News That Didn’t Make It to News, Doctors and Scientists Who Abandoned Science and State of Karnataka Which Just Cleared Two-Third of Its Forests
Karnataka High Court Judge Justice H P Sandesh recently said he received a transfer threat for his remarks against the functioning of the state's Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB). Only a collegium, which comprises judges can transfer a judge. So who gave him this threat? You want to read this one.
Employment fell by a massive 13 million from 404 million in May to 390 million. This is the biggest fall in employment during a non-lockdown month. Did your sources of news inform you of such important news? If not, don’t you think you should update your sources? I mean, what else could they be hiding from you? Your decisions are as good as the information they are based on. Also, Foreign investors have dumped a record $33bn of Indian shares since October last year. This blow has been softened by a huge inflow of retail investors like you and me, but how long can this run continue? Are we moving towards something bad?
Prime Minister of Union govt of India held a huge rally at Parade Ground in Hyderabad - this was a prep rally for next year's Assembly polls. BJP workers were seen physically assaulting members of the Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi (MRPS) who were at this massive public meeting of PM. The MRPS members were reportedly holding up placards reminding PM Modi of his assurances to fulfil the demand for categorisation of Scheduled Castes, a long-held demand of the Madigas and other SC communities.
On June 11, a video surfaced on social media which was extensively shared. It showed some young men being brutally beaten up in police custody at the Kotwali police station in Saharanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, India. Eight Muslim men who were seen on video being brutally assaulted in custody by uniformed police personnel have now been cleared of all charges. Release orders came from a magistrate’s court nearly a month after the arrests. Custodial torture is illegal. Will any action be taken against the police? You know the answer already!
“I appeal to Amit Shah and the Prime Minister not to push us to the path followed by Periyar. Don’t push us to demand for a separate nation. Please grant us state autonomy,” said DMK MP A Raja in the presence of party chief and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, at an event in Namakkal on Sunday. Speaking on ‘Coalition Government at the Centre and Autonomy for States’, Raja explained the rights that the Constitution originally granted to the Union and state governments. Referring to Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement that Hindi is the only language that can unite India, Raja “reminded” him that East Pakistan seceded from Pakistan only because Urdu was “imposed” on the Bengali-speaking people.
At least 42 people have died from consuming spurious liquor in the Botad district of Gujarat where alcohol is banned, i.e., the prohibition law says the brewing of alcohol, its possession, sale and consumption are illegal inside the state. But this isn’t the first such tragedy. 148 had died in 2009 after consuming similarly adulterated alcohol.
The last one, and please, think slowly about this one. Let it seep into your consciousness.
A court in Chhattisgarh recently acquitted 121 tribals booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for allegedly assisting Maoists in the 2017 Burkapal attack, citing the lack of evidence against them. These tribals spent five years in jail. The innocent tribals — yeah, they are officially innocent now, proven so by a court of law. If you think of what that means, it means, they are definitively innocents unlike us whose innocence is up for doubt — you get what I’m saying? So after five years in prison, they were pronounced innocent and let off, just like that. Probably just like that they were caught and sent to prison too. Abruptness. After a delay of four years, the trial finally began in the NIA court at Dantewada in August 2021. Notice this. A trial is when the state (which captures people) sits down and judges if the ones they have arrested are really criminals. And it took the Indian state four years to even start this process and during those four years, these 121 tribals, spent their time in prisons, away from their freedoms, work and family. To be honest, this is not such a first case. There are so many such. There are people who have spent 21 years, 12 years and so in an Indian prison and then declared innocent by our court. These are ordinary unknown people we care close to nil about.
“A total of 25 prosecution witnesses were examined and the judgment was delivered on 15 July 2022 acquitting all the accused,” said Bichem Pondi, a lawyer for the accused.
After the acquittal, activists said the Burkapal case would be remembered as one of the injustices done to Bastar tribals in the name of anti-Maoist operations.
“Five years of their lives were wasted behind bars and they were brought to court hearings only twice during the trial when it is mandatory to produce the accused in person in every hearing. Bail was denied in the designated NIA court at the district level as well as the high court,” said Bela Bhatia, a human rights activist and one of the defence lawyers in the case.
Next time when you are about to believe in the state’s side of the story, the police’s version of the truth, remember this story. Think of the Hyderabad rape and police encounter case. A committee recently said the encounter was fake, and that police were concocting lies.
The point of starting with these bullet points was also to just give you a hint of so many important stories (or events) that took place recently but those that weren’t important enough for our news channels. I mean, we have a judge on record in a video saying he was threatened, a huge fall in employment, foreign investments being pulled out, violence at the Prime Minister of India’s rally by his own partymen, custodial torture captured on camera, a state government threatening (warning?) union government over its policies - and none of this made it to national tv. All of these stories speak of something rotten in our polity and somehow our news tv does not think these are important stories. And what do our news channels broadcast on daily basis?
