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December 29, 1998
ELECTIONS '98
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'It's because of great men like Bal Thackeray that we have a place called India'
How Readers reacted to Dilip D'Souza's recent columns
Date sent: Sun, 6 Dec 1998 18:55:37 -0800
I think Dilip is one of the best writers on the Web.
Date sent: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 09:51:26 PST
Wow! Dilip D'Souza really does take up the cudgel for minorities! First it seemed to be for Muslims and Christians, now it is for the Pardhis and tribes of that nature. I will confess that I do not know much about the Pardhis except for the fact that they have a reputation of being dishonest. Reading the article I got the feeling that Dilip was trying to make us all feel guilty or at least take notice of the fact that even after all these years we consider a whole tribe as a tribe of robbers. He seems to be against this broad generalisation. OK, fine. We should not generalise. But on what basis does Dilip D'Souza spew venom against the Shiv Sena, the BJP and Hindus in general when he calls them communal? Why does he generalise? Nothing but a true hypocrite!! Hey Rediff, you guys need to do something about this guy! And to think that he has actually been awarded that fellowship you mentioned! What a waste! Arjyo
Date sent: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 15:48:13 -0800 (PST)
Dilip, I discovered your writings on Rediff recently. There is a certain motif running through your pieces that disturbs me. A long time ago, I came to live in the West. When I left India, I carried the usual baggage of thinking the standard tripe that Christianity was somehow up there and all Christians were do-gooders. In the REAL world, outside Bharat, it was a shock to find that Christianity is a bumbling, stumbling, lecherous, insidious religion. Believe me, there is more dirt under the carpet in ONE century of Christianity than there is in all the history of Hinduism. It took me many painful years to accept that Christians continue to inflict terrible harm in the world at large. I find it difficult to stand silent when any Christian anywhere starts the 'holier than thou' masquerade. The five-line write up about you states that you spend your days mainly overcoming your inertia. That explains the limited span of your articles. Nowhere in your writings have you dealt even slightly with the larger world. India is not a closed box. Son, you write well. But don't be a cheat. For every heart-rending article on the state of specific individuals or groups in India that you write about, there are a hundred on Christian involvement, complicity or silence in massive murder or mayhem in the world at large. Look at Bosnia, do you know where it is? You can posture as a good fellow all you want, but unless you are prepared to lift the carpet on your own religion -- your views don't count! Someone else will lift the carpet for you and the stench of rotting carcasses that will hit you, will knock you out. Better you sniff it out little by little and share the Bad News with your readers. Some of your Hindu colleagues have the guts to do just that. Do spruce up your bio-data and tell us clearly where you stand. There are many Indians living outside Bharat who know enough about how exactly Christianity works. They won't fall for simplistic sentiments. Una Ahdar
Date sent: Thu, 03 Dec 1998 16:56:51 +0530
I am surprised that Dilip D'Souza actually gives reasons for voting in the BJP and now voting against it. From his own article, you just need to look at the issues that swayed people -- temple-mosque issue, singing songs, test of patriotism, banning Pakistani cricket team etc. If people of India had any sense, they shouldn't have been swayed by these issues. Why then do you talk of abstract things like people's message to the government? You have spoken too soon. Indians vote like sheep without thinking. True the BJP was pathetic but then to give people credit is absurd. The very fact that education, infrastructure, sanitation, healthcare, economy etc are not issues in ANY party's manifesto but caste, Ayodhya, women wearing jeans etc are means that the Indian people do not vote sensibly. They just get swayed by non-issues. The politicians just dish out what the people want. The root cause of course is the socialist (this includes BJP too) mentality of all parties and the assumption by educated Indians that they can prove themselves to be intellectuals if they say "True wisdom lies with illiterates". Tell me, with such an attitude what else other than the mess we are in do you expect? Arvind
Date sent: Wed, 2 Dec 1998 23:25:23 -0500
Why is this man so personally peeved at the BJP and what in the world is he talking about? Aren't there any writers among BJP-haters less petty-minded than this one? What a waste of a column. Either Rediff quells this man or the readers be advised to pass this one up in the future. Tarun Seam
Date sent: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 09:16:00 +0530
I just hope that Dilip D keeps on writing despite all the hate mail he gets. I, for one, appreciate and understand his point of views. Amitabh
Date sent: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 16:28:52 -0600
Dear Dilip, Excellent article! I think it captured the heart of the matter. I came to the US a few months back, leaving behind my family. I know how the price rise and the economic downturn has affected us, a middle class family in Bombay. Both my brothers have lost their jobs due to downsizing by their respective companies. We were traditional Congress supporters, but voted for the BJP in the last election for a change and also because we were totally disgusted by the Congressmen's lack of morals and fawning over Sonia Gandhi. But things have remained unchanged. I do not know which of the louts (as you so eloquently put it) will take India to its rightful place in the world. Which party will not only meaninglessly babble about but take action on education, health, food and housing. India awaits!! Arvind Sherigar
Date sent: Wed, 02 Dec 1998 21:15:39 -0600
