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HOME | NEWS | COLUMNISTS | DILIP D'SOUZA |
October 13, 2001
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Dilip D'Souza
SIMI-larly, Let's Ban PartialityJust read Arvind Lavakare's smooth knockout of those who question the ban on SIMI. (That's the Students' Islamic Movement of India, though none of those men look much like students to me.) Thanks to AL, we now know the explicit reasons our mighty government has banned SIMI. So I'm sure he won't mind if I use his expertly gathered material -- why gather it myself, I say, when it's been done? -- to make a few points of my own. Do you believe these violate section 153-B of the IPC? Did Thackeray's writings violate section 153-B? The late H M Seervai: A clearer violation of sections 153-A and 153-B is difficult to imagine. (All quoted in Communalism Combat, January 1995: also see my columns Years That Have Passed and Story of a Petition.) Frankly, I don't even believe I need to quote these men's opinions. I find it difficult to imagine that anyone -- you, for instance, or AL -- would read both section 153-B and Thackeray's writings and still believe he did not violate that section. But still, taking just one of these scholars, H M Seervai believed that by writing these editorials, Bal Thackeray undertook activities that section 153-B defines as unlawful. Why then was Thackeray not imprisoned "for up to five years"? Why did he not attract the attention of section 2 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, helpfully explained to us by AL? After all, it's not as if our government is unaware of, or reluctant to use, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. It has just used that very act against SIMI. Let me make a couple of things clear here. First, I don't like bans. They achieve nothing except underground sympathy and support for the banned, undermining the ostensible reason for the ban in the first place. Second, I don't like sections 153-A and 153-B of the IPC. I think they constrict free speech, which is a dangerous thing to allow a government to do. You don't fight hate speech with official bans. You fight it by publicly and repeatedly demonstrating the dangers of such speech and treating those who indulge in it as the outcasts they must be. Yet, when people argue like this, helpful men like AL choose the easy route and pretend that they must be defending such bodies as SIMI. Indeed, AL aims his gun at the "secular wolves" and fires with skill and verve, not forgetting helpfulness. But he quite deliberately misses the point. Which is that nobody would object to the ban on SIMI if the government showed a scrupulous fairness in applying these acts and bans. (After all, nobody wants thugs roaming free -- yes, believe me, not even those "secular" journalists that make AL "puke"). If the government was indeed that fair, going by AL's own explanation of the ban on SIMI the government would clearly also have to ban the Sena. Instead, that party actually is part of this government. Think of that for a moment. How much revulsion would AL feel, would I feel, would you reading this feel, if A B Vajpayee appointed members of SIMI as ministers? Yet members of the Shiv Sena are precisely that: ministers in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Cabinet. And since there is this transparent, brazen partiality in the application of the laws of our land, since helpful men like AL quote so extensively to actually defend such partiality, you will have to forgive those of us who believe this ban on SIMI had nothing to do with SIMI's criminal activities. It had everything to do with simple political expediency. Political expediency has its problems any time. But these days it's worth remembering: it is just this kind of partiality that breeds the terror that we are so anxious to fight. Or, to put it another way, nobody will take our protestations about terrorism seriously -- which is just what we are seeing -- until we fight it within our country. Fairly and firmly. I look at it this way. I have no particular liking for Dubya Bush or his politics or his policies, both before and after September 11. But I feel absolutely sure of one thing. Let's say a prominent American politician wrote these sentences in an article: 50 million blacks in the United States will stage an armed insurrection. They form one of Mexico's atomic bombs. I don't believe he, or his party, would be rewarded with senior posts in Dubya's Cabinet.
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