Let’s not Fool Ourselves, Kerala Congress Tweets on Kashmiri Pandits is a Message from the Top

 The following article was written for MyInd Makers. Pasting it here for reference:

The Kerala Congress twitter handle has been on a rampage in the last couple of days. Actually, let’s not fool ourselves. The Kerala Congress twitter handle is just a messenger. The message is coming right from the top. The most vocal amongst the top three in the Congress party is the crown prince, Rahul Gandhi. So, for the sake of arguments in this article, we can safely assume that it is Rahul Gandhi whose thoughts have been expressed by the Kerala Congress twitter handle. Rahul Gandhi did two twitter threads in a matter of 2 days – astonishingly absurd arguments were presented in the first one and even worser justifications of the first thread were written in the second one.

The timeline Rahul Gandhi chose to highlight -1990 to 2007 – in his now deleted first tweet in the first thread, is very intriguing. I am still not able to understand why he chose this particular period of 17 years. Rahul Gandhi has given us an exact number – 399 – of Kashmiri Pandits who were killed (according to him). But gives a round figure of 15,000 for Muslims! He claims that 15,000 Muslims were killed by terrorists in this time period. Does he mean that these killings happened only in Kashmir? Or was he referring to the entire country? There is absolutely no report, official or otherwise, that claims that 15,000 Muslims were killed by terrorists between 1990 to 2007, either only in Kashmir or in the whole of India. His party was in power for 10 out of these 17 years he chose to mention here, so is he now alluding that his party was majorly responsible for loss of 15000 lives? Like many things Rahul Gandhi does, this tweet also didn’t make any logical sense.

In his second tweet of the second tweet thread, he makes a startling revelation that “Congress bought peace & rehabilitated victims”. Now I am confused. According to Rahul Gandhi’s now deleted tweet, terrorists killed 15399 people from 1990 to 2007. How does that amount to bringing peace? Since the year 2008, stone pelting was a regular occurrence in Kashmir. We all remember the mayhem of the year 2010 when there were “Go back, India” slogans written on the roads of Kashmir; when alleged students were encouraged to call the violence as an “Anti-India movement” and be proud about it.

We all remember the wise words of then Home Minister, P. Chidambaram, who said “You pelt stones, make security personnel targets, burn government property and expect us to remain silent and do nothing?" How does all of this amount to bringing peace? Did Rahul Gandhi really want us to forget things that happened after 2007 under his government’s watch?

He also claims that “For Congress, it's a long battle between separatists & those who stand with India.” We must thank his highness Shri Rahul Gandhi for acknowledging the “long battle”. He should now enlighten us as to why the battle has been a long one. Is it because his family was busy developing friendship with the very same separatist mindset people that the tweet mentions? Is it because his family has nurtured the seeds of separatism by introducing Article 370? And while the “long battle” was going on, why was the face of the separatists given an audience with none other than the Prime Minister of India? Rahul Gandhi wanted to make the “long battle” sound like an achievement of his without realizing that it the failing of his family that led to nightmares to the Kashmiri people.

Through his tirade of tweets, Rahul Gandhi wanted us to believe that everything was all rosy till January 19th, 1990. He wants us to believe that Farrukh Abdullah resigned just out of fun, and when Jagmohan was appointed as Governor on 21st January, all Kashmiri Pandits decided to pack up and leave Kashmir. There are multiple sites that provide a better accurate timeline of the simmering tensions in the valley during Rajiv Gandhi’s reign and how they peaked during January 1990, so we will not get into those details in this article.

Many have often made this point that Rahul Gandhi is very dangerous to the integrity of our country. He is not as naïve as people think he is. What seem as disjoint and disoriented thoughts are often born out of the urge to create divisions in the Indian society. The tweet threads have further reinforced this image of Rahul Gandhi.

Should BJP ally with maverick Pawan Kalyan in Andhra Pradesh?

