Imagine that party A indulges in widespread loot and corruption. It is voted out and party B comes to power. It now has two options:

a)      Be honest. Win the next election. Gain = zero

b)      Be corrupt. Lose the next election. Gain= a few thousand crores in the bank account

Which option would a party take?

The fight is against entrenched corruption in the political system. Why is this so difficult to understand?

Indian democracy is a failure. It is becoming a failure now, although it was not a failure earlier.  The first stage was universal franchise, which has been achieved.  Now the child moves from class one to class two. Obviously he cannot pass class two one class one syllabi.

In a democratic model, especially of India, it was implicit that people would become, better, aware and more assertive with the help of the government that they have elected. Obviously this has not happened. People remain illiterate, poor and afraid of authority. Every five years they go and cast their vote and come back to live the same wretched life. This has been going on decade after decade. The time has come to question this mode of governance.

Just because the majority of impoverished, caste-ridden, unaware or weak voters are resigned to a certain way of governance, must the minority who is not so poor, afraid and unaware keep on accepting their soiled way of life?

There have been innumerable issues that have been decided in this country based on sentiments of a section of people. These range from quotas, community related issues, crimes, everything. Why is that people are falling back on the now impotent universal franchise when the issue is corruption.

If a government has made plans to complete loot a nation in 5 years, should we wait for the elections to vote it out of power. Let us say they have made a pact to share half of the loot with the alternative formation, what do we do then?

There does not seem to be enough discussion on this matter. Media , as always, is engrossed with how many islands baba ramdev has, and which sari he was wearing and what congress running dogs barked.

Where is the meat?

This time round, the bearded one wants to make villains of Indian nationalists. Using one faulty argument after another, as is his custom, he sets upon the task of vilifying them. But we in India have had enough of these semi-literate media crooks, and love to rip these pen-pushers apart. Honestly, I haven’t seen any full-time Indian journalist who is more convincing than a part-time blogger. What are these guys paid for? To kiss the bottom of the establishment?

Here, Naqvi pretends to take issue with chest-thumping nationalists, but his beef clearly is with all nationalists. The word chest-thumping is a clever sleight-of-hand. There is no nationalism which cannot be conveniently branded chest-thumping. I am sure the clever one knows his, he has been doing this act for so long.

The nationalism he vilifies is the same that protects his precious posterior from jihadi attacks.But to a dyed-in-the wool mullah, global ummah matters more than national security. These guys have so little attachment to their country that nationalism looks like a cuss word to them. That is why they find its presence so onerous and intolerable. They live, the world over, like leeches, creating friction and hatred wherever they go, crazily standing apart with their fungal beards and skull caps, and abusing the genuine people of the land as nationalists.

Naqvi uses the following repetitive and tired tricks in his column:

1) Pretend that you are attacking a fringe group, but make sure anyone can smell you hate the entire community (viz. nationalists)

2) Ascribe hyper and imaginary arguments to his hated group, and then proceed to vilify them. Straw man fallacies, these are called.

3) When pontificating on anti-americanism and anti-whatever the mullahs love to talk about, do push in a few anti-hindu arguments. Carefully replace Hindu with nationalists/Sangh Parivar/ obscurantist.

4) While mouthing poison against Hindu fringe (of course) elements, drop in a few lines against mullahs which everyone knows to be the truth, such as ‘madarsas teach intolerance’. These do not sound provocative, because the mullah world is full of example of hate and intolerance and this is what we expect of them. But these serve the purpose of creating the illusion of a balanced picture, not just an anti-Hindu tirade, and you can freely ascribe imaginary heinous motives to Hindus.

5) Mix timelines and contexts like a raving maniac.

6) Link shallow, worthless examples to a larger point, such as a girls’s jeans and America’s imperial designs.

He has used these tricks ad nauseam and I thought it was high time we told him we know them.  Most of us are more intelligent than these pedestrian journalists, who are usually mediocre in the intelligence department. It is not difficult to see through them.

