Further emboldened by its victory in the by-elections in 5 out of 8Assembly seats, the ruling BJP has intensified its communal fascist onslaught. At Mangalore, a coastal district is the nerve centre of Sangh Parivar’s saffron offensive. B V Seetaram, Editor of a Karavali Ale, a magazine that had been a bold voice against the BJP Government, was arrested recently on flimsy charges and even displayed in handcuffs. The arrest came on the heels of months of harassment, fake cases, attacks on the magazine’s office and public bonfires of copies of the magazine.
In Mangalore, the Sangh Parivar’s moral policing is not confined to a few incidents. Groups of young people are routinely attacked on the grounds that Hindu women are fraternising with Muslim or Christian men. A bus in which college students were being taken on a trip was stoned on the same grounds. A Hindu school girl visited a Muslim girl, her schoolmate; both were beaten up and the Muslim girl’s home ransacked. Sangh activists boast that mostly, girls ‘behave’ if thrashed and humiliated in public, but it is more difficult to make boys obey the ‘moral code.’
Recently the office of the PUCL’s Karnataka Working President D’sa was attacked by the Bajrang Dal. The inmates of a jail in Mangalore were attacked brutally within the jail premises by Bajrang Dal members, who were later shifted to other jails, without being punished for their acts.
In a shocking incident, a young man Mukarram was killed by army personnel in Bangalore city. Chased by traffic police for ‘drag racing’ on his bike, he had taken refuge on the roof of a house, which turned out to be that of an army Major. The Major’s security staff heard him weeping and speaking to his mother in Urdu on the phone – and shot him dead, claiming they assumed he was a ‘terrorist’. Meanwhile, recently, eight Hindu boys were arrested in connection with a bomb blast in the Hubli court premises last year. Earlier the act was attributed to SIMI and LET by the Hubli police. The state government’s anti-terrorism campaign in schools and colleges is a euphemism for a hate campaign conducted by Sangh outfits.
The state is slowly but surely moving towards communal fascism on the lines of Gujarat.
N Divakar
