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Now Saharanpur Rural incentives |
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A thundering silence at the top
Exchanges on Eid
When will the impunity to Israel end? More resistance online than on the ground
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Now Saharanpur It is hard to believe that a minor incident - construction work on a disputed plot adjoining a gurdwara - alone triggered such large-scale violence and arson in UP's Saharanpur. As usual, the administration was caught napping. After the three deaths and extensive damage to public property, a curfew was imposed and shoot-at sight orders were issued. Apparently, there is more to it than meets the eye. The town does not have a history of communal violence. Local Muslims and Sikhs have lived peacefully for years. News reports suggest those who instigated and indulged in violence and arson were outsiders. Residents have named certain Congress and BJP leaders for igniting communal passions. Western Uttar Pradesh first erupted ahead of the Lok Sabha elections when Muzaffarnagar emerged as the epicentre of communal violence. There too Muslims and Jats had co-existed peacefully for long. BJP leaders who were charged with instigating riots were feted by the party. One of them has become a Central minister. Then Moradabad, another trouble spot in western UP, witnessed communal tension after a BJP MP donated a loudspeaker to a temple at a nearby village. The loudspeaker was used constantly during the Ramazan prayers, provoking Muslims. Protesters attacked the police when they removed the loudspeaker. Saharanpur and Thakurdwara in Moradabad district are to have assembly by-elections next month. In the last elections the BJP and its allies won 73 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh. The situation would not improve unless the real trouble makers are booked. Whether there was a genuine or engineered police and intelligence failure in Saharanpur needs to be investigated. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, who has accused BJP leaders of vitiating the atmosphere over issues like the use of loudspeakers at religious places, cannot himself escape the responsibility for the deterioration in the law and order situation in western UP. He has not been able to rein in his own party leaders responsible for fomenting communal trouble and bring to justice all those political leaders - regardless of which party they belong to - blamed by victims for inciting violence.
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Rural incentives The Himachal Pradesh government has taken the right step by exempting new hotels in the rural areas from luxury tax for a specified period of time. The logic for such a step is attractive, since it seeks to motivate tourists to move away from the oft-visited traditional destinations to explore the virgin beauty of the hill state. Rural areas are ideal for tourists who seek to get away from the hustle and bustle of the urban environs. While some are happy enough with homestays and other bed-and-breakfast places, others look for establishments that provide them with more amenities and activities. Homestays have done well in the state, and now these are also exempted from luxury tax. Extending the same sop to new units will act as an incentive for investors. The thrust on creating more facilities in the rural areas is welcome, since it will help in de-congesting the hill towns that are often overwhelmed in the tourist season. However, care has to be taken to ensure that the new establishments are eco-friendly and complement the natural surroundings. Many towns in Himachal Pradesh are paying the price of haphazard urban development. Now that they are chock-a-block with people, their attraction for tourists is getting affected. It is imperative that large new resorts and other tourist accommodation being built in the state be made in a manner that is sensitive to local needs. It should not encroach on the forest cover in the state. Besides giving tax sops, the government should also concentrate on providing a safe and pleasant experience to visitors who throng the state. Safety measures were seen to be inadequate as there have been a number of unfortunate incidents in which tourists have been injured, and some have even lost their lives. The government needs to tighten its administration in an effective manner to ensure the safety of its residents as well as tourists, even as it seeks to establish more tourist destinations.
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Thought for the Day
When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
—Rita Rudner, American comedian, writer and actress
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The ignorance of Sir J.D. Rees WHERE ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise. Sir J.D. Rees is utterly ignorant of Indian conditions beyond Madras. His knowledge even of that Presidency is ante-diluvian and has often exposed him to ridicule. Still he refuses to learn and plays the Subjantawala in Parliament on every conceivable question. He lately asked the Under Secretary of State whether in view of the need for Indian labour in Assam and the determination of the authorities not to accept such labour in Canada, the Secretary of State would enquire whether the Government of India would advise the Government of Madras to withdraw restrictions upon migration from that Presidency to Assam. Are Punjabis undesirable immigrants? MANY harsh, unjust and cruel accusations have been made against the Punjabis who emigrate to British Columbia; and the Canadian correspondent of the Allahabad Pioneer has seldom missed an opportunity to blacken their character. But it has been left to a Canadian paper to make a frank statement as regards the reasons which underlie the exclusion of the Punjabis. We are indebted to the Sansar for the following quotation from the Victoria Colonist: "The Sikhs who shivered on our docks a few years ago now own farms, town lots, houses, motor cars, horses, engage in dairying, have almost captured one branch of the wood market and are large real estate speculators. Let us be frank about it: the reason we want to keep the Hindu out is in part because he is not of our race, because he is not of our religion, although some who object to him on that ground are not themselves overburdened with any religion, lastly because he is ready to compete with white people in any activity in which he can get a foothold and make good."
