Poor Dr. Manmohan Singh. He is so easily moved, seeing the parents of Jehadists on T.V. He is a good man. He does not want all Muslims to be tarred by the Jehadi brush. Fair enough. Nobody does it anyway. But there is so much to weep and spend sleepless nights over. And perhaps this is the time to specify them.

Thus, does Dr. Singh know that an astonishing 27 per cent of UP's elected legislators have criminal backgrounds and that, according to an Allahabad Court Report, 24 of UP's Members of Parliament face 128 criminal cases, including murder and dacoity? Oh well, he might say, so what? Listen to this; An NGO, Movement Against State Repression, recently wrote a letter to President Kalam disclosing that according to a survey carried out by it in the 93 Villages of the Moonak subdivision of Sangrur district, there have been 1,445 rural suicides between 1988 and 2006.

A report in The Tribune (June 28) said that "the real picture for the entire state (Punjab), even by conservative estimates is too horrific at 40,000 rural suicides over a period of 18 years". T.V. programmes did not show the faces of the wives and children of these people who were killing themselves in their desperation. Dr.Singh has been spared more sleepless nights. And it is worthwhile to remember that these suicides are just in one state, Punjab.

More suicides have been reported from other states like Karnataka and Maharashtra, which the media quietly brushes aside, no doubt to spare the Prime Minister sleepless nights. And then there is another variety of deaths to deal with. According to Hindustan Times (July 6), across the North East, insurgency exists in some degree in almost all the eight states Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim and "almost 5700 militant attacks have taken place since 2003 (or just about four years ago) killing almost 4,000 people"

A Naga community leader has been quoted as saying that "it is an open secret. There is a parallel government in Manipur". And listen to this, again, reported in the same paper. This is about Naxalism in Andhra Pradesh ruled by the Congress.

The report says: "More than 50,000 people from 650 Villages have left their homes and now live in makeshift roadside shelters, guarded by police and paramilitary forces. In Chattisgarh, a so-called "People's movement" called Salwa Judum is being run by a powerful tribal leader and some 57,000 villagers now live in 23 relief camps.

In a series of clashes, some 750 people died just in one year, 2006". Is anybody interested? Are they just people or are they part of us whose plight should not only make us sleepless, but cry as well? People in thousands commit suicide. People in thousands according to Hindustan Times "tens of thousands" are staying away from their homes "and still losing lives to rebels". They don't come to our attention. And it is not fashionable to claim that our dear Prime Minister spends sleepless nights on hearing of their plight. Our politics is a farce. We do not even realise how corrupt we have become.

According to `Global Corruption Report 2007: Corruption in Judicial Systems', Indians pay an estimated Rs. 2,630 crores as bribes to the judiciary. And, according to a 2005 study by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS), the bribe money went mostly to lawyers (61%), followed by Court officials (29%), and middlemen (5%).

According to the report, as of February 2006, as many as 33,635 cases were pending in the Supreme Court with 26 judges, 3.34 Lakhs cases in the High Courts with 670 judges and 2.5 crore cases in 13,204 subordinate courts.

In 1999, it was estimated that at the current rate of disposal of cases, it would take another 350 years or ten generations to dispose of pending cases. Should we laugh or cry? We ignore those hard facts but speak dayin- and-day-out about secularism and the evil Hindu fundamentalists and how sad it is to label Muslims as terrorists.

It is fashionable to do so because one gets a certificate of high stature as secularists. Instead of addressing ourselves to these problems we constantly attempt to appease Muslim terrorists and Wahabi fundamentalists in our midst. And who says that? Not the RSS or the President of the VHP, but a man who could not be more secular, K.P.S.Gill who saved India and Punjab from the Khalistani terrorists.

In a recent article in The Pioneer (7 July) he said that in India, the Enforcement Agencies "are inhibited in their actions precisely by the political injunctions against "labelling" or "causing offence" to "a community". And he added; "But the fact is that Islamic terrorism is squarely rooted in radical Muslim populations and institutions, just as Khalistani terrorism was rooted in radical Sikh populations and institutions.

This is something that must be recognized and addressed, instead of pampering or offering a constant apologia for the `larger community'.... There is a constant fear of `offending' a `particular community' and this cannot and must not be the basis of response to specific acts of subversion or terror. Mr. Gill drew attention to the case of Mohammad Afzal's death penalty in the Parliament Attack Case.

He noted that the man had been found guilty and sentenced to death and went on to say; "A clear message needs to be sent out that such acts of terrorism will not meet with clemency.... Yet there is a clear policy of indecision and delay in this case.... The underlying concern in the Afzal case appears to be the appeasement of the "Muslim community"....

It is not enough to lose sleep over the trauma and predicament of the families of terrorists.... All this demands intellectual clarity and not the matters of justification and apologetics that have dominated the perspective of India's feeble intelligentsia". That is putting it mildly.

In the past few decades the word `secularism' has been prostituted to such an extent that it has become a dirty joke. Nehru insisted on it because, after partition, India had to show that while it reluctantly agreed to partition, the people and the government did not believe or accept the Two-Nation Theory. If India claimed that it was a Hindu State, it would have given Jinnah every reason for justifying his murderous action of dividing the country.

But Hindus are natural secularists and accept every religion as valid. They have lived under tyrannous Islamic rule for centuries and in Goa under similar atrocious rule by Portuguese Christians and bear no ill-will to other religions.

But there has now to be a limit to what Gill called "arrant nonsense" in the excuse given by a UPA minister to save Afzal from the gallows. There is no need to spend sleepless nights over the fate of Jehadists. They have to be identified as terrorists, rather than by their religion. And we have to take a lesson from Musharraf and from Gill himself who earlier put the nation above religious terrorism.

Musharraf has learnt his lesson, belatedly and has promised to eliminate all terrorism from Pakistan. Good luck to him. He needs to eliminate the country's ISI as well. Meanwhile, don't spend sleepless nights over wrongs done to the country by Islamic terrorists, Mr. Prime Minister.

Kindly try to bring peace to this country where thousands of people commit suicide and the government looks the other way as money from outside pours in lakhs into the hands of Naxalites through havala transactions, as a TV channel recently exposed and the government does not seem to be aware of what is transpiring right under its nose.

Save your tears for better purposes, Mr. Prime Minister. The UPA government has to govern or get out.

Courtesy: www.samachar.com, July, 2007