INDIA, A DEMOCRATIC NATION, RULED BY COMMUNAL BLOODBATHS
http://articles.timesofindia.
KOKRAJHAR: In the latest round of violence in Assam's Kokrajhar district, the first blood was spilled over bundles of paddy. Early morning on November 10, in Bajugaon village in Gossaigaon division, Ainal Haque had spent four hours bent over the ripened stalks, cutting and bundling them, with his friend Sadan Talukdar, when three men slipped out of the shadows of the encircling trees. In the scuffle that ensued, Sadan miraculously escaped, but Ainal was pinned down and shot dead.
Nine more killings followed in a week - of the 10 killed, eight were Muslims and two Bodos - a return of blood-letting in an area that had seen nearly a hundred lives lost and more than four lakh people displaced in violent clashes between Bodos and Muslims in July and August. That violence has returned at the time of harvest is not without reason. "If a farmer can harvest his crop, he is richer by 15,000-25,000 rupees. If he is stopped from harvesting, those who stop him can enrich themselves in turn," says G P Singh, the inspector-general of police, who points out that the first round of violence was timed to the sowing season, while the second round to the harvest.
But economic competition between the two communities is not limited to the fruits of one agricultural season. A long-running tussle over land, which fuelled the clashes, is now impeding rehabilitation, in turn sparking fresh friction.
Bodo leaders are convinced there is a large population of illegal Bangaldeshi immigrants among local Muslims. In August, when they sat down to draw up a rehabilitation plan with a Group of Ministers (GoM) of Assam government, representatives of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) - which has special powers to administer four districts of Assam - insisted on a verification process to separate citizens from migrants among the refugees before they could be given official rehabilitation assistance to go back and rebuild homes. The GoM accepted this demand.
In the first six days of September, district officials visited relief camps to collect 30,000-odd applications. The officials matched the details in the applications with revenue records and by mid-October, 17,016 applications were approved - of those who owned land and of the descendants of land owners. "If my father or grandfather has land in the village, it means I am a genuine resident and not an illegal immigrant," says Jayant Narlikar, Kokrajhar's deputy commissioner, explaining the rationale used to identify eligible people.
With 17,016 applications forwarded to BTC, officials returned to the camps to photograph all the families found eligible. By the middle of November, however, BTC sent back only 4,698 applications, approving only those who owned land directly. Of those, nearly half were of Bodos.
"We were verifying the genuineness of people, while it appears BTC was solely verifying land ownership," says Narlikar.
"Your grandpa had 20 children. They, in turn, have 20 children each. How can you mention land in your grandpa's name and still be considered as a land owner," counters the deputy chief of BTC, Kampha Borgoyary. He claims BTC simply placed the applications in two categories - those who had land and those who did not. "In meetings, we said even those not having land but who are descendants (of land owners) could go back to the villages," he says. The rider - to avail rehabilitation, they would have to prove their line of descent in a second round of verification.
Some believe that by cutting short the public list, and yet taking a more liberal view in closed door meetings, BTC manages to cleverly score political points - they conveyed to their Bodo constituents that they had done utmost to stem the tide of Muslims.
Far away from the official deliberations and machinations, in Soganchara relief camp, 33 year old Mansuf Ali, patiently waiting for the rehabilitation assistance, was thrilled when he was photographed with his wife and children - it was a sign the money was on its way. But later, as he heard only 4000-odd applications had been approved by BTC, he didn't wait any longer, and rushed back home, keen to harvest the crop he had sown in his three bighas of land, most of it in his deceased father's name, but half a bigha in his own.
But with the area still tense, Mansuf had to forgo the harvest. He now lives in a makeshift tent outside his village. Through all the upheaval, he has carefully guarded a plastic folder, bursting with laminated documents - his birth certificate from 1979, land ownership papers from 1960, a certificate from the National Register of Citizens in 1951 which shows his father was 18 years old at that time. Despite the voluminous documents, Mansuf is yet to receive the rehabilitation grant.
Of the 90 displaced families of Bajugaon village, only five have received the grant. For Abdul Aziz Shaikh, one of the recipients, a land owner in the area, the money is of little consolation. He hasn't been able to harvest his 41 bighas of paddy. On his return from the camp, the first time he visited his land, a group of Bodo men asked him to stay away. The next time he went, bullets were fired in a distance. A few days later, not far from Shaikh's fields, Ainal Haque was shot dead.
