The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. A mob chanting "Jai Shri Ram" vandalises a church in Chhattisgarh, leaves at least five injured.
2. After posters go up in Delhi, offering a bounty to murder Kanhaiya Kumar, the police register a case of defacement of property.
3. The National Security Guard has been deployed at Somnath and Delhi has been put on high alert as intelligence agencies warn of a possible Shivratri terror attack.
4. At least 60 have been killed by an Islamic State truck bomb near Baghdad.
The Big Story: Memories of Muzaffarnagar
Over two years after riots in Muzaffarnagar killed at least 62 and displaced 50,000, the Justice Vishnu Sahai Commission report has given a clean chit to the Akhilesh Yadav government in Uttar Pradesh. The commission, set up to investigate administrative lapses during the riots, blames the police for mishandling the situation and failures in local intelligence. It is not clear how the responsibility for handling riots that raged for days and and started spreading from the town to the countryside can be concentrated purely at the local level. Besides, in the years following the riots, the state administration has been guilty of apathy and neglect that some allege is criminal.
What exactly triggered the murderous bout between Jats and Muslims of western UP is lost in speculation. It is now known that the riots proved to be a turning point for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which swept western UP in the Lok Sabha elections of 2014. Individuals charged in riot cases contested and won on BJP tickets. Party president Amit Shah's vicious polarising campaign fed on the insecurities created by the violence, and the BJP gained from the erosion of support for the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal. But if the BJP stoked majoritarian sentiments, the Samajwadi Party also stands accused of a longer, more insidious polarisation in UP, where it has projected itself as the sole custodian of Muslim interests.
There is, however, more tangible evidence of the state government's abdication in Muzaffarnagar. Thousands of people, mostly Muslims, moved to refugee camps after the riots and lived in abject conditions through the bitter winter that followed. As children died in the camps, Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav commented that the people living there were not victims but political provocateurs egged on by the Congress and the BJP. Soon afterwards, the state government started evicting camp dwellers and bulldozing shelters. It is perhaps too much to expect that such a government would restore a sense of security that would allow Muslims to go back to their abandoned homes. Ten months after the riots, in at least 25 villages, fields and shops once owned by Muslims had been taken over by Hindus. In six villages, not a single Muslim had returned. When it was making its calculations of guilt, did the Sahai commission miss the tents and empty houses of Muzaffarnagar, or do they not count as crimes?
The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's biggest stories
Dhiren K. Jha finds that in Uttar Pradesh, those stoking violence have one eye on politics, the other on land.
Nandini Ramnath on Nakul Singh Sahwney's documentary like an "inquiry commission report", Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai.
Politicking and policying
1. The government tells the Supreme Court to factor in "merit and integrity" while choosing judges.
2. The Film Certification Appellate Tribunal removes ban on Muttrupulliya, a Sri Lankan documentary on the lives of that country's Tamil population in the wake of the civil war, after the Central Board of Film certification refused to certify it.
3. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says the Bharatiya Janata Party has "won the ideological battle" in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Punditry
1. In the Hindu, S. Gurumurthy on why the finance minister is right to get the fiscal deficit reviewed.
2. In the Indian Express, M. Rajivlochan warns the Haryana government that investors stay away if property cannot be secured.
3. In the Telegraph, Sukanta Cahudhuri on how the lack of a congenial atmosphere on campus kills academic activity.
Don't Miss...
Nandita Haksar on how students debating on Afzal Guru were discussing a question that the law cannot:
Who then was Afzal Guru? A militant, a terrorist, a surrendered militant, a martyr, or a victim of history?
Afzal Guru himself admitted to helping one of the Parliament attack suicide bombers obtain a car and rent a room. But if that is true, why do so many people in Kashmir remember him as a person who was wronged by the Indian state and not as a part of the 2001 attack conspiracy? Why is he regarded as a martyr by them and the Peoples Democratic Party? Do they condone the attack? They certainly do not.
Even the Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of Kashmiri organisations, didn’t publically support the attack. It issued no statement and raised no slogan in support of the attack or the people accused of particpating in the conspiracy. In fact, at the time Afzal Guru was arrested, Kashmiris looked upon him as a traitor. He was a surrendered militant and Kashmiri militants see all surrendered militants as traitors.
The people in Kashmir started calling Afzal Guru a martyr only after he was hanged secretly by the Indian government without giving his family an opportunity to meet him a final time. They felt he had been denied justice.
