Narendra Modi said teach Muslims a lesson: IPS officer

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In Modi's Gujarat, Muslims assume Hindu names to find work

Malegaon: In a shocking revelation the leading English daily Indian Express in its today's issue says that in Gujarat Muslims are assuming Hindu names just to get a job.

The front paged report narrates how Mehboob Pathan took the name Jayenti Bhatti to get the job in Surat. It was only when he was killed over a monetary dispute that his family members revealed that he was actually a Muslim.

According to the report, Pathan’s story came to be known after his body was found in a farm at Antroli last Monday, with the head smashed in. The police registered a case and kept the unclaimed body in the Palsana Primary Health Centre mortuary till Thursday. Then they arranged to give Pathan alias Bhatti a Hindu funeral, with all the rites.

His family, who had been looking for Pathan, had filed a missing complaint. Then, seeing news stories in local newspapers about an unclaimed body, Mehboob’s brother-in-law Iqbal Pathan decided to check. By that time, Pathan had been cremated, but the brother-in-law identified him from a photo of the body.

Indian Express report further says, the family terms Pathan as a pious Muslim and the change of name was just so that he and his children could find and keep a job.

“We are too poor to do anything, but how could the police dispose of his body the Hindu way?” asks son Mushtaq. “A genital examination would have shown he was a Muslim.”

Sub-Inspector of Kadodara police V R Malhotra said they had kept the body in mortuary hoping someone would turn up. “We disposed it of according to Hindu rites not knowing he was a Muslim. The family turned up too late and we are now helpless", Indian Express quoted the sub inspector as saying.

The report says, in the ledgers of Surat’s diamond units, there are many leading a double life like Pathan. His son Mushtaq is registered as Mukesh and daughter Samina as Sharmila, and both are afraid of losing their jobs if the fact was known.

The report further says, diamond industry sources and workers say many Muslims assume Hindu names to find work in the city’s lucrative diamond business.

Though the report quoted Rohit Mehta, president of the Surat Diamond Association as denying knowledge of Muslims passing themselves off as Hindus for jobs, the report is expected to create shock among the Muslims across the country.

Terming the day as the sad day for secular India, Mumbai based political analysts Ghulam Mohammad says, "I will blame Congress, Nehru, Indira, Rajiv and now Sonia for this state of affair. It is they who had indulged in double game and systematically reduced 150- 200 million Indian Muslims to such a level of desperation that their very survival as Muslims at grass root level has been so thoroughly become impossible."

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Ahmedabad: In a scathing attack aimed at the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat, senior Congress leader and political secretary to AICC president Sonia Gandhi, Ahmed Patel warned the bureaucrats in Gujarat not to "act like BJP workers" in the state, reports The Asian Age.

"Do your job as you are supposed to, instead of behaving like workers of a political party," the leading English daily quoted Ahmad Patel as saying.

"Narendra Modi", Patel said, "Is simply converting Central schemes into state schemes. He is showcasing Central projects as his and trying to cheaply take credit for all the good work being done by the Centre."

"All for cheap publicity,", he said. "These characters do not have shame to compare themselves with Gandhi and Sardar," he said.

"Know such people who claim to be your well-wishers. They were no where in the forefront when India fought for independence and now also they are no where when it comes to genuine welfare of the underprivileged," Patel told a massive tribal convention at Haripura.
Haripura in south Gujarat had hosted the Congress convention in 1938 where poverty and illiteracy were defined as national evils by elected president Subhas Chandra Bose.

Patel’s stern stance against Gujarat bureaucrats toeing the Modi line has startled government officers here.

"After Independence, they changed a lot of names. From Jan Samiti to Jansangh, Janata Party and Bharatiya Janata Party. Same way these people are changing names of Central schemes and trying to garner cheap publicity by converting these into their brainchild schemes and projects".

"All those who convert government offices or collectorates and police stations into BJP offices and work like BJP workers need to understand that this is wrong. Just by treating poor people as commodity or getting them in hordes for garib kalyan melas is not a solution to alleviate poverty", he said.

Lamenting that the Gujarat bureaucrats have started comparing the chief minister with Ram, Rahim and Jesus and are conveniently ignoring the fact that they are government servants and not workers of any political party, Patel said that the culture of sycophancy has seeped deep into the state and the state government is asking the bureaucrats to praise the chief minister.

"The state government has been diverting Central funds of various schemes into garib kalyan melas and there the chief minister hits out at the Centre," he said while addressing a public meeting of more than 50,000 people. According to Patel, Gujarat has got maximum funding under various schemes like NREGS, JNNURM, Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and other programmes from the Central government during the UPA regime.

