Sunday, September 22, 2013

Why MODIfied India will give jitters to alienated Bharatwasis?

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Subject: Why MODIfied India will give jitters to alienated Bharatwasis?

Modi: Enemy at the Gates

Modi has arrived and arrived in style, notwithstanding the bombastic resistance from the Congress and their paid agents in the BJP and Media. Delhi is finally on NaMo’s radar and his troops can see the domes of South Block, which he will hopefully occupy by May 2014, if not earlier.

The political career of the senior BJP leadership is over. They did not see the writing on the wall and have now been removed by their cadres. The BJP President, Rajnath Singh, handled it well, but in hindsight, his efforts were completely unnecessary. The lesson for the future is to let the leadership come out through open internal elections where the village, district and the state level leaders vote. Had there been a contest to choose the PM candidate, it is evident that Modi would have easily vanquished the rest. Unanimity is not required. This is true democracy.

The Congress is notably jittery. During Modi’s recent visit to Jaipur, the Rajasthan CM had the electric supplies shut so that the village folk did not see the live telecast. Their impending doom will now translate into incoherent actions. Where in the world has anyone ever heard of an opposition leader, who is only a state CM, being discussed thoroughly be it TV, print media, cocktail circuits, vegetable vendors, taxi drivers etc. NaMo is taking away 80% of their time. Nobody wastes time on the ruling dispensation. Does anybody even discuss MMS, PC, SG, RG etc? The discussions on them are generally negative and the junta only wants to know if they are likely to go to jail.

From the Aam Admi’s point of view, NaMo had made an important statement on a Zee TV program “Kahiye Janab”. He stated: “*Na mein kahta hoon, na kisi ko kahne deta hoon*”. No wonder, the levels of corruption in Gujarat is comparable to that of Singapore.

Modi at the gates of Delhi augurs well for the Indian State.
a) Sycophancy and nepotism will soon be an era of the past.
b) Good bye to vote bank politics.
c) Bureaucrats will fall in line.
d) NGOs who operate from garages of Lutyens Delhi will have to move to safe havens in Congress ruled states.
e) Many newspapers will die. The advertising budget in Gujarat was reduced by 80%.
Expect the same by the Modi Government.
f) The Armed Forces will get their much cherished “Political Control”. Issues will be solved pronto before
any soldier can say “Jack Robinson”.
g) Along with Swamy and Jethmalani, most of the black money stowed abroad will be brought back. The Rupee will challenge the Dollar.
h) NO Income Tax as per Swamy’s statement.
i) Terrorists will now have a “maut ka saudagar”. The Congress has made India the most dangerous country after Iraq and Afghanistan.
j) The Pakis and Chinese may have already gone into a huddle.
k) Modi has a good memory. The Americans had better watch out.
l) J&K will finally be Indian Territory. Enough of Article 70.

An eminent General recently wrote an article “Death of Politics”. I disagree. Modi will bring in clean politics. He has no dependents or damaad to speak of. A bright future awaits a *Modi*fied India.

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MMS, the closet spiritualist

The widely respected economist and scholar has been credited with heralding a new era of economic liberalisation in India with his laissez-faire policy. Yet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been at the receiving end of late. Criticisms include use of adjectives like "ineffective", "pusillanimous" and "understated" to "spineless" and "puppet PM."

"It astonishes me that Manmohan Singh should talk so little and be so barely visible that we might be forgiven for thinking thatIndia has an imaginary Prime Minister," wrote a celebrity-journalist in his blog a few months ago.

It is difficult to believe that the architect of India’s laissez-faire could be all that vulnerable, naive or "imaginary". The non-committal, non-controversial and understated disposition that characterises the gentleman could be a veneer that conceals a far more evolved and enlightened approach towards his duties and responsibilities – in the current situation, as prime minister – that enables him to navigate life without much ado.

In a speech he gave at a public conclave held in the Capital, Manmohan Singh said: "I do not want India to be a super power; I just want India to stand in the comity of nations." So he doesn’t seem to display any signs of being power-needy.

Perhaps he has no dark side, then. Manmohan Singh could, in all likelihood, be an advanced spiritualist who perceives himself as having absolutely no stake – neither in the country, in the species nor in the planet! He also shows great resilience in adverse situations, whether in a political, social or economic exigency. To be detached like a yogi even while living among fellow beings in the rough and tumble of politics and economics is no easy task. Guru Nanak described such a one as ‘raj mein jog’ – that is, the one who can achieve enlightenment in civic life. He also said: "The lotus in the water is not wet / Nor the water-fowl in the stream. / If a man would live, but by the world untouched, / Meditate and repeat the name of the Lord Supreme."