Close to Bajugaon, in Doawagiri village, both Muslim and Bodo villagers who had escaped to relief camps have now come back. In the Bodo quarter, all the families who lost homes have received the rehabilitation grant. Some were quick to harvest their crop, but others who started late had to stop mid-way - soon after Ainal Haque's killing, curfew was imposed, uniting Bodo and Muslim farmers in the despair over this year's bitter harvest.
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http://blogs.timesofindia.
25 November 2012, 04:29 AM IST
The Gujarat election will revive charges that Narendra Modi killed a thousand Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with the BJP accusing Rajiv Gandhi of killing 3000 Sikhs in the 1984 Delhi riots.
To get a sense of perspective, i did some research on communal riots in past decades. I was astounded to find that the greatest communal slaughter occurred under neither Modi nor Rajiv but Nehru. His takeover of Hyderabad in 1948 caused maybe 50,000-200,000 deaths. The Sunderlal report on this massacre has been kept an official secret for over 60 years. While other princes acceded to either India or Pakistan in 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad aimed to remain independent. This was complicated by a Marxist uprising. The Nizam's Islamic militia, the Razakars, killed and raped many Hindus. This incensed Sardar Patel and Nehru, who ordered the Army into Hyderabad. The Army's swift victory led to revenge killings and rapes by Hindus on an unprecedented scale.
Civil rights activist AG Noorani has cited Prof Cantwell Smith, a critic of Jinnah, in The Middle Eastern Journal, 1950. "The only careful report on what happened in this period was made a few months later by investigators - including a Congress Muslim and a sympathetic and admired Hindu (Professor Sunderlal)- commissioned by the Indian government. The report was submitted but has not been published; presumably it makes unpleasant reading. It is widely held that the figure mentioned therein for the number of Muslims massacred is 50,000. Other estimates by responsible observers run as high as 200,000."
A lower but still horrific estimate comes from UCLA Professor Perry Anderson. "When the Indian Army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out, aided and abetted by its regulars. On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim Congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate.
It reported that at a conservative estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover. This was the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian Union, dwarfing the killings by the Pathan raiders en route to Srinagar which India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of Kashmir.
"Nehru, on proclaiming Indian victory in Hyderabad, had announced that 'not a single communal incident' marred the triumph. What action did he take on receiving the report? He suppressed it, and at Patel's urging cancelled the appointment of one of its authors as ambassador in the Middle East. No word about the pogroms, in which his own troops had taken eager part, could be allowed to leak out. Twenty years later, when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter banned the publication of the document as injurious to national interests."
Perry Andersen is accused by some of anti-Indian bias. This cannot be said of author William Dalrymple. In The Age of Kali, Dalrymple says the Sunderlal report has been leaked and published abroad, and "estimates that as many as 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered."
Our textbooks and TV programmes show Sardar Patel and Nehru as demi-gods who created a unified India. The truth is more sordid.
You will not find any mention of the Hyderabad massacre in our standard history books (just as Pakistani textbooks have deleted reference to the East Pakistan massacre of 1971). The air-brushing of Patel and Nehru is complete. My friends ask, why rake up the 1948 horrors now? You sound like an apologist for Modi's killings of 2002.
I can only say that the killings of 1948 cannot possibly justify the killings of 2002, or 1984, or any others. Modi has blood on his hands, whether or not he was directly culpable. But why pretend that others had spotlessly clean hands? There is a macabre logic in the praises Modi has recently heaped on Patel: the two were not entirely dissimilar. Nations need to acknowledge their past errors in order to avoid them in the future. Germany acknowledged the horrors of fascism and militarism, and this helped it build a new anti-war society focused on human rights.
Something is terribly wrong when Indian citizens are kept in dark about the biggest pogrom since Independence, even after foreign sources have lifted the lid. India's jihadi press is fully aware of the 1948 massacre, and projects its censorship as evidence of Hindu oppression . This is not how a liberal democracy should function. India cannot become a truly unified nation on the basis of suppressed reports and sanitized textbooks. The Sunderlal report must be made public.
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http://articles.timesofindia.
