Kasab got hanged but 84 victims still looking for Justice

[AnkurK]

Soulja boy (Govind) tell em!

 

[AnkurK]

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Book-Grammar-Punctuation-Edition/dp/0966722183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354310081&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+grammar

 

[Multani]

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Book-Grammar-Punctuation-Edition/dp/0966722183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354310081&sr=8-1&keywords=book+of+grammar

saleya aah mere layi post kiti book kea kisse hor li lol, Punjabi ch gall karle, jea english grammar di takleef ea.

 

[AnkurK]

Hahaha i'll stick to what im good at - you should too

 

[Multani]

Haha I'll worry about my own things - you should too

 

[amancheema]

I'm surrounded by idiots

 

[Ashveer]

On August 17, 1983, Bhindranwale asked Sikh youth to buy a motorcycle and a revolver and threatened to kill 5,000 Hindus in an hour if the police delayed the minibus he had sent to fetch Amrik Singh who had just been released from police custody.59

I'm always on the lookout for concrete and cross-checked instances where Hindus were targeted and murdered by Sikh militants, given how well the documentation of the extrajudicial killings of twenty-five thousand plus innocent Sikhs by the Indian government has been well researched by Ensaaf (http://www.ensaaf.org/publications/reports/descriptiveanalysis/). Here's the original speech, the part you're looking for is at 8 minutes watch it till the end and you'll see the quote is definitely uttered but then at least partially contextualized: Sant Jarnail Singh Speech Two Part Two


Re:"All my original post was about was it is stupid to assert that the justice delivered to bombay victims came at the cost or deprioritization of justice to Sikhs (or for that matter any other groups subject to religious/political-based violence)."


Agreed that it probably didn't come at the cost of the Sikhs, but definitely contributes to perpetual de-prioritization. The evidence is all there, its unquestionable that the government was complicit in murdering its citizens in both 84 and during militancy in Punjab. A cable revealed by WikiLeaks show that the American consulate in Delhi acknowledges the former. We *just* got Khalra's killers convicted some 16 years later for God's sake, and that's because highly trained lawyers seized upon evidence that the Punjab Police was messy about covering up. Why should justice come differentially to the rest? In the Bombay situation, partly because India has to assert its stance on Pakistan and Islam. Jai ho.

 

[hardeep_singh]

[SIZE=small]I got your attention with my pointing to the shared mentality, the common denominator being: "Take punishment and justice into your own hands through violent and militaristic means. Khalistani propaganda like what hardeep posted up as a testament to Bhindranwale's character really falls to the ground when the same person has gone on record saying the terrible things cited in Joshi's book[/SIZE]

the video i posted isn't khalistani propaganda, there are no statements in that speech about khalistan or violence against hindus. i haven't listened to all of the speeches, but the few i have listened to are along the same vein; injustices against sikhs and sikhism are discussed. do i think everything that was done by bhindranwale and his followers was right? no, i don't. but i do believe bhindranwale had reason to start his movement, people don't seem to discuss or question what led up to the events of 1984. khalistani movement, bhindranwale, blue star, delhi riots, it all didn't just come out of nowhere. there were a lot of factors that led to that explosion of violence, the militaristic movement that was started was in direct response to persecution and injustice. has there ever been a militaristic movement in this region that wasn't in response to acts of aggression? would bhindranwale have gained so much influence if people in punjab hadn't been under duress? no one really cares about the idea of khalistan anymore, it's a fairy tale, all people really wanted all along was justice and freedom from persecution.

Full text of "The Gurudwara Reform and Sikh Awakening"
http://www.archive.org/stream/gurdwarareformmo00singrich/gurdwarareformmo00singrich_djvu.txt
Details a lot of the corruption and injustice faced by sikhism during the period when gurudwaras were under the control of state appointed mahants.

