Journalists From India

"[It is] one of the fundamental tenets of Islam -- namely, to multiply the tribe."

"But wasn't this what Pakistan was supposed to be? After all, it came into being on the basis of the two-nation theory, that Hindus and Muslims were two separate states, that Hindus and Muslims could not live together. That was Pakistan's raison d'être. Supposing by some black magic they converted to another way of thinking... Pakistan would collapse. Therefore one of the planks of Pakistani statecraft was to keep reminding its people and the world at large of that mantra of survival: we are because we cannot live with them."

"After the ceremony, Nehru and other Congress leaders addressed a mass meeting on the river bank. As the meeting ended, Ran Ahmed Kidwai whispered to me: "Jawaharlal has performed the last rites not only of Gandhi but of Gandhiism as well. Now that the master has gone, there will be no one to discipline the crowd. The High Command is dead.""

"Feroze was furious, to say the least. He fought her with all means, through the press, via other politicians and face-to-face with her over the breakfast table at Teen Murti. According to Janardan Thakur, well-known political correspondent: ‘It was her husband who perhaps first called her a “fascist”, way back in 1959 when she was Congress President, Indira Gandhi had been lobbying hard for intervention in Kerala and Feroze had taken a stand against it. He thought it was undemocratic to dismiss an elected government, whether it was a communist government or otherwise. The issue had come up at breakfast table at Teen Murti, and there had been quite a row between Indira and Feroze, with Nehru looking on very distressed. “It is just not right,” Feroze had said, “you are bullying people. You are a fascist.” Indira Gandhi had flared up. “You are calling me a fascist. I can’t take that.” And she had walked out of the room in rage.’"

"...strengthen the bloc of Muslims states in the west of India, as together they will command allegiance of 80 millions of Muslims including the three most virile and warlike races of Islam, the Turks, the Afghans and the Arabs. If to this bloc is added the Muslim state of Pakistan, in the Northwest of India with its Muslim population of 30 millions, it will magnify the Hindu fear into a permanent nightmare and probably this may be one of the reasons why the Hindu is opposed to the idea of Pakistan."

"...commend these two books to all readers who want to understand the problem of India’s future constitution and its solution and I feel that anyone who reads them dispassionately and with an open mind will find by sheer facts and figures and historical arguments that partition of India is in the interests of both the major nations, Hindus and Muslims."

"The book recommended by you gives me no help. It contains half-truths and its conclusions are unwarranted."

"There is a great deal of discussion and literature on this point which is available and it is for you to judge finally, when you have studied this question thoroughly, whether the Mussalmans and Hindus are not two separate nations in this sub-continent. For the moment I would refer you to two publications, although there are many more – Dr Ambedkar’s book and MRT’s Nationalism in Conflict in India."

"This doesn’t mean we have to stop developing. Just we have to do it differently."

"We cannot afford to do what China and America did: have decades of 8 percent GDP growth, then do a cleanup act later."

"It didn’t much matter how well we understood the issue if we weren’t to take that both were common property resources to share and manage globally."

"Now you don’t; everyone knows what it is. It’s right there for you to see."

"No one is an environmentalist by birth. It is only your path, your life, your travels that awaken you."

"What we need today as a nation is a new paradigm of growth—whenever and however it happens."

"When I was in my 20s, I covered the Kargil war from the frontline. I have grown up as the daughter of India’s first woman war correspondent. Before my mother died when I was 13, she would tell me how the newspaper she was working for did not agree to her going to the war front in 1965. So, she would take a couple of days off and go there with a notepad and a pen, and then start sending stories from there. Many years later, when I said that I wanted to cover the war, the organisation I was working for and the military said, “Absolutely not. We cannot have a woman at the war front"."

"In a changing India, gender finally does not exist only on the margins of public and political attention. It is now center-stage and we are demanding accountability and justice for all."

"If you’d asked me what it is like to be a woman in this profession 20-30 years ago, I would have said that gender doesn’t matter. But today, gender does matter. At every stage, you have to fight at least four or five times harder, and when you get success, there will be people who will try to punish you for your ambition, professionalism and competence."

"In a second incident in Anjar, she played up the news that a Hanuman mandir [temple] had been broken and vandalized. I told her, "What are you up to? You are in Kutch which is a border district. There you are showing the attack and destruction of a mandir. Do you realize the implications of broadcasting such news? We haven’t yet recovered from the earthquake. Have you actually done proper investigation into the riots? Why are you lighting fires for us? Your news takes a few minutes to broadcast that such and such place is unprotected or a mandir has been vandalized. But it takes for me a few hours to move the police from one disturbed location to another since these incidents are breaking out in the most unexpected places.""