Refugees went back home to reap a bitter harvest
Supriya Sharma, TNN Nov 21, 2012, 02.11PM IST
KOKRAJHAR: In the latest round of violence in Assam's Kokrajhar district, the first blood was spilled over bundles of paddy. Early morning on November 10, in Bajugaon village in Gossaigaon division, Ainal Haque had spent four hours bent over the ripened stalks, cutting and bundling them, with his friend Sadan Talukdar, when three men slipped out of the shadows of the encircling trees. In the scuffle that ensued, Sadan miraculously escaped, but Ainal was pinned down and shot dead.
Nine more killings followed in a week - of the 10 killed, eight were Muslims and two Bodos - a return of blood-letting in an area that had seen nearly a hundred lives lost and more than four lakh people displaced in violent clashes between Bodos and Muslims in July and August. That violence has returned at the time of harvest is not without reason. "If a farmer can harvest his crop, he is richer by 15,000-25,000 rupees. If he is stopped from harvesting, those who stop him can enrich themselves in turn," says G P Singh, the inspector-general of police, who points out that the first round of violence was timed to the sowing season, while the second round to the harvest.
But economic competition between the two communities is not limited to the fruits of one agricultural season. A long-running tussle over land, which fuelled the clashes, is now impeding rehabilitation, in turn sparking fresh friction.
Bodo leaders are convinced there is a large population of illegal Bangaldeshi immigrants among local Muslims. In August, when they sat down to draw up a rehabilitation plan with a Group of Ministers (GoM) of Assam government, representatives of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) - which has special powers to administer four districts of Assam - insisted on a verification process to separate citizens from migrants among the refugees before they could be given official rehabilitation assistance to go back and rebuild homes. The GoM accepted this demand.
In the first six days of September, district officials visited relief camps to collect 30,000-odd applications. The officials matched the details in the applications with revenue records and by mid-October, 17,016 applications were approved - of those who owned land and of the descendants of land owners. "If my father or grandfather has land in the village, it means I am a genuine resident and not an illegal immigrant," says Jayant Narlikar, Kokrajhar's deputy commissioner, explaining the rationale used to identify eligible people.
With 17,016 applications forwarded to BTC, officials returned to the camps to photograph all the families found eligible. By the middle of November, however, BTC sent back only 4,698 applications, approving only those who owned land directly. Of those, nearly half were of Bodos.
"We were verifying the genuineness of people, while it appears BTC was solely verifying land ownership," says Narlikar.
"Your grandpa had 20 children. They, in turn, have 20 children each. How can you mention land in your grandpa's name and still be considered as a land owner," counters the deputy chief of BTC, Kampha Borgoyary. He claims BTC simply placed the applications in two categories - those who had land and those who did not. "In meetings, we said even those not having land but who are descendants (of land owners) could go back to the villages," he says. The rider - to avail rehabilitation, they would have to prove their line of descent in a second round of verification.
Some believe that by cutting short the public list, and yet taking a more liberal view in closed door meetings, BTC manages to cleverly score political points - they conveyed to their Bodo constituents that they had done utmost to stem the tide of Muslims.
Far away from the official deliberations and machinations, in Soganchara relief camp, 33 year old Mansuf Ali, patiently waiting for the rehabilitation assistance, was thrilled when he was photographed with his wife and children - it was a sign the money was on its way. But later, as he heard only 4000-odd applications had been approved by BTC, he didn't wait any longer, and rushed back home, keen to harvest the crop he had sown in his three bighas of land, most of it in his deceased father's name, but half a bigha in his own.
But with the area still tense, Mansuf had to forgo the harvest. He now lives in a makeshift tent outside his village. Through all the upheaval, he has carefully guarded a plastic folder, bursting with laminated documents - his birth certificate from 1979, land ownership papers from 1960, a certificate from the National Register of Citizens in 1951 which shows his father was 18 years old at that time. Despite the voluminous documents, Mansuf is yet to receive the rehabilitation grant.
Of the 90 displaced families of Bajugaon village, only five have received the grant. For Abdul Aziz Shaikh, one of the recipients, a land owner in the area, the money is of little consolation. He hasn't been able to harvest his 41 bighas of paddy. On his return from the camp, the first time he visited his land, a group of Bodo men asked him to stay away. The next time he went, bullets were fired in a distance. A few days later, not far from Shaikh's fields, Ainal Haque was shot dead.
