A blackmail a day won't keep the BJP at bay

The Left is back to what it does best - blackmail. The latest relating to the Indian stand on Iran's nuclear programme. According to the Indian Express, at a joint rally in Lucknow on November 12, the Left parties, the Samajwadi Party and the Janata Dal (S) warned the government to change its stand. Or else, Prakash Karat, the middle-aged firebrand of the CPI (M), warns "if the government does not listen to us and see reason, we will raise the issue in Parliament and force the government to change its stand."

I am not getting into the merits of the Indian government stand on the issue. There can be endless debate on it. What's more important is how the Left is constantly threatening the government on issue after issue. No issue is sacrosanct or out of bounds for them. After having successfully stalled all economic reforms, they are now turning to foreign policy. Not for a moment are they bothered about embarrassing the country.

The Left is entitled to live in its outdated world and swear by its antiquated ideology. It is entitled to air its bizarre views. Because the left parties are supporting the government, they are entitled to persuade it to listen to them. But they - a minority partner in the coalition and one which is not even in the government - cannot keep resorting to threats and blackmail. If they are so unhappy with the government, let them withdraw support.

The Congress cannot be happy with this situation - the grand old party with a national reach reduced to being a bit of a puppet in the hands of a group of five parties with sizeable clout only in two states.

So complete is the hold of the Left over the Congress and the government that anyone with a grouse against the latter promptly runs to it for help, alleging that the United States is behind the problem. Look at the Left's shameful defence of Natwar Singh. The same Left which wanted finance minister P Chidambaram's scalp because his hugely successful, taxation law specialist wife had accepted a brief from the income tax department! Clearly, corruption is to be condoned, even forgiven, if you oppose the Americans or the BJP. But if you believe in free markets or share thoughts even remotely similar to the Americans, or are seen as being soft to the BJP line of thinking, you deserve to be thrown into the dustbin.

And if you think that is ridiculous, listen to this. Students of Jawaharlal Nehru University protested against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh unveiling a statue of Jawaharlal Nehru, because Singh is following neo-imperialist policies. The current Congress Prime Minister is unveiling the statue of another Congress Prime Minister and the left parties will have none of it!

It's high time the Congress calls the bluff of the Left. Or else dump it before it is reduced to a laughing stock.

And the Left should realise that the more it indulges in this kind of mindless blackmail, the only gainer will be the BJP. It was also subject to all kind of pressures of coalition politics when it led the National Democratic Alliance government. But the NDA never became a joke the way the United Progressive Alliance has. If things continue this way, the BJP may well succeed in coming back to power, this time on its own steam.

Allah, save the Indian Muslims

In all this drama over Iran and the left's blackmailing tactics, something more outrageous - and downright foolish - has got ignored. Karat, in trying to drum up support for the Left stand, says there is a close Shia link between Lucknow and Teheran, according to a report in the Indian Express. A Shia leader, Mukhtar Anees, says that after Ayodhya, Iran is the biggest issue for Muslims. It is not poverty; it is not education; it is not jobs; it is not even Gujarat (the other issue on which the left brigade turns apopletic); it is not any other issue affecting Indian Muslims within India. It is Iran.

At a time when Indian Muslims are constantly fighting the image that the rabid right is trying to give them - that they have extra-territorial loyalties - is this the kind of statement that is needed? Does the ordinary Indian Muslim really care about Iran's nuclear programme? Do Messrs Karat and Anees really think that the Muslims will thank them for this statement? Not only are these worthies playing into the hands of the Shiv Sena-sangha parivar, they are also exposing the Muslims to more taunts and jibes. Allah, save the Indian Muslims from the politicians who claim to speak on their behalf.

Saying it like it is

Here's a wonderful straight talking piece from the Indian Express

Terror's Jeru-Salem

Why in India, unlike in Israel, a terrorist means more than those he murders

SAUBHIK CHAKRABARTI

Posted online: Monday, November 14, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=81918

Abu Salem looked good in Saturday's Page 1 photographs. The security officials accompanying him looked a little bedraggled. For the families of the 257 Mumbaikars who died in the 1993 bomb attacks, that would have seemed wholly appropriate. For them, the extradition of Salem is not, as it is for the Indian establishment, proof of the state's persistence and cleverness. It is a reminder that the Indian state is soggy soft when it comes to responding to attacks on Indian citizens.

