Author: Radha Rajan
Publication: Organiser
Date: May 21, 2006
URL: http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=131&%20%20page=9
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.