This article lists a lot of the factors which ignited the militant movement
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Khalistan

Articles relating to conflict between sikhs and nirankaris
http://www.sikhreview.org/pdf/february1996/pdf-files/retrospect.pdf
http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Sant_Nirankaris

Link relating to rss anti-sikh propaganda
http://www.rajkaregakhalsa.com/rssarefalse.htm

i have no clue whether or not bhindranwale seriously promoted violence against the hindu community (i don't take 1 statement made in a speech as substantial evidence that he was openly anti-hindu and promoted violence against all hindus) , he was openly anti nirankari and anti rss, both organizations from my understanding were funded and supported by government elements. i find it stupid that people assume the khalistan movement was bent on performing an ethnic cleansing of all non sikhs in punjab. facts are facts, there were never any large scale coordinated programs in punjab or anywhere else to kill hindus. but as a result of all of these factors, blue star, indira gandhi getting executed, the delhi riots did occur. they were coordinated and effective and a lot of the perpetrators are still alive today. if you do some research on ethnic cleansing and mass murders, you'll come across the concept that the perpetrators "dehumanize" their victims. there have been mass murders and events of ethnic cleansing all over the world, and usually the victims are viewed as an infestation that must be destroyed. but in all cases this dehumanization doesn't just occur over night. the victims are villainized over time and portrayed as a threat. what was done in delhi was depraved, evil, disgusting, and inhumane, sikhs were slaughtered worse than animals so how can it be ignored that so much hatred was meted against a community? the scariest part is the thought that the hatred that destroyed so many lives is still alive today, shit like that doesn't just disappear, it lasts as long as or longer than it took to develop in the first place. so how bout instead of demonizing one person we take a look at the whole picture and actually realize that there is more to this situation than just sikhs being violent and creating a militaristic movement.

 

[Gagan-Gill]

Sant Gyani Jarnail Singh Ji Khalsa Bhindranwale Zindabad

 

[Ashveer]

[SIZE=small] there's enough in Joshi's Bhindranwale Myth or Reality to back up my statement.
[/SIZE]

[SIZE=small]

Govind given your undergraduate training I'm curious if you ever looked towards ethnography rather than journalism to understand the situation? Remember the power of a discipline that works to eschew quick judgements and bias (in Joshi's case, the power of religion as an illusion to oppress the masses) in favor of analysis that takes into account the longue duree of life. Remember the disciplines use of cultural relativism not as the suspension of moral judgement but rather as method to specify social contexts and be adequate to them. Pettigrew takes this seriously, and if you haven't already you should check out her monograph "The Sikhs of the Punjab: Unheard Voices of State and Guerilla Violence" its the best frame of reference since Pettigrew worked in the Punjab before the rise of JSB. Looks like its checked out of your library (http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/002987705) unfortunately. [/SIZE]

 

[Govind]

Thanks for the link Ashveer. I actually haven't read that book but I will check it out now that j have some down time. I think my point that a jsb, while having valid reasons for starting a movement (which would be addressed in this ethnography) was still guilty of instigating militant conflict will still stand. How one is characterized in the media/journalism adds social context to the situation and public reception of his statements helps us understand the dissemination of militant ideology.
Ill get the book thru the interlibrary loan

 

[Govind]

I actually agree with most of your post Hardee's and the video could still be khalistani propaganda without explicit proK or antihindu statements. Propaganda could take the form of painting someone in overtly positive light, while ignoring (especially coming from a former priest) the crazy things he did say at points.

 

[Ashveer]

@Govind lets start from this post and backtrack to how misguided I think your original post is.


Surely JSB's charismatic speeches and militarization of the Darbar Sahib complex were speaking the language of violence, or at least violence to come. At the same time, the central government wasn't some weak state ill-equipped to attempt to negotiate. It allowed the situation to escalate to the point that it did. You can say that the American invasion of Iraq is Osama Bin Laden's fault because of the primacy of his ideology in 'Islamic terrorism'. Does he bear responsibility for an American bullet in an Iraqi body? This is a sneak peek into my conclusion. The contexts might seem wildly different but the logic is the same that cradles your assessment of JSB. Is JSB responsible for the Indian army distributing this to all of its jawans?:

"Some of our innocent countrymen were administered oath in the name of religion to support extremists and actively participate in the act of terrorism. These people wear a miniature kirpan round their neck and are called Amritdhari …. Any knowledge of the 'Amritdharis', who are dangerous people and pledged to commit murders, arson and acts of terrorism, should immediately be brought to the notice of the authorities. These people may appear harmless from outside but they are basically committed to terrorism. In the interest of all of us their identity and whereabouts must always be disclosed" (Baat Cheet, A publication of the Department of Defense, Government of India, Serial Number 153, July 1984; reproduced in Surya Monthly, October 1984, page 6).