This may seem unfair not only to security agencies but also to neutral observers. There was after all months of patient, often hard-nosed diplomacy that got Salem out of Portugal. There is also the continuing efforts to get Dawood Ibrahim, who is a bad guy for even the Americans now. Didn't we also send a list of 20 most wanted mischief makers to Pakistan? Didn't we catch the chaps who attacked Parliament and then massed our army along Pakistan's border? Hasn't Manmohan Singh called Pervez Musharraf to express his strong displeasure at indications of "external involvement" in the pre-Diwali Delhi blasts? Aren't security agencies already hot on the trail of LeT terrorists thought to have planned and executed the pre-Diwali attacks?

All this and more surely don't indicate a soggy soft state? It does because all this is not the point. The point - this is the easiest to understand when any of us is a direct victim of terror and not a sympathetic observer - is how does the state fundamentally view an attack on its citizens.

How instinctively outraged is the Indian state when a bomb kills 40 holiday shoppers in a market? How deep is the feeling that such an attack is utterly unacceptable because it holds up to ridicule the state's primary remit - protecting citizens? To what extent does the state accept the argument that no matter how important the relevant policy/political constraints and strategies, the horror that follows the death of innocents and the compulsions that follow the challenge to authority must be the first inputs in any response? In short, does the Indian state have moral capacity and pragmatic courage? To put it even more briefly, is India like Israel?

This is, of course, an awfully politically incorrect thing to say. But the point here is not Israel's many sins of insensitivity towards the Palestinian cause. Just as the point about examining the Indian state's DNA is not this, that or the other investigative action. The Israeli state may really push the envelope when it comes to ignoring the suffering of another people, but it is almost matchless when it comes to empathising with the suffering of its own people. The moral capacity to feel deeply outraged and the pragmatic courage to do something about it is in the Israeli state's DNA. The Indian state lacks that particular trait.

It is fashionably "liberal" (a misnomer, as we shall shortly see) to say that the lack of this trait makes the Indian state a better entity. But those who are forever arguing that we must search for the roots of terrorism and not search and destroy the perpetrators of terror forget, or don't care, or don't know, that the state's moral and practical incapacity in the face of thugs-with-a-cause is symptomatic of a greater failing: The state doesn't respect citizens, it doesn't respect their liberties.

If the state that governs us doesn't deeply care if we die because of a terrorist bomb, how can it care if in our lives so many rights are circumscribed. Think about the callousness you have encountered from so many representatives of the governing class. Think about the boorish cop, the arrogant bureaucrat and the venal politician. Almost none of them subscribe to the foundational principle of a civilised society - that every individual and his rights count. That is why a state that is soft in its response to terrorism is not liberal, if we take liberalism to principally mean the recognition of the individual.

That is also why the state's responses to natural disasters are so horrendously ineffectual in India. We are not a sub-Saharan basket case with meagre resources and zero institutional capacity. The Indian state doesn't do as much as it easily can because the people are on its radar screen as an undifferentiated mass. Two thousand killed in an earthquake, 20 killed in a terrorist bomb and two killed in a hell hole of a public hospital - they are all, in the most dreadfully apt meaning of the word, statistics.

The only thing that has changed, although partially, in the state's treatment of its citizens is the scope of economic liberty. This is not a heartfelt change - as politicians and bureaucrats prove daily when they take decisions or talk reforms. But it's a change that was forced by a crisis and is perhaps irreversible.

The state may not particularly like the fact that a phone, a cooking gas cylinder, a car, or a home, is no longer an unattainable fantasy for many of us. But the cost of reversing the process that made these things possible scares it.

There in lies a clue about a possible corrective to the Indian state's responses to terrorism. The state has to be apprehensive about the cost of treating dead Indians as dead sheep. Who can scare it? We can. How can we scare it? By getting angry.

Treated for decades as a big blob of humanity, we have lost most of our capacity for anger. Sure, we get angry when power bills go up and when law suits threaten live cricket telecast. Sure, we get angry sometimes during elections. But we don't get angry at the quotidian reality of the state's brutal indifference to us as individuals. If we did, the day after the pre-Diwali blasts, Delhi would have been seething, not shopping. The pundits called it Delhi's resilience. Resignation was more like it.

No wonder Abu Salem looked so cool is those photographs. He knows that he means something as an individual to the Indian state. The 257 Mumbaikars he allegedly helped murder meant nothing.

