Priyamvada Gopal's latest idiocy

When a lethal virus is spreading and the Government is seeking to enforce a lockdown, it is vital to lock up peddlers of fake news who want to advance a mischievous agenda.

Priyamvada Gopal doesn't get this. She thinks Governments should not enforce the law against writers and journalists during a lockdown though it is the one time when it is vital that all such people are made to feel vulnerable to the long arm of the law if they keep lying in their usual manner.

She writes in the Guardian-

As a lethal virus scorches its way across continents, the leftwing Indian rights campaigner Gautam Navlakha has been reminding us of the words of Leonard Cohen, urging people to speak up for the right things: “There is a crack/a crack in everything, that’s how light gets in.”

This suggests that Navlakha and Gopal are utterly deracinated. Few Indians know English. Even among English speaking Indians, only a tiny minority have heard of Leonard Cohen.

While many of us experience lockdown in varying degrees of constraint,

many of us? All of us.  Gopal is a cretin.

Navlakha – who cited Cohen’s lyrics in a recent statement – faces actual incarceration

because he is charged in a rioting case where there was loss of life

as does another high-profile Indian, the eminent academic and Dalit intellectual Prof Anand Teltumbde.

who is an accused in the same case.

Meanwhile, Siddharth Varadarajan, the well-known journalist and a founder-editor of the respected investigative online portal the Wire, faces prosecution in an unrelated case.

Because the Wire reported that the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh- who is widely respected by Hindus- had said that Hindus would be immune to the virus through the power of their faith. This was a highly mischievous act. The Wire published a retraction. That may be enough to get Varadarajan acquitted. But the law must be upheld. Had some religious nutjob made this false allegation, he would have been prosecuted. Varadarajan must be held equally accountable even if he is an American citizen.

While locking down its vast population from coronavirus, why is India seeking to lock up dissident intellectuals and intimidate journalists?

Because the lockdown can save lives. Professional liars must know that they will be held accountable for anything they publish.

The three men have been accused of outrages ranging from assassination plots to promoting “enmity, hatred or illwill among classes” — allegations that have been widely criticised as politically motivated.

These men, and Gopal herself, believe they should receive praise for promoting hatred of Modi and the BJP.  But, if they break the law, they must take the consequences.

But their apparent common crime is one that underlies the harassment and intimidation of scores of other journalists, writers, academics and human rights campaigners in India. They have criticised the actions of the hardline Hindu nationalist dispensation that rules India today, as well as the culture of divisive bigotry that it has fostered widely in civil society.

They can do this in perfect safety. But if they break the law, they may be prosecuted.

 The last six years of Modi’s government have seen an alarming crackdown on campus dissidents as well as journalists and writers

But 'campus dissidents' and 'journalists and writers' have no popular following. That is why they are generally ignored or else highlighted so as to attract support to the ruling party because the truth is they genuinely are anti-national.

Navlakha is a longstanding critic of state and army atrocities in the disputed region of Kashmir, which has faced a disgraceful lockdown since August last year and continues to experience unconstitutional — and, in corona-ridden times, dangerous — limits on internet access.

Yes. The previous administration too took a dim view of his anti-national activities. If the evidence against him holds up in Court, he can look forward to a long stretch of porridge.

He is accused, along with respected figures like the poet Varavara Rao

who is 80 and considered a senile Marxist nutter

and trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj,

 a leftist Law Professor, not a trade unionist 

of allegedly conspiring in a plot against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018.

So, these are serious charges. Since bail has been rejected, it seems there is a prima facie case against her.

Teltumbde, related by marriage to India’s towering Dalit leader and constitution-drafter, Babasaheb Ambedkar, has been remanded in custody in the context of violence in the town of Bhima Koregain in 2018.

I think he will get off. After all, he is a genuine Dalit. He has an excuse for being there. The others look like Marxist troublemakers.

Ironically, Teltumbde has written in the past about how the Indian state seeks to “discredit and eliminate individuals it deems a threat to its apparatus.”

The irony is that he wrote this about previous administrations yet Gopal, cretin that she is, is pretending that Modi's Government is doing something unprecedented.

Varadarajan, whose platform the Wire has previously fallen foul of powerful and wealthy figures with strong connections to the government,

but which was supported by powerful and wealthy rivals of those figures

faces a different set of charges. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, there have been strong moves in the Indian media and sections of the ruling dispensation to pin blame for the spread of the virus on Muslim communities.

Sadly, the Tablighi Jamaat had a big conference in Malaysia which caused the virus to spread to other countries.

Yogi Adityanath, a fundamentalist Hindu cleric turned politician with a good line in inflammatory speech, is the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where tensions have been rising. Although the Wire misattributed a quote to him on its website, the erratum was quickly corrected and acknowledged.

What was that quote? Gopal seems to be suggesting it had something to do with Hindus. This is not true. The Wire was saying that the Yogi claimed that religious Hindus would be immune. They merely wanted to defame the Yogi. They didn't understand that this fake quote of theirs could be used by Hindu nutjobs to get people to defy the lockdown.

