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More Perspective from TOI today...

Band-aid state
29 Aug 2007, 1130 hrs IST,Tarun Vijay
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Bombs are deadly. They suddenly blast and even before you could know what has hit you, your body would be scattered all around in a hundred pieces. You may be having fun at a local food joint or preparing to solemnise marriage the next morning. Everything goes off in a second. Marriages turn into mourning and the enquiries are ordered.

That’s the system requirement. A democratic state needs enquiry reports.

But bombs do not arrive uninvited. They are invited and sheltered and facilitated. The biggest facilitation comes from the state apparatus through the creation of an atmosphere where blasts become a routine affair so much so that people stop counting or reacting to them. The blasts, the condemnations, the expressions of deep sorrows and the steel resolves –’not to be cowed down by such dastardly acts’ become so standardised like the cyclostyled copies of the municipal payment receipts we used to see in childhood days, that nobody read.

Yet they are kept as sacred documents, readily producible in future if asked –did you pay your bills? Yes, sir. So if someone would ask our worthy leaders what did you do when your people were killed, they would smartly produce the newspaper cuttings – we condemned the incident in strongest words. Band-aid solutions. Never eliminating the cause of the hurt, never finding the permanent solutions. Just a first-aid and the matter ends like an ill-equipped public hospital treating a wounded pedestrian.

Do we remember how many of them have occurred so far? Jammu, Gandhi Nagar, Varanasi, Bangalore, Delhi, again Delhi and yet again....Hyderabad, Kolkata, Imphal, Guwahati, Coimbatore...

The one who did it in Delhi was condemned to death penalty by the Supreme Court but secular politicians wanted him to be set free. The other, a rogue politician himself, caught for the Coimbatore blasts was felicitated in a public function by the entire cabinet of a state government run by the Leftists, with the home minister in the lead, when the accused was freed on technical grounds, mainly because the state apparatus that was supposed to present proof of his involvement in the bloody incident ‘failed’ to do so. Have you ever heard a state cabinet felicitating a soldier’s family who gave his life for defending India?

A Taslima is attacked and the victim herself is booked for the ‘instigation’ like a rape victim in Pakistan being accused of ‘instigating’ rapists to commit the act! A party in power, which takes decisions calculating an electoral win and safety of political power rather than the lives of people it is supposed to rule and protect, would even go to the extent of hobnobbing with the anti-nationals to secure their support for staying afloat in governance.

The Muslim League (ML), under Jinnah’s leadership, was responsible for India’s division and the subsequent massacres. Post-Independence, ML survived, though it was a political pariah like the Communist party and Lenin’s memory had become in Russia. It was helped revive by the Left parties in Kerala to get Muslim votes and the first district based on a religious group’s majority, a Muslim one, was created and named Mallapuram in the late fifties. Now, for the first time in our post-Independence history, the UPA invited ML to join the central government. Parties which would show no qualms in hating any group with a Hindu tag or inclination, go an extra mile to accommodate a communal Muslim party which didn’t think to change its name after its condemnable role in the nation’s partition. Suppose the Hindu Mahasabha, which was against Partition, was revived by Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, saying it’s a different party now, would any of them be allowed to join the mainstream?

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