When the other shoe dropped ...

PRIEST'S VOICE: Michael Francis Rizzi, do you renounce Satan?

MICHAEL CORLEONE: I do renounce him.

Given a choice and with no trade offs involved, all of us will readily vote for a peaceful society - like in the Government newsreels that accompanied 70s Bollywood pictures. Yet such a society has remained elusive so far, and how so!

Naturally we turn to our intellectuals for an answer, an honest answer. What we get instead is names. We are told that society is made up of Satan and Saints, or if you prefer, Devas and Asuras. It takes just a casual review of the the political discourse of the last decade to find out how the public sorts itself out into the two categories. We are also told that the necessary conditions for peaceful society comes from the heart. Apparently renouncing violence and giving up conspicuous consumption will lead us down the path to socialist Nirvana in no time at all.

Some intellectuals do not answer at all, instead they hit us back with a barrage of what they call "uncomfortable" questions and inundate us with anecdotes they find "disturbing".

Jarnail Singh, the journalist who achieved instant fame (or notoriety, depending on which side of the aisle you are) by throwing a shoe at Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has just published a book called: I Accuse: The anti-Sikh violence of 1984.

The journalist made some shocking revelations in an interview with Rediff. For instance, we find this rather shocking statement from the journalist's Rediff interview transcript:

I had always been following the issue and developments. When my publishers contacted me after the incident, I started conducting interviews with the victims and after researching the various committee reports, I have put together this book, which will clearly expose that what happened in 1984 was a state-sponsored massacre of the Sikhs, and not 'riots', when the issue got highlighted on April 7, I realized that there was nothing in media about this. I went back to the reports of that year, and again found that barring the Indian Express, there was no reporting of the incident. DD was interested only in Indira Gandhi's funeral when the capital was burning.

If you take the Gujarat riots, everyone now knows about all the individual incidents, like the Best Bakery massacre and so on. But when you think of the Delhi riots, it is just a vague, 'it happened somewhere in Delhi' is the idea one gets ...

This distinction between the Gujarat riots and the 1984 carnage may seem like splitting hairs, but then again this hair splitting has been going on in our political discourse for the last decade or so.

Much has also been made of various statements issued by politicians. Yet, we found the following quite disturbing:

On April 2, there was a PTI report quoted the home minister as saying: 'I am happy that my friend Tytler has been exonerated by the CBI.' What kind of home minister says that? If he gives such a statement, what kind of message is he sending down to the investigators in the CBI, which is an investigating agency under the home ministry? If your agency has failed to prove a case against a mass murderer how can you be happy? The clean chit is a sign of your negligence and you express happiness at that?

Mind you, this is our current, superstar Home Minister, uber intellectual Harvard graduate.

Jarnail Singh also expresses his sadness about the lack of concrete steps being taken to curb communal violence. This is a rarity, most writers and journalists are usually happy just to have made their point:

There is something wrong with the political system. The anti-communal law is still not in place. This in a place where the Pandits have been subjected to severe communal violence. Sikhs in Delhi, Muslims in Gujarat, Christians in Kandhamal. How long will this continue?

It took years and much prodding for our intellectuals to finally start adding a couple of obligatory statements about 1984 to their Gujarat riot stories (which is about all some of them write about).

Jarnail Singh's book may finally help our intellectuals find some answers to their questions so that in turn they can educate us better. Assuming of course they are sincere and really trying to solve the problem.