In the examples below, note the relevant trick number in brackets. Going through them, you can understand why his columns sound so confusing.

Naqvi you can rant and rave all about America and pakistan you want, but no false word of yours against us will go unchallenged here.

Chest-thumping Indian nationalists, for example, have periodically slandered fellow compatriots, usually Muslims, as anti-Indian, all because they backed a different cricket team. (1)

Ah, the hurt! This is because there is an all-too obvious similarity between people who cheer for the Paki team and those who burn alive women and children in packed compartments. Who do you think Kasab would cheer for, India or Pakistan?

 Likewise, groups of Christians are declared anti-national for spreading the word of Christ among the socially shunned lower strata of indigenous Indians. (3)

Let them start converting your impoverished bearded mullas with bags of rice and abusing your prophet, then we will see how much you howl about misplaced nationalism. But then the missionaries will never dare to. Not because there is any dearth of impoverished mullahs, but because they are so sectarian, brutal and violent that no missionary will dare to risk his neck. It’s amazing how much advantage people take of the tolerance of certain communities, provoke them, and then blame them for violence. I think till the time all mullah countries became secular in law and deed, you guys better unload your preachings onto them.

 A homegrown movement against big dams is readily branded as national treachery, (2) as is someone visiting Srinagar to release a book on Kashmir’s struggle against military occupation.

Clever trick, mixing the two examples, to get sympathy for your fellow bearded genocidal Kashmiri mullas. But I don’t know anyone who calls anti-dam activists as anti-national. Who called Medha Patker anti-national?

 When it comes to fudging facts there is no one to beat Israel. It has cleverly turned the tables on the most agreeable critics of Zionism by labelling them anti-Semitic.

This is good strategy on the part of Israel.Until the whole world rubs their noses on the ground asking jews forgiveness for the holocaust and also slaps muslims wholesale because their book refer to jews as pigs, they can and should do anything to the rest of the world.

 However, the flip side of the narrative is just as absorbing. Underneath the chador, the younger women have not abandoned their love of jeans, universally seen as an exclusively American symbol. (6)

Exactly the kind of shallow and stupid observation you are capable of. Many jeans wearing muslims have been known to plan bombing sane non-muslim communities. What about your pro-Americanism? Was your underwear invented in Arabia?

 “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” asked Samuel Johnson in 1775. “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American,” he famously stated. (5)

He did not know one day there will be a grotesque pool of inhumanity called Pakistan in the world, else he would have never said that. Dont use quotation of 1775 to justify the schizophrenic acts of mullahs in 21st century. You mix timelines and contexts like a raving maniac.

“Marx once compared [the] revolutionary new era of struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This [Obama] is the old revolutionary ‘mole’, not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through.”

Jabbering uncontrollably, are we?

It is my humble submission that he is a failed journalist. He has found his space- mouth abuses at India and get some column inches in Paki papers. I also feel that it is his failure and bitterness that he tries to pour out through his bread- and -butter columns.

In case J Naqvi is reading this, let me assure him that in our eyes, he is a miserable old hag. What’s more, all the vitriol inside him makes him write fanciful, bizarre and ill-intentioned pieces for his mother rag. Read the Pakistani journalists. They are measured, rational and worried to death about the state of affairs in Pakistan. His is the lone voice, clutching to conspiracy theories and convoluted logic. The Pakistanis live in a make-believe world of their own, their reality being so ghastly, so dehumanized, and so despicable. So he writes for them, offering them bitching material by the bagful. I mean, which country uses its military to train terrorists who kill innocents? What kind of madness are we talking about here? This is the diseased brain with which Manmohan wants to make peace? This is the diseased brain for which Naqvi writes.

