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Former SP govt accused of showering favours on Mulayam’s daughter-in-law’s NGO

Hemant Bijapurkar
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Former SP govt accused of showering favours on Mulayam’s daughter-in-law’s NGO

The former Akhilesh Yadav led Uttar Pradesh government is in the news for the wrong reasons after an RTI query has revealed that 86% of the funds reserved for the NGOs carrying cow welfare activities were granted to an NGO run by the Mulayam Singh Yadav’s daughter -in-law.

The RTI query initiated by activist Nutan Thakur revealed that the Gau Sewa Aayog had sanctioned a total amount of Rs 9.66 crores from 2012-2017 out of which 8.35 crore or about 86.4% were sanctioned to Jeev Ashraya an NGO run by Aparna Yadav.

The Gau Sewa Aayog falls under the State Animal Husbandry department and gives grant to cowsheds and organisations which work for the welfare of cows. Interestingly, a total of Rs 1.05 crores has been granted by this Aayog in 2017-18 out of which Aparna Yadav’s NGO has not received any penny. This duration coincides with the departure of the SP government and the arrival of the Yogi led BJP government.

Apart from this the RTI applicant Nutan Thakur has also claimed that the initial lease of land allotted to Aparna Yadav’s NGO was extended to 5 years by the SP government.

Aparna Yadav who is the wife of Prateek Yadav, the step-brother of Akhilesh Yadav, has reacted and come out with a simple defence regarding all the allegations. She has stated that if some organisation is doing good work, why shouldn’t it be helped out financially.

It remains to be seen if the authorities decide to further investigate the matter to find out if any rules were broken in giving away the funds. This issue though might just add to the already sizeable tally of skeletons which are tumbling out of the former UP government’s closet.

In the past, we had reported how the Agra Lucknow expressway, which was dubbed as Akhilesh Yadav’s pet project, got riddled with allegations of illegal land conversion. Apparently few of the land sellers had colluded with government officials to show their plots as residential land to earn more compensation.

The Yogi government has also announced a probe into Akhilesh’s Gomti riverfront project for financial irregularities. Plus it has been reported that constructions worth Rs 1280 crores carried out under the SP government could have instead been done at 1/4 the the total cost.

Beware! Don’t fall for the ‘data’ lies like ‘97% of cow related violence happened after 2014’

Abhishek Banerjee
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Beware! Don’t fall for the ‘data’ lies like ‘97% of cow related violence happened after 2014’

It is often said that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. If you have been watching the  media over the last few days, you might have come across a puzzling statistic that “97%” of cow related violence happened after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has been actively promoting this number and here are just a few examples of media outlets that have made it to the roll of dishonor thus far.

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Where did this 97% number originate? It turns out that all these articles are referencing a report compiled by an organization called IndiaSpend :

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I visited their website and discovered that they claim to do something called “data journalism”. Which is shocking, because the methodology behind their “data” of 97% cow related violence happening after 2014 is so dishonest that it can only be considered a lynching of statistics:

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A “database” on crime compiled not by looking at police records, but by running Google searches with certain keywords! Worse, they decided to stick to English language media only, taking pride in saying that a “cursory search” through Hindi media “appeared” to throw up the same incidents.

Well, the Hindi media should count its blessings. At least they got a “cursory search”. Everyone knows that nothing worth talking about is ever reported in media in any other language.

So, if the English media chooses not to cover an incident, it doesn’t get counted! Of course, they found that 97% of cow related violence happened after 2014! Because the English media only began talking about this after 2014.

Hey IndiaSpend, why stop there?

For your next “data journalism report”, perhaps you could save some more effort and just search the NDTV website instead of all of English language media.

Why do that even? Why not just collect all your “data” from searching Rajdeep Sardesai’s Twitter timeline? There’s no way that could throw up a fake, distorted picture of India, right?

If only IndiaSpend had bothered with a “cursory” search regarding the ethical methods of data collection….

This 97% number and the media fanfare surrounding it is something of a watershed moment in the history of fake news. Liberals couldn’t find the actual data to prove their accusations against the Modi government. The IndiaSpend report is the first attempt that I know of where liberal outrage itself has been recycled into “data”.

Considering the furious pace at which the mainstream media has fanned this piece of fake news, it is only a matter of time before this number of 97% becomes a fixture as well in international reports about India.

This first wave of  “reports” in the Hindustan Times, Economic Times, Firstpost and Business Standard will soon be referenced by BBC and New York Times.

In turn, future articles in Indian media will reference this second wave of “reports”, firmly establishing this fake 97% number in the discourse.

The final stage will consist of academics and court poet historians whose job it is to turn the fake news into accepted historical fact.

