Columnists call for Sedition charges against Antulay and Suzanne Arundhati Roy

The following TOI cartoon says it all:

Renowned journalist Tavleen Singh has called for sedition charges and trial against the irresponsible Minister of Anti-Majority Rights and Muslim Affairs Abdur Rehman Antulay and Anti-Bharat Anti-Hindu bigot leftist author Suzanne Arundhati Roy in her article "The real enemies". Both of these two individuals have time and again ranted Anti-Bharat diatribes and acted like Voice of Radical Islamists and Pakistan. It took Congress less than one day to suspend Narayan Rane because he chose to speak his mind about Antonia Maino and it took them over four and a half long years and 38 major terrorist attacks to remove worthless corrupt Shivraj Patil from the Home Ministry. With such precedence of precarious response by the Government, it would take a meteor strike to wake this callous Government out of its Kumbhakaran sleep to sake a Muslim Minister.

As Abdur Rehman Antulay unintentionally reminded us last week, India has enemies within her borders that are more treacherous than those who come in boats from the sea. If we had a real Prime Minister, instead of one by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen, not only would the Minister for Minority Affairs be sacked, he would be tried for sedition. How dare he suggest that in the middle of the worst terrorist attack India has ever faced, our police officers are so evil that instead of fighting the terrorists they plotted to kill one of their own officers? If Antulay had any sense he would stop trying to explain why he, as a former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, made such baseless charges. He makes it worse every time he goes on television and says that he is only speaking out against those he believes sent Hemant Karkare deliberately to his death and not against the entire police force.

In Pakistan, he is the newest hero. Did they not always tell us there was no proof that those responsible for the horrors in Mumbai were Pakistani? Did Pakistan’s alleged security experts not point at ‘Hindu Zionists’? And, now incontrovertible proof that they were right. A Minister in the Government of India has confirmed on national television that he has doubts about who killed Karkare and that “lakhs of Indians” share his doubts. He seems not to notice that in saying this he is really saying that the Indian state is too venal to be trusted.

A famous Indian novelist—whose name I will not take because it would defile this column—goes further. In the latest of her series of hysterical diatribes against India and all things Indian, she justifies the attacks on Mumbai. There is a context to everything, she says, and so we must understand that the jihadis who want to destroy India have good reason to do so. The novelist is not alone in her hatred of all things Indian. Nearly every Indian writer who has written in the Western media since the attack on Mumbai has found reasons why the jihad against India is justified. Look at our ‘atrocities’ in Kashmir and look at what happened in Gujarat and what about the Babri Masjid. One British newspaper went so far as to say that India used 9/11 to treat its Muslims even worse than we did before. This editorial was used by a Pakistani journalist to explain what happened in Mumbai.
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Well, you know what, I am sick of it. I am sick of India being blamed all the time for everything by people who would not dare open their mouths in a country that did not offer them the freedom that India does.
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Yet, if you were to read the views of our refugee writers who make their money and win their prizes in New York and London, you would think that there was no difference between India and Pakistan.
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Anyone with basic knowledge of the Indian sub-continent should know that it is not possible for groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e-Toiba to survive in India. Yet, our enemies within persist in spreading the canard that these violent Islamist groups are no different from the Bajrang Dal. You would have to be a real fool to believe this but because the message is spread by credible ‘intellectuals’ of leftist persuasion, it is believed by gullible Western journalists. It appalled me to read an editorial in the Financial Times while Mumbai was still under siege that said the terrorists could be Hindu because one of them (Kasab) wore sacred Hindu threads on his wrist.

The Indian state is corrupt, weak and incompetent but anyone who believes that it is capable of organising the attack we saw on Mumbai has to be mad. If anyone needs proof, they only need to look at the effete, namby-pamby manner in which the Indian state has dealt with the aftermath of the attack on Mumbai. Not only has it been unable to force Pakistan to act against the jihadis who fight their war against India from its soil, it has not even been able to act against the enemies within. In any other country there would be sedition trials.

Another known journalist Swapan Dasgupta has this to say on Antulay's treason,

It is in this context that the shenanigans of Minority Affairs Minister A R Antulay are giving sleepless nights to the Congress. In conferring political dignity to some crazy conspiracy theories circulating in cyberspace and the Pakistani media, Antulay is guilty of two offences.

First, he bolstered the Pakistani argument that India was levelling wild charges at a neighbouring country as part of some collateral agenda. Second, he introduced cracks in the national resolve to combat terror by injecting a Hindu-Muslim dimension to it.

No doubt, Antulay has articulated the mood of denial and victimhood that is to be found in Muslim ghettos. As a party that depends disproportionately on the Muslim vote for sustenance, the Congress cannot be unmindful of this sentiment. Yet, by being seen to be pandering to it and allowing the misgivings of the new anti-terror legislation to come centrestage, the Congress is creating doubts in the minds of Middle India of its ability to confront the jihadis effectively.

