Author:
Publication: www.vigilonline.com
Date: June 15, 2004
Thoughts on issues of current interest
[my comments - as an Indian citizen - within square brackets], including
instances of some double standards of our public figures, especially in
the construction of Indian identity (all those Macaulayan myths, and the
hypocrisy that is Nehruvian secularism) - Krishen Kak
[V'mala 61 and 62 took off from
the mission of Mr Rahul Gandhi (our new Member of Parliament) to uphold
Truth in Indian politics, and proposed "funny-verita" for his interpretation
of Truth - "verita" being "truth" in his mother tongue, and "funny" because
his interpretation turns out - mother of all surprises! - no different
from the interpretations he so derides! Those two V'mala focused
on his Congress Party and its members; V'mala 63 suggested our country's
President is no different either, and V'mala 64 to 67 show that the new
government subscribes to the same understanding of truth.
So, let's complete the series with
those extracts (marked with an @ below) from our Rashtrapati's address
on June 7, 2004 (V'mala 63) and see just how funny-verita they are.....]
@ 46. The Government is determined
to rid the country of the scourge of corruption. The root causes of corruption
and the generation of black money will be effectively tackled. For this
purpose, procedures will be streamlined and processes will be appropriately
re-engineered to bring in transparency in governance.....
["Transparency in governance"? -
when our Rashtrapati still does not tell "we, the people" how he chose
"his" ministry (V'mala 58)?
"Tainted" men selected by La Duce
Suprema Sonia Gandhi, their names forwarded by Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh, and their appointment tamely by our Rashtrapati to occupy the highest
ministerial positions is how the government has decided "to rid the country
of the scourge of corruption"?
But who says they are "tainted"?
In the wise words of Mr Rahul Gandhi, according to The Pioneer, Jun 9,
2004, "Have you ever heard of a criminal accepting that he has committed
the crime?" But then, so what if they are "tainted'?
In the even wiser actions of Mr Rahul Gandhi, according to The Hindu, Jun
10, 2004, "He dismissed the Opposition campaign against `tainted' Ministers
in the UPA Government saying, `those BJP people who are doing the finger-pointing
now are themselves tainted'."
And as an aside, did you know that
the declared assets of a West Bengal Communist MP (CPI/CPI-M) average Rs
18.23 lakhs, ranging from a meagre Rs 33,000 (Susmita Bauri) to a very
comfortable Rs 94.21 lakhs (the aptly-surnamed TB Topdar) with Lok Sabha
Speaker Somnath Chatterjee at a quite respectable Rs 64.69 lakhs in between
("Know Your MP", India Today, Jun 14, 2004). To each according to his (or
her) need, eh?!
Of course, corruption need not just
be of the money kind.
There is the absence of intellectual
integrity, as V'mala 63 suggested of our Rashtrapatiji. Then, the
good Doctor Manmohan Singh, in all those years that he worked as a government
official, loyally and faithfully implemented policies the complete opposite
of which he then is credited with formulating as finance minister:
"...Mr Manmohan Singh is the father
of India's economic reforms.....Fact:..Mr Singh held every important economic
office in the land through the 1970s and 1980s and should have been the
last person offered the chance to guide the country out of the extreme
state of economic emasculation that we found ourselves in June 1991. Yet
he got it and created such a further mess that the 1996 Congress campaign
brushed every piece of arguable profit from five years of his disastrous
experiments under the carpet.....Mr Singh was no `reformer'. If you
don't believe me, go through any issue of People's Democracy, the CPI(M)'s
organ, from the 1990s and there is enough vindication to be found there
in the lurid details of his tinkering with the superficialities of the
general mess. If anybody benefitted from his alleged reforms, it
was Harshad Mehta, MS Shoes, the family which owned Amrita Bazar Patrika,
Enron, Cogentrix, World Bank, IMF...the list is formidable" (Udayan Namboodiri,
"Questioning shibboleths", The Pioneer, May 22, 2004).
"It is not the intention of this
column to either undermine or ridicule the good professor.....The poor
man couldn't exercise the luxury of choosing his own council of ministers.
A stickler for propriety, he had to look the other way when the heads of
the intelligence services went to brief the deity of Janpath. An
upholder of standards, he had to meekly acquiesce in the appointment of
one of the family's erstwhile bodyguards to a gubernatorial post.
And now, he has had to stomach Bharadwaj's sanction of remote control."
