Bill's posts with tag: hate
It's kind of fashionable, these days, in India, to look at the Bush regime with something akin to worship.
No, I'm not kidding. When the rest of the world, including the people of the US itself, have turned against Bush with the ferocity of the disillusioned believer, what passes for public opinion in India - the right wing Hindu-fascist dominated Great Indian Muddle Class - has decided Bush is God come down among us.
Not quite surprising, because, like Bush, the Great Indian Muddle Class hates all Muslims and supports Nazi measures as long as such measures don't impact on it.
So when the Hindu right was in power here in India, not that long ago, it imposed "tough anti-terrorist laws" - called TADA [Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act] and POTA [Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act]. Under these lovely little laws, both since repealed at the national level, an accused is guilty unless he proves himself (yes, the burden of proof is on him) innocent; no warrant is required to arrest anyone; and any confession before a policeman, even if obtained by threat or torture, is evidence. You get the drift?
Naturally, both TADA and POTA were meant to be used exclusively against religious minorities and left wingers, and so they have been used. But even with all the dice loaded against the accused, in truth, hardly one in ten of the accused under these laws has ever even been brought to trial and fewer than one in ten of those have been convicted. That's how effective those "tough" laws are. And if one thinks they were effective in stopping terrorist and "terrorist" attacks, well, just check the recent past of this would-be-fair land...
But since those laws were meant basically as a legal means of locking up Muslims and lefties, a sort of modern-day Nacht und Nebel decree, any Hindu fascist spokesman worth his trident would be bound to shriek from the temple-tops about how they need to be brought back at once if the evil terrorists are to be stopped, and that Bush's Guantanamo is the way to go.
And if one points out the utter uselessness of these laws, the response is always the same, whether from the Hindunazis themselves or their Muddle Class followers: "Well, OK, so the laws don't achieve anything directly, and some innocents do get locked up. But that's precisely the point. It shows that we won't even hesitate to imprison innocents.It sends a strong message, it shows we aren't a soft state!"
OK, so I have a suggestion: since India is now the murder capital of the world, let's send a strong message to would-be murderers: every time there's a murder, let's at once hang everyone at hand from the nearest tree, lamp-post or gallows, even if those persons are obviously innocent passers-by.
No, to ensure that the message is at maximum strength, let's hang everyone at hand, especially if those people are obviously innocent passers-by. Or even more especially if they weren't within a thousand kilometres of the murder.
How d'you like them apples?
We're such a wonderful, deep, great democracy. We're the best and most liberal and so on and so on and so on...
In fact, we're so good that anyone who even thinks anything against us has to be evil, am I not right?
So, suppose there's a doctor who works in the villages for poor people, a doctor, moreover, who dares to claim that poor people may have some human rights, after all, and that just perhaps, big companies shouldn't be allowed to do just as they please, especially in connivance with the government and its security forces and its illegal private militia. Also assume that the heretical bastard just won't keep his trap shut. What should you do with him?
Well, Geez Louise, as one of my friends here would say, since we're such a liberal democracy, anyone who's against anything we do is evil, isn't he? So call that bastard a Maoist (he must be one, since he opposes free enterprise and the rights of companies to do what they want), get him in jail, and throw away the key.
Meanwhile, of course, we can go on forming illegal private militia (it's strictly against the constitution) and unleash them on their fellow villagers. it's all in the name of fighting terrorism - or Maoism in this case.
In fact, I'm not making all this up. There is a doctor, a paediatrician named Binayak Sen.
 He also happens to be a vice president of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), one of those pesky left wing organisations, who, you know, are subversive enough to ask for the poor and marginalised to be given the same rights as SUV-driving upper middle class city people. He also was misguided enough to write of the depredations of the Salwa Judum.
 Salwa Judum is a (strictly illegal as per law) private militia set up by the government to "fight Maoism", which, predictably, instead just turned into another gang of gun-toting goons intent on robbery and pillage, who are, in connivance with the state (which in India is now synonymous with big business concerns) forcing people from their homes by beatings, murder, and loot. The fact that he also criticised Maoist violence was unimportant.
One might have been able to predict what would happen to Sen. I think I can say he was lucky - he wasn't shot dead in a staged "encounter", which is the standard way the Indian government disposes of its opponents. Instead, he arrested in May of last year, on charges of being a Maoist (during his visits to jail inmates, he had treated an alleged Maoist prisoner, you see) and thrown into prison without producing any evidence, under one of our "tough anti-terrorism laws". He was in solitary confinement for months, and despite winning international humanitarian awards, there's no sign of him being released soon, if ever.