"It was my endeavour that we restore peace at the earliest possible. If you look at the data you will see that in 72 hours we had put down the riots and brought the situation under control. But these TV channels kept on playing up the same incidents over and over again. At the time, Rajdeep [Sardesai] and Barkha [Dutt] were in the same channel NDTV. During those inflamed days, Barkha acted in the most irresponsible manner. Surat had not witnessed any communal killings, barring a few small incidents of clashes. However the bazaars were closed [as a precautionary measure]. Barkha stood amidst closed shops screaming "This is Surat’s diamond market, but there is not a single police man here.""

"I phoned Barkha and said, "Are you providing the address of this 'unprotected' bazaar to the rioting mobs? Are you inviting them to come and create trouble there by announcing that there is no police here so you can run amok safely?""

"The forced attempt to forge a Semitic, monolithic, chosen people identity for Hindus... stand in sharp contrast to the enlightened effort at founding a modern, social rationale for religion as say, in Vivekananda."

"The distinctive feature of the Muslim League in Kerala is that it strove to keep the community at the centre of the state’s politics, unlike other Muslim political formations elsewhere in India that revelled in confessional isolationism. As a result, the Kerala Muslims emerged as probably the only community of that faith in India that achieved genuine political empowerment on the one hand and, on the other, lived out the promise of equal citizenship enshrined in the Constitution."

"If organising a religious community politically on the basis of antagonism to another is communalism, the IUML has never mobilised its cadre nor used its political and often administrative clout to create religious divides. On the contrary, whenever the state faced a communally sensitive situation, the party rose to the occasion and played a stellar role in dousing the flames. It is pertinent to mention that the decision to establish the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, for “the promotion and development of the study of Sanskrit, Indology, Indian Philosophy and Indian languages” was taken when a Muslim League leader was Kerala’s minister of education."

"Religious conflict is not unique to India. It happens in most parts of the world. Unfortunately, it appears that while there might be some genuine cases of religious conflict that must be addressed by the laws of the land firmly and strictly; most it seems are an exaggeration to create an impression that India and its majority population of Hindus are unleashing unwarranted atrocities on Christians."

"As an Indian Christian, I have always advocated that claims of the ‘Christian’ community being persecuted in India are mostly exaggerated and play into a larger game plan to cover up the growing menace of forceful, coercive, and allurement-based conversion in India."

"I believe that every Christian who is a victim of a religious hate crime must get justice under the laws of India but a Christian who falls prey to propaganda and works to portray India in questionable light must face the law for the lies spread."

"Do you people consider the word ‘Mulla’ derogatory? Are you getting rid of this word just as you did with the word ‘Jihadi’? You should release your dictionary. Wire madarsa’s dictionary will not be used at Sudarshan."

"Every time I go to Bangladesh—and I go regularly— I find the country still in the midst of war. The guns of 1971 have stopped long ago but conflicts and tensions have not. The society remains divided from top to bottom. People of Bangladesh can be categorised into two groups: pro-liberation and anti-liberation. The first claims to represent the forces which fought against Pakistan to create an independent country. It mostly favours Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Sheikla Mujib-ur-Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh. The second group supports Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. Her husband, Zia-ur-Rahman, headed free Bangladesh through a coup. ...After 30 years of Independence, who did what during the liberation struggle is getting hazier, but not the prejudices. Some impressions about people—a few may well be true—remain implacable. The worst part is that there is no mood of forgetting and forgiving. The liberation or the anti-liberation label has become such a prized possession that the fakes and failures use it to settle scores politically and, worse, violently. The cleavage, really speaking, is like India's caste system, with its prejudices and biases. Appointments, transfers and even allocations of funds are made on the basis of who was on which side."

"The slogans and the war cries from the mosque did not stop. So, in a way, every day in Kashmir after January 19 was January 19. The cries just became a little more systematic. They would begin during the night and continue till the wee hours of the morning. After a break, they would resume until late morning. Then another break and so it would go on."

"Sometimes I think back to the events of the night of January 19. How does one depict the fear we felt that night? I found my answer much later in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel in which the author interviews his father, a holocaust survivor. Depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman asks his father how it felt to be in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His father startles him by producing a loud ‘Boo!’ and says ‘it felt a little like that. But always!’ That is how we felt on the night of January 19."

