I K Shukla
Posted June 14, 2000

  A case in point is Carter. The media in the US decided to promote him as a presidential candidate. He suddenly became a "nuclear physicist".  He was also the "liberal" president as projected by the US media.  The cost of his "liberalism" in terms of blood and fire was bitterly paid by Zaire, Afghanistan, and South Korea, to name just a few cases. In South Korea ( Kwangju,1980) 2000 protesters were killed by the dictator Chung Doo Hwan. Their crime: demanding an end of martial law, of  torture, of fraudulent elections, and the release of dissidents. He is heralded as a "human rights advocate", and not only in the official history of the United States.

  Closer to home is our own variant of human rights advocate: Vajpeyi. Our media determined to promote him as their "liberal"( his qualifications:boycotting our
freedom struggle, betraying democracy by apologizing to IG), "right man in the wrong party (RSS is my soul)", the "poet"(no one had ever heard of him as one
before he became PM), the "orator"(  not a demagogue: which Mai ka lal can buy India?). But in the words of the Hindutwa gang itself, he was just the "mask" for its  ghoulish agenda of restoring medieval barbarism geared to uprooting democracy, secularism, and pluralist unity-in-diversity of an ancient land. However, our media chose to be "different", "objective", "independent", and duly deferential - all in the interest of Big Business, happily coeval with Communal capitalism.

  Our media conveniently forgot that Vajpeyi had apologized to Indira Gandhi, as  to Britishers in the 1940s, and belonged to a party which had consistently opposed India's freedom struggle, and to a Parivar which assassinated Mahatma Gandhi who, to their chagrin, had fought the British. He never retracted these stands which spelled treason, opportunism, and fascism; later neatly and catchily subsumed within the devil's incantation of "one nation, one people, one culture". He never recanted. So, in promoting him as the man of India's destiny, the media assiduously and intently promoted treason, and fascism, giving him several paints of  teflon. The mask  given him by the party wore off, but the teflon given him by the media abides. Never in his life did he suffer from a scruple, or  for a principle. He  had none. He was busy building his career. Media generously helped.

  That he is a good person surrounded by baddies is a mega  myth, a macro mendacity, laboriously manufactured by the mercantile media. Thus media arrogantly  assumed the duty of authenticating and grooming the acceptable ones. It can be seen in the references made ad nauseam to the Raja of Manda (V.P.Singh), and his "assuming the mantle of messiah of the poor". These derogatory ascriptions are dismissive of not only V.P. Singh the politician, butthey go far beyond. That he is a hypocrite,( since no Raja can take up cudgels on behalf of the oppressed), is the most apparent meaning. The second, more sinister, is : "Beware of him. He is a rabble rouser pleading crazy causes that upset the apple cart of elite privilege and predation. Were he sensible, he would not advocate such a radical redistribution of power, or so-called egalitarian restructuring of society."

  How lies are concealed in such sobriquets becomes evident when others are not repetitively and derisively alluded to as Rajas or Ranis (Jaswant Singh, Madhavrao Scindia,Vijay Raje Scindia). And it gets edited out in the mercenary journalism of mendacity that while the Raja of Manda donated his 185 acres of land to the poor, no other of the trio ever evinced this weakness for the weak, the altruistic streak.  Thus the media makes it clear for the benefit of its readers, and in the interest (profits) of its owners, whom among politicos  it regards worthy of its endorsement and largesse, and whom it damns as subversive agitators. The hacks, aspiring to be really serviceable, become more of panders and less of journalists in the process. A goodly number are not only aspirant but also apprentice politicos in this regimen.

  That is how in the wake of massive atrocities on Christian in Dangs, all that Vajpeyi could think of was a national debate on conversion. That was his inhuman and instant prescription for wiping the tears of the victims and consoling them for the loss of their lives and properties. Not one word on churches destroyed, majoritarian mayhem, and communal terrorism rampant all over the nation, induced and instigated by the saffronite thugs. It was not only viciously diversionary but also desperately granting advance absolution and encouragement to the neo-Hindu terrorists from their demonstrable and legally chargeable culpability. This was a daring aid and  abetment of crime. It came out in his contemptuous and querulous query, (w hen shown the debris at the church), " Why didn't you clean it up?" His reprimand was heard by the victims as : " How do you dare publicize, and why did you not remove, so visible a proof of ersatz Hindu crimes and criminals whom it is my duty as a partisan to protect by all means? How else, otherwise, would I prove loyal  to my party, and true to my "soul", if  as PM, I don't advance its agenda? I have a mandate to fulfill." Who gave him the mandate to liquidate the minorities, the NDA?