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Witness claims Modi abused Jafri when he called for help:

A key witness in the Gulbarg massacre case has told a special court that chief minister Narendra Modi had abused former MP Ehsan Jafri when he called him for help on February 28, 2002, report The Times News Network today.

According to the TNN news published online today, Imtiyaz Saeedkhan Pathan, the first star witness to give testimony, recounted events of that day and said when they asked Jafri why police hadn't come to their rescue, the former parliamentarian told them that he would call up Modi for help.

"When I asked him what Modi said, he said there was no question of help, instead he got abuses," Pathan told court. When a mob went on a killing spree at Gulbarg society a day after the Godhra carnage, Jafri, whose home had turned into a refuge, was making frantic phone calls to every one for help.

Sixty-nine people were killed in Gulbarg Society including Jafri, whose body wasn't found. A young Parsi boy, Azhar Mody, also went missing from his house, the story of which became a Bollywood film Parzania. This film was banned in Gujarat.

Pathan described the gruesome killings in detail how his family members and neighbours were butchered and women raped before his eyes.

 

[RoYaL~GuJJaR]

Muslims happier in Gujarat

People of India have widely come to acknowledge, that in terms of honest governance and development, Gujarat’s achievements are beyond dispute. What is often questioned is how happy and contented the Muslims are in the State. Our PM Dr. Manmohan Singh had once appointed a high power committee headed by Justice Sachar to make a detailed study of the economic, social and educational conditions of Muslims in the country. The report submitted by this committee is indeed surprising. It claims that Muslims are happier in Gujarat than anywhere in India.

Here are a few highlights of the report-

1) In terms of per month per capita income, Muslims in the urban areas of Gujarat earn an average Rs 875 which is more than the national average of Rs 804.
2) The story is similar in rural Gujarat where the per capita monthly income of the Muslims 20-25% more than the Muslims living in the rural areas of most other states.
3) In terms of literacy level, Muslims in Gujarat stood at 73.5 percent as compared to the national average of 59.1.
4) Even Muslim women in the urban areas of Gujarat have average literacy rate 5 point higher than the national average.
5) Against the national average of 60.9%, Gujarat has 74.9% Muslims at the primary level while the percentage is 45.3 at Secondary level as compared to national average of 40.5%.
6) The average years of secondary schooling for Muslim children between age 7 and 16 years is higher in Gujarat at 4.29 years compare to the national average of 3.26 years.
7) In terms of people living below poverty line, Gujarat had 54% Muslims living below it in 1987-88 while the figure stood at 34% in 2004-2005 showing a healthy pace of improvement.
8) If these reports are correct, than Modi is definitely repenting Godhra and bringing all round development in the state. I was content to see the growth and propsperity in all sections of the society. I wish the other states like U.P. and Jharkhand will follow the path Gujarat has laid by showing the power of administration and honesty

 

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Muslims in Gujarat continue to endure the lasting results of the pogroms in the form of
ghettoized living conditions, often in ‘relief colonies’ that lack access to clean water and
sanitation, causing severe health problems.
8
They also suffer from unemployment, severely
restricted access to schools, and social/cultural ostracism.
9
In 2006, at its pre-session working group, and again in 2007, the CEDAW Committee
recognized the urgency of the situation and expressed its dissatisfaction with the Government of
India’s failure to provide sufficient information about the steps it has taken to address the lasting
effects on Muslim women resulting from the Gujarat attacks in 2002.
10
Consequently, the
Committee requested that India submit a follow-up report by January 2008 describing the impact
of the Gujarat violence on women; the legal, compensatory, and rehabilitative measures it was
taking for the victims of sexual assault and violence; and the steps it was taking to economically
and socially rebuild the Muslim community and resettle displaced Muslims.
11

To date, the Government of India has not submitted the report the 2007 CEDAW
Committee requested be provided by January 2008. The government continues to fail to
take measures to ameliorate the destitute situation of Muslims. The government’s
continuing failure to address these issues persists in its State report before this Committee.

---------- Post added at 04:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:32 PM ----------

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/info-ngos/Gujarat_India40.pdf

 

[RoYaL~GuJJaR]

Gujarat top investment destination - ASSOCHAM

Industry body ASSOCHAM said that with 1,445 live investment projects worth INR 1.34 million crore, Gujarat has leveraged its traditional strengths and emerged among the top preferred investment destination in recent years.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India said that the power sector has 40.2 per cent share of these projects followed by manufacturing (24.9%), services (16.8%) and real estate (11.4%). Close to 70 per cent of these investments were in districts of Kutch, Jamnagar, Ahmedabad, Bharuch, Surat and Bhavnagar.

