After the carnage: the predatory 'intelligentsia' Gujarat

The events in Gujarat recently have been extremely deplorable. Nobody covered themselves with glory. The murders in Godhra were an outrage, a crime against humanity. The riots that followed were also a crime against humanity. The perpetrators should be found, tried and punished forthwith. And the State failed miserably in its duty and responsibility of protecting its citizens and of dealing with the criminals.

But the self-proclaimed 'intelligentsia' has been equally at fault: it has attempted to mislead the public with its biased and one-sided perorations.

The gullible public has been misled: I have seen several people suggest that they are 'ashamed to be Hindu' or 'ashamed to be Indian'. This is ridiculous: if you are ashamed to be a Hindu because of what happened in Godhra and Gujarat, then you were not a Hindu to begin with. For, otherwise you would be sharing the pain of Hindu pilgrims being burnt alive. Do not blame the religion for your own frailty, lack of self-confidence. In contrast, not a single Muslim (including famous bleeding heart Shabana Azmi) said he/she was 'ashamed to be a Muslim' because of 9/11 or Godhra. All they said was that the attacks were un-Islamic. Okay, so Gujarat's riots are un-Hindu, the rioters are not Hindus, thank you very much, we can all rest easy now.

There is an interesting situation in the Indian media: whenever a single Hindu does anything obnoxious, it is supposed to show how horrible Hinduism is. On the other hand, if any Christian or Muslim anywhere does a single good thing, it is celebrated as proving the goodness of the religion. Why? Aren't these just individual acts?

Those who are 'ashamed to be Hindu' should consider formally converting to the religion of their choice, be it Marxism, Christianity or Islam. Those who are 'ashamed to be Indian' should consider emigrating. Really, nobody made you India's ambassador or anointed representative: you should feel free to seek citizenship in China, Saudi Arabia or America, for instance.

The proximate cause of the Godhra incident, according to the 'intelligentsia', is the effort in Ayodhya to revive the Ram temple. And the proximate cause of the ensuing riots in Gujarat, according to the 'intelligentsia', is the alleged nature of the so-called Hindu fundamentalists, a term that is, in passing, an oxymoron: the fundamentals of Hinduism are tolerance and plurality, so a 'Hindu fundamentalist' is a contradiction in terms.

On the contrary, a very good case can be made that there are several layers of causes: the proximate cause, the preponderant cause, and the root cause.

The preponderant cause is endemic Islamic fundamentalism, the deleterious results of which we see everywhere in the world: fuelled by intolerant petro-dollar Wah'abism from Saudi Arabia, Muslims have turned violently intolerant against both minorities and majorities everywhere.

The root cause in India is the decision circa 1947 by the Nehruvian Stalinists to impose apartheid against Hindus, by oppressing them in every conceivable way:

by looting Hindu temples through control of their finances (and only theirs; while providing largesse for others);

wealthy churches and mosques get huge amounts of foreign money for conversion purposes, but this is not even audited;

by declaring open season for conversion, which is clearly violence against Hindus because only they are victimised and are never the proselytisers;

by discriminating against them by only allowing non-Hindus to run educational institutions (thus preparing the way for generations of Hindus to be brainwashed and alienated);

by creating and assiduously cultivating a negative Marxist interpretation of Hinduism and making it the state-supported official view;

by continuously insulting Hindu tradition by labelling it primitive and superstitious, whereas it is highly rational and scientific;

by negating Hindu history itself and brushing under the carpet massive Islamic and Christian damage done to it;

by propagating as State ideology something called 'secularism', which in essence means oppression of Hindus.

In effect, there is jaziya, or a Muslim religious tax, on Hindus. The status of Hindus today is roughly what prevailed under the Muslim tyrant Aurangzeb. In 50 years, Jawaharlal Nehru's policies have also created an entire cadre of people who are intellectually colonised, who have built up their careers on Marxist dogma that has been proven utterly wrong everywhere in the world.

