By Dr Irfan Ahmad,
(Editor’s note: Sixteen Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) personnel were acquitted by a court in Delhi on Saturday, March 21, 2015 in the 1987 Hashimpura massacre case. A total of 19 PAC personnel were facing trial for allegedly killing 42 people in Hashimpura Mohalla of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh on May 22, 1987, of which three died during the trial. Below is the reaction of noted Anthropologist Dr Irfan Ahmad. This is the note taken from his Facebook wall, with due permission.)
What does the acquittal by the court in the Hashimpura massacre case mean? The lack of courage to face the truth and resultant lies!!!
1987 Hashimpura massacre (Courtesy: IE)
To Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters” and “whatever it says, it lies – and whatever it has, it has stolen.” Tellingly, only a few passages after this, Nietzsche wrote about journalism. “Just look at these superfluous ones,” screams Zarathustra, “They are always sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and can’t even stomach themselves.”
So this time media will not talk about ‘collective conscience’. No SMS poll by media! Why would it? Is conscience not predicated on number and ethnicity?
Ujjwal Nikam told the truth about his lies as if to ask: yes, it was a lie; what can you do?
How lies flourish in democracy? Here is the Australian way:
On October 7, 2001, a boat with over 200 asylum seekers aiming to reach Australia was turned back. The government claimed that some parents in the boat threw their children into water to blackmail the government to let them land in Australia. Australian media across the board published this dehumanising story.
Three days later, the Department of Defense released photographs and media published them to validate the story. That parents threw their children was a rumour, was proven months after the incident; but John Howard had achieved his goal. He was re-elected as the Prime Minister.
Rather than question this story, The Herald Sun, conducted a poll –– similar to the Indian TV channels’ which conducted SMS polls whether Mohammad Afzal should be hanged or not – asking: “Should boat people who throw their children into the sea be accepted into Australia as refugees?” Over 90 % non-hesitantly said “No”.
It was not only Howard and his government which “frequently lied to the public”; all prime ministers of Australia “from [Robert] Menzies [b.1894] to Howard lie.” In 2006, editor of Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher published result of an opinion poll according to which most Australians held that Howard was a liar yet his approval rating stood at 52%.
Such is the truth about democracy!
Democracy doesn’t oppose lies, it simply converts them into statistics and translates them into tables.
Let me add the passage about Hashimpura killing from my book Islamism and Democracy in India (P. 167):
“Started in October 1984 by Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a constituent of Sangh Parivar, by the late 1980s, the temple campaign had reached a flashpoint resulting into sharp communal antagonism, especially in Uttar Pradesh. The worst of riots that took place in its aftermath was in 1987 in Meerut, a town situated near Delhi, and with a sizeable Muslim population. The victims were Muslims. According to an Amnesty International report, at least 89 Muslims were killed and burnt alive in the Hashimpura locality of Meerut and Maliana, a village some 10 kms away from Meerut. The report stated that it was the police who killed people…”
(Dr Irfan Ahmad is Associate Professor of Political Anthropology at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne and author of ‘Islamism and Democracy in India’, which was short-listed for the 2011 International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Prize for the field of Social Sciences.)