That Bloke In The Big Smoke

"ONE DAY IN EARLY FEBRUARY 2002, a 12-year-old girl named Anika, the daughter of a senior engineer at Larsen and Toubro in Surat, got word she would be giving a dance performance at her school’s annual day on 1 March. It was to be her first dance in costume, and Anika insisted that her grandparents, who lived in Ahmedabad, should come to Surat to see her on stage. Her grandfather assured Anika he would certainly be there to see her perform.

Two days before Anika’s performance, on 27 February, 58 people—many of them women and children—were killed on a train passing through Godhra, 160 kilometres east of Ahmedabad. The train was carrying members of the VHP and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, who were returning from Ayodhya after celebrating the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, and initial reports suggested that a mob of Muslims in Godhra had executed a pre-planned attack on the coach.

As word began to spread from Godhra—and pictures and video from the scene hit the airwaves—fury mounted, led by the activists of the VHP, Bajrang Dal and RSS, baying for revenge. By the evening, the VHP called for a statewide bandh the next day, which was endorsed by the ruling BJP.

That same night, Ehsan Jafri, a 72-year-old former MP for Ahmedabad, called his granddaughter Anika in Surat with some disappointing news. Ensconced in his home in Gulburg Society, a mostly Muslim upper-middle class neighbourhood in Ahmedabad, Jafri, a veteran Congress politician, already sensed it would be risky to attempt a journey to Surat the next day. On the phone, he told Anika he wouldn’t be able to come. “But it’s just a shutdown, and he should make it,” she protested to her mother.

At around noon on 28 February, Anika called her grandfather again. “Have you not started?” she asked him. “Beta, the situation is not good here,” Jafri answered. “There are mobs everywhere.” He told her he needed to put the phone down, since he had a lot of calls to make.

A huge mob had already gathered around Gulburg Society, armed with petrol bombs, cycle chains and swords, shouting slogans like “Take revenge and slaughter the Muslims.” Many of Jafri’s neighbours, as well as Muslims from neighbouring slums, had come to his house seeking safety, expecting that his status as a former member of Parliament would afford them protection. “He must have made over a hundred phone calls for help,” Jafri’s wife, Zakia, told me. He called the Gujarat director-general of police, the Ahmedabad police commissioner, the state chief secretary and dozens of others, pleading for their intercession. A witness who survived the carnage later told a court that Jafri even called Narendra Modi: “When I asked him what Modi said, [Jafri] said there was no question of help, instead he got abuses.” Word of Jafri’s frantic calls for help even reached Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani in Delhi: a BJP insider close to Modi, who was with Advani on 28 February, told me that the BJP leader had even called Modi’s office himself to ask about Jafri.

By 2:30 pm, the mobs had broken through the gates of the housing society, and a flood of men converged on Jafri’s home. Women were raped and then burned alive; men were made to shout “Jai Shri Ram”, and then cut to pieces; children were not spared. According to records later submitted in court, Jafri was stripped and paraded naked before the attackers cut off his fingers and legs and dragged his body into a burning pyre. The official police report indicates that 59 people were murdered in Gulburg Society, though independent inquiries put the number at 69 or 70. Jafri’s wife, Zakia, and a few others who had locked themselves in an upstairs room survived.

To this day, Modi maintains that he had no knowledge of the events at Gulburg Society until he was briefed by police officers later that evening. But Sanjiv Bhatt, who was then the state deputy commissioner (Intelligence), says that Modi is lying. (Modi and his administration have vigorously contested Bhatt’s account, as well as the testimony given by several other police and government officials.) Bhatt insists that Modi, who also served as home minister, was in regular contact with the senior police and intelligence leadership throughout the day, and well-informed of events on the ground. Bhatt told me that he spoke with Modi over the phone several times before 2 pm, and reported that a mob had circled Gulburg, and that he met Modi at his office in the afternoon to report that the situation demanded immediate intervention.

“His response was very strange,” Bhatt told me. “He listened and then said, ‘Sanjiv, try to find out if in the past Jafri has been in the habit of opening fire.’”

“Outside the chief minister’s office, in the corridor, I bumped into the former chief minister Amarsinh Choudhary and former home minister Naresh Rawal,” Bhatt continued, referring to two Congress leaders. “Naresh Rawal was my minister earlier, so we talked. They told me Gulburg Ehsanbhai has been giving frantic calls, and they came to meet Modi. I said I had briefed the CM, but you also go and tell him,” Bhatt told me.

“I then got a call on my cellphone from my informer on the site at Gulburg,” Bhatt continued, “telling me that Jafri had opened fire. I was surprised. And when I reached my office, a short report was lying on the table saying Jafri opened fire in self-defence. That was when I realised that this man [Modi] knows things even before I came to know of things.”"

You can read the whole article here. Admittedly, it's two years-old and rather long (to put it mildly), but I can't recommend it enough, especially to those bemused by the comprehensive electoral victory of a man associated with the worst inter-religious violence in India in recent times.

