Hinduism, Islam and Christianity are equal

• Retired Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, Ajit Prakash Shah, declared scathingly, “The Republic of Intolerance that India has turned into in the last few years reflects and confirms to us our collective psychological malady, where we have lost sensitivity to the pain of our fellow citizens, and have become numb to the increasing loss of rights as citizens.”
• Justice Shah confessed that his own roots were seeped in saffron: “My grandfather was one of the founding members of the Hindu Mahasabha in pre-Independent India. I grew up reading the poems of Veer Savarkar.”
• He said, “Until the day the RSS declares that Islam and Christianity are equal to Hinduism and other religions born in India, there will be little scope for social harmony.”
• He said that those who lead the mob violence are clearly doing so with impunity, while fear spreads amongst the minorities. The mobile phone and the violent content it brings to you has become a terrorising device, with mob lynchers recording their acts and spreading them.
• The home ministry has directed wide publicity of the severe punishments that participation and abetment to mob fury can draw, it needs to be seen how sincere the government is in implementing this stated intent, Justice Shah said.
• The Indian media has been a big disappointment. “Far from questioning the government on behalf of the people, the media today circulates fake news and questions those who question the government. If the media at large feels compromised, barring a few exceptions, then democracy is in peril. Lynchings have to be condemned by news anchors, not used as ‘masala’ for prime time television,” he said.
• Justice Shah said that in the recent judgement of the Supreme Court directing continued detention at home for activists accused of conspiracy, the value was is in the dissenting verdict of Justice DY Chandrachud. 
• “Dissent is being curbed. Sloganeering is becoming a test of patriotism. When Akhlaq was killed, it wasn’t his body that was sent for post-mortem first. It was the meat which was sent for testing,” he said, pointing out the prejudice in the law and order machinery.
• “When violence happens in small doses, and regularly, we find it hard to remain angry, and accept it as commonplace.”
• The hope for the nation lies in common citizens refusing to accept any deviation of the founding values of the Constitution, Justice Shah concluded.

The one-day event saw nearly 2,000 people register to attend and listen to various speakers, which also included the articulate MP Shashi Tharoor and student leader Kanhaiya Kumar.

Modi's lies - what it means to India?

US President Donald Trump had spoken 2,140 lies, or uttered several such inaccuracies in his public life since becoming a Republican contender for the White House. Trump is not a stand-up comic artist jocularly falsifying facts to arouse amusement, or a founder of a fake news website running a political agenda. He is not just only the commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military power, but also has the largest nuclear button in the world at dangerously close proximity.

• If the most powerful leader of the free world cannot be trusted on account of his mental equanimity or is of questionable credibility, we clearly have a lot to worry about. By an uncanny coincidence, the world’s largest democracy, India, has a similar predicament; fake news, post-truth and alternative facts dominate mainstream media.
• Politicians regularly indulge in making outrageous statements and get away with it. Since their brazen lies go unchallenged and social media amplifies that mendacity, they inflict incalculable damage to society due to proliferation of misinformation, calumny and distorted history. 
• We as a nation are far too lazy to contradict the negative torrent of fake news with ulterior motives or delusional in the  false notion that automatically people will segregate the wheat from the chaff in the long-term. Or we under the current dispensation are just too scared? Several have surrendered the fight as they believe it is a Sisyphean exercise. Either way, the consequences can be serious. We are in a quicksand, and sinking.
• From the moment, Modi became the PM in 2014, India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru became the target of an orchestrated BJP campaign of calumny and character assassination. A malevolent media campaign was unleashed to malign Nehru, by insinuating that there was an attempt to cover-up the untimely death of the valiant freedom-fighter and former Congress president Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in an unfortunate air crash. The BJP, using right-wing stooges with literary pretensions, dubious historians, indulgent media editors delighted to be co-conspirators and disgruntled family members of Netaji launched a vicious assault on Nehru’s character. India’s finest statesman was being stigmatised by snake oil salesmen.
• The BJP was clearly relishing the malicious and disingenuous deluge as Modi gave a generous reception to the noble cause of knowing the ultimate truth on Netaji’s death. A member of the Bose family joined the saffron brigade, contested the elections, and lost. The Sangh Parivar went to the extent of creating a fabricated letter wherein Nehru called Bose a "war criminal". It was utter balderdash, but who cared? The fact is we should.
• Modi’s speech in Parliament on February 7, 2018,  he hemorrhaged truth by saying that had Sardar Patel been the first PM, Kashmir would have been totally ours. Sure, if my aunt wore a pyjama she would be my uncle. It was a convenient political twist with no historical foundations, but Modi continues to violate the basic precept of political morality by populating ludicrous charges on all and sundry, especially targeting the Nehru-Gandhi family. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel in our daily discourse.
• Politics was always about perceptions, but in the world of Facebook feeds, YouTube videos, Twitter trolls and WhatsApp forwards, truth itself is subjected to Amazonian proportions of vulnerability. No one is safe. No one has a constant bulletproof against sustained malignant accusations. There are no vanguards.
• It is a disconcerting reality that the process of transparent news dissemination has become carnivalesque and that Netaji indeed died in the plane crash at Taipei on August 18, 1945, was acknowledged by Modi sarkar in an obscure part of a daily newspaper.
• The vituperative anti-Nehru strategy was quickly consigned to the backwaters. Several susceptible minds subjected to the carcinogenic tirade against Nehru, would still be wondering  what is the real truth? That residual doubt that lingers long is exactly what fake news really wishes to accomplish. 
• Remember that the human mind can be extremely fragile to sustained bulldozing. Recollect the Holocaust? That Netaji named one of his infantry brigades in the Indian National Army after Nehru, or that the Nehru wore his barrister robes for the first time to defend the INA army soldiers charged with treason by the British are nonchalantly overlooked.
• Fake news, consciously elliptical, still triumphs. It is like heads I win, tails you lose.
• Another masterly deception is a work-in-progress and it even boasts of a grand edifice, the Statue of Unity, allegedly the tallest such in the world. Modi’s ideological mentors and political strategists is the RSS, without whose support he would not have even become the chief minister of Gujarat. It would seem like political incongruity that Modi is lionising Sardar Patel, the same man who banned the RSS for creating a poisonous environment that led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. 
• Nehru and Patel were brothers-in-arms, each other’s conscience keepers, but Modi and the BJP are burning the midnight oil to tell the country otherwise. It is a cunning project to deceive India. Political hypocrisy has reached epic proportions.
• Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation. Savarkar himself miraculously escaped conviction by the skin of his teeth. Modi has publicly called Savarkar a patriot. The rest is left for public wisdom.