I would like to ask all those petitioning the Human Rights Commission and the Commission on Minorities about 50,000 Muslim refugees in Gujarat, and ask those august bodies themselves, what about the damage done to Hindus in Jammu & Kashmir? Every day, we hear of a few Hindus murdered there, and they are clearly minorities in J&K. Why aren't the commissions visiting Rajouri and Doda or the refugee camps in Delhi where 700,000 Kashmiri Pandits have lived in pitiful conditions for an entire decade?

The attitude of the 'intelligentsia' can only be explained by assuming that Hindu lives are less valuable than Muslim lives. This, in fact, mirrors what the Saudis believe (see The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2002), and therefore buttresses the charge of dhimmitude against the Indian 'secular' 'progressives'. In Saudi Arabia, there is the concept of blood money. If a person has been killed or caused to die by another, the latter has to pay blood money or compensation, as follows:

That is, a Muslim man's life is worth 33 times that of a Hindu woman. This is clearly the view of the Indian 'intelligentsia' as well; for they have made 33,000 times as much noise over the death of even a Muslim rioter in Gujarat as over the torching of a Hindu pilgrim woman in Godhra.

I find this discriminatory valuation of human life deeply offensive to the core. But this is the fact in the Indian media; I wrote about this in a column The value of a human life. The life of each human life should be valued at exactly the same. Why is the life of some Australian missionary considered so much more valuable than the lives of the Hindu priest and Buddhist priest murdered in Bangladesh last week? Have you even heard of this in the Indian media? Of course not!

All this has led to a perception among some sections of Hindus that they have no rights, and that therefore they have no responsibility to, or stake in, civil society. They have begun to perceive what amounts to a gross conspiracy against them, perpetuated by the State and the chatterati. They have a grievance. Gujarat is the result. The 'intelligentsia' who readily accept that Muslims, or Palestinians, or blacks in the US, have legitimate grievances, will not accept that Hindus may have legitimate grievances too.

As the Nehruvians sowed in Punjab, we reaped during the troubles there. It is worth remembering, now that Baisakhi and Jallianwallah Bagh Day have just come and gone, that the same ugly combination of State and media succeeded in converting the most patriotic of Indians, the Sikhs (a section of them, to be precise) into enemies of the nation. See my earlier column, Remember Jallianwallah Bagh! Incidentally, I would like to request that the International Court of Justice be moved to bring charges of war crimes against the British queen for Jallianwallah Bagh.

I received several hundred emails about a previous column Godhra, 'secular' 'progressives' and politics, most of it positive; but a number of people took exception to my suggestion that the Americans would take a very dim view of violence by minorities. I said that if a bunch of Muslims torched a Greyhound bus, they would round up and incarcerate all Muslims in the US in concentration camps.

My correspondents disagreed, suggesting that Muslims killed a lot of people on 9/11, Black Thursday, and that despite this, Americans did not retaliate in general against Muslims. Ah, but they are wrong. The situations aren't entirely comparable. 9/11 was not an attack on Americans by Americans, it was clearly perpetrated by 'others:' foreigners, Arabs, Muslims. Whereas in Godhra it was Indian citizens murdering Indian citizens.

And some ordinary Americans did take revenge on Muslims and others like Sikhs who they thought were Muslims. It is true that this was not widespread, but that was because they had full confidence in the ability of the American State to take revenge. They did not have to resort to acts of individual violence as there would assuredly be revenge. And there was. Can you say the same in India? Is there any chance whatsoever that the perpetrators of Godhra will ever be identified and caught? Absolutely none!

And surely my correspondents must be kidding when they say that Americans did not retaliate. What do you call the 10,000 reportedly killed in Afghanistan by the American-led force? Estimates vary all over the place from 5,000 to 50,000 civilians killed in the brief but bitter Afghan 'War against Terrorism'. What was (is?) going on there is State-sponsored retaliation, overwhelming and punitive force directed by the American state against foreigners, Afghans, Muslims, civilians.

