lettertoaamir

A letter to Aamir Khan

Dear Aamir,
I went through the transcript of your 'walk the talk' interview with Shekhar Gupta. It provided a good insight into your thinking and approach to your professional and personal life. You are a man of integrity. You are sensible, sensitive, intelligent and generally aware of what goes on around you. You also have a tremendous sense of discrimination and the capacity to discover bright gems hidden in tonnes of garbage heap. This is evident from your selection of films, friends, and whatever else you choose to do.
One has heard stories about how hard you work with writers, directors, and even crew members of various film projects to ensure their success. You ask questions, discuss and debate even seemingly insignificant details, within and without, and then come to a conclusion. Some say you become a royal pain in the ass for all those who work with you as you seek and demand the best from them as well as from yourself.
Though you are a Muslim, this has hardly mattered as Indians of all hues, shapes, sizes, and religious and political denominations equally admire you for your work as well as your sense of justice and fair play. We assume that hype will not sway you since you have the capacity to see through it before passing any judgement.
However, your comments on Modi’s visa denial come as a big surprise. They show that the secularist propaganda on Gujarat riots has taken its toll on you as well. Some of the comments you made while you were going to cast your vote during the last parliamentary elections were indicative of your unhappiness over the Gujarat incidents. It was understandable. All of us were unhappy. Whenever riots take place, society is fearful, unhappy, angry, and tense. It also gets divided on communal lines. All those ideals preached by Indian cinema since ages come to nothing. It is the nature of communal conflagration to bring into play deep-seated distrust among communities.

You know, it is something like the ‘casting couch’ business. Everyone knows of the film industry treating all those brave girls who dare to enter it as ‘free maal’. We pretend otherwise. ‘Hindu Muslim Bhai Bhai’ works well for everyone during times of peace. When a riot breaks out, we start thinking of how cruel and dangerous the other community can be. We count the number of dead like we follow a one day cricket score. You have done a film on this subject. 1947, the Earth. Yours was a really believable role in the film. I am sure, you must have used a bit of self reference to live your character. We all do it. That is the beauty of being an actor. We can express the deep dark secrets of our hearts in different roles.

The Gujarat and Mumbai riots were also normal riots. They were widespread though. Earlier, riots would mainly be confined to Muslim areas. For instance, in the Bombay riots, the Muslim lumpen had a free rein in Muhammad Ali Road, Jogeshwari, and Mahim. Delayed response of the administration allowed the riots to spread to Hindu areas. Now, the Hindu lumpen went on the offensive. This was a rare phenomenon that was only witnessed during the partition of India. The killing of Sikhs in 1984 cannot be termed as riots. It was a planned and organized genocide, and the lumpen among Hindus were used by the Congress party to bolster its election prospects.
Gujarat was a repetition of Bombay in a way. The response of the Hindu lumpen was swift because of the enormity of the Godhara incident. The police administration was not in a position to contain it. It is not equipped to handle widespread conflagrations. Even the NYPD, which probably has the best police population ratio, cannot handle it. At any given point of time, the police machinery has very limited capacity. Suppose, for instance, Bandra police can handle 50 cases of theft, 20 cases of murder, and 5 cases of arson effectively in it jurisdictional area in a day. If these cases increase multi-fold, it will have no option but to seek reinforcements. Now, if the problem is as bad in other areas of the city, it may not get any reinforcements immediately. What would happen then? A Supreme Court judge will call the SSP of Bandra a Nero. He will do it because he is far removed from ground realities and may even have some personal axe to grind. Who knows, one of the retired old judges would have influenced his opinion. There are hundreds of factors that go into the passing of such comments by the judges. They too can get very badly affected by the hype like anybody else.
An officer like K.P.S. Gill, a known doer and hard taskmaster, admitted that the communal conflagration in Gujarat was beyond the handling capacity of the state police. Yet the police and army acted ruthlessly. The number of rioters killed in the police firing in Gujarat is by far the largest in the history of independent India. They were all Hindu lumpen because the riots were happening in pre-dominantly Hindu areas. The much hated VHP and Togadia did not make an issue of it unlike what the secularists did in the post Babari Bombay riots. The riots broke out in the Muslim areas of Bombay. The rioters were all Muslims. It took almost a week before the riots could be contained. A number of Muslim lumpen died in police firing. The secularists blamed the police for firing and killing innocent Muslims. In the next round of riots a month later, the police did not open fire on rioters at Muhammad Ali road. Hindus were being killed right in front of the policemen. The police job was to pick dead bodies up and despatch them to JJ Hospital morgue which itself was not safe. The doctors there were shouting for security. The secularists’ propaganda had benumbed the police force and it was busy in PR. For three days riots continued in Muslim dominated areas and the fourth day the Hindu reaction engulfed the whole city. The known secularists, now rehabilitated as great social workers, disappeared from the scene, out of a sense of shame probably, while Bombay burnt.
The secularists and the Catholic Church inspired anti Modi campaign is not as innocent as it looks for various reasons: -