To quote the writer Anand Patwardhan, "As the system we live in successfully crushes or co-opts all movements of opposition, the term (Maoist) has become synonymous with any form of uncompromising protest. The charge that anyone believes in violence or abets violence need not be substantiated. In a corrupt system, it is enough that a person cannot be bought to mark him as a mortal threat."
But that's quite all right. What's the fate of one man more or less when there's so much money to be made?
I admit this is not a new bit of information, but since I see that this seems to be unknown to many, I decided to bring it up.
In Iraq, recently, a girl of a minority Kurdish (yes, the same Kurds who are the darlings of the Bush imperium) religion was stoned to death by her own family because she fell in love with a Muslim and it was thought she would convert to Islam.
The comments flooding Internet pages on this episode somehow all seem to miss a few points:
First, this girl was not a Muslim; unfortunately for those who would love to show this up as another piece of Muslim savagery.
Second, these were Kurds who are now "democratic and free".
Third, stoning to death is a hallowed old punishment sanctioned for adultery, not just by Islam, but by its predecessor the Jewish religion. Stoning is, in fact, a social custom of the Semitic peoples which got transformed into religious custom.
Fourth, we Indians and our Pakistani friends, of all religions, are enthusiastically engaged in murdering our own young people for falling in love. Among those guilty of this was a Sikh woman cleric, Bibi Jagir Kaur, who killed her own daughter. Honour killings are so common in North India they barely draw any comment any more. The authorities are most reluctant to intervene in order not to interfere in "traditional practices". It's also a great cop-out.
After all these authorities would likely love to do it themselves.
 
For any observer trying to stay at all impartial, our society today is fairly obviously well on the path to Nazism. It's evident in the rightward shift on virtually every parameter; the social, where retrograde "values" are actively promoted; the political, where exclusive, identity-based politics now seem to be the only sort going; the economic, where business houses and industrialists are involved in the running of government; and in the arena of foreign policy, where the nation is being dragged into an alliance with the most heavily armed goon on the block..
Yes, we're becoming a Nazi nation. And the Muslims are the Jews, targeted in numbers as in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 (second photo above), for mass extermination; or individually for petty harassment, like MF Husain, the 91 year old painter and shameless gimmickist who's been hounded into exile because he allegedly "insulted" Hindus by painting Hindu goddesses nude.
We've become a Nazi nation, where to be left wing is to be ipso facto anti-national; where right wing action squads based on the Nazi Sturm Abteilung (SA, top photo above) can arm, drill and train under the benign gaze of the authorities while left wing activists are hunted down and murdered in staged encounters as "Maoist rebels".
We've become a Nazi nation, when history and prehistory are re-invented to prove the origin of the "Aryan" (yeah, that same "Aryan") race was here in India, and that all other races are interlopers and by implication "inferior".
We've become a Nazi nation, where the perceived and propagandised interests of a single, and invented at that, community (the North and West Indian versions of Hinduism, and to hell with the very different East Indian and South Indian traditions) becomes the "national interest" and where adherents of different religions are all "foreigners" (and no matter that Christianity in India is older than it is in most parts of Europe, having arrived here in the First Century CE, or that Islam has been an Indian religion since at least 700 CE). We've become a Nazi nation, when anyone opposing the official line is hounded by legal and illegal means till he or she either pipes down or is forced to leave.
We've become a Nazi nation, where the - again, invented - traditions of a group of people not making up half the national population is sought to be made the official traditions of everyone else, and this is passed off as "culture", and where the worst features of that tradition are those that become dogma.
We've become a Nazi nation, when women are asked to go back into the kitchen and know their place (and it's not for want of trying that the Nazis won't get them back there).
We've become a Nazi nation, when trade unions are suppressed and the police and authorities automatically take the side of industrialists in trade disputes.
We've become a Nazi nation, when increasingly large parts of the national budget are hived off into weapons purchases which have no conceivable use but to enrich certain officials through kickbacks.
Fortunately, our homegrown Nazis are the poor imitations of the originals. For whatever the originals were, they had a sort of awful majesty; they never did things by halves. Ours - well, look at the pathetic image of the RSS oldsters on parade below, and compare them with the SA on top.
If Nazism was the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, Hindutva is the Corporal "Schicklgruber".
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