According to the ASSOCHAM study titled Sustained Balanced Growth in Gujarat, the amount of existing scope coupled with enthusiasm shown by investors during biennial Vibrant Gujarat summits in the past eight years offers a unique opportunity to transform the state into financial capital of the country.

The study was released by chamber president Mr Dilip Modi chairperson of its Gujarat council Mr Bhagesh Soneji and national secretary general Mr DS Rawat.

A variety of opportunity areas have been identified for sustaining the growth momentum: engineering, biotechnology, food processing, agriculture, gems and jewellery. The study said that “These opportunities can make Gujarat a hub for research and development in the country.”

Even village tourism besides arts and handicrafts has a lot of scope for development. The state is fast emerging as an important destination for IT-related activities and services led by hotels, restaurants, transport and banking.

ASSOCHAM cautioned that however, two third of investment activities currently underway is in announcement stages and the value of projects actually implemented account for 35.2% of total investments. As a majority of new investments involve high-cost projects, cost and time over runs can throw their management haywire and make completion unpredictable.

Another relevant issue is that adequate long-term finance is not being made available to small and medium industries by banks. The Small Industries Development Bank of India and state finance corporations are lending to small firms for projects involving up to INR 10 crore outlay on plant and machinery.

Large firms are raising money from the bond market. In this backdrop, ASSOCHAM suggests that state-level development finance institutes be revived to help small and medium enterprises.

Metro trains are now being made at Savli near Vadodara by Bombardier Transportation of Germany. However, the state is yet to create metro and rail transport services system, said the chamber. To keep pace with its development and make its cities more livable, Gujarat needs to develop environment-friendly mass transport system.

The state’s economy grew at a compounded rate of 10.2% between 2000-01 and 2009-10. This is exceptional and much higher than what other progressive state in the country achieved during the same period.

But ASSOCHAM said the state must focus more on equity aspects while sustaining the present growth momentum. In the past two years, deficit indicators have been seen climbing up. The annual revenue deficit and fiscal deficit as share of the gross state domestic product work out to 1.8% and 4% respectively since 2000-01

 

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Hating Muslims is a Natural Thing in Gujarat


This is probably the only state that has a sizeable number of Muslims but no Urdu paper Gujarat has become an intolerable place; at least that is how I find it. Today, there are very few people I can talk to in Gujarat because they simply do not understand basic things, or don't want to. I can make myself a very comfortable citizen of Vadodara. But the problem is, I cannot talk to the people of this city; it is like walking in the desert. I find the popular myth of Gujaratis being peace-loving people impossible to believe.



How could all the riots, so many of them since 1969, have happened if this were true? I have thought about this deeply and my sense is that violence is an attribute of their acquisitive nature. Gujaratis are extremely acquisitive people. They will do anything to acquire. The most decent people here, people I would other wise respect, would do anything to get a visa to the United States, even resort to cheating and dishonesty. They are hungry to acquire. Even Gujarati devotion is about acquiring. They have an exchange relationship with God - I give you devotion, you give me riches.


The Muslim hatred practiced here is not conscious or learnt. It is just somehow normal, as nature would have meant it to be. There is no bitterness of Partition here, as is the case with Punjab. There is only the deep, almost genetic, knowledge of Somnath and the invasions and an accumulation of prejudices. Then there is a huge void in their memory until Gandhi arrives. Gandhi, I have to say, is not a popular man in
Gujarat; they merely pay him lip service. You do not become a bad man in Gujarat if you hate Muslims; you are normal. Decent people hate Muslims. And it is not a city phenomenon alone; this is true of villages as well. If a Muslim is traumatised, it is a normal thing. Just to give a sense of how Gujarati Hindus relate to Muslims, I will come to the Narmada issue.



Gujarat is extremely pro-dam and, therefore, extremely anti-Medha Patkar. Gujaratis will call all pro-Medha people Muslims. Intolerance in Gujarat is unanimous. If Muslims are hated, entire Gujarat will hate them. If Medha is seen as an 'enemy', all of Gujarat will look at her as an enemy. In that sense, Gujarat has treated Medha as much an 'enemy' or a 'fundamentalist' as Muslims are treated. The minds have got locked here. The culture of disagreement and dissent is pervasively shunned. This is so even when Gujarat is not a feudal state in terms of its economic makeup.


Some years ago, Habib Tanvir wanted to come and stay and work in Vadodara. He did not find a house for six months. Eventually, he went back. Some of us tried to find him a place to stay, but nobody was willing. My own landlord at the time, a perfectly decent man otherwise, refused. Raoof Valiullah, an honest and purposeful Congress MP was killed by gangsters in the centre of Ahmedabad a few years ago. Not even the Congress party made a noise about it. I think because Raoof was a Muslim. There was no sense of loss or outrage when Ehsan Jafri was killed. There is no political or ideological divide in Gujarat on the Muslim question; even the Congress hates Muslims.



