala
operators, many of them already behind bars. It was they who had complained
against Singh who had tightened the nuts on them.
The
media mileage is all very fine but it
will be interesting to follow the case with
the CBI’s track record being what it is
and Modi himself leading a diatribe against it during his chief
ministerial days. With Modi in the driver’s seat, what has changed in the CBI
except that cases pursued with vigour during the previous government are now falling like nine pins?.
Another
high profile case for which snide reports let it be known that the PMO provided
the inputs is that of Ashok Singhvi, IAS 1983 batch ,the principal secretary, mines,
Rajasthan government. The charge was that money
had been collected on his behalf from a Chittorgarh mine owner for
re-starting the mine. The mine owner did
not tattle. The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) processed information on
it’s own. Interestingly, the operation was carried out by IGP, Dinesh M.N., a
Rajasthan cadre IPS officer of the 1995 batch. Dinesh spent seven years in jail
in connection with the Sohrabuddin Sheikh
alleged fake encounter case .Perusal of documents of the case point to
suspected involvement of a clutch of Gujarat and Rajasthan police officers at
the behest of the Rajasthan marble lobby to liquidate Sohrabuddin Sheikh
and later his wife as well as friend
Tulsiram Prajapati. Co-accused in the case included the then Gujarat home
minister and now BJP president Amit
Shah, DIG Vanzara and then SP Rajkumar Pandian besides a host of others. The
then Rajasthan home minister, Gulabchand Katara was also named by the CBI in
it’s chargesheet. Both the ministers were subsequently discharged. All spent
extended time behind bars though Shah was the first one to come out. Both Singhvi
and his deputy, additional director, mining, Pankaj Gehlot had joined issues
with the Centre on it’s mining guidelines issued on October 30,2014. Both found
themselves arrested on September 17,2015.As for Dinesh M.N., the change of
government at the Centre did him a world of good. An SP when arrested, he was
promoted DIG and then IGP with retrospective effect from May 9,2014.The
notification for this was released on January 23 this year and he was released
on bail four days before being re-instated.
Transparency
should be the norm, the Prime Minister states and turns his administration stone opaque.
The press is barred and officers threatened with the worst if they speak to the
media.
The
government of the day is in a terrible
hurry to re-write history. Not by
scripting it’s promised new agenda for development but by
expending colossal energy to erase the old. And that includes the Mahatma. The Hindu
Mahasabha has announced nationwide plans
to celebrate November 15, the day
Nathuram Godse, the killer of Mahatma Gandhi was hanged as ‘balidan diwas’ (martyrdom day) and not a single
BJP/RSS leader has anything to say, not even the great gujarati pride.
On the other hand, the might of the BJP led Anandiben Patel
government in Gujarat slaps sedition charges on Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS)
leader, Hardik Patel twice and for waving the national flag upside down. Interestingly
the Gujarat and Delhi governments were both hauled before the Delhi High Court
in May 2013 for wrongly depicting the national flag in their advertisements. Punjab
minister Bikram Majithia unfurled the national flag upside down at an official
flag hoisting ceremony this independence day and deputy commissioner Ravi
Bhagat and Amritsar police chief Jatinder Singh saluted the upside down flag as
well. Never heard of any action against them. Earlier on September 23, in
Gujarat charges of sedition had
similarly been slapped on a relatively unknown PAAS leader Nilesh Ervadia for
circulating ‘abusive’ messages on social media about prime minister Modi, BJP
chief Amit Shah and chief minister Patel. Still earlier on October 29,2008, the
Modi government in Gujarat had picked up
VHP secretary Ashwin Patel on sedition charges for sending defamatory SMSs
against the chief minister, among other things.
If the
sedition stick can be flashed to protect the image of lesser minions seeking
to bring disrepute to national pride, why
the stone dead silence on an organization trying to celebrate the father of the
nation’s killer as ‘balidan diwas’. Let alone sedition, this is treachery to
the nation. It is an issue of national
honour worthy of each one of India’s 1,282,390,303
citizens and calls for action by authority. Regardless of the price!
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