It is up to the common people to resist. And it’s a good thing that the criticism over IndiaSpend’s figure of 97% lynchings occurring after 2014 (see examples here and here) seems to have reached some of the usual suspects.

One of these social “science” eminences put out a series of tweets, apparently defending IndiaSpend’s practise of using media reports to generate its now (in)famous “data” (We also note with some amusement Prof. Varshney’s possible bid for self promotion):

Let’s quickly examine this line of reasoning. Prof. Varshney’s main claim is that media reports would be more reliable than the “useless” government records when it comes to cow related violence.

So, why not check this assumption quickly with respect to the “data” that IndiaSpend has put out here? In its list of 63 incidents of cow related violence, IndiaSpend itself admits that charges have been filed in as many as 61 cases. In another case, IndiaSpend says that the police didn’t file a case, but the High Court acted severely transferring the District Magistrate, the SP, DSP and the SHO of police and even the CBI took note of the case. That makes 62 of 63 where the case of cow related violence is present in official government records.

Or as IndiaSpend would have said, 98.4% of cases of cow related violence appearing in English media have been recorded by the government.

This blows apart Prof. Varshney’s core argument that government data would be “useless” for cow-related violence.

Thus far, IndiaSpend seems to only have discovered instead that there is little reason to suspect that the government records are leaving out cow related violence. This means that real unknown in the data put out by IndiaSpend is the extent to which the “English media” might have left out other incidents of cow related violence.

If anything, IndiaSpend’s data seems to make a stronger case for reliability of government records. Instead, the question mark shifts firmly to IndiaSpend’s approach of using media reports instead of government records.

But wait, let us not forget that IndiaSpend did much worse than scan media reports, they only scanned English media reports.

Scientists and in fact even social scientists are trained to spot every qualifying word. As such, it is rather shocking that Prof. Varshney fails to even notice the leap of faith from “media” to “English media”.

Data from the Audit Bureau of circulations [pdf] shows that only one out of the top 10 most circulated newspapers in India is published in English. That would be The Times of India. Incidentally, the ToI is referred only once in IndiaSpend’s alleged dataset, further underlining how spectacularly unrepresentative their search effort was.

Instead, there are 5 newspapers in the top 10 that are published in Hindi and the Hindi media gets only a “cursory search”.  Other languages which make for 4 of the top 10, don’t even get that much.

Imagine if you were faced with an opinion poll that surveyed only Indians who speak English…

Not to mention that IndiaSpend did not even make an attempt to define the term “English media”. Their list of sources seems to include plenty of links from outlets such as Catch News and The Wire.

To summarize, we see:

  1. No attempt to define the source (“English media”) that has been studied.
  2. No attempt to explain why the subclass (“English media”) that has been studied is representative of the whole class (“media”).
  3. No justification provided as to why media reports are to be preferred to government records.

No. (2) is particularly surprising in light of the fact that publicly available data proves their implicit assumption to be spectacularly false. And No (3) is totally unforgivable in view of the fact that their own data blatantly contradicts the idea that government records on cow related violence are useless.

I don’t know about Prof. Varshney, but I think it is recognized worldwide that such sloppiness should be the kind of blunder that ends careers.

Of course, the more deep seated evil here is the assumption that English media, written by the elite, can be used to exonerate the elites who are themselves in the dock here.

Remember that the issue at hand here is branding of the country as Lynchistan, and that branding happens through narrative setting, which is the main job of the English media. The accusation is that the English media selectively highlights instances of cow-related violence in certain years and in certain states with a specific agenda.

Remember ghar-wapsi reports and debates in English media? They always happened but somehow never made their way into English media reports before 2014, but you just needed to look into Hindi media (e.g. here and here) and you knew it was an annual affair.

When English media itself is the accused party here, how exactly can you use media reports to give it a clean chit? This is worse than AAP’s internal Lokpal.

It is understandable that certain eminent personalities, who have thus far comfortably and cyclically quoted each other through decades of agreement under a Congress-fed establishment feel irritated that their assumptions are being questioned. But the challengers are here, whether the consensus likes it or not.

Cultural Marxism, and how it is similar to other ‘prophet driven’ industries

D V Sridharan
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Cultural Marxism, and how it is similar to other ‘prophet driven’ industries

Let’s begin with Marxism. For most of a century, it had a craggy, bearded Prophet staring down at you from everywhere. For half a century, world’s best universities produced apostles interpreting Marx’s word as the key to a Utopian future of economic equality.

When Gorbachev and Deng abandoned Marxism, you’d have thought Marx’s flock would have dispersed and merged into the emerging capitalist societies.

