October 31, 1984: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is brutally gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards to avenge her decision to storm the Golden Temple in Amritsar. What followed was a horrific pogrom, which left thousands of Sikhs in Delhi dead.
December 6, 1992: L. K. Advani’s Rath Yatra culminated in Ayodhya, which witnessed demolition of Babri Masjid. What followed were ghastly religious riots nationwide leaving thousands dead.
February 27, 2002: Fifty-nine helpless were charred to death in Compartment S-6 of Sabarmati Express. The horrendous incident was followed by statewide riots, which left hundreds of innocents dead, predominantly Muslims.
If you dig down to the apparent sequence of events during each of the above three, there is a striking similarity. All three involved murder of civilians. Also apparent is occurrence of a major event preceding the riots.
But there is a subtle dissimilarity. If you were to go by the media reports, the cause of riots in 1984 and 1992 were the preceding events. So, in the first incident above, the murder of Mrs. Gandhi caused genocide of Sikhs. In the second incident, the L. K. Advani, the RSS and the allied organizations were responsible for riots. But the same theory, according to media, is not applicable in the third case.
According to our ‘independent’ media, the riots were NOT a reaction to the brutal murder of Kar Sevaks in Godhra, but they were actually carefully orchestrated by Narendra Modi to score brawny political points.
Doesn’t it really throw up nauseating media bias? In a country like ours, 90% of the English Language media is driven by ideological bias and they do everything at their disposal to further their appalling agenda, by hook or crook.
This is precisely what S. K. Modi portrays in this impressive book: Godhra, The Missing Rage.
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An excerpt from the preface adequately summarizes what the book has to offer.
What was more deafening? The silence of February 27, 2002 or the roar that rose on February 28? The people of Gujarat will debate that forever.
“Next Morning. I was there on the morning of 28th.”
On September 23, 2003, at around 3:15 pm, NDTV’s ace reporter told me that he had arrived at Ahmedabad on the morning of February 28, 2002. The Godhra carnage had taken place the previous day, February 27.
It was a lie. I personally knew he had come on the evening of 28th. I was at the airport on the evening of February 28, 2002.
I felt exhilarated. Not because I had caught the reporter telling a lie. But because he had felt the need to tell a lie. This implied a certain degree of remorse. However, remotely and notionally, the lie represented a sense of shame. Shame at not having considered the Godhra train carnage important enough to cover personally.
My heart was filled with a certain degree of warmth towards the man. One major complaint of the people of Gujarat has been that no national level journalist considered the Godhra carnage to be important enough for a visit. Everybody descended on Gujarat only after large-scale violence broke out on the afternoon of 28th.
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The author counters each serious allegation hurled by media using the intelligent fact checks. For example, the infamous Naroda Patiya massacre. Several stories were published by different media outlets in their own separate versions. The author has a simple argument: How could an incident have occurred in n different ways? Any two news reports had hardly anything in common including amount of casualties.
Most international media houses basically regurgitate what they read in Indian media. Seldom do they have curiosity to indulge in thorough fact checks and research. Additionally, Global media, especially scribes from West, still meanders in colonial mindset and for them, Gujarat riots were a golden opportunity to denigrate India, its democracy and secularism at International level.
The author further ventures on to analyze the fundamental reasons behind such obvious bias. Anyone who has closely followed and analyzed the English Language Media beyond the superficial layers would be aware of their palpable bias against right wing, mainly RSS. Gujarat riots gave them a golden opportunity to settle score with the organization, which has grown leaps and bound despite being hammered by negative campaign carried out by the media.
If they were to openly acquiesce to the theory that the riots were actually a reaction to the Godhra carnage and more than that apparent lack of condemnation it received from the pseudo-intellectuals and ‘secularists’, it would defeat their hypotheses of solely blaming Narendra Modi for the riots. And hence, the entire media brethren started producing propaganda stories to insinuate theories that the Godhra carnage was actually an accident. TOI published a story that the fuel was actually spilled from inside the compartment. A story in Outlook claimed that there was no waiting mob outside as stated by some fact witnesses. But some exasperating questions still remain unanswered, which have been conveniently ignored by media.
If there was no waiting mob outside, then what about the marks of stone pelting from outside? Why couldn’t the passenger come out of the compartment when it caught fire? How were the doors locked from outside? And to suggest that all passengers in a compartment voluntarily spilled fuel and burned themselves, in short committed mass suicide, is insane.
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Nanavati Commission recently submitted a report, exonerating Rajiv Gandhi from the allegation of conspiracy and not acting swiftly to stop the intended. The report, according to sources, does not hold the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi directly responsible in any way for the failure to check the violence. ''How can a prime minister be held responsible for each and every action in a police station or a particular district of Delhi?'', states the report according to NDTV. Question is then why shouldn’t the Narendra Modi be exonerated based on the same argument? Obviously two wrongs don’t make it right but this convenient bias is exasperating.
I am severely critical of genocides, both Godhra and post Godhra. Any sane person cannot condone killing of innocents. What frustrates me the most is the manner in which both are treated in a biased manner by the media and the ‘secular’ politicians!
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