On Sunday 17 May 2009 3:53:08 pm Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Are you joking? Or do you actually believe that? > Raising hindutva card - hell, any number of people will do that .. Shiv > will probably point you to a bunch of harmless people (and I have very dear > relatives who are card carrying bjp members). It takes a very special kind > of person indeed to countenance a pogrom. And that's what the gujarat riots > were, plain and simple. It is a political viewpoint that has existed at least from the time Gandhi was shot. Unfortunately in discussions such as these the expression "raising the Hindutva card" is used exacty in the sense of the act of raising a yellow card or a red card in a soccer match, after which the "marked" person who brings up the topic is branded an offender of a sort and a supporter of a murderer. For this reason, discussion progress no further in allowing someone (In this case Bharat Shetty) to put a viewpoint across. In other words, once a person is said to have "raised the Hindutva card" he must not be allowed to proceed further on pain of being dubbed a supporter of genocide and a cheerful bystander while pregnant Muslim women have their child ripped out of their belly by a frothing Hindu fanatic. All that this does is to stop the presenting of a viewpoint, but it does not alter the fact that there are, out in the community, certain people and certain red lines that cooperate to commit horrendous acts of murder and destruction. A frank exchange of views is avoided by the calling of the card. There are two aspects to Modi and he and his supporters lose no opportunity to thumb their noses at people who keep getting worked up about his continued success in Gujarat. What is missed in this rhetoric is the rubbish that the so called "secular parties" are up to when it comes to Muslims. Hindus who claim to be secular and pointedly shiver with horror at Modis communalism are no better at doing anything for Muslims in India than Hindutvadis - and may actually be a lot worse than Modi. Whatever problems the "community of Hindus" may have - an overly exaggerated horror at "Hindutva" represents only ignorant lip service to Muslims. All the secular parties treat Muslims as a bloc or as a vote bloc. They do not really spend as much thought or effort as they ought to in improving Muslim neighborhoods and genuinely believe that Muslims are happy in their madrassas. Check this article http://www.deccanherald.com/content/1496/muslims-entitled-full-fledged-schools.html > 'Muslims are entitled to full-fledged schools, not madarsas' > Saturday, May 09, 2009, 1:30 [IST] > > > Muslims are entitled to full-fledged schools, not Madarsas. The government > engages two teachers with minimum pay for Madarsas and claims that it has > taken care of minority children. But the government is doing it with a > purpose, as engaging Urdu teachers in full-fledged schools or setting up > more schools in Muslim-dominated areas will be far more expensive than just > doling out a few thousand rupees for the Madarsas. The government should > not spend a single penny for the madarsas and let them be as they are. > Instead there should be more schools where a Muslim boy can sit with his > Hindu classmate and learn what every other child of his age is learning > elsewhere. Only then this exclusion, this ghettoisation of the Muslims will > come to an end. "Secular" Hindus who huff and puff and rant in horror at Hindutva are as much of a problem as Hindutva when it comes to the status of Muslims in India. But they somehow seem to imagine that if they express their horror at Hindutva sufficiently vehemently they are absolved of all responsibility of understanding what is actually happening. That understanding often never comes when discussions are scotched with an outporing of the memories of horror of some event or the other in what I see as an exaggerated sense of Hindu embrarrassment and apology about an event that they were not personally responsible. This is the precise behavior which has been dubbed as "pseudo-secularism" Why not sit back and listen to a person expressing a viewpoint without making a vigorous attempt at connecting him with murder? shiv