But no. It morphed into ‘Cultural’ Marxism.

If classical Marxism was about the haves pitted against have-nots, Cultural Marxism pits the ‘oppressed’ against the ‘oppressors’.

And you know what? The morphed version of Marxism is hugely successful. It in fact penetrated the West in ways the original version could not. Today, it thrives in academia, the social sector and enjoys patronage from wealthy Foundations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8pPbrbJJQs

Our purpose here of course is to understand how this Cultural Marxism is not any different from other Prophet-driven industries. We’ll also explore the reason why India might be proving to be a formidable territory for it to conquer.

But, first let’s try and answer two questions: one, why does Cultural Marxism (or whatever the movement now calls itself) attract huge funds from wealthy capitalists and two, why it is not to be underestimated.

Lone-wolf capitalists are deep thinkers. They are not content with their personal wealth having grown past all possible vulnerabilities. George Soros and Pierre Omidyar are shrewd strategists who think long term. They want a future that is just a bit less than stable but not entirely unstable. It is when nations are not entirely settled that big profits are to be made. They payroll media, NGOs and staged events to keep things tense.

Here’s a quick read on how and why the Omidyar Network funds NGOs and India-focused media. [Indian industrialists are no match to these but are beginning to learn. Many run media houses and a titan among them, buys into every media house he can.]

With funds in ample flow, sepoys for Cultural Marxism are not hard to recruit. Tenures and chairs in universities, fellowships, seminar junkets, NGOs, media fronted events, over-paid jobs are among the many inducements. What is required of them is not stupid, bare faced propaganda, -though there is also plenty of that – but sophistry couched in research-ese and mangled statistics.

Western Universities have been steadily training oppression researchers. Curriculum probably includes – and I am guessing here – how to identify oppressors and victims, create new oppressed classes, counsel them, inspire them to rise, publicise and stage summit events to show-case unrest. In order that the industry may endure, the mission is defined as ‘eternal warfare between increasingly, narrowly defined victim groups and their oppressors’. Women, sexual variants, minorities, nomads, tribals… heck anyone with a marketable grievance is an opportunity for a scholar or his NGO to champion.

Pardon my seemingly trivialising tone. I am not saying suffering does not exist or does not require redressal, especially in a diverse society like India, but I do charge that there is wanton mischief that’s on parade here sporting altruistic airs.

Be all that as they may, how is this a ‘Prophet’ industry? See, a Prophet’s job is to ‘save’ people. To stay in business he needs people to save. He can point to born-with sins in them and ‘save’ them. He can call them idolatrous kafirs and ‘save’ them.

Since every Prophet craves the whole world for himself and wants exclusive rights to ‘saving’, competition in the industry gets severe. There’s only a finite supply of people who can be persuaded they are born with sin or worshipping in any and every way is a sin.

A new Prophet must therefore create a narrative all his own that has an eternal appeal. Enter ‘Cultural’ Marxism. By it’s credo anyone can be persuaded he is a victim. And then saved.

Western universities’ humanities departments are the neo-madrasas from which issue a stream of victim-finders.They serve their Prophet’s mission. The pitch of the Prophet of Cultural Marxism is different and novel. It is this: “You have not sinned; but you have been sinned against. You need to be saved.” Voila, you have victims in endless supply.

Another claim I made was, India exasperates Prophets. Why? Because there is no concept of everyone’s a sinner. Nor, that worshipping Murtis can be evil – far from that. Here, everyone errs in his own way, and for each, there’s an amelioration in the form of an explanation, a rite or a god to invoke.

There are a thousand Murtis to choose from and worship. A Hindu is pretty much left to himself. He has choice. He must take personal responsibility for his own errors. He’s guided but not trussed. He exercises his free-will. He may if convinced, go to a dargah, have peacock feathers blessing him and directly from there saunter into a church and genuflect.

These deviant ways were a hurdle for the Prophets of Peace or Love. But the new Prophet has a better chance of success with his liberal definition of people he’s looking to save – as long as funds flow to feed his projects.

That’s where he hits a new wall. The wall is Laws – or rather, their enforcement. Things have changed lately: a bearded threat has been ruling in Delhi since 2014. Fund flows are now required to be – eeks! – legal. Prophets don’t like laws except the ones they lay down. Like see, democracy is a man made system but sharia is the Prophets’s. There’s a clearly perceived threat to the whole industry.

A deal is struck to carve territories, much as mafia dons used to. Cultural Marxists will grow its own victims. Human Rights, nuclear power, food fascism, Dalit suppression, linguistic pride, sub-nationalism, lynching, suspect EVMs… anything and everything is a nursery bed.

