Spluttering with rage because Bollywood actor Aamir Khan indicated his alarm at levels of intolerance in the country is beside the point, since it only lends credence to the fears he has expressed. It isn’t the first time that an Indian couple has discussed moving out of India. Many of those who excoriate Aamir today encourage their children to take the same step or contemplate it themselves; attacking him merely for voicing in a public forum what’s on people’s minds is hypocrisy of the worst order. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi routinely reaches out to and fetes Indian diasporas wherever he goes.It then boils down not to why anyone should say what Aamir has been saying; but more specifically why Aamir, as much feted Bollywood hero, should say so. The same controversy erupted when Shah Rukh Khan spoke recently about intolerance in India. The allegation against them is that India made Aamir (or Shah Rukh); hence their speaking their minds is black ingratitude. But it could equally be argued that it is Bollywood actors like Aamir and Shah Rukh who make India – love of Bollywood unites the country and gives it a soft power edge in a world where it lacks the hard power of, say, China. As Shah Rukh has argued, Bollywood is the finest example of ‘Make In India’. Bottomline: India cannot afford Aamir or Shah Rukh leaving.
Has intolerance gone up in India in recent times? If one takes an objective criterion such as the incidence of communal riots, India is actually much safer than before. We’ve not had a major riot since Gujarat 2002. But equally, we live in a far more mediatised world than before. Gujarat 2002 was the first televised riot, and Indians do not like riots beamed into their drawing rooms.
On February 27, 2002, Gujarat changed for the worse. The S6 coach of the Sabarmati Express caught fire at Godhra, killing 59 people, mostly kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya. The communal riots that followed affected at least 16 of the state’s 25 districts and claimed over 2,000 lives, mostly Muslims. Many were rendered homeless.
The commissions that probed the Godhra incident have arrived at different conclusions. While the U.C. Banerjee Commission, appointed by the Centre, said the fire in the S6 coach was accidental, the state-appointed Justice (retd) G.T. Nanavati and Justice (retd) Akshay Mehta Commission, in its part I report, said the carnage was pre-planned.
Where politics decides everything and extinguishes the line between right and wrong? When I first heard of the conviction of former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi in the Naroda Patiya case on Wednesday morning, my first reaction was: why is it that the associates of Narendra Modi get nailed every time This was even when pressure was put on Modi by Advani and Arun Jaitely to relent. In fact Jaitely found Modi’s behaviour churlish and Advani happened to be the political guru of Pandya. After being forced out of electoral politics, Pandya was out in the cold contemplating what to do next when somebody decided to bump him off. The million dollar question is: who was that person? I did not believe in 2002 that there was an organised conspiracy that led to the Godhra train burning and nine years later in 2011 my belief remains the same. Notwithstanding the judgment delivered by the trial court. Well, it was always not like this. For the first month after the February 27, 2002, carnage, I believed like most others that coach S6 of Sabarmati Express had been deliberately put on fire
Saturation 24×7 news coverage may have made us safer, but it also means that incidents like beef lynchings or murders of rationalists, coupled with statements condoning hate crimes from people in government or close to the ruling party, send ripples of fear everywhere. They create an impression of intolerance in the public sphere and have caused a great deal of disquiet among the country’s artists and intellectuals, which cannot be brushed under the carpet. The times call for sensitivity to public opinion and a healing touch; there’s little point arguing earlier governments got away with less When leaders of the Sangh Parivar lead the charge against democracy, such as in the instance of mob violence at Dadri that killed a middle-aged Muslim and maimed his son, and representatives of the Sangh Parivar who are part of the government at the Centre prevaricate on condemning such attacks, there is definite cause for alarm.The RSS project of reshaping India as a Hindu nation goes on, regardless of which party is in power, but gets a boost when the BJP holds sway. When violations of democracy occur and those who man the levers of state power, such as ministers and politicians attached to the ruling party, seem to justify such incidents or refuse to condemn them forthright, it is legitimate to conclude that communal ideology is beginning to permeate the state apparatus. The result would be to spread the communal virus across society. This is new and this is what causes extreme disquiet. This new threat to democracy and national coherence has been called intolerance but should properly be understood as communalism, present in society and politics for long, threatening to become the ideology of the state. The democratic Constitution is no automatic defence against this danger.
