06/11/07

did hindus kill muslims in gujarat?

the andhra pradesh government runs a programme called 'indiramma' (yes, the chief minister would like to name everything under the sun...no, including the sun, after indira or rajiv). it's a housing scheme- the govt makes available to rural households long-term loans for building homes. each householder is also required to make his own contribution too, of course. well, the scheme works like the first link in this paragraph. one television report showed who exactly it works for - the camera first panned over an upper-caste neighbourhood, in a village, with almost completely built houses, and then moved over to the dalitawada.. the dalit homes couldn't rise beyond the bare foundations. and there were shots of other neighbourhoods with incomplete structures- these belonged to the other castes who couldn't chip in with enough resources of their own. nor borrow enough.

the congress and the communists agree with the bjp that hindus killed muslims in gujarat. did they?
It is, therefore, not very surprising that earlier the Jan Sangh and now the BJP, has systematically used the dalit masses to advance its own political agenda and also have always used them for attacking minorities. The poor dalit youth are always in the forefront of all the riots. The dalit leadership, itself very weak, finds itself almost helpless in controlling the dalit youth to perpetrate communal violence. The job of killing is done usually by dalit youth and upper caste followers of the BJP keep themselves away form this ‘dirty job’
asghar ali engineer, i think, has got it almost right (many of the dalits he refers to are probably obcs) because dhimant bhatt, chief auditor of m.s.university, seems to echo his views:
Until Godhra happened, the upper castes would never come out… Baniyas… Patels… they would never come out… But we mobilised them… told them that we had prepared teams from the police and amongst advocates… that if they went to jail, we would get them released.
the congress, the communists and the bjp- they need each other. and they all need the poverty line as much as they need hindus.

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