Communal Violence Bill is Sonia’s game plan
Sandhya Jain
October 21, 2013
The Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh which put the ruling Samajwadi Party on the defensive, and Narendra Modi’s taunt that his State had ‘passed’ him with distinction while the Congress still had to give an account of itself, have driven the latter to revive the contentious Prevention of Communal and Targetted Violence Bill, now slated to be introduced in the Winter Session of Parliament. The coveted prize is the Muslim vote-bank, put into jeopardy since Deoband’s Maulana Mehmood Madani reprimanded the party for trying to instil fear of the Gujarat strongman among Muslims.
The Bill, widely perceived as anti-Hindu, is the brainchild of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council. It has been opposed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and some regional parties, and is certain to be resented by public servants who are liable to be penalised for ‘dereliction of duty’ and ‘breach of communal responsibility’ in the event of targetted violence against a community.
Muzaffarnagar can be a good benchmark against which to judge the presumptions governing the Bill.
It is widely known that a young school girl was constantly harassed by a boy from the minority community. Two members of her family confronted the miscreant, who died in the altercation between them; the duo was brutally murdered in retaliation. When the police arrested seven of the alleged assailants, they were ordered by a senior Cabinet Minister of the State to release the men; this triggered a series of group meetings of both communities and the subsequent spiral of violence.
How will the proposed Bill apportion guilt and deliver justice to the victims on both sides?
The original version of the Bill, drafted by UPA-I in 2005, was referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee, which submitted its report in December 2012. Minority Affairs Minister Rehman Khan, who mooted revival of the Bill after the Muzaffarnagar riots, is reportedly busy giving it more teeth. This could intensify opposition to the Bill when finally presented in Parliament this winter.
The extant draft has been resisted because it empowers the Centre to declare an area in a State as “communally disturbed” on its own and send Central forces without the State’s request, thus compromising the federal structure of the Constitution and creating situations of potential confrontation between the Centre and the States. The BJP, Akali Dal, Shiv Sena and Bahujan Samaj Party opposed this as usurping the rights of States.
A contentious provision is transfer of cases outside the State concerned for trial (as happened in Gujarat), ostensibly to protect witnesses. This could establish a dangerous precedent of presuming the entire judiciary of a State as incapable of delivering justice to victims of riots. If riots simultaneously break out in several States (as Maoist violence has affected many at the same time), how feasible will it be to shunt cases, witnesses and lawyers across the country? Who will bear the cost of this exercise? Controversies pertaining to some Gujarat riot victims (who claimed they had not been raped and did not know that this allegation figured in their sworn affidavits which were in English) establishes that it is not proper to leave witnesses and victims to the mercy of NGOs and activists who may have their own agendas, and may tutor their wards to that end.
The essential criticism of the Bill is its flawed conception, which aims to prevent and control targeted violence, including mass violence, against Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and religious and linguistic minorities in any State. Large sections of society that do not fall in any of these categories, and might fall prey to communal violence, are denied protection under this legislation.
Worse, it does not extend to Jammu & Kashmir, where Kashmiri Pandits were targetted and driven out of the Valley in the 1990s, and where Hindus of Jammu Province are now in the crosshairs of jihadi elements who want to drive them out of the entire State. This was recently witnessed in Kishtwar, where a private arms factory was generously opened to help miscreants arm themselves against an unarmed populace of anther community. If ever there was a State where citizens need the protection of such legislation, it is Jammu & Kashmir.
As rape and gang rape is one of the specific crimes listed in the Bill, it bears asking if rape will be considered as having occurred only on the statement of an alleged victim, or will have to stand medical scrutiny? Secondly, there is no recognition that a communal conflict could be triggered by the targetting of girls from the majority community, a phenomenon widely known as ‘love jihad’.
As for public servants who are to be held responsible for failing to control a situation, it needs to be mentioned that the proposed Bill offers no protection against political interference in the arrest and prosecution of culprits. The extant Bill places disproportionate emphasis upon the role of public servants (police, civil servants), who are all too often forced to abide by the whims of a political class. Nowhere does the legislation provide for punishment for political interference leading to the release of arrested persons in a riot situation.