Close to Bajugaon, in Doawagiri village, both Muslim and Bodo villagers who had escaped to relief camps have now come back. In the Bodo quarter, all the families who lost homes have received the rehabilitation grant. Some were quick to harvest their crop, but others who started late had to stop mid-way - soon after Ainal Haque's killing, curfew was imposed, uniting Bodo and Muslim farmers in the despair over this year's bitter harvest.
-------------
http://blogs.timesofindia.
SWAMINOMICS
Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre
SA Aiyar25 November 2012, 04:29 AM IST
The Gujarat election will revive charges that Narendra Modi killed a thousand Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with the BJP accusing Rajiv Gandhi of killing 3000 Sikhs in the 1984 Delhi riots.
To get a sense of perspective, i did some research on communal riots in past decades. I was astounded to find that the greatest communal slaughter occurred under neither Modi nor Rajiv but Nehru. His takeover of Hyderabad in 1948 caused maybe 50,000-200,000 deaths. The Sunderlal report on this massacre has been kept an official secret for over 60 years. While other princes acceded to either India or Pakistan in 1947, the Nizam of Hyderabad aimed to remain independent. This was complicated by a Marxist uprising. The Nizam's Islamic militia, the Razakars, killed and raped many Hindus. This incensed Sardar Patel and Nehru, who ordered the Army into Hyderabad. The Army's swift victory led to revenge killings and rapes by Hindus on an unprecedented scale.
Civil rights activist AG Noorani has cited Prof Cantwell Smith, a critic of Jinnah, in The Middle Eastern Journal, 1950. "The only careful report on what happened in this period was made a few months later by investigators - including a Congress Muslim and a sympathetic and admired Hindu (Professor Sunderlal)- commissioned by the Indian government. The report was submitted but has not been published; presumably it makes unpleasant reading. It is widely held that the figure mentioned therein for the number of Muslims massacred is 50,000. Other estimates by responsible observers run as high as 200,000."
A lower but still horrific estimate comes from UCLA Professor Perry Anderson. "When the Indian Army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out, aided and abetted by its regulars. On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim Congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate.
It reported that at a conservative estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover. This was the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian Union, dwarfing the killings by the Pathan raiders en route to Srinagar which India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of Kashmir.
"Nehru, on proclaiming Indian victory in Hyderabad, had announced that 'not a single communal incident' marred the triumph. What action did he take on receiving the report? He suppressed it, and at Patel's urging cancelled the appointment of one of its authors as ambassador in the Middle East. No word about the pogroms, in which his own troops had taken eager part, could be allowed to leak out. Twenty years later, when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter banned the publication of the document as injurious to national interests."
Perry Andersen is accused by some of anti-Indian bias. This cannot be said of author William Dalrymple. In The Age of Kali, Dalrymple says the Sunderlal report has been leaked and published abroad, and "estimates that as many as 200,000 Hyderabadi Muslims were slaughtered."
Our textbooks and TV programmes show Sardar Patel and Nehru as demi-gods who created a unified India. The truth is more sordid.
You will not find any mention of the Hyderabad massacre in our standard history books (just as Pakistani textbooks have deleted reference to the East Pakistan massacre of 1971). The air-brushing of Patel and Nehru is complete. My friends ask, why rake up the 1948 horrors now? You sound like an apologist for Modi's killings of 2002.
I can only say that the killings of 1948 cannot possibly justify the killings of 2002, or 1984, or any others. Modi has blood on his hands, whether or not he was directly culpable. But why pretend that others had spotlessly clean hands? There is a macabre logic in the praises Modi has recently heaped on Patel: the two were not entirely dissimilar. Nations need to acknowledge their past errors in order to avoid them in the future. Germany acknowledged the horrors of fascism and militarism, and this helped it build a new anti-war society focused on human rights.
Something is terribly wrong when Indian citizens are kept in dark about the biggest pogrom since Independence, even after foreign sources have lifted the lid. India's jihadi press is fully aware of the 1948 massacre, and projects its censorship as evidence of Hindu oppression . This is not how a liberal democracy should function. India cannot become a truly unified nation on the basis of suppressed reports and sanitized textbooks. The Sunderlal report must be made public.
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