Anyhow, the reason I am writing this is because sometimes his articles carry some common myths, and it is a good opportunity to trash them once and for all. In a recent article, he fantasizes that we were in peril of being attacked by rat country Pakistan if they mistook US attack for Indian. Must be doing drugs, Naqvi fellow.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/12/close-call-with-a-nightmare.html

In this article, Mr Naqvi opines that the US action was rash and it could have triggered a nuclear war with India. I think this is absolute rubbish. Even if the Pakistanis thought it was India, they would not have retaliated. They don’t have the balls. They have not done a single act of bravery in their entire lifetime. Why do we think they would precipitate a war with India? It is true they have attacked surreptitiously a few times. But that is quite different from reacting to a bold act of aggression. They are bullies and cowards, basically one and the same thing.

Pakistanis, the dumbfuckers that they are, have built a stockpile of nuclear weapons. Yet, a few armymen got into their territory, disrobed and raped their honour publicly, and these cowards could not move a finger. What is the use of these nuclear weapons?

In the event of a war with India, why would Pakistan use nuclear weapons? They know Indians wont use it first. But if they use it, then Indians would. Which means unless they want to be assuredly roasted in war, they will not risk a nuclear weapon exchange. They can have all the weapons and delivery systems and airplanes, but these rats wont have the courage. Nuclear deterrence is a bogus concept.

So to conclude, US was quite right. These cowards wont react, as they rightly guessed. And they did not. So all the paper that J Naqvi has blackened with his wild conjectures can be used to wipe rears.

Paksitan would have reacted blah blah blah, we all know you are not talking about real possibilities, you are trying to find some leaves to cover your dishonoured father nation, isnt it Naqvi?

Here is the link    http://www.dawn.com/2006/06/12/fea.htm#2 

Here is my reply (also sent to the author):   

Dear Javed, I read with interest your article “In search of a balanced picture” It was written a long time ago. But I couldn’t resist letting you know some views contrary to yours, in case you still hold them.

In the first line you contradict yourself when you say, “THERE were 16 per cent downtrodden Dalits in India at the last count. There were eight per cent adivasis or tribespeople. The Indian constitution guarantees 22 per cent job reservations for them in nearly all government departments. That quota was never filled up. Thus, between them the two communities share just two per cent of government jobs, a heavy component of these being lower division clerks and menial workers, including sweepers.”

Evidently, if dragging on for 22% reservations for 50 years (year of last count?) gives you 2% of seat-filling-success, wouldn’t you agree that this policy is a colossal failure? What do we need to reach 22% then- a reservation of 220%?Why don’t we bring quota down to 5%, achieve that target, take it to 10%, then 22% and so on. Why for your deep love of 22%, should ‘upper-caste’ educated guys go around begging for food and jobs in these days of extreme unemployment? Oh, I forgot. All upper-castes were born in royal families. Only the dalits were the life and soul of the freedom struggle, while the upper castes drank honey and nectar from gold bowls.

You probably also would not want to know that in the educational institutes (the ones producing doctors, MBA, engineers) the rate of occupancy of reserved seats is many times higher ( In my college, a regional institute of technology- a relatively high-tier college, all SC/ST seats were full). And yet by your own admission if they are only 2% of jobs-that too mostly sweepers- wouldn’t you care to know what went wrong in the colleges? Do you know that nearly all SC/ST students get hefty scholarships? Most of them drink heavily, study little and fail so many times that either they are thrown out or have to sober up and study so that they pass out atleast in a few additional years time. I shouldn’t wonder. Reservations have made them slothful and devoid of self-esteem. They want crutches everywhere. They will argue, blame, squabble, talk of persecution- but they won’t work their butt out to glory.

Also in my college, BCs were as good as the upper -castes in studies, and coolly used the reservations to their advantage to fill both the reserved and the general quotas hugely with their numbers.

I don’t know why shirt-tearing students qualify less for your sympathy than dalits, but I can see a severe disconnect of your views from the enormous complexities (chiefly introduced by the neta’s ill-intent) of the issue. Why should you not see that the more you do ‘positive -discrimination’ against upper-castes, the more hard-work they put in and find newer areas to shine. And once they have established themselves in these enterprises, social-justice rats come around snooping- ‘What, no dalits here! Discrimination!!’ I read a dalit leader protesting that Infosys is run by a Brahmin (namely, Narayanmurthy). What hope these sad leaders have for their followers?