The proposed National Authority for Communal Harmony, Justice and Reparation, if retained in the final draft, will likely be a sinecure for unelectable politicians and other cronies of the ruling dispensation.The Authority seems to duplicate the functions of the National Human Rights Commission, National Commission for Minorities, National Commission for Women, National Commission for Scheduled Castes, and National Commission for Scheduled Tribes. A six year term for the Members, along with attendant permanent bureaucracy, seems an entirely avoidable drain on the exchequer in an era of economic meltdown.
The draft proposes to make all offences committed under the Act as cognizable and non-bailable. This is not objectionable in itself, except for the fact that political interference (as seen in Muzaffarnagar) could ensure arrests from a single community, which may even be the victim/aggrieved community. And if culprits who are arrested are promptly released due to political interference, such persons will roam free with impunity throughout the trial and prosecution of the case, and will have ample freedom to tamper with or intimidate witnesses. The whole legislation is thus flawed in conception and certain to be unfair in implementation.
The proposed National Authority / State Authority has been given the power to order further investigation or re-investigation of cases deemed not to have been carried out in a fair, impartial or unbiased manner. But under the Code of Criminal Procedure, the power to order re-investigation is vested only in a competent court, and further investigations also needs court permission.
Clearly, the UPA is trying to make a mockery of the established law of the land for petty political gains.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FROM THE ARCHIVES PLEASE :
http://dailypioneer.com/340369/NAC-drafted-Bill-to-kill-State-Govts.html
COLUMNIST | Sunday, May 22, 2011
NAC-drafted Bill to kill State Govts
Swapan Dasgupta
The next time a partisan Government at the Centre decides to facilitate the dismissal of an elected State Government with majority support in the Assembly, it will not have to appoint a less ham-handed version of Karnataka Governor HR Bhardwaj. The former Law Minister who was sent to Bengaluru on a mission of subversion failed because both the political culture and Supreme Court judgments have made it difficult (but not impossible) for the Centre to impose President’s Rule on flights of whimsy. Gone are the days when Governors such as Ram Lal, BD Tapase and Romesh Bhandari could subvert the Constitution’s federal principles with impunity.
No, the next time an inconvenient BS Yeddyurappa or a Narendra Modi has to be destabilised and eventually dismissed, the role of the Governor will become secondary. The principal part may well be played by an emerging body of professionals who will have the power to hold any State to ransom. Like the wedding organiser and party organiser who have made life incredibly easy for people with sufficient money to burn, a breed of riot organisers will be very much in demand in the coming years. That is if the draft of the Communal Violence Bill prepared by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council is passed by Parliament.
India has always been indulgent to bad ideas.The Nehru-Gandhi family in particular has taken exceptional care to nurture quackery and cretinism as long as they were packaged in the garb of ‘progressive’ politics. Just as the Planning Commission was the nursery for bad economics for four decades, the NAC is fast becoming the instrument for Sonia Gandhi’s misapplication of mind. Its contribution to the derailing of India’s global competitive potential will be assessed (and, hopefully, even quantified) by economic historians in the future. However, mercifully, the NAC had so far desisted from imposing its grubby paw prints on the basic features of the Constitution — although the centralist ‘one size fits all’ philosophy was a recurring feature of all its proposals. The draft Communal Violence Bill marks a departure.
The implications of the Bill are grave. To destabilise a difficult State Government, a cynical dispensation at the Centre will merely have to engage the services of a riot organiser. The riot organiser will simply have to either orchestrate tensions in a chosen locality — not a very difficult project — and trigger a little riot against either a minority community or local Dalits and tribals. No administration, however well-meaning and committed to social harmony can prevent a determined bid to foster disharmony.Under the proposed law, that local disturbance will become the pretext for the Centre to use Article 355 to intervene in the State.
Next, the seven-member National Authority for Communal Harmony, Justice and Reparationmade up, presumably, of ‘non-partisan’ grandees such as Harsh Mander and Teesta Setalvad, will get into the act. Blessed with statutory sanction, this committee of the good and virtuous will stricture the local administration and the State Government for its alleged lapses and suspected complicity in the riots and make a case for the breakdown of the Constitutional machinery.The committee’s report, in turn, will become the occasion to file FIRs against ‘difficult’ State leaders and an obliging Bhardwaj-like Governor will recommend the imposition of Article 356 on the State.