Extolling the attributes of the one who has cultivated studied non-attachment to highs and lows, Guru Tegh Bahadur sang thus: "…He who has neither gluttony in his heart / Nor vanity nor attachment with worldly things, / He whom nothing moves, / Neither good fortune nor ill, / Who cares not for the world’s applause, / Nor its censure, / Who ignores every wishful fantasy / And accepts what comes his way as it comes… / He knows the righteous path…"

Some might conclude that Manmohan Singh’s proclivity for remaining a ‘Nirlep Narayan’ makes him out to be one without a stake and therefore he has nothing to win or lose. If he makes promises, they’re bound to be ones that concern issues that would get resolved if not now, later and if not later, even later, perhaps… or not.

It might not be in order to compare Manmohan Singh with King Janaka, who is the only one Krishna praises in the Bhagwad Gita for having transcended everything even while administering a kingdom. However, there are tantalizing similarities between the PM’s studied ‘indifference’ and the non-attachment and transcendence of someone like Janaka, that leads one to conclude that Manmohan Singh is laissez-faire by nature, in the spiritual sense.

How will all this pan out if Manmohan Singh and his party lose the next round of elections? He might just quote from the Ashtavakra Gita: "From one lifetime to another, kingdoms, sons, wives, appearances and pleasures to which you were attached have been lost… For innumerable births have you undertaken work, painful and exacting, with your body, mind and speech. Hence find rest at least now."

Narayani Ganesh is a senior editor with The Times of India. She writes on issues concerning the environment, science and technology, travel and tourism, heritage, philosophy, and health. She edits The Speaking Tree Sunday newspaper and daily column of that name, and is a leader writer with the Times of India opinion pages.

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"An History of India as it Happened (not as it was written)":

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"An History of India as it Happened (not as it was written)":

CHAPTER 6 : NEGATIONISM AND THE MUSLIM CONQUESTS (Part II)
It is not only Indian historians, who are negationists, but also western historians and India-specialists. We know that the first historians of Indian – the Britishers – twisted India’s history to suit their theory that they had come to civilize a race which was not only inferior to them, but also was supposed to have been heavily influenced in its philosophies or arts by European invaders – read the Aryans or Alexander the Great. But what is less known is that today many western historians not only still cling to these old outdated theories, but also actually more or less willfully mislead the general European public, who is generally totally ignorant and takes these “knowledgeable” comments about India as the absolute truth. One example is France, which has a long tradition of Indianists, who devote their time and life to the study of India. The main school of historic research in France is called the CNRS (National Center of Social Research), which has a very important South Asia section, of which India, of course, is the main component. Unfortunately, many of these India-specialists are not only Left-leaning, that is they are very close to the ideas of the JNU historians, with whom they are anyway in constant contact, but are also specialists of the Moghol period of India history, which is to say that they are sympathetic to Islam’s point of view on India, while they often consider Hindus as fanatics…

Take for instance one of the recent Indian History books published in France “Histoire de l’Inde moderne” (1994 Fayard / Paris), the authors (there are seven of, all famous Indianists), having subscribed to the usual Aryan invasion theory, accuse Shiva “to incarnate obscure forces” (Introduction III) and of course use the word “fanatics” to describe the Hindus who brought down the Ayodhya mosque. Basically, the book does an apology of he moghol period in India; while keeping quiet about all their crimes. In the chapter dealing for instance with Vijaynagar, the last great empire of free India, which symbolized a Hindu Renaissance after nine centuries of savage Muslim conquests, one cannot but perceive the enmity of the authors for Hinduism. The two young princes, founder of Vijaynagar who were converted by force to Islam when in captivity, are accused of “duplicity”, because they reverted back to Hinduism as soon as they were free; then the French historians highlight the “ambition of Brahmins, who used these two young princes to reconquer the power that at been lost at the hands of the conquering Muslims” (page 54); the book then mentions “the unquenchable exigencies of the (Hindu) central power in Vijaynagar”, forgetting to say that that for the first time in centuries, Hindus could practice freely their faith, that they were not killed, their women raped, their children taken as slaves and converted to Islam. And all this to finally sum up in seven words the terrible end of Vijaynagar, which has left a wound in the Hindu psyche even up to today: “looting and massacres lasted for three days”…

