I/II. http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/kairana-as-kashmir-the-bjps-farce-with-impending-tragedy-1419578?pfrom=home-topstories
In Modi And Amit Shah Speeches, The 2 Sides Of The BJP Mihir Swarup Sharma Salary Credited! Take the Wise Step Now, Start a SIP (ABM MyUniverse®) EMAIL PRINT 58 COMMENTS For a shining example of the Narendra Modi-era BJP's ability to be two things at once, look no further than the parivartan rally in Allahabad that effectively launched the Uttar Pradesh election campaign. At practically the same time you could hear, with unusual clarity, the two sides of the BJP: Narendra Modi, the "development-minded" Prime Minister, declare that UP just needed to grow once to catapult India into the first world; and Amit Shah, the "tough-guy" party president, further the party's core agenda of ensuring that every Hindu remembers that they are constantly threatened by Muslims. Almost simultaneously with Modi reminding his party to be committed to "service, balance, restraint, coordination, constructiveness, sensitivity and dialogue", Shah gleefully broke several of these Seven Commandments by warning the voters of UP that they had better sweep the BJP to power in Lucknow unless they wanted a repeat of the "exodus" of Hindus from the town of Kairana. It was an "eye-opener", he said, "no ordinary event". What earth-shattering event was Shah talking about? Well, the sequence of events is instructive. More than a week ago, the local member of parliament for the west UP district where Kairana is located, one Hukum Singh - watch the name, he's both villain and hero of this story - declared that Hindus were leaving the area, changing its demography permanently. The BJP set up a fact-finding mission to investigate Hukum Singh's startling claim. (With the attention to institutional strength for which the party is justly celebrated, it was reported at first that the team examining Hukum Singh's claims would be led by - Hukum Singh.) Singh's accusations certainly were startling. He said Hindu families had been forced to sell their property at reduced rates; that some were outright grabbed by Muslims; and that this process, which certainly sounded like ethnic cleansing the way he told it, was spreading from the town of Kairana to the surrounding countryside. Naturally, the Internet went mad. #StopHinduExodus and various other such phrases trended on Twitter. Tens of thousands of young men online had simultaneous aneurysms at the thought that this ethnic cleansing was being ignored by the mainstream media. Except of course for the television channel Zee News, which, with its trademark restraint and accuracy, spread the news far and wide. "You've heard of the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits," began the award-winning anchor. "But can you believe that Hindus are being forced to leave their homes barely 124 km from the nation's capital? The national media is ignoring it." He went on to claim that the proportion of Hindus in Kairana had dipped from 32 per cent to just eight per cent. I literally lost count of the number of times he said "Hindu" in a seven-minute segment. As is appropriate in a well-functioning republic, once something trends on Twitter, the awesome majesty of the Government of India steps in. The Union Minister Shripad Naik declared that Modi was watching matters himself, and that three Union Ministers would shortly travel to the small town to discover what happened (presumably by talking to Hukum Singh). The National Human Rights Commission, hated by the BJP during the previous government as being full of Congressi meddlers, but now of course proudly independent, demanded an explanation from UP's Chief Secretary and its Director General of Police, etc, etc. You see, for the BJP, this was a godsend. It fit perfectly into the narrative they prefer to craft: of Muslim thugs and terrorists intimidating good Hindu families and making "their own country" unsafe for Hindus. So the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's Joint Secretary declared that it was "jihadi elements" who were behind the exodus, and that they were protected by the "anti-Hindu" leadership of the Samajwadi Party. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's leading intellectual, Rakesh Sinha, went further, and blamed Jinnah, according to news agency ANI: "Any intervention would be welcomed to rehabilitate Hindus there. It is not only the question of rehabilitation but also fighting the mindset of Jinnah. It is a vestige of Jinnah which is creating such a situation. It is this ideology which parted the country in 1947." Kairana, he added helpfully, in case any newspaper was short of a sensational headline, was "becoming Kashmir". (Frankly, we should all be glad both Kairana and Kashmir start with K, given how compulsory alliteration is for the BJP these days.) Worst of all, to my mind - because it came from a man directly responsible for law and order in India - is the statement of the junior Home Minister Kiren Rijiju, who spoke of people having to leave their villages "in their own country". So the message was so clear it doesn't even deserve to be called subtext: Hindus "in their own country" are under threat from aggressive jihadi Muslims who want to turn Western UP into Kashmir. (And pinko liberal media in Delhi doesn't want you to know.) Unfortunately for the junior Home Minister, the BJP president, various functionaries of the Sangh Parivar, and all those apoplectic tweeters, the story soon fell apart. The first few reporters to reach Kairana discovered that the place was in fact in the grip of various local gangs, and the law and order situation was terrible - but there wasn't really a Hindu vs Muslim angle to it. According to one report, at least 150 Muslim families had moved out of the crime-hit town too. Then the list of ethnically-cleansed Hindus that Hukum Singh released was discovered to have various cringe-inducing errors - people who were dead, or still in the town, or had left a decade earlier. News reports began to be filled with delightful quotes from locals, along the lines of "What, him? No he hasn't gone anywhere, unless it's the liquor store. He's bound to be back after dark", and that kind of thing. The upshot of all this was that just as a high-powered BJP team arrived in the area, poor Hukum Singh had to bend to the facts and say that he was shocked - shocked! - that people were giving a "communal angle" to things. "This is not a question of Hindus and Muslims," said the poor MP. "It is about law and order." This, incidentally, is why Hukum Singh is both villain and hero of this story - for, after all, who in today's politics is actually willing to change their mind when presented with facts? Not Twitter, which, when I last checked, was trending #MediaLiesOnKairana. A warning, though. Indian political history is backwards - it can frequently repeat itself - the first time as farce, but the second time as tragedy. The farce that was the BJP's attempt to create a Kashmir out of Kairana has genuinely dangerous implications