There are rentable troopers aplenty in academe, media, politics, and there’s a ready choir of familiar Indians that can be switched on to auto-fulminate. Political parties turfed out of office are ever eager to join. Pastors have been having slow days, and can be rewarded to mobilise their parishes for victimhood. Muslims will offer victims too, in return for not being named oppressors under any circumstances. So there: Prophets have synergies. New victims can now have dual membership. Thus it is, the project to declare India to have become an evil land in the last three years is underway.

George Friedman in ‘The Next 100 years’ is candid: when America wages a war, the idea is not to win but to shake the enemy up so that he’s slowed down. Likewise, the current idea for India is not a broken nation but a frequently shaken one.

I doubt if the bearded man in Delhi will be amused. Besides, you see, he has the nasty skill of finessing any opponent by playing the biggest victim of them all.

Opposition is just reacting, has no alternative narrative to offer : Nitish Kumar

OpIndia Staff
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Opposition is just reacting, has no alternative narrative to offer : Nitish Kumar

Opposition is lacking ideas to take on the Modi government at the Centre. This is what JD-U president and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said earlier today in Patna.

Highlighting the lethargy and inaction of the Opposition on key issues, Kumar said, “We have forgotten the farmer issue. Many within the opposition admit in private that issues like demonetisation etc. do not work against the BJP government.”

In a dig at Congress, which leads the Opposition, Nitish Kumar said that no solutions or alternative narratives were being offered while attacking the Modi government and its policies.

“Opposition parties need to come out with an alternate narrative. Congress being the largest party in the Opposition block should set the agenda. Only reactive narrative and talks of unity won’t work. Without an agenda Opposition unity is simply meaningless,” Kumar said.

Nitish Kumar, who heads grand coalition (mahagathbandhan) of JD-U, RJD and the Congress in Bihar, is also officially part of the Congress-led Opposition at the Centre. But in the Presidential election, the JD-U broke the Opposition ranks by announcing its support to NDA’s Presidential candidate Ram Nath Kovind. Party’s national general secretary KC Tyagi recently said that the JD-U was much more comfortable with the BJP during its 17-year-long partnership with the saffron party.

The Bihar CM, however dismissed talks about him wanting to to back to BJP or NDA, terming those media speculations. Instead he seemed to offer “constructive criticism” to the Congress and opposition, asking them to focus on issues and set an alternative narrative.

He reminded how the farmer’s issue was forgotten because there was no alternative narrative and the opposition was just focusing on a few incidents in Madhya Pradesh. He stressed on this need for alternative narrative even on issues like cow protection, where the opposition’s views were not clear.

Separatists, journalist and even retired judges under radar for Kashmir unrest

Hemant Bijapurkar
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Separatists, journalist and even retired judges under radar for Kashmir unrest

Recently we have been seeing a lot of action by Indian investigative agencies when it comes to investigating Kashmiri separatist leaders for uncovering the funding trail from Pakistan, which is then used to create terror and propagate unrest in the Kashmir Valley.

In the beginning of June, NIA had raided  as many as 23 locations across Delhi, Haryana and Kashmir including those of hawala traders and separatists. Residences of prominent separatists like Shahid-ul-Islam, a leader of Awami Action Committee of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, and of Altaf Fantoosh, who is the son-in-law of Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani were among those raided.

The NIA then proceeded to question and detain Geelani’s son in law along with two other Hurryat leaders.

Now it seems the ED too has got in action after it managed to obtain a non-bailable warrant against separatist Shabir Shah which may result in him getting arrested at the end of the week. This arrest warrant was a result of Shabir Shah not obeying 8 summons issued against him in the last 2 years in connection with him receiving money from Pakistan via hawala channels.

The ED had apparently found in its probe that Shah had acquired properties around Delhi using unaccounted money. Shah has been under the radar after a hawala dealer in 2005 had admitted to be in possession of Rs 63 lakh, which were meant for the separatist leader.

Also a OneIndia report claims that not only separatists, but even journalists and retired judges are being paid money via hawala channels to trigger unrest in Kashmir.

The report claims that the Intelligence Bureau and the CID’s special branch has created a list of 20 individuals, which includes Journalists, a retired High Court Judge, and Jammu & Kashmir officials who get money via hawala channels for spreading the separatist ideology and inciting the youths of the state to take up arms.

An IB official quoted in the report also claims that all the people on the watch list would be acted up by the security agencies. The report also claimed that few journalists were also on the payroll of the ISI to create a pro-azadi narrative about Kashmir.