Is this his fault, as part of his responsibility for 'starting' militancy? Should culpability for those murdered by the state fall on JSB, and thus should those citizens who had their justice suspended because their grandfathers, fathers, brothers, husbands, uncles, nephews, sons, and grandsons were electrocuted, waterboarded, scalped, raped, beaten, killed, and cremated by a perverse state logic that collapsed all Sikhs into (potential) terrorists.? I'm being purposefully polemic here.

You wrote: "How one is characterized in the media/journalism adds social context to the situation and public reception of his statements helps us understand the dissemination of militant ideology."

My point was that your understanding of JSB comes from a journalist, and I was pointing out the weakness of journalism's methodology vis-a-vis anthropology's. But to take your quote above, what matters is which media, which journalism, and which publics you're talking about. Fox News as a media apparatus is taken very differently on different sides of the Mason-Dixon line (for our non-American friends, the Mason-Dixon line divides the parts of America that did and didn't have slavery, my point being that different communities read the news differently). Equally, Joshi writing in in the Hindustan Times to a national audience would be taken very differently than the small army of journalists that the Tribune had on the ground, with the widest readership in Punjab. Fun fact for the kids: The Tribune newspaper based in Chandigarh (also the longest-running English language newspaper in Punjab, since 1881) later becomes one of the most solid sources for tracking the government's forced disappearances (human rights lingo for murders) of innocent civilians (which number over twenty-five thousand) during the militancy era.

You wrote: "You mean the Khalistani propaganda speeches that have selectively been put all over youtube? They paint just as false of a picture of this man as the government/media suppressing the true events that occurred at that time."

I'm not entirely certain what your point here is. Firstly, the government/media *did* suppress the true events that occurred at the time, which is partly why there is no reliable data available on the victims of Khalistani terror. Returning to the speeches, those speeches were very widely circulated as part of an ethical soundscape to draw in more support for JSB. (shout out to a similarity with the Islamic revival in Egypt pre-revolution in which cassettes circulated as a means to create communities of fate http://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Soundscape-Cassette-Counterpublics-Cultures/dp/0231138199). I do not know enough about militancy in the Punjab to make a claim that I'm willing to dig my heels into the ground about, but nonetheless I would submit that if you read Saleem's post and then listen to the speech that I linked, a very different image of JSB appears. I don't think that the JSB had enough time to produce one set of narratives like this one (one that rejects a communal politics standpoint of Hindus vs. Sikhs), and then another one that was the "real" Khalistani narrative that was ant-Hindu. In your sense of 'selective' display of texts, Saleem's three minutes of googling landed him on propaganda. I'm not absolving JSB, but yearning for that hoary thing old anthropology teaches its students to give to every situation: context.

For example, the full quote that you cited is:
"I have declared that if there is someone who drinks while wearing a kirpaan, and you catch him drunk, the punishment I have announced is that you should get him examined by a doctor (to make sure he has been drinking) and then pour kerosene over him and burn him alive [Your quote stopped here]...I shall fight your court case. This is regardless of the party affiliation of the person in such a garb doing such a thing. My appeal to all is that no one should drink but this does not apply to the others, it is only for those with the kirpaan. ... If any raagi, sant, mahatma, granthi even if he is from Bhindranwale [JSB's group], who wears a kirpaan and drinks, wherever you find him, blacken his face, put a garland of old shoes around his neck, put him on a donkey and parade him throughout the village or the district.'

You wrote: "not to mention your news article doesn't address my argument that only a small number of people are turning this into oh justice for kasab's mistakes, but no justice for 84. "justice" the two are different...there were injustices committed, yes, they were awful and highly regrettable. but if you want to talk about terrorists, there is very little difference between bhindrawale's mentality and Osama's."

