This is excerpt from the Times of India report you have mentioned in the earlier post. Just highlighting a couple of lines.
I really don't know the complete history of these riots in Bengal. I guess I was born a few decades too late to know what happend first hand. What caught my eyes in the article are two points. I may be off track here but I thought I will put them across.
I was not. I was eighteen, and joined college that year.
Are my recollections of that, and 84, and the Babri Masjid and the horrified reactions of the man in the street, and of Bombay 92, to be dismissed because you, @
Vinod2070, for all I know, @
Rig Vedic, were not present or were not able to recollect those incidents? The point is that your inability should not be used to disable the inputs of others who were not similarly disabled.
This is M J Akbar's personal experience. I wonder if everyone (all victims/sufferers of riots in 1968) had the same personal touch from the home minister. I am not criticizing Jyoti Basu. He is a Statesman par excellence and very few leaders in India can match his stature. But are we expecting personal handling by Home Minister of a State for each Individual. Neither its physically possible nor desirable for a Home Minister to give individual attention to each citizen. In my eyes a life of person in a Jhuggi is as important as the life of an MP. I don't know why M J Akbar got a special attention. I hope everyone else did get the same attention as well including someone who lived on the streets. If that really happened my respects for Basu will only go higher.
It is not clear whether you are ignoring the main point deliberately and using Basu as a smokescreen, or whether you have genuinely missed it.
The point was not about Basu going personally to the riot-hit spot.
The point was that the police were able to suppress it, firmly and efficiently. With a minimum of bloodshed. They faced no interference, rather, they were encouraged to restore law and order. That was the contrast, the shocking contrast, one that I have personally witnessed in my lifetime, between Telinipara and between the Sikh riots, the Bombay riots and the Gujarat riots. In each of the latter three, the state machinery was subverted by the administration.
You found the personal intervention of Basu strange. From my memories of that incident 45 years ago, Basu spent considerable time in the area. Akbar is an articulate man, and was writing a very emotional piece about his personal interaction with Basu at various times. His account should not be misread to indicate that he, and only he, was singled out for attention. In that locality, which was largely filled with ordinary workers from the jute mills on that side, the Howrah side, of the Hooghly, a student going to Presidency was an oddity. In every other respect, Akbar was a jhuggi resident.
We all knew, and admired him, in college, as juniors. But that was because of the intensity of his academic pursuit (he was English Honours, a faculty known for its brilliance, from the same batch as Sukanta Chaudhuri and Gautam Adhikari). In all other respects, in the milieu of Telinipara, he was not particularly distinguished.
It is not difficult to understand that this oddity would have been brought to the attention of the Home Minister. Hundreds received his personal attention besides Akbar; again, that was not the point. The point was that he allowed the police to function.
Second thing that caught my eyes was that M J Akbar hadn't been to his college for weeks. Does that mean the communal riots/tentions went on for weeks. Did this mean that common people couldn't leave their homes without police escort. May be it will be good to compare that time line with Gujarat.
Bluntly, no.
The riots lasted a day or two; there were sporadic incidents on the second day. The tension continued for some time. It was this, and the death of his Hindu friend, that kept MJ away 'for weeks'.
I am sorry that this kind of fishing for exculpatory facts seems necessary. Just looking up the Telinipara riots would have resolved these overblown doubts.
I think we will just disagree here. If I start doubting every law agency in this country including one that is hand picked by Supreme Court I don't think there is any agency in this country that a citizen can trust. Neither the government nor the Judicary. The only option left for me will be to leave the country or form another one.
For your information, the SIT was not handpicked by the Supreme Court. Raghavan was, and he was given the rest of the team by the Gujarat Government, which was asked to provide staff by a court directive.
This same SIT was so far from the satisfaction of the Court that appointed it, that the Court was compelled to appoint an amicus curiae to go into the facts that it claimed to have established. Does that say nothing to you?
Incidentally, regarding a somewhere dramatic ending line, Pulak Sanyal (Pulluck Sanyal), an associate of Ram Chatterjee, said that for the Muslims, there would only two countries to go to: Pakistan and Kabristan.
Communal minds seem to move on the same sets of tram lines.
Huh? The bodies were transported at 3 am to a hospital on the remote outskirts. I don't know from where you have been fed this story about slowly moving trucks surrounded by chanting crowds.
Read the eye-witness accounts gathered by the independent fact-finding bodies.
What an idiot you are! Nice to see you banned on PDF! 
