Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
Uncalled for.
i think that was your post which was uncalled for...saying charo aur shanti hain.......
when people are loosing their lives.....:(
i used to think you have great respect for human lives
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
i think that was your post which was uncalled for...saying charo aur shanti hain.......
when people are loosing their lives.....:(
i used to think you have great respect for human lives
Reasonable folks will understand I was trying to lighten the atmosphere with humor. Thread got too serious with people attacking each other and even their faith. You can choose to interpret my post using your perspective/ bias. Ain't notn I can do about it. Carry on.
Re: ‘‘Thousands flee Banglore’’
This was published in a popular Urdu daily from New Delhi:
I have blurred the image as this is a family forum, but still one can see that the gruesome pictures of massacres were published in full colors. All except one (the one with the crying man) are fake and contain mutilated dead bodies. PM me if you want the image in full technicolor.
Here is the rough translation of the accompanying article. Read it carefully.
I am stunned. The massacre of Burmese Muslims has become so common, and so shamelessly bold, that it is hard to find a parallel to it in human history, even after much searching. This game of hatred is not being played for the first time. Repeatedly the Muslims in that country have been made the target of the tyranny and oppression **of the Buddhists. **The news appears in the papers, then disappears. But this time the Muslims have been slaughtered on such a scale, so ruthlessly, and in such an organized manner that we can only say: God save us.
**It seems that the Buddhists are not human; they are like wild animals, and their nature contains nothing but barbarism and a thirst for blood.** Why are the Buddhists so wrathful toward the Muslims? Did the Muslims take away their properties? Did the Muslims extinguish the lamps in their homes? Did they destroy the watering channels to their fields? Did they cast lustful eyes on their women? Did they beat them up for no cause, or harmed them in any other way? Did they inflict tyranny of any sort on them?
The answer to all the above is only one: No. No, absolutely not. Then for what uncommitted crime were the Muslims punished? Why were they burnt alive? **Why was their blood used to colour the robes of mankind?** Is there a jungle Raj in Burma even today? Is it still ruled by kings? Is there nothing called Liberty there? Has Democracy not come their way? Why is it that England and America, who are the thekedars of human rights across the world, have not heard of the killing of more than **two thousand Muslims**? Has England shown any concern about it?
You, the organizations concerned with human rights across the world, do you not recognize Burmese Muslims as human beings? In your list of countries does not Burma find a place as a human habitat? Why have you not taken any concrete steps in response to this obscene crime?
It is said that this province of Burma—where men and women, young and old were only recently cruelly tortured and then killed—was once a part of Bangladesh. A king who ruled Burma attacked and took control of it. That is why it today borders Bangladesh. **When the Buddhists made life impossible for the Muslims the **latter were compelled to save their lives by performing hijrat to Bangladesh. In the beginning they found shelter there. But then Bangladesh put a closure to it, fearful of an endless immigration. When the refugees did not stop coming, the army of Bangladesh stopped them with bullets. Now where can they go? They have no place on earth nor any in the sky. We feel they have become a burden on earth … [and bring to mind] the words of the last Mughal Emperor when he was imprisoned in Rangoon. "Where should I live? Where should I go? No one is happy with me. I am a burden on the earth, and an object of the heavens' wrath."
Today the Muslims in Burma face the same situation. The Buddhists have made life impossible for them in Burma, and in Bangladesh the state refuses to give them shelter. Where can these oppressed people go? To whom can they appeal? **Of the two thousand slaughtered Burmese Muslims not all were young men, **whom one might imagine to have instigated a fight with the Buddhists. **What fight did the children start? What guns did the women fire? What sticks did the old and the decrepit use to strike? But look at the sheer shamelessness of the Buddhists. **They first herded together all the people of the locality—male and female, old and young—then threatened and abused them. **Cast aspersions on Islam.** Created an air of terror. And then, after slashing their victims’ bodies threw them alive into fire to burn to ashes.