(Swapan Dasgupta, "10, Janpath vs Race Course", The Pioneer, Jun 13, 2004)
"Let's face it, the quest for personal
power is the only distinguishable aspect of a Nehru-Gandhi's political
being, and Ms Gandhi is no different" (Namboodiri, op.cit.). Which
leads one to believe that Ms Gandhi chose this sardar for the same
reason her mother-in-law chose hers - both so-called learned men (one a
vilayati Doctor, the other a desi Giani) but both ready to sweep the floor
for the Dynasty. No real credit to the Sikhs. And no wonder
a new history textbook makes no mention at all of a very different kind
of sardar, of whom all Indians can be proud - Maharaja Ranjit Singh (The
Hindu, Jun 2, 2004).
There is moral corruption, there
is legal corruption, there is cowardice, there is the debasement of patriotism
and the perversion of Truth, and there's just plain dishonesty. Such
as of Mr Rahul Gandhi getting into Delhi's prestigious St Stephen's College,
not on merit but through a quota to which he wasn't entitled. He
started practising his version of truth early, this missionary for Truth
in Indian politics.
Consider Mr Rahul Gandhi again,
who says "his family has taught him that `our country is our religion'"
("Rahul: I am needed in party, not Govt", The Pioneer, May 20, 2004).
Now, consider Mr Rahul Gandhi's
family. Consider that his mother, sanctified as Santa Sonia, Our
Lady of Renunciation, by Tavleen Singh (http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=32196&headline=Yes~Madam,~No~Madam,~All~right~Madam:~PM
)
hasn't actually renounced anything
at all, neither pelf nor power, that she's appropriated both through the
backdoor while her "inner voice" answers the front door, and that as La
Duce Suprema she has our country's prime minister as her puppet (and foreign
powers - Pakistan, Nepal, the PLO - have recognized this, inviting her
to visit them rather than him).
Consider that his mother lied -
again - about studying English at Cambridge University (this time she lied
under oath - V'mala 62).
Consider the revelations of his
mother's past - how she broke our country's electoral, foreign exchange
and citizenship laws - documented in A Surya Prakash, ed., "Sonia Under
Scrutiny" (India First Foundation, 12E Feroz Shah Road, New Delhi 110001).
Consider the revelations in the same book of her cowardice and that of
his father when they fled to Italy while all his father's fellow-pilots
remained on duty in India during the Bangladesh war, and then how she fled
again into Italian refuge after her mother-in-law lost the post-Emergency
elections. Consider the revelations of how she and his father subordinated
our commercial interests to Italian ones. Consider the revelations
of how she and his father subordinated our national security to Italian
interests, confirmed by former Cabinet Secretary BG Deshmukh. And
confirmed also by former Additional Cabinet Secretary B Raman's "Ex-Intelligence
chief raises concerns about Sonia as PM" (The Statesman, May 16, 1999)
in which Raman states quite unambiguously that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi
placed his Italian wife's priorities above Indian national ones, that Indian
security was subordinated to Italian interests, and that Sonia Gandhi's
Italian businessman brother-in-law wa s involved in Indian security by
Rajiv Gandhi. If all this is not treasonous corruption, what is it?
And her puppet of a prime minister has already enabled her to examine all
government files, including national security ones, notwithstanding the
unrebutted evidence that she and his father placed Italian espionage interests
above Indian security ones.
Consider how his mother sat for
hours, arrogantly receiving the servility and sycophancy of other human
beings grovelling before her. They compared her to Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus
Christ, and Gautama Buddha. But did the Mahatma, Christ or the Buddha ever
allow human beings to so abase themselves before another human being?
What does it say of her character? That it is like Gandhi, Christ
and the Buddha's, or that it is like Mussolini's and Hitler's?
Would Rahul Gandhi say of all this
too, as he has of that fraud of her "renunciation", that his mother "did
what an ideal Indian woman should have done" ( http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/09rahul.htm
)?
Would "an ideal Indian woman" or
"an Indian bahu", in the tradition of which so much is made by La Duce
Suprema, La Gran Speranza Bianca and their fascista fellow-travellers,
call a liar an elderly man and her country's prime minister (http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/feb/28sonia.htm
)?
Who is caro Raul's ideal of an Indian
woman? Kaikeyi?
@ 60. Democracy has been described
by someone as a periodic redistribution of power. The people of India have
spoken loud and clear......
[Have they indeed? Perhaps
only La Duce Suprema's inner voice heard them. Because the outer
voice speaks with a forked tongue - one tine for power at the Centre and
the other tine for power in Karnataka.
This is Expediency is Truth. Funny-verita.