I have a young Muslim associate who has been pursuing post-graduate studies. After the 2002 violence, I suddenly noticed that he was having a problem trying to form his sentences while speaking. He used to write clearly but I saw that his writing too was breaking up. In fact, he wasn't able to write. This was a typical case of aphasia, which is a condition of loss of speech and articulation caused by external trauma.


Gujarat is probably the only state that has a sizeable Muslim population but no Urdu paper. I wonder if there is something to it, a state of collective aphasia. I often wonder how it must feel to be a Muslim in Gujarat. I shudder to think what it must require to live at the wrong end of so much hatred, contempt and threat.

 

[SpArK]

29 pages in no time.. This thread should be made sticky.. It will be a disaster if it gets closed and all hard searched posts are just gone..

 

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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: Gujarat Officials Took Part in Anti-Muslim Violence

State officials of Gujarat, India were directly involved in the killings of hundreds of Muslims since February 27 and are now engineering a massive cover-up of the state's role in the violence, Human Rights Watch charged in a new report released today

The Indian parliament is scheduled today to debate the situation in Gujarat, and may vote to censure the Indian government for its handling of the violence.

"What happened in Gujarat was not a spontaneous uprising, it was a carefully orchestrated attack against Muslims," said Smita Narula, senior South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch and author of the report. "The attacks were planned in advance and organized with extensive participation of the police and state government officials."

The police were directly implicated in nearly all the attacks against Muslims that are documented in the 75-page report, 'We Have No Orders to Save You': State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat. In some cases they were merely passive observers. But in many instances, police officials led the charge of murderous mobs, aiming and firing at Muslims who got in the way.

Under the guise of offering assistance, some police officers led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. Panicked phone calls made to the police, fire brigades, and even ambulance services generally proved futile. Several witnesses reported being told by police: "We have no orders to save you."

Three weeks after the initial attacks, Human Rights Watch visited Ahmedabad, a site of large-scale destruction, murder, and several massacres, and spoke to both Hindu and Muslim survivors of the attacks. The report also provides testimony on retaliatory attacks against Hindus, which Human Rights Watch strongly condemned.

More than 850 people have been killed in the Western state of Gujarat in the past two months, most of them Muslims. Unofficial estimates have put the death toll as high as 2,000. The violence began on February 27 after a Muslim mob in the town of Godhra attacked and set fire to two carriages of a train carrying Hindu activists. Fifty-eight people were killed.

Starting February 28, 2002, a three-day retaliatory killing spree by Hindus left hundreds dead and tens of thousands homeless and dispossessed. The looting and burning of Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship was also widespread. Muslim girls and women were brutally raped. Mass graves have been dug throughout the state. Gravediggers told Human Rights Watch that bodies keep arriving, burnt and mutilated beyond recognition.

Burnt Muslim shops and restaurants dot the main roads and highways in Ahmedabad. Neighboring Hindu establishments remain notably unscathed.

Between February 28 and March 2, thousands of attackers descended on Muslim neighborhoods, clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist groups, and armed with swords, sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by voter lists and printouts of addresses of Muslim-owned properties-information obtained from the local municipality. In the weeks following the attacks, Hindu homes and businesses were also destroyed in retaliatory attacks by Muslims.

The groups most directly involved in the violence against Muslims include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP), the Bajrang Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that heads the Gujarat state government. Collectively, they are known as the sangh parivar, or family of Hindu nationalist organizations.

The Gujarat state administration has been engaged in a massive cover-up of the state's role in the massacres and that of the sangh parivar. Numerous police reports filed by eyewitnesses after the attacks have specifically named local VHP, BJP, and Bajrang Dal leaders as instigators or participants in the violence. The police, reportedly under instructions from the state, face continuous pressure not to arrest them or to reduce the severity of the charges filed. Top police officials who sought to protect Muslims have been removed from positions of command.

"This is a crisis of impunity," said Narula. "If charges against members of these groups are not investigated and prosecuted accordingly, violence may continue to engulf the state, and may even spread to other parts of the country."

The violence in Gujarat has triggered national outrage and has been strongly condemned by political parties, the National Human Rights Commission, the Indian prime minister, and civil society at large. Both the Godhra massacre and the attacks that ensued have been documented in meticulous detail by Indian human rights and civil liberties groups and by the Indian press.

"After two months of violence, the international community is now waking up and needs to respond," said Narula.