I know of many upper-caste and lower-caste ordinary people of my and my parents’ generation- who threw themselves in the cauldron of competition- and came out with success and self-respect. My father used to go around from house to house to tie rakhi and get a day’s food. And he finally ended up as a pretty high functionary in a public-sector company. I just cant understand what stops your mama’s boy dalits, but I guess lying around drunk singing lewd songs in the hostel premises, all at the public’s’ expense, is more fun.

It would surprise you to know that many upper caste Hindus wouldn’t love more to see an equal society. Many of their numbers have done a lot for dalits, most notably Gandhi. What gets us mad is these lazy, cynical, divisive, blind policies created by impotent and decaying politicians like VP and Arjun (upper castes for you, with no other claim-to-fame than shortcuts to social justice) masquerading as social justice.Nothing exposes their rabid hypocrisy more than their resistance to reserving seats for lower-castes in the Parliament on the lines of other government jobs, to the tune of 50% at least.

Who will deny that a person who loves India will want an equal society? However if the netas believe upper-castes hate equality, it must follow they hate India- so try them for treason and have them killed or deported. Decide once and for all, for God’s sake; stop this daily nautanki of weak-kneed policies.

Frankly, expecting upper castes to live in poverty because of their akas’ stunted social-justice programs will always remain what it is – a perverted and unfulfilled dream.

Where else in the world will the dalits find policies so favourable to them but India? Who will ‘positively’ discriminate on their behalf with such wild abandon, giving finger to the ‘equality of opportunity’ and thereby the  ’right to live’ doctrine ? By all intents and purposes, India is first their country. It is in their interests to keep it healthy. Why are they digging its roots with so much hate-mongering? They will be left with a rotten country in the end from which to claim their benefits.

What good is a policy that alienates such a huge proportion of the people? What are these leaders for- don’t they know how important it is to look equitable, as well as to act? Where did they learn leadership-in a fish market?

You might say that exceptions in a caste may happen. Not necessarily so. I find Arun shourie’s advice good- implement reservations on an individual level, not on a caste level.

My advice- Teach them to fish. There is no moral principle behind reservations. It is wrong.

This is with reference to the other part of your article. DO Indians suffer from inferiority complex of sorts as a people? President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam gave an indication last week that unnecessarily perhaps, but they do…………………
 

India is by no definition a developed country. It is severely underdeveloped. Why are you so gleefully pointing out its flaws? We know where we stand. I can understand the satisfaction of Pakistani readers when they read all this in the spirit of ‘even they have problems -hee, hee”. But battling the ghosts of inferiority complex of a colonised country is a laudable mission. Atleast we are trying to improve.

Pakistan unfortunately has fallen to such depths of decay that ‘Pakistani’, is synonymous with ‘terrorist’. Part of the inferiority complex of Indians living abroad stems from the fact that they look like Pakistanis, and hence are liable to be looked upon as cold-blooded killers. Will you write about it? If not, how do dark reports about India help Pakistanis readers?

Of course, Journalists do a lot of picking and choosing while reporting, based on what they want to say. Your fellow journalist M. Saleem Chaudhry has this to say in his article “Two future economic powers: India, China ” in Dawn: There is no centre in this world economy. India is becoming a power house very fast. The medical school in
New Delhi is now perhaps the best in the world. And technology graduates of the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore are as good as any in the world. Also India has 150 million people for whom English is their main language. So India is becoming a knowledge centre. “  

I think that in a country that is attempting to drastically improve, journalism needs to be done in a positive spirit. Cribbing, negative reporting infests Indian newspapers, matched only by those riding the latest hype, and I think they are both a burden. They are of little good to any society wanting to move ahead. Dr. Kalam’s predominant mission in life is to make Indians positive. His single-handed leadership of India’s missile development is unmatched by anyone else in any other country. It requires self-belief of a massive magnitude. Surely you are not trying to teach him?

Warm Regards

Abhishek