Here your point is that there is only a small number of Sikhs upset that the government has prioritized victims of "Islamic terror" versus what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have rightly called "state terror." I can speak to the latter specifically; I know people who took advantage of America's stance on political targets/prisoners to immigrate to poverty in the United States because they were terrified that the cops would come to the kheth one day and take the breadwinner away and murder him (this is how many people were killed by the state). Its funny actually, that you and those who later agree with your post hector seemingly pro-Khalistani posts that come later in the thread, but you were the one who made the very odd jump from state and Islamic terror to JSB, invoking his name next to OBL, as if you didn't know that was going to be an "ignorant, stupid, and inflammatory post". Bracket that for a second, that you wanted to teach the other BTF members a lesson about terrorism.

||We're almost there for the three of you still reading. I know that life is short and my posts are long, but I hope its worth it.||

You wrote: "this is such an ignorant, stupid, and inflammatory post. seriously your incendiary religious politics are illogical. terrorist victims in bombay were from all different faiths. justice in hanging kasab had nothing to do with preferential treatment of bombay victims vs. others affected in 1984. only a fervent small number of sikhs under the guise of AISSF (who even knows who they are or who they truly represent...) in punjab seem to really care, so why are you trying to light an unnecessary fire?"

Now, we arrive at your original post. What are were we talking about in the first place? Here is what I see it boiling down to which might be different from what is actually at stake:
1) The Indian Government has hanged Kasab, responsible for the Mumbai terror attacks
2) The Indian Government has yet to adjudicate on its state-sponsored pogroms in Delhi (and I would add, in Punjab)
3) Thus, there is an injustice here, in that justice is being differentially delivered

Why do you think that the post is stupid and inflammatory?
1) Terrorist victims in bombay were from all different faiths
2) Justice for the victims of Bombay has nothing to do with justice for the victims of '84 (and I would add, in Punjab)
3) Only a few Sikhs (probably lubricated by NRI money) seem to care
4) Pointing out differentially delivered justice is lighting an unnecessary fire

I do not know enough about the Indian judiciary to make a strong case for this, but at least from an phenomenological rather than juridical perspective, it 'hurts the sentiments of the Sikh community' to see the victims a nationally-important case involving terrorism get fast-tracked to its conclusion, while five thousand Sikhs were killed in Delhi in five days with state support and planning (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Words-Violence-Ordinary-Lilienthal/dp/0520247450) and twenty five thousand Sikh civilians were killed in the Punjab during the militancy era (http://www.ensaaf.org/publications/reports/descriptiveanalysis/) and the government refuses to acknowledge it. Do the Sikhs not deserve justice because the victims of state terrorism are not of different faiths? Similarly, I don't know what kind of unnecessary fire the cited news articles or original post are lighting? I think that you and others might do well to reflect on why seeing Sikhs upset at differentially applied justice in relation to human rights violations makes you think that conflict is being incited. That you read what I assume to be an anti-Hindu politics within these claims is immaterial to the problem at hand and boggles this already addled mind. Whereas I understand your point that you see a false equivalency between Mumbai and the Sikhs, the underlying concept that is being punished is the same: terror. I remember seeing a write-up once about how black men in the United States get insane jail time for petty theft, but the likes of Raj Rajaratnam and white collar wall street criminals stealing millions of dollars get cushy treatment and differentially small jail time for the same crime: theft. This reveals the demons of America's incomplete project of emancipation and desegregation, but I want us to dwell here on how outraged everyone is that there is differential treatment for the same crime inversely punished, and that is so unfair that it makes you want to jump out of your skin. The Sikhs are pissed at the state for the reasons that I outlined above, and because ultimately in Delhi and Punjab during the periods we're talking about a state that operated as a terrorist apparatus. A terrorist state. A terrorist government. A state that routinely kills its own citizens without evidence, without due process, that suspends habeus corpus, that raped an anthropologist was gathering evidence on what was going on (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1409.2008.00001.x/full), and one that murdered a man who uncovered the evidence of its workings.

