Playing politics over riots

Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh (Source: Google)

Our country is not new to communal riots. Whether it is 1947, 1984, 2002 or 2013, the same thing keeps happening. People are tortured, raped, and murdered.

Children are orphaned and rendered homeless. Refugees lose all their belongings and property and have to start from scratch, in terrible conditions.

Humans are supposed to learn from their mistakes, yet the same thing happens over and over again.

And, equally inevitable, are the opportunistic politicians who turn up in the aftermath.

Former Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh played the role to perfection on his 58th birthday, lashing out at SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav for his callous decision to party while the victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots were dying in the camps.

Although Singh did not accuse Mulayam of inciting the riots, the implication was obvious.

We don't say it enough, but it is a fact: most riots are incited by party leaders for political gains.

And the ones that turn up later are simply there to earn brownie points, and maybe polarise the survivors to their own benefit.

Muck is thrown around until it has covered everyone, so that you can't distinguish the polariser from the polarisee.

If it was the Britishers who sowed the seeds of communalism in India, it is our politicians who watered them for their personal gain.

In the mad rush to take advantage of the situation, the lives of the ordinary - the ones who are killed, injured, put out on the streets and generally traumatised - are ignored.

And we ordinary Indians seem to fall for it every time.

And remember, this has nothing to do with religion, no matter what those at the forefront might be saying.

What could be better proof of this than the fact that, as a girl who might find herself in the middle of a riot-hit area, I'm liable to be tortured, raped and even murdered without anyone so much as asking me what god I believe in?

© 2014 Nasreen Ghani

Published in Daily Mail and Mail Today:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2549023/WHIPLASH-Playing-politics-riots.html

Netaji vs the Queen's English

Mulayam Singh Yadav (Source: PTI)

HUNDREDS are spending sleepless nights in makeshift refugee homes after communal clashes broke out in Muzaffarnagar. 

The usual problems of poverty, electricity and water remain. The government has returned to gunda raj. 

And yet, 'the need of the hour' for Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav is to promote Hindi. 

And that too not Hindi in Uttar Pradesh's schools or on television, but the use of a colonial bhasha in Parliament, which according to him is a threat to national integrity. 

These are the same politicians who wouldn't think of putting their children in a Hindimedium school. The same ones whose kids would have a hard time completing two sentences without slipping an angrezi word in. 

And yet, their concern is the use of English in Parliament - that too on the shocking grounds that it will interfere with the country's development. 

Yadav might have a point, although he would be reluctant to admit it this way. His anti-English tirades usually forget to mention the tiny little detail that his son, Uttar Pradesh's chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, got his college degree in Australia - where Hindi-medium universities are a bit hard to find.

But all the 'development' that was supposed to come with Akhilesh's regime has amounted to nothing. 

Maybe that's what triggered Mulayam's move to automatically magnify the importance of the Hindi language through an anti-English law in Parliament? With a population of 1.2 billion, India has over a hundred regional languages. 

Of these, there are 22 officially recognised languages. How are our politicians - who already have enough trouble being understood and getting things done - expected to hear each other out in the name of development if they can't speak a language that is common?

© 2013 Nasreen Ghani

Published in Daily Mail and Mail Today:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2511383/WHIPLASH-Netaji-vs-Queens-English.html