The Hindu worm must turn to
catch them by the scruff
By Radha
Rajan
For comic relief, the
Minister of State for Home Affairs Shri Prakash Jaiswal offered gratuitous
advise to the Gujarat DGP, instructing him to “act professional”. Shri 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.
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.
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
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.
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
unauthorised 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.
The demolition of the dargah catalysed
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 unauthorised structures too. Secular Indian polity was brought down on its
knees and secular India groveled and cringed before the violent Muslim mob and
gave in to its unreasonable demands - for the nth time since
1947.
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 plank,
rushed to the Supreme Court pleading for a stay of the Gujarat HC order. Supreme
Court, 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 communalised Gujarat
went back whistling to their homes.
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 Justices Ashok
Kumar and Dinakaran 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, ordered all local
authorities, municipalities, corporations and panchayats to remove all
encroachments and unauthorized structures. I cannot believe that this order 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 on 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 Courts
issue interim orders on the issue and you can gauge the extent of Hindu
powerlessness. 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 organised
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 jehadis 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 ex-pressionless remark by the
NSA MK Narayanan that the peace process will not be affected by the massacre of
Hindus by Muslim jehadis, the UPA government was not traumatised 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 Shri Prakash
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.
Shri 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 Shri 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 Jehadi 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 rioting 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 organised minority communities, it has one yardstick for Muslim
victims of the Gujarat riots and another for the Hindu victims of Jehadi 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.
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