Wednesday 11 December 2019

Jayati Ghosh raping India's soul

This is the text of my deleted comment on Jayati Ghosh's latest vomit served up by Project Syndicate.

Jayati Ghosh and her husband were in favor under the Congress administration. They are unhappy with the new regime. It is understandable that they will have partisan feelings of anger and indignation. Yet, Ghosh is supposed to be an academic economist. She should not show a reckless disregard for the truth.

Every paragraph of this screed contains a material, intentional, falsification. There is no appearance of mob rule in India- though, it is true, that Ghosh's students are behaving very badly because they are peeved at a hike in hostel fees. Indian democracy is stronger than ever. Why? Because the vice like grip of dynastic, casteist, parties has been broken. It was they who instrumentalized mob violence.

In 2016, the Supreme Court stated that Kashmir had no 'vestige of autonomy'. It never had. The Indian Army had protected it from Pakistani invasion and it had acceded unconditionally many decades ago. Nehru jailed Sheikh Abdullah, the Kashmiri leader, for a decade. Indira Gandhi kept him in jail till he did a deal and formed a Government. He too was a dynast handing power to his son who anointed his son. Because the Valley is troubled by terrorism, it is vital that the police answer to the Center not to local, corrupt and criminalized, leaders. The Valley ethnically cleansed its Hindus in the Nineties. It is still unsafe for them to return. The militants in the Valley kill and chase away non Kashmiri Muslim migrant workers. As a result, the Valley is in the economic doldrums kept alive by grants from the Center.

Jayati does not mention recent TV footage showing a Kashmiri cricketer saying he could arrange for 20 days of stone pelting in return for one crore Rupees. Another man, who specialized in arson, demanded a similar amount for setting schools on fire. This is the 'dark picture' which must be changed by catching and jailing the terrorists and disrupting their networks. So far, India has prevailed and Pakistan's Imran Khan is gnashing his teeth in disappointment that no 'river of blood' has flowed there.

The Supreme Court is not giving this matter urgent action because prima facie the Govt's action is good in law. By contrast the petitions presented to it are defective in law.

Indira Gandhi, in the Eighties, promised the Assamese she would deport illegal migrants. The rights of Tribal and other indigenous people must be protected. The alternative is genocide. The BJP has sufficient organizational and administrative power to make good on Indira's promise. This is because they aren't a bunch of dynastic cretins.

India has a serious problem of illegal migration which has changed the demographics of border districts. Its detention camp is tiny compared to those of America. Ghosh says it is xenophobic to deport illegal migrants. She must think the UK and the US where she studied and taught were terribly xenophobic because they had detention centers for people of her ethnicity who remained in those countries illegally. Ghosh, who must have learned some Hindi after living so long in Delhi, misquotes Amit Shah. Perhaps she is thinking of Mamta's 2005 Parliamentary speech against 'termites' who voted Communist. At that time Mamta wanted to throw them into the Bay of Bengal. She is known for her abusive language. By contrast, Amit Shah's Hindi is chaste. We can see for ourselves what he says in his speeches on You Tube. He is a smart guy who knows very well that the Election Commission will hold him to account if he uses wrong language.

Ghosh has been blinded by her partisanship. She is not accusing the Supreme Court of 'instigating' everything. Yet the Judiciary is independent and acts according to the Constitution to enforce the laws of the land. She may not like it, but it is very irresponsible of her to depict the Indian Judiciary in such contemptible terms to her students.

It is not unconstitutional to recognize a plain fact. Non-Muslims have suffered terrible persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Their share of the population has dropped considerably. Muslims originating from those regions may be economic migrants, it can't be that they are in fear of persecution on the basis of religion. It is entirely constitutional to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from countries where their share of the population has plummeted and where they are subject to intolerable violence and discrimination. It is not constitutional to ignore the law of the land and permit illegal, purely economic, migrants to be granted voting and other rights to which they have no legal entitlement.

Ghosh repeats the old canard that the BJP is a high caste outfit. Indians don't believe her because they can see for themselves that the President is a Dalit and the Head of Government an OBC. The Govt. passed legislation to get around the Supreme Court's decision re. misuse of the anti-Dalit atrocity act. The dynastic, casteist, parties hate the BJP because it alone wants to rid India of the blight of hereditary privilege.

Extra judicial killing reached a peak in the Nineties under a Congress government. However it was Jyoti Basu , the communist leader, who first licensed such killing by police and paramilitaries against his challengers on the left- the notorious Naxalites.
The BJP, unlike the dynastic cretins and the gerontocrats of the Left, believes in private enterprise and the rule of Law. It wants to rid India of the nexus between the corrupt politician, the terrorist and the gangster which also extends to the police. That is why people vote for the BJP. By contrast, nobody wants the failed 'development economics' that Ghosh and her husband have been peddling for many decades. Ghosh's anger is understandable. She has wasted her life and destroyed the life-chances of her students. She backed the wrong horse. But telling lies about 'the rape of India's soul' is not going to help her retrieve her reputation. The plain fact is she and her ilk have been spewing hate at the RSS and the BJP for three decades now. They cried wolf again and again, but no wolf appeared. Now they are saying it is the soul that is being raped- in other words, the crime was imaginary. They are very angry with the Supreme Court for not taking imaginary crimes into account. Yet what else can Judges do? They studied Law, not some soi disant 'development economics' which developed nothing but a penchant for incoherent rage.


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