If not entirety, please watch at least two minutes of Manisha’s show.
All that’s old news now. A lot has happened ever since I wrote the above. A lot keeps happening in India.
ON 30 JANUARY 2020, India reported its first case of COVID-19; thus began a degradation of Indian medicine unparalleled in the country’s independent history. It started with three cases reported in Kerala and never really stopped. The story of India’s scientific debasement is also a story of the rise in state-sponsored occult thinking. Despite the country’s considerable advantages—immense resources, scientific knowledge, unmatched experience in dealing with infectious diseases, deep logistical expertise in running mass vaccination campaigns and the world’s largest pharmaceutical industry—the Modi government squandered every possible opportunity to control the pandemic. In a country with too many people and as many gods, the will of one man reigned supreme as Indians died without recourse or recompense.
In the first half of 2020, the coronavirus infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. Few places were hit as severely by the pandemic as India, home to a sixth of the world’s population and a country uniquely incapable of social distancing. By December 2021, close to half a million Indians were claimed by the virus. Even this is a conservative estimate. The actual toll, undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the Modi government, characteristically, failed to keep an accurate count of its dead.
The coronavirus exploited every weakness the Modi administration had to offer, including its short-sighted leadership, mistrust of science and disdain for expertise. This was coupled with the government’s divisive politics towards the country’s minorities. The same social-media platforms that allowed the seeds of hate and misinformation to be sown during elections became vectors for conspiracy theories during the pandemic. The BJP’s army of online trolls played their part.
The science denialism was led by Paul, who was recommending the use of the home remedies such as chawanprash and kadha. WhatsApp messages peddled unscientific information. On television channels, citizens found themselves listening to moral sermons from Modi about being atmanirbhar, or self-sufficient, while the yoga guru Ramdev peddled false remedies with state sanction. Soon enough, the Gujarat government was conducting “very exciting” experiments on suspected COVID-19 patients at quarantine centres by giving them kadha, a herbal concoction used across India as immunity boosters or prophylactic, while the Maharashtra government was distributing homeopathy pills, under the aegis of AYUSH ministry—established by the Modi government specifically to champion traditional medicinal beliefs.
In my interviews, multiple scientists expressed a sense of being betrayed by members of their fraternity who acted with utter disrespect for science. These “establishment scientists,” as they are now known among their peers, failed to stand up against the Modi government’s disastrous chosen course and so, collectively, became joint authors of India’s fate. On their watch, India burned like Dante’s inferno.
Through this time, frontline health workers were battling the pandemic, often without salaries, proper protective gear, medical equipment or even oxygen supplies—all without being able to see their families and loved ones for days, if not weeks, on end. One doctor described the experience as being expected to stop a rising river with a few sandbags. Others equated being in an ICU during the pandemic to being in the trenches on the losing side of a war, with the death toll mounting, people screaming and sometimes beating you up. At an inhuman time, they remained human. Meanwhile, the government presented a cockeyed version of reality to the public. It continued to deny community transmission of the coronavirus as late as May 2021, despite chalking up the highest number of cases per day. It saw no contradiction in the fact that the health minister was recommending that Indians wear masks even inside their own homes.
The botched pandemic response and the massive death toll it led to were not the handiwork of politicians alone, but also of doctors and scientists who gave an illusory medical legitimacy to political decisions. Elsewhere in the world, politicians, scientists and whole governments have had to bear consequences for mishandling the pandemic. In Brazil, one the countries closest to India in the number of casualties, over eighty prominent figures including the president, Jair Bolsonaro, were charged with “inciting an epidemic,” accused of delays in purchasing vaccines, government negligence and marketing unscientific treatments. In France, a special court launched an investigation to determine whether senior government officials committed “criminal negligence” in their response to the pandemic. Agnès Buzyn, France’s former health minister, has been accused of “endangering the lives of others.” In Malaysia, the country’s largest political party withdrew its support to the ruling government over its handling of the crisis, prompting the prime minister’s resignation. In the United States, many political analysts argue that Donald Trump lost his bid for re-election as president partly due to his many blunders on COVID-19.
But in India, great power came with zero accountability. How the Modi government handled the pandemic, and who should be held responsible for all the deaths the country has endured, is not an electoral issue and does not occupy primetime debates. But a full accounting is necessary if we are to stop a similar disaster from happening again, and if we are to respect the millions who are still grieving for lost loved ones. To count every lie uttered by the Modi administration is a Sisyphean task. Instead, it is more instructive to turn the spotlight on what these lies did to Indian scientists, scientific institutions and, most of all, citizens—whom scientists failed just as spectacularly as the government did.
That was from Caravan Magazine’s March 2020 cover story. Highly recommend you read the reportage in its entirety. You will notice how bad the veins and innards of this nation have rotten themselves. The caravan is a subscription-based magazine that does long-form journalism. They invest a lot of resources and long duration into getting such kind of work done and so I urge you to subscribe and read them. But for some reason, if you cannot subscribe and still wish to read, I have included a link to a PDF version of the same article at the end of this newsletter1. Happy reading!
