SUNITA CHIMA SHAME ON YOU PLAYING SPIN ISN’T JUST MIND OVER MATTER
in response to your article in malaysian whore house of journalism 
your article A (personal) Malaysian Spring — Sunita Chima
Sunita Chima “India is the world’s greatest democracy.” is it so then watch this
why Bal Keshav Thackeray, founder of Shiv Sen inspired so much fear in people. no answer, though figured out that as a man he was reasonable only that his politics was that of hate. More than two decades later as news of his death trickled in, went back to the same question. Now have an answer about Balasaheb’s politics and why it was like that. Though India has progressed in the last sixty years, in society there is always a group of people who can be labeled as ‘haves’ and others who can be classified as ‘have-nots’. This categorization is not only on the basis what people have or have not but based on what they think they are. Thus people can be ‘haves’ (in terms of people think of them or their economic position) but who are ‘have- nots’ in their own perception. This was so forty five years ago (when Balasaheb burst forth into the scene) and even now.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. civil society indicating that both had certain common features and suggested that the role and nature of civil society is reflective of the role and condition of the State and that the development of one could not be understood in isolation from the other. In both, there is a prevalence of corruption, weak leadership rooted in a neo-patrimonial political culture, ethnic and class divisions as well as tendencies towards may be linked to the lack of a strong, effective system which could have fostered the creation of a shared national identity. There is evidence to suggest that such a formation did not occur in countries that have been colonized in the past after independence. This may have hampered the genesis of national cohesion and the ability of the State to evolve to nationhood.
In the name of being the largest democracy we seem to be getting away with a great deal of bullying and terrorizing of our citizens. Attacks on the online community are growing. Political masters, the security agencies at their beck and call, are basking in a culture of impunity. The latest arrests of two young girls for their critical comments on the Mumbai shutdown following Bal Thackeray’s death, is yet another example of this trend. Shaheen Dhada’s comments on Bal Thackeray, ‘liked’ by her friend Rini Srinivasan, landed both of them in prison. The girls were released on bail following a hue and cry in the media. But that they could be dragged to prison on such a non-issue is in itself a scary reminder of the future; of a fair measure of our vulnerability in the face of the wrath of the powers that are unable to whiplash social media into submission but want to control it nonetheless. One wonders once again about the differences, if any, between a multi-party democracy like India, and a one-party totalitarian Communist state like China. In both countries the social media is under attack, bloggers are hauled over hot coals, punished with imprisonment and legal cases. In India the political class has taken to a wink-wink, nudge-nudge game. Let the police make the arrests, its a good way of teaching the ‘culprits’ not to be irreverent towards the high and mighty. The IT law with its sinister section 66A is used time and again to ‘straighten’ the ‘rebellious’ online community. It’s time to scrap that offending section.
Following the aresst, there’s always an ‘afterwards’ when the buck can be blithely shifted to the police. And that’s exactly what the Shiv Sena has tried to do this time. The Shiv Sena leaders have tried to shift the onus of the arrests of the two girls on to the police. Interestingly though, they have refused to condemn the arrests, shooting off inane statements instead. The script was pretty much the same in several incidents in the recent past when Congress governments at the center and in the states too were guilty of persecuting the social media.
But let’s get things in perspective for this latest incident, which is also a reminder of what the Shiv Sena stands for. It wasn’t just the arrest. Angered by Shaheen’s post Shiv Sainiks vandalized a hospital run by her uncle, dragging patients out of beds and destroying the equipment. Strangely, the police, which had been so prompt in arresting the two girls, are yet to arrest any of the vandals. And what about the Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray, whose death touched off the incidents?
The last couple of days have been quite a nightmare. First, the seemingly endless 24×7 telecast of Bal Thackeray’s health bulletins and then the minute-by-minute scan of his funeral procession. Second, the semi-choked voices of some commentators, their contrived imaging of a ‘benign’ and popular Thackeray, who, incidentally, worshipped and emulated Hitler. He was the ‘great dictator’ at whose bidding Shiv Sainiks thrashed lovers on Valentines Day, chased North Indian students who landed in Bombay to take the railways examination, vandalized cinema halls, media offices and sets of film shootings. This was the man behind the mass killings during the riots in Bombay in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition; the man, who, according to those who were chronicling the event of his death, spoke the ‘truth and nothing but the truth’.