Characteristic (as V'mala offerings repeatedly annotate) of the Nehru-Gandhi
Secular Creed and of the Dynasty that is its papacy. And of the young
man presented to the public as the heir-apparent. La Gran Speranza
Bianca ("The Grear White Hope", for you native heathen ignoramuses) whose
white skin masks a heart as dark as those of the benighted natives he is
being groomed to rule.
Because, let's face it, there is
no Congress party, there is just a knot of toadies who, without La Duce
Suprema, would only be tearful single toads. Their own Union
Law Minister HR Bharadwaj acknowledges this - "''It is she who brought
the party to power and is the only unifying force in the party'' (Anita
Saluja and Navika Kumar, "Sonia can call for Govt files: Law Minister",
The Indian Express, Jun 9, 2004, emphasis added).
And, finally, let us not forget
the role of the mainstream English-language media that, in the words of
MV Kamath ("Who got the real mandate?", Jun 4, 2004, Cybernoon.com) "propagate
lies", how they concoct and spread stories (Press Council of India decision
14/106/02-03 dt.30/6/2003, http://www.india.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=7600&group=webcast),
and their influence on our polity:
"...top editors of English language
newspapers in India like Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express had told Pakistani
audiences recently that the media in India "will take care of the BJP,"
and Vinod Mehta of Outlook India had expressed similar willingness to bring
the NDA government down while talking at a recent seminar in Bangalore
on the Gujarat events", Ramesh N Rao, "Don't Coddle the Goons", http://www.sulekha.com/expressions/column.asp?cid=249146
. Hence, ".....the repeatedly distorted lies on Gujarat in the Indian and
the world press, which, one knows, relies on the version of India's 'secular'
press. Take the total number of those killed in the riots following the
horrifying Godhra incident. Our English press and our Muslim press and
'secularists' and human rights missionaries mentioned the numbers killed
as 2,000 or 3,000 or simply 'thousands' -- figures that were echoed by
the foreign press.
The truth is different even by the
very very 'secular' standards of The Times of India. Thus, one week after
the most bloody riots broke out, that newspaper's Bharat Desai reported
on March 7, 2002, that the toll stood at 677. The report stated that nearly
100 people, most of them Hindus, were killed in police firing.
On April 28, 2002, when the frenzy
was almost doused, Sanjay Pandey of that same newspaper reported that 726
people in all were killed; of this number, we were told, 552 were Muslims
and 168 were Hindus including, never forget, the 58 kar sevaks charred
in a railway bogey. Reporter Pandey reiterated that in the first month
of police firing the Muslims killed were 40 while Hindus so killed were
60. So much then for the 'Hitleresque pogrom' of Narendra Modi.
There was also a failure to detail
the steps taken by Narendra Modi to curb the riots and contrast them with
the inaction of the Congress government after the 1984 killings of Sikhs
in Delhi, Mumbai, and elsewhere; there was failure, simultaneously, to
drive home the point that, unlike in 1984, riots were confined to certain
pockets of Gujarat and did not go beyond Gujarat's borders.
There was failure also to cash in
on India Today's reports that several thousand Adivasis in Gujarat killed
Muslims by using bows and arrows and stones. There was failure too to drive
home the point that Modi couldn't have 'organised' or 'pogrommed' these
tribals to kill with bows and arrows and stones.....
The press corps should particularly
have been told to examine why Dr Rafiq Zakaria, an ex-Congress politician
and well-known Muslim scholar, should have written in his book, 'After
the terrible carnage in Gujarat, Indian Muslims must open their eyes to
the ground reality that an increasing number of Hindus have begun to hate
them... This is not confined to a small section; it has infected the rich
as much as the poor; men as much as women; the young as much as the old;
even children are no longer free from it.' (Communal Rage in Secular India,
Popular Prakashan, September 2002, pages 193 and 201)" - Arvind Lavakere,
"BJP needs killer instinct", http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/09arvind.htm.
So, respected Rashtrapatiji, remember
that it is you who say to us "When you speak, speak the truth"
(http://presidentofindia.nic.in/scripts/quotes.jsp).
So, did you speak the truth to us
in your speech?
You can't have it both ways (V'mala
63). Either then was not the truth, or now is not. So, if you
yourself won't tell the truth, how can you ask us to?
Therefore, for whatever it is worth,
this is what at least one citizen believes about your speech and your government.
Double standards.
Expediency is Truth.
Funny-verita.
And the butt of your joke is, of
course, ultimately the pluralism that is our pagan civilization.]