Government figures indicate that more than 98,000 people, an overwhelming majority of them Muslim, are residing in more than one hundred relief camps throughout the state. The state government has failed to provide adequate and timely humanitarian assistance to internally displaced persons in Gujarat. Relief camps visited by Human Rights Watch were in desperate need of more government and international assistance. One camp with 6,000 residents was located on the site of a Muslim graveyard. Residents were literally sleeping in the open, between the graves.

Assistance from international humanitarian and United Nations agencies is urgently needed for Hindus and Muslims in relief camps, Human Rights Watch said. It urged the Indian government to actively seek the assistance of international agencies and to invite United Nations human rights experts to investigate state and police participation in the violence in Gujarat.

Human Rights Watch also urged the international community to put pressure on the Indian government to comply with international human rights and Indian constitutional law and end impunity for orchestrated violence against Indian minorities.

 

[Roby]

Who is winning??

 

[53fd]

To get job in Surat, Muslim took Hindu name; revealed when he was killed

Kamaal Saiyed Posted: Dec 29, 2009 at 0522 hrs
Surat All Mehboob Pathan (50) of Valak village on Surat’s outskirts wanted was a job in the city. Having a Muslim name, he felt, came in the way. So, to get himself a job in Surat’s diamond units, he passed himself off as Jayenti Bhatti, and managed to find work in two separate units in the Kapodara area.
Early this week, his “cover” was blown, after he was brutally killed over a monetary dispute. As the distraught family stepped forward to admit that Jayenti Bhatti was indeed Mehboob Pathan, they worried that having been cremated as a Hindu, the practising Muslim’s soul may not find peace.

In the ledgers of Surat’s diamond units, there are many leading a double life like Pathan. His son Mushtaq is registered as Mukesh and daughter Samina as Sharmila, and both are afraid of losing their jobs if the fact was known.

Diamond industry sources and workers say many Muslims assume Hindu names to find work in the city’s lucrative diamond business.

One of them, Allarakha Khan, admits to having passed himself off as a Hindu like many others from his village. “We would not get a job if we are known to be Muslims. We have been doing this for a long time, and we take great care not to reveal our real names or addresses at work,” he told The Indian Express.

Rohit Mehta, president of the Surat Diamond Association, however, denied knowledge of Muslims passing themselves off as Hindus for jobs. “We will inquire into this,” he said.

Pathan’s story came to be known after his body was found in a farm at Antroli last Monday, with the head smashed in. The police registered a case and kept the unclaimed body in the Palsana Primary Health Centre mortuary till Thursday. Then they arranged to give Pathan alias Bhatti a Hindu funeral, with all the rites.

His family, who had been looking for Pathan, had filed a missing complaint. Then, seeing news stories in local newspapers about an unclaimed body, Mehboob’s brother-in-law Iqbal Pathan decided to check. By that time, Pathan had been cremated, but the brother-in-law identified him from a photo of the body.

The family says Pathan was a pious Muslim and the change of name was just so that he and his children could find and keep a job. “We are too poor to do anything, but how could the police dispose of his body the Hindu way?” asks son Mushtaq. “A genital examination would have shown he was a Muslim.”

Sub-Inspector of Kadodara police V R Malhotra said they had kept the body in the mortuary hoping someone would turn up. “We disposed it of according to Hindu rites not knowing he was a Muslim. The family turned up too late and we are now helpless.”

Kapodara police inspector S J Tirmizi, who is probing the murder, confirmed that Pathan had passed himself off as Bhatti for work. Manoj Rokad, who is the manager of the Varachha unit in which Pathan’s daughter Samina works as a diamond polisher, has reportedly confessed to the murder.

According to the police, Rokad had become a family friend of the Pathans and knew their real identities. Two years ago, Pathan had reportedly loaned Rokad Rs 60,000 for an emergency, which he never returned. Pathan used to call Rokad repeatedly asking him to return the same, and the latter reportedly asked Pathan to meet him on December 20. They went to Antroli village, where Rokad allegedly killed Pathan with the help of two other diamond polishers, who have been identified as Chhanya Rathod and Sanjay.

While Rokad has been held, and has reportedly admitted that they beat Pathan to death, Rathod and Sanjay are on the run.

 

[SpArK]

Who is winning??

Bilal.... he is leading all the way..

Others have nt got this much time to waste over it.

 

[53fd]

India's failing secularism
In a supposedly secular state, India's religious minorities find themselves in an increasingly precarious position

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Kapil Komireddi
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 April 2009 17.00 BST
Article history
As India prepares for the 15th general election since it became a republic in 1950, the country's religious minorities are anxious. The impressive economic growth that put India on the covers of major western news weeklies has not touched their lives, and they are acutely aware of their precarious position in a country that is routinely celebrated by the rest of the world as a redoubt of western-style modernity in a region associated with backwardness.

