Unwilling warriors

Tarun Vijay

The governance was never so fatigued. Led by unwilling, hesitant, ready-to-resign, tired and moist cartridges that end up taking a potshot at each other through signed newspaper columns. The irony is, this "secular" dispensation is working wonderfully to make people more and more faithful and believe in some divine power, which must be wondering why this billion-strong nation cannot produce some leaders who take responsibility.


Our Prime Minister had a nice dinner, the most luxurious one Obama had given to any one, last time and this time he happily lapped up the sermons of a lady in love with Pakistan ostensibly wearing the burden to make two school going kids to behave in a nuke jungle. We didn’t even murmur against the completely unacceptable arrogance of Washington. We didn’t have to talk to Pakistan, the mother of all terrorism, without getting a foolproof assurance that it won’t support terrorists against us. Yet we began unilaterally a dialogue process only to be red-faced at the end of it. Why? Yielding to external pressures is a sure sign of fatigue and a resigned mood.


We don’t need to have their nuclear reactors, never used by the seller country for the last 50 years and we can met our energy requirements with solar, hydroelectric and thermal power plants. Yet we are buying the US reactors. We don t have to yield to the US to ink a civil nuclear responsibility bill, so insultingly drafted against our people. Yet we are pushing it. We were not obliged to send our foreign minister for a Beijing trip – to inaugurate a festival commemorating 60 years of bilateral diplomatic ties unless their prime minister had assured an appointment, a normal courtesy extended to a friendly country’s foreign minister. Last time too Pranab Mukherjee came back with a long face without meeting any high-ranking leader worth India’s status. Yet S M Krishna went on his first visit to China as minister for external affairs with a bang created through his XP division and returned without even a whimper.


Fatigued policy makers. Tired and confused itinerary providers. Fatigued and myopic statue builders. Who are so unsure about their popularity that they love to build their own memorials lest their followers forget to do so when they are gone. Fatigued warriors yawn to get permission to garland stone statues and conveniently forget the living soldiers who died for the cause of democracy and constitution. This silence of the dynasty, otherwise too vocal on poor and women’s empowerment and MNREAGA, is deadlier than the Maoist bullets. Look at the public condemnation of his pal Chidambaram by Digvijay Singh in a signed article. The chips would fall in their place.


Could a Congressman like Digvijay have the courage to criticize his own home minister publicly without the blessings and the tacit approval of 10 Janpath?

Signs of yawning and fatigued governance, which can't, look beyond the small time games. And such dangerous ones at that. Making a political "pilgrimage" to the homes of the terrorists in Azamgarh was one, then the other was to keep eyes wide shut at the cannibalistic celebration at the factory that produced largest number of Naxalites and their cohorts, JNU, on hearing the news of the killing of 65 jawans by Maoists. How can a government, if it means governance, tolerate such a grave insult to state power? The students who celebrated the death of the soldiers should have been booked with Kasab and tried for treason.


Instead the whole issue has been put under the carpet and campaign Uttar Pradesh is in full swing for reasons known to all. Here is the nation shrunk to the vote box. Boundaries shrunk to the domains to be "conquered". What about the rest of the nation and the larger issues of security and an equitable distribution of economic opportunities and wealth?


The state bonded to a party’s loss and profits prospect and the opponents being unfairly treated as has been in the cases of Uttarakhand and Himachal recently where the sanctioned plan outlays were withdrawn or cancelled. Only fatigued and the disinterested governors can afford to be so careless and callous towards their own countrymen.


The other example simply reminds us why we lost Somnath to Ghazni in 1024. Hang the man you hate most to placate the black goddess of sham secularism if you can. But to keep silence and feel pleasure at a foreign delegation insulting your own countryman, without any rhyme or reason except that of an intense hatred, is a crime as was committed by the back stabbers during the resistance war against Ghazni.


Only a fatigued and defocused government can have no strength to protest and answer appropriately the continued incursions by a mischievous neighbour. The soldiers who are asked to defend the frontiers are ill equipped. Nothing moves till a couple of accidents like that of Dantewara occur. At any critical moment, when the enemies find us unprepared, the chinks are exposed as we saw in 1962 and on 26/11. Should we allow that again? Aren’t the people as much responsible for allowing bad governance as much as the bad governors are responsible for the atrociously unacceptable state of affairs?

Naxalites in Delhi

Tarun Vijay

Seventy-six jawans who were on duty to fight the antinational and barbaric Communist terrorists were killed in an ambush and the home ministry says "there was an element of failure".

