Let me try to summarize the points discussed in this thread (as per my understanding) and give my response to each: The questions to be considered:
1) Are the people and police justified in becoming suspicious of a stranger (that too from another state) settling in a rural surrounding, and getting visitors from abroad? Is it a natural response or an indication of a deeper (cultural?) malaise? 2) Does the 'Muslim' identity of the gentlemen play any part in fuelling suspicion or rumour? 3) Is the police's response justified - in other words, was it an over reaction, was it prompted by anti-Muslim bias and whether the gentleman's constitutional rights were violated? Here are my responses: 1) I think people are justified in becoming suspicious. Mainly because people are by and large suspicious of strangers. There is nothing wrong in that - of course, those at the receiving end may feel quite differently. I personally do not enjoy being looked upon with suspicion, because I know that I am, well, a law abiding citizen who can't think of harming a fly :) But how do strangers know about my noble, Gandhi like character? At any rate, I will not act much differently in similar situations - if anything, I would be even more paranoid. So is it a natural reaction? Absolutely. Does it 'look nice'? No, unambiguously. Should we do anything about it? Not on my corpse - the consequences of criminalizing thought are too frightening even to think of (didn't Communism teach us anything?) 2) It surely did. Is it good? Not really. Is it 'labeling' a whole community? Not at all - in any village, you will see people not only not suspicious of Muslims, but living in perfect harmony with them. The fact is that, some Muslims, misguided and brainwashed no doubt, do indulge in acts of terrorism, and some Muslims justify those acts based on Islamic scriptures and aggressively use the Muslim identity to swell the ranks of the terrorist outfits. The difficulty is that there are no other reliable means to identify these bad apples - they come in all shapes: from billionaire scions to doctors to financial analysts. The only identity perhaps is that most of them are well educated and come from middle to upper middle class background. The so called 'Islamophobia' is in a large measure due to this. Is this prejudice? I am not sure - it looks more like 'post-judice' to me. Now the question: do Tamil Brahmins settling in similar surroundings invite suspicion to a similar degree - not at the moment, but surely they will, if Tamil Brahmins start blowing up commuter trains, justify those acts on some Brahministic scriptures and recruit Brahmin youth using the Tamil Brahmin identity. By the way, Tamilians acting like the gentleman in question in early 90's would have invited much more suspicion then. Do you remember a time when Sikhs were looked upon with suspicion? These are certainly not good things, but part of the natural scheme of things. Again, the only way to suppress people's suspicious minds is to institute thought policing. 3) I think this is the crux of the problem. Getting suspicious of somebody doesn't mean barging into their dwellings at the dead of the night. Feeling hatred for your neighbor doesn't mean you kidnap his son. But the police's behavior is symptomatic of a larger problem with law enforcement. If you become a suspect in some crime, the police's behavior to you would be very similar - that is, this problem - that of crude and illegal methods of investigation - is not limited to inquiries about possible terrorist activities. There is a lot to write about police reforms. There are any number of non-intrusive methods of investigation that could have been employed. That they didn't do so, is not indicative of any bias, but of incompetence, hegemony of authority and all that is wrong with our colonial style of policing. Best regards, Murali. On 7/31/07, Ranjit Ranjit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. - Joseph Stalin To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)! - Che Guevara -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ greenyouth mailinglist is the activist support mailinglist for kerala To post to this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
