Author: Radha Rajan
Publication: Vigil
Date: May 5, 2006
URL: http://www.vigilonline.com/news/plain_speak/ps_view.asp?plainSpeakId=104
The Congress-led anti-Hindu UPA government
has cheered and participated in a macabre game of Muslim brinkmanship in Vadodara.
This game was played out in three sessions with three players - the judiciary
in the form of the Gujarat High Court and the Supreme Court, the Muslim community,
and the Sonia Gandhi master-minded UPA government.
Pre-Lunch Session
Taking note of a newspaper report on 'unauthorised religious structures' posing
a hindrance to the free flow of traffic, the Gujarat High Court is alleged
to have pulled up the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) and the Ahmedabad
Urban Development Authority (AUDA) for having been "silent spectators"
to the encroachments, and ordered the removal of all such unauthorized structures
phase-wise or zone-wise.
Now what is the AMC and AUDA supposed to do
in the face of this activist judicial order? The Vadodara municipal authorities,
unlike their avant-garde trend-setting counterparts in Tamil Nadu, observed
due process, issued notices of demolition and gave the affected parties time
to either remove the structures themselves or take recourse to law. The municipal
authority then went ahead with implementing the orders of the Gujarat High
Court. One structure to be so demolished was a Muslim dargah.
Post-Lunch Session
The demolition of the dargah catalyzed the riot-happy Muslim community to
indulge in its favourite pastime of rioting, causing social mayhem, violently
confronting state law-enforcing agencies and finally pushing the police, the
para-military forces and the army to the limits of their endurance. This,
the Muslim community does routinely, wearing the cloak of religious persecution
and it works every time! Waiting on the sidelines of this contrived and well-orchestrated
mayhem were the usual, now familiar, 'social activists', human rights industrialists
and their partners-in-'secular'-entrepreneurship the 24-hour satellite news
channels, who picked up the 'poor persecuted Muslim community' chorus and
used the demolished dargah as grist for their media mill; all the while deliberately
ignoring the other truth that before the Vadodara municipal authorities demolished
the dargah, they had already demolished several Hindu temples which they considered
to be unauthorized structures too. Secular Indian polity was brought down
on its knees and secular India including the secular Apex Court, groveled
and cringed before the violent Muslim mob and gave in to its unreasonable
demands - for the nth time since 1947.
After-tea Session
Confronted by a determined Narendra Modi who had declared deadpan that "the
administration will deal firmly with the rioters irrespective of their religion",
and faced with the municipal authorities who declared that they were merely
implementing the Gujarat HC orders, Sonia's UPA which fought the elections
with the help of the human rights industry on the anti-Hindu secular plank,
rushed to the Supreme Court pleading for a stay of the Gujarat HC order. Our
Supreme Court, not wishing to lag behind in the frenzy to protect minority
rights and secularism, granted the stay with alacrity.
Having made their point in typical fashion
and having attained their objective to browbeat Indian polity and administration,
the poor persecuted Muslim community of communalized Gujarat went back whistling
to their homes.
Expert comments
Just about a year ago, the Madurai Corporation decided to lease a portion
of the pavement before a shop to pavement traders. The shop owner objected
to the move (forget the fact that he did not own the pavement) and moved the
Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court against the Madurai Corporation. The
case came up for hearing before Their Grey Eminences - Justices Ashok Kumar
and Dinakaran (Christians both) who exceeded their brief and not confining
themselves to the case in point - which was to determine whether the Corporation
could lease that small portion of the pavement to pavement traders, over-reached
themselves and ordered all local authorities, municipalities, corporations
and panchayats to remove all encroachments and unauthorized structures. I
cannot believe that Their Grey Eminences did not foresee what would follow
inevitably.
Now this order applied to all districts under
the judicial jurisdiction of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, which
included Tiruchy, Thanjavur and Kanyakumari - hoary temple towns all of them.
Remember, this is the state whose polity and administration has been poisoned
by anti-Hindu Dravidianism and this was the terrible period when Hindu society
had been completely demoralized by the arrest and incarceration of the revered
Kanchi Acharyas by Jayalalithaa. Armed with the High Court order, the local
authorities in several districts of Tamil Nadu went on an orgy of demolition
without observing due process. Notices were not issued, time was not given
and victims were taken by surprise and shocked when the demolition squads
arrived in their localities and rampaged through shops, homes and temples
which the authorities considered, often erroneously, to be encroachments.
The demolished structures besides extensions to homes and commercial establishments
also included one church, one dargah and over 250 temples. Hundreds of temples
were destroyed and several others threatened with demolition completely in
violation of two existing laws - one state, one central, governing land belonging
to temples and other places of worship.
The state law is a hangover from the colonial
period; and this law, passed in 1905 defines lands that belong and do not
belong to the government. The land upon which a temple stands and its appurtenant,
is temple land and does not belong to the government. This law is still in
effect in Tamil Nadu; which means, if a temple stands upon a piece of land
then the land belongs to the temple and the local government or local civic
authorities cannot demolish any structure standing upon temple land. And then
we have the central law brought in by the Narasimha Rao government in the
wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid that status quo will be maintained
with regard to all religious places which have existed as of 15 August 1947.