This is the legacy left by Bal Thackeray, a legacy that his followers intend to stay true to, as evident from yesterday’s events.
Chances are you’re up for grabs. The whole country is up for grabs What’s all this grabbing that’s going around with a fervency worse than a dengue epidemic? What’s being grabbed? Gold chains? Handbags? Sensitive parts of our anatomy? Worse. What’s being grabbed is land. All over the country, Operation Landgrab is on with a vengeance, and no one is safe.. The original grabbers were the local authorities. Of course they didn’t use the word ‘grabbing’; they used the word ‘acquisition’. For the purposes of making the grabbed – sorry, acquisitioned – land into an eco-friendly green belt. The NMC pointed that the land in question already was an eco-friendly green belt.
The exception as the rule Good Intentions cannot justify bad delivery
Bill passd in parliamnt are not in the laudable intention but in the clogged delivery. The desire to be politically correct has overtaken the imperative to be politically sensible. Method and order structural flaw could further erode the already ebbing credibility of our parliamentary systemThe irony is that such flaws can be easily corrected, with some time and thought. Both have been absent from the process, the favourite weapons of Hercule Poirot, might be usefully employed in analysis.It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape ofJustice related article PM’s duty to ensure independent judiciary, says CJ
When Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over years; this central truth has not.the umbilical chord of the colonial, or neo-colonial. Who had dared to arrest a pillar of the American corporate establishment. ‘Bail or no bail’: what was a rotten piece of paper signed in an Indian court worth to a lord of Wall Street? Not even the decency of silence. Anderson was publicly, even proudly, contemptuous of those who did not have the courage to interrupt his freedom for a mere industrial disaster in which a few thousand semi-slave Indians had been gassed to death within hours and thousands more would die over years.Accusation is the easy exit route from Bhopal. Introspection will take us back to the beginning. Betrayal is impossible without trust. We did not trust Carbide to be honest. We trusted our political class, and it continues to search for new and inventive ways to betray us again.November 16, 2012 Comment by Din Merican This morning I received via sms an invitation from Dato Ramli Yusuf, former Director, Commercial Crime Investigation Department to inform me that the Royal Malaysian Police Force (PDRM) is giving him a formal farewell. He wanted to honor me as one of the many Malaysians who had supported … Continue reading »
Bill passd in parliamnt are not in the laudable intention but in the clogged delivery. The desire to be politically correct has overtaken the imperative to be politically sensible. Method and order structural flaw could further erode the already ebbing credibility of our parliamentary systemThe irony is that such flaws can be easily corrected, with some time and thought. Both have been absent from the process, the favourite weapons of Hercule Poirot, might be usefully employed in analysis.It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape ofJustice related article PM’s duty to ensure independent judiciary, says CJ
When Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over years; this central truth has not.the umbilical chord of the colonial, or neo-colonial. Who had dared to arrest a pillar of the American corporate establishment. ‘Bail or no bail’: what was a rotten piece of paper signed in an Indian court worth to a lord of Wall Street? Not even the decency of silence. Anderson was publicly, even proudly, contemptuous of those who did not have the courage to interrupt his freedom for a mere industrial disaster in which a few thousand semi-slave Indians had been gassed to death within hours and thousands more would die over years.Accusation is the easy exit route from Bhopal. Introspection will take us back to the beginning. Betrayal is impossible without trust. We did not trust Carbide to be honest. We trusted our political class, and it continues to search for new and inventive ways to betray us again.November 16, 2012 Comment by Din Merican This morning I received via sms an invitation from Dato Ramli Yusuf, former Director, Commercial Crime Investigation Department to inform me that the Royal Malaysian Police Force (PDRM) is giving him a formal farewell. He wanted to honor me as one of the many Malaysians who had supported … Continue reading »
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
The burden of independence OF Justice
The unfortunate truth is that there is reason for this cynicism. A lot of the opinions that abound in media, both mainstream and social, are rooted in pre-fabricated positions that fly under the flag of one label or another. In addition, over the last few years it has become clear that very few of our certitudes about the independence ofjustice the allegedly independent institutions stand up to scrutiny.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order.