 The following article was written for MyInd Makers. Pasting it here for reference:

Ever since Modi won a resounding mandate in May 2019, many politicians from Andhra Pradesh were making a beeline to join the BJP! The first major jolt to TDP came when 4 out of their 6 MPs in Rajya Sabha decided to merge the TDP RS unit into the BJP. Slowly, many spokespersons of the TDP started to jump ship into the BJP. And finally on January 16th 2020, popular actor Pawan Kalyan led Jana Sena party and the BJP had announced an alliance to contest all future elections together.

I had written back then on the futility of such an alliance. The viciousness with which the BJP was attacked by many of these politicians pre-2019 was to be heard to be believed. In addition to this, the maverick nature of Pawan Kalyan is bound to create troubles for any alliance that he is a part of.  

The alliance wasn’t a smooth one right from the word go. Pawan Kalyan withdrew his candidates from the GHMC elections at the instance of BJP’s negotiations with him (despite him being part of an alliance) but did not campaign for the party. Pawan Kalyan openly supported the TRS MLC candidate, just 1 day before the elections in early 2021. Pawan Kalyan and the BJP had multiple rounds of discussions and deliberations and announcements regarding which party will put up a candidate for the bye-election of Tirupati Parliamentary constituency in mid-2021.

Amidst all these tensions, on March 14th, 2022, Pawan Kalyan made another significant announcement. He said that he will not allow the “anti-YSRCP” vote to be split in Andhra Pradesh. To achieve this goal, he said that he will take a decision on what alliances need to be made, at a later point of time. But one does not need to be a genius to understand what he meant – that he will now be allying with the TDP in the 2024 elections; and that it won’t matter to him if the BJP will come along with him or not.

For all the frenzy that Pawan Kalyan creates, amongst his fans, when he speaks or ventures out for a public meeting, his electoral record is woefully poor. He went alone in the 2019 elections and won about 17 lakh votes state-wide (~5% of the vote). Pawan Kalyan himself lost both the assembly constituencies he contested. Only 1 MLA won on Jana Sena ticket in the YSRCP wave that swept the state. Pawan Kalyan doesn’t have enough cadre to make any mark in local body elections too. The local body polls in 2021 were also very one-sided in nature but the performance of the alliance was very pathetic even then.

Pawan Kalyan doesn’t engage with the press and public on a regular basis. His thought process is opaque and is often driven by emotion rather than reasoning. He always sounds angry and incoherent in his speeches. No one knows what stand he will take on a particular issue; and if he takes a stand, no one knows how vociferously he will be about it. It took him about 2 years to distance himself from BJP and TDP back in 2014-2016 window. It took him about 6 months to come back to BJP in 2019. And it took him about a year to again distance himself from the BJP.

So, you may now be wondering why does the BJP continue to stick with him? BJP is at its lowest ebb in Andhra Pradesh. The anger people had on Modi and BJP showed up in the 2019 elections (Just 2 lakhs votes from the entire state). Just when you thought that the anger was subsiding and that people were trying to warm up to the BJP, came the decision to privatise the Vizag Steel Plant in 2021. This set off another long series of public resentment against the “arrogant” BJP. The BJP has nothing to lose further in AP. And hence any alliance with the BJP will naturally be welcomed by them. But, in my  opinion, the BJP is going to gain nothing by allying with a maverick like Pawan Kalyan. They might as well focus on building their party from scratch, like they are doing in Tamil Nadu for example.

Amit Shah has repeatedly declared that the party will never ally with the TDP. Any alliance with TDP will be a huge slap on the face of the cadre too. Even TDP cannot sell this alliance to the people of AP, after the vicious campaign they unleashed against BJP in the runup to 2019. So, a TDP-Jana Sena-BJP alliance is really out of the question for the 2024 elections. Pawan Kalyan has all but announced his intention to come out of the alliance with the BJP.

The BJP needs to spend time to understand the strong resentment the people of AP have against it and put in stronger efforts to gain their trust. The past two years have proved that allying with Pawan Kalyan isn’t the path to do it.