Yes, a few innocent citizens would have died or had their property destroyed in the exercise. But at least they would have died so that the supercops of secularism could rule.
The Communal Violence Bill proposed by the NAC is not merely flawed, it is positively dangerous. In a country where laws sometimes exist to be subverted, the proposed legislation will be a direct incitement to made-to-order rioting and political destabilisation. The presence of a legally-sanctioned committee of the wonderfully virtuous overseeing the State administration is calculated to undermine any elected Government and make administrators accountable to two masters. Governance would be made dysfunctional and the primary focus of every official would be to keep the Centre happy. Even an issue as localised (but no less regrettable) as the violence in Greater Noida over the quantum of compensation for land acquisition would become the pretext for the Centre to first intervene directly and subsequently dismiss the Mayawati Government.
There is a strong case for ensuring that the State Government (which has ultimately responsibility for law and order and the preservation of peace) carries out its obligations diligently and without fear or favour. The best way to ensure this is all-round vigilance. Many district-level committees made up of local notables can be constituted to be an informal watchdog body and even assist the local administration. But political power ultimately vests with an elected Government and not with do-gooders nominated by the Government because they have the right aesthetic and NGO credentials. Sonia Gandhi has chosen to exercise power without making herself accountable. Now she seems determined to foist this model of colonial paternalism on the rest of the country.
India is a federal country and the more federal it becomes the better. The attempt to regress to back-door centralism has to be resisted. The issue is not riots versus secularism; the choice is between federalism and centralism, between a Delhi Sultanate and local democracy. Parliament should choose wisely.
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RELATED LINK PLEASE :
NAC seeks public views on draft communal violence bill
May 20, 2011
The National Advisory Council on Friday placed in the public domain for comments the draft 'Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011'.
The same had been presented by the NAC's working group on April 28, 2011.
A press release issued by the NAC said comments may be sent to it by June 4, 2011 by email atwgcvb@nac.nic.in or by post to Secretary, National Advisory Council, 2 Motilal Nehru Place, Akbar Road, New Delhi, 110011
The Working Group Draft of the Bill can be downloaded here.
Communal & Sectarian Violence Bill, 2010 Advisory Group
Constituted by National Advisory Council Working Group
Time Frame: August 1, 2010 – January 31, 2011
Advisory Group Members
- Abusaleh Shariff
- Asgar Ali Engineer
- Gagan Sethi
- H.S Phoolka
- John Dayal
- Justice Hosbet Suresh
- Kamal Faruqui
- Manzoor Alam
- Maulana Niaz Farooqui
- Ram Puniyani
- Rooprekha Verma
- Samar Singh
- Saumya Uma
- Shabnam Hashmi
- Sister Mary Scaria
- Sukhdeo Thorat
- Syed Shahabuddin
- Uma Chakravarty
- Upendra Baxi
- Aruna Roy, NAC Working Group Member
- Professor Jadhav, NAC Working Group Member
- Anu Aga, NAC Working Group Member
Joint Conveners of Advisory Group
- Farah Naqvi, Convener, NAC Working Group
- Harsh Mander, Member, NAC Working Group
Communal & Sectarian Violence Bill, 2010 Drafting Committee
Constituted by National Advisory Council Working Group
Time Frame: August 1, 2010 – February 28, 2011
Drafting Committee Members
- Gopal Subramanium
- Maja Daruwala
- Najmi Waziri
- P.I.Jose
- Prasad Sirivella
- Teesta Setalvad
- Usha Ramanathan (upto 20 Feb 2011)
- Vrinda Grover (upto 20 Feb 2011)
Conveners of Drafting Committee
- Farah Naqvi, Convener, NAC Working Group
- Harsh Mander, Member, NAC Working Group
Home>Working Groups>Communal & Sectarian Violence Bill
Draft ‘Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011
As agreed by the NAC at its meeting on July 14th, 2010, the NAC Working Group on the Communal Violence Bill, has set up an Advisory Group and a Drafting Committee to develop a draft bill on communal and sectarian violence. The bill shall be drafted on the basis of certain key elements accepted by the National Advisory Council.