It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape of JUSTICE
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
The unfortunate truth is that there is reason for this cynicism. A lot of the opinions that abound in media, both mainstream and social, are rooted in pre-fabricated positions that fly under the flag of one label or another. In addition, over the last few years it has become clear that very few of our certitudes about the independence ofjustice the allegedly independent institutions stand up to scrutiny.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order.
It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape of JUSTICE
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
Promoting equality of unequally?
legal system,local or in international sphere the subjects of law are the persons, nationals and judicial, upon whom the law confers rights and impose duties .In international law these persons are normally states, but they are not so exclusively. States have been described by Weber as the human community that claim itself the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within the territory with determined boundaries .However, the advisory opinion in the case concerning Reparation for the injuries suffered of the united nation ,the international court of justice rejected the view that the only states can be subjects of international law and affirmed that ―throughout its history ,the development of international law has been influenced by the requirements of international life and the progressive increase in the collective activities of states has already given a rise to instances of actions upon the international plane by certain entities which are not states.
Promoting equality of unequally?
legal system,local or in international sphere the subjects of law are the persons, nationals and judicial, upon whom the law confers rights and impose duties .In international law these persons are normally states, but they are not so exclusively. States have been described by Weber as the human community that claim itself the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within the territory with determined boundaries .However, the advisory opinion in the case concerning Reparation for the injuries suffered of the united nation ,the international court of justice rejected the view that the only states can be subjects of international law and affirmed that ―throughout its history ,the development of international law has been influenced by the requirements of international life and the progressive increase in the collective activities of states has already given a rise to instances of actions upon the international plane by certain entities which are not states.
Justice M S Liberhan did not need 17 years and a thousand pages to tell us what has been public knowledge since December 6, 1992. The Babri mosque was not torn down in the dark of night. It was brought down slowly, stone by stone, in Sunday sunlight, before hundreds of journalists, to the cheers of countless thousands of kar sewaks in and around Ayodhya. The mosque was not dynamited in a minute; it was demolished by crowbar and shovel.The Liberhan Commission could have completed half its report by taking a look at that film. The media was equally comprehensive in its coverage of the brutal riots that followed: The Sri Krishna report has done far greater justice to the truth in its findings on the Maharashtra riots, so much so that there is all-party collusion on its non-implementation. There was only one question trapped in doubt: What was prime minister P V Narasimha Rao doing while Babri was destroyed on the longest day of the last two decades? Why was home minister S B Chavan, father of the present Maharashtra chief minister, immobile, inscrutable and stolid?
Shock raced through Delhi when word filtered through that an assault had begun in Ayodhya. Phone calls began to pour into the prime minister’s residence in the hope that he would use the authority of the state to uphold the rule of law and fulfil a political and moral obligation. There was a monstrous response from the prime minister’s personal secretary. The PM was either unavailable or, worse, asleep. It was a lie. Rao’s inaction and Chavan’s collaboration were deliberate.
Liberhan protects prime minister then with an equally conscious fudge, shuffling the blame on to unspecified intelligence agencies. Everyone knew what was going on, IB officers better than most. PM called a Cabinet meeting only in the evening, when there was nothing left to be saved — not even reputation. By this time, fires of hatred were lighting up the dusk of Mumbai and dozens of cities across the nation. An elaborate programme of blame, reward and punishment was put into place. Those (including bureaucrats and journalists) who acquiesced in Rao’s charade were rewarded; Congress Muslims got a bonus for silence. Rao remained in power till 1996, but he neither ruled nor lived in peace.
The words of this column will make no difference. A government can reduce the past to rubble as easily as an Opposition party can erase a centuries-old mosque. My apologies for a rare detour into the personal, but this is a rare moment. I was a minor part of the Rao government and resigned on the night of December 6 since the stone wall constructed around the prime minister’s house had become impervious to anything except sycophancy. Words demand a different kind of loyalty, and one was relieved to return to the world of words.
Shock raced through Delhi when word filtered through that an assault had begun in Ayodhya. Phone calls began to pour into the prime minister’s residence in the hope that he would use the authority of the state to uphold the rule of law and fulfil a political and moral obligation. There was a monstrous response from the prime minister’s personal secretary. The PM was either unavailable or, worse, asleep. It was a lie. Rao’s inaction and Chavan’s collaboration were deliberate.