If true, this could be implementation of Pakistan’s new Kashmir strategy – as highlighted in our report – which called its agents to use media:

Media Coordination Committee with select Journalists as members to “counter Indian propaganda” and specifically promote a media strategy

Vadra’s relative, who earlier sent obscene tweets to Smriti Irani, now lies about ‘lynching’

OpIndia Staff
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Vadra’s relative, who earlier sent obscene tweets to Smriti Irani, now lies about ‘lynching’

A Twitter user named Tehseen Poonawala, who is the brother-in-law of the most famous brother-in-law of the country, Robert Vadra, got himself in a tight spot on Twitter yesterday after claiming that his driver was “lynched” by a mob.

Apart from Twitter, Tehseen is also seen on TV defending Congress in news debates while posing as a “political analyst”. Recently, the newest narrative being peddled in the country, and backed by the Congress party, is about India becoming ‘Lynchistan‘. Tehseen’s tweet appeared as another “data point” to prove that India was indeed becoming Lynchistan.

It all started, when the brother-in-law of Robert Vadra tweeted this:


Going by the classical definition, lynching means that ‘someone is killed by a mob without a trial’ but Tehseen’s own tweet admitted that the driver was not killed.

Tehseen then claimed that even though he didn’t know the details or the reasons for the incident, he did know that his it was a case of ‘mob lynching’. Not only that, he somehow even thought that religion of the driver was relevant to the case:


When the Delhi police on twitter promptly reached out to him, he pompously asked them to serve him as soon as possible:


He was soon widely condemned for his sense of entitlement (asking police to call him instead of other way round), which also betrayed how much really concerned he was for his driver:


He later tweeted out his claims about what transpired between the alleged mob and his driver. According to him, his driver was walking to his home when a few youngsters asked him for money to buy alcohol. The driver refused, after which he was allegedly assaulted and his shirt torn. A woman came to his aid but she too was allegedly assaulted. He even claimed that the police was a bit reluctant to register the case.

However, Delhi police has contested his claims. According to a DNA report, police denied any mob lynching (obviously, as no one died) or even organised mob violence. The police said that the whole affair was about a fight between Tehseen’s driver Sharda Prasad and a 19-year-old boy named Rohit, where both abused and assaulted each other, though no major injuries were inflicted on the driver. Police has booked both of them for the assault.

So in all probability, a member of the most powerful political family of India made wrong and exaggerated claims about ‘lynching’ and ‘mob violence’ when it was a petty fight between two individuals. Whether it was borne out of genuine lack of information and knowledge, or borne out of ill-will to spread panic about ‘Lynchistan’ is left for readers to conclude, but the police has termed Tehseen’s allegations as “ill-founded and not-based on facts”.

This isn’t the only time Tehseen has found himself in the middle of a self-created controversy. In February this year, Smriti Irani had revealed on a TV nenws channel how he had sent an obscene tweet to her. Tehseen proceeded to delete the tweet and made ridiculously false claims that he never sent any.

Dalit-Muslim clashes in Pilibhit after casteist slurs thrown in petty fight

OpIndia Staff
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Dalit-Muslim clashes in Pilibhit after casteist slurs thrown in petty fight

In yet another example of a petty fight turning into a communal clash, groups of Dalits and Muslims attacked each other with stones and sticks after an altercation between some youths at a local shop spiralled into tensions between the communities.

The incident happened on Saturday night in Kalinagar area of Madhotanda police station, which is situated in the Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh. According to reports, a person named Kamil Raza and his friends had gone to buy some eggs from the shop of a certain Naseem, where they picked up a fight with another person named Sunil.

The personal fight, apparently over rate of eggs, became serious after Kamil and his friends reportedly threw casteist slurs and abuses at Sunil and his friends, who belong to Paswan caste from the Dalit community.

This soon turned into a physical fight at the shop itself, though the youths then went back to their homes after the quarrel. However, they soon returned along with mobs from their respective communities and a pitched battle took place as mobs targeted houses in the region. Both groups are accusing each other of starting the fight.

Apart from injuries, the clashes led to damages to the shop and respective houses of people from both the communities. Police forces had to be called in and deployed in the area to stop the clashes from getting worse and bloody, as mob reportedly swelled in numbers.

Over 100 people have been reportedly booked for the violence and under the Prevention of Atrocities (against SC/ST) act, though most of them are unnamed except Kamil, Sunil and their friends.

The police took help of respected and senior people from the region to douse flared passions. The current situation is under control and no fresh violence has been reported from the area.

However, some are blaming the police for acting late and even acting in a partisan manner. The police allegedly took more time to file cases on behalf of Dalits and did so only on Sunday, while cases following the complaint by Muslims were registered on Saturday night itself.