This is not the time for a blame game. I wrote before too, "Support Chidambaram's war", though the home minister dithered in between and gave wrong signals to the Naxalites, hoping that they would listen to him and his badly produced ads. In a way, the Indian polity helps fissiparous tendencies. It's mired in taking revenge on Amitabh Bachchan and making a tamasha of a nikah, which is strictly a matter between two interested persons. Such a polity can issue carbon copies of the previous statements of sham condemnation but can't instil confidence in the citizens and the security forces. Ask Raman Singh, the brave face CM of Chhattisgarh, who has been struggling hard to tackle the Naxalite menace amid a volley of attacks by Dilliwala Naxalites, who accused him of being harsh on the barbarians, and almost killed his Salwa Judum through false allegations.

So far the government hasn't spoken about taking the war on the Communist terrorists to its logical end. Neither has it announced a free hand to the security persons to find, flush out and annihilate the cowardly terrorists who have become a bigger threat to the nation than the Pakistan-supported jihadis. It should be doing that immediately. Home secretary Gopal Pillay has rightly questioned "not only the CPI (Maoist) but also those who speak on their behalf and chastise the government' as to what was the motive behind the attack and what is the message the CPI (Maoist) intends to convey". The "jholawala" supporters of the Naxalites should also be booked for instigating murders and sedition.

They are all Communists. They swear by Mao, Lenin and Stalin. Their loyalties are extraterritorial. Their sources of inspiration - all of them have smeared their hands in the blood of innocent people - from Lenin, Stalin and Mao to Pol Pot. And they have thrived so far in spite of having killed more than 6,000 Indian citizens and security personnel because there is a powerful lobby in Delhi which portrays them as revolutionaries and puts pressure on the government not to take any stern action. When a publishing house like Penguin chooses to publish a book of so-called poems of a jail inmate, a known supporter and the voice of the mass-killer Naxalites, Varavara Rao, what can be expected of the morale of those who are supposed to take on the barbarians to protect the Constitution? There is a socially desensitized section of the neo-rich enveloped in Anglo-Saxon traditions that has taken upon the "responsibility" to romanticize the butchers and win dollar awards.

They are the writers, filmmakers and poster boys of the glitterati that find it fashionable to safeguard Maoists and have them as an acceptable phenomenon in a society that's described as (a positioning to justify the murders) 'ridden with corruption, administrative lethargy, rich class insensitive towards the poor and the downtrodden', etc. So the logic is, if there would be so much of political and administrative injustice to a large number of poor, they would, rise in revolt. Yeah, sounds good. Doesn't it? Poor revolting against the rich, burning their bungalows and establishing a just, fair and Communist reign of the proletariat!

Like they did in Moscow and saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union? Like they did in Cambodia and saw the mass murder of 25% of the population? Like they did in China and saw millions killed and ultimately a Communist regime giving way to the market forces? There is not a single place on this earth, including the haven of the Red revolutionaries West Bengal where they have been able to establish a small corner that portrays the model success of their revolution. Bad roads, dillapidated schools, no industrialization, poverty-struck labour class and the fattened Commissars. That's the end result of their struggle. Naxals too become rogue armies, blackmailing gullible villagers and their kids to join their ranks, destroy schools, public health dispensaries and roads. They are, in the words of Chidambaram, just criminals.

This must make Indian citizens to sit up and ask the media and the government some inconvenient questions. Did the Sania-Shoaib controversy really merit front page when the nation's foreign minister was in Beijing negotiating the country's most sensitive issues? Did Penguin do the right thing by publishing the so-called poems of a barbaric supporter of the mass murderers, giving him and the book a halo of revolutionary spirit, thus according the criminals a social sanction. Those who mock at the patriotic people and heroes like Savarkar, decorate gun runners who kill citizens with a sadistic pleasure? That lady, Arundhati they say is her name, with a penchant for laughing at the beheading of security personnel like Francis and eulogising in her inimitable de-Indianised style the savagery of the Naxals must be charged with sedition and supporting mass annihilators.

Who were those seventy-six killed by the Naxal? And who felt happiness seeing their dead bodies? Who were the bereaved families and who were negotiating electoral alliances and secret pacts with the killers? The rebels or the antinational insurgent groups called Naxal, Maoist and Red revolutionaries have been working in 220 districts in 20 states and the government has established a special cell to monitor and resist them. They created a Red Corridor from Tirupati to Pashupatinath. Help from China to Nepalese Maoists to them has been suspected by Indian intelligence agencies. They are working against India and it's a war, in real sense. Still the rebels prove weightier than the patriotic jawans, who had nothing in their mind except to protect the citizens and the Indian constitution? Why? So far this is a skeleton of some official statistics describing killings of Indians by Naxals:

1996: 156 deaths
1997: 428 deaths
1998: 270 deaths
1999: 363 deaths
2000: 50 deaths
2001: 100+ deaths
2002: 140 deaths
2003: 451 deaths
2004: 500+ deaths
2005: 700+ deaths
2006: 750 deaths
2007: 650 deaths
2008: 794 deaths
2009: 1,134 deaths

Why the sacred forces of the state die like cattle unsung and often insulted like it happened in the case of Inspector Mohan Lal Sharma and pilgrimages are organized to the homes of the terrorists in Azamgarh but none to the homes of the patriotic soldiers? Why it helps to be a terrorist in Delhi to remain safe and have civil rights committees to organise interviews in magazines and channels and its often embarrassingly deadly to be soldier, with none coming to hear their woes and interview the mother of the martyred?