for the future. Because the fallout of the Muzaffarnagar riots a few years in ago is indeed a move towards ghettoisation in Western UP. Communities that were once integrated are separating from each other - which is, of course, just what the BJP wants. A time may well come, unless action is taken soon, when Muslim and Hindu-majority localities actually become homogenous in terms of religion, no-go areas for people of the other creed. What we just saw was the harbinger of what will in fact happen unless UP politics reverses course. Both the BJP and the SP benefit from polarising voters. The SP needs to keep Muslim voters on its side and prevent them from defecting to Mayawati - which means they need to feel insecure, and confined to their own ghettoes. And the BJP needs to remind Hindus that they are constantly under threat, and that only the Sangh Parivar is awake to the dangers posed to Hindus in "their own country". Shah's party will carry this message aloft on their trishuls through India's largest state - the world's fourth-largest democracy - as it prepares for its election. And in the middle of it all, Narendra Modi will talk serenely about development. (Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.) II. http://thewire.in/42647/up-is-not-assam-and-kairana-may-not-be-another-muzaffarnagar/ CRIME UP is Not Assam, and Kairana May Not be Another Muzaffarnagar BY GAURAV VIVEK BHATNAGAR ON 14/06/2016 The BJP’s reliance on divisive politics over Kairana may end up strengthening the BSP. After its thumping election victory in Assam, where it successfully managed to play the twin cards of development and polarisation (over the perceived threat from Bangladeshi migrants), the Bharatiya Janata Party can be excused for believing the ‘Kairana story’ will allow it do divide voters on religious lines in Uttar Pradesh in the same way that it believes the Muzaffarnagar riots did. But in equating Kairana with Muzaffarnagar, or Uttar Pradesh with Assam, the party could just be making a huge mistake. It is once again trying to build up a situation of fear psychosis among the Hindus in the state by presenting the apparent out-migration of families from Kairana as one similar to the forced exodus of Hindus from Kashmir. Several right-leaning channels have been doing stories to build this argument. Blinded by the urge to repeat its magical performance of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, in which it had won 71 of the 80 seats, what the BJP is overlooking is the fact that a tirade against the Muslims will prove counter-productive for the assembly elections due next year, . At the BJP national executive meet, party president Amit Shah had also attacked the Akhilesh Yadav government for the way it handled the situation in Kairana. While ahead of the “year of challenges’’ – 2017 – Shah has been careful in his selection of words and names of communities while driving home the point, other party leaders have spoken their hearts out and not left an iota of doubt about where they stand on the issue. Many of the party leaders have termed Kairana as a “Kashmir in the making”, giving the impression that Hindus are being deliberately driven out of there. At the forefront of this campaign has been BJP MP Hukum Singh who claimed that 346 families had moved out of the township as they feared a threat to their lives. The list contains the names of several persons who are dead or migrated in order to better their prospects. In view of Singh’s allegations,however, the National Human Rights Commission had on June 9 ordered a probe into the alleged exodus of Hindus from the area due to fear of criminals belonging to the minority community. The party state unit announced on June 12 that an eight-member team, comprising four members of parliament, has been formed to probe the allegations. Subsequently, at the BJP national executive in Allahabad too it was announced that a team has been probed to investigate the issue. While the issue has been covered at length by several news channels and it has indeed come to light that many Hindu families have migrated from Kairana, the reasons have been many. The issue is more of a law and order problem than a communal one. The NHRC notice also made a mention of this aspect, when it said: “According to the complaint dated June 10, 2016, a woman belonging to Kashyap caste was abducted, gang-raped and killed, yet no action has been taken by the police against the offenders. Two of the businessmen, Shankar and Raju, both brothers, were shot dead by the criminals in broad daylight in the market when they did not pay protection money…” Television crews who visited Kairana reported how many of the houses in several localities like Mohalla Kayasthwada, Jain Mohalla and even Teachers’ Colony were lying abandoned as their residents had moved out. Many of them also had sale signs or messages painted on them with contact numbers. Most of the traders in Kairana spoke about ransom calls and notes becoming more common and police not acting on their complaints. Some even charged that their farms, shops and properties were being grabbed, but there was little or no confirmation of this. While a bullet mark outside the shop of Shiv Kumar and Rajender, both of whom who ran a successful iron rod business from Panipat Road and were killed in 2013, still bears testimony to the terror unleashed by gangs of extortionists, a close reading of the statements of their family members as also other traders reveals that the problem lies with the Akhilesh Yadav government’s poor handling of law and order rather than of any communal plot. As a former employee of the brother duo said, the criminals would just leave behind a slip with the extortion demand and then kill to show that they meant business. While much of this is true, it is equally true that most of the Hindu families had left Kairana over a long period of time and even around 150 Muslim families have moved out of the township in search greener and safer pastures. Kairana has a few active gangs which not only extort from Hindus but also Muslims. Two of these gangs are led by Mukim Kala and Furqan, who are both in jail right now. By giving a law and order situation a communal colour, the BJP is gambling on religious polarisation as a poll strategy. Not surprisingly, the Kairana discourse is creating a sense of insecurity among the Muslims in Uttar Pradesh. It is also taking the focus away from development issues, which the saffron party had earlier described as its main poll plank. In the context of UP, it should be remembered that Dalits constitute about 21% of the population and Muslims about 19%. While one survey in 2014 suggested that about 10% of the state’s Muslims had voted for the BJP in the general election, the party’s reliance on divisive politics will not only cost it this new-found support but also end up brightening the chances of Mayawati, who this time around is hoping to be able to do a repeat of 2007 and that too without much of her famed social engineering. -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