The Hindu ties itself in knots trying to downplay BJP’s victory in 4 states, including Uttar Pradesh: Here is how

 The following article was written for OpIndia. Pasting it here for reference:

Today’s editorial in The Hindu, “The winning formula”,  begins with us being emphatically told that the BJP won despite accumulating “fatigue and popular disenchantment” over the past 5 years in 4 of the 5 states that went to the elections. Now, if there was “popular disenchantment”, then it is but natural for you to wonder how did the BJP end up winning the popular vote in the first place? To understand this, we must thank the editorial page team of The Hindu. Their editorial and articles today put forth some fascinating insights into the minds of the English language media “analysts” and “experts”. 

We are told that “In Goa, the BJP retained power, though the Congress put up a spirited fight.” We are not told that the BJP retained power even after being in power for 10 years. Instead, we are told that the BJP won because it was “helped by a division of votes” and with the “strategy of selecting candidates on the basis of ‘maximum winnability’”. 

We are told that “Manipur did not escape the general trend in the northeast, where people tend to vote for the party or coalition in power at the Centre since the States are dependent on Delhi for funds.” In fact, the editorial enlightens us that the Manipur election “was bereft of emotional issues, and the BJP gained from its development rhetoric.” Notice the choice of the phrase – development rhetoric – indicating that there was actually no development but there was only sweet talk related to the development and the voters of Manipur simply fell for this!

We are told that though the BJP retained power in Uttarakhand “the defeat of its Chief Minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, is a serious embarrassment for the BJP.” I was immediately reminded of the fact that Mamta Banerjee had also lost her election while the TMC won a handsome majority in the West Bengal election just about 10 months back. The editorial in The Hindu on May 3rd doesn’t tell us that the defeat of Mamta is a “serious embarrassment” for the TMC. It still beats me how the loss of Pushkar Dhami can be a “serious embarrassment” but the loss of Mamta Banerjee is not even a normal embarrassment.

The best analysis was reserved for the biggest victory – Uttar Pradesh. In fact, there were two very long articles on the Editorial page today trying to understand how the BJP won there. The editorial tells us that the voters of UP had “appeared anguished with inflation, stray cattle menace, poor COVID-19 management, and unemployment”. You are of course left wondering why the voter would then choose the same party with which he/she is anguished with. Seema Chisti attempts to provide an answer to this in her article – Five State polls, their messages and implications.

The focus of her article is to analyse “the implications of when the voter does not factor her/his own well-being when making electoral choices.” The ease with which arrogance oozes from the pens of our “experts is simply mind-blowing! When you begin your article with an assertion that crores of people have made a choice despite knowing it is wrong, it simply exposes the vacuous depths of intellectual hollowness in your brain. The article continues its predictable rants on how bad the economy of UP is; how bad the CM Yogi Adityanath is; how bad Hindutva is and so on. The people have given a resounding response to these rants. So it is now time for Seema Chisti to be more concerned as to why she lives far away from reality and be less concerned about why voters are making their own choices. 

The second article “A demonstration of a durable political phenomenon” by Asim Ali also gives a great insight into the confused minds of the “experts” and “analysts”. Asim Ali tells us that there was “economic security” but that alone didn’t win it for BJP. He tells us that there is a lot of welfare but that alone didn’t win it for BJP. Asim Ali tells us that there was better “physical security” but that alone didn’t win it for BJP. Asim Ali tells us that the major reason for this victory is because “Mr Adityanath had framed this election as an 80 versus 20 elections”. Asim Ali quotes Yogendra Yadav and concludes that voters did not bother about their own “material suffering and misgovernance because they wished to stay on their ‘own’ side”

Why would the voter be undergoing “material suffering” if he/she has economic security, physical security, welfare security etc as mentioned by the author himself? Why would all these experts and editors assume that crores of people will choose to live under harsh circumstances even at the cost of their own well-being? Simply put, why would the authors assume that crores of people in this country are as stupid as they are?

I’ve reserved their best argument for the last. We are told that “AAP, which has been in power in Delhi for seven years, has built a reputation for its welfare schemes, particularly in health and education — two sectors that voters care a lot about. That reputation stood AAP in good stead in Punjab”. They spent so much ink and space to explain that things like health, education, security, welfare etc didn’t matter to voters of 4 states that voted BJP. But to the one state that voted AAP, it was health and education that mattered. How can Malini Parthasarathy and her team not see their hypocrisy in their arguments, just with today’s examples?