Well done Labour, if indeed they were instrumental in securing two votes in the Commons. The second is the crucial one on military action, but it won't take place until the on-site UN weapons inspectors have reported back their findings. My views on Syria are still fairly fluid given the complex nature of the conflict, however if chemical weapons have been used (regardless of whether it was the government or the rebels), then I think I would support a limited air strike, merely to dissuade either party from engaging in that type of attack again. But only on one mandatory condition, that we had UN (and possibly even Arab League) support, just as we did with Libya. Surely that's the most important lesson to draw from the Iraq War fiasco. I don't think we should (ever) engage ground troops or take sides in this conflict because I think they're as bad as each other. If the rebels were to come to power, I'm fairly confident they would wipe out the Alawite community, to which Bashar Assad belongs. Sad as it is to digest, pre-Arab Spring, Assad, like Saddam Hussein before him, had largely maintained the peace (albeit fragile) between the various communities. Both belong to minorities, just as the Sunni rulers do in Shiite majority Bahrain. I suspect the best solution for Syria, would be to broker a deal between the warring factions, with the support of Russia. The last thing we need is to meddle in another regional conflict that is essentially a Greater Game being contested between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Yet I suspect between Iran's sabre-rattling over Israel, the Anglo-American Jewish lobbies, Iran's nuclear enrichment, and rising oil prices, my advice will eventually be ignored.

Windows Live Photo Gallery, which comes pre-installed with Windows Vista and Windows 7, has a panoramic stitching feature. Judging by the image below it's bloody good. You can even use the program to upload directly to Flickr and Facebook!


The result using Windows Live Photo Gallery.


The result using Autostitch.

A mobile phone advertisement featuring an illustration of Jesus winking and giving a thumbs-up has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This isn't the first time the ASA has adjudicated on religious matters and I think it's wrong that they do. Generally speaking, the ASA should only regulate ads that are misleading or deceptive to consumers, but thanks to powers bestowed upon them through the CAP Code (which they didn't write), they have assumed the roles of pope/imam in British society. To better understand what I'm on about, take a look at Clause 5.1 from the Code about Decency, which states that ads:

"should contain nothing that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence. Particular care should be taken to avoid causing offence on the grounds of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or disability. Compliance with the Code will be judged on the context, medium, audience, product and prevailing standards of decency"

I think the ASA should not have the power to decide what is or isn't offensive to me on any of those grounds but even if you thought they did, alarm bells should start ringing when ads are banned on the basis of a dozen or a few dozen complaints, rather than the necessary threshold that the ad "is likely to cause serious or widespread offence" (emphasis mine). In the case of the mobile phone advertisement mentioned above, the ASA investigated the matter after receiving... wait for it, 98 complaints! But if you thought that was bad enough, consider the case of a magazine ad for Antonio Federici ice cream exactly a year ago that was banned after 10(!) complaints were received. Why? Let the ASA explain for themselves:

"We considered the use of a nun pregnant through immaculate conception was likely to be seen as a distortion and mockery of the beliefs of Roman Catholics. We concluded that to use such an image in a light hearted way to advertise ice cream was likely to cause serious offence to readers, particularly those who practised the Roman Catholic faith. We noted that the number of complaints was relatively small but that the ad had been placed in a small number of publications only. The ad breached CAP Code clause 5.1 (Decency). The ad must not appear again in its current form."

Now I don't know about you but I think the ASA has no business banning ads just because it thinks, for whatever reason, the ad would cause serious offence to the entire Roman Catholic community. But it also seems obvious that even if you did think it was their business, the number of complaints makes little or no difference to the people deciding on such matters. They are both judge and jury on matters that hardly concern them.

Such moral policing is common in countries we deplore for a lack of free speech but it seems to me that even at home, there's one rule for advertising and one rule for the press. What's the press got to do with this? Well consider the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed from 2005. It seems obvious to me that had the cartoons been printed as part of an advert, they would've been banned by the ASA. Similarly, had the mobile phone or ice-cream adverts mentioned above been depicted in the form of a newspaper cartoon, it seems highly unlikely that they would've been banned. Now I can understand there's a difference between newspapers and advertisements, as the former seeks to inform and the other seeks to sell (although with the popularity of tabloids there are shortcomings in that assumption). Therefore it could be argued that from a starting point of free speech, a higher degree of regulation is necessary for ads, and I'll agree with that. But the question is at what point should that regulation end? Should the ASA, which derives its powers through parliamentary legislation, be able to in the first place adjudicate on, for example, religious matters? If yes, to what extent should they be able to do so? If clause 5.1 clearly states the ad should contain nothing that is likely to cause serious or widespread offence, should the number of complaints play a bigger role in reaching a conclusion? Should the ASA have so much unfettered discretion in reaching its decisions on such matters? You know where I stand.

In the midst of the hysteria about turning a site into a community center, Anne Barnard offers us a timely reminder via the NY Times:

"...what the two mosques have in common [...] is that both have existed for decades, largely unnoticed, blocks from the World Trade Center site. Masjid Manhattan, on Warren Street, four blocks from ground zero, was founded in 1970. Masjid al-Farah, formerly on Mercer Street, moved to its present location on West Broadway, about 12 blocks from ground zero, in 1985."

9/11 was the world's worst terrorist atrocity and a lot of Americans are still angry about it, but the opposition to the community center goes against everything the American constitution stands for. Which ironically is what many of the protesters use to defend antiquated gun laws and environmentally unsustainable lifestyles. Frankly, it's a response comparing favourably only with what is de rigueur in the third-world.

I came across a BBC article yesterday that promised a different take from each of our esteemed Fleet Street establishments. I was right:

BBC - Schools advised against swimming lessons in Ramadan
Mirror - Schools consider cancelling swimming in Ramadan
Telegraph - Council tells schools to rearrange exams and cancel swimming for Ramadan
Daily Mail - Council forces schools to rearrange exams and cancel lessons to avoid offending Muslims during Ramadan
Express - SCHOOLS FORCED TO DELAY EXAMS TO AVOID INSULTING MUSLIMS AT RAMADAN
Daily Star - HEADTEACHERS TOLD TO STOP SEX ED LESSONS DURING RAMADAN

Aw, I miss being in England. :) (Also notice how most of the left-wing media ignored the story)