Shaurya - Only A Few Good Hindus?

Okay, I’m back after almost 6 months!

It’s not that nothing worthwhile had happened in this country that made me think, but somehow I was lazy. That’s the problem with communal Hindus, they need to be alert and on-job 24-hours like other communal beings – islamists, catholics, communists, et al. I’d try to be more regular.

I just came back after seeing a movie called Shaurya. It’s directed by journalist turned director Samar Khan. The director claimed in one of his interviews that the movie is inspired by the tribulations of his personal life – the prejudices he had to face being a Muslim.

And he surely had allowed his personal experience to ruin the movie. The movie seemed just another attempt by Muslims, ably assisted by secularists like Rahul Bose, to cry from the rooftop that they are not bad, and there are only bad Hindus (a character played by Kay Kay Menon in the movie) who either give them bad name or turn them into bad beings. I have been sick of listening to this accusation, and the movie is just another manifestation to it.

If you don’t want to believe me, go and pick up any docu-drama produced by Pakistan TV in early 1990’s where they portray happenings in Kashmir. I remember seeing such a drama on P-TV when secular Congress government allowed it to beam all over India. I still remember how they had shown a fanatic Hindu Army officer who orders killings in Kashmir, and when he is posted in Assam, he tries to rape a local girl, the only reason being that he believed Assamese were not ‘pure’ Hindus. Remember, that was the time when ISI was trying to connect ULFA and other North East insurgents to Kashmiri Terrorists.

Shaurya toes the same line. Army atrocities happen, and Shaurya seems to suggest that they happen only because there are ‘bad Hindus’ in Indian Army. The Muslim director tries to show ‘a few good Hindus’ (the concept of the movie is copied from a Hollywood movie called ‘A few good men’) like secularist Rahul Bose, or a half-believing Hindu played by Javed Jafri.

In secular India, especially in secular Bollywood, there is no concept of a temple going, tilak sporting tolerant and progressive Hindu. A patriotic, progressive and ‘nice’ Hindu has to be non-believing (just born a Hindu) and non-practicing Hindu. Whereas a 5-times Quran reading, skullcap sporting Muslim can be perfectly nice, patriotic and progressive. The central character of the movie, a cop called Javed Khan, is shown offering Namaaz in the movie, he is a hero in the movie.

Anyway, coming back to the movie, as I told, it looked to me as if I was watching a docu-drama aired by Pakistan TV, and I can’t ignore the fact that a Muslim director has made this movie. And the director wants all of us to appreciate his effort. And I hated the movie and him.

Kashmir problem is not the result of ‘a few bad Hindus’. It is the result of a psychology that asserts that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations, and they can’t live together. It is a psychology that Sir Syed Ahmed and Allama Iqbal (one of the two revered Muslims by our secularists) propagated first and ‘a few bad Hindus’ (?) reacted to it. It is the result of a belief that doesn’t need ‘a few bad Hindus’ to keep it alive and burning. Yeah, this is the first post where I assert that ‘bad Hindus’ are just a reaction to ‘bad (or true?) Muslims’, and this assertion will appear again and again through my confessions.

I, a communal Hindu, confess, that I owe my existence to other communal beings – islamists, catholics, communists, et al.

Death of a Muslim

For more than a couple of weeks I have been reading about death of a Muslim guy called Rizwanur Rehman. This 30 years old guy, coming from a poor and rather uneducated family and working as a multimedia teacher in a private company at Kolkata, allegedly fell in love with a 23 years old Hindu girl student Priyanka Todi, and married her against the wishes of her family members, her father being a wealthy and powerful businessman.

Two weeks after the marriage, Rizwanur was found dead on railway tracks. Police and CID say that he committed suicide. Communists, human rights activists, and Muslims say that he was murdered. They blame top police officials of West Bengal and Priyanka’s father for the alleged murder. The chief minister of West Bengal is more than willing to believe these guys than his own police force. Media, especially a television news channel called CNN-IBN, is hell bent upon delivering justice to this dead man. Secularism is the in-thing.

Interestingly, the Hindu girl Priyanka was contacted by West Bengal’s Women Commission and she denied any pressure or coerciveness from her father and didn’t suspect any foul play in the death of her husband. But her views don’t matter to our secular heroes, the clairvoyants know the truth, and battle for truth and justice has been flagged off.

And I confess, I see it as a battle against Hindus.

For the communist politicians, the battle serves dual purpose – it appeases their Muslim vote bank and it helps them burden Hindus with another charge of being murderer of Muslims. Of course, Hindus like me don’t treat it as a burden, rather I feel proud that I can also be as violent and brutal as Muslims and battle it out with them. But it is the fence sitters like XYZ who are cursed to carry the burden of being intolerant and murderers.

Why is this state government behaving in a manner as if it was the rarest of the rare cases? Haven’t their own policemen tortured people before? What happened in Nandigram and Singur? Did the chief minister then care to pay a visit to the aggrieved families?

And they claim to be disciplined administrators. The whole issue came into limelight because Muslims from Rizwanur’s colony (one of the several lawless Muslim ghettos of this country) got violent, pelted a police station with stones, and harassed innocent bystanders. When other Indian citizens, read Hindus, show such aggression against establishment, they are termed as anarchists and lawless, but when Muslims do it, their actions are treated with Gandhian grandeur. Is this the way a disciplined administrator allows law and order to be taken hostage by crowds?

What was really so special about this case? A daughter of a rich industrialist defies him and marries a poor man outside her social class and it results in a murder. Is this again the rarest of the rare cases? In western Uttar Pradesh, around each month a murder takes place because couples defy their parents and marry against their wishes. Why doesn’t CNN-IBN make a headline out of that?

So whose battle is it really? And against whom? I’m pretty sure, it’s one of those several attempts to demoralize Hindu consciousness and appease the minorities. But XYZ says I’m reading too much into this. As always, he is innocent enough not to believe in conspiracy theories. While Muslims get away with Godhra and 9/11 conspiracy theories, he refuses that there could be any against Hindus. It’s important that people like me exist so that one day he can see the other side of the story too.

Anyway, XYZ says that it is one of those stupid attempts by media and government to prove that they care for the citizens of this country (see, how innocently he has confused care for Muslims as care for common citizens).

XYZ thinks that an unfortunate death or murder has been used by one television channel to gain TRPs and by a government to gain goodwill. He sees Rizwanur’s case as being no better that Jessica Lall or Nitish Katara cases, where media tried to shove their socially conscious image down the throat of Indian viewers by making use of these dead names. All the time Indian news channels show crap and useless stories, they need such stories now and then for hogwash, to clean their own conscious too, while government has been shrewd enough to use the opportunity to gain goodwill. Both of them (media and government) will now conveniently ignore similar cases in future, as they would have already ‘proven’ themselves once.

XYZ tries to reason with me that it’s just happenstance that the victim this time was a Muslim. I would have liked to believe him if this whole case would have been dealt by government, media, intellectuals, and human rights activists as a law-and-order problem. But haven’t I been reading and hearing words like ‘secularism’, ‘minority rights’, ‘intolerance against Muslims’, and many other such brotherhood words in the whole episode?

XYZ, it just can’t be so simple.