‘Bhuladia’ is not the name of a factory. It is a sickness of the ruling class. Somewhat different from Alzheimer’s disease, it is more selective in choosing what must be forgotten and what must be remembered. A ‘bhuladia’ patient is predisposed to forgetting the insignificant and the ordinary, while remembering the rich and the powerful.
The violence in Dhule Maharashtra seems to be the new face of communal violence in India. As per the report of a major national daily (Jan 26, 2013), the evidence with the newspaper shows the evidence of police looting and destroying the property. The video clips in possession of the civil society groups also show one police official exhorting the rioting mob to move on. So far even if it was there it was not so blatantly clear. One sensed the partisan nature of police as discerned through different inquiry commission reports, but this type of role of police is a new and downhill chapter in the history of communal violence in India.
Unless the Verma panel report really singes the conscience of the of the legislators into making a change in election law where a candidate if charge-sheeted with cognisable offence six months before the date is debarred from contesting the elections, I am afraid criminality in politics would continue and this would make a mockery of Verma panel’s recommendation of changes in a electoral law, a very strong component of the recommendations. The demand is therefore that all the recommendations along with that of electoral law should be carried out simultaneously.
A review of The Nation and its Margins: Reading Gender and the Politics of Sovereignty in India’s Northeast, by Papori Bora.
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