Three traits of an Indian pseudo liberal – an easy guide to identify them

Srivy Anand
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Three traits of an Indian pseudo liberal – an easy guide to identify them

Indian liberals have been actively at play in the mainstreams of politics, media and art for decades since independence. Their character, shaped by the aristocratic foothold they enjoyed over the years, has changed considerably and thus the meaning of “liberalism” in India is no longer what a textbook might tell you.

With the rise of the social media, they faced some resistance, but they soon discovered how to “game” this platform as well. From selective “blue ticks” (in the beginning on Twitter) to using their foothold in mainstream media to promote “favourable” social media handles, such as selected stand-up comedians, they know the art of keeping hold on narrative and perception.

This unchallenged power has given rise to an army of the pseudo-liberal talking heads and their cheerleaders. It is not easy to speak against them, but it is easy to identify them.

Let us see how you can recognize them in the crowd with some special characteristics they possess.

Note: If you are reading this and have ever been name-called as an anti-national/sickular or even an Aaptard, please oblige this piece of work with patience and perspective.

Common symptoms of an Indian pseudo-liberal:

Disguise

The Indian liberal masquerades under the hood of being “neutral”. Well, in a country whose major political opposition figures are reduced to theatrical caricatures like Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal, what else can one afford to do?

Secondly, it is easy appear neutral if you love Red colour and all the choices you have are shades of Red.

But this neutrality is a mask. More often than not, the receivers of their outrage are extremist elements of only one religious ideology. And more often than not, the receivers of their outrage or contempt are gaffes of only one political party.

When pointed out this lack of neutrality, they usually dismiss your critics as “whataboutery”, but when suffering from rare pangs of honesty, they may justify their bias by saying that the incumbent government deserves more outrage because they are in power.

But somehow this theory fails to see that Trinamool Congress (TMC) is in power in West Bengal, Left Democratic Front (LDF) is in power in Kerala, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is in power in Delhi, and so on and so forth. There have been communal riots in TMC’s West Bengal, ideologically motivated daylight murders in LDF’s Kerala and an agriculture crisis in AIADMK’s Tamil Nadu in the recent past.

Try to recollect the outrage, contempt, or activism you saw from the so-called Indian liberals over such issues and against the people in power. You get the disguise?

Disenchantment

They’re not happy.

Yes exactly. They are never happy.

They will share/rant endlessly about the issues with the current state of affairs, the ones which have been long withstanding, the ones which can’t be solved overnight, but somehow they know that there is only one reason why these problems exist – presence of people who are not like them.

Mind you that they won’t provide a practical alternate solution to the issue at hand. The only solution they have is to protest against and demonize “the other” – the not so enlightened who are not like them.

For example, if you spot a social media post offering practical alternatives without hyper ventilating, you can safely assume that the person is not your typical “liberal”. It’ll be a rarity to spot even a few approving articles or social media posts with constructive argument/opinion directed towards the policies or problems.

They’re just here to outrage. Just outrage, call names and have a hearty laugh (while being deeply distressed about problems).

After all, who wants to get into “serious” stuff after you spot a nice rib-tickling troll on cow vigilantism and rising “Hindu terror”?

Denial

Many of such liberals had threatened to leave India if Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister. They did not want to live in a “Hindu India”. And they are not living in one, they are living in denial.

They deny that people like Narendra Modi or Yogi Adityanath can represent the people of India, despite winning huge mandates.

They deny that there is extremism among Muslims in India, or that Kashmir issue is about Islamic extremism.

They deny that they themselves are intolerant bunch who are not open to dissenting views, and who would trample of the freedom of expression of dissenters on the first possible opportunity. Labeling someone “troll” and “bigot” to silence them is just one of the tools they employ. They have tried to take away jobs of those who disagree, and they give intellectual cover to those who kill in Kannur and Dantewada.

They deny that they can ever be wrong.

Conclusion

We, as a country of more than five thousand years of culture of assimilation and mutual respect, are strong enough to tolerate the conveniently twisted pseudo-liberal views, which doesn’t allow assimilation or respect for the tradition.

However, this tolerance will be ill conceived if the “liberals” go on an unjustified tirade with a vile agenda, similar to the one which broke our country into pieces several decades ago.

cTherefore we must identify the pseudo-liberals and keep an eye on their agenda, with a hope that the real liberals take control and save “liberalism” from becoming a bad word for good.

Data vs Data – is India really ‘Lynchistan’?

Editorial Desk
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Data vs Data – is India really ‘Lynchistan’?