Indian Muslims in particular have rarely known a life uninterrupted by communal conflict or unimpaired by poverty and prejudice. Their grievances are legion, and the list of atrocities committed against them by the Indian state is long. In 2002 at least 1,000 Muslims were slaughtered by Hindu mobs in the western state of Gujarat in what was the second state-sponsored pogrom in India (Sikhs were the object of the first, in 1984).

Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, explained away the riots by quoting Newton's third law. "Every action," he said on television, "has an equal opposite reaction." The "action" that invited the reaction of the mobs was the torching of a Gujarat-bound train in which 59 Hindus pilgrims, most of them saffron-clad bigots who were returning home from a trip to the site of the Babri Mosque that they had helped demolish a decade earlier, perished. The "equal and opposite reaction" was the slaughter of 1,000 innocent Muslims for the alleged crime of their coreligionists.

Such an event, had it occurred anywhere else, would have destroyed that country's reputation. But, astonishingly, the years since 2002 have witnessed a steady stream of books, mostly by western authors, extolling India. The unwillingness on western intellectuals' part to engage honestly with the violent reality of India, or offer a sincere portrayal of its transformation, has much to do with their own assumptions of history and modernity; but glossing over India's treatment of its Muslims – or omitting it substantially from their analyses – must have at least something to do with the insidious apathy towards Muslim tribulations that has characterised western attitudes since 9/11.

The rise of Hindu chauvinism in India has a complex history, but the absence of any meaningful sanction from the rest of the world has certainty emboldened Hindu bigots. Last week, Varun Gandhi, the Hindu-chauvinist BJP's London-educated parliamentary candidate from the Pilibhit constituency in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state, made remarks of a kind that even European neo-Nazi leaders would hesitate to make in public.

Addressing an exclusive gathering of Hindu voters, Gandhi talked about the injustices faced by Hindus; then he told his enthusiastic listeners that he would sever any hand that was raised against a Hindu; that the lotus (the BJP's election symbol) would chop off Muslim heads; that Muslim names were scary; that his opponent's name sounded like "Osama bin Laden".

The name of his opponent, Riaz Ahmed, does not sound remotely like bin Laden's; but listening to a "Gandhi" make such an inflammatory speech should, if it hasn't already, shatter complacent Indian liberal notions about the country's experiment with secularism. Varun Gandhi is not a fringe figure: he is the great-grandson of India's first prime minister, the staunchly secular atheist Pandit Nehru.

For decades Indian intellectuals have claimed that religion, particularly Hinduism, is perfectly compatible with secularism. Indian secularism, they said repeatedly, is not a total rejection of religion by the state but rather an equal appreciation of every faith. Even though no faith is in principle privileged by the state, this approach made it possible for religion to find expression in the public sphere, and, since Hindus in India outnumber adherents of every other faith, Hinduism dominated it. Almost every government building in India has a prominently positioned picture of a Hindu deity. Hindu rituals accompany the inauguration of all public works, without exception.

The novelist Shashi Tharoor tried to burnish this certifiably sectarian phenomenon with a facile analogy: Indian Muslims, he wrote, accept Hindu rituals at state ceremonies in the same spirit as teetotallers accept champagne in western celebrations. This self-affirming explanation is characteristic of someone who belongs to the majority community. Muslims I interviewed took a different view, but understandably, they were unwilling to protest for the fear of being labelled as "angry Muslims" in a country famous for its tolerant Hindus.

The failure of secularism in India – or, more accurately, the failure of the Indian model of secularism – may be just one aspect of the gamut of failures, but it has the potential to bring down the country. Secularism in India rests entirely upon the goodwill of the Hindu majority. Can this kind of secularism really survive a Narendra Modi as prime minister? As Hindus are increasingly infected by the kind of hatred that Varun Gandhi's speech displayed, maybe it is time for Indian secularists to embrace a new, more radical kind of secularism that is not afraid to recognise and reject the principal source of this strife: religion itself.

 

[RoYaL~GuJJaR]

Who is winning??

29 pages in no time.. This thread should be made sticky.. It will be a disaster if it gets closed and all hard searched posts are just gone..

Milte hai Break k baad ..

 

[53fd]

Muslims left behind in Gujarat's growth story'

NEW DELHI: Muslims in Gujarat have a long way to go. A new study shows there's deep-rooted poverty and income inequality among the state's lower castes and Muslims. The latter, in particular, fare poorly on parameters of poverty, hunger, education and vulnerability on security issues — nowhere benefiting from the feelgood growth story of CM Narendra Modi's state.


