---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Lesley Esteves <[email protected]> Date: 4 April 2014 17:10 Subject: [whyremember:781] Article on upcoming elections by Firdaus Kanga, pls forward widely
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Firdaus Kanga <[email protected]> Date: Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 9:42 PM Subject: Article To: Firdaus Kanga <[email protected]> When I saw Baba Ramdev embracing Narendra Modi I wondered how he ever managed to get his arms around the man! Soon I stopped laughing. I had remembered the paradigm of Attila and the Witch-doctor. For centuries in our country and all over the world the god-man has given his moral sanction to the political leader and in return has received protection, publicity and wealth. While this has continued in post-independence India at a regional level, where politicians queue up for the blessing of the latest Baba or Swami in vogue with his electorate, India has essentially as a state remained secular, as our Constitution defines our nation, Bharat, that is India. Bharat was of course deliberately chosen instead of Hindustan to distinguish it from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and to assert our identity as secular. When Baba Ramdev together with fanatics from other religions approached the Supreme Court to overturn the decriminalisation of LGBT life that the Naz Foundation had achieved in the Delhi High court, it was a deliberate and direct attempt to inject the virus of private belief into public life. Baba Ramdev has of course claimed to be able to "cure same-sex love and desire" and the president of the BJP Raj Nath Singh has said that the ruling is in tune with India's culture, by which he and the party he leads mean Hindutva. While Narendra Modi has kept uncharacteristically silent in order not to alienate the liberal voter he is so ardently hoping to deceive. We, LGBT folk have had to struggle for our right in every democracy in the world. London where I live saw its first gay wedding only this month and in the United States sodomy remains an offence in many of the states which have gone out of their way to ban same-sex relationships. There is nothing unique or distinct about shunning LGBT people in India. Uganda only recently criminalised them. Ironically, Baba Ramdev and Modi's BJP are trying to turn India into a mirror-image of the Islamiststates. In Iran and much of the Arab world homosexuality is punishable by death and LGBT people are regularly arrested, tortured and even raped, sexual violence being in their eyes the ultimate humiliation. The BJP claims that it has no party position on the recent re-criminalisation of people like us, playing good cop to Baba Ramdev's bad cop. The vice-president of the party says that he believes in the restoration of LGBT rights, in which case why does he keep the company of the those who so obviously dispose and detest us on so basic a right as the liberty of the individual? Does any serious commentator believe that the BJP is neutral on the subject of our rights? The BJP is heavily into censorship, the latest example being a book about female sexuality by an American academic that Penguin India had to withdraw, again on an application to the Supreme Court. It has invented the myth of the Babri Masjid being the birth place of Ram and in its attempts to destroy the masjid created a nationwide open season on Indian muslims where at least two thousand muslims in the slums of Bombay, where I was at the time, were murdered. Not to mention many other parts of India, including Surat where mobs forced Muslim men to take down their trousers so that they could know if they were circumcised and Muslim. This of course was a practice commonly followed by the Nazis in Europe to identify Jewish men and their families. This was followed by the revenge killings in Gujarat, something that is documented very well in Rakesh Sharma's documentary film the Final Solution. Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat allowed this to happen. As an observation by the Supreme Court said that he had behaved as Nero did, by looking away from the events happening all around him. BJP activists were applauding every murder and encouraging their supporters to target the next Muslim household in any street. That fifty-nine Hindus had been murdered by Islamist terrorists in Godra cannot possibly be an excuse for innocent Muslims who had nothing to do with the terrorists whatsoever to have been slaughtered in such a vicious massacre, presided over as Chief Minister by Narendra Modi. I am writing this because it is time for us Indians to elect a new Parliament. Modi and the BJP are offering the Gujarat model, typically fascist in that it welcomes industrialists and makes investing in Gujarat very easy, in return the industrialists remain silent about the political horror that is gone on under its government. Muslims are regularly discriminated against, kept in poverty and fear by threats from the BJP's bully-boys. To my shame, as a Parsi belonging to the tiniest communal minority one of our heroes Ratan Tata, who has built a huge organisation, the profits of which go mostly to charity, shook hands with Mr Modi and chose to produce the Tata's iconic small car called the Nano in Gujarat. At the meeting Ratan Tata joked and said that Nano was not that different from NaMo, which as almost everyone knows is Modi's nickname. For those of us who are politically conscious the fascist nature of the BJP is very clear and it is unlikely that we would vote for the BJP. The crucial thing is for us to talk to and convince our families, our friends, everyone who loves and respects us, to do the same. I am not a member of the Congress or a publicist for that party but I must say, from what I have seen Sonia and Rahul Ghandhi were the first people to come out against the re-criminilisation by the Supreme Court. Followed swiftly by Kapil Sibal, the Law Minister, who actually suggested that the best and safest thing to do was to ask the Supreme Court to review its judgement. And that the government should issue an ordinance immediately to protect people like us from blackmail and bullying and outright violence. I have not heard Arvind Kejriwal speak out against this moral outrage. The last time I heard him speak in Varanasi on my television, was to say that he had been an atheist all his life until the success of his party convinced him that this was a "kudrat ka karishma", whether it was by the blessings of Bhagwan, Allah or Jesus. I will end by paraphrasing the words of the good German who protested against Hitler and was sent to Auschwitz where he was killed. What he said in effect was "when they came for the Muslims, I did not shout, I was not a Muslim. When they came for the homosexuals, I did not shout, I was not a homosexual. When they came for me, there was nobody left to shout." When the Supreme Court re-criminalised us and said we were a minuscule minority, I think all of us in India would be wise to remember that the smallest minority of all is the individual. -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