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A thundering silence at the top THERE is a time for silence and a time to speak. Last week witnessed some most shameful events, especially on the part of the BJP and its allies that warranted strong comment. What we got was silence from the top and dodgy explanations from the rest. In fact, the defiant and irrelevant explanations were worse than the original statement, a compound of divisiveness, hate and wilful provocation. It turns out that the Sena MPs had various grievances against the New Maharashtra Sadan, prime among which was that Maharashtrian food was not being served as the railway caterer had no Maharashtrian cook. The Sadan's food is subsidised and had these Shiv Sena goons wanted Maharashtrian food they could have gone elsewhere or paid for a Mahatrashtrian cook. Instead they ran amok, indulged in vandalism and caused a religious affront to a catering assistant. Thereafter, the plea taken by the ring leader, Ranjan Vichare, MP for Thane, was that casual irritation over "bad food" was deliberately given a communal cover by the media. By his own sworn affidavit with the Election Commission, Vichare has 13 criminal cases registered against him from rioting to intimidation. According to one report, another MP shouted: “This is India, not Pakistan”, a totally irrelevant and gravely provocative statement that speaks of the communal mentality of the Sena. The same upstarts and their sympathisers would have sung another tune, a commentator on TV rightly said, if a piece of beef had been stuffed into the mouth of a Hindu catering assistant. The Maharashtra Resident Commissioner sent a written apology to the catering assistant, and the railway catering establishment has terminated its contract with the New Maharashtra Sadan. The country and Parliament were outraged but the Shiv Sena is unapologetic while its ally, the BJP, has sought to defend the indefensible with unctuous nonsense. Advani alone expressed dismay but the government and party leadership was silent for days, making absurd excuses. An immediate apology would have cleared the air and cooled tempers. That was not forthcoming. Instead, Shiv Sena MP, Anandrao Adsul, claimed that like Godhra-2002, the real reason for the violence that followed was being ignored. Uddhav Thackeray, the party's boss, claimed the uproar was intended to silence his party's voice! Such incidents cannot be shushed up or draped in dishonest, self-serving rhetoric. These disgraceful episodes have happened far too often. Mr Modi promised on being elected that he proposed to speak for India. What has he to say? As if this was not enough, the Telangana BJP has criticised the state government for naming Sania Mirza its brand ambassador. It labelled her a “daughter-in-law of Pakistan” as she is married to cricketer Shoaib Malik. What a disgusting and totally unwarranted slur on a fine young woman who is thoroughly Indian and has brought laurels to the country. And for Subramanium Swamy, to say that Sania must be suspected of “divided loyalties” after her marriage confirms his status as a clown. As if this nonsense was not enough, A Goan minister, Dipak Dhavalikar, a member of the BJP’s alliance partner, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Dal, told the state assembly he was confident Mr Modi would make India a Hindu Rashtra while his brother, also a MGD Minister in the Parrikar Cabinet, sought a ban on bikinis on Goa's beaches to the consternation of the Tourism Ministry and tour operators. In both cases, the fatuous extenuation offered was that these were personal and not official statements. To crown matters, last Friday’s Express carried the story that Dina Nath Batra of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, that had got Wendy Doniger's book on Hinduism pulped, has now been made compulsory reading in all government schools in Gujarat by the State School Textbook Board with the formal patronage of the Education Minister, who released nine of his books on March 4 when Mr Modi was still Chief Minister. What do these books say? “Tejomay Bharat” (Shining India) insists that all maps of India include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Burma which are all part of Akhand Bharat. It notes that “undivided India is the truth; divided India is a lie” and “unnatural and can be united again”. These statements are inimical to Article 19(2) which calls for restrictions on incitement to offence and harming friendly relations with foreign states. Mr Modi is on record as knowing little or no Indian history or geography. Is his illiteracy in these matters now being officially propagated in