Speaking of wanting to jump out of your skin, a personal story:
I went to a friends house a couple of months ago, and there was a random aunty ji hanging out in the living room, so I said fateh and went on my business which was to get ready for an event. My friends and I came back to the living room to talk to her before we left and she joked about how long Punjabi men both in Punjab and the diaspora take to get ready these days, and that it seems like young women are the practical ones getting shit done while boys are obsessed with making sure they look good. We laughed with her. I peaced out, and on the way her identity was revealed, and I wanted to jump out of my soul: She is Jaswant Singh Khalra's wife. I see her daughter here and there too, and it makes the perverse logics of the Indian security state very very real to me; this very sweet girl doesn't have a dad because of a state apparatus that decides for itself when it will and will not dispense justice to groups that it itself unleashed hell on, it decides who lives and who dies. [[In fact I would argue that state is *still* enacting terror, because by killing the breadwinners it is not "killing" their families, but rather letting them die]] Jaswant Singh Khalra's work revealed that the narratives of violence in the Punjab are worth every inch of the hagiography. In this moment of Indian history, the government and judiciary are morally bankrupt and the state has nothing to say for itself. Justice for smattering of people who were killed by a group of terrorists in Bombay, but not for an entire community rendered impotent to bring justice to itself? Damn right people are pissed and I would submit that they absolutely should be. I know that this tome is simply too large to respond to, but I'll concede that my personal politics and efforts around this issue probably make it such that I can't see the truth for what it is and thus my points are likely to be deeply, deeply flawed and should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless I am compelled to demonstrate that taking this (biased) approach reveals your posts on the subject to be inflammatory, ill-informed, hollow, and congruent with the Indian state's approach which ultimately denies Sikhs justice.

"The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." -Walter Benjamin


TL;DR nope.

 

[Kaur]

@Gobind lets start from this post and backtrack to how misguided I think your original post is.


Surely JSB's charismatic speeches and militarization of the Darbar Sahib complex were speaking the language of violence, or at least violence to come. At the same time, the central government wasn't some weak state ill-equipped to attempt to negotiate. It allowed the situation to escalate to the point that it did. You can say that the American invasion of Iraq is Osama Bin Laden's fault because of the primacy of his ideology in 'Islamic terrorism'. Does he bear responsibility for an American bullet in an Iraqi body? This is a sneak peek into my conclusion. The contexts might seem wildly different but the logic is the same that cradles your assessment of JSB. Is JSB responsible for the Indian army distributing this to all of its jawans?:
Z
"Some of our innocent countrymen were administered oath in the name of religion to support extremists and actively participate in the act of terrorism. These people wear a miniature kirpan round their neck and are called Amritdhari …. Any knowledge of the 'Amritdharis', who are dangerous people and pledged to commit murders, arson and acts of terrorism, should immediately be brought to the notice of the authorities. These people may appear harmless from outside but they are basically committed to terrorism. In the interest of all of us their identity and whereabouts must always be disclosed" (Baat Cheet, A publication of the Department of Defense, Government of India, Serial Number 153, July 1984; reproduced in Surya Monthly, October 1984, page 6).

Is this his fault, as part of his responsibility for 'starting' militancy? Should culpability for those murdered by the state fall on JSB, and thus should those citizens who had their justice suspended because their grandfathers, fathers, brothers, husbands, uncles, nephews, sons, and grandfathers were electrocuted, waterboarded, scalped, raped, beaten, killed, and cremated by a perverse state logic that collapsed all Sikhs into (potential) terrorists be denied justice? I'm being purposefully polemic here.

You wrote: "How one is characterized in the media/journalism adds social context to the situation and public reception of his statements helps us understand the dissemination of militant ideology."

My point was that your understanding of JSB comes from a journalist, and I was pointing out the weakness of journalism's methodology vis-a-vis anthropology's. But to take your quote above, what matters is which media, which journalism, and which publics you're talking about. Fox News as a media apparatus is taken very differently on different sides of the Mason-Dixon line (for our non-American friends, the Mason-Dixon line divides the parts of America that did and didn't have slavery, my point being that different communities read the news differently). Equally, Joshi writing in in the Hindustan Times to a national audience would be taken very differently than the small army of journalists that the Tribune had on the ground, with the widest readership in Punjab. Fun fact for the kids: The Tribune newspaper based in Chandigarh (also the longest-running English language newspaper in Punjab, since 1881) later becomes one of the most solid sources for tracking the government's forced disappearances (human rights lingo for murders) of innocent civilians (which number over twenty-five thousand) during the militancy era.

You wrote: "You mean the Khalistani propaganda speeches that have selectively been put all over youtube? They paint just as false of a picture of this man as the government/media suppressing the true events that occurred at that time."