In the recent Lynchistan debates, the data assembled by the scientist and writer Anand Ranganathan was quoted widely, on TV and social media, to dispel the fake Lynchistan narrative. A counter set of data, being repeated ad-nauseum these days, uses reports in the English language media as raw data (data set included reports from unreliable websites like Catch News, whose journalists have been caught spreading fake information many times) to prove that there indeed is a rise in cow related violence.

This is most absurd enough use of data, because the main criticism of those who disagree with branding the country as Lynchistan, is that the narrative is being pushed by the English language media, which has inherent bias against a particular ideology and thus it is wired to churn out biased reports.

To suggest that this media bias is some “conspiracy theory” is as naïve as believing that government is never wrong. It is not rocket science to realise that the mainstream media has a “liberal” bias. So much so, that renowned thinker and media critic Noam Chomsky once said that “if the system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias” (emphasis added).

Almost every journalist identifies himself or herself as “liberal” and flaunts this identity and swears by this allegiance. There have been open admissions that the media used to “downplay” various incidents earlier, lest it leads to communal tensions – something television journalist Rajdeep Sardesai refers to as “moral compass”. The same Sardesai had given “political context” to killing of a person who was saving cows and virtually termed it a lesser crime when compared to killing of a person who wants to eat a cow.

The question is not whether the mainstream media has a “liberal bias” – it obviously has, and it is so as a matter of ingrained principle – but what does being “liberal” mean in India. And that’s is an open and relevant debate.

At OpIndia, our belief is that liberalism has been corrupted beyond recognition in India, with the mainstream media leading this “corruption”. Therefore, any research or analysis based on trends in news reports churned out by the same biased media is pointless. Such conclusions are as good as result of any Twitter poll.

However, that leads to a valid counter question that if we are not ready to accept a conclusion based on biased English language media reports, why should we accept the arguments made by Anand Ranganathan, who also used the reports by the same media.

On our part, we did not see him throw any numbers or graphs – as the other “research” articles are doing – to back his claim. His moot point was that mob lynchings – including cow related and communal ones – was hardly a new phenomenon that saw “alarming” rise under Modi.

Still, we asked him to elaborate on why he felt there was a need for this data and what this data actually meant. Following is his response.

Anand Ranganathan:

The whole point of my collecting rudimentary data was:

  1. To quickly counter the view professed by a journalist that a dozen odd lynchings in 3 years make India now Lynchistan. If they did, then dozen odd lynchings in 2012 and 2013 should have made India Lynchistan as well. Moreover, many of these lynchings were communal and caste-based in nature, and many were carried out by Muslim mobs.

For example:


  1. To explain in detail – 15 points – why the Lynchistan narrative is specious, both on account of data, and logic.

Here:


And here:

  1. To show that there occurred in just one year (2016) more than two dozen Muslim mob attacks, to dispel the notions of Islamophobia and exclusive attacks on Muslims, the two primary reasons why Media quickly began branding India Lynchistan.

Here:

  1. To show that the IndiaSpend data was non-normalised.

Here:

  1. To explain that purely in data terms, basically, all this data is noise, not signal. 60 odd attacks in 7 years, that too non-normalised data, cannot be anything else but noise in a population of 1.3 billion. On top of it, if this figure is not normalised with respect to to population and vocation, as I point out here, it doesn’t mean much. For example, if 2 incidents happened in 2013 and 4 happened in 2014, can we shout from the rooftops that 2014 saw a 100% increase in such incidents? Sure, technically, one would be right in saying so, but in my opinion, it would be alarmist to assert this, in a nation where every year there occur more than 60,000 communal incidents involving all communities. The same non-normalisation methodology for cow-related incidents has been followed in an article recently published in ORF blog. Signal Vs Noise distinction and normalisation is crucial and elementary for any meaningful interpretation.
  1. To show that data based exclusively on English news media reports cannot be the basis for reaching a definitive conclusion, given the obvious bias in the media as well as given that not all news is reported by the English news media. As people discovered in 2014-15, tens of temple thefts and robberies were reported in regional and other language media but not in the mainstream English media. Had it been, the scaremongering on account of church vandalism and robberies could have been quickly nipped in the bud and not taken 3 weeks to do so. And as people are finding out now, multiple instances of mob violence perpetrated by the Muslim community on account of goat theft was reported in non-English media but never found its way into the mainstream English media. Therefore, at best, such data is useful only to quickly point out the hypocrisy of some, or to provide quick counter arguments that themselves are based on such data.