Gujarat schools? What has Smiti Irani or Amit Shah or Mr Modi himself to say on this atrocious outpouring of saffron venom? They must answer or stand morally naked and nationally condemned. To recall past Congress sins simply will not wash. Here we have a cascading litany of Hindutva glorification and hate, preceded by similar utterances by members of the Parivar. These constitute a pattern and suggest a sinister design. Many, like this writer, were prepared to give Mr Modi a fair chance to show that he would deliver on his word. That patience is wearing thin. Justice Markandey Katju's broadsides on judicial collusion in promoting tainted judges have meanwhile stirred the pot. His case is weakened by his own silence in the matter for almost nine years. His plea that speaking out against a collusive ruling on the part of a Chief Justice by a sitting judge would militate against "judicial discipline" is unconvincing. His higher duty was to uphold judicial integrity. His silence enabled what he says was a wrongdoing to go unchallenged and unpunished. The judge says: “Better late than never”. To which a distinguished jurist retorted: “Better sooner than later”. To read a query by the then PM about some letters and notings put up to him as complicity in guilt is also excessive. Let the matter be duly investigated. The government’s answer is to appoint a National Judicial (Appointments) Commission instead of the collegium system. Let that Bill be thoroughly debated and a better system than the present be put in place. Finally, is the Modi government intent on introducing an administrative spoils system in India by insisting that personal office staff of former UPA ministers cannot serve in similar positions in the new regime? First, Governors were shown the door. Now private secretaries. Why? Are they meant to be loyalists of the party in power and of individual ministers? Is the civil administration to be ideologically divided? Where are we headed? www.bgverghese.com
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Exchanges on Eid IT happened almost every year. They would come to offer me Eid greetings, but left messages which remain etched in my memory. The guests in the morning would come straight from the main mosque, not far away from our house,
savour the dishes prepared by my better-half and then move to another house in the area where we lived. They did it like a ritual. There were no discussions. Yet they added to the colour on Eid. One of them, a retired Sardar Sahab, always having an aura of confidence about him, would land at our place in his well-maintained Bajaj Chetak soon after the other person, an eye specialist, would be seated in our drawing room. Sardar Sahab had nothing to do with the medical profession, but would interact with my doctor-friend as if he was an authority on medicine. They would invariably talk on health-related issues, mostly discussed in conference halls. I enjoyed their discussions but would avoid interfering in their dialogue. On one Eid day, the Sardar was late. He came around 2 pm, not 11 am, his usual time every year. Soon after he took his seat came the doctor-friend knocking at my door. When the two exchanged pleasantries, I asked them, “Do you communicate with each other on the phone before coming to my house?” Both had a hearty laugh and then looked at each other. The answer was given by Sardar Sahab, Yeh sab Rab karta hai. Kya aap ko koi apatti hai. Hum ik-dooje ko pasand kartey hain, aur Rab milata hai? After they left my house — first the Doctor Sahab and then Sardar Sahab — a number of other friends and acquaintances would visit us. But these two gentlemen's visit belonged to a different category. The stream of visitors we had would normally end around 11 pm. They belonged to different professions and religious denominations, which provided a pluralistic character to the festival celebrations. A truly memorable occasion. But this could happen only at a small place like Chandigarh, where driving is a pleasure. What was possible in Chandigarh is unthinkable in Delhi, where driving is not everybody’s cup of tea.
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When will the impunity to Israel end? Impunity is the word that comes to mind. Eight hundred dead Palestinians. Eight hundred. That’s infinitely more than twice the total dead of flight MH17 over Ukraine. And if you refer only to the “innocent” dead – ie no Hamas fighters, young sympathisers or corrupt Hamas officials, with whom the Israelis will, in due course, have to talk – then the women and children and elderly who have been slaughtered in Gaza are still well over the total number of MH17 victims.