They felt no shame or regret for their inhuman action; on the contrary, they took pride in it. **And the proof for it is the video made available on the Internet….**
Listen Muslim, when will you come awake from this sleep of neglect? When will you take an account of your own deeds? When will you get ready to safeguard your honour and your family? Is it not incumbent upon you to protect from harm your life and your property, your name and your honour? How long will you continue to live this life of infamy? **Will you always only shed tears of blood?** Have you taken a vow to stay away from knowledge and action? If you have really closed your eyes to all that surrounds you then it does not matter. I have no complaint. But if there is even an iota of left in you, if your conscience is alive even a tiny bit, and if you have even the most ordinary understanding of things, then you should stand up. Stand up and look at the events that are happening around you. Understand the times, examine the ways of the world, then put into action your resolution and shake the foundations of every house of tyranny. **Otherwise you will be erased from the face of the earth; not even a story about you will remain.**
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
^
This is not an isolated case. Almost every Urdu daily contains such propaganda full of emotion and empty of facts. Surely, anybody who reads such hate speech will get his mind addled. Why does Indian media totally ignore in what is printed in Urdu media ?
Anyways following testimonial was printed in today's Hindustan's Times, Mumbai edition.
“Umar went with our younger brother and some friends. They didn’t even tell us clearly what they were going for. Umar only said that **there was an ailaan after the Friday (Aug 10) namaaz that all proud Muslim youngsters must go to Azad Maidan rally to show solidarity with our brothers and sisters who had been butchered somewhere. **I had been seeing the route 310 bus stop near our colony, **had banners for eight days earlier showing unmentionable things. My brother said the rally venue too was full of banners and posters showing women being cut and children being burned. **Who knew then that they weren’t true? Yeh to bhadkaneka zariya tha (this was just a way used to incite people) and young men are easily given to extreme emotions of rage and revenge.
What happened there was not correct, but what else would an enraged group of men do? They shouldn’t have called this rally during Ramzan. It was wrong. Those who organised the rally must take responsibility now, why are they washing their hands off ? I heard Saeed Noori say on TV that he doesn’t know the men who did tod-phod and beat up the police. But when he gave the call, he knew them as Muslims; now why is he shrugging off his responsibility?
Another testimonial:
“There was talk about this rally for two Fridays (Aug 3 and 10) after namaaz when ailaans were made that men must go to Azad Maidan if we wanted to send out a message. When such ailaans are made, they are taken seriously. **Throughout those few days, there were so many posters around in our areas, each poster made my blood boil. The posters showed women mercilessly massacred and little children cut up and burned. **The question was should we keep quiet when our Muslim brothers and sisters all over the world are being massacred like this.
Those posters made us feel as if we should have gone into Burma and taken revenge. There were SMSes and video clips that many of us saw. Someone told us that **these photos were shown after the namaaz at the main Minara Masjid on Friday (August 3) afternoon**. When I reached, the maidan was full and we were standing outside. Then suddenly it erupted. Someone gave me a stone to throw and I did. Someone pulled me towards a vehicle that had just been set on fire. I knew there would be big trouble and ran away.
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
Finally Bangalore Pplz Getting Little Space To Breathe !!
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
Jee bilkul but Pakistan isn’t exactly a pluralistic, democratic, ideal society, is it? Neither is its constitution. Hence why it’s self-explanatory, which translates to obvious, not to justifiable.
That's a 'creative' interpretation of your original statements. You suggested no one should be surprised that Muslims enjoy preferential status, not because discrimination exists and it's unfortunate, but because this was the reason Pakistan was created. This isn't someone pointing out discrimination, it is someone justifying the existence of it. If you find you are being 'misunderstood' by several people, saying what you 'really' mean might be helpful in avoiding confusion. There is plenty in the Constitution/penal code that forbids the incitement of ill-will or violence against any religion or sect/that requires the state to allow citizens to freely practice their faith, whatever that may be. It's different that religious amendments like the blasphemy law have distorted the state's priorities and created a conflict of interest. You could have mentioned this, but you invoked the reason for Pakistan's existence to explain why a Hindu Pakistani may face discrimination. Odd.
In subsequent posts, you conceded that 'ok this is a humongous deal, I get it.' This hardly sounds like someone who is particularly convinced of the gravity of the situation. Nor does it reflect the empathy you instinctively give fellow Muslims, even when they don't require it. It is human nature to err on the side of empathy when it comes to your co-religionists, and to err on the side of skepticism when it comes to the Other.
