Terrorism vote-bank politics of Kerala and Tamil Nadu

The extent of jihadi entrenchment in Kerala was demonstrated in 2003 in Marad, a sleepy coastal fishing village, where eight Hindu fishermen were hacked to death by a Muslim mob on the beach. The killers then hid inside the nearby Jumma Masjid, where hundreds of local Muslim women converged to prevent the police from entering to catch the attackers. This became known as the Marad Massacre or Second Moplah Massacre. Justice Thomas P. Joseph's commission was set up to investigate the massacre, and it come out with shocking details about the robust infrastructure that the jihadis had built in Kerala. The assistant commissioner of police testified before the commission, stating that National Development  Front (NDF) had been receiving very large funds from unspecified foreign countries to carry out its terror training. The commission reported that the Crime Branch had failed to inquire into the source of funds for such a large quantity of weapons and well coordinated attacks.

Another disturbing dimension that the commission brought out was the nexus of politicians, bureaucrats and jihadis. The assistant commissioner was severely criticized for the way he tred to shield one of the prime accused, and for his failure to maintain surveillance on a suspected militant despite intelligence warnings. This police officer tried to remain involved in the massacre area even after he had been transferred in the 'public interest'. The commission pointed out that his appointment was 'shrouded in suspicious circumstances' and that allegations of his links with the terrorists could not be ignored. The commission reported that this official had been appointed without knowledge of the police head and this was done 'to oblige a Muslim leader'.

Such political patronage has made the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) very strong in Kerala. SIMI operates behind a dozen front organizations, of which at least two are based in the state capital and others are located in strategic places, like the main seaport. The Kerala government officially declared in 2006 that SIMI's cadres had developed links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba of Pakistan. Police reports indicate that SIMI is operating under the cover of religious study, rural development and research. Some of these organizations are spreading 'extremist religious ideals' among the youth of Kerala, under the guise of 'counselling and guidance centers working for behavioural change'. SIMI is also reported to have established a women's wing. It receives generous funds from Kuwait and Pakistan.

The escalating level of terrorism in Kerala led a retired official, who had served in Jammu and Kashmir, to say that a similar situation had prevailed in Kashmir before terrorism reached unmanageable proportions.

Tamil Nadu-Kerala jihad Nexus

In Tamil Nadu each of the dominant radical groups that have been spun out of SIMI and their social fronts, has become intimately aligned with one of the two Dravidian parties. Thus, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been compromised and have become accommodating to jihad. The Tamil Nadu government charged a Muslim senior civil officer with unlawfully attempting to help Madani, and this official was suspended. But the next government in power revoked the suspension and promoted him as the chief secretary to the chief minister.

An investigation by The Indian Express revealed that as soon as the DMK government came to power, it ordered the cases to be dropped against twelve Muslims involved in violence and having Al Ummah contacts. The report said that senior policemen were shocked by the government's 'blatant sympathy' for the radicals.

In 2004, the Tamil Nadu police took action against a new Islamic group which was receiving foreign funds. Founded by the former SIMI president of Tamil Nadu, this group converts disenfranchised Hindus to radical Islam and then deploys them as militants. In 2006, the police arrested youths belonging to this organization with maps and ingredients for bombs. The police officer making the arrest was transferred as a punishment, and the police was harassed by the state officials for making these arrests. Police trying to arrest Al Ummah cadres have been attacked and not allowed to enter the Muslim area, turning certain areas into 'Muslim-only zones' that are outside government authority.


(Excerpt taken from pages 403-405; for all original references kindly refer the 'Breaking India' book)

External Links


The judicial commission probing Kerala’s worst communal massacre in Marad in 2003 has severely indicted almost every arm of the Congress-led United Democratic Front Government: politicians, police officers and top bureaucrats. Click to read article

How 'liberal' scholars are Christian proselytizers in disguise

Anti India Talk by Angana Chatterji - MP3 Link

Angana Chatterji is associate professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), an institution that was established specifically to bring the spiritual teachings of Sri Aurobindo to the West. Ironically, she has used this position to do exactly the opposite, namely, to try to demolish the legitimacy of Indian spirituality and the Indian nation. She cites her interests as 'identity politics, nationalisms, self-determination'. Prior to joining CIIS, she worked in policy and advocacy research at the Indian Social Institute, which is run by Jesuits in Delhi, for the explicit purpose of propagating 'Christian inspiration and following the social teaching of the Catholic Church'.

Chatterji provided 'critical assistance' to a highly libelous and unsubstantiated report that damned a US-based Indian charity organization, India Development Relief Fund (IDRF), alleging that they were funding hatred and atrocities against Indian minorities. The driving force behind this was that IDRF's schools in Indian rural and tribal areas were providing a successful alternative to Christian missionary schools involved in conversion, and Chatterji was brought in to defame the non-Christian competition that IDRF provided.

