The man who covered-up a ghastly crime, and remains unrepentant

How does one react when a man who hushed up a brutal case of mass rape calls the testimonies of the victims as “at best a gross exaggeration but more probably a massive hoax”?

A tiny, far-flung village in Kashmir called Kunan is assaulted by Indian soldiers during the night of 23 February, 1991. The assault is part of a ‘cordon and search’ operation. After the ordeal is over, villagers say the soldiers had sexually assaulted the women of the village. News reaches the international press. Local bureaucrats and government officials make reports, and the army is given a clean chit.

But the tiny, far-flung village begins to attract further international attention. Indian government flies a Press Council of India (PCI) team to Kashmir, headed by a BG Verghese, to make a report.

India’s Dissent Intolerance

The offensive republic does it again. For cheering Pakistan cricket team’s win over the Indian team in Bangladesh, Indian state books 67 Kashmiri students under section 124 A (sedition), 153 A (promoting enmity between different groups) and 427 (mischief) of the Indian Penal Code.

Sedition charges in India carry three years prison sentence. Three years… for cheering and clapping! Wendy Doniger, you’re mildly lucky, India is pulping only your books. Here it is pulping sixty-seven young Kashmiri lives, for one of the most frivolous reasons possible.

Soon, we will hear that the fault is all with colonial laws, or the arctic chill in India’s much-touted tolerance is coming from the “Modi wave”. 

The Offensive Republic

The self-righteous liberals in India are shocked by Penguin India’s decision to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book ‘The Hindus’. They are disseminating and signing petitions, and writing articles that express a range of emotions, from disgust to dismay. A few others are (rightly) concerned that the actual blame may lie with the antiquated Indian laws and not with the publisher. Among the latter is Doniger herself.

Indian liberal give an impression that India is mostly a benign Republic , except periodically when it kowtows to fringe rightwing groups. This Indian elite, which cloaks its nationalism—a nationalism not so different in form from the explicitly Hindu rightwing nationalism—in a liberalist discourse, would have us believe that Penguin’s decision to withdraw the book is either just a rare case or an unexpected thing to happen in India. But it is certainly not rare.