Scope, mandate and timelines for the Drafting Committee & Advisory Group
- To draft a bill that can provide effective prevention and control of communal and sectarian violence, and justice and comprehensive reparations to survivors and victims of communal and sectarian violence. This would be ensured on the basis of certain essential elements accepted by people’s groups, civil society groups and the NAC, including the key principle of accountability of public officials.
- To frame relevant provisions, including rules, for relief, compensation, rehabilitation, resettlement, restitution, and reparations, keeping in mind the rights of internally displaced persons.
- To frame relevant provisions, including rules, of evidence, procedure, and victim-witness rights.
The Working Group Draft of the Bill can be downloaded here.
Citizen’s submissions and feedback
- Suggestions on this Working Group Draft may be sent by 4 JUNE 2011 to wgcvb@nac.nic.in
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Website hosted by
National Informatics Centre, Department of Information Technology,
Government of India
Page Last Updated on 20 May, 2011
COMMENT:
Take the case of JUST THREE of the LUMINARIES mentioned above :
Teesta Setalvad:
(A) - Teesta’s House in Disarray
By Sandeep | Published: December 23, 2008http://www.sandeepweb.com/2008/12/23/teestas-house-in-disarray/
(B) - Teesta, it Hit Your Face
By Sandeep | Published: April 14, 2009
http://www.sandeepweb.com/2009/04/14/teesta-it-hit-your-face/
Dr. Koenraad Elst, the Belgian historian, whose writings on Ayodhya and 'communalism in India', stand vindicated by the Aodhya verdict delivered by the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, had in his book "Ayodhya: The Finale", Voice of India, New Delhi (2003),mentioned in 'detail' the 'riot vulture' called Asghar Ali Engineer !! It is worth quoting at length !! Here goes !!
QUOTE:
3.10. Public opinion engineering
These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in India, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician’s two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts”. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India (decision 14/106/02-03 dd. 30 June 2003, Dr. Krishen Kak vs. Times of India) for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara (Times of India, 20 March 2002; incidentally a title borrowed from a poem by Mohammed Iqbal, who claimed “our India” for Islam and became the spiritual father of Pakistan).
[ Note: Harsh Mander is a 'current member' of the 'SUPER CABINET' @ 10 Janpath, that goes by the nomenclature :
"National Advisory Committee" !! ]
These riot vultures do a lot of damage to India,among other reasons because they are so eagerly believed abroad. Yet they don’t interest me too much, if only because they pale in comparisonwith the past master of their art, the one who was already doing the same job long before these newcomers had discovered the uses of riot “reporting” in anti-Hindu hate-mongering.I mean Asghar Ali Engineer.
Since approximately the Stone Age, Engineer has been travelling to riot spots in India (butchering of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh somehow doesn’t interest him as much) with prefabricated riot reports invariably showing the same ingredients: Hindu pre-planning, Muslim victimhood, anti-Muslim complicity of the police and some local politicians. With the “facts” of the matter fixed beforehand, the main purpose of his visits is to note down some local names in order to give his reports more credibility.
Admittedly, Engineer is of a different calibre than his followers, in the sense that he doesn’t mix his mendaciousness in the service of the hate cause with mendaciousness for self-promotion. People like Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy easily come across as laughable because their corrupting concern for their own image-building detracts mightily from the force of their propaganda against Hinduism: Roy posturing as an environmentalist all while setting up shop in a villa in a protected forest zone, Mander taking early retirement in peacetime from the civil service but falsely claiming that he had “resigned” (which implies loss of pension rights and other privileges) as an act of protest against the Gujarat riots, etc.Engineer won’t be an impeccable human being, but at least his human defects don’t come in the way of his effectiveness as an anti-Hindu campaigner.
In the present debate, he has predictably contributed his two cents’ worth: “Archaeological excavations and temple”, Secular Perspective, 1 Sep. 2003. The text goes through most of the tactical moves discussed in the preceding sections.Engineer is not an archaeologist nor a historian,but he makes the most of newspaper reports as if these were primary and reliable sources. He is not above quoting even anonymous sources as arguments of authority.