It is this Naxalism that needs to be crushed. They don't remove poverty through guns. They use poor to help their luxuries.

Come On Rajdeep, Face the Nation, Save your Face!

An open letter emailed to Rajdeep Sardesai

To: rajdeep.sardesai@network18online.com
Sent: Sun, 4 April, 2010 2:04:09 PM
Subject: Response to 'Face the Nation' HT dated Apiril 02, 2010

Dear Mr. Rajdeep,

I am more a fan of your charm and eloquence than anything else. I am a regular viewer of your program 'The Weekend Edition' in CNN-IBN. As an occasional reader of 'Beyond the Byte' of Hindustan Times, I chanced to read your article 'Face the Nation' dated April 02, 2010. I thought that there will be an apology from media hosts of your integrity and caliber in falsely reporting the date of the Gujarat CM being summoned by SIT as March 21st (Sunday!). But my poor eyes couldn’t stumble upon apologies or anything of that sort. On the contrary it was another blitzkrieg against Modi.

My decipherment of your article could be summarized in two points:

1) Modi and Mayawati accuse all the time of being victims of media campaigns each in their own way.
2) Supporters of Modi in ground & cyberspace are abusive of journalists who dare raise discomforting questions for the Gujarat CM.

Yet I found a ray of hope in the last few paragraphs wherein you included even Sonia Gandhi, PM and LK Advani in the list of politicians who are unwilling to subject themselves to rigorous media scrutiny. This nation has seen LK Advani give an interview to Barkha Dutt of NDTV before the General Elections 2009.

But Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, never ever!

In your piece you have also accused many of the top journalists of becoming foot soldiers of the political class. As your hard core fan I believe that you are not one of those foot soldiers and should have no problem in inviting Mrs. Sonia Gandhi as a guest speaker for one of your programs.

To make the session a lively and an entertaining one, I suggest the topic for discussion to be either of the following:

1) How to control inflation and what are the efforts taken by the UPA in this regard?
2) How to bring back Black money stashed away in Swiss Banks?
3) Bt. Brinjal – Boon or a Bane? Let's hear it from NAC Chairperson.
4) Why free Mr. Q from red corner notice of Interpol?
5) Whom to blame for 1984 Anti - Sikh riots and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits?
6) Should 'Terrorists turned Humans' be invited back to India from POK?

I firmly believe that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi will be able to add flavor to the program with her Cambridge education and strong oratory skills in English. The nation is need of such eminent persons though politicians to enlighten the common man on these pressing issues.

If you find your efforts of inviting her go in vain owing to madam's busy schedule, there can always be a general talk session with the audience on 'Sonia Gandhi's early life & achievements'.

I have always thought Indians of being one of the most exploring lots in the domain of journalism and media. But this opinion of mine could last only until a couple of years back since when I have been coming across a few 'Open Letters' to the Editors of Indian dailies and media persons. I couldn’t merely dismiss them as hate campaigns similar to the once against Gujarat! They had substance and were well enunciated with facts. The essence of most of these letters was indicative of the print and electronic media of being anti – Hindu, anti – National and a stooge of the UPA.

I am least interested in pity political skirmishes but nevertheless I am an ardent Indian citizen in exercising my franchise. Though urban votes hardly play a big role in deciding the future of the nation, I am aware that the media shapes the opinion of a selective few who can spare a walk to the polling booth on the Election Day. Having said this, I wish media persons like you to remain free of any political banners and affiliations.

Now-a-days I have seen many viewers indicate their displeasure over the bias displayed by some TV anchors in choosing the cross section of the audience for debate shows and programs. Also in your article, it is very sad to see you complain on the disdain exhibited by victims of media campaigns. So it would seem kind and more impartial of you to invite 25 top RSS cadres out of say a 50 audience for a show on / with Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. I sincerely hope that you will display the same vigour and vitality in probing Mrs. Sonia Gandhi's antecedents as much as in 'Stalinizing' Modi. Please see if you can include these humble suggestions in any of the programs of CNN – IBN. This will undo the damage done on you by your detractors. This is written in the best interest and spirit to save your image from embarrassment any further. Come On Rajdeep, please don’t lose another fan of yours. Face the Nation, Save your Face.