 Yes, he is loyal to the precept of ethnic cleansing. He is loyal to the project of demolishing the Constitution by denuding it of its guarantees and provisions in respect of the minorities, who, he believes, have been pampered far too long via (hold your breath!) centuries of degradation, enslavement, denial and deprivation, and unremitting  exploitation of every conceivable kind. He would not have the upper classes, the  privileged parasites, similarly pampered .

  Whenever major violence against Christians, Muslims, and Dalits is reported in various parts of the country, Vajpeyi chimes without any loss of nerve or even a minute, religiously and regularly, like a mechanical ventriloquist: "Minorities are safe". If he thought vandals and arsonists, assassins and rapists to be the minority, he was right. They are, and will be, safe in his dispensation. But if by minorities we understand, and as certainly does Vajpeyi, Golwalkar's "foreigners" and the saffronites' bete noires - Muslims, Christians, Parsis etc., then he is telling a memorized and tutored  lie with a dead pan face. It betrays his moral opacity as an Indian and governing incapacity as PM, though he gets accolades from his acolytes and partners in crime, and  great marks for his inventive cynicism.  Vajpeyi, in the process, gets progressively alienated from not only the minorities, but the masses of India. He subverts both the Indian ethos and the democratic norms, he plunges the polity into medieval pits of savagery sanctioned by a delirious construct of  religious tribalism. Throwing India backward by several thousand years, he believes, he would see India restored to its cradle of  "purity".

  Take Advani who nearly pioneered the project of raising lie to the level of a virtual art. In fact he takes the cake. Preceding and following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India was rocked by communal riots in which Muslims were killed in several thousands, almost close to 4000. But whenever he opens his mouth he puts his foot in it first by declaiming: "No communal riots happened in India since BJP came to power". Nobody alive as a human in India, whatever his station in life, can make a statement like that and get away with it. But he does it in and out of season as a professional practitioner of the art of prevarication, with his claque applauding his verbal trapeze. No communal riots in India, says the HM. Minorities safe in India, says the PM. Q.E.D. But, pray, who asked them. Most of the time, they are issuing these statements unasked, timed as machines that these myrmidons and  pipsqueaks are. Machines don't tell lies. They are instruments fed with lies that they gurgle at regular intervals. And, this they do to great effect. Over time you get used. In  fact, you miss these bold, bald, white lies. You have ingested them not as Ad Vani but as Akash Vani.

  Then there is the mighty George Fernandes. He never stops surprising me. He has decreed that BJP is not communal. George doesn't wince at his own fraudulent lie. Is he persuading the Indian masses, or the minorities (the vote banks), or himself ? He succeeded in luring only himself with that self-serving falsehood conjured wholesale from the hat of his somnambulistic delusions. Or, to be charitable to human frailty, his politically ambitious calculations. But this quirky quick change artist has put the chameleon out of business.

  How lies become respectable and companionable is evident from the welter of parties joining and giving the BJP poitical viabilty on a national scale. If one is known by the company one keeps, these latter are party, if not privy, to the regime of lies pulverizing India and destroying it brick by patient brick it took millennia to build it as a nation, and over 50 years to weld it as a nation-state. For their partnership in a national crime of the most heinous kind they stand exposed. If they don't kick their way out of the witches' coven even so late as now , they must not be spared popular justice at the hustings in the future. For them, the fire next time, to use the biblical phrase, immortalized by the eminent afro-American writer James Baldwin in a book of that title purporting to be letters to his nephew and to Americans from "a Region in My Mind" (1963).  Painful as it may be to recall in order for us to face the truth for square, it was the small parties that joined Hitler to enable him form the government, and wreak the Nazi devastation on all of Europe. Just as they helped Hitler launch his fascistic terror in Germany and beyond, their Indian counterparts have enabled the saffronite fascists to straddle the land and stalk it with impunity. These pigmy parties must be punished in an exemplary manner by
the people in the next polls for their complicity in and endorsement of rank communalists, rabid hate mongers, diehard exclusivists, and seasoned liars whose weapons are arson, rape, assassination. They have even issued a 34-page manual on how to lacerate and eliminate the "foreigners".

