Madhany-haters and human lovers!

The pro-Sangh apostles of democracy can’t tolerate a moderate Madhany

There is a hue and cry over Abdul Nasar Madhany’s entry into the mainstream politics in Kerala. Both the Sangh Parivar and the Congress-led opposition parties are peeved at Madhany’s bonhomie with the CPM-led Left front in the state.

Hardcore Hindutva extremists and ‘liberal’ and ‘secular’ Congress are clamouring about Madhany’s terror links. For the Congress party it is simply a case of sour grapes, for it had no problems when PDP extended its support to the party in previous elections. The dynasty party didn’t find any ‘extremism’ in the PDP then. Now with the PDP deciding to support the Left, Congress simply can’t stomach it.

The past...

Of course, Madhany was not a saint. His avatar as an alternative to rightwing nationalist Hindutva forces in the 1990's had posed a great threat to Kerala's secular fabric in as much as the Sangh Parivar had done to the state.

He in fact is the product of Muslim insecurity in Kerala post-Babari, by trying to emerge as the savior of Muslims by exploiting this feeling. The decadence of Muslim League, the party of elite Biriyani-gobblers, coupled with the emergence and strengthening of rightwing Hindutva extremists, provided a fertile ground for Madhany. ISS, the outfit he floated and got banned later along with the RSS post-Babari, was his answer to the RSS. To be precise a 'Muslim RSS'!

His fiery speeches antagonised not only the Sangh Parivar but also the Muslim League, for whom Madhany posed a formidable threat, for, here was a man for the first time attacking the League’s shenanigan and elitist ways. In his speeches, he showed the temerity to attack League's supreme God Shihab Thangal.

In one of his speeches Madhany had said: “It is halaal (good practice) to visit chronically ill patients. I just visited one such patient: the Muslim League!”

All those fiery speeches and his appearances (he used to be accompanied by body guards) earned him notoriety. After ISS was banned along with RSS post-Babari he floated PDP.

Soon came his arrest. The timing of his arrest is still intriguing. Madhany along with ex-Naxal leaders K. Ajitha and K. Kunhikannan, decided to initiate a state-wide agitation on the Kozhikode ice-cream sex scandal case in which Muslim League leader Kunhalikutty was an accused. On the very third day (31st March, 1998) Madhany was picked up by Kozhikode Kasaba police on a charge of making provocative speech that took place five years ago. None asked why Madhany was not arrested during those five years after the arrest warrant was issued in the case of making the provocative speech.

Soon after arresting Madhany on charges of making provocative speech, he was transferred to the Tamil Nadu police in connection with the Coimbatore bomb blast case.

The Tamil Nadu police wanted to grill Madhany as they found that Basha, the key accused in the Coimbatore bomb blast case, had a one-and-half minute’s conversation with someone in the office of Muslim Review, a magazine ran by Madhany at that time. In the very next issue of Muslim Review an interview with Basha was published. In fact, the phone call was made from the magazine’s Kochi office to Basha for arranging the interview.

The rest is history. After almost nine years of illegal detention he was freed because the prosecution couldn’t find a shred of evidence linking him to the Coimbatore blast case.

And the present...

Those who are now whining about Madhany’s terror links want him to be behind the bars till eternity, no matter whether he has terror links or not. In their minds he still is the face of terror, no matter his attempts to shake that image off.

He has admitted many a time to his erroneous ways in his ISS-PDP avatars pre-jail days and has challenged the accusers to prove his terror links. The fact that he has an unsavoury past doesn’t mean he has no rights to lead a political life. If Madhany still has terror links/suspicious links no doubt the law of the land should take its course.

All these Madhany-haters have no problems with the Sangh Parivar’s killer machines and its hate politics. Madhany hasn’t caused the death of people, unlike those Modis and Thackareys, indicted for mass murders. When all those hate-mongers remain scot-free, it is unjust and unethical to single out and attack Madhany.

In his hey days with ISS and PDP, he was no greater threat than rightwing Hindutva leaders. But while the Sangh Parivar hate-mongers gained acceptance in the state's mainstream political parlance, Madhany assumed the aura of a hardcore militant.

The tendency to bay for Madhany's blood and keep a prejudiced view on him has to do with the general anti-Muslim feelings in our society and the Sangh-parroted all-Muslim-are-terrorists hogwash that runs deep in our psyche.

The crotchety has-been is at it again

A desperate Varun Gandhi seems to have burned his fingers

When all those me-too-is-a-Gandhi histrionics failed miserably, poor Varun Gandhi seemed to have been advised by none other than his mother Maneka, the messiah of animal rights (remember: her clinic is not for treating human beings!), to deliver a sermon that will fetch him all "Hindu votes" in the communally sensitive Pilibhit, in north west Uttar Pradesh.

But the sermon didn’t blow the socks off the Hindutva camp. On the other it has posed a tough competition for all those Togadis and Modis. This poor fellow’s anti-Muslim hate speech shouldn’t surprise anyone. In fact they shouldn’t seem dim-witted either.

His dad, Sanjay Gandhi, ruled like a dictator minus any official power during the infamous Emergency. Now, is his son readying himself to enjoy the fruits of power because he believes having been born in the Gandhi dynasty gives him the hallowed duty of ruling the country?