It so happens that the US government will not attack Arabs because of other compulsions, namely, oil; so they went ahead and massacred whichever Muslims were easy prey. And they did so with such good propaganda that the world applauds them. Nobody weeps for the innocent bystanders who perished in the thousands in Afghanistan. So Muslims killed 3,000 in the US, the US killed 10,000 Muslims. This is not retaliation? A kill ratio of 1:3? And they are planning to kill more Muslims in Iraq (not to mention the 500,000 children already murdered there in a decade of sanctions.)

Retaliation is an ugly thing. No one can justify the torching of 58 Hindu pilgrims at Godhra by a Muslim mob; and no one can justify the riots that ensued in retaliation. This is something most sane people would agree on. The suffering of innocents, on both sides of the religious divide, is a blot on civilization. It is also true that the State of Gujarat has appeared to be helpless at best, and predatory at worst.

But there are several points I would like to raise. One is the endemic and brutal unfairness in the media. The media should have a simple criterion: are innocent Indians getting hurt? If so, the media should raise its powerful voice against it. The media should be colour-blind as they say in the US, or religion-blind as the case should be in India. When Hindus are systematically massacred in Jammu & Kashmir or ethnically cleansed in Tripura, when Sikhs are butchered in Delhi, when Muslims are killed in Gujarat, there should be equal vehemence on the part of the media. They should not discriminate.

But they do. They are diabolically one-sided. When I wrote my columns Blaming the Hindu victim, and "Godhra, 'secular' 'progressives' and politics", I simply followed a tactic made infamous by the 'secular' 'progressives' in the media: being one-sided and downplaying the fears and concerns of the other side. For instance, in literally thousands of articles and opinion pieces published by them, they say, "Godhra was deplorable", dismiss the horror with that, and then go on to write thousands of words about what happened in the ensuing riots. This is certainly lip service.

The 'secular' 'progressives' always mouth meaningless platitudes when there is aggression against Hindus. Then why isn't it perfectly legitimate for me, in reverse, to weep for Hindus, and to downplay aggression against Muslims? And I am one of only a pathetic handful of columnists who worry about Hindus at all. I noticed that a few 'secularists' got quite angry with what I said. Can you -- and you know who you are -- see how one-sided your own cherished values are? Do you realize that you have been brainwashed by the prevailing orthodoxy into accepting gross discrimination?

This brainwashing comes across in a series of exhibits I would like to present to you, mostly related to the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, and one relating to the ensuing riots in Gujarat. I must thank reader Kaleem (a propagandist for Islam) for bringing several of these to my attention. Others too keep sending these to me as if they proved something. In fact, they prove gullibility on the part of the senders. You have been conned, folks, by the unscrupulous media. Even though Varsha Bhosle exposed some of these as fabrications some time ago, new ones have come up, and clearly a lot of people still swear by them as the gospel truth. Stop being so gullible, will you? Think!

In the following, you can see the chain of quotations: how a fabrication from one source is repeated ad nauseam until it becomes the 'truth.' Truly Goebbelsian: say a simple thing again and again until it becomes the truth -- "truth by repeated assertion". Reminds me of the Upanishadic story of dogs forming a circle biting each other's tails.

Arun Shourie recounts the tale of how the leftist chatterati do the same thing often. There was a story of how Aurangzeb allegedly demolished the Kashi Viswanath temple in Benares "on the request of a Hindu Rajput queen". A number of 'eminent historians' asserted this, each quoting another of their tribe, each quote making the story appear more and more solid. The indefatigable Shourie finally located the source: a grey eminence who said he had heard about an old Muslim man who had a parchment which proved this; said grey eminence never saw the document and then the old man died! Pure hearsay, but the story had become an accepted 'truth' meanwhile.