While she finds US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan to a violation of those countries' rights and calls George Bush 'a man who himself should be charged with crimes against humanity', she still wants US intervention in India's affairs, for example, through the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. Chatterji provided testimony before the United States Congressional Task Force on International Religious Freedom on violence in Orissa, chaired by Congressmen Trent Franks and Joseph R. Pitts, both with strong right-wing evangelical connections.

She also sent an unsolicited testimony on Orissa violence to the government of India, in which all her data came directly from the report by the All India Christian Council, which was discussed earlier. Her input was so one-sided that she completely ignored some well-established facts about the aggressive evangelism involved and the nexus between Christian evangelists and Maoists in the state. The violence was precipitated by the murder of a Hindu sage, who she dismisses as 'a male Hindu proselytizer'. She describes the social services done by Hindu organizations, as 'conscription into Hindu activism', even as she praises the same kind of social work in 'health care, education and employment offered by Christian missionaries'.

Source: http://asiasociety.org/files/091216_mirakamdar_1.jpg

Chatterji is also a standard and predictable face at major events supporting Kashmir separatists, having declared herself to be working on 'self-determination in Indian-administered Kashmir'. At one such conference on Kashmir, organized by the Pakistani students Association at George Washington University, the embassy of Pakistan, and Pakistan's Minister of Kashmir Affairs, she spoke of the 'growing concern among civil society groups about human rights crises in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the areas of social, political, cultural, religious, and economic rights'. She accused India of 'continued occupation of [certain areas of] Kashmir'. Muhammed Sadiq, who maintains a Kashmiri news and analysis portal, explains how Angana Chatterji uses human rights concerns in lopsided way to play in the hands of Islamic terrorists:

[Angana Chatterji] announced the formation of the 'International peoples' Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian Administered Kashmir' on 5 April in Srinagar. Interestingly, this organisation too insists that the focus of HR investigations should be on the Indian side of Kashmir and not in PoK too. Moreover, this is a fault-finding mission. Its only aim is to slam the Indian security forces, further highlight HR issues and vitiate the situation. There is no attempt at reconciliation, offering succour to HR victims or working with the government to ensure that HR violations do not take place. Dr Chatterji, like many before her, are, intent on primarily demonising the Indian security forces and thereby fanning hatred.

By depicting India as an undemocratic state filled with horrors of Hindu savagery, such left-wing academics have blurred the distinctions between Islamic terrorism and what they portray as equally bad violations by Indians against Muslims, Christians and Dalits. This seems to justify terrorist attacks on India as well-deserved. In the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, this view was reflected by Julian Duin, the religion editor of Washington Times:

The terrorist assault - this time by Muslims - on Mumbai later in the year, highlighted the powderkeg India has become and how often in this Hindu-majority country, the oppressed don't get a get a lot of justice. The perpetrators in Orissa have gone unpunished.

Another public event at the New York Public Library also featured the same view, namely, that Indians deserved the blame for the Mumbai attacks because they were illegally occupying Kashmir and oppressing Muslims in general. One of the prominent panelists with this view was Columbia University professor of philosophy, Akil Bilgrami, an Indian-American with staunch views against Indian civilization. The meeting was declared closed once a few Indians in the audience, led by Narain Kataria, started to point out the radical one-sidedness of the discussion.

(Excerpt taken from pages 263-266; for all original references kindly refer the 'Breaking India' book)

Is NDTV's Jennifer Arul a secular journalist or a 'Christian journalist' ?

'News with a Christian twist'

India's overtly secular media is also heavily influenced by foreign organizations, which helps plant devout Christian journalists to serve their interests. An example of such a journalists is Jennifer Arul, who wields considerable clout as someonne with more than thirty years of experience as a broadcast journalist and media executive in Asia. She regularly visits evangelical educational institutions in the West to address students. When she visited Point Loma Nazarene University (USA), which calls itself ' one of the leading Christian universities in the country', the journalism students described the focus of her discussion as 'fighting against violence in th cast system and standing up for the rights of women and mistreated children'. She spoke of her campaign to educate 'her native India to the effects of dowry deaths that, according to her research, took the lives of twenty thousand Indian women' in one year alone. Arul told the students that her solution to dowry deaths was to bring Christianity to India, saying, 'I think that we should use our Christian faith to help people speak out and tell the truth'. It was noted that she always keeps her cross necklace visible when she reports. She explains: 'As a journalist, you can't remain uninvolved. If I can bring this little Christian twist to my story, I'll do it'.