Insulting the voters, for voting for the BJP, is a favourite pastime of the “experts” and “analysts” community. The editorial must be taught in journalism schools for being a perfect case study in ambiguity and hypocrisy. In fact, the entire editorial page in The Hindu serves as a great case study to understand the dangerous thought process of this whole community. 

The Kashmir Files Is A Story That Should Have Been Told 32 years Back

 The following article was written for MyInd Makers. Pasting it here for reference:

The first time I heard about the Kashmiri Pandit genocide of 1990, I told my friend the exact same thing that the hero of The Kashmir Files said – if it happened like you said, it would have been all over the media. I asked him how come I didn’t get to read about this anywhere? I told him that I trust our awesome media will not hide crimes like this and that he is simply exaggerating events to further his propaganda. I believed in my “propaganda” up until the time I met a Kashmir Pandit a few years later. He was a well-educated professional who spoke about his personal experiences of the trauma and how they rebuilt their life afterwards.

During those times, there was this constant churn of narrative in the media on how the “oppressed” people are picking up guns. This narrative was being built in defense of both Naxalism and Islamic terrorism. And I couldn’t help but wonder – the Kashmiri Pandits could have very well chosen that route, but they chose peace; they chose to live a worthy life while nursing grievous wounds. And when Mithun Chakraborty delivers a similar one liner in The Kashmir Files, my mind went back to all those years where the transformation from ignorance to enlightenment happened.

The experience of watching The Kashmir Files is very numbing is because it is relatable to many people at different levels. The gory nature of the murders; the ghastly torture; the subsequent normalizing of the genocide; the narrative building against the Pandits – all of these are captured in great detail by the writer and director Vivek Agnihotri. A genocide of this scale should have resulted in multiple movies already, but The Kashmir Files is the first movie that brings this reality to the big screen. Before the movie began, Vivek Agnihotri told us why. Because there was no producer from the famed Mumbai industry who came forward to make a movie on this. He then introduced us to the producer of the movie, Abhishek Agarwal as the real hero of this project! Vivek Agnihotri also spoke about the various struggles he had to go through to make this movie and how Pallavi Joshi stood by him all through this struggle.

And Vivek Agnihotri is right – all viewpoints of the Kashmir issue were highlighted in the movie. The conversations in the movie often make engaging viewing and even though the run time is close to 3 hours, there is seldom any instance of monotony that sets in. At many instances in the movie, you would be tempted to dismiss certain scenes as the director’s creative freedom. Until you realize, they are actually not. For example, terrorist Farooq Ahmad Dar actually gave an interview in which he said he killed 20 Kashmiri Hindus. But this is not about whether the movie is a brilliantly made one; whether the movie will receive “critical acclaim”; or whether this movie is a badly made one.

This should be about why such a movie was not made till now. This should be about how The Kashmir Files is the first movie to be made on the gory happenings of January 1990 and the subsequent trauma. This should be about why no one in the media or movie industry dared to highlight the slogans that were raised through the loudspeakers of mosques to ‘Ralive, tsalive, galive’. This should be about how JKLF was treated with kids gloves by many governments and how JKLF got a seat at the Prime Minister of India’s table also. This should be about the chicanery of our narrative builders in suppressing the trauma of Kashmiri Pandits.

It took 32 years to get here. The long time duration should not and cannot be used as an excuse to let go of discussing the reality of the ghastly events of 1990. Because even in the year 2020, we have newspapers still trying to tell us that what happened was a mere expulsion - “The expulsion of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley was grossly unjust.” – wrote Rajeev Bhargava in The Hindu just 2 years back. Imagine if we didn’t have social media to amplify the reality of 1990, I would have still lived under the illusion that a simple “expulsion” was being exaggerated as murder and genocide by my friend. I would have tried to brainwash him instead! The Kashmir Files is a story that should have been told 32 years back. It took a team led by Vivek Agnihotri to be told. And told how!