But the authors of “Histoire de l’Inde moderne” do not only run down Hindus, they also glorify Muslims, particularly the Moghols. Babur for instance, this monster who killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus and razed thousands of temples becomes at their hands a gentle hero: “ Babur did not like India and preferred to isolate himself in the exquisite gardens he had devised, with their geometrical design, their crossed canals, which evoked to him the rivers of paradise”. Oh, God what a sensitive poet! And to make it sound even more glorious, the author adds: “there he translated a manual of Koranic law and a Sufi treaty of morals”. Oh, what a saint and lover of humanity… Aurangzeb, the cruelest of the Moghul emperors, has also the full sympathies of the authors: “Aurangzeb seems to have concentrated on himself the hatred of militant Hindus, who attribute to him systematic destruction of temples and massive conversion drives. But this Manichean impression has to be seriously countered (page 126)”… Unfortunately for the authors, as we have seen earlier, Aurangzeb was not only proud of what he was doing to the Hindus, but he had his scribes note each deed down for posterity… In 2006 the same authors published “L’Inde contemporaine”, with the same prejudices and bias against Hindus and their political parties.

These French Indianists have also a tradition of speaking against the BJP, which they have always labeled as “fundamentalist” and dangerous for the “secular” fabric of India, although the BJP has been in power for quite a few years and nothing dramatic has happened to the secular fabric of India. The problem is that these Indianists not only write lengthy and pompous articles in France’s main newspapers, such as Left-leaning Le Monde, explaining to the ignorant reader why is India on the point of exploding because of fanatic Hindus, or how the Harijans in India are still the most downtrodden people on earth (this is why when President Narayanan visited France in April 2000, all the French newspapers chose to only highlight that he was an untouchable and that religious minorities in India were persecuted, nearly provoking a diplomatic incident between France and India), but unfortunately they also advise the French government, who like his citizens, is often shamefully ignorant and uninterested by India. This is why, although there has been a lot of sympathy for the French in India because of their tolerant response to the Indian nuclear tests of 1998 (whereas the whole western world reacted hysterically by imposing absurd sanctions), France has not yet bothered to capitalize on this sympathy and has not managed to realize that India is the ideal economic alternative to a very volatile China.

It would be nice to say that Indian journalists are not blind to this influence of French Indianists and the adverse impact it has on Indo-French relations, but when Christophe Jaffrelot, for instance who wrote many a nasty books on Hindu fundamentalism and is most responsible for the bad image the BJP in France, comes to India to release the English translation of his book, he is feted by the Press corps and all kind of laudatory reviews are printed in the Indian Press. So much for secularism in India.

And, ultimately, it is a miracle that Hinduism survived the onslaught of Muslim savagery; it shows how deep was her faith, how profound her karma, how deeply ingrained her soul in the hearts of her faithfuls. We do not want to point a finger at Muslim atrocities, yet they should not be denied and their mistakes should not be repeated today. But the real question is: Can Islam ever accept Hinduism? We shall turn towards the Sage, the yogi, who fought for India's independence, accepting the Gita's message of karma of violence when necessary, yet who had a broad vision that softened his words: "You can live with a religion whose principle is toleration. But how is it possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is "I will not tolerate you? How are you going to have unity with these people?...The Hindu is ready to tolerate; he is open to new ideas and his culture and has got a wonderful capacity for assimilation, but always provided India's central truth is recognised.. (Sri Aurobindo India's Rebirth 161,173)
Or behold this, written on September 1909: "Every action for instance which may be objectionable to a number of Mahomedans, is now liable to be forbidden because it is likely to lead to a breach of peace. And one is dimly beginning to wonder whether worship in Hindu temples may be forbidden on that valid ground (India's Rebirth p. 55). How prophetic! Sri Aurobindo could not have foreseen that so many Muslim countries would ban Rushdie's book and that Hindu processions would often be forbidden in cities, for fear of offending the Muslims. Sri Aurobindo felt that sooner or later Hindus would have to assert again the greatness of Hinduism.