In early May, the Karnataka government announced its plan to denotify two-thirds of its deemed forest land. As part of this, 6.64 lakh hectares of forest out of 9.94 lakh hectares will cease to be forest land, leaving less than a third of the forest land – 3.3 lakh hectares – as deemed forest in the state.
The intent to cut back on deemed forest cover comes close on the heels of the state opting for a raft of measures to increase its green cover to meet India’s climate action goals.
Do you notice the doublespeak and irony here? Well, read this important Scroll piece to find more such absurdities and tales of doom about our future.
Did You Know?
It was Savarkar who first advocated and floated the idea that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations. Yes, the two-nation theory was first introduced by Savarkar, years before Jinnah went haywire with it. In fact, The Hindu Mahasabha of Savarkar (and an off-shoot of RSS) joined the Muslim League of Jinnah to form coalition governments during colonial rule. They even opposed the Quit India movement in August 1942.
Both Savarkar and Jinnah were critical of each other since they catered two separate vote banks. Both were critical of Gandhi’s Congress too. Jinnah had the Muslim support base where as Savarkar had the Hindu support base. Publically they were thirsty of each other’s blood but the “opportunist politics” or “pragmatic politics” made the odd bed-fellows to fill up the vacuum created by the Congress following “Do or Die” cry of August 1942 mass movement. Both ML and HM opposed the Quit India movement following the call given by Mahatma Gandhi and preferred to join hands with the British under the garb of the ‘pragmatic politics’. Even when most of the Congress leaders including Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Nehru and Maulan Azad were in jail, Barrister Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the second in command of HM, with the blessings of Savarkar, had joined the Fazlul Haq ministry in Bengal as the Finance Minister in 1941 and remained in the ministry of the mover of the Pakistan Resolution for nearly 11 months. Even earlier, Syamababu was elected to Bengal Legislative Council in 1929 for the first time on the Congress ticket. He was also the Union Minister for Industries in Nehru cabinet before resigning on 6 April 1950 to launch the Jan Sangh in October 1951 with the blessings of Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar(Guruji), the second Sarsanghchalak(Chief) of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh(RSS).
Sindh Province, being the birth place of Jinnah, was special to him in his movement for Pakistan. The Sindh Assembly was first to pass the Pakistan Resolution moved by G M Sayed in 1943 when the Province had a coalition government with diametrically opposite political forces i.e. Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha!
The historical facts which remained hidden so far are needed to be made public however bitter they may be. If one goes through the speeches of Savarkar at Bhagalpur and Kanpur conventions of the HM, his efforts to justify his actions of joining hands with the British rulers are crystal clear. Savarkar expected more and more Hindu youth to join the British Army and Air force when the British were engaged in the World War II. The Hindutva icon even condemned the efforts of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army(INA) to align with Japan against the British. The facts of the history and the events which took place cannot be denied.
Every day when a Muslim person walks out of their home they come across or by the time they get back to their home in the evening, they invariably would have interacted with close to five or seven non-Muslims. This has been happening for generations and continues to happen even today with most Muslims, and to the most extent even without their own explicit knowledge. But in contrast, how many Hindus interact with Muslims on a daily basis? In fact, many Hindus end up knowing zero Muslim persons in the entirety of their life. Try to think of yourself, randomly ask elders at your home, how many Muslims have they interacted with and know personally. So Muslims interact with non-Muslims, especially Hindus on a daily basis while Hindus by and large do not. One mingles and the other does not. In fact, Hindus have gone out of their way to move Muslims away from spaces they previously existed in and where there was a chance for Hindus to encounter and interact with Muslims. Hindus have evicted and moved Muslims away from spaces thereby reducing or completely nullifying even the bare-minimum possibility of interaction with them. Secularism in India, unlike what’s practised in France, is tolerance and respect for all faiths. In schools, offices and almost every sphere of their life they participate in Hindu festivals that are celebrated there, they wish you on your festivals, they adjust their businesses to accommodate your religious beliefs, and they go out of their way to make you and your practice of faith possible without any hassle. There are Muslim poets who have written songs praising lord Krishna, Muslim qawwals who sing Hindu bhajans and a lot more. Clearly, Muslims (compared to Hindus) come out as more secular or better practitioners of secularism in India. If secularism is at the heart of Indian identity and the core ideal of the Indian republic then Muslims come out as its strongest practitioners and custodians.
That’s from my new blog post in which apart from above I write about two more instances/reasons which strengthen my assertion that it is Hindus who are to be suspected (if anything) about their patriotism and love of this nation and, not Muslims and their commitment to India and its constitution.
That’s all for this one. I saw a few movies, and shows and listened to a lot of old music; we will talk about them in the next one, which I will try to send sooner than the time this one took. #FingersCrossed
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Modi’s Doctors (PDF)