I'm not entirely certain what your point here is. Firstly, the government/media *did* suppress the true events that occurred at the time, which is partly why there is no reliable data available on the victims of Khalistani terror. Returning to the speeches, those speeches were very widely circulated as part of an ethical soundscape of JSB's speeches (shout out to a similarity with the Islamic revival in Egypt pre-revolution in which cassettes circulated as a means to create communities of fate http://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Soundscape-Cassette-Counterpublics-Cultures/dp/0231138199) . I do not know enough about militancy in the Punjab to make a claim that I'm willing to dig my heels into the ground about, but nonetheless I would submit that if you read Saleem's post and then listen to the speech that I linked, a very different image of JSB appears. I don't think that the JSB had enough time to produce one set of narratives like this one (one that rejects a communal politics standpoint of Hindus vs. Sikhs), and then another one that was the "real" Khalistani narrative that was ant-Hindu. In your sense of 'selective' display of texts, Saleem's three minutes of googling landed him on propaganda. I'm not absolving JSB, but yearning for that thing that hoary old anthropology teaches its students to give to every situation: context.

For example, the full quote that you cited is:
"I have declared that if there is someone who drinks while wearing a kirpaan, and you catch him drunk, the punishment I have announced is that you should get him examined by a doctor (to make sure he has been drinking) and then pour kerosene over him and burn him alive [Your quote stopped here]...I shall fight your court case. This is regardless of the party affiliation of the person in such a garb doing such a thing. My appeal to all is that no one should drink but this does not apply to the others, it is only for those with the kirpaan. ... If any raagi, sant, mahatma, granthi even if he is from Bhindranwale (JSB's group), who wears a kirpaan and drinks, wherever you find him, blacken his face, put a garland of old shoes around his neck, put him on a donkey and parade him throughout the village or the district.'

You wrote: "not to mention your news article doesn't address my argument that only a small number of people are turning this into oh justice for kasab's mistakes, but no justice for 84. "justice" the two are different...there were injustices committed, yes, they were awful and highly regrettable. but if you want to talk about terrorists, there is very little difference between bhindrawale's mentality and Osama's."

Here your point is that there is only a small number of individuals upset that the government has prioritized victims of "Islamic terror" versus what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have rightly called "state terror." I can speak to the latter specifically; I know people who took advantage of America's stance on political targets to immigrate to poverty in the United States because they were terrified that the cops would come to the kheth one day and take the breadwinner away and murder him. Its funny actually, that you and those who later agree with your post hector seemingly pro-Khalistani posts that come later in the thread, but you were the one who made the very odd jump from state and Islamic terror to JSB, invoking his name next to OBL, as if you didn't know that was going to be an "ignorant, stupid, and inflammatory post". Bracket that for a second, that you wanted to teach the other BTF members a lesson about terrorism.

||We're almost there for the three of you still reading. I know that life is short and my posts are long, but I hope its worth it.||

You wrote: "this is such an ignorant, stupid, and inflammatory post. seriously your incendiary religious politics are illogical. terrorist victims in bombay were from all different faiths. justice in hanging kasab had nothing to do with preferential treatment of bombay victims vs. others affected in 1984. only a fervent small number of sikhs under the guise of AISSF (who even knows who they are or who they truly represent...) in punjab seem to really care, so why are you trying to light an unnecessary fire?"

Now, we arrive at your original post. What are were we talking about in the first place? Here is what I see it boiling down to which might be different from what is actually at stake:
1) The Indian Government has hanged Kasab, responsible for the Mumbai terror attacks
2) The Indian Government has yet to adjudicate on its state-sponsored pogroms in Delhi (and I would add, in Punjab)
3) Thus, there is an injustice here, in that justice is being differentially delivered

Why do you think that the post is stupid and inflammatory?
1) Terrorist victims in bombay were from all different faiths
2) Justice for the victims of Bombay has nothing to do with justice for the victims of '84 (and I would add, in Punjab)
3) Only a few Sikhs (probably lubricated by NRI money) seem to care
4) Pointing out differentially delivered justice is lighting an unnecessary fire