Exhibit A: Rajeel Sheikh's report on the Islamic site, ummahnews.org, dated March 2

Exhibit B: The anonymous email purportedly based on a report by Anil Soni, a journalist, undated and unsigned

Exhibit A is from a site meant to rally the Muslim faithful. Here are a few excerpts about what allegedly happened in the Godhra railway station:

The kar sevaks started a quarrel with this stallholder too. While beating him and pulling his beard they are reported to have repeatedly shouted the slogan: "Mandir Ka Nirmaann Karo, Babur Ki Aulad ko Baahar Karo" (Start the construction of the temple, throw out the sons of Babar).

Hearing the chaos, the stallholder's 16-year-old daughter came to intervene. She pleaded with the kar sevaks to stop beating her father and leave him alone. The kar sevaks then carried off the young girl to the train and locked her inside one of the reserved compartments (S-6).

As the train started to move out of Godhra with the elderly man banging on the compartment doors, two stall vendors jumped onto the last bogey of the moving train and pulled the emergency stop chain to halt the train. The train came to a standstill about one kilometre away from the railway station.

Having been written for a site that specialises in Islamic sob stories, it, not surprisingly, provides a tale of Islamic victimhood. It relates a story (uncorroborated by anyone else) that the torching of the train happened because a Muslim vendor's daughter had been abducted by Hindus and forced into coach S-6 of the train.

There are some gaping holes in this story, which make it, literally, incredible. Why on earth would Muslims set fire to the coach where the alleged Muslim girl was? Why on earth would the Hindu men take the purported girl to a coach where their own womenfolk were sitting? And how come there was a mob of 2,000 Muslims ready and waiting with weapons and kerosene and petrol at 7 in the morning, anticipating this eventuality?

In any case, it also gives the impression that if a Muslim girl had in fact been abducted, that was sufficient provocation to burn alive 59 Hindu women and children. Isn't this a little excessive? But according to the 'intelligentsia', it was fully justified: these were Hindu activists, including Hindu activist babies and Hindu activist ten-year-olds and Hindu activist women. Obviously, because of their ties to Ayodhya, or so went the media logic articulated in many columns, they invited the justified wrath of the Muslims. They only have themselves to blame, these dangerous Hindu activist babies and women and children.

Then about 7:00 to 7:15 am the train reached Godhra railway station. All the karsevaks came out from their reserved compartments and started to have tea and snacks, at the small tea stall on the platform, which was being run by an old bearded man from the minority community. There was a servant helping this old man in the stall. The karsevaks on purpose argued with this old man and then beat him up & pulled his beard. This was all planned to humiliate the old man since he was from the minority community. These kar sevaks kept repeating the slogan, "Mandir ka nirmaan karo, Babar ki aulad ko bahar karo. (Start building the mandir and throw out the sons of Babar.) Hearing the chaos, the daughter (16) of the old man who was also present at the station came forward and tried to save her father from karsevaks. She kept pleading and begging to them to stop beating her father and leave him alone. But instead of listening to her woes, the karsevaks lifted the young girl and took her inside their compartment (S-6) and closed the compartment door shut. The train started to move out of the platform of Godhra railway station. The old man kept banging on the compartment doors and pleaded to leave his daughter.

Just before the train could move out completely from the platform, two stall vendors jumped into the last bogey that comes after the guard cabin. And with the intention of saving the girl they pulled the chain and stopped the train. By the time the train halted completely, it was 1km away from the railway station. These two men then came to the bogey in which the girl was and started to bang at the door and requested the karsevaks to leave the girl alone....

Exhibit B is an unsigned Internet email that I got from some readers, purportedly written by Anil Soni, a PTI reporter. I contacted Anil Soni to ask about the veracity of this account. He said, "Some enemy of mine has done this to make life difficult for me. Do you understand, sir? I did not write this at all. I am a PTI correspondent. Yes, that is my phone number, but it is not my writing." He apparently had heard from hundreds of people, and he was very upset.

