Karan Thapar’s breakthrough: Law of Assumption

While Newton may have given the world the fundamental laws of motion, Karan “Sudden removal of Modi” Thapar is finally on his way to codifying the laws of the anti-national pseudo-liberal English media. In an interview with Arun Shourie, self appointed Congress party/Gandhi family  spokeperson Thapar gave the world the “Law of Assumption”.  Based purely on this law, Karan Thapar makes the startling claim that the bulk of Indians money in Swiss banks is actually legal. The fundamental basis of the “law of assumption” is that the BJP is always wrong and the pseudosecular intelligentsia is free to cook up arguments based on whimsical notions which are mostly in lockstep with the Congress party/Gandhi family’s ideals. While all available indicators point towards Indians being among the largest hoarders of illegal money, Karan Thapar seems quite amazed that this may be actually true.

Manmohan Singh – what he actually said and what he really meant

Said: “We have not been successful in warding off terror”

Meant: “It is impossible to do this without upsetting our electoral calculations and hurting our muslim votebanks”

Said: “Terrorists could attempt to destabilise the electoral process”

Meant:”Its all finally left to chance, we can do only so much and will only do so little.”

Said:”Though we have made every effort to deal with it, we have to do more to strengthen intellligence, state police system and also our ability to minimise the fallout of terror sttacks”.

Meant:”Lets learn to be tolerant of terror, lets take cosmetic measures which make it seem like we are doing something about it, we do not want to piss off our votebanks by taking strong measures which address the real root causes”.

Said:”The US could take draconan measures to ensure no terror attacks after 9/11 which we cannot. We are a country of 1 billion people”

Meant:”We do not want to be seen as being rude to terrrorists, do we? We also have a 200 million muslim segment to constantly appease”

Said:”Taliban is a threat, dialogue with Pakistan is important”

Meant:”I agree with the Pakistani leaders, Pakistan itself is a victim of terror, as I had said before in Cuba. It is India’s duty to make sure that Pakistan becomes strong enough so that they can refocus their energy on cleaning out the remaining few Pandits in Kashmir.”

Said:”Dreaded terrorists were released and taken to Kandahar by NDA leaders, we did not negotiate with the Mumbai terrorists, we sent our trained commandos instead”.

Meant:”Lets forget that to begin with, our home minister changed his clothes thrice before our commandos could get into action. Lets also forget that despite a dozen attacks prior to that, we were ill prepared to handle any terror related emergencies”

Said:”Due to our diplomatic initiative, Pakistan for the first time admitted that its territory was being used to provoke terror against India”

Meant:”Lets forget that under severe NDA pressure, Musharraf went on national Pakistan National Television and swore to not allowing Pakistani territory being used as a launchpad for terror against India”.

Said:”I have great regard for the Left leaders”

Meant:”After all I shared their communist command-control ideology for the most of my career, including as chairman of the Planning Commission and RBI governor. Both the Congress and the Communists are in perfect synergy in their belief  that Muslims are a votebank that needs careful nurturing. Nevermind that occasionally we let them be butchered like in Nandigram. Both  us in the Congress and the left also strongly oppose nasty things which respectable societies possess like say a Uniform Civil Code. Also the Congress and the left firmly believe that Muslims have the first right over national resources. We both agree that the biggest enemy of the country are the communal Hindus. With all this synergy we are but natural bed fellows, we may sleep with others when needed but those are ignorable details”

Said:”The Indo-US nuclear deal was my biggest achievement. We negotiated with the US  for three years and if it did not get signed after that it would have been bad for India’s reputation. I staked my reputation for India’s honor”

Meant: “Throwing gunny bags of cash at legislators and buying their support needed a lot of skill.  It was a watershed moment which actually marked my coming out as a seasoned politician. It helped me break away from the image of simply being Sonia’s water bearer.  Also as I have said before when I was at Cambridge University, India is currently what it is only because we were civilized by the whites, and consequently its also India’s rightful place to be a pliant satellite of the west, so what if our hard built nuclear sovereignty has been signed away. You see my ability and very reputation to faithfully serve the west was at stake, and so once negotiations started it was only imperative that it be hurriedly signed in whatever form it was before my term ended, never mind that the deal was loaded against the Indians. Also minor things like say that the terms of the deal had significantly deviated from what GW Bush had promised at the outset of the deal matter very little.”

Said:”I am not contesting polls because of my heart surgery”

Meant:”Why bother about minor details like seeking the peoples mandate when there is an assured way of weaselling my way in as a Rajya Sabha member? This is an assured time tested way as the party’s nominee as chief-clerk and will ensure that our plans not be hindered by unplanned events like an election loss”.

Media reaction – Mangalore vs Kolkata

I remember that the Kolkata incident where Muslims held the editor of The Statesman hostage, played out at the same time as the Mangalore pub incident. I personally got wind of it because I receive regular updates from “The unregulated media” (as Burka Dutt puts it). It received near zero coverage in the English media, but for a column  called “Stand up to the Mullahs” by Vir Sanghvi. Vir incidentally seems to have a once a year epiphany about the dual standards applied by the pseudo-liberals as far as Hindu sensibilities are concerned.

