How much is too much? To go by the tortured valley standards, it may vary… from day to day, month to month and indeed from year to year; for the preceding four years for the Kashmir valley, as of this moment, blood and gore appear to have become the norm. So many killed, militants, ordinary civilians and the odd security man; so many houses burnt, so many IEDs blown up. Forget it; that’s absolute routine. In fact even the media, the so-called national electronic one, seems to be losing its fell interest in the daily routine enacted in rural South Kashmir and in the North as well, if I haven’t already lost of my sense of direction. There is a new front that is becoming ever so assertive, recklessly so, in the rest of the country, as unwelcome and unwholesome, as the valley routine. And to go by a Home Ministry statement no data is available on the toll of human lives taken in places as far apart as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Rajasthan not to mention odd places like Maharashtra and, of course, Madhya Pradesh. Thanks to a well- known Supreme Court lawyer while the Home Ministry may have lost interest in collecting overall crime data for the country – a new phenomenon this, very true indeed, a convenient one at that, when to the avoidable task of recording incidents recording the crimes committed against Muslim minority in the context of cow or conversions. A benign government like the one headed by the Bharattiya Janata Party in Delhi and in many major States wouldn’t want to burden itself or the Muslim community by maintaining statistic listing the number of times our gow rakshaks and ghar wapsi choose to go hunting for the Muslim cow smuggler or spotting instances of inter-faith marriages or even most bizarrely for an out of the way qabristan. The saafronites, to heir Ministers and legislators are always on hand to brow-beat the police, if it shows any inclination of playing fair. So, the policemen too have taken it upon themselves to remove any victim of cow bhakts from the site, and as they reportedly did last week, “finish” the job at the police station, give the dead/dying a quick wash and a change of clothes, if warranted, before taking the near-dead “smuggler” to the hospital (a bare 15 minutes away in the Alwar case) before the hospital declares the victim “brought dead”. Nothing dents the ardour of the cow bhakts, nothing quenches their craving for blood. I heard someone telling me the other day in a state of ecstasy of the deep appreciation his African hosts for Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the presentation of Indian cows he apparently made to some of his hosts in Africa. Gone obviously are the days when a Nehru would present a baby elephant to the Moscow or Tokyo zoo. It’s the cow now. About the exultant gow bhakts or their cousins from other ultra right Sangh Parivar outfits meanwhile never give up their vigil. They continue to be on the look out for the greedy Muslim cow killer or the mad Hindu-Muslim couple (lovebirds one would call them) choosing to fall in love and getting married to boot. They may have virtually lived like man and wife in a mixed neighbourhood, and finally deciding to tie the knot in Ghaziabad, which they are assured was more tolerant. One such Muslim young man was very nearly beaten to death en route to the registrar’s office. Less lucky than the similarly mixed couple with eleven years of married life behind them who were close to being jailed when they went to renew their passports. They were married for 11 years, had only appeared for renewal of their travel paper. Oh, no. Nearly forgot about the absence of data relating to cow-killers and ghar wapsi wallas mentioned earlier. The government department responsible for maintaining crime data or statistics, if you will, pleaded ignorance about the existence of such details of communal killings.. The Home Ministry refused to divulge the numbers due to their non-availability in Parliament. It fell to the lot of a Supreme Court lawyer who volunteered that the figure was 89 – the number of Muslims delivered instant justice via lynchings etc., by the right wing Hindu extremists groups between October last year and now. And Mr Rajnath Singh, forget his flailing hands and overlong fingers slashing the air in front of him, a fencing enthusiast he must be, keeps repeating fair play but is rarely willing to concede a crime unless confirmed by the State (usually BJP-ruled) too, had assured us twice during the week in the Lok Sabha that lynchings were nothing new in India. The Honest man that Rajnaath Singh must be thundered in the Lok Sabha, a questioning finger almost poking into the eyes of Sonia Gandhi, seated across, on the other side of the Parliament Reporters long table, asking the Congress leader about the mass killing of Sikhs in 1984. Nobody has forgotten that. He didn’t say it but the parallel didn’t quite make it, granted that Sikhs suffered immensely following Mrs Gandhi’s murder by her Sikh Guards but a more appropriate parallel for the Sikh massacre for Mr Rajnath to fall back upon would have been the killing of 2000 Muslims in Ahmedabad in 2002 when Mr Modi was the Chief Minister and the BJP President Mr. Amit Shah was is hatchet man cum Home Minister in the State. That was when Modi’s then leader, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was constrained to invoke for the then Gujarat Chief Minister the path of Raj Dharma. That Mr Modi had in Vjapayee’s words failed to observe. The Home Minister Mr Rajnath Singh has in this case himself and his mentors in the Sangh to blame if the impression is created that the Government is tepid in its response to this new phenomenon of organised crime against the minorities. His response even to the Supreme Court’s strong admonition that Parliament enact legislation to contain mob lynching and curb the increasing tendency for instant justice delivered on the streets. When the lynchings came under repeated focus in the streets as much as in the legislature the while promising action added his own rider “if necessary” Sadly, despite rash of killings by gow vigilantes the political leadership of the ruling party both at the Centre and in the instant case in Rajasthan has not ticked off the saffron cadres – the ruling party’s very own creation – asking them clearly to cease and desist. Adding insult to injury are BJP Chief Ministers, State Ministers and RSS leaders. Of that happening there is little chance since we have had occasion when BJP leaders and Ministers haven’t been able to resist the temptation to publicly encourage the cow vigilantes. The RSS-BJP plot is thickening. Only yesterday you had the rising star of saffronites in Uttar Pradesh, the arrogant Yogi Aditynath, the Chief Minister, proclaiming that every one, bar the parivar, was making a mountain of the molehill called public lynchings and Muslim-baiting. Too much, too bad.
How much is too much
