Skip to main content

Gau rakshaks, listen to the PM


I salute Mr Modi for his latest speeches.  On Saturday, he lambasted the gau rakshaks in no uncertain terms.  He called them anti-socials who are trying to masquerade their maleficence with feigned religiousness.  He has appealed to the state governments to take stern action against such criminals.

Today addressing a rally in Hyderabad, he said, “If you want to attack, attack me and not Dalits. If you want to shoot, shoot me and not Dalits.” 

Better late than never.  The PM should have spoken out long ago when certain sections of the country’s population or their religious places were attacked right from the time he took over the highest political authority in the country.  

The PM should have spoken out when Kalburgi, Dabholkar and Pansare were murdered brutally for supporting the causes of secularism.  Not even the protests from eminent writers of the country who returned their Sahitya Akademi awards provoked the PM into taking the issue seriously. 

Rohith Vemula’s suicide note that “My birth is my fatal accident” and the polarisation of the country into the entitled and the disentitled failed to move the PM. 

When Akhlaq was lynched by a mob of gau rakshaks, the PM refused to condemn the act and demand stern action against the murderers.

When some students of JNU demanded justice, they were labelled antinational by the PM’s own men and the PM refused to speak.

Silence is endorsement.  It is only natural that criminals began to think that they could indulge their antisocial proclivities in the name of the cow or other religious symbols.

Now the PM has spoken.  I hope the umpteen organisations that mushroomed in the country in the last two years purportedly to defend cows and other such icons will listen to the PM. 

As the PM said, those who really love the cows should look after the welfare of the cows instead of killing people in their names. 

As the Rig Veda says, "Let noble thoughts come to us from every side."




Comments

  1. All I can say is that he is managing both the roles of PM and party member quite well. Pretention if becomes a habit can no longer be considered as being pretentious.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If his latest pretension becomes a habit, the nation will be richer.

      Delete
  2. Mr. Modi's honesty and integrity is often misunderstood or not understood or misused, even abused:(
    He is more sinned against than sinning:(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have serious reservations about Mr Modi. There's a lot of narcissism in him. Coupled with hunger for power and hatred of certain sections, the narcissism can be very volatile. Now he is defending the Dalits most probably for getting their votes or because cow carcasses are becoming a serious problem in North India. Most probably, both. But, as Pranju said above, if the pretension becomes a habit, it will be quite good.

      Delete
  3. How much of what is said is truly meant by the politicians....!!! There is more to it than what meets the eye....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I know, Sunaina. But there's always a hope that something good will come out of even this mess.

      Delete
  4. that's his political strategy to garner Dalit votes, He didn't mention Muslims who are targeted more by these so called gau rakshaks, if he was serious on the issue he must take everybody into confidence

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are right in all probability. Modi is too shrewd and egotistical to have such a quick conversion. But if this can mark a new beginning it will be great. If!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...

Duryodhana Returns

Duryodhana was bored of his centuries-long exile in Mythland and decided to return to his former kingdom. Arnab Gau-Swami had declared Bihar the new Kurukshetra and so Duryodhana chose Bihar for his adventure. And Bihar did entertain him with its modern enactment of the Mahabharata. Alliances broke, cousins pulled down each other, kings switched sides without shame, and advisers looked like modern-day Shakunis with laptops. Duryodhana’s curiosity was more than piqued. There’s more masala here than in the old Hastinapura. He decided to make a deep study of this politics so that he could conclusively prove that he was not a villain but a misunderstood statesman ahead of his time. The first lesson he learns is that everyone should claim that they are the Pandavas, and portray everyone else as the Kauravas. Every party claims they stand for dharma, the people, and justice. And then plot to topple someone, eliminate someone else, distort history, fabricate expedient truths, manipulate...