Exhibit B is clearly mischievous. It is almost believable: a key attribute of good propaganda. Goebbels would have approved. It was sent to me by a dozen people, who told me it was the true story of what happened. Clearly, it has made the rounds of the email lists. It can be seen that Exhibit B is basically Exhibit A with:

a. A number of little rhetorical flourishes added -- imaginative, creative fiction -- and some semi-literate writing added. A fine touch, that!

b. A master-stroke: a poor reporter's name and phone numbers, and that too valid ones, added.

c. An apologia for the Congress mayor of Godhra, a Muslim, who is accused of being the mastermind in the torching of the train, added.

Exhibit B might be. An axiom: what you see on email is not always the truth, the whole truth or nothing but the truth. See how easily Exhibit B has been manufactured; see how easily large numbers of people have apparently been taken in. And the beast refuses to die even when discredited.

At Godhra, a similar scene ensued. The karsevaks, now noisily drunk, poured on to the platform, ordered more tea and snacks, consumed them, and then made difficulties. Exactly what transpired between the bearded Muslim stallholder and the travellers varies from one account to another. But all witness accounts seen by The Independent agree that there was a row. "They argued with the old man on purpose," one witness said, on condition of anonymity. "They pulled his beard and beat him up... They kept repeating the slogan 'mandir ki nirmaan karo, Babar ki aulad ko bahar karo'. (Build the temple and throw out the Muslims...)"

Suddenly the row took a dangerous new turn: the karsevaks grabbed hold of a Muslim woman. Her identity, and how she became involved, remains ambiguous, but four different witnesses mention this event. One says it was the 16-year-old daughter of the abused tea-seller. She "came forward and tried to save her father". Another mentions a woman washing clothes by the railway line being hauled away. A third describes how a Muslim girl wearing a burqa and taking a shortcut to school through the station platform was pounced on and dragged into the carriage. All agree that a Muslim woman was hauled into the carriage by the karsevaks, who slammed the door and would not let her go. Refusing to be quoted by name, a local policeman confirms the story.

The woman seized by the karsevaks was dragged into compartment S/6, and word of what had happened began to spread. "The girl began screaming for help," said Ahmed, a wood dealer who was waiting for a train going the other way. "Muslims who were travelling on the train got off. People began pouring on to the platform to try to rescue her. I ran home -- I could see trouble was brewing..."

The train moved off, and the gathering crowd began pelting the carriage with bricks. Inside the train, someone pulled the emergency cord; the train stopped, then moved off again; the cord was pulled again 1km out of the station, and this time the train stopped and stayed stopped. "People in the vicinity... started to gather near the train," says one witness. "The mob... requested that the karsevaks return the girl. But instead of returning the girl, they started closing their windows. This infuriated the mob..."

See how Peter Popham has further embellished the story that Rajeel Sheikh invented? These anonymous 'witnesses' may well be telling a well-rehearsed lie. I am reminded of "lithe and strong like a tiger" from the great Costa-Gavras film Z. This is also an excellent example of how the Western media and Indian media live off each other's lies. Francois Gautier has more than once made the point about the venal foreign press corps in India. Popham seems to be one of the worst offenders:

GODHRA, India, March 5 - For two days, as the Sabarmati Express snaked across northern India, some Hindu activists in cars S-5 and S-6 carried on like hooligans. They exposed themselves to other passengers. They pulled headscarves off Muslim women. They evicted a family of four in the middle of the night for refusing to join in chants glorifying the Hindu god Ram. They failed to pay for the tea and snacks they consumed at each stop. When the train pulled into this hardscrabble town in Western India on the morning of Feb. 27, the reputation of its rowdiest passengers preceded it. When they refused to pay for their food, Muslim boys among the vendors at Godhra station stormed the train....

'Hindu activists' were 'hooligans', but Muslim 'boys' (so innocent!) stormed the train. Clearly, the wives and daughters of the 'hooligans' deserved to be incinerated by the offended 'boys'. Chandrasekharan claims that Hindus stockpiled rocks on the train. Yes, in the ladies' reserved compartment. He also claims that there were cooking gas cylinders and kerosene containers on board the train, and that these were what had caught fire: not firebombs and Molotov cocktails thrown by the Muslim mob. Innovative, inventive fiction writers indeed are the purveyors of 'secularism'!

