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Killer
Debate
Kalam
Nishan Singh
 NEW
DELHI: In his remarkable work ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’, one
of America’s most original thinkers Thorstein Veblen told us more
than a hundred years back how the rich perceive themselves, devoted
to being “a connoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of
merit.” Much the same is the case with Indian politicians on both
sides of the fence, ruling as well as the opposition, when it comes
to massacre of the innocent and the shameless politics over how the
mountain of corpses the other has rustled up is slightly higher.
More than 23 years after marauding mobs ran after any Sikh in sight,
burning people alive on the roads of the national capital as police
watched mutely and the newly anointed Congress Prime Minister only
exhorted the murderers further, India's right wing Hindu communalist
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has reminded the country's Sikh Prime
Minister of his party's role in the November 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom.
"The PM has lost his mental balance," the BJP spokesperson said,
shedding any semblance of understatement employed by Veblen, but
what is interesting is what had provoked the BJP into such shrill
reminder about the anti-Sikh genocide.
Just a day earlier, the Prime Minister had questioned any moral
right for the BJP to even stay in politics saying it was a party
that was the culprit when Godhra riots left thousands of Muslims
dead and India's image permanently soiled in the world, as if there
was any left after the 1984 dance of death right in the national
capital under a Congress government.
What message if the official India, its rulers as well as the
opposition, sending to the minorities in the country? That the
Muslims will be killed by the BJP, the Sikhs will be at the mercy of
the Congress and the marauding hordes of killers will be protected
by each of the main political parties as per their turf division.
The Sajjan Kumars, the Jagdish Tytlers, the HKL Bhagats will be
eulogized by the Congress and the Narendra Modis will be the poster
boys of the BJP?
 As
for the minorities, the official India – which includes both the
so-called secular killers like those in the Congress and the
communal killers like those in the BJP ranks – are in agreement that
they must be further deprived of any semblance of power leverage.
Hence the upcoming bill which will re-design the criteria for
defining a minority, making it easier to hunt for the weak (Read
‘Dumping the Minorities’ on Editorial Page inside).
Those bred high on power and communalism have historically damaged
other perceived as weak. “It is only the high-bred gentleman and the
rowdy that normally resort to blows as the universal solvent of
differences of opinion,” wrote Veblen about the arrested development
of a certain kind of power drunk. He, of course, knew nothing about
the Congress or the BJP, in 1899, but then, he knew nothing about
the Great Depression of 1929 either which he had predicted with
remarkable clairvoyance. Or is it that the true face of power drunk
is difficult to hide?
Narendra Modi this week walked out of interview when TV anchor Karan
Thapar had just started asking about the riots in Gujarat. The
Congress has taken on Modi on the issue. Very fine, thank you. But
will any Congressman please take to the same microphone left
available by Modi to talk about the 1984 riots? Come on, Godhra was
just yesterday, and poor Modi is to face elections next month while
the anti-Sikh pogrom is old hat. Oops! We know it will hurt. May
possibly remind them that they too don’t have a moral right to talk
about riots and genocide. In a Killer Debate, only the Killers get
to Debate. That is the only sure fire way of Killing The Debate,
softly, without anyone noticing. The Congress and the BJP have
mastered the art; that’s why not one Indian newspaper saw the stark
irony of killers debating killings while indulging in selective
amnesia. The Sikh nation must see the shenanigans of the Indian
State in a clear light if it is to decide its own destiny; otherwise
it will only get to hear scintillating TV discussions about which
one is worse: a Holocaust or Genocide?
24 October, 2007
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