There are a lot of news clips out there about last week’s Mumbai atrocities but this particular Sky News segment manages to hit a couple of angles particularly well –
- A new-to-me video clip where the train station mob unleashes some old skool justice on the lone surviving terrorist
- Photographer Sebastian D’souza provides the frame-by-frame narrative for how he captured his now famous pictures of the terrorists & repeats his assertion that terminal cops didn’t intervene
- The correspondant recreates the sea-borne attack route used by the terrorists to gain frontdoor access to the hotels
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Update: Another video – taken from CCTV inside the station – shows the terrorists at work. It also, however, clearly show a couple of cops engaging them and shooting back with a single rifle between them –
modi and thackeray deserve the same kind of justice that the isi and army goons in pakistan do, and the same goes for their footsoldiers on either side.
Modi/Thackeray/Advani ask for votes in India. Who is going to bell the cat on the Pakistani side of the border?
Jinnah and others understood Muslims as a socio-cultural group rather than a religious group, though obviously there was overlap among the broader Pakistan movement. On the other hand, RSS/VHP are religious fundamentalists and have always been so, though the sangh as a whole traverses the range from “moderate” Hindutva politics to complete and total assholes – the real battle is probably between whether you support Modi as the leader of the Sangh or someone who is still problematic from my vantage point but would potentially do far less harm.
All those words and you are still utterly simplying issues. Jinnah and others were mainstream politicians in the 40s. You would be hard-pressed to find their thought process in present day Pakistan. Pakistan is now a hardcore Sharia/military state. RSS was a fringe group in the 40s and in fact remained so until the 70s. RSS/BJP fought in the marketplace of ideas and in present day India can be considered a national alternative to the Congress party. Equating the (BJP to the pakistani army/RSS to Lashkar-e-Toiba) does a great disservice to the Indian democractic process.
251 · amaun said
Wow, you hit upon a brilliant solution! It should satisfy you then if we just let the LeT/ISI folks run for office in India then!
213 · louiecypher said
I don’t know what this means. What does “not accepting the Two nation theory” mean? Going back to pre-partition idyll? Living in perennial guilt over the original sin perpetrated by the birth of the only country they knew? There are a large number of Indians who subscribe to the “at least, he made the trains run on time” philosophy, and are willing to permit and abet incredible damage over events they can avert, who are certainly part of “polite company”, whatever that means in this context.
252 · amaun said
I really don’t want to go all Godwin but…
That’s good to know. 🙂
256 · Ponniyin Selvan said
I guess that’s what people who are not Modi/Thackeray enablers are doing wrong! Smileys are such an important, and so often neglected, PR tool for terrorist sympathizers.
Right, I guess no one is preventing you though from using those tools. 🙂
258 · Ponniyin Selvan said
Cheerfulness is always a redeeming, and often uplifting quality, in supporters of mass murder.
221 · Kumar_N said
Hindutva as articulated by Veer Savarkar follows from the Garibaldi-Mazzini nationalism line (details beyond the scope of this post) whom he greatly admired. Savarkar was not a religious person in most senses of the term, and formulated Hindutva as a a binding principle for the entire land or what could be had of it then. Although the man was well read there is nothing substantial in his writings or speeches (isolated quotes won’t do) that suggests that he spent any amount of time trying to sketch the outlines of a Hindu state. Difficult as this task may be (because there is no tradition of such philosophising in the Hindu traditon) Savarkar’s national ideal overlapped with the aggressive self-explanatory nationalism of Ambedkar (yes, read his Thoughts on Pakistan for that) and Patel, the economic liberalism of Rajaji, and to some extent the individual liberty centered structure envisioned by Ambedkar. Savarkar was a social reformer around the same time Ambedkar moved away from reform and the two remained life-long friends. Savarkar is criticised by some know nothing idiots for having hatched the 2-nation idea before Rahmat Ali and Jinnah, a totally bogus and disingenuous charge made by those who imagine that their readers and listeners lack the ability to study up on their own. Savarar advocated a Hindu nation because at that time when the freedom struggle was fluid and the Congress seemed ready for anything – multiple-linguistic states, confederacy of priniciplities, religious enclaves etc., Savarkar tried ot draw a line in the sand and demand a Hindu state as a minimum. Remember that in those days national entities were recent innovations, while the idea of a religious entity inspired Caliphatism (and the Khilafat movement) was still fresh, and the Muslim League had already been formed (in 1906) to work towards creating a successor to the mythical “Mughal/Muslim India”. The RSS then way behind on the thinking curve, saw Golwalkar produce his by now infamous tract “We or Our Nationhood Defined” which in its foreword itself (from a more knowledgable critic) bears heavy criticism of the bizarre consequences of Golwalkar’s ideas! Even today if you were to ask an RSS apparatchik what his definition of Hindu Rashtra is and then to ask a Jihadi apparatchik what his idea of an Islamic nation is, you will be struck by the remarkable clarity of the latter and confusion of the former. There are a few lost in the past folks in India who still entertain notions of an Akhand Bharat (Godse and his collaborator’s descendants) but political parties have long since accepted that the Partition happened and is a done deal >50 years ago. What no Indian political party will accept is further partition of India on any grounds – because all such reasons are bound to be cultural, broadly, and that runs against the idea of India. So it doesn’t matter if a small part of Jammu & Kashmir (the 10,000 sq.km. Valley) consists of a majority of Muslims, Hindus, Martians, or Klingons; it shall not be partitioned on those grounds. FIN. And so too with Junagadh and the Nizam State. India is not a creation of the colonial powers, it is a modern form of an ancient nation (Ambedkar again). The Partition of Bengal and west Punjab and beyond is all India is willing to accept and the line in the sand. The rest is undivided India. So runs the argument, and that I agree to.