His best source, a “senior archaeologist” who was “speaking on condition of anonymity”, has “stated categorically, ‘There is no evidence of a temple. In fact, as we go deeper, we are seeing more evidence of Islamic influence.’” Surely Mr. Engineer should know that Islam originated in 7th-century Arabia, yet at the Ayodhya site where findings date back two thousand years earlier, it only gets more Islamic as you recede deeper into the past? Could it be that under Hindu
influence, Islam in India had a few previous incarnations?
Predictably, Engineer invokes the authority of “noted archaeologist” Suraj Bhan and of “historian”Irfan Habib without
informing the readers about their status as long-standing servants of the Babri Masjid lobby. Yet, in his case this may be due to mere carelessness, as elsewhere he does reveal that one Supriya Verma of Panjab University “spent months in Ayodhya as an expert of the Sunni Waqf Board”. Indeed, he knows from lawyer Zafaryab Jilani that the Waqf Board has six archaeologists under contract to follow the diggings and study the conclusions at length. It just makes you wonder where the Waqf Board is getting all this money from.
But it’s good to see what Engineer quotes Habib for: “When digging was ordered, many historians like Irfan Habib had warned that excavation could not lead to a clinching evidence for the existence of a temple.” Which merely amounts to saying that those historians, knowing how the evidence would go against them, had prepared their escape from facing the facts by declaring these impossible beforehand.
As for Waqf Board emissary Supriya Verma, she makes the most of the animal bones found at different layers: “If any shrine
and a temple existed, how can anyone account for the animal bones?” As per the ASI findings, the site lay in ruins several
times, circumstances in which animals may have made their home in it. Is she really an archaeologists that she doesn’t know how the strangest objects accumulate at sites of interest over the millennia? Or did she mean to say that the animals indicate a Muslim rather than a Hindu presence, with mosques as sanctuary for our four-legged brethren? It seems the anti-temple experts are clutching at straws in desperation.
Like so many others, Engineer uses the counterbalancing posture, pretending that the ASI’s scientific findings are evened
out by the obstinate anti-scientific protests of the usual suspects: “However, the report will be subject to different interpretations and would not go unchallenged.” Yes, just as even the most cast-iron evidence in a court case never goes
unchallenged by the disfavoured party’s lawyer.
It’s also what he had heard Irfan Habib predicting: “The artefacts could be interpreted differently.” True enough, Engineer notes with satisfaction: “And this is precisely what is happening. The final report submitted by ASI seems to be highly controversial and is bound to be challenged.” Well, well, those who were predicting trouble are now exulting in the realization of their prediction. Only, everyone can see that it’s merely they themselves who are creating the predicted trouble.
Like many others, Engineer disingenuously plays off the interim report with its allegedly “negative” result against the final report: “Now we have the final report of the ASI which says that there could have been a temple-like structure below Babri Masjid. Is it not a glaring contradiction? All through the digging no definite indications of any temple-like structure were found and suddenly the final report discovers temple-like structure there.” Once more, old lies are falsely presented as facts to counter new facts.
This had been done before, viz. with B.B. Lal’s findings. Like most secularists in 1990-91, Engineer is still contrasting B.B. Lal’s public statements about his excavation results with his remark in his published ASI report summary that “the late period was devoid of any special interest”. To our crusading secularist, this means that B.B. Lal speaks with forked tongue: “But later in 1990 Lal began to claim that certain brick bases he had excavated in the seventies were meant to support pillars and thus suggested ‘the existence of a temple-like structure in the south of the Babri Masjid’.”
