Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Tehelka's Operation Kalank: Some links


Rahul Siddharthan:

... What happened in Gujarat arose from an ideology that has been poisoning our lives since well before independence; and that ideology is not just alive and well, but given respectability by the participation in our political process of parties such as the BJP and the Shiv Sena.

It amazes me that people bother to protest when the RSS, or its offshoots like the BJP, are labelled "fascist". The founders of this organisation, such as M. S. Golwalkar, quite openly modelled the RSS after fascist European organisations of the 1930s. The inspiration ranged from their supremacist ideology down to cosmetic details like the wearing of shorts at their "shakhas". And Hindu supremacism is every bit as evil as white or "Aryan" supremacism.

The ideology has not changed one iota since those days. From Golwalkar's time, the RSS and its offshoots have continuously striven towards the same goal; and all the "incidents" punctuating their history since then -- such as Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, the Babri masjid demolition, numerous riots including the 1993 Mumbai riots -- all stem from that ideology: Hindus (of a particular description) are supreme, and don't dare to be nice to Muslims.

Dilip D'Souza:

Consider, on the other hand, the situation of the guys who feel forced to defend the killers.

They have to make out that your concern is motivated by elections, or profit, or some other triviality. They have to resort to the curious logic that because you speak about some murders, you don't care about other murders (and if you mention those, then its some others still). They have to ask peculiar questions like "Who started it?" -- because they cannot express straight out the perversity they really believe, that hundreds of innocent Indians killed across Gujarat somehow had asked to be murdered. They have to pronounce that Gujarat (or Bombay, or Meerut, or Delhi, or any of many other places before) has "moved on" and we must not "reopen old wounds." They have to insult you, your friends, your family, whoever -- because they have to try everything to discredit you who asks for justice.

Bhupinder Singh:

... for the already beleaguered BJP at the national level, Mr Modi has now become an albatross around its neck. It is yet to recover from its electoral debacle of 2004, it is not clear who exactly its leaders are, despite courageous attempts to re-live their past authority, Vajpaee and Advani have both age and past record against them. The skeletons in the cupboard that emerged after Pramod Mahajan’s death call into question the calibre of its NextGen leadership that now is on the defensive, more often squabbling amongst itself if not, like Ms Uma Bharti, discrediting, the mother Party. TV channels are not banned outside Gujarat, and Mr Modi’s misdeeds will not go unnoticed by the substantial number of fence sitter supporters of the BJP.

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Mumbai riots stemmed from this ideology!!

    Next, we will hear that Dawood is a henchman of RSS.

    Yes, agreed that Godhra is reprehensible. No words are enough to castigate that. The perpetors should be brought to justice. But to blame even Mumbai riots on BJP-RSS ideology... well... carry on.

  2. Anonymous said...

    we have seen this movie before, have we not. consider this... what happened in Godhra, and in numerous other communal riots that we would not speak of, is the result of the same ideology. heck, what has been happening in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Varanasi, Ayodhya etc. is also the result of the very same ideology!

    Just in case you got the wrong ideas, the ideology I am talking about is druuuuumrollsssssss........the right wing, fascist, hindu supremacist, (insert your favourite phrase here)......and keep going on and on.

    as the previous comment says: carry on :)