When the capitalists wooed the comrades

Here's something I wrote about in DNA, put off as I was with the way Mukesh Ambani, Swraj Paul and L N Mittal went to pay their respects to the CPI (M).:

Currying favour with the comrades
Seetha

Monday, October 24, 2005 20:11 IST

http://dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=7003&CatID=19

When all those business barons descended on AK Gopalan Bhavan (the headquarters of the Communist Party of India-Marxist) were they really, as we have been told, attempting to understand the Left position on various economic policy issues? Or were they merely trying to buy peace with a party that is being seen to increasingly influence - nay, dictate - the economic policy of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government?

Going by the past record of corporate India, the latter assumption wouldn't be too far off the mark.

Take the case of the Swatantra Party, the only party to champion the cause of free enterprise at a time when socialism was the dominant ideology. One would have thought the party coffers would have been flush with funds from all the big business houses. Perish the thought. The Swatantra was always strapped for cash. Businessmen did contribute to it; but in dribbles.

The bulk of the funds went to the Congress Party, the party that was driving all those socialist policies. Even the Tata group - among the few business houses that supported the Swatantra openly and wholeheartedly - gave only one-third of its political contribution to the party. The other two-thirds went to the Congress. No wonder, a chronicler of the party's history, Howard Erdman, commented that this was a rich man's party which no rich man was willing to give money to.

Little seems to have changed over the years. As Indira Gandhi steered the country's economic policies further and further to the left, Indian businessmen preferred to operate under the table and shovel funds into party coffers and to individual politicians to get their work done. So much easier, isn't it, to swing a licence here and a permit there than compete fairly.

Businessmen across the world may make noises about being stifled by government interference in the economy, but all of them prefer a situation where they are in a position to tweak policies to their benefit.

Interesting that Mukesh Ambani, in his meeting with CPM heavyweight Sitaram Yechury, should have appreciated the party's stand on certain aspects of globalisation and have commented that there is no need for the country to go in for "mindless foreign investment". It would be interesting to know what Ambani meant by 'mindless'. Something that adversely affects the interests of the Ambani empire, perhaps?

Remember the Bombay Club that came up when the Indian economy was being opened up in 1991? The group lobbied against foreign investment, using the specious argument of the need for a level playing field for Indian businesses. Many of the worthies behind that campaign changed their tune when they realised their businesses could also benefit from globalisation. But the lobbying against competition never ceased.

When the automobile policy was being revised around 2000, many of the foreign car manufacturers who came into India when the sector was opened up in 1994, were at the forefront of lobbying against the import of second-hand cars. The current campaign against foreign direct investment in the retail sector comes as much from organised Indian players as by politicians.

When Arun Jaitley was information and broadcasting minister for a brief period, he used to recount with glee how owners of newspapers which used to carry scathing editorials criticising the government for various restrictions on foreign investment would come to him to lobby against foreign investment in the print media. Take any sector of industry - even those like telecom, which benefited hugely from the liberalisation of the economy - and tales abound of players manipulating government policy to stymie competition or incumbents ganging up against new entrants.

But how sustainable is this, from a business point of view? Wheeling-dealing and lobbying are hardly cost-less transactions. There is a price to be paid - in cash, cheque or some other favour - especially around election time. It definitely won't show on the books of companies, but surely such unrecoverable costs will impact bottomlines in some manner? Wouldn't there be a larger cost to be paid somewhere, by someone?

Also, is it worth it? Business environment keeps changing and today's gain may not be of much use a year later. That time a competitor may be more successful in getting its way on something. Remember, the intense lobbying in the telecom sector in 2002 over WLL and fixed line services was sparked off by new technologies completely transforming the playing field. Sneaky lobbying only vitiates the policy-making environment and has an adverse pass-through impact on the economy as a whole, as inefficient players manage to negotiate preferential treatment and protection for themselves. The country has paid a price for that. Can it continue to do so?

It might be far better for the industry to stand up and take a stand against mindless and short-sighted populism. Let them generate informed public debate and build up awareness on issues. Decisions affecting their operations have an impact on the entire country, and people have a right to be informed. Clearly, it's time to jettison what Minoo Masani called the "cowardly and supine attitude of big business in India."

How utterly Congressi

(Bibek Debroy took back his resignation a week after I posted this after an assurance of his academic independence being protected. All's well that ends well.)