A full bench of the Madras High Court upheld
the two-bench order of the Madurai Court but ordered the municipal authorities
to follow due process, and the demolitions continued with a vengeance. The
full bench too did not deign to re-consider the Madurai High Court order in
the light of these laws and merely effected cosmetic changes in the implementation.
Compare this with loud protestations of secularism, rule of law and upholding
the constitution when it comes to thwarting the Hindus from performing the
shilanyas on Ramjanmabhumi and the alacrity with which the Apex Court issues
interim orders on the issue and you can gauge the extent of Hindu powerlessness
when the judiciary itself presided over the demolition of Hindu temples!
A lawyer known to the author and practicing
in Madurai had filed no fewer than 50 petitions on behalf of devotees of temples
that were threatened with demolition. He managed to save three temples and
one Samadhi, all of them more than a hundred years old. One temple was Madurai's
well-loved and famous landmark temple - "Ganesha-under-the-banyan-tree",
at least 120 years old say the inhabitants of the locality, one was the famed
Bhoothalingaswami koil in Tiruchy, and the third was an ancient Iswaran temple
in Madurai believed to have been consecrated by Maharishi Patanjali himself.
The Samadhi was that of Muthuswami Dikshitar,
one of the trinity deities of Carnatic Music. My friend told me how, as he
argued passionately against the demolition of the revered Samadhi, the judge
listened with great care and at the end of it all told him that while he appreciated
his arguing skills, my friend had not convinced him why the Samadhi must not
be demolished. It was obvious, my friend told me between despair and amusement
that the Dravidian judge had not heard of Muthuswami Dikshitar and did not
know when he lived or died! I did not have the heart to ask him if Patanjali
fared any better in the Dravidian courts.
Hindus do not riot, do not go on the rampage,
do not confront the police as organized mobs and do not have the will or the
power to bring Indian polity down on its knees. And that was why Jayalalithaa
could arrest and jail two of Hinduism's tallest religious leaders, why jihadis
could kill 32 Hindus in Doda three days ago without a murmur from Sonia's
UPA (Sonia herself is making yet another of her unending sacrifices in public
life by contesting for election to the Lok Sabha in Rae Bareilly) and except
for a completely expressionless remark by the NSA MK Narayanan that the peace
process will not be affected by the massacre of Hindus by Muslim jihadis,
the UPA government was not traumatized nor the National Commissions for Minorities
and Human Rights nor the Supreme Court.
Even as the post-lunch session of political
and religious brinkmanship was being played out by the rioting Muslims of
Vadodara, the Home Ministry jumped into the game. It played to the secular
gallery, issuing dramatic warnings, advisories and veiled threats of dismissal
to Narendra Modi, asking him to bring the situation under control. "It
is the state government's duty to maintain law and order" and "Such
situations cannot continue, they must end and we will make sure the state
government ends them" were the last brave words from Home Minister Shivraj
Patil flexing the UPA government's puny muscles. For comic relief the Minister
of state for Home Affairs Jaiswal offered gratuitous advise to the Gujarat
DGP, instructing him to "act professional".
Narendra Modi did not bat an eyelid and declared
again that the law will take its own course against the offenders "irrespective
of their religion", calmly sent the strong signal that he reposed confidence
in his police to act correctly and came to Mumbai for Mahajan's funeral. The
Gujarat police did bring the riots under control, well within three days and
a crestfallen Jaiswal now declared that perhaps police firing against the
rioters was uncalled for. Of course Jaiswal's volte-face had nothing to do
with the fact that the rioters were Muslims and those that died in the police
firing included Muslims. The communal bias of the UPA government was bare-faced
and naked. Narendra Modi was damned if he did and damned if he didn't.
Having nothing to say or do once the riots
were controlled by Modi's administration, and restless with being denied a
Hindu/Modi-bashing excuse to demonstrate how much the UPA government loved
the Muslims, the UPA government ordered the Additional Solicitor-General to
rush to the Supreme Court to try and procure a stay order against the Gujarat
HC's instructions to remove all encroachments without fear or favour. And
the Supreme Court obliged.
Tamil Nadu Hindus did not go on the rampage,
did not burn cars and buses, did not pelt stones at the police, did not let
loose mayhem and murder and so the very same UPA government did not think
it had to intervene to ask the Supreme Court to stop the demolition of temples
in Madurai, Tiruchy and other districts; Kashmiri Hindus whose temples were
burnt, destroyed, demolished and razed to the ground by Jihadi Muslims also
did not riot, burn buses or pelt stones. Therefore no central government,
no Supreme Court, no National Commission for minorities or human rights thought
that they had to stretch themselves to protect Hindu rights and Hindu temples.
The message from secular Indian polity is
loud and clear. It has one yardstick for rioting Hindus and one for Muslims
and Christians, it has one yardstick for Hindu temples and religious institutions
and another for Muslims and Christians, it has one yardstick for Hindu sensibilities
and another for the sensibilities for the two most vocal and organized minority
communities, it has one yardstick for Muslim victims of the Gujarat riots
and another for the Hindu victims of Jihadi Islam.
Hindus must effect an attitudinal change if
Indian polity must be brought to its knees, if secular Indian polity must
be caught by the scruff of its neck and taught to respect Hindus and Hindu
sensibilities. The Hindu worm must turn.