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In the study titled "Relative Development of Gujarat and Socio-Religious Differentials", economist Abusaleh Shariff used the NSSO, NCAER's human development data and the Sachar Committee report, among others, to tabulate the status of Gujarat's Muslims. "Estimation of poverty by social group is rare, but the NCAER survey data, and NSSO, allow for such estimates," says Shariff, also chief economist at National Council of Applied Economic research (NCAER).

Disturbingly, and surprisingly, says Shariff, Gujarat's levels of hunger are high alongside Orissa and Bihar, with only Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh having higher hunger levels. Urban poverty among the state's Muslims is eight times more than high-caste Hindus, 50% more than OBCs.

Muslims are educationally deprived: despite 75% enrolment of Muslim children in primary school, a mere 26% reach matriculation. This is against 79% enrolment of 'others except SCs/ STs', 41% of who make it to matriculate levels.

Worsening matters, the study shows 2% Muslims in Gujarat face theft and burglary, though they make up merely 11% of households. At the national level 13% Muslims face theft and burglary with the same share of households. Harassment of Muslim girls is high, with 17% reporting it in urban areas, though they make up only 11% of share of population.

 

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On Muslim Women in Gujarat

The violence against Muslims which began in Gujarat on February 28,
2002, the day after the Godhra incident, has been called one-sided
and state-sponsored and has been likened to a pogrom. Neither gender
was spared, nor any age group. One form of violence, though, could be
directed only against women and girls. Rape often took the form of
gang rape and was followed by mutilation and finally by the
destruction of evidence through the burning of the victims. But some
victims of rape were left alive, and for an excellent reason.

While there are ways of estimating, at least roughly, how many people
were killed, the number of rapes committed cannot be estimated. Many
victims will not have spoken of their trauma, because rape is perhaps
the single crime known in which the victim is made out to be the
criminal, morally and socially. Further, the police of Gujarat either
refused outright to register complaints or else twisted them and
watered them down so that they became meaningless.

Figures of several thousand rapes must be discounted, since there is
no evidence and since wild exaggeration is common in situations of
this kind. Other methods of estimation must be used, imprecise though
they are. There were many instances of women's being raped in
groups. Survivors have described the subsequent killing of the others
of their groups. Such accounts have not been systematically recorded
and collated, but there have been enough of them to indicate that
many more women were raped than those who survived. Two thousand or
more Muslims have been widely estimated to have been killed. How many
of this number were women who had been raped is uncertain. It is
perfectly possible that even the charred remains of some, or of many,
were never seen.

The chilling reality is that just one case of assault on a woman is
being tried in the courts: that of Bilqees Yaqoob Rasool. In the
second week of February 2005, almost three years after the violence,
a news report did say, "Police in Gujarat said they were re-
investigating many of the cases that had been closed down and had
also filed charges in a majority of rape cases." There are two
obvious difficulties here. First, the Gujarat Police has a record of
evasion and of an inability to substantiate its claims, a fine
instance being its replies to the National Human Rights Commission.
Second, the facts that "many of the cases" and "majority"
can be defined any which way, and that the Gujarat Police can
scarcely be expected to bring to light its complicity in the cover-ups
or worse.

Before and after the assembly election of 2002, rapists swaggered
about and threatened their victims with the repetition of their act.
They do it to this day. The act itself is seen as one which brought
glory to them, and obscene songs are sung to keep its memory alive.
Even the police, staunch defenders of a law perverted beyond
recognition, use the threat as a means of keeping Gujarat's
Muslims cowed and silent. I said that some Muslim women who were raped
were not killed. They are the walking, breathing proof that the
threat is real.

Throughout history, while women have been the immediate victims of
rape, the act has served to subjugate the groups to which they have
belonged - caste, tribe, kingdom, nation, religion, race. Thus the
swaggering rapists threaten all of Gujarat's Muslims, not just
women. Three years later, they do it as part of their daily routine,
even as an indication of their agenda. This is murder of the spirit
of an entire community.

Of the hundreds of men who were arrested in Gujarat under POTA after
the "riots", just one was not a Muslim: and of course he was
not a Hindu. Those in prison have been tortured physically and
mentally, and their trials have not even begun. That is so far as
their individual suffering goes. That they are almost all young and
that they were nearly always the sole bread earners of their
families, are facts whose implications are staggering.

Indian women's social circles are almost always smaller than those
of men. They can turn to fewer people for support, and their ability
to earn is limited. A woman in trouble is likely to have to deal with
it by herself. But the responsibility of looking after the home, of
feeding and clothing both children and the old, is hers. She bears
this burden even when a man is around, and it becomes far heavier
when the man is locked up or dead. It is a slow, painful and sure
starvation.

The government of Gujarat promised a compensation of Rs.150,000 to
the families of those who were killed: Rs.90,000 in cash and the
remainder in bonds. Whether the bonds will ever have any value is not
known. What is known is that an identical package was promised after
the riots of 1985 - and the bonds still remain promises.