And here we must say a word about monotheism, for it is the key to the understanding of Islam. Christians and Muslims (and Jews) have always harped on the fact that their religions sprang-up as a reaction against the pagan polytheist creeds, which adored many Gods. « There is only one real God they said (ours), all the rest are just worthless idols ». This « monotheism versus polytheism business » has fuelled since then the deep, fanatic, violent and murderous zeal of Islam against polytheist religions, particularly against Hinduism, which is the most comprehensive, most widely practiced of all them. It even cemented an alliance of sorts between the two great monotheist religions of the world, Christianity and Islam, witness the Britishers’ attitude in India, who favoured Indian Muslims and Sikhs against the Hindus; or the King of Morocco who, even though he is one of the most moderate Muslim leaders in the world, recently said in an interview: « we have no fight with Christianity, our battle is against the Infidel who adores many gods ».
But as we have seen earlier, Hinduism is without any doubt the most monotheist religion in the World, for it recognises divine unity in multiplicity. It does not say: « there is only one God, which is Mohammed. If you do not believe in Him I will kill you ». It says instead: « Yes Mohammed is a manifestation of God, but so is Christ, or Buddha, or Krishna, or Confucius ». This philosophy, this way of seeing, which the Christians and Muslims call « impious », is actually the foundation for a true monotheist understanding of the world. It is because of this « If you do not recognize Allah (or Christ), I will kill you », that tens of millions of Hindus were slaughtered by Arabs and other millions of South Americans annihilated by the Christians. And ultimately the question is: Are the Muslims of today ready to accept Hinduism ? Unfortunately no. For Muslims all over the world, Hinduism is still the Infidel religion « par excellence ». This what their religion tell them, at every moment, at every verse, at the beginning of each prayer : « Only Allah is great ». And their mollahs still enjoin them to go on fight « jihad » to deliver the world of the infidels. And if the armies of Babar are not there any longer; and if it is not done any more to kill a 100.000 Hindus in a day, there is still the possibility of planting a few bombs in Coimbatore, Mumbai or Varanasi, of fuelling separatisms in the hated land and eventually to drop a nuclear device, which will settle the problem once and for all. As to the Indian Muslim, he might relate to his Hindu brother, for whatever he says, he remains an Indian, nay a Indu; but his religion will make sure that he does not forget that his duty is to hate the Infidel. This is the crux of the problem today and the riddle if Islam has to solved, if it wants to survive in the long run.

We will never be able to assess the immense physical harm done to India by the Muslim invasions. Even more difficult is to estimate the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu India. But once again, the question is not of vengeance, or of reawakening old ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, the harm done by the Muslims conquest is not over. The seeds planted by the Moghols, by Babar, Mahmud, or Aurangzeb, have matured: the 125 million Indian Muslims of today have forgotten that they were once peaceful, loving Hindus, forcibly converted to a religion they hated. And they sometimes take-up as theirs a cry of fanaticism which is totally alien to their culture. Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo once said: "More than 90% of the Indian Muslims are descendants of converted Hindus and belong as much to the Indian nation as the Hindu themselves"...(Rebirth of India, p.237) The embryo of secession planted by the Mahomedans, has also matured into a poisonous tree which has been called Pakistan and comes back to haunt India through three wars and the shadow of a nuclear conflict embracing South Asia. And in India, Kashmir and Kargil are reminders that the Moghol cry for the house of Islam in India is not yet over.

One of the main reasons I have decided to build in Pune a Museum of Indian History, dedicated to the great Shivaji Maharaj (who is depicted in Indian History books as a petty chieftain and a plunderer), is that it will not be enough to rewrite Indian History in books, it will also have to be done in STONE. Please see our website fact-india.com and contribute financially, if you can, to the making of that Museum (we have US, UK and Indian tax exemption). We are also looking for IT persons to donate time to do presentations, animations & GAMES based on the lives of India's Hindu heroes: Shivaji Maharaj, Maharana Pratapa, Ranu of Jhansi, Ahilyabhai, the Vijaynagar empire, etc. You can contact me at fgautier@rediffmail.com

courtesy Francois Gautier, a french author and journalist, who has been covering India and South Asia for the last 35 years. All throughout his reporting years, he noticed that most western correspondents were projecting the problems, warts and shortcomings of India. Hence when Francois Gautier got a journalism prize (Natchiketa Award of excellence in journalism) from the Prime Minister of India, he used the prize money to mount a series of conferences & exhibitions highlighting the magnificence of India and the threats to its sovereignty.

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Wednesday, September 11, 2013

WHY IT IS ALWAYS GUJARAT? WHY ONLY NARENDRA MODI TO BE BLAMED?

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This is a very good and thought-provoking article. I would like to give a few more incidents to enable Ashok Malik to refer in his future writings. Most of the cases occurred in Congress- ruled states and Congress was ruling at the Center.

1) P. Rajan’s case- It took place in Kerala during the Emergency. You may read P. Rajan’s case on Wikipedia and "Stripped Law- Rajan : A revisit". At that time Chief Minister was Achutha Menon ( A communist). The Home Minister was K.Karunakaran (Congress)The CM never resigned at that time.