Eminent liberal economist Bibek Debroy has resigned as director of the think tank Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies (RGICS). Forced to resign would be a better term. Debroy was told that he wouild have to get all research papers cleared by the executive panel of RGICS before they are published. Why? Because a project he led - an Economic Freedom Index for Indian states - rated Gujarat as the most economically free state. So what's wrong, you may ask? Nothing really. It's just that the present Gujarat chief minister is a man who goes by the name of Narendra Modi.

How utterly Congressi! The party has proved that it hasn’t shed its inherent dictatorial tendencies, even though it sports a liberal mask. Scratch the surface and all the old Congress failings are there for everyone to see.

And all this happened because an irresponsible journalist gave a ridiculous spin to an apolitical academic exercise based on objective and economic criteria. This was not a perceptions-based survey. The EFI ranks states for economic freedom on 26 indicators put under three groups:

* Size of government (government revenue expenditure, power subsidy, state-level taxes and government employment).

* Legal structure and security of property rights (quality of legal infrastructure, completion of cases, violent crimes and economic offences).

* Regulation of credit, labour and business (wage levels, man days lost, licence and market fees, implementation of industrial entrepreneur memorandums (IEMs) and so on).

Are Debroy and the team he led - which included think tank Indicus Analytics - to be blamed if Gujarat comes up tops on these counts? Debroy has explained that much of the data used for the research were sourced till 2001, just about the time that Modi became chief minister. And that this really speaks of achievements of successive Gujarat governments.

But that’s neither here nor there. Assuming the data – data doesn’t have any political colour – were for Modi’s tenure, should facts be suppressed because of his political record? Is this the intellectual freedom that the Congress and the liberals supporting it claim to uphold? How different are they from the sangh parivar whom they accused of intellectual tyranny?

The needless controversy erupted because, I am ashamed to say, of my tribe. The Economic Times, to be more specific. It gave a needless political hue to the report. `Rajiv Gandhi think tank gives thumbs up for Modi' (or something to that effect), the headline screamed. It was an absolutely mischievous thing to do and I apologise to Debroy on behalf of my profession. It was that article which probably led to Modi deciding to use the report to his advantage. I had written about the index in the Business Standard in March 2004. A few months later Sunil Jain also wrote about it, also in Business Standard. Neither of us gave any `spin’ to it and the report went unnoticed. Till The Economic Times needlessly sensationalised it.

When I read the ET report, I was dismayed and since then I have been expecting something like what eventually happened to happen.

But there are some basic issues involved here.

One, should one deny credit to Gujarat as its economic performance and record or just because its chief minister has a rather sorry record of human rights? Going by that logic, one should deny China credit as an economic superpower because of the human rights record of its government. Successive governments and not just one government as in the case of Gujarat. All those people who are critical of Debroy sing paeans to China's economic performance. Sounds very much like double standards doesn't it?

Secondly, are we all going to say that as long as Modi is chief minister of Gujarat, we will never give it credit for anything? Sounds like intellectual tyranny to me.

Ironically, by forcing Debroy to quit over this index, the Congress has only helped Modi claim entire credit for something that is really an achievement of successive Gujarat governments. It was ridiculous when Modi went to town with the report, touting it as some kind of certificate for his performance. Somebody needed to counter that by saying, `buddy, this isn't an endorsement of your government. This is something for which all Gujarati politicians - across parties – and bureaucrats must take credit.' But those who forced Debroy to quit - and my fellow journalists who feel Debroy was wrong - have done just the opposite.

Who’s come out the winner in all this? Sadly, Narendra Modi.

Remembering 1975

This is an absolutely fantastic piece that appeared on the edit page of Business Standard on 25 June 2005, the thirtieth anniversary of the Emergency.

The Family and the Emergency
T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan / New Delhi June 25, 2005
If Nehru can be assessed, why not his daughter and grandson?