"Negativism, then, was a defining feature of being 'progressive', and that's what I began to revel in. But such negativism was almost entirely one-sided in 'activist' circles, for to be counted as a 'real' 'social activist' it was simply unthinkable that the 'oppressed' could be faulted for almost anything at all. For a 'social activist' to even mention, leave alone condemn, the foibles of the 'oppressed communities'--gender injustice or caste rivalries among Dalits or the obscurantism and misogyny preached in many Muslim madrasas or the terror attacks and killings of innocents by Naxalites and radical Islamists--was tantamount to nothing less than treason. Reports about such matters were generally dismissed as 'malicious ruling-class propaganda' or 'malicious Brahminical brainwashing' or even as an 'understandable reaction of vulnerable minority communities to ruling caste/class/imperialist oppression'. Sometimes, if these were grudgingly admitted to be true, they were sought to be passed over in silence in order to 'respect the sensibilities of the oppressed' or as 'minor contradictions' that ought not to be addressed on the grounds that it would allegedly 'divide' the oppressed, 'sabotage' the struggle against 'oppression' and thereby 'play into the hands of the real opressors'. If you only just pointed out that there were serious faults in the madrasas that needed to be urgently addressed (even for the sake of the Muslim children who studied therein) or that Muslim Personal Law was seriously biased against Muslim women or that many Dalits who had taken advantage of the system of protective discrimination behaved with fellow Dalits almost as shabbily as did their 'upper' caste Hindu 'oppressors', you were sure to be shouted down as a 'government agent' or a 'paid stooge of Hindutva forces', not only by fellow 'progressives' but also by a whole host of voices among the communities whom you had spent years trying to defend and promote. If you even so much as mildly hinted that the conditions of Muslims in India weren't half as bad as sections of the Urdu media wanted people to believe or that the Muslims in this country had much more freedom than in any Muslim-majority state or that untouchability was no longer as rampant as it once was in some parts, you were bound to be accused of betrayal and your motives were rumoured to be entirely suspect. If you acknowledged that probably less Muslims were killed by Hindus in riots in India every year than the number of fellow Muslims slaughtered by their co-religionists in the 'Islamic' Republic of Pakistan or in God-forsaken Afghanistan or that the plight of religious minorities in many Muslim countries, particularly those ruled by theocratic regimes, was much worse than in India or that some Dalit officials were neck-deep in corruption, you were bound to be hollered at for allegedly being a 'traitor' to 'The Cause' of the 'oppressed'. The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn't have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media) would shrilly denounce you as an 'agent' of this or the other 'power' if, in your quest to be honest and balanced, you pointed out even some of the mildest of their faults. It was as if by definition the 'oppressed' were spotless angels who could do no wrong and their 'oppressors' wholly and incorrigibly demonic."

"There was nothing at all good in Hindu traditions or in America or in Capitalist Modernity, for instance, I convinced myself, for I was hooked onto the 'progressive' and 'radical' rhetoric that 'upper' caste Hindus in general (including most of my own family!) and almost every single American was complicit in perpetuating 'oppression'."

"The very same folks who egged you on to write about their problems and to take the Hindutva beast by its horns (for they were either too scared to do it themselves or didn't have the same writing skills or the same access to the English media) would shrilly denounce you as an 'agent' of this or the other 'power' if, in your quest to be honest and balanced, you pointed out even some of the mildest of their faults. It was as if by definition the 'oppressed' were spotless angels who could do no wrong and their 'oppressors' wholly and incorrigibly demonic."

"But all that came with a heavy personal price. The more I identified with the 'Revolution' of the 'oppressed', the more unbearably negative I became as a person."

"All that energy and enthusiasm that went into my contribution as a 'social activist' and in the cause of the 'Revolution' paid me well in material terms, however, though I have to say that this wasn't the only or even major reason why I was in the business of championing the 'Revolution' in the first place. I won generous scholarships to go abroad to do a Ph.D. and then two post-doctoral projects to study various aspects of 'marginalised groups' in India. I was invited to attend conferences in over two dozen countries to pontificate on the same subjects. I was appointed as a full professor in an Indian university and was paid handsomely for the articles and books that I continued to churn out, machine-like, all about the 'oppressed'. In addition, I was assigned projects by several NGOs to study the 'oppressed', for which I was well rewarded financially. Although I have to say that I did not quite intend this to begin with, writing and conferencing about the 'oppressed' soon turned into a lucrative source of livelihood for me. I was actually, and quite literally, living off the misery of the 'oppressed', although I did not fully realise it then."