The true story has been explained threadbare long ago, but for poor listeners like Mr. Engineer, we may repeat that Lal’s
excavation focused on the ancient period and that from the viewpoint of Ramayana studies, the medieval layer with its
unmistakable temple foundations was indeed devoid of much interest. The discovery of temple remains was nothing unexpected or controversial at the time, given the consensus (still prevalent in the late 1970s) on the site’s known history of Islamic iconoclasm. Yet, after the normal bureaucratic and human-inertial delays, as the 1980s were advancing, the ASI started deliberately postponing the formal publication of Lal’s findings because secularist opinion had started mobilizing against the longstanding historical consensus. The reason for the endless procrastination must have been the same reason why the court case has been dragging on for decades: fear of getting involved in controversy, particularly one where the facts would force a stance favoured by the Hindu side. In other words, fear of being demonized by the secularist establishment with its bloodhound attitude towards dissent.
If anyone expected Mr. Engineer to be above personal attacks on the ASI experts, he’d better wake up. Taking umbrage behind two Waqf Board lawyers whom he quotes with approval, he has Abdul Mannan dismiss the report as a “saffron report”, while Zafaryab Jilani is quoted as saying: “It was prepared under political pressure.” Not meaner than what most secularist reporters have alleged, but just as unfounded. [Engineer of course does not mention, just as Irfan Habib and ‘secularist’ publications never do, that four out of the twenty authors of the ASI report itself were Muslims. Are these Muslim archaeologists also ‘saffronized’? It seems more likely that Irfan Habib is an Islamist masquerading as a Marxist. – Vishal Agarwal]
Finally, another false semblance of balance in Engineer’s text is the one between two evaluations of the report. All manner of experts and so-called experts are quoted as denouncing the excavation report, but neither the ASI team, nor other archaeologists nor even VHP-affiliated experts were called to contribute even one sentence in defence of the ASI findings. For his semblance of balance, however, Engineer had to also relay a pro-evidence voice. So he has picked one, only one, and that one is the voice of “RSS spokesman Ram Madhav”, not an expert but a political leader. This way, our spin-doctor creates the impression that on the one hand you have “the expert archaeological opinion”, which “may not give much credenceto the ASI report”, while on the other hand you only have partisan Hindu nationalist opinion.When in reality, the opposite asymmetry holds good: genuine expert opinion supports the ASI report and only politically motivated secularists, whether sporting academic titles or not, denounce it.
Undeniably, Asghar Ali Engineer remains a formidable master of disinformation. This makes him an excellent representative
of Indian secularism and of the anti-temple campaign in particular.
UNQUOTE
http://www.sandeepweb.com/2009/04/14/teesta-it-hit-your-face/
(C) - A Lie Split Wide Open
By Sandeep | Published: April 22, 2009
http://www.sandeepweb.com/2009/04/22/my-op-ed-a-lie-split-wide-open/
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HARSH MANDER :
The Press Council of India, found Mr. Harsh Mander "GUILTY" of spreading "FALSE RUMOURS" in his column "HINDUSTAN HAMARA", in the case of 'Krishen Kak V/s Times of India, vide its decision '14/106/02-03 dated 30 June 2003.
To know more about this "NAC WORTHY", please read :
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=530
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASGHAR ALI ENGINEER :
http://www.sandeepweb.com/2009/04/22/my-op-ed-a-lie-split-wide-open/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HARSH MANDER :
The Press Council of India, found Mr. Harsh Mander "GUILTY" of spreading "FALSE RUMOURS" in his column "HINDUSTAN HAMARA", in the case of 'Krishen Kak V/s Times of India, vide its decision '14/106/02-03 dated 30 June 2003.
To know more about this "NAC WORTHY", please read :
| Scoring Against Paganism: Untangling the Manderweb |
Krishen Kak |
26 Apr 2009 |
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=530
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ASGHAR ALI ENGINEER :
Dr. Koenraad Elst, the Belgian historian, whose writings on Ayodhya and 'communalism in India', stand vindicated by the Aodhya verdict delivered by the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, had in his book "Ayodhya: The Finale", Voice of India, New Delhi (2003),mentioned in 'detail' the 'riot vulture' called Asghar Ali Engineer !! It is worth quoting at length !! Here goes !!
QUOTE:
3.10. Public opinion engineering
These days, much-acclaimed characters like John Dayal, Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in India, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician’s two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts”. Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India (decision 14/106/02-03 dd. 30 June 2003, Dr. Krishen Kak vs. Times of India) for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara (Times of India, 20 March 2002; incidentally a title borrowed from a poem by Mohammed Iqbal, who claimed “our India” for Islam and became the spiritual father of Pakistan).