D D Kosambi is perhaps India’s finest historian. He wrote in 1964 that ancient Indian history was like a fine mist. “In India, there is only vague popular tradition, with very little documentation above the level of myth and legend.”
But for once he got one detail wrong. It is not just ancient Indian history that is as described by Kosambi. Even modern Indian history—very modern Indian history, indeed—is like that as well.
We have seen an example of this recently over the Jinnah debate, which, oddly, has had the effect of getting people to scrutinise Nehru’s responsibility for the partition! Perhaps that was what L K Advani intended all along, which, if true, is really quite cunning of him.
But even closer to us lies another event, now mostly forgotten even by those who suffered hugely because of it. Without prodding by one or two newspaper columnists, how many people would have remembered that, 30 years ago at midnight this day, the Congress party imposed the Emergency, which took away all our basic freedoms?
Indira Gandhi proclaimed a national Emergency merely because she had been unseated from her parliamentary seat by a court verdict that held her guilty of electoral malpractice? How many recall that she did so merely in order to maintain herself and the Gandhi family in power?
How many people realise that it was her Congress party which introduced the notion of “a mere technicality” even for major infringements of the law by politicians? How many remember that she amended the Constitution in such a way that the Prime Minister could not be accused even of murder?
Indeed, how many Indians have any idea at all of what the Emergency meant for India, and under what circumstances it had been imposed?
My sons, who are 21 and 17, know exactly what happened on January 30, 1948, when, and how. But they have no clue at all of what happened on June 26, 1975, and why. Nor, indeed, do their cousins who were born during the previous five or so years. That whole generation has been kept in the dark.
The Emergency, infamous as it was, is a black hole in the collective memory of the country. Even the RSS and the BJP have forgotten it, so much so that, in the true Hindu tradition described by Kosambi above—in which history is reduced to mythology—even the head of the RSS thinks that Indira Gandhi was great.
But should he not actually be asking: If the RSS is being held guilty of the murder of Gandhiji, why do we not hold the Congress guilty of the murder of democracy? If it is not enough for the RSS to express regret over what Nathuram Godse did, why is it enough for Indira Gandhi (and last year, Sonia Gandhi) to express similar “regret”?
I am not writing this article to “rake up the past”, which is how reminding people of the uncomfortable things done by the Congress is described by the Congress. (What others did, of course, is proper history.)
I am writing this merely to remind ourselves of the narrow escape India had in 1975-77. If Sanjay Gandhi had had his way India may have become mightily prosperous. But, have no doubts, it would at the same time have become like a Latin American dictatorship.
The ironies are also worth recording. The very same Communists, who are now in bed with the Congress, had been jailed in large numbers by Indira Gandhi (barring some major exceptions like Jyoti Basu. I explored this point in an article last year).
How have these fellows, with their long memories of “historical forces”, forgotten the tortures suffered by their party colleagues? Clearly, like Henry Ford, Indian communists also think that “history is bunk”.
And you know what the supreme irony is? Kosambi was of the Marxist intellectual persuasion and a mathematician, a lone brilliant star in a sea of mediocrity.
Historians can be very influential, even more so than economists because they alter the way we view the past and therefore the present. For instance, properly speaking, we should remember Indira Gandhi for imposing the Emergency.
Instead, what do we remember her for? For lifting it, because reams have been written by official family historians, mostly of the Marxist persuasion again, about how democratic she was. Why, a couple of years ago one of them even published a whole book saying that the blame for the Emergency should be shared at least half by JP because he challenged Mrs Gandhi.
The truth about what actually happened between November 1974 and June 1975 was brought out two years ago when the diary of B N Tandon, who was a joint secretary then in the Prime Minister’s secretariat (as it was then called) looking after political affairs, was published. I translated it from the original Hindi. The diary makes for extraordinary reading because it was maintained on a day-to-day basis.
But when it was published, 28 years after it was written, the reactions were typical. Far from trying to cross-check what Mr Tandon was saying, most reviewers attributed motives to him. The pack was led by no less a person than R K Dhawan, who said Mr Tandon was peeved because he had been denied promotion.
Dhawan can be forgiven, but what about the others? What excuse did they have for ignoring the facts and attacking the author? One reviewer even had nasty things to say about me!
The second volume of the diary, covering the period from July 15, 1975, to July 24, 1976, when Mr Tandon left the Prime Minister’s secretariat, will soon be published. I should add that I have not translated it. It throws even further light on what went on.
But to what extent will it alter the way we view the Gandhi family? Even if we concede that the sins of the grandmother should not be visited on her relics, surely the time has come to re-assess the role of this family in the country’s fortunes? If Nehru can be re-assessed, why not his daughter and grandson, if not yet his grandson’s wife?
Not to put too fine a point on it, it is time the family went out of politics. Many young Congressmen think so too (and the mother of one of them has already been punished because the son said so openly.)