2)Bhagalpur blinding:- Took place in Bihar. Police blinded 31 under- trial prisoners by pouring acid in their eye. At that time Jagannath Mishra was CM of Bihar. He had not resigned at that time.

"The Bhagalpur blindings refers to a series of incidents in 1979 and 1980 in Bhagalpur in the state of Bihar, India, when police blinded 31 under trials (or convicted criminals, according to some versions), by pouring acid into their eyes. The incident became infamous as Bhagalpur blindings. The incident was widely discussed, debated and acutely criticized by several human rights organizations. The Bhagalpur blinding case had made criminal jurisprudence history by becoming the first in which the Supreme Court had ordered compensation for violation of basic human rights.^[1]"

3) Bhagalpur riot

The Bhagalpur riots of 1989 refers to the violence between the Hindus and theMuslims in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar, India. The riots started on 24 October 1989, and the violent incidents continued to happen for 2 months. The violence affected the Bhagalpur city and 250 villages around it. Over 1,000 people (around 900 of which were Muslims^[2]), were killed, and another 50,000 were displaced as a result of the violence.^[3] It was the worst Hindu-Muslim violence in independent India at the time,^[1] surpassing the 1969 Gujarat riots.

Satyendra Narayan Sinha was CM at that time.

In his autobiography Meri Yaadein, Meri Bhoolein, released by the then Bihar Governor Buta Singh in the presence of Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee {now President of India}, Satyendra Narayan Sinha accused his Congress colleagues of "fanning" the 1989 Bhagalpur violence to malign him, specifically mentioning his predecessor and former chief minister Bhagwat Jha Azad and the former speaker Shivchandra Jha. He also accused the Prime Minister of overruling his order to transfer the then superintendent of police K S Dwivedi who had failed miserably to discharge his duties. The decision was not only an encroachment of the Constitutional right of the state government but also a step detrimental to ongoing efforts to ease tensions.^[25] When he stepped down from the post of Chief Minister of Bihar, Jagannath Mishra succeeded him. He recalled when he met Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi later on, he informed him about the "role of some Congress leaders" in the riots. The Prime Minister expressed surprise and said "so, the riots were motivated!^[26]

4) Naxal Uprising in West Bengal

Siddhartha Shankar Ray

After the Congress won the General Election of 1972, he became the Chief Minister of West Bengal from March 19, 1972 to June 21, 1977. He took office shortly after the Bangladesh Liberation War, and his administration was faced with the massive problem of resettling over a million refugees in various parts of the state. The civic services of Calcutta in particular found rehabilitation of the Bangladeshi refugees to be an uphill task, and failed in this aspect. The crackdown on Naxalites also took place under his watch.^[9]

Ray is often misunderstood for his role during the heydays of the Naxal uprising in the state. The Left have always blamed him for unleashing a reign of terror, which he didn't deserve. But Ray took all the criticism without a murmur. At his time, the district magistrates and superintendents of police had enough independence. They treated the Naxals under criminal procedures. Ray didn't prevent them from doing that. But he didn't encourage them, either. He was deeply disturbed when the government had to call in the Army in Birbhum to tackle Naxals. "I have no child. But the Naxals, as I see them, are like my children. It pains me when I have to send in the Army to tackle them," Ray had said. He introduced a unique method to tackle Naxals. Jail break and shoot out encounters were done to eliminate large number of under- trial Naxals.

Tcg

It’s always Gujarat

Ashok Malik

8 Sep 2013

Vijay Salaskar was killed on the evening of November 26, 2008. An inspector in the Mumbai police, he was driving the vehicle that was also carrying senior officers Hemant Karkare and Ashok Kamte when it was ambushed by Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorists.

This was a dramatic incident that made clear the intensity of the attack on Mumbai on the dark night of 26/11.

Following his martyrdom, the government of Maharashtra recommended Salaskar for a gallantry award. On January 26, 2009, three months after his death, the Union government named Salaskar for the Ashok Chakra. India was grateful to him.

P. Chidambaram, then home minister, took personal interest in ensuring Salaskar’s young daughter was given a government job. No doubt in the years to come Salaskar will go down as an authentic Indian hero and school textbooks will carry chapters on him and his colleagues.

What was the trajectory of Salaskar’s career before he was killed?