[ Note: Harsh Mander is a 'current member' of the 'SUPER CABINET' @ 10 Janpath, that goes by the nomenclature :
"National Advisory Committee" !! ]
These riot vultures do a lot of damage to India,among other reasons because they are so eagerly believed abroad. Yet they don’t interest me too much, if only because they pale in comparisonwith the past master of their art, the one who was already doing the same job long before these newcomers had discovered the uses of riot “reporting” in anti-Hindu hate-mongering.I mean Asghar Ali Engineer.
Since approximately the Stone Age, Engineer has been travelling to riot spots in India (butchering of minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh somehow doesn’t interest him as much) with prefabricated riot reports invariably showing the same ingredients: Hindu pre-planning, Muslim victimhood, anti-Muslim complicity of the police and some local politicians. With the “facts” of the matter fixed beforehand, the main purpose of his visits is to note down some local names in order to give his reports more credibility.
Admittedly, Engineer is of a different calibre than his followers, in the sense that he doesn’t mix his mendaciousness in the service of the hate cause with mendaciousness for self-promotion. People like Harsh Mander and Arundhati Roy easily come across as laughable because their corrupting concern for their own image-building detracts mightily from the force of their propaganda against Hinduism: Roy posturing as an environmentalist all while setting up shop in a villa in a protected forest zone, Mander taking early retirement in peacetime from the civil service but falsely claiming that he had “resigned” (which implies loss of pension rights and other privileges) as an act of protest against the Gujarat riots, etc.Engineer won’t be an impeccable human being, but at least his human defects don’t come in the way of his effectiveness as an anti-Hindu campaigner.
In the present debate, he has predictably contributed his two cents’ worth: “Archaeological excavations and temple”, Secular Perspective, 1 Sep. 2003. The text goes through most of the tactical moves discussed in the preceding sections.Engineer is not an archaeologist nor a historian,but he makes the most of newspaper reports as if these were primary and reliable sources. He is not above quoting even anonymous sources as arguments of authority.
His best source, a “senior archaeologist” who was “speaking on condition of anonymity”, has “stated categorically, ‘There is no evidence of a temple. In fact, as we go deeper, we are seeing more evidence of Islamic influence.’” Surely Mr. Engineer should know that Islam originated in 7th-century Arabia, yet at the Ayodhya site where findings date back two thousand years earlier, it only gets more Islamic as you recede deeper into the past? Could it be that under Hindu
influence, Islam in India had a few previous incarnations?
Predictably, Engineer invokes the authority of “noted archaeologist” Suraj Bhan and of “historian”Irfan Habib without
informing the readers about their status as long-standing servants of the Babri Masjid lobby. Yet, in his case this may be due to mere carelessness, as elsewhere he does reveal that one Supriya Verma of Panjab University “spent months in Ayodhya as an expert of the Sunni Waqf Board”. Indeed, he knows from lawyer Zafaryab Jilani that the Waqf Board has six archaeologists under contract to follow the diggings and study the conclusions at length. It just makes you wonder where the Waqf Board is getting all this money from.
But it’s good to see what Engineer quotes Habib for: “When digging was ordered, many historians like Irfan Habib had warned that excavation could not lead to a clinching evidence for the existence of a temple.” Which merely amounts to saying that those historians, knowing how the evidence would go against them, had prepared their escape from facing the facts by declaring these impossible beforehand.
As for Waqf Board emissary Supriya Verma, she makes the most of the animal bones found at different layers: “If any shrine
and a temple existed, how can anyone account for the animal bones?” As per the ASI findings, the site lay in ruins several
times, circumstances in which animals may have made their home in it. Is she really an archaeologists that she doesn’t know how the strangest objects accumulate at sites of interest over the millennia? Or did she mean to say that the animals indicate a Muslim rather than a Hindu presence, with mosques as sanctuary for our four-legged brethren? It seems the anti-temple experts are clutching at straws in desperation.