If this reporter had been in Rwanda during the time of their troubles, I suspect he would have accused the Tutsis burned to death in churches of provoking their Hutu murderers by, among other things, pleading for their lives. Or then, maybe not: his contempt is reserved for Hindus.

Not once does Chandrasekharan, or anybody else, mention that the murdered were Hindu pilgrims, going at their own expense on a long and tiring rail journey to a site holy to them.

They are 'activists', 'extremists', 'fundamentalists'. In contrast, Muslim pilgrims going on pilgrimage to their holy sites get a subsidy from the Indian government to fly in comfort to Jeddah. This probably wouldn't strike an impartial observer from Mars as entirely fair.

Let us remember that Rajiv Chandrasekhar was in the news during the Afghan war for getting kicked out of Pakistan by Musharraf's minions, for the 'crime' of being of Indian origin. His behaviour here smacks of someone trying to demonstrate that he is more sympathetic to Islam than Muslims themselves are. Dhimmitude (or is it 'dhimmitva'?) leaps to mind. Maybe Musharraf will now invite him to Pakistan, now that he has demonstrated what a good little 'secularist' he is. All is forgiven, Rajiv!

Finally, Exhibit E is in a class by itself. It is not about Godhra, but about the riots in Gujarat that followed. It is written by a person who got a lot of credibility solely (and this is a critical point, as nobody had heard of Harsh Mander before) by identifying himself as a serving IAS officer who is on deputation to an NGO.

This brings up some interesting questions right there: why are IAS officers deputed to NGOs? Why this straddling of two worlds? We have heard a lot about NGOs being tools for all sorts of Western agendas, especially evangelism, in India.

Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame. As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmedabad, in which an estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. People clutch small bundles of relief materials, all that they now own in the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others busy themselves with the tasks of everyday living in these most basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children, tending the wounds of the injured. But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so macabre that my pen falters in the writing. The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organised bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the past century...

What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her foetus and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity...

I have never known a riot, which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat. There are reports every where of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw driver....

I'm afraid Harsh Mander's report is also literally incredible, but it shows a flair for fiction. The purple prose and hyperbole, the wringing of hands and beating of breasts, the stories about pregnant woman being disembowelled and mass rapes, and in particular the truly novel bit about mobs dressed in khakhi shorts and wearing saffron sashes (RSS uniforms, to the uninitiated); all this seems a little overblown. Mander has taken reports from every known pogrom and attributed them all to Gujarat, with a little local colour thrown in about saffron sashes. I like that detail: as though the RSS were stupid enough, with plenty of television cameras around, to parade around in their regalia even if they were the culprits.

Consider, for example, Mander's assertion that sexual violence against women in Gujarat was on an unprecedented scale (this is calculated to get emotions running high in the Muslim community which is very proprietary about its women's virginity and chastity: note the honour killings of women that take place widely in Muslim nations). The National Commission of Women said "that the reports on crimes against women belonging to the minority community are exaggerated and that sexual violence did not take place 'on that scale'."

What is also interesting is how his righteous indignation at minorities being hurt was not triggered by the December 2001 incidents of Hindus being murdered, raped, ethnically cleansed and deported from Bangladesh, even though he is responsible for the entire subcontinent for his NGO. Also, where was his indignation when in 1984 several thousand Sikhs were massacred by Congress goons in Delhi? Why, is it only Muslim pain that causes Mander to hurt?

Mander is with ActionAid, a British 'charity'. Is Mander's anguish the official voice of ActionAid? If so, why is a foreign NGO, especially one that has been accused of covert Christian evangelism, interfering in India's internal affairs? If not, why does ActionAid refuse to distance itself from Mander's reports? (Krishen Kak, a retired IAS officer, who filed a complaint about Mander, did contact them several times, but they refused to comment.) Is the alleged fact-finding mission's report from Britain that has caused such a furore based on ActionAid/Mander's liberally embroidered 'findings'?

