news details |
|
|
| 'Secularists need to visit J&K to see plight of minorities' | | Social media under attack | | Early Times Report
Jammu, May 16: Social networking sites are under severe attack these days. The "secularists" are attacking it as well as private news channels. Their grouse against social media and news channels is that they are pro-Hindu and pro-Hindutva and anti-minorities and certain social segments.
"Till very recently, our media cleaved to that tolerant ideal mentioned earlier because newspapers tend to be liberal and are disengaged from much reader feedback. Today TV stations scan social media in the afternoon to determine the angle of attack on their evening debates. The average user of this social media is anglicized, urban, upper class and upper caste: Hindutva's base. It should not surprise us that its view and its anger have come to dominate the mainstream media. Through twitter, the soul of this nation, long suppressed, finds utterance," they have been saying, particularly after the formation of the BJP Government at the Centre.
"Elsewhere, the Hindu majoritarian instinct has always controlled the cultural space (it is why there is zero dalit, Muslim, adivasi representation in our popular culture - meaning the characters of film, television and advertising). This instinct is no longer suppressed by authority. Its consequences are no longer effaced, and not even an attempt is made to counter them, if only through platitudes," they have also been saying.
They are also not sparing the Congress. "The Congress decades hid an essential fact: sub-continental man is not tolerant. He is majoritarian. In his ideal state, the minorities exist on sufferance. His model constitution is the Pakistani one, because it puts minorities in their place by law and not only by practice. It is this model that Hindutva aches for, the one that legitimizes the mistreatment of others," they have been saying to make their point that the Congress also stood behind the majority community and created a situation under which the plight of the minorities was no different from the minorities in the Muslim Pakistan.
It is clear that these secularists are highly biased and their approach is subjective. They have the audacity of speaking for the minorities inhabiting different states of the country, barring J&K, but they refuse to appreciate the ground situation in J&K where the non-Muslim minorities, who constitute almost 40 per cent of the state's population, have little or no say in the governance and where the members of a particular religious sect in Kashmir rule the roost and ill-treat the minorities.
They secularists also don't have the audacity to reflect on the circumstances under which the miniscule minority of Kashmiri Hindus quit the Valley in early 1990 to become refugees in their own motherland and the manner in which the authorities in New Delhi and Kashmiri leadership and its stooges in Jammu have been depriving the refugees from Pakistan of their right to enjoy all citizenship rights in the state for almost 70 years.
The Kashmiri Hindus want to return to the Valley but the fanatics and Pakistani agents in Kashmir as well as elements in the political establishments in J&K and Delhi are one as far as their opposition to their demand seeking separate homeland invested with UT status is concerned. The separatists even go to the extent of opposing the idea of setting up of a few enclaves in some secure zones in the Valley for the persecuted and hounded out Kashmiri Hindus. They want them to return to the places they vacated in early 1990 and also support the anti-India movement. The Kashmiri Hindus reject outright these suggestions.
Similarly, refugees from Pakistan, all Hindus, have been struggling since 1947 to obtain citizenship rights in the state, but with no result. But neither the ruling elite in Delhi nor Kashmiri leaders and their Jammu-based agents support their genuine demand. They only insult them by taking about their "livelihood and sustenance". With the result, these refugees continue to lead a miserable life.
But these are only a couple of instances which serve to indicate the extent to which the minorities in the state have been marginalized and rebuffed. These secularists would do well to visit Jammu, Ladakh and refugee camps in the Jammu region to see for themselves the miserable plight of the minorities. But they will not do that because the non-Muslim minorities have no place in their scheme of things. It's no wonder that the minorities in Jammu and Kashmir term these secularists as agents of Kashmiri communalists and separatists. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
STOCK UPDATE |
|
|
 |
| BSE
Sensex |
 |
| NSE
Nifty |
|
|
| |
CRICKET UPDATE |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
