News about the release of the Nanavati Commission report was in the Indian papers yesterday, but it wasn’t until this morning that I finally saw an coherent explanation of what it means, in the Indian Express:

NEW DELHI, AUGUST 8: Twenty years after hundreds of Sikhs were massacred in the Capital, a judicial inquiry has for the first time given a finding that Congress leaders were involved in it. The Justice G T Nanavati Commission, which was set up in 2000 to undo the “whitewash” by the Justice Ranganath Misra Commission in 1986, has indicted, among others, a minister in the Manmohan Singh Government, Jagdish Tytler, and Congress MP from the Outer Delhi constituency, Sajjan Kumar. But, having waited till the last permissible day to table the Nanavati CommissionÂ’s report in Parliament, the Government today rejected the finding against Tytler on a ground that is bound to trigger a legal controversy. The Commission concluded that there was “credible evidence against Jagdish Tytler to the effect that very probably he had a hand in organizing attacks on Sikhs.” In its action taken report (ATR), the Government however interpreted these carefully chosen words to mean that “the Commission itself was not absolutely sure about his involvement in such attacks.” And then, turning Indian jurisprudence on its head, the Government claimed that “in criminal cases, a person cannot be prosecuted simply on the basis of ‘probability.”(link)

If you were waiting for justice, too bad: as often happens with Indian justice, all you get is bupkis.

Incidentally, some of these guys faced criminal trials earlier, but no one has ever been convicted of anything. Sajjan Kumar, most famously, was acquitted for his involvement in 2002. Both Kumar and Tytler are still in the Congress government.

More recent coverage of Nanavati here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Update:: Jagdish Tytler has submitted his resignation. Continue reading →

In the August 4 Guardian, the writer Hanif Kureishi weighs in on what British multiculturalism might mean in light of the atmosphere of extreme intolerance that prevails at some of the London Mosques. (Via Locana)

Kureishi’s name has been in the air a bit since it was revealed that the men behind the 7/7 bombings in London were second-generation Brit-Asians. The spread of an ultra-fundamentalist ethos amongst second-generation British Muslims was something Kureishi explored in his screenplay to My Son the Fanatic (which began as a short story in The New Yorker) as well as in The Black Album, a novel responding to the turmoil in the British Muslim community following the Rushdie affair.

But the interesting part of this essay isn’t really its central point about the poison of religious extremism –- which I think any moderate or progressive person would probably agree with. What is more intriguing is actually Kureishi’s unusual use of the word ‘multiculturalism’ in the context of British ‘faith schools’. There’s a lot of confusion about what these schools are and how they work (especially for us non-Brits), and in this post I’ll explore them a little. Continue reading →

July has been a tough month. Besides the bombings in London, the shooting of an innocent man in London, the terrible bombing at a resort in Egypt, and the ongoing bombings occurring daily in Iraq, there have also been important developments involving terrorism that is home-grown to India.

The news is both good and bad. The good news is, Indian Express reports that the Punjab police have arrested more than 60 members of a Sikh militant group called Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), many of them with large caches of arms and explosives, including 53 kilograms of RDX and PETN (as specified here). The arrests took place mainly in Chandigarh and Delhi. The key arrest might be that of Jagtar Singh Hawara (pictured left; photo from Frontline), who masterminded the murder of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh some years ago. Hawara is clearly a brutal man bent on killing — a sort of criminal mastermind (he committed his first murder — of a Sikh Granthi — at the age of 15). He had escaped from a Chandigarh prison in February 2004, when he dug a 60 foot tunnel over several months that prison authorities claim they didn’t notice. He is, perhaps most importantly, the ringleader of BKI in India; we should all be glad this guy is behind bars again. Hopefully this time he will stay there.

The bad news is, there may be more terrorists as well as explosives out there. Since the BKI has been quiet since 1997-1998, when it initiated a bombing campaign in Punjab, Indian police hoped that the organization had gone defunct. Its current global leadership is based in Pakistan, where the leader, Wadhawa Singh is reportedly ailing. But the current arrests tell a different story. Not only is BKI not defunct, the police readily admit there are still known members as well as an alarming quantity of explosive material in India that has not been recovered. Continue reading →