I would also like to know what ActionAid does for the Hindus and Sikhs being massacred systematically and regularly in Jammu & Kashmir. What has Mander done for the 700,000 Kashmiri Pandits in refugee camps? Without evenhandedness, Mander is grandstanding. I wonder if he has political ambitions. I have seen his email that suggests he decided to abandon the IAS two years ago, but chose to have his cake (the IAS as a fallback option with full pension and benefits) and eat it too (enjoy the lavish MNC perks of an NGO). Perhaps like Arundhati Roy he is also planning to become a martyr en route to greater things (Nobel Peace Prize in her case, politics in his?). His highly publicised 'resignation' from the IAS may have been part of this planned show of conscience.

With motivated friends like these 'intellectuals' above, who says India needs enemies?

Let me also give you a few other snippets I have gathered with much trouble from the media. These relate to the events in Godhra before the train was attacked.

1. A group of outsiders from the extremist Deobandi Tableeghi Muslim sect had taken over the mosques in Godhra and deliberately inflamed passions (India Today, March 18, 2002)

2. 500 cows were slaughtered illegally in Bharuch in February. Cow slaughter is prohibited in Gujarat, and Hindus consider this a deliberate provocation by Muslims (Outlook, April 1, 2002)

3. Firefighters testified that when their tenders rushed to the scene of train fire, they were prevented from reaching the scene by a mob led by Haji Bilal, one of the main accused (India Today, date unknown, and The Hindustan Times, March 18, 2002)

4. The original plan was to torch the entire Sabarmati Express at a place called Chanchlav, near Godhra. This was revealed by a SIMI militant named Hasim, alias Syed Raza. The plot was foiled because the train was late by five hours (The Pioneer, April 18, 2002 and Gujarat Samachar, date unknown).

5. The intent was to create massive communal disturbances all over the country (The Pioneer, April 18, 2002 and Gujarat Samachar, date unknown).

So why are these apparent facts, which buttress the suggestion that the Godhra massacre was not spontaneous, but part of a planned communal conflagration, not debated in the media? The intent, and to some extent the outcome, are clear: to divert all of India's attention away from the war situation with Pakistan; to cause yet another Budget to become ineffective; to help the Congress come to power; to make Indians defensive and thus more likely to cave into pressure on other items.

Finally, I repeat myself: why has nobody published the details about the nameless victims of the Godhra massacre? Why is it that the public is being told to think of them as mere numbers, in fact 'Hindu militants', 'Hindu activists', etc which imply that they got what they deserved? These were just pilgrims; despite looting Hindu temples, the Indian State does not provide Hindu pilgrims with subsidised travel, for instance to Manasarovar.

I repeat myself again: the English-language media and the alleged 'intelligentsia' of India are a major part of the problem, as they suffer from self-imposed dhimmitude and the Marxist propensity for lies on a gross scale. Until they learn to at least have a semblance of evenhandedness, they will continue to be mere Pied Pipers: evil people, Ugly Journalists with no ethics, leading people to their doom.

The thing that is really important about the English language media in India is that they rarely question stuff and almost like the media in USA, they have been brainwashed to be anti-religion and marxists. But, most of the American journalists, realy on these guys to report what has happenned. As a result, India looks bad.

This post is getting bit old but tonight PBS has a piece on about the Gujarat riots and killings.

I could not help but notice that the Hindu writer just had to tell us that "...Nobody weeps for the innocent bystanders who perished in the thousands in Afghanistan....." immediately after he's told us how great it was that the US military was killing lots and lots of really nasty Moslems in Afghanistan.

He should know that there's really nobody else around in Afghanistan than Moslems! No doubt he does. But he is so bound up in the anti-Western Hindu-fascist point of view of the BJP that even the slaying of his personal enemies by the United States is not sufficient to divert his attention from hating us.

All in all this is a good lesson in why the US cannot afford to take sides between the Hindus and Moslems in India, although a good case can be made for dropping some serious ordinance on their rat temples, and some other things I can think of.

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