On paper, then, the government of Gujarat has fulfilled its
responsibility. There end its efforts at the rehabilitation of an
entire uprooted community. Muslim groups stepped in to provide
shelter and means of livelihood; but at this time none can say what
the effect of these actions will be in the long term.

One effect, though, is only too visible: the growing power of the
Muslim religious establishment. Progressive Muslims in Gujarat look
on, helplessly, as the bulk of the adherents of their religion are
taken backwards. They speak of the ruin of a quarter century's
worth of advances. There is the inevitable policing, with a constant
watch being kept specially on women. Having suffered so much
barbarity, and while being kept deprived of material resources,
Muslims must also bow before the dictates and whims of those who
claim to be their moral guides. What is to stop the rise of suicidal
fundamentalism?

We humans need anchors which hold us in place. We need basic
security, hope, good times to look forward to. I paraphrase a
description of what happens routinely in Muslim homes in Ahmedabad.
"Twenty or more men hammer on your door at 3 a.m. They ransack
household goods and abuse and kick you. After an hour or two of this,
they take away a male 'for questioning'. You are warned not to
tell anyone about what has happened. After that you begin to wait.
Often your wait is without end, for your loved one never returns."

Report after report, based on investigation, interviews and analysis,
and prepared by journalists, activists, academics, lawyers and judges
of unimpeachable integrity, has spoken in detail of what Gujarat's
Muslims, women in particular, have suffered and are still suffering.
The most recent is "India: Justice, the Victim", released in
January by Amnesty International. Like the others, it sets out the
administrative and legal measures which must be implemented. The
victimisation must end immediately, it says, and compensation and
restitution must take a real form.

Not one cogent argument has been advanced against any of these
reports, yet their recommendations have been ignored. The reports
might just as well not have been prepared. Our leaders say, ad
nauseam, that we are a democracy in which people's voices are
heard: but those who have spoken up for the thousands who were
mercilessly crushed have been crying into the wind.

What compels the Central Government to permit Gujarat to continue to
deny to Muslims ordinary human rights and to keep them from living at
a level even of bare subsistence? Are those shattered people not
citizens of India, not human beings? Is our Constitution no more than
paper?

 

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Gujarat Authorities Fail Muslim Women: Amnesty International



Bilqis Yaqoob Rasool fled Randhikpur village in Gujarat, India, when it was attacked by right-wing Hindus on 28 February 2002. The attackers burned the mosque, and houses and crops belonging to Muslims in the village. They caught up with Bilqis and her family three days later. Shouting “kill them” and “cut them up”, they gang-raped Bilqis, her mother, sisters, aunt and cousins in front of their family. Fourteen of her relatives were then killed. Bilqis saw an attacker kill her three-year-old daughter with a rock. She fell unconscious and was left for dead.

What happened to Bilqis is typical of what happened to hundreds of other Muslim women in Gujarat in 2002. Large-scale violence against the Muslim minority erupted in the state after 59 passengers, mostly Hindu activists, died in a fire on the Sabarmati Express train in Gujarat on 27 February. Officials claimed that it was part of a planned attack by local Muslims on Hindus. Official figures say 762 died in the ensuing violence, but human rights groups estimate that over 2,000, mostly Muslims, were killed in the following weeks.
Muslim men and women were attacked in the violence, but women were particularly targeted because of their gender. Girls and women were reportedly dragged naked before their families and thousands of attackers. They were then raped, often gang-raped, beaten, had rods violently pushed into their vaginas, had breasts cut off and wombs slashed open by swords. Many of them were then cut into pieces or burned to death. The victims included young girls and old women, pregnant women and babies.

To date, no one has been brought to justice for the rape and killing of women in Gujarat in 2002. The Supreme Court of India ordered that the case against those accused of raping and killing Bilqis’ family be investigated by a central police agency which found that Gujarat police had sided with the offenders and closed the case, claiming that the culprits could not be found. The case is now being heard outside Gujarat.

Failure to prosecute the perpetrators of such grave abuses sends the message to women of the minority community that the state does not take their protection seriously. Amnesty International (AI) believes that dozens of women who suffered sexual violence in Gujarat in 2002 have not filed complaints because of the attitude of the Gujarati authorities and the shame which they feel about the sexual violence they experienced.

The National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court have provided some relief in selected cases but the majority of Muslim women have been failed by the criminal justice system in Gujarat. Some survivors, supported by human rights activists, have shown enormous courage in pursuing their cases in the face of state indifference to its human rights obligations.

In November, AI is publishing a report on the failure of the authorities in Gujarat to protect women in the 2002 violence.