On February 27, 2002, Gujarat changed for the worse. The S6 coach of the Sabarmati Express caught fire at Godhra, killing 59 people, mostly kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya. The communal riots that followed affected at least 16 of the state’s 25 districts and claimed over 2,000 lives, mostly Muslims. Many were rendered homeless.
The commissions that probed the Godhra incident have arrived at different conclusions. While the U.C. Banerjee Commission, appointed by the Centre, said the fire in the S6 coach was accidental, the state-appointed Justice (retd) G.T. Nanavati and Justice (retd) Akshay Mehta Commission, in its part I report, said the carnage was pre-planned.
Where politics decides everything and extinguishes the line between right and wrong? When I first heard of the conviction of former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi in the Naroda Patiya case on Wednesday morning, my first reaction was: why is it that the associates of Narendra Modi get nailed every time This was even when pressure was put on Modi by Advani and Arun Jaitely to relent. In fact Jaitely found Modi’s behaviour churlish and Advani happened to be the political guru of Pandya. After being forced out of electoral politics, Pandya was out in the cold contemplating what to do next when somebody decided to bump him off. The million dollar question is: who was that person? I did not believe in 2002 that there was an organised conspiracy that led to the Godhra train burning and nine years later in 2011 my belief remains the same. Notwithstanding the judgment delivered by the trial court. Well, it was always not like this. For the first month after the February 27, 2002, carnage, I believed like most others that coach S6 of Sabarmati Express had been deliberately put on fire
Saturation 24×7 news coverage may have made us safer, but it also means that incidents like beef lynchings or murders of rationalists, coupled with statements condoning hate crimes from people in government or close to the ruling party, send ripples of fear everywhere. They create an impression of intolerance in the public sphere and have caused a great deal of disquiet among the country’s artists and intellectuals, which cannot be brushed under the carpet. The times call for sensitivity to public opinion and a healing touch; there’s little point arguing earlier governments got away with less When leaders of the Sangh Parivar lead the charge against democracy, such as in the instance of mob violence at Dadri that killed a middle-aged Muslim and maimed his son, and representatives of the Sangh Parivar who are part of the government at the Centre prevaricate on condemning such attacks, there is definite cause for alarm.The RSS project of reshaping India as a Hindu nation goes on, regardless of which party is in power, but gets a boost when the BJP holds sway. When violations of democracy occur and those who man the levers of state power, such as ministers and politicians attached to the ruling party, seem to justify such incidents or refuse to condemn them forthright, it is legitimate to conclude that communal ideology is beginning to permeate the state apparatus. The result would be to spread the communal virus across society. This is new and this is what causes extreme disquiet. This new threat to democracy and national coherence has been called intolerance but should properly be understood as communalism, present in society and politics for long, threatening to become the ideology of the state. The democratic Constitution is no automatic defence against this danger.
Safer to be a cow than be a Muslim in India' Since the past few years issues like love jihad, beef and ghar wapasi have been manufactured to spread hatred and engineer riots. Every day ramzade brigade comes out with a new divisive issue or digs out an old one. The latest in the series is demand to delete word Secular from preamble of the constitution and revival of Ram temple movement in Ayodhya.
Sangh Parivar took no time in declaring Aamir an anti-national, whereas when asked, “Do you think it is time that people like you have a more strong voice when it comes to representing the moderate Muslims?“, Aamir replied, “Why should I only represent just Muslims and not everyone…as an individual if I am representing my country.” He not only condemned ISIS and terrorism being carried out in the name of Islam but every act of violence. But nobody bothered to find out what Aamir actually said and abuses started pouring inWithin minutes social media was full of morphed and photoshopped hate messages asking Aamir to quit India. Some announced to boycott him and his movies. His wife and children were targeted. His effigies were burnt. The level of insanity could be gauged from the fact that even sedition case and FIRs were lodged against him. It was made a national issue overnight.
The fact is that nowhere Aamir said that he wants to leave India. Aamir’s entire conversation (text and video) is available on the internet. Every word can be verified but when the sole aim is to spread hatred, anything and everything is misinterpreted to provoke religious sentiments and anyone and everyone who speaks about tolerance and secularism is dubbed as anti-national and ridiculed.