Secularism (keeping aside the crystal clear analysis if this much abused term by the Baalu/Ghent Group) in India is a different kind of struggle. The late Girilal Jain proposed that secularism in India is a struggle within the Hindu community on how to carry its tradition forward. Building upon that I would say that Indian Secularism is a struggle within the larger mass of people who call themselves Hindus and also have been touched by it (which is everyone until they turn themselves against it) either for good or bad. And in this I will include also the Southern Pakistani Muslim who utters “satyanash”, the Bangladeshi Muslims with their penchant for Sanskritic daak naam, and the many Indians of every faith who have chosen to view their own 1st preference tradition through what they see around them. Sorry if I left anyone out. There was a time when in some parts of India a chance meeting between strangers would begin with Ram, Ram and end with a khuda haafiz. I had one such encounter with a very old Sikh at a gas station in Full Service New Jersey a few years ago. As he filled my tank and took my signed charge slip I folded my hands (as my parents taught me) and said “Sat Sri Akal” to which uncle responded with a wave of his hand as if to bless me and my family “Jai Shri Krishna”.
And can we please stop picking on the “Muslim psyche/angst/etc.” in India? There are >150 million Muslims in India and they have nice things and bad things to say about the Goverment, Modi, and everything else like everyone else. It is preposterously obscene to even hint that their discontent fuels terrorism in India. The much lasciviously looked forward to “retaliation” this time failed to turn up post-Mumbai-26/11 as many times before. And to all my Muslim Indian brothers and sisters please do not wear a black armband on Id this year. Let us not mix our symbols please. You may wish to tone down your observances and that is your prerogative.
Looks like at least they have one admirable quality.
rahul @ 259 and jyotsana @ 260, thank you. you both have, indeed, uplifted and redeemed this thread. 🙂 (smiley sponsored by mutineers against terrorist sympathizers).
Jyotsana@260,
That was a readable, and insightful post. Thanks.
How about we close comments now?
Similarly, Communism in India is a Hindu reformist movement, not that different from the Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, but with parliamentary ambitions. The Communists have not addressed the social problems (such as polygamy, gender equality, dowry, casteism etc.) in any other community, they only want Hindus to be accepting, inclusive and secular. The land reforms in Kerala also focused entirely on the Hindus. The Communist national leadership is also dominated by Hindus, particularly Brahmins.
The late EMS (former CPM General Secretary, Prakash Karat was his personal assistant), who was both cunning and insightful, pointed out that Kerala’s politics today is India’s politics tomorrow. And that has come true, right from coalition politics to the politics of caste and religion. So watch that pretty space in the southwest.
Now, back to lurking, seriously.
265 · Feathers said
There is some warrant to conclude so. TVR Shenoy the most perspicacious commentator on Kerala since OV Vijayan wrote as much recently when the CPI(M) decided to out-appease the Congress in N.Kerala and capture the jihadophilic vote. There was that shameful episode when the Kerala Assembly passed a unanimous resolution demanding the release of an indicted but acquitted for want of evidence Islamicist radical and then hosted him at State expense. The “land reforms” have also left the plantations in S.Kerala untouched and have obviously never done anything about the trading monopolies of N.Kerala. But that’s all for another day.
261 · Ponniyin Selvan said
The word for you is “us”, ponniyin, “us”.
he..he .. 🙂
The story behind the video. This is what it cost to capture one terrorist alive.