Source: http://www.themediaproject.org/author-profile/jennifer-arul

What she avoids mentioning is that dowry deaths are evenly distributed across the Indian religions, including Indian Christianity. In fact, there are especially high levels of this crime in the predominately Christian state of Kerala. When this problem in their own communities was pointed out, church leaders were hesitant to forthrightly condemn the practice. Instead, the main church denominations in Kerala (the Syro-Malabar, Marthoma and Jacobite churches) asked their followers to merely 'reduce the wedding expenses', but did no condemn the dowry system. On the other hand, the head acharya of Kanchi, considered one of the most orthodox Hindu leaders of India, condemns dowry repeatedly as being against Indian culture and tradition. While dowry abuse and coercion was not a social phenomenon in pre-colonial India, it was practiced until modern times in Christian countries.

Gegrapha and Indian Christian Journalists

Gegrapha is a transnational para-church organization founded by David Aikman, a Christian fundamentalist fighting scientific evolution theory ho also declared that Christianity had made George Bush a better president. Gegrapha's official mission statement is a 'call to all journalists who are Christians - Protestants, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox - at all stages ot their career....'

Aikman elaborates :

As journalists all over the world, many of us operate in cultures which either do not acknowledge truth to exist or are hostile to those who claim that it exists and can be known. In this climate, we need to remind ourselves that we serve a King [i.e. Jesus] who embodies both truth and justice, and who indeed is the truth (John 14 : 6).

in 1997, Aikman produced atrocity literature about India that was outright false. just before the 1999 General Elections in India, Jennifer Arul was featured prominently at the Gegrapha International Conference in England, and she said :

The burning of a missionary, the rape of nuns, the destruction of churches, the assault on a priest, are ominous signals to Christians of all denominations.... How many perpetrators against the Christian community in Indian have been brought to book? Commissions of inquiry are appointed but very little comes out of them. Action? Seldom! A true picture or a report objectively and dispassionately, to be correct and impartial. It is no wonder that those who try to do their Christian duty are branded as activists. Talking of activists, three days before I left Chennai I met John Dayal, the editor of the midday newspaper, based in Delhi. he has involved himself in the United Christian Council, which is currently involved in telling Christians about various anti-Christian activities around India, activities which, as a journalist, he obviously is privy to. We are due to have our general election during the month of September and the information he gave at that meeting was most valuable. I heard him and I also saw the reaction from the six hundred organisations that were represented.... Christian media persons like ourselves have to use the power we have to influence.

At another international meeting of Gegrapha, Arul spoke again about the role of a Christian journalist operating in a non-Christian environment. She referred to non-Christian Indian journalists as those 'who follow different paths', while praising the Christian journalist as someone who has the 'responsibility of telling the truth'. Criticizing the limits placed on evangelism in government media channels, she praised her ability to use private satellite channels to report exclusively on the problems of Hindu society. She advocated that the 'Christian journalist has to bring a perspective to every story', and said that she did not care about being 'accused of inciting violence and not promoting religious tolerance'. Before her applauding Western Christian sponsors, she made it clear that the Christian identity in her takes precedence over the journalist :

Do we believe we are journalists first and foremost and only then does the Christian label get tagged on? It's a tricky question and one that needs thinking about. As for me, I believe that being a Christian journalist puts me in a uniquely privileged position to bring the truth , as I see it, to my 375 millions viewers who are of course the public Square.

Gegrapha is a facilitator of Christian journalists who ground their professional work in personal faith and use their transnational connections. Stephen David is another strategically placed Gegrapha member who is the principal correspondent on political and current affairs for India Today, the country's largest news weekly. Such journalists now comprise a rapidly growing group across India's media, where they can act behind the scenes in framing the news. Yet, the impressions that are created internationally by John Dayal, Jennifer Arul and other high-profile indian Christian journalists, is that the Indian media is anti-Christian, that Hindus terrorize Christians, and hence foreign intervention is necessary for justice in India. This is music to the cars of their sponsors, who naturally, reach for the pocket book.

NOTE
Based in Chennai, she is the resident editor and bureau chief in South India for New Delhi Television Ltd., Jennifer Arul is also chief operating officer of an Indonesian news and information channel, Astro Awani, honored in its first year for best current affairs programme in Indonesia. (Bio-data of Jennifer Arul as presented in 'Journalism Through the Eyes of Faith' section of Bethel University : URL : http://www.bethel.edu/special-events/jtef/bios). In 2007, she launched a similar Astro service in Malaysia. According to ChennaiTVNews.com, Jennifer Arul has been made the managing editor of a new channel in association with 'The Hindu' newspaper. (ChennaiTVNews.com 2008)

(Excerpt taken from pages 360-362; for all original references kindly refer the book)