And there’s something very odd, isn’t there, about our reactions to these two outrageous death tolls. In Gaza, we plead for a ceasefire but let them bury their dead in the sweltering slums of Gaza and cannot even open a humanitarian route for the wounded. For the passengers on MH17, we demand – immediately – proper burial and care for the relatives of the dead. We curse those who left bodies lying in the fields of eastern Ukraine – as many bodies have been lying, for a shorter time, perhaps, but under an equally oven-like sky, in Gaza. We do not care Because – and this has been creeping up on me for years – we don’t care so much about the Palestinians, do we? We care neither about Israeli culpability, which is far greater because of the larger number of civilians the Israeli army have killed. Nor, for that matter, Hamas’s capability. Of course, God forbid that the figures should have been the other way round. If 800 Israelis had died and only 35 Palestinians, I think I know our reaction. We would call it – rightly – a slaughter, an atrocity, a crime for which the killers must be made accountable. Yes, Hamas should be made accountable, too. But why is it that the only criminals we are searching for today are the men who fired one – perhaps two – missiles at an airliner over Ukraine? If Israel’s dead equalled those of the Palestinians – and let me repeat, thank heavens this is not the case – I suspect that the Americans would be offering all military support to an Israel endangered by “Iranian-backed terrorists”. We would be demanding that Hamas hand over the monsters who fired rockets at Israel and who are, by the way, trying to hit aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. But we are not doing this. Because those who have died are mostly Palestinians. More questions. What’s the limit for Palestinian deaths before we have a ceasefire? Eight hundred? Or 8,000? Could we have a scorecard? The exchange rate for dead? Or would we just wait until our gorge rises at the blood and say enough – even for Israel’s war, enough is enough. It’s not as if we have not been through all this before. Massacre in 1948 From the massacre of Arab villagers by Israel’s new army in 1948, as it is set down by Israeli historians, to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Lebanese Christian allies of Israel murdered up to 1,700 people in 1982 while Israeli troops watched; from the Qana massacre of Lebanese Arabs at the UN base – yes, the UN again – in 1996, to another, smaller terrible killing at Qana (again) 10 years later. And so to the mass killing of civilians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. And after Sabra and Shatila, there were inquiries, and after Qana there was an inquiry and after Gaza in 2008-9, there was an inquiry and don’t we remember the weight of it, somewhat lightened of course when Judge Goldstone did his best to disown it, when – according to my Israeli friends – he came under intense personal pressure. In other words, we have been here before. The claim that only “terrorists” are to blame for those whom Hamas kills and only “terrorists” are to blame for those whom Israel kills (Hamas “terrorists”, of course). And the constant claim, repeated over and over and over, that Israel has the highest standards of any army in the world and would never hurt civilians. I recall here the 17,500 dead of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, most of whom were civilians. Have we forgotten all this? Indifference to Palestinians And apart from impunity, the word stupidity comes to mind. I will forget here the corrupt Arabs and the killers of Isis and the wholesale mass murders of Iraq and Syria. Perhaps their indifference to “Palestine” is to be expected. They do not claim to represent our values. But what do we make of John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State, who told us last week that the “underlying issues” of the Israeli-Palestinian war need to be addressed? What on earth was he doing all last year when he claimed he was going to produce a Middle East peace in 12 months? Doesn’t he realise why the Palestinians are in Gaza? The truth is that many hundreds of thousands of people around the world – I wish I could say millions – want an end to this impunity, an end to phrases such as “disproportionate casualties”. Disproportionate to what? Brave Israelis also feel this way. They write about it. Long live the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. Meanwhile, the Arab, Muslim world becomes wilder with anger. And we will pay the price. — The
Independent History of the Israel-Palestinian conflict Israelis and Arabs have been fighting over Gaza on and off, for decades. It's part of the wider Arab-Israeli conflict. After World War II and the Holocaust in which six million Jewish people were killed, more Jewish people wanted their own country. They were given a large part of Palestine, which they considered their traditional home but the Arabs who already lived there and in neighbouring countries felt that was unfair and didn't accept the new country named Israel. In 1948, the two sides went to war. When it ended, Gaza was controlled by Egypt and another area, the West Bank, by Jordan. They contained thousands of Palestinians who fled what was now the new Jewish home, Israel. Israel’s recognition In 1967, after another war, Israel occupied these Palestinian areas and Israeli troops stayed there for years. Israelis hoped they might exchange the land they won for Arab countries recognising Israel's right to exist and an end to the fighting. Israel finally left Gaza in 2005 but soon after, a group called Hamas won elections and took control there. Refuge in the heart of bloodletting The Sunday service had been taking place in a morning of quietness and calm, a rare chance of reflection amid the turbulence of war. That ended as the last prayers were being held, the sound of air strikes and tank rounds echoing not far from the church: the “humanitarian ceasefire” was over. It was one interlude on 24 hours of truce and counter-truce. The refugees who had taken refuge at St Porphyrios were not going back to their homes and they were not going to move to the mosque down the road. Both, they felt, would be highly dangerous.
Around 2,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children, including infants, had gathered at the Greek Orthodox church in Zaytun, Gaza. Families sleep on mattresses in the corridors and rooms of the church and adjoining buildings, meals are provided, doctors from a nearby private hospital provide medical care. The midnight prayers for the last Friday of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, were held at the courtyard of St Porphyrios. "It would have been simply too risky going there, they might have bombed the mosque," St Porphyrios dates back to 407 AD. It was converted to a mosque in the 7th Century and a new church built in the 12 Century. Says Alexios, the Archbishop of Tiberias and Gaza, "This has been a place of God for a long time. If people seek sanctuary it is our duty to provide it. But we cannot take any more, there are around 600 people in the church itself, 430 of them are children, 117 of them are babies aged 20, 30 days. People feel safer here than in a mosque. I know a number of mosques had been bombed; why the Israelis do it? Who knows?” — Kim Sengupta, The Independent Timeline of conflict In the years since Israel withdrew its troops in 2005, Gaza has seen several Israeli offensives. * In 2008, Israel sent soldiers into Gaza. An estimated 1,300 people, many of them civilians, were killed in Gaza before a ceasefire was declared; 13 Israeli soldiers also died. * In 2012, at least 167 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed during an Israeli operation. After eight days a ceasefire was declared. * In July 2014, Palestinian authorities said over 200 people were killed by Israeli air strikes. Israel says more than 1,100 rockets were fired from Gaza, seriously injuring at least four Israelis, with one Israeli man killed. Israel launched a ground offensive to bust the network of tunnels laid by the Hamas.