"In the fascist Hindutva imagination, the Indian Muslims are continuously reviled as Pakistani "fifth columnists," as "enemies of the nation" and so on, and their patriotism is said to be suspect. The Muslim as the menacing "other" occupies a central place in Hindutva discourse, and this has been used to legitimize large-scale anti-Muslim violence."

"It was only after Tipu’s tyrannical regime ended that the original idol of Krishna was transported back to Guruvayoor and reinstated with due ceremony. Equally, if no signs of destruction are visible today, it is because of the intervention of an officer named Hydrose Kutty, a Hindu who had been forcibly converted to Islam by Hyder Ali. He helped repair, renovate, and restore the temple and reinstated the land grants and exemptions that had historically been given to it by various kings."

"However, the bigoted handwork of Tipu is clearly visible even today in the temples of Parampathali, Panmayanadu and Vengidangu. One look at the appalling damage done to the sanctum sanctorum of the Parampathali temple is sufficient to estimate the nature of Tipu’s iconoclasm."

"The case of the Thrikkavu temple in Ponnani was no different. After smashing the idols in the temple, Tipu converted the entire temple into an ammunition depot."

"Tipu also didn’t spare the Krishna temple at Guruvayoor, which is one of the holiest Hindu temples in India. However, today’s Tipu-worshippers assert that it was Tipu who gave the land grant to Hindus to construct the Guruvayoor temple! An eminence named C.K. Ahmed writes with supreme confidence that “the Guruvayoor temple of today exists on the land that was granted as Inaam[gift or grant] by Tipu” but fails to give a single shred of evidence to back his assertion. However, the real story is that when the people of Guruvayoor heard of Tipu’s approach, they secretly transported its main idol to the Ambalapuzha Krishna temple then in the Travancore State. Here’s what the 2 January 1977 issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India says about the affair: The truth is that when Tipu raided the Malabar, he looted all the gold and jewelry in the Hindu temples there, pulled down the gold, silver and copper covering that placed on the roofs of these temples, looted their money, and vandalized them. Seeing the nature of his raid, the locals and Brahmins at Guruvayoor feared for the fate of the idol of Krishna in the temple, shifted it to Ambalapuzha and hid it."

"The Sultan was ambling his way towards death in one fit of helpless fury at a time. In all probability, the sultan merely suspected that the illness that had seized him this time would pass, too. He was, after all, the Shah, the Upholder of the Deen, The Only True Faith in the world, the sultan who had known no defeat, who had ‘conquered the east and protect[ed] the west’, who had been honoured by none less than the mighty Chief of the Abbasids, and more importantly, he was the One who had ‘destroyed the country of the sun-worshippers’.1 Wherever his sword had been raised, such far-flung, powerful kingdoms like those at Kara2, Ujjain, Ranthambhor, Chittorgarh, Deogiri, Dhur Samundar and Madura5 met the same fate as that of the ‘garden of Behar’, whose soil was ‘dyed with blood as red as a tulip’, and everywhere the ravaging sultan went, the ‘Hindus, in alarm, descended into the earth like ants.’"

"The Thirunavaya Temple, of unknown antiquity—local legends trace it back to about 5000 years but its written history dates to at least 1300 years—is today located 12 Kilometres south of Tirur in the Malappuram district. It was always renowned as one of the great centres of Vedic learning and a principal place of pilgrimage of the Vaishnava sect. Tipu’s brutal army not only plundered the temple but desecrated and destroyed it."

"He (H. Kissinger) kicked off his day with breakfast with Indian thinkers and academics at the Ashoka Hotel. It went horribly. One of the Indians was especially livid: K. Subrahmanyam, the author of that April secret strategic report that urged India’s top leaders to attack Pakistan to secure India’s regional hegemony. Subrahmanyam, emotional and bitter, told Kissinger that he, as a refugee himself, should understand the horror of what was happening. The United States was “making the same mistake as it made with Hitler in the 1930s—trying to deal with and placate an authoritarian regime which has embarked on a major program of reducing its population.” Kissinger, at the start of what was clearly going to be a very long day, tried to duck confronting him."

"In the late 18th century, Tipu Sultan, one of the last Muslim rulers to command a significant kingdom in southern India, wrote frequent, anxious letters to the Caliph, inviting him to invade India and aid him in his fight against the infidel Christians, the British. The underlying significance of all such correspondences is a historical theme that has remained constant from the day the alien invading forces of Islam began their forays into Bharatavarsha, looking for favour, approval and endorsement of their authority in this country from a transnational religious imperialism."