Appeasement politics and the obsession with BJP

For once, I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with the left. Every right-thinking person (for once, the left is thinking right) has to be outraged by the absolutely inane move by the human resource development ministry, headed by the ageing Congress warhorse, Arjun Singh, to reserve 50 per cent seats in the Aligarh Muslim University for Muslims. This from a government that came to power on an anti-communal plank and is surviving only because of a negativist anti-BJP glue holding the UPA coalition together. Apparently, Arjun Singh was also the one who advised Rajiv Gandhi to enact the retrogade Muslim Women's Bill. And he is supposed to be one of the upholders of true secularism in the Congress!

Well-known left intellectuals like Irfan Habib and his AMU colleagues were the first to raise their voices in protest. The left parties have opposed the move as strongly as they do any economic reform measure. They have all said it is minority appeasement politics in its worst form and demanded its withdrawal. But while the government caves in to their protests about economic reform, it refuses to retract on this. Speaks volumes for the Prime Minister's oft-stated assertion that his government is committed to an open economy, doesn't it?

That apart, there are several interesting aspects to this issue.

One of them is the almost complete silence by those I term the `proper' liberals over this. All the disapprovals and displeasure have been expressed only by the left lobby. Come to think of it, even some of the other prominent leftists are silent on this. Why haven't we heard a word from Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Mushirul Hasan or Romila Thapar?

Second, is the left concerned about the communal overtones of the move or something else? If you read all their statements carefully, one sentence comes through in each case - that this move will result in the government playing into the hands of the BJP. So they seem more bothered about the mileage that the BJP will get out of this, rather than the inherent immorality of the action itself. It gives the impression that they would have kept quiet if the BJP is not likely to make political capital out of the issue.

I would love to be proved wrong but I have a feeling I won't. Because in the first week of April, there was another instance of blatant minority appeasement. The Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, assured a delegation of Parsis of all government help to help the Parsi community check the alarming decline in its population. Is that the job of any government, let alone a secular government?

Why did no one react to this bit of news? Because, unfortunately when all manner of liberals berate communalism, they are only talking about the BJP- sangh parivar-Shiv Sena. We are supposed to believe that these groups - and the odd fanatic fringe of the Muslims - needs to be decimated if the scourge of communalism is to be eliminated.

It would be foolish to think that the battle against religious fanaticism will be won with the obliteration of the BJP and sangh parivar just as it would be foolish to think that the battle against statism will be won with the defeat of the communists. The communists were in no position to influence policy through the 1990s (except for one and a half years of the United Front government) but statist economic policies continue to prevail. If true economic liberalism has not been achieved in India, it is not because of the communists alone. It is as much, if not more, because of opposition from rent seeking politicians, bureaucrats and other incumbents of the present system, none of who will be card carrying members of any of the communist parties.

Similarly there is ample evidence of communalism being alive and well in various other political and social formations. The banning of Satanic Verses, the Muslim Women's Bill, the opening of the locks on the Babri Masjid were all done by the secular Congress. In an earlier post, Hum to anything karega, I had cited various instances of blatant pandering to the Muslim votebank by Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan. All of them are supposed to be the torch bearers of secularism! Or look at the disgustingly casteist Mandal card played by V P Singh in 1990.

Forget politics and politicians. Look at one demand that the Parsi community has made. They want the government to step in to support health clinics for Parsis, which are few and badly maintained. It is both a communal and statist demand. And that too from a community from which many of India's liberal stalwarts are drawn and one that has prospered through private enterprise.

Or look at the reaction to an extremely forgettable film called Jo Bole So Nihal. A handful of Sikh groups - political and religious - have ensured that it is pulled out of all theatres of Punjab. What were the grounds for protests? The film had some semi-nude scenes and this was offensive because the title o f the film was a Sikh religious chant or war cry. There was organised violence at the theatres in Punjab and the distributors finally had to withdraw the film from the state. But the Sikh groups are not satisfied and are now crying for a worldwide ban on the film. And even as I write this comes news of bomb blasts in two cinema halls in Delhi that were screening the film.

Concentrating the guns all the time on the BJP-sangh parivar-Shiv Sena while keeping silent on other forms of communalism on the grounds that the former is more dangerous is not going to weaken them, let alone eliminate them. On the contrary it is only giving them a readymade plank of hypocrisy, one which they are using constantly to their advantage. Communalism has to be opposed because it is a detestable phenomenon, not just because a particular political formation is indulging in it.