Not sure if you’re misquoting me here on purpose or you actually didn’t read the full para which basically said muslims protesting against persecution would make complete sense BUT protesting over a bollywood movie scene or a star plus controversy wouldn't. How does that mean it wouldn’t make sense if it was a Hindu?? These are your words, not mine. Yes, it definitely helps to read before reacting. Perhaps you also didn’t read the bit where I said I stand by the Pakistani minorities in speaking up against the persecution and pressurizing the government to put an end to the discrimination. I was only naïve about telecasting a conversion because I was seeing it from the point of view of a European (hence all those EU/US references), and that point of view later changed when people emphasized the seriousness of the matter in the context of a society like Pakistan. And why I brought it up in this thread? *To compare the gravity of the two protest scenarios for Dron. * And yes, I partly misread the news because the article I read was about Muslim leaders asking Assamese people not to flee hence why I hastily assumed they were Muslims. Yeh wakiye meri ghalti hai, my apologies. The question I asked in my first post remains though – amongst all this ethnic tension, what makes the authorities so sure that there would be no clashes in Bangalore? Also, any updates anyone on the evidence which lead them to believe that this is an attempt at cyberwarfare from Pakistan?
Again, these are not '2 protest scenarios,' I don't see the comparison. Unless you interpret Muslims defiling Hindu deities to be a valid form of 'protest.' Yes, I did read your posts in their entirety. Your opinions weren't particularly modified by the information presented to you. In fact you continued to rhetorically wonder why it was a big deal by contrasting anti-Muslim events in Europe/elsewhere. If you did have a change of mind, it makes little sense to post what you did in an unrelated thread. "Apparently one live conversion gives the minorities every reason to fear the worst of the worst repercussions." This sarcasm has little to do with Drona. If you acknowledge minorities have valid fears, it appears you do so reluctantly, as opposed to any genuine understanding. If someone as neutral and non-confrontational as Southie noticed your partiality, it says something. The 'BUT' about Bollywood doesn't qualify your main point. Nor does it detract from my suggestion that your comments reflect the same double standards you accuse Drona of.
No apologies needed, we are all entitled to our opinions and our prejudices. My intent was not to interrogate or judge you, but to comment on what I perceived to be a blind spot. I have biases like anyone else, and they come through in my comments.
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
Bold bit: You say that yet the rest of your reply is exactly that especially your last line. No offence. :)
If anything, I'm being earnest and condemning, which is the opposite of flippant and patronizing. You'll find that Dictionary.com can be your friend. (Now I'm being patronizing, see the difference?).
No offense. :)
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
So you're going to continue to insist that I meant B when I said A even though I've already clarified what I meant. In that case, I'm just going to quote Southie here - You can choose to interpret my post using your perspective/ bias. Ain't notn I can do about it. Carry on.
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
I think the people are getting back to Bangalore (and other places). Good business for railways!
Re: ‘‘Thousands flee Banglore’’
Will wonders ever cease? BBC published more or less neutral article on the issue this Monday.**
Why the violence in Assam is not communal**
By Anjum Hasan
The tragedy unfolding in the Indian state of Assam over the past month - the killing of nearly 100 people, mostly Bangladeshi Muslim settlers in lower Assam, and the displacement of others in hundreds of thousands - is not without precedent.
In February 1983, more than 2,000 men, women and children - all Bengali-speaking Muslims and allegedly illegal immigrants from Bangladesh - were killed in a single morning of violence in Nellie, a small town in the Nagaon district of Assam.
One paradox about the violence both then and now is this: those who kill allege they are targeting illegal immigrants and yet a long-running complaint of the Assamese people is that **the state's successive governments have failed to create proper systems of identification. **How is an illegal immigrant to be distinguished from a Bengali Muslim resident of Assam?
A second paradox is evident in how **some Muslims in the rest of the country have viewed the recent violence as an attack on fellow Muslims rather than on unwelcome guests from a neighbouring country. **
While the Bodo community in Assam's Kokrajhar district - where most of the recent violence has taken place - does battle with the Bangladeshis over issues of land and livelihood, the crowds in faraway Mumbai who staged a protest on 11 August against the killings in Assam and then **ran amok, killing two people and injuring several more, claimed to be acting on behalf of their suffering Muslim brethren.
**Given that the conflict has largely come to be seen in terms of "Muslims versus north-easterners" (rather than, for instance, **Assamese versus Bangladeshis), **where does it leave Assam's approximately 9 million Muslims? And how does it feel to be both north-eastern and Muslim?