  By the way, since ISI is ruling India, if one goes by the regime's own interminable assertions, then these ministers are the appointees of Islamabad, carrying out the designs of Pakistan. They must be investigated. In this scenario, it is  the ISI that instigated Advani's Blood Yatra (the trail of blood across India running its course which never stopped in time or space), our ministers leading the demolition squad of hired vandals to raze a valued monument of our history widely known as Babri Masjid ( Pakistan has no history pre-1947, so it wanted ours gone too. Quite plausible.), this calculatedly inciting retaliatory reprisals against Hindus and destruction of their temples in Pakistan and Dhaka (Taslima Nasrin's novel Lajja's theme), to mutual advantage of Islamabad and N.Delhi, ostensibly.

  In the same vein, it was the ISI and foreign agencies (not the CIA?) who, to defame us, torched Graham Stuart Staines and his teenage sons, and continue
defaming us by well timed pogroms against beleaguered Christians; who instigated and purveyed the lies that Ayodhya was invaded 77 times by the Mughals and over 31 lakh Hindus were killed from 1528 to 1847 defending it. The ISI seems good at it. But if it is all the way ISI which is running India, why do we need scums
and scoundrels, vandals and ventriloquists, in New Delhi, deputizing as its surrogates and overseers?  Why are we maintaining this top heavy administrative machinery breaking the nation's back and squeezing it dry?  Shouldn't we get rid of it first and fast, however late it already be? If it is ISI's writ running here (Vaiko, hear hear) let us pay Islamabad for its administrative services to India, and let us tell them what kind of services we, the people, are interested in.

  Another joker to the pack, welcome him. Naidu says if it is proved that BJP or its ideological partners in communal outrage were guilty in the matter of Church
bombings in three southern states the same day, he would get out of NDA.( Not quit politics? That is a favor to us. No small mercy). Before anyone took him at
his word, the slicker jumped out of it, blaming the press wrongly reporting him. Question: If it was to get out of the NDA, Babu, you would not have joined it in
the first place. Do you think you can insult the intelligence of the people and get away with it? Just wait, and fear the next elections whether in Andhra Pradesh or New Delhi. It will an eye-opener for you. Get ready for the people's verdict on your too smart by half opportunistic and dirty  tricks. It is a game others too are good at. You will meet your match.

  This poser to New Delhi's  tin pot dictators: Since you have proven times without number that you are incompetent at every level of  governance in states and at the center, it is time you resign en masse and quit post haste before the wrath of the people sacks you unceremoniously. Your work of xeroxing that you started in your first stint of 13-day rule is calculably close to end, if it hasn't ended long ago, since that was your priority. Beyond that neither you needed more, nor deserved more. The sordid months that you have been at the helm have seen depredations that India hadn't witnessed in hundreds of years.

  All the institutions of democracy you took care to destroy. They are destroyed. Take one example, the National Minorities Commission. It has stripped itself
shamelessly in public view and people find it to have been Majorities Commission right from day one, but masquerading as Minorities Commission. Since you don't
recognize minorities as Indian citizens, you could not appoint a Foreigners' Commission. But you hit at the  the next best: give them  a masquerade. If a PM can agree to be a mask, why not a Commission? Once you steel yourself nothing seems impossible. This phoney Commission finds  nothing communal in the rampaging violence against Christians, unappeased and unabated. So, Maliana, Meerut, Surat, Dangs, Goa, Manoharpur, Mathura never happened, or were stray incidents of robbery, hence unpunishable, because it is OK against theminorities, it is "nationalistic passion". Fired with this brand of "nationalist" passion, if the minorities were to react similarly, would they too be absolved, or charged and framed as "foreigners"? But how will your writ apply to "foreigners"?

  The minorities have already drunk your poison of violence quite heavily.  They won't mind vomiting some of it. They know in their bones that according to your long brewed plan you are killing Gandhi in each murder and rape, each demolition, each vandalism, every day. This, if not their own inhuman dishonor and grievous loss, they will stand up to avenge, since to them the was the Father of the Nation, their  Mahatma. And as men they will face you down, and show you their mettle, and reclaim this land .

  This land is theirs, they are not a minority - Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Adivasis, and not least, Women. Aryan interlopers, whose descendants you claim to be, were a minor and none too glorious an episode in the nation's history. You are the usurping and foreign minority, long here on our sufferance despite your assaults on our native cultures, which explains your desperation, haunting fear, and savage violence.  The cycle of history turns. Await your fall, beware of your extinction. There is little time left  for you to wake up from your violent delusions,  repent your crimes, lies, and frauds, wear sack cloth and ashes, seek forgiveness from your genuinely contrite hearts (at least once earnestly), and vamoose before the Avalanche of Time crashes on you and writes your FINIS.