1. It is not based on facts. Most of the stuff that you see in countless films made on Gujarat riots, with money pouring in from Christian NGOs, is hearsay and false. They are manipulated and pre-determined propaganda stuff. They don't twist the fact. They cleverly present falsehood as fact.
2. If you talk to a secularist like Anand Patvardhan, he would immediately say that a People's Tribunal has already indicted Narendra Modi. Who are there in this People's Tribunal? Known RSS bashers and secularists.
3. Even the People's Tribunal does not present one single case where Modi asked its administration to allow innocent Muslims to be killed. The so-called upright officers too have not said that Modi or other ministers asked them to do anything wrong. The police administration was effectively under the control of K.P.S. Gill. He is not the kind of police officer who would have allowed such interference. He was sent to Gujarat to contain the riots. He succeeded too. Yet the secularists keep shouting for Modi’ head.
4. They keep referring to the NHRC report. The report talks about the administration's failure in acting promptly. It does not mention anything about the complicity of the administration in the heinous deeds perpetrated by the lumpen. It states that the police failed to come to the rescue of people without really seeking the reasons for it. What were the reasons? The riots were so widespread that there was not enough of the force available to go after each and every case. The army was called in time and the riots were brought under control in major cities. However, smaller towns continued to smoulder. K.P.S. Gill reported it candidly. What’s more, the NHRC has denied that it had a case against Modi when the US Ambassador to India used its findings to support the Visa ban.
5. Forget about Modi, these reports do not even mention that the RSS was involved in these riots. Yet, the secularists and the Church inspired NGOs make films that present this organization in a very bad light. It is a highly motivated campaign of calumny. It has nothing to do with justice or truth.
6. Why is American administration getting so concerned about Gujarat all of a sudden? It is not without reason. It has always used the Church to further its geo-political objectives. It has acted in this way not out of any concern for human rights issues. There is a deeper game plan, to involve the Church and American Multi National Corporations (MNCs) in the creation of protectorates on Indian soil. They all think Sonia is their best bet. I am talking about neo-colonisation of yet another kind here knowing it very well that you can brand me a paranoid fool. But no harm in taking this risk. I am sure that you must have read a few things about the history during the making of the Rising of how the East India Company, a British MNC, laid the foundations of full-fledged British rule in India.
7. Modi can be blamed for only one thing. He used the communal divide to his political advantage. He was forced to do so. He was forced to go for elections. Lyngdoh, a known Congress sympathizer, delayed elections deliberately. Modi won the elections in spite of all this. The secularists and the Muslims targeted him and the Hindus backed him. That is what democracy is all about. It is common occurrence even in the much touted land of ultimate democracy called the USA. You create vote banks by dividing people. Bush did it blatantly in his re-election campaign. The cruellest of these divisions happened in 1984 when Rajeev Gandhi and the Congress fought the elections on anti Sikh plank by using the dead body and the ashes of Indira Gandhi. Why do I find it cruel? Because, they pitted a really miniscule minority against the huge majority. The next abominable deed was what Lalu did in recent Bihar elections by bringing out a sham report on the Godhra carnage to galvanize the Muslim votes in his favour. This was a brazen and despicable attempt. He is not talking about it any more as the elections are over.
8. What did Modi do? He simply spoke the truth. He said that he was being targeted and the secularists and Sonia were providing fodder to Musharraf for mischief mongering. It was a fact. Musharraf used the hearsay of Modi haters in the UN to buttress his cause. This is what the Americans are doing. Using the hearsay of the Church supported NGOs to insult the democratically elected Chief Minister of an Indian state. They dared to do it because they knew that the present political dispensation in Delhi would be favourably inclined towards such a decision. Why did they not do it when Vajpayee was in power?
9. Now, Modi has done a few other things too. The Gujarat government’s rehabilitation package to the riot affected is by far the best this country has ever offered to the victims of communal violence. He has not discriminated against anyone. For the first time in the history of India, fast track courts have been created to handle riot cases. And please, do not go by the blind anti-Modi hype here. Seek the facts and you will get them all.
10. The secularists may argue that these courts have failed to deliver justice. Riot cases are like that. Almost all the arrests made during riots are false and are based on fabricated evidence to show that the police are doing something. Real culprits are rarely caught. Even the witnesses are told to register false complaints to provide the police sufficient grounds to keep innocent guys behind bars. Everyone knows about it. You can talk to a police officer in confidence and he will tell you the truth behind these arrests. This is the mode of operation that has been followed since the British days. Finally, these guys are released, as the police know that the cases against them are false.
11. What’s more, if you look at the history of communal violence in India, there has not been a single indictment of anyone from any community. There are instances where the two communities have come together and have mutually agreed to withdraw cases for the sake of social harmony.

You mentioned in your interview that we are all Indians. Yes, we are all brothers. And it is not that brothers do not fight among themselves. They do. However, they do not seek the intervention of outsiders in their family affairs. When they do it, it does not remain a family feud. Those who have sought this intervention are working with a very dangerous agenda. You should not become a tool in the hands of such schemers.
It will be wishful thinking to assume that riots will not happen again in Gujarat or elsewhere. However, in the aftermath of riots communities also get conscious of the fact that both sides were responsible for it. They realise their errors sooner or later and work towards reconciliation in their own native ways. The secularists and the media are not allowing this process to be set in motion, by introducing alien ideas and concepts in an essentially Indian phenomenon.
I hope you read this letter to get yet another perspective of the issue.
With warm regards and best wishes,
RKS