Here is an example of Within minutes social media was full of morphed and photoshopped hate messages asking Aamir to quit India. Some announced to boycott him and his movies. His wife and children were targeted. His effigies were burnt. The level of insanity could be gauged from the fact that even sedition case and FIRs were lodged against him. It was made a national issue overnight.
The fact is that nowhere Aamir said that he wants to leave India. Aamir’s entire conversation (text and video) is available on the internet. Every word can be verified but when the sole aim is to spread hatred, anything and everything is misinterpreted to provoke religious sentiments and anyone and everyone who speaks about tolerance and secularism is dubbed as anti-national and ridiculed.
Here is an example of how this hate propaganda machinery works. .
The vagueness of the intolerance debate has allowed the Hindutvawadis to position themselves as defenders of India against pernicious troublemakers like Muslim filmstars and liberal writers. This is a lie. It should be seen immediately as being such.This is a political matter only insofar as our ruling party is invested in Hindutva. It is a matter of social and national concern.
The questions we are dealing with so far are: Is India becoming intolerant? Intolerance has a name, and it is Hindutva,Safer to be a cow than be a Muslim in India’,
As an ideology, Hindutva is unappealing, unintellectual, even unaesthetic. It is not attractive enough to be supported fully by even its enthusiasts (some of them lurking nearby) who cough out their objections every so often. But my big problem with Hindutva is that it is also dangerous. The BJP is convinced it can calibrate Hindutva, and that once the benefit is milked, in Muzaffarnagar, in cow politics, it can be switched off or turned down. But we have seen that this is not always possible. And it is Indian citizens who, as they always have, will pay for the recklessness.
the honourable MP from Thiruvananthapuram just said that in Parliament. Yes, Mr Shashi Tharoor ‘foreign publications are talking about intolerance’, but is that the only thing the image of India stands on… And if it does, is saying something that sounds so insensitive, at least to my very Indian ear, helping that image?
Celebrities are of course, easy to attack because, unlike politicians they are famous without being powerful. In this case, part of the reason probably had to do with Aamir himself. Over the years, he has slipped into the role of India’s finger-wagger-in-chief, who somewhat sanctimoniously lectures us on a variety of ills that we suffer from. A common criticism leveled at him is that his air of earnest concern is carefully constructed and that his bursts of empathy are often aligned with the timing of the release of his films. In this case, the framing of his concerns through the idea of ‘leaving India’ certainly did set off an emotionally charged reaction. And finally, the timing itself. Coming as it did, after so much had been said and done, it crystallised a feeling that there was an overkill at work. Dadri was no longer as fresh in the minds of people and the sharp reduction in the incidence of award returning after Bihar were among the factors that might have helped produce this feeling. The feeling that there was an organized attempt to corner the government gained momentum, although even if that were to be true, why would it be deemed illegitimate is not entirely clear.
Controversy over actor Aamir Khan’s remarks during an interaction at Ramnath Goenka Awards not only shows how hatred is being manufactured in India, but also how herd mentality is turning into insanity and assuming monstrous proportion.
The attack on Aamir is well-planned. As soon as the interaction was aired on news channels, (andh) Bhakts started trolling and abusing the actor for one line he spoke on growing intolerance in India and deliberately ignored the fact that he actually endorsed Modi’s view on terrorism and religion expressed a day before in Kuala Lumpur.They picked a part of the remark “Kiran (wife) even suggested leaving India” to hammer him, conveniently overlooking the remaining part of the sentence in which he said “I told Kiran that the idea of leaving India was disastrous.”
Actors like Anupam Kher and Ravina Tandon, for the reasons better known to them, added fuel to fire by dubbing Aamir as anti-Modi, whereas he said, “Today BJP is being criticized but what happened in 1984 (anti-Sikh riots under Congress rule) was horrendous. Violence has taken place in all ages and places. It doesn’t matter who is in power, people want sense of security and that can be brought through quick justice.
It is not as if Aamir was trying to make a pointed statement; the bit that caused such an uproar was part of a thoughtful and somewhat low key conversation. He was not saying anything substantively new, nor was he the first big name to voice these opinions. Reacting with such venom and in such a personal way reinforced the point that he was making, a fact that he has himself has drawn our attention to in a subsequent statement. He had every right to express his opinion, as did those who disagreed with him, provided of course they challenged his views
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