For 20 years he had been a doughty warrior for the Mumbai police, part of a band of officers responsible for cleaning up the city underworld.Criminal syndicates in Mumbai — some but not all of them later merging into terrorism — established themselves as a force by the 1980s. The state government decided to adopt a proactive policy of neutralising these groups and safeguarding Mumbai.

Salaskar was instrumental in this, killing his first criminal in 1983. Subsequently, he was responsible for removing some 70-80 people who, depending on how you saw them, could have been gangsters, petty criminals, terrorist auxiliaries or just plain suspects.

How did Salaskar do this? Presumably not by feeding his victims lollipops.

Salaskar was an encounter specialist. His methods were his own. The government followed a “don’t ask-don’t tell” approach. There was nobody to leak letters or even ghost-write these for him. There was no gaggle of activists out to challenge the Mumbai police or any politician who was backing it. There was no Central Bureau of Investigation to conduct lengthy investigations into Salaskar’s career record and attempt to finish him. He was lucky.

Sitting in his cell, D.G. Vanzara, former chief of the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad, may well be pondering Salaskar’s luck and fate. Today, Salaskar is held up as a model, no-nonsense police officer. For doing pretty much the same thing, Mr Vanzara is painted as a villain. If we get over the trite cliché that all fake encounters are bad — of course they are; though it must be said not one of
Mr Vanzara’s encounters, or Salaskar’s for that matter, have been legally proven to be fake — it is worth asking why Mr Vanzara does not deserve sympathy.

He has been in prison for six years now, implicated in three high-profile cases, without the trial having even begun. He is not alone; 32 officers of the Gujarat police, and virtually the entire ATS squad, find themselves behind bars and out of action. The anti-terror network set up in the state in the early years of this century has been crippled.

The CBI and a politician-activist cabal in Gujarat have no interest in quickly taking Mr Vanzara’s cases to resolution. A delay and a battle by innuendo suit them best because they are targeting Narendra Modi’s political future, not “seeking justice” as is claimed. If nothing else, Mr Vanzara deserves to have somebody pay for a good lawyer. If at the end of all this he is acquitted, who will give him back his lost years? Even if there are convictions, it is a fair guess that many of the 32 Gujarat policemen who are currently remand prisoners (undertrials) have probably already spent more time in custody than they may be sentenced for.

Thundering voices on television insist Gujarat cannot be compared to Punjab in the 1980s or Kashmir in the 1990s. True, it can’t; but that doesn’t mean it faced no threat from terrorism. In the 1990s its coastline was used by terror groups to bring in munitions, including for the 1993 Mumbai bombings. After 2002, Mr Modi began to carry the highest threat perception, greater than any other chief minister at least. This has been borne out by successive Intelligence Bureau inputs. In 2010, the WikiLeaks cables revealed Western intelligence agencies believed that the Lashkar threat to Mr Modi was clear and present and had not died out with the elimination of Ishrat Jehan and her accomplices in 2004.

For anybody in public life — politician, civil servant, even activist and journalist — a fundamental test of integrity is in according different subjects equal treatment under conditions of equality.

Has this happened with Gujarat? Why are terror threats to Gujarat and its chief minister ridiculed and the anti-terror operations of Gujarat police sabotaged? Why does this happen to no other state?

Take two other examples.

Recently, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), headed by a Congress member of Parliament, demanded a CBI inquiry into alleged manipulation in the Tulsiram Prajapati case.

Prajapati, a criminal who happened to be a dalit, was killed by the Gujarat ATS. The basis of the commission’s move was a “sting operation” carried out by a conman at the periphery of the media — and previously accused of and arrested for blackmailing public servants using fake “sting op” videos — who found support from Congress Party spokespersons.

The NCSC’s promptness was remarkable. In Uttar Pradesh, dalit writer Kanwal Bharti was arrested for a Facebook post that criticised the state government and backed Durga Shakti Nagpal, the civil servant who took on the sand mafia in Greater Noida. Why has the commission not found Mr Bharti worthy of support?

Second, Mr Vanzara’s long spell in prison, without trial, is seen as justified by those who blame him for the killing of Ishrat Jehan.

Gopal Kanda, a former Congress minister in Haryana, has been charged with harassing, stalking and driving to suicide a woman called Geetika Sharma. This past week, he was given bail and allowed to attend the state Assembly.

There was no clamour in the media.

All women are equal but is (or was) Ishrat Jehan more equal than Geetika Sharma?

Now if only Geetika Sharma had lived in Gujarat and Kanda been a minister in the Modi government…

The writer can be contacted at :malikashok@gmail.com