Nonetheless, Varadarajan now stands accused of a fantastical range of crimes, including disobeying an order of a public servant and creating or promoting enmity between classes.

He may get off by saying no malice was intended.

The real problem may be that the Wire reported correctly that Adityanath had attended a Hindu religious gathering after the national lockdown was declared on 24 March.

Swarajya Magazine reports 'On 31 March, Varadarajan tweeted a link with this text, “On the day the Tablighi Jamaat event was held, Adityanath insisted on a large Ram Navami fair planned for Ayodhya from March 25 to April 2 would proceed as usual and that ‘Lord Ram would protect devotees from the coronavirus’.”

This was wholly false. Varadarajan was warned to take this down. He refused. That is why he is in trouble. The fact is there was TV coverage of the Chief Minister cancelling the event on 19th March.

This report came even as public feelings have been whipped up against Muslims because Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim organisation, held an event prior to the lockdown where many attendees did get infected.

But the event continued after the lockdown. By contrast, there was no Hindu gathering of any sort because of the prompt action of the Yogi- who is the head of an important Hindu sect.

The Wire has also noted that “believers” in more than one religious community have been late in adopting precautions against large gatherings.

But the Wire has lost all credibility. It publishes fake news. Varadarajan may get a stiff fine or even have to do some jail time. He may try to pretend that he is a martyr. The truth is he is a shoddy journalist.

For a long time now, India has benefited from the title of world’s largest democracy

nonsense! It has suffered from having such a big population.

(meaning, in fact, the most populous democratic state). That grand moniker continues to lull the world into believing constitutional rights and freedoms thrive in that nation, when they are in fact under grave threat.

Nobody gives a shit about far away countries unless they grow economically and make cool stuff and provide a great return on your investment dollar.

Although the misuse of state powers to intimidate principled journalists and of religious divides to garner votes has occurred under other governments, including those of the current Congress opposition, there is little doubt that the last six years of Modi’s government have seen an alarming crackdown on campus dissidents as well as journalists and writers.

Nonsense! A journalist in Mamta's Bengal lives in fear. Modi knows that stupid lefties publishing fake news benefit him. They cause the English speaking elite to embrace the BJP.

Fourteen journalists have been killed in India since Modi’s election in 2014. (In the 10 preceding years when the opposition was in power, 17 journalists were killed.)

But none were killed in states with a BJP Chief Minister.  The fact is there are a lot more journalists now than ever before because of rapid economic growth and technological progress.

Journalists routinely face intimidation, legal proceedings and restrictions on accessing information.

Journalists also routinely use fake news to extort money.

Female reporters deal with constant online harassment, including threats of sexual violence.

Often from their editors. Tarun Tejpal is still out on bail.

Three prominent rationalists who have challenged Hindu orthodoxy have been murdered in recent years.

But the suspect is not linked to the BJP at all.

A widely condemned 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act promises fast-track citizenship to select religious minorities claiming asylum from neighbouring countries, conspicuously discriminating against Muslims.

Because Indian Muslim organizations won't tolerate people like Dr. Taslima Nasrin who fled Bangladesh.  A price was put on her head. She had to run away to Sweden. By contrast, though Indian Muslims may not like to see non-Muslims escape Islamic persecution, they are powerless to do anything about it because the non-Muslim majority will retaliate. By contrast, no one cared about Taslima Nasrin. The Left turned their back on her. Then the Swedes took her in.

As Donald Trump wrongly claims his government has “absolute power”, we know from the case of Viktor Orbán, who has seized sweeping emergency powers in Hungary, that the global lockdown against the virus can strengthen authoritarian forces if not strenuously guarded against.

We know nothing of the sort. China is plenty authoritarian. That seems to have worked for it in this case. America, with a much smaller population, has higher mortality from this 'Chinese virus'.

It will take a vigilant citizenry and media to stop that from happening.

It takes smart people to keep bad shit from going down. This disqualifies all the gobshites Gopal mentions.

In India it is precisely dissident intellectuals like Teltumbde, journalists like Varadarajan and committed activists like Navlakha who are leading the defence of pluralism and democracy.

Fuck off! Those cretins are pathetic failures. At one time they seemed so promising. But by doubling down on telling stupid lies they painted themselves into a corner. This doesn't mean they can't try to commit crimes. It just means that they get caught before they can work any great mischief.

It is of the utmost importance that the world speaks up for them and stands by them now.

Hilarious! Why stand up for nutters who believe that BoJo and Macron and Trump and so forth are all evil puppets of Neo-Liberalism who should be killed immediately?

For, in doing so, we stand up for ourselves and a world we will want to see changed for the better after the pandemic, one in which we can all breathe more freely.

Gopal is a lecturer in English. She is as stupid as shit. I'd rather read BoJo's threatened book on Shakespeare than anything Gopal writes. Anyway, she is Indian. Why does she not go home and stand up for the cretins she mentions in India? Is it because she can't play the race card back home? Nobody will say 'poor thing. She is a darkie. Thus her brain is puny. We must be nice to her when she talks worthless shite. Intellectual affirmative action, don't cha know.'