The Kolkata  incident was completely ignored by the otherwise hyper vigilant media/intelligentsia/pink chaddis, who are notorious for policing BJP ruled states. One can see why political parties behave the way they do however ludicrous it may be. However why does a seemingly independent media behave so, unless it is actually merely a mouthpiece of a particular government ideology?

Read the below piece by Sankrant Sanu about this.

Standing up against Muslim and Hindu zealots

http://www.chowk.com/articles/mangalore-vs-kolkata-sankrant-sanu.htm

Is government, media and even civil society in India intimidated by Islamic religious zealots?

Religious zealots abused women sitting in a pub in Mangalore in Karnataka, India. Zealots from another religion violently protested against the publication of an article in the Statesman in West Bengal.

While the government in Karnataka proceeded to arrest the religious extremists in Mangalore, the government in West Bengal succumbed to their variants in Kolkata, arresting the editor instead. The first incident received widespread media-coverage and editorial condemnation and while the second, in comparison, was largely papered over. What lies at the heart of this difference in approach?

‘The Statesman’ in Kolkata reproduced an article titled ‘Why should I respect these oppressive religions’ written by Johann Hari that was first published in the Independent London. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-why-sh ould-i-respect-these-oppressive-religions-1517789.html . The article recommended that the right of free expression should not be curtailed by religious zealotry. It ended with promoting membership of the National Secular Society in UK for fighting for secularism and freedom of speech.

As a result of the article, a Muslim group of 4,000 people protested outside The Statesman’s office and demanded arrest of the Editor and Publisher. Some violence broke out. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) led government of West Bengal could not resist the pressure. The Editor and Publisher of The Statesman were arrested for publishing the article.

There are some interesting parallels and contrasts between this incident and what happened in Mangalore. A few weeks ago, a Hindu group beat-up some women in Mangalore who were visiting a pub. Civil society was outraged and the Karnataka government took swift action, arresting the perpetrators and standing up for civil liberty.

Both these cases are fundamentally about free expression and speech. In Mangalore the issue was of the freedom for women to visit pubs without intimidation by religious zealots. In Kolkata the issue was the right of a newspaper editor to publish a reasoned academic critique of religious fundamentalism (and a defense of free speech) without intimidation by a different set of religious zealots.

The issue is not about the relative merits of defending visits to pubs versus the right to a reasoned academic discussion and debate in a free democratic society. Far more interesting is the response of the Indian establishment, media and civil society.

1. While in both cases, a private group of religious zealots wanted to curtail free expression, in Karnataka the BJP-led government sided with free expression by arresting the Hindu religious zealots. In West Bengal, the communist-led government sided with the Muslim religious zealots by arresting Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of the Kolkata-based English daily The Statesman.

2. While the violence by the religious zealots of the self-styled “Shri Ram Sena” received huge media coverage and condemnation by the national and coverage by international media the larger violence by a bigger mob of religious zealots in Kolkata received hardly any coverage in relative terms. A preliminary analysis shows that the Mangalore incident received about hundred times the media coverage of the incident in Kolkata.

3. While it was heartening to see civil society rally around in large numbers against the acts of a small group of private Hindu vigilantes in Mangalore—including starting a Facebook group which garnered over 50,000 members , the state did take quick action against the vigilantes; on the other hand, the draconian actions of the state itself against free expression in Kolkata—a case which really requires civil society to be more vigilant—hardly evoked a response. Even more surprising is the apathy of the Indian media to rally to the defense of the editor of the Statesman–one of their kind. The Indian media downplayed the incidence, and with the notable exception of Vir Sanghvi of the Hindustan Times, there were few editorial condemnations.

The Mangalore pub violence and that of the mob in Kolkata are both outrageous strikes against civil liberty. However if our goal is primarily civil liberty rather than the advocacy of particular political or religious agendas, it behooves us to understand the mechanics of this differential response by the state, media and civil society. In order to do so, here are some preliminary questions.

1. Is an attack of freedom of expression of a newspaper editor less significant than that of a woman going to a pub?

2. How much of the frenzy about the Mangalore pub incident media-orchestrated? Why would the media choose to orchestrate it?

3. Does the Indian media, on the average, have a political or religious bias? Is this bias institutionalized or decentralized? Where does this stem from?

4. Vir Sanghvi, in his article on this topic writes: “It is now clear that the liberal society has been suckered into relaxing its standards for free speech by militant Islamists.” Is this true? What are the consequences of this?

5. Is the response by the state in Kolkata due to “political compulsions”? Why is the communist government of West Bengal under political compulsion from Islamic zealots while the BJP-ruled state of Karnataka not under similar political compulsion from Hindu zealots?

6. It is interesting to note that Johann Hari, who wrote the original article in The Independent, is known for his advocacy of secularism. Yet few Indian secularists stood up for him. Has Indian secularism essentially turned into apologia for Islamic religious zealotry? What will this mean in terms of long-term consequences for Indian civil society?