After 11 Years, Nothing has Changed Indeed

Consider these headlines:

Mob attacks Gujarat train, toll 57 (Times of India)
godhra: in a ghastly incident, at least 57 persons were burnt alive and many injured when the ahmedabad-bound sabarmati express was stoned and set on fire by a mob at godhra junction on wednesday morning. the dead comprised 17 men, 25 women and 14 children, most of whom were in the s-6 coach which was charred as the mob put petrol cans to deadly use. at least 36 persons were taken to the godhra civil hospital with burns

Fifty eight killed in attack on Sabarmati Express (Rediff)
At least 58 people, most of them kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, were killed and 43 injured when miscreants attacked the Sabarmati Express and set afire four of its coaches at Godhra railway station in Gujarat on Wednesday.

57 killed as mob torches train in Gujarat (The Hindu)
Fifty-seven persons, mostly women and children, were killed and 43 sustained burn injuries when a coach of the Faizabad-Ahmedabad Sabarmati Express carrying `Ram sevaks’ was set afire by a group of people on the outskirts of the Godhra railway station, about 200 km from here, this morning. The `Ram sevaks’ were returning from Ayodhya.

It’s quite obvious what these reports refer to: the ghastly torching alive of 57 Hindu pilgrims in the Sabarmati Express train compartment at Godhra, Gujarat on 27 February, 2002.

How did the media report the attack back then? More specifically, how did the media report the identity of the perpetrators of that unprovoked, ghastly attack? The answer lies in the choice of words, from just the aforementioned partial list of news reports. It was a “mob” or “miscreants” or even worse, “a group of people.”

Now how did the BBC report the same incident?

Hindus die in train fire (BBC)
Fifty-seven Hindu pilgrims have died in a fire on a train in India…A gang of Muslims are suspected of causing the fire…it appears this morning’s train fire was started by a gang of Muslims who were angered by pro-Hindu chanting on the train.

Enough said.

And thus, starting right from the intentionally misleading verbiage, one born out of cowardice and/or malice, the media ensured that the lives of these murdered Hindus were worth zilch. Worse, many leading mainstream newspapers blamed these unfortunate souls for inviting their deaths. Their only crime? To chant the name of their holy God, Rama. Barely two days after their horrific death, when the their ashes were still warm, the Hindu, in its lead editorial on 1 March, 2002, wrote thus:

THE GRISLY GODHRA (Gujarat) episode of arson…and the backlash of mindless violence it had triggered elsewhere in the State…are clear, disturbing pointers to the explosive communal buildup across the country as a direct consequence of the VHP’s provocative and destructive campaign for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya…one cannot but pinpoint the harsh reality that events such as the horror of Godhra were tragically predictable as a result of the wounding and aggressive communal campaign of the VHP.

In other words, the way for Muslims to express their displeasure or grievance—both real and imagined—is by torching a coach full of innocent Hindu pilgrims who had invited their deaths by showing their devotion to one of their Gods. And neither was this kind of perverse reasoning limited only to editorials and oped pieces. Almost every newspaper reporting on the roasting alive of Hindus by Muslim mobs heavily editorialized in terms of “grave provocation” emanating from Hindus.

This same editorial from the Hindu and other papers also set the tone for the expansive web of lies that followed with lines like:

What happened in Godhra, about which there are different and conflicting versions…

This served three main purposes: to preempt questions from Hindus over such blatantly slanted reporting, to preempt facing their just demand for justice, and to shift the focus entirely on only the Muslims who died during the riots that ensued. And so if you look at everything that has been written about the Gujarat riots, it’s only about heartbreaking stories of Muslims who were bereft of their families, property, and the rest. Not one story has a journalist or writer interviewing at least one Hindu of the 59+254 Hindus who were killed and whose kin suffered similar losses. Which eminently, sickeningly proves what Rajeev Srinivasan wrote about the Value of a Hindu Life.

a Hindu’s life is without value as far as politicians and the Government are concerned. But a Christian man’s life, and a Muslim man’s eye, are of great value…violence generally befalls only powerless ‘minorities’ in most places. So this is yet more evidence that in India, it is the Hindus that are the oppressed ‘minority’

To say this more directly in the case of Godhra and the Gujarat riots, Hindus get massacred & burnt alive in their own homeland while the secular establishment and its handmaid-media plays politics with their blood. Neither is this new. This pattern was quite evident in the post-Babri demolition riots where the Shiv Sena in the main, was blamed for killing Muslims but the episode of the deadly serial bombs detonated by Dawood Ibrahim’s goons was given short shrift. And little or no mention was made of the Hindus who died in those riots.