"Hindus were suddenly rudely jolted awake to a wholly unfamiliar, living nightmare when Mahmud’s armies overwhelmed the sacred Indo-Gangetic plain, the nucleus of their ancient punyabhoomi, the hordes of his locust-like barbarians setting fire to its fertile, green, smiling plains, plundering, indulging in indiscriminate massacre of innocent citizens, gangraping women, enslaving boys, girls, men, women and children, destroying ancient cities and centres of learning, art and culture, razing magnificent temples sanctified by uninterrupted centuries of nationwide devotion, smashing murtis and enforcing an alien religion at the point of the sword and fire."

"It marks the first episode of forced and panicked mass migrations of Hindus, Jains and other native non-Muslim populations from various parts of northern and western India towards the central and southern regions. Indeed, a separate volume dedicated to narrating the full history of such forced Hindu migrations within India awaits the pen of a future historian. One of the more enduring and durable features of Hindu social life since time immemorial was the remarkable continuity and attachment they had towards their immediate geographical surroundings. Muhammad’s perfidious victory shattered that sense of permanence and continuity forever. From then onwards, this age-old stability and settled generational rhythm of life would repeatedly be smashed for the next five hundred years throughout northern, eastern and western India by the same forces of religious zealotry and iconoclasm that motivated Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni and now, Muhammad of Ghori. The Jain Acharya Asadhara writes33 that when the Sapadalaksha34 region was conquered by Shihab-ud-din alias Muhammad of Ghor, he fled from his native country and migrated to the safe haven of Malwa, because he was scared of being forcibly converted and his family molested by the marauding armies."

"While Qutub-ud-din Aibak deserves credit for sundering all ties with Ghazni and thereby preventing further, destructive Muslim raids from Central Asia, he also heralded a new power structure and centre that would endure for the next six hundred years. For the first time in the long history of ancient Bharatavarsha, Delhi became the seat of a prolonged, oppressive religious despotism concentrating all power within itself. So far, the city, at various points, had at best been a principality, governorship and protectorate. With due regard to vastly changed historical and political circumstances, it can reasonably be said that a basic element in the template that Qutub-ud-din Aibak had set has continued till date, minus the religious despotism: Delhi continues to be the political centre of modern India, shorn of any traces of the native classical culture and civilisation."

"One significant reason, however, is the fact that the overall discipline of historical scholarship in India, especially after the 1950s, has largely been destroyed thanks to Marxist ideological manipulation. To put this in real terms, nearly three generations of first-rate scholarship has been wiped out, as a result of which the pioneering work begun by Sir Jadunath Sarkar, R.C. Majumdar, S. Srikanta Sastri, D.C. Sircar, A.D. Pusalker and Radha Kumud Mookerji has continued to languish."

"It was also a period of all-round sweeping changes: old systems of governance and statecraft were uprooted, the administration was Islamised, an oppressive tax regime was introduced and centuries-old native traditions, worship, manners, customs, dressing, food habits, education and language underwent a brutal and, in many cases, irreversible transformation and destruction."

"Mulastana—the original name of the Islamicised ‘Multan’—is a great city hailing from untold antiquity. The general region has been continuously inhabited for over five thousand years and is one of the proverbial cradles of human civilisation, now home to numerous archaeological sites dating back to the early Harappan period of the Indus Valley Civilisation. According to Hindu lore, Mulastana was founded by Rishi Kashyapa and was the capital of the Trigarta kingdom when the Great Kurukshetra War occurred. During Alexander’s raid of India, Mulastana was located on an island in the Ravi River (known as Iravati or Parushni in Vedic texts). This ancient city is now fabled for a proliferation of mosques, minarets and a vast collection of Islamic structures. It is also home to the largest collection of Sufi shrines in a single place. However, for at least three thousand years, Mulastana was one of the original homes that embodied and breathed the sanctity of the Sanatana Vedic civilisation and culture, which found its most magnificent and sublime expression in the Aditya (or Sun) Temple. According to the Bhagavata Purana, it was built by Krishna’s son Samba who performed a penance to propitiate Aditya in order to obtain a cure for his leprosy. When Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang visited the Sun Temple in 641, he described the murti of Aditya as made of ‘pure gold with eyes made from large red rubies’. Its doors, pillars and the shikhara (tower/dome) were all studded with silver, gold, rubies, gems and numerous varieties of precious metals. At a more profound level, Mulastana was one of the most sacred pilgrimage centres for Hindus, on par with Kashi, Prayagraj, Mathura and Kanchipuram."