Like so many others, Engineer uses the counterbalancing posture, pretending that the ASI’s scientific findings are evened
out by the obstinate anti-scientific protests of the usual suspects: “However, the report will be subject to different interpretations and would not go unchallenged.” Yes, just as even the most cast-iron evidence in a court case never goes
unchallenged by the disfavoured party’s lawyer.
It’s also what he had heard Irfan Habib predicting: “The artefacts could be interpreted differently.” True enough, Engineer notes with satisfaction: “And this is precisely what is happening. The final report submitted by ASI seems to be highly controversial and is bound to be challenged.” Well, well, those who were predicting trouble are now exulting in the realization of their prediction. Only, everyone can see that it’s merely they themselves who are creating the predicted trouble.
Like many others, Engineer disingenuously plays off the interim report with its allegedly “negative” result against the final report: “Now we have the final report of the ASI which says that there could have been a temple-like structure below Babri Masjid. Is it not a glaring contradiction? All through the digging no definite indications of any temple-like structure were found and suddenly the final report discovers temple-like structure there.” Once more, old lies are falsely presented as facts to counter new facts.
This had been done before, viz. with B.B. Lal’s findings. Like most secularists in 1990-91, Engineer is still contrasting B.B. Lal’s public statements about his excavation results with his remark in his published ASI report summary that “the late period was devoid of any special interest”. To our crusading secularist, this means that B.B. Lal speaks with forked tongue: “But later in 1990 Lal began to claim that certain brick bases he had excavated in the seventies were meant to support pillars and thus suggested ‘the existence of a temple-like structure in the south of the Babri Masjid’.”
The true story has been explained threadbare long ago, but for poor listeners like Mr. Engineer, we may repeat that Lal’s
excavation focused on the ancient period and that from the viewpoint of Ramayana studies, the medieval layer with its
unmistakable temple foundations was indeed devoid of much interest. The discovery of temple remains was nothing unexpected or controversial at the time, given the consensus (still prevalent in the late 1970s) on the site’s known history of Islamic iconoclasm. Yet, after the normal bureaucratic and human-inertial delays, as the 1980s were advancing, the ASI started deliberately postponing the formal publication of Lal’s findings because secularist opinion had started mobilizing against the longstanding historical consensus. The reason for the endless procrastination must have been the same reason why the court case has been dragging on for decades: fear of getting involved in controversy, particularly one where the facts would force a stance favoured by the Hindu side. In other words, fear of being demonized by the secularist establishment with its bloodhound attitude towards dissent.
If anyone expected Mr. Engineer to be above personal attacks on the ASI experts, he’d better wake up. Taking umbrage behind two Waqf Board lawyers whom he quotes with approval, he has Abdul Mannan dismiss the report as a “saffron report”, while Zafaryab Jilani is quoted as saying: “It was prepared under political pressure.” Not meaner than what most secularist reporters have alleged, but just as unfounded. [Engineer of course does not mention, just as Irfan Habib and ‘secularist’ publications never do, that four out of the twenty authors of the ASI report itself were Muslims. Are these Muslim archaeologists also ‘saffronized’? It seems more likely that Irfan Habib is an Islamist masquerading as a Marxist. – Vishal Agarwal]
Finally, another false semblance of balance in Engineer’s text is the one between two evaluations of the report. All manner of experts and so-called experts are quoted as denouncing the excavation report, but neither the ASI team, nor other archaeologists nor even VHP-affiliated experts were called to contribute even one sentence in defence of the ASI findings. For his semblance of balance, however, Engineer had to also relay a pro-evidence voice. So he has picked one, only one, and that one is the voice of “RSS spokesman Ram Madhav”, not an expert but a political leader. This way, our spin-doctor creates the impression that on the one hand you have “the expert archaeological opinion”, which “may not give much credenceto the ASI report”, while on the other hand you only have partisan Hindu nationalist opinion.When in reality, the opposite asymmetry holds good: genuine expert opinion supports the ASI report and only politically motivated secularists, whether sporting academic titles or not, denounce it.
Undeniably, Asghar Ali Engineer remains a formidable master of disinformation. This makes him an excellent representative
of Indian secularism and of the anti-temple campaign in particular.
UNQUOTE
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