As succinctly put here:

  1. To show that given the noise/signal point of above, and non-normalisation of data, and the fact that more than 2 dozen incidents of mob violence occurred in 2016 where the mob belonged to the Muslim community (just 1 year), it would be unwise to link scaremongering/hate speeches/anti-community sentiment, with the actual occurrence of the crime itself. Some of these issues have been addressed in point 2. Another interesting question that also arises if one were to think thus, is the following: UPA2 saw an 18% increase in crimes against Dalits. [In one year alone, 2012, 5 Dalits were raped every day.] Now would one assume that this astonishing increase was because the Cong professed anti-Dalit sentiment? I don’t think that they did. So then why did the crime increase? And here we aren’t talking of a dozen odd attacks to make a conclusion; we are talking of enough volume in data terms, tens of thousands of crimes, for us to be able to make a sound conclusion.

Nonetheless, I am happy that my tweets have led people to focus on data and its use in the media.

Goat belonging to Hindu strays into farm belonging to Muslim, four injured in ensuing violence

OpIndia Staff
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Goat belonging to Hindu strays into farm belonging to Muslim, four injured in ensuing violence

In a bizarre incident coming to light from Esakhpur village in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, the village is locked in a communal dispute from the past 4 days, which started over the grazing of goats. Things have turned so serious that there have been communal fights involving sharp weapons and even guns.

The genesis of the incident took place on 25th June, when the 10-year-old kid of Shivkumar Rajbhar was out grazing their goat. Around that time the goat decided to go into the fields belonging to Ahmed. This angered Ahmed who then proceeded to slap Shivkumar’s son.

This soon took shape of altercation between the two groups, however things remained in control though tense. But on Wednesday night, when Shivkumar’s elder son named Ranjit (25) was out in the market buying meat for some guests, a few people from the other community attacked him. In the resultant fight Ranjit got badly injured.

The police were informed, who then arrested Ahmed and three other people. On Thursday when they got out on bail, they decided to attack those who had filed a complaint against them. This resulted in both the communities coming face to face on Friday and violence ensured. This resulted in injuries to total 4 people.

Seeing the situation, the authorities decided to send in a police force from various nearby police stations. Even PAC jawans were deployed in the area to maintain peace. Meanwhile the police have registered a case against 4 people on the basis of a complaint by Saraswati Rao, the mother of Hriday Rajbhar who was shot in the right thigh during the communal violence. The police are still waiting for a complaint from the other community.

Such incidents of ‘goat related violence’ are unfortunately in no ways a new affair. These violent incidents have varied from being petty skirmishes to serious incidents of communal violence. Following are a few such incidents:

Fight between two groups:
  • Last month, the Purushottampur village in Shrawasti district of Uttar Pradesh witnessed heavy fighting in between two groups which resulted in injuries to three people including two women. Apparently two goats of Jhabbar Ali entered the farm of Gaffar Ali’s son and ate all the grains present there. This resulted in a violence between the two groups even though Gaffar and Jhabbar were brothers.
  • On 26th June, 6 people were injured in Meerut after a two month old goat theft incident involving Noor Bano and Abdul Javed again caused tension which resulted in stone pelting between the two groups.
  • In Maharajganj, Uttar Pradesh two people named Umesh and Jhinak were badly beaten by a mob and then were handed over to the police after they attempted to steal goats from the locality.
Leads to communal incident:
  • Last month, Hindu-Muslim tensions were witnessed in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh after the goat of Gangaram strayed into the fields of Nusrat Jahan after which it was brutally beaten. This resulted in both the groups getting locked into a fight where shots too were reportedly fired.
  • In March this year, in Azamgarh of Uttar Pradesh, communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims were witnessed when goat of a person named Arvind strayed into the house of a Muslim neighbour. Arvind’s wife was beaten up and had to be hospitalised, due to which Arvind decided to file a police case, leading to communal tensions.
Deaths due to goat related violence:
  • In April this year, a biker named Ram Navin Singh was lynched by a mob while his co-passenger was badly beaten in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, after he accidentally hit a goat on route to buy some diesel. After the people from the Ram’s village came to know of this killing, they ended up attacking the locality of the mob and vandalised many houses.
  • In March this year, a fight over goat grazing which broke out between the children of two brothers named Mohammed Gaffar and Mohammed Tohid resulted in the death of the former after they decided to have a go at each other during which Tohid decided to hit Gaffar on the head with a bamboo which caused his death.
  • In May this year, two families were involved in a bloody fight, triggered by goat grazing, which resulted in the death of a 65 years old elderly person.
  • In May last year, in Jalpaiguri region of West Bengal, alleged goat thieves were nabbed from their car by a mob who then proceeded to beat them, leading to death of one. The other 2 alleged thieves somehow ran away. The mob then also proceeded to burn their vehicle.
  • In 2015, a thief named Prahlad was caught and lynched by villagers in Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh for stealing goats from the residence of Sunderlal.
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