Liberhan protects prime minister then with an equally conscious fudge, shuffling the blame on to unspecified intelligence agencies. Everyone knew what was going on, IB officers better than most. PM called a Cabinet meeting only in the evening, when there was nothing left to be saved — not even reputation. By this time, fires of hatred were lighting up the dusk of Mumbai and dozens of cities across the nation. An elaborate programme of blame, reward and punishment was put into place. Those (including bureaucrats and journalists) who acquiesced in Rao’s charade were rewarded; Congress Muslims got a bonus for silence. Rao remained in power till 1996, but he neither ruled nor lived in peace.
The words of this column will make no difference. A government can reduce the past to rubble as easily as an Opposition party can erase a centuries-old mosque. My apologies for a rare detour into the personal, but this is a rare moment. I was a minor part of the Rao government and resigned on the night of December 6 since the stone wall constructed around the prime minister’s house had become impervious to anything except sycophancy. Words demand a different kind of loyalty, and one was relieved to return to the world of words.
The recent scandalous episode in which two young girls from Maharashtra were jailed by local cops for having shared an innocuous Facebook comment about the late lamented (or unlamented, according to your political views) Bal Thackeray once again showed what an increasing intolerant society India is becoming with freedom of speech daily being muzzled.
In my own case, the column I do for TOI has been censored only once. And that was because of the Shiv Sena leader. Sometime in 1989 I did a take-off on Bal Thackeray, who was shown being busy pulling wings off flies. When asked by a sidekick why he was pulling wings off flies, the Shiv Sena supremo was made to retort in my column: “Why am I pulling wings off flies? Because, stupid, minorities don’t have wings for me to pull off them, that’s why.”
In those days, my column used to appear on Sundays. On Sunday morning I got a phone call at home from Dileep Padgaonkar, the then editor of TOI.
“You column’s been carried in the Delhi edition, as you must have seen. But I’ve had it pulled out of the Bombay edition,” said Dileep.
Before I could respond, he continued: “I thought I’d phone you and tell you about it, before you found out for yourself later and blew your stack. Do you want to know why I had your column dropped in Bombay?”
“I do,” I said.”It was because I knew that you’d never forgive yourself if, because of something you’d written, a Shiv Sena mob had attacked the TOI’s office in Bombay and beaten up our colleagues, including Dina and Bachi,” said Dileep. Dina Vakil was the resident editor in Bombay, where Bachi Karkaria, who had left The Statesman to join TOI, was also posted.
In a moment, my anger at my column having been dropped evaporated and instead I felt grateful to Dileep. “Thanks, Dileep,” I said. “What you did was absolutely right. I would never have forgiven myself if anything had happened in Bombay thanks to me, while I sat safely in Delhi.”
That episode raised questions about censorship, intolerance and liberalism to which I have yet to find satisfactory answers. I was, and am, against censorship. This is not only because I’m a self-styled liberal and believe in the fundamental right of freedom of expression, but also because of a pragmatic reason: namely that, more often than not, censorship doesn’t work. It’s like a medication which suppresses the symptoms of a disease which later manifests itself in even more virulent form. Censorship is like plugging the safety valve of a pressure cooker; all that pent-up steam, with no outlet, is eventually going to blow the cooker’s lid.
That said, I believe there is one form of censorship which can, and ought, to be exercised on occasion, and that’s self-censorship. My right to freedom of expression becomes a wrong if it puts others in danger. The textbook example is of the prankster who yells ‘Fire!’ in a crowded hall, causing a stampede in which several people are hurt, or killed.Despite the lip service we pay to Gandhian ahimsa, India’s an extremely violent society particularly where religion and political ideology (the two are often indistinguishable) are concerned. In such a context, mob violence at the slightest provocation – or sometimes no provocation at all – is the disorder of the day.
Shaheen Dhada whose Facebook comment roused the Shiv Sainiks’ wrath apologised for her remark. This didn’t help. A Shiv Sena mob wrecked a medical clinic belonging to her uncle. And Shaheen and her friend were hauled off to jail and released on Rs 15,000 bonds.
What response will this blog provoke?
No comments:
Post a Comment