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More resistance online than on the ground Israel has discovered that it's no longer so easy to get away with murder in the age of social media. All you now need is a mobile phone and a Twitter account to hold power to account, and help change It used to be said that a lie goes twice around the world before the truth has put its shoes on. Not any more. I arrived in Israel on Christmas Eve 2008, the date chosen by Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead, an attack to end all attacks on Gaza. The tanks rolled in, killing over 1,300 people, many of them women and children, and reducing their homes, schools and hospitals to rubble. But all I heard from the media was that some Israelis were very, very scared because a few primitive rockets were being sent from Gaza into southern Israel. Reporters were not allowed into Gaza and Israeli soldiers were banned from taking on mobile phones for security reasons. So the 2008/9 massacre, which included use of the banned White Phosphorus, went un-witnessed and almost unreported. It also failed dismally in achieving its objective, as Hamas survived and the local population’s hatred of their arrogant oppressors burned as bright as the fires which consumed their homes. But for the “international community” it was “out of sight, out of mind”. Business as usual. What a difference a few years of developing technology can make. The Gaza atrocities are now being reported on a constant basis by eyewitnesses, be they professional correspondents representing major media organisations, or amateur locals under fire. Because all you need is a mobile phone and a Twitter account. It is those devices which brought us heart-rending images – some too horrific to be shown on television – of children with their limbs or half a head blown off. Children covered in shrapnel wounds screaming for dead parents; surviving parents carrying tiny bodies. Sights which caused the battle-hardened BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet to sob during a live broadcast. They are all on Twitter now, should you care to look. This is the shape of wars to come. Anything less than total nuclear annihilation will, from now on, be recorded for posterity by the victims, as well as the victors, in their own versions. Imagine if this was the case in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, not to mention earlier massacres. Historians will finally have both sides’ stories to work from, and the evidence with which to back up their words. But far more importantly, aggressors will have to live with the consequences of their acts, unable to hide behind hollow rhetoric. Because the Israelis had and have nothing with which to balance those images of bloodied, mangled little corpses in Gaza. Yes, as of today they continue to bludgeon Gaza in defiance of the UN Security Council. On the other hand, mass protests marches from California to Chile are taking their toll. The Israeli army is getting more resistance online than on the ground. It’s not used to it and cannot cope.
— The Independent Life in Gaza For the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in the Gaza Strip, life is tough. Israel controls its coastline and all entry and exit crossings into Israel. There is no working airport. Access is restricted, not many goods get into or out of Gaza. Food is allowed in, but aid agencies say families are not eating as much meat or fresh vegetables and fruit as they used to. Large numbers are unemployed. Few products out of Gaza can be sold and people don't have much money to buy things. Palestinian refugees During the 1948 and 1967 wars, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left, or were forced out of, their homes and moved to neighbouring countries to become refugees. More than 4.6 million Palestinians are refugees and their descendants, many living in camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. They get help from the UN.
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Eleven the Shiv Sena MPs, dissatisfied with the meals served at the New Maharashtra Sadan in Delhi, after holding a press conference there, forced a Muslim member of the contracting railway catering staff to eat an "indelible" chapatti, forcing it into his mouth despite his wearing a give-away name badge, Arshad, that disclosed his religious identity and ignoring his protests that he was fasting (during Ramzan). The incident was caught on CCTV and debunks the sorry explanations offered, including the ultimate boorish comment in the Sena mouthpiece Saamana that no one complains of Muslims committing rape during Ramzan! Are not such gratuitous taunts a criminal offence? And can Parliament turn a blind eye to such gross misconduct by “honourable” members? 
These guests in their well-ironed kurta and pyjama, were invariably followed by two people whose arrival was a must to complete our Eid celebrations. They had little in common. They did not know each other before their chance meeting in our house on one Eid day. Yet they eagerly waited for Eid so that they could exchange pleasantries in our presence. 