The planning and execution of the roasting alive of Hindus in Sabarmati Express points mainly to Muslim elements in the Gujarat Congress party. Here’s a partial list:

• Mehmud Hussain Kalota, convener of the Congress district minority cell and president of the Godhra municipality
• Salim Abdul Ghaffar Sheikh, president of the Panchmahal Youth Congress
  Abdul Rehman Abdul Majid Ghantia, a known Congress worker
• Farroukh Bhana, secretary of the district Congress committee
• Haji Bilal, a known Congress worker

Haji Bilal was subsequently convicted by a special court. And true to style, the media relegated this news—if it condescended to report it at all—to some obscure corner of Page 7. The value of Hindu lives. Which brings us to a brief historical examination of major riots since Independence. Consider the following table.

All of these were bloody riots, and all except the 2002 riots occurred under Congress Governments. At 2191, the death toll of Muslims is the highest again under the selfsame Congress Government. What makes the Nellie riots the most horrid is that Indira Gandhi held elections in Assam despite this, effectively washing her hands with the blood of Muslims.

These figures belie the Congress party’s claim that it has the interests of minorities at heart. At the same time, these figures are also a good testimony to the élan with which the Congress plays communal politics, nay, bloody politics, literally. Indeed, the Congress party has only the Dynasty’s interests at heart. It is one of the wonders of the world that here’s a party which has no ideology, no vision, no policy, and has a utterly dismal record of service to the nation, yet keeps getting elected repeatedly. The secret of this is well-known: keep the folks poor and uneducated, cultivate the media, divide Indians along various lines, and exacerbate these divisions to the point of large-scale violent conflicts.

The role of the slavish media in furthering this vile agenda of the Congress party has largely remained unexamined. Until 2002, the ordinary news consumer had no access to sources to independently verify the veracity of what the media reported. Worse, the media was in a position of monopoly. However, in the Gujarat riots of 2002—the first televised (sic) riots—the media had to contend with the Internet, which it didn’t.

Unaware of the power and reach of the Internet, it continued to do what it was used to doing: lying blatantly, blacking out uncomfortable stuff, and shouting down people who dared to question its version of the truth. As we witness in this age of viral social media, the media has refused to learn—a Barkha Dutt continues to threaten bloggers and Twitter users with legal notices, a Sagarika Ghose labels anybody who questions her as an “Internet Hindu (even if the questioner is a non-Hindu!),” and most celebrity journalists, when they are not condescending, are openly dismissive of news consumers who possess independent thought. It appears as if they hate the fact that their divine right to talk down to news consumers should remain unchallenged.

However, over time and with repeated and multiple questioning, and faced with solid evidence to the contrary, the media realized that it was too late. Witness how now all the bets are off. Nobody in the media pretends anymore that they are “objectively analyzing the BJP and/or Narendra Modi.” It takes the side of the Congress party straightaway. In many ways, the Gujarat 2002 riots set the tone for the media’s fall from studio-light-endowed grace. This has reached such a pitch that media houses, which once used to invite charlatans and riot-porn makers like Teesta Setalvad now seek out unnamed Twitter users to “give the alternate perspective.” However, these Twitter users no longer need the media. The media needs them.

This could be seen as a positive development and it is but the subtext remains unchanged because despite all this, the media hasn’t made one attempt to shed a tear—forget doing a talk show—for the innocent 59 Hindu pilgrims who were roasted alive in Sabarmati Express and those Hindus who were killed in the subsequent riots.