I put the question to Tabris Ahmed who lives in the city of Shillong, one of the region's multi-ethnic hubs and the capital of the state of Meghalaya.
**Mr Ahmed is a successful 40-year-old lawyer who belongs to a small community of Manipuri Muslims called Pangan. **
‘Incredible diversity’
The Pangans live in the largely Hindu state of Manipur, as well as in Assam and Tripura states and in Bangladesh. There are also a handful of Pangan families in Shillong.
As I sit with Mr Ahmed in his small living room, made even smaller by its lining of forbiddingly thick law books, I realise that, given the incredible diversity of background and experience in the region, the general question about being a north-eastern Muslim can only be answered in very specific terms.
Mr Ahmed's parents are from Banskandi, a village near the Assam border with Manipur. **His father belongs to a family of imams and arrived in Shillong in 1961 after a religious education at the famous Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband.** He became the maulvi [Muslim priest] of one of Shillong's mosques and remained so till his death in 2003.
He sent his sons to one of Shillong's many English-medium Christian missionary schools and none of them took up a religious career. But the family continues to live close to the mosque as they did in the Maulvi Sahib's time, and Mr Ahmed, who is vice-president of the mosque committee, **talks with a sense of responsibility about "taking care of the namazis [Muslim faithful]".**
**When the talk turns to the situation in Assam, Mr Ahmed makes a very clear distinction between those Bengali Muslim migrants who have the historical right to live in the state (their ancestors having arrived there before the 1971 creation of the nation of Bangladesh, or even before 1947 when the state of East Bengal was a part of India), and those who have stolen across the border in search of a livelihood.
**And the border is porous, he says, and the guards easy to bribe.
**Mr Ahmed is convinced that there is large-scale migration of Bangladeshis into Assam and that this must be stemmed.
**
Underlying these views is his faith in himself as a “liberal Muslim” and a patriotic Indian - someone who will, for example, always support the Indian team and not the Pakistani during a cricket match.
Mr Ahmed regularly travels across the country to visit relatives and friends and his patriotism is not dented by his repeated discovery of his countrymen's shocking ignorance about the basic geography of the north-east or the names of its main cities.
"They don't know about us," he says, "while we in school learn about the whole country."
Multiple identities
When I ask Mr Ahmed about his roots, he does not talk of Manipur or Assam but describes himself as a “Shillongite”.
He is fluent in a number of Shillong’s many languages - Khasi, Hindi, English, Bengali, Assamese as well as his native Meiteilon. He describes the city as a welcoming place and one where he has always felt at home.
He has made a choice - just as his father did in leaving that village and settling in Shillong. In choosing for himself, Mr Ahmed is cosmopolitan.
At the same time, he has a very sure sense of himself as belonging to a Muslim community that has a right to live in Assam.
**Unlike the protesters in Mumbai who rioted over the killing of their fellow Muslims, Mr Ahmed does not subscribe to the idea of an international Muslim brotherhood.**
**He says that certified Indian Muslims like him are in a position to help the government of Assam identify and deport illegal immigrants**. "It is easy for us to tell who is a long-term resident and who isn't," he says.
Mr Ahmed is many things at once -** Manipuri, Assamese, Shillongite, Muslim, north-eastern, Indian.
**In negotiating these multiple identities with ease, he gives lie to the dichotomous way in which the Assam conflict has been portrayed.
But as a middle-class professional who could live and work anywhere in the country, he is far removed from the victims of the violence in Nellie then and Kokrajhar now - largely the poor who either live off the land or work at manual jobs.
Similarly, along with the students who recently fled back home to the north-east, there were also many who work as contract labour in the service industry - security guards, waiters, hairdressers - those whose sense of insecurity in mainland India is compounded by their precarious economic situation.
**To view the fight over Assam as a communal one, therefore, is to wilfully ignore the poverty of those both waging this battle and dying in it.
**As so often happens in conflicts of this nature, the fundamental issues are obscured by the spectacle of violence driven by the logic of "an eye for an eye".
In this case, **the culpability of a government that first allows impoverished immigrants to illegally enter a state already wracked with issues of underdevelopment, and then turns a blind eye to their murder, is what the nation's attention should be wholly focused on. **
*Anjum Hasan is a novelist and books editor at The Caravan** magazine*
Re: ''Thousands flee Banglore''
Drona - very useful article. Provides context. Thank you.