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RSS, Tricolor flag & Patriotism

• One fact is certain: the organization (RSS), which runs the party (BJP) that runs the regime (Modi led NDA) cannot just appropriate the 'Indian national movement' as its own.
• RSS had refused to participate in the freedom struggle. It has, therefore, no right to claim its glory even though the Congress cannot also monopolize on any 'sole heir status' for various reasons.
• K.B. Hedgewar, who founded the RSS in 1925, did have some initial loose association with the freedom struggle. But from the 1930s, he ensured that his boys in khaki shorts stayed away from this historic movement. He said "Patriotism is not only going to prison. It is not correct to be carried away by such superficial patriotism." 
• The Hindu Mahasabha's V.D. Savarkar, who is another cherished role model of the current dispensation, had been active long before Hedgewar but he was rather mercurial. He did lead strident anti-British agitations and was jailed, but he also signed multiple clemency petitions to the colonial government, promising total cooperation if he was released. The Congress retaliated in 1934 and banned its members from joining communal organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS and the Muslim League. 
• In any case, during the critical phase of the Quit India movement and other agitations, not only was the RSS missing but we also have British reports of the 'good conduct' and the law-abiding nature of its members, while thousands of women, children and men all over India braved the onslaught of imperial repression.
• Nana Deshmukh in his book, RSS: Victim of Slander (1979): "One might well ask: why did the RSS not take part in the liberation struggle as an organisation? The question arose for the first time when Gandhiji launched his movement in 1929-30. It was decided that the members of the RSS were free to take part in their individual capacity". Fine. But it may be instructive to know which particular RSS member actually took part and what suffering he went through for it. 
• It is only logical that the RSS and its dedicated cadre that run the government should come clear on this phase of history before attempting to snatch credit in this new version of ultra-nationalism.
• On the eve of Independence, when much of the nation was preparing to celebrate freedom, the RSS's mouthpiece, Organiser, declared that the Indian tricolour will "never be respected and owned by the Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil, and a flag having three colours will certainly produce a very bad psychological effect and is injurious to a country." 
• Second head of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar lamented that "our leaders have set up a new flag for the country. Why did they do so? It is just a case of drifting and imitating... Ours is an ancient and great nation with a glorious past. Then, had we no flag of our own? Had we no national emblem at all these thousands of years? Undoubtedly we had. Then why this utter void, this utter vacuum in our minds?" 

Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948, however, changed the political chessboard of India decisively. The government banned the RSS and the then deputy prime minister, Patel, declared quite unequivocally that though "the RSS was not involved... his assassination was welcomed by those of the RSS and the [Hindu] Mahasabha who were strongly opposed to his way of thinking and to his policy." Golwalkar repeatedly pleaded with Patel, but the leader, whom the current regime seeks to appropriate, remained firm. He lifted the ban on July 11, 1949, only after the RSS pledged to stay away from politics, not be secretive and abjure violence. More important, it had to profess "loyalty to the Constitution of India and the National Flag". After removal of ban, RSS hoisted the flag at their headquarters on 26th January 1950. Sardar Patel died on 15th December that year, and RSS never hoisted the flag in their headquarters after that until 2002.