Submitted by Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
Bombs went off in the famous Times Square of New York city this morning. This is the same city that carries the scarred memories of 9/11 bombings of World Trade Center’s twin tower buildings. Hours have gone by and still the police is not quick on the draw, like the notorious media-publicity hungry Mumbai police, to announce or rather proclaim from the rooftops that the bombings are the handiwork of Al-Qaida or Muslim terrorists. New York City’s prime newspaper has carried story about the bombing, list how similar bombings, similar timings and similar targeting of prominent buildings, but did not hazard the most crucial guess as to who could be behind these series of city bombings right from 2005. There can be no better investigative reporters available to New York Times, than, one can be sure, than say with the Times of India, or Indian Express or various TV channels, dominated by the Rupert Murdock’s Star News and Times’ TIMES NOW news channels. Still, the restraint shown by the print and electronic media in New York is an exemplary lesson to both the Mumbai police and Mumbai media, who are obsessed with the ‘demonisation of Muslim’ agenda and are ill-equipped to envision the greater harm they do to the security and national integrity of the nation. No nation can center its politics on internal or external violence and enjoy peace that is necessary for progress in all human endeavors. The hate mongers among us should learn from the current mood in the US, which has now learnt the lessons of neo-con warmongerings and its negative damaging effects not only to US economy but in a chain reaction to the rest of the world. It is time, Mumbai police and Mumbai’s print media as well as national electronic media reform their thinking and their agenda and work with a positive state of mind, to cope with the increasingly deteriorating conditions prevailing in the city, to which they have been so mindlessly contributing to, since December 1992.