But the poor chap was robbed off that chance at the age of three when he and his mother Maneka were mercilessly thrown out of her house by Indira Gandhi just after the death of Sanjay Gandhi in 1980. The mother queen got furious when Maneka claimed ownership of all moveable properties worth Rs 4.73 lakh.

Maneka didn't have the mettle or material to mount a palace coup against the Empress Indira Gandhi. Since Gandhi wasn’t a patented name, the Empress couldn’t file a suit claiming its ownership either. So an estranged Maneka found solace in the more creative field of animal rights. And the Gandhi tag was so tempting for the BJP the Saffron party embraced the Madame wholeheartedly.

Now, mostly from a realisation that there ain’t a sliver of hope that might redeem her moribund past, Maneka wanted her son to test his luck. But didn’t anybody tell Varun that he should have inherited all those ‘Gandhi’ traits to hoodwink the Indian asses (sorry masses)?

The Amul Baby was in fool’s paradise to think that some Hindutva-spouting will win him votes. He was desperate and has burned his fingers big time.


Photo: Nitant8899/Wikimedia Commons

The inimitable Fab Four

Who can beat Beatles? The four lads from Liverpool is now a subject of study

Liverpool Hope University in the UK has launched a Master of Arts degree in The Beatles. And there is no other apt place than Liverpool for a course like this as this is where all the band members were born and raised.

A senior lecturer at the university has said that though there are over 8,000 books about the Beatles there have never been serious academic studies on the band.

Perhaps this is the first time that a band has become the material for academic studies. And coming after forty years since the band’s break-up, this shows the relevance of the band at a time the music world is flooded with various genres.

This, no doubt, is a tribute to one of the greatest bands on earth as it has redrawn the many dynamics of the music, with its unique style and the kind of music. The Beatles music still flows, transcending generations and genres.

It is simply difficult to attribute the band's success to a particular member. The Police means Stings; The Rolling Stones means Mick Jagger. But in the case of Beatles, all the four were unique in their own right. It wasn’t just John Lennon and Paul McCartney alone. There’s Ringo Star (Remember his wonderfuly-rendered ‘Don’t pass me by’) and of course the inimitable George Harrison whose Indian connection and association with sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar produced genre-defying numbers like ‘within you without you’.

It is impossible to confine the Beatles’ music into a particular genre like pop or rock. We have a number of songs that just cannot be bracketed into any particular style. Remember ‘Come together’, ‘Cry baby cry’ or ‘Revolution.’ The band wasn’t averse to experimenting.

So the ruling is: Bealtes still rocks!

A hyped film and loony ambassadors

Was Slumdog hyped beyond its worth?

It may be a belated review of a film which gained jingoistic reviews. I watched Slumdog Millionaire the other day and I felt it was hyped much beyond its worth. In the first place, the story seemed to me illogical; a guy getting all his answers right in the Indian version of Who Wants to be Millionaire purely from his life’s experiences. So much for a rag-to-riches fairytale.

The first half of the film was pretty okay with the travails and hardships of the lead character Jamal. The background music in most of the places put me off and they seemed out of the place, qualifying it to be tagged as just another Bollywood flick. I'm not juxtaposing the movies’ immense popularity to its winning eight Oscars, for Oscar is not the ultimate word in the film world.

After watching this I was reminded of City of Gods. The Brazilian movie also uses real life characters from a Brazil slum. But the comparison, I feel, just ends there. Slumdog doesn’t reach anywhere near this Brazilian movie, be it in craft or treatment.

I also found some similarities between a grown-up Salim, Jamal’s brother, and Rocket, the main character in City of Gods: from the way he holds the gun to his gait. But I am not sure whether this is pure coincidence or not.

One positive thing about the film as said by my dear friend Abis is that at least “some slum kids got to act in a movie, got admitted in school, had the chance to see "good things", felt important....” And it’s heartening that all the proceeds from the film will go for the benefits of the slum kids. I wish this movie will act as a catalyst for initiating a movement that will lead to eradication of the squalid underbelly of a “growing superpower”.

Where’s the poverty?

What baffled me most is why the ambassadors of India-shining campaign went ballistic with the selling-India-abroad whine. Because the film has only a very few passing shots of the slums, inevitable for the movie’s main story about a slum kid.

There's nothing in the film that suggests that it glorifies poverty in India. Now I think all those Bachchans and the like went to town with their pseudo-nationalism even before watching the film. They seemed to have jumped the gun just on hearing that word slum.

Talking about Bachchan he is hypocrisy personified. There is little reason to think that the yester-year superstar was so much concerned about India’s name abroad or the poor people here. He is the one who unabashedly acted as the brand ambassador of Eveready, a product once loathed and boycotted by many because it came from a company responsible for one of world’s greatest ever industrial disasters: Bhopal tragedy. Did he ever give a damn for the victims for whom justice is still a mirage?

These pseudo patriots were peeved because this film 'discredited' India's name in the international arena. This is patriotism minus responsibility and politics! These guys never had a problem when India's name was tarnished internationally when a state-sponsored genocide killed thousands many rendered refugees in Gujarat.