Another journalist and political analyst Kanchan Gupta in his article "Islamists in PM's team outed!" points out how bereaved is this current Government of any shame.

It is possible that Mr Ahamed as well as Mr Manmohan Singh and Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee thought that the omission of any mention of Chabad House in the December 9 statement at the UN Security Council would go unnoticed in India -- after all, not everybody reads official texts posted on the Ministry of External Affairs website with great diligence and care; Indian journalists who reported on the statement stressed only those portions that were pointed out to them by the Permanent Mission in New York or the spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs, which speaks volumes about their professional ethics, if not abilities. To its credit, the Times of India picked up the story after the omission was pointed out in this column; to Mr LK Advani's credit, he raised it forcefully in the Lok Sabha. But I am reluctant to either accept Mr Ahamed's apology -- "I am very sorry. It is my duty to defend every Indian or any foreigner who is in India. We are all one," he said in response to Mr Advani's barbed comment -- or grant him the benefit of doubt: It was not an accidental miss, as has been claimed by the Ministry.

Just as there's nothing unintended or accidental about the vicious remarks of Minister for Minority Affairs Abdul Rehman Antulay, who has converted his Ministry into a Muslim welfare bureau, insinuating that Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare was not killed by the Pakistani fidayeen who attacked Mumbai but 'somebody else'. The valiant police officer who went down fighting the jihadis, according to him, could have been a victim of "terrorism or terrorism plus something. I do not know ... the terrorists had no reason to kill Karkare". Within hours of this outrageous calumny, Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari told BBC that there "is no evidence" to prove Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the 'Butcher of Mumbai', is a Pakistani citizen! Which side is Mr Antulay, who we are told by the Shahi Imam of Delhi's Fatehpuri Masjid, has merely lent voice to what "millions of Muslims believe", batting for? Do his rancid views represent those of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet? If they don't, then he is guilty of not only violating the principle of collective responsibility (which many Ministers have done while thumbing their nose at the Prime Minister) but also of embarrassing the nation -- this Government is so bereft of shame that it cannot be embarrassed, no matter how hard anybody tries, which also explains why the Prime Minister has chosen to sit on Mr Antulay's letter of resignation instead of despatching it to the President for immediate acceptance.

There is some comfort in the fact that at least two closet Islamists in the Prime Minister's team have been outed in less than a fortnight since the jihadi carnage in Mumbai. There will be cause to celebrate when this Government, which has so severely compromised India's national interest, is consigned to the dustbin of history.

It's a toothless law, says Dina Nath Mishra, a victim of Indira Feroz Gandhi's undemocratic emergency when he along with over hundred thousand citizens were put in jail for 19 months on June 25, 1975.

In the Supreme Court, the Attorney General told that during emergency even right to live remained suspended. A number of arrested leaders told me that they doubted if they would ever come out of jail in their lifetimes. The same Congress party, which under pressure enacted TADA, NSA and laws like that, repealed them under pressure from a community which breeds most of the terrorists. TADA was allowed to lapse sympathising with Muslims, for most of the detainees under this law were from that community.

During NDA rule, a new and stronger law, POTA, was enacted to deal with terrorist activities. A chorus for its removal was raised; numerous Muslim groups clamoured for its repeal. The UPA promised to do so and, when it came to power, its first action was to repeal POTA. It was declared from the rooftops that POTA was anti-Muslims. Repealing it was an act of Muslim appeasement — terrorist or no terrorist.

Muslim society, as a whole, does not have any sympathy for terrorists, nor do they help them by any means. But these so-called sympathisers of Muslim cause clubbed terrorists and their abettors with the Muslim masses resulting in identity crisis for the whole community. Out of the 14 crore Muslim population in India, it is not unthinkable that hardly some twenty thousand terrorists and their sympathisers support the stupendous efforts of our sworn enemy — Pakistan and its agencies. But the UPA Government has created an identity crisis for all the Muslims.

With POTA gone, signals were sent to all terrorists in India, Pakistan and other countries. The number of terrorists’ acts and its intensity skyrocketed. The crescendo reached on November 26, 2008 in Mumbai. 200 innocent people were killed and a larger number were injured. Targeted locations included prestigious hotels, which gave them added publicity. It was a 60-hour horror film. Meanwhile, brainwashing through media debate continued. The day POTA was repealed, a parallel debate started on the need for a strong law to deal with terrorists. So much so that even National Security Advisor of UPA Government M K Narayanan went public pleading for stronger anti-terror law. But Congress and its allies did not want to lose the gains obtained by repealing POTA.

Several decorative teeth have also been added in the UAPA. There was a clause that any confession by a terrorist before a senior investigating officer would not be admissible in court. Instead, the confession had to be done before the Magistrate in court. However, this clause was dropped at the last moment due to political reasons.

Both NIA and UAPA are an eyewash. The laws are not sufficient to deal with dastardly terrorist acts that our police force is dealing with. Our laws are not sufficient as compared with American, British and other countries’ laws as stipulated by UN Security Council while dealing with the menace of terrorism.