I do not know enough about the Indian judiciary to make a strong case for this, but at least from an phenomenological rather than juridical perspective, it 'hurts the sentiments of the Sikh community' to see the victims a nationally-important case involving terrorism get fast-tracked to its conclusion, while five thousand Sikhs were killed in Delhi in five days with state support and planning (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Words-Violence-Ordinary-Lilienthal/dp/0520247450) and twenty five thousand Sikh civilians were killed in the Punjab during the militancy era (http://www.ensaaf.org/publications/reports/descriptiveanalysis/) and the government refuses to acknowledge it. Do the Sikhs not deserve justice because the victims of state terrorism are not of different faiths? Similarly, I don't know what kind of unnecessary fire the cited news articles or original post are lighting? I think that you and others might do well to reflect on why seeing Sikhs upset at differentially applied justice in relation to human rights violations makes you think that conflict is being incited. That you read what I assume to be an anti-Hindu politics within these claims is immaterial to the problem at hand and boggles this already addled mind. Whereas I understand your point that you see a false equivalency between Mumbai and the Sikhs, the underlying concept that is being punished is the same: terror. I remember seeing a write-up once about how black men in the United States get insane jail time for petty theft, but the likes of Raj Rajaratnam and white collar wall street criminals get cushy treatment and differentially small jail time for the same crime: theft. This reveals the demons of America's incomplete project of emancipation and desegregation, but I want us to dwell here on how outraged everyone is that there is differential treatment for the same crime inversely punished, and that is so unfair that it makes you want to jump out of your skin. The Sikhs are pissed at the state for the reasons that I outlined above, and because ultimately in Delhi and Punjab during the periods we're talking about a state that operated as a terrorist apparatus. A terrorist state. A terrorist government. A state that routinely kills its own citizens without evidence, without due process, that suspends habeus corpus, that raped an anthropologist was gathering evidence on what was going on, (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1409.2008.00001.x/full) and one that murdered a man who uncovered the evidence of its workings.

Speaking of wanting to jump out of your skin, a personal story:
I went to a friends house a couple of months ago, and there was a random aunty ji hanging out in the living room, so I said fateh and wen't on my business which was to get ready for an event. My friends and I came back to the living room to talk to her before we left and she joked about how long Punjabi men both in Punjab and the diaspora take to get ready these days, and that it seems like young women these days are the practical ones getting shit done while boys are obsessed with making sure they look good. We laughed with her. I peaced out, and on the way her identity was revealed, and I wanted to jump out of my soul: She is Jaswant Singh Khalra's wife. I see her daughter here and there too, and it makes the perverse logics of the Indian security state very very real to me; this very sweet girl doesn't have a dad because of a state apparatus that decides for itself when it will and will not dispense justice to groups that the state itself unleashed hell on, it decides who lives and who dies. [[In fact I would argue that state is *still* enacting terror, because by killing the breadwinners it is not "killing" their families, but rather letting them die, you can smell the Agamben a mile away]] Jaswant Singh Khalra's work revealed that the narratives of violence in the Punjab are worth every inch of the hagiography. In this facet of Indian history, the government and judiciary are morally bankrupt and the state has nothing to say for itself. Justice for smattering of people who were killed by a group of terrorists in Bombay, but not for an entire community rendered impotent to bring justice to itself? Damn right people are pissed and I would submit that they absolutely should be. I know that this tome is simply too large to respond to, but I'll concede that my personal politics and efforts around this issue probably make it such that I can't see the truth for what it is and thus my points are likely to be deeply, deeply flawed and should be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless I am compelled to demonstrate that taking this (biased) approach reveal your posts on the subject to be inflammatory, ill-informed, and hollow.

"The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." -Walter Benjamin


TL;DR nope.

I just read through this whole thread and this last post by Ashveer is a +5 for me I don't think any of us can make a more clear point and articulate it as well as he has.

 

[Multani]

This book goes into depth of the politics at time being, written by one of my fav author Khushwant Singh.




Bleeding Punjab by Khushwant Singh


http://www.amazon.com/My-Bleeding-Punjab-Khushwant-Singh/dp/8185674647

 

[Govind]

thanks for the detailed andwell thought out post Ashveer.i pmd multani earlier telling i stretched it too far. was surprised to see the extent to which these sentences of antiSikh riot cases have been commuted. http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/442-convicted-in-various-anti-Sikh-riots-cases-Delhi-Police/Article1-875466.aspx which shows that the state has turned a blind eye.

should indira gandhi not have been killed i would have hoped she be answerable on the world stage today. my stance is not pro anything just that people should not mete out justice on their own terms.