Reading your article blaming the BJP for everything it did and gloating over their election losses will surely make us think that all the parties which were ruling till now were doing a great job and it was only some unknown unwanted aberration which resulted in the BJP coming to power. It is surely the truth that the prices went up to a very bad level after the BJP came to power and the government in all it sincerity or lack of it, could not do anything to control it. And it happened that being a political party and involved in a important election, it tried to downplay its failure, instead of admitting or taking responsibility for it. And the intelligent people expressed their disapproval for it clearly. But I don't think that price rise was not something the BJP tried to ignore and I am surely disappointed in the way you tend to dismiss of whatever this government has tried. For surely you know something called appreciation is always needed. Blaming may look good on paper and make you a secular person but looking at both sides will raise you from an anti-BJP faithful to a journalist capable of assessing and disseminating details. I would like to go into more details regarding your article, but will stop after pointing out one small (may be unimportant to you, sir) detail. Bal Thackeray said Pakistan cricket team won't be allowed in India, but did you miss reading the newspapers on the days when our prime minister and home minister chose to respond on that? Sankar
Date sent: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 11:16:39 -0500
The travesty of 'powerful' and connected people committing crimes and not paying for them means that 'democracy' in India is still far from ideal. The criminalisation of politics is partly because this is the only way disenfranchised people get heard. It is also because in our political correctness we refuse to debate openly the issues that the man on the street is thinking about. Why are we not open enough to debate the things that the militant Hindus exploit? Why should there be a special set of laws for the Muslims? Cynically, you would say that there are Islamic elements that like the status quo and so-called 'secular parties' that use their support for such policies as a way to get votes. Kudos to you for writing about this and I hope you are able to make this a mainstream issue. Shashi Kant
Date sent: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 11:26:54 PST
This is what the BJP should have done instead of conducting nuclear tests: 1. It should have saved up the money it spent on nuclearising Indian arms forces and the millions of dollars it has spent in buying the aircrafts from France and Russia and put that money in food, agriculture so that we would have had MORE than enough onions 2. Then Dilip D'Souza and Pritish Nandy should have been given enough onions, tomatoes and then put on the sensitive border of Kashmir where our Indian jawans risk their life everyday from Pakistani attacks so that Pritish and Dilip would throw onions and tomatoes at the Pakistanis when they came to capture Indian posts in Kashmir. After all if Dilip says that onions can be replaced by N-bombs, then why not vice-versa? 3. Dilip and Pritish are Hindu bashers. If I was the PM of India, I would make sure they were put on trial for anti-Indian writings. The conductance of N-tests is something that needed guts, which only the BJP showed after Indira Gandhi. Instead of supporting that step, these communists are slaughtering it in their commentaries. Little do they realise that this way Hindus who were anti-BJP for any reason would not only support the BJP henceforth, but also rightwings like the VHP and RSS. 4. No matter what Sonia, the CPI or D'Souzas of India say, the Indian forces feel way more confident now that they have nuclearised themselves against both Pakistan and China, which is a silent attacker with ample nuclear warheads facing India in Tibet.
Date sent: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 20:26:44 -0500
I just wanted to say that I really liked this piece. I think that as the trauma of events like the 1984 riots in Delhi and the 1992-3 riots in Bombay stay with the affected communities, so does and should the guilt of people like me in the name of whose community these things are done. Well-said! Swarna Rajagopalan
Date sent: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 12:45:53 -0500
As I read this essay I am thinking of the big debate that seems to be gathering strength: What is our history, how is it portrayed, what our children learn, whether Akbar was indeed "Great" and so on. Even as we debate these issues, we are setting the stage for obliteration of history in the making by refusing to deal with our dirty deeds like the State-sponsored massacre of innocent people. Let us go 10 or 20 years into the future. What will our history books include? Will children then ever learn of how thousands of innocent people called Sikhs were massacred and every piece of their belongings reduced to ashes? Will they be told how those who perpetrated these crimes were never punished? Or will all of this pass into a collective national amnesia? Like it never happened. But they will learn of how Mrs Indira Gandhi attained martyrdom and the sacrifices made by her family. They may, if they are lucky, learn something about the riots in our most cosmopolitan of cities, even if it is laced with partisan communal rhetoric that paints the other guys as bad. This will be so because that is the dominant worldview. To think and know otherwise is too painful. Those who dare will be derisively labelled as 'pinkos' or divisive. But it is about time we paid as much attention to our current, immediate history as we fret about centuries old events. It's time the Congress, BJP/Sena and the Muslim parties faced up to their complicity in the two most gruesome mass murders, punish the guilty and find ways to move on. Gopal Ratnam
Date sent: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 04:44:03 +0500
I think the column was real brilliant and well-written. But the futility of it is very much prominent as I am sure not a single person in this dumb country is gonna react to anything that does not concern or bother him in any direct way!! All the same it was a pleasure and an eye-opener for someone like me who was a lil' kid when this thing happened way back in 1984. Zarir
Date sent: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 17:37:07 -0500
That our own, your own, particular partisan leanings will help them stay protected. Well said Dilip D'Souza! You were particularly right in the above sentence. It is and will be the strategy of the politicians as long as we, the people, cannot come out of our petty squabbles. We should start blaming ourselves than the politicians for sure. Vivek
Date sent: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 14:36:04 -0500
While he sheds crocodile tears over the fate of those Sikhs massacred during the Delhi riots in 1984, there is not a single mention of the fact that President Zail Singh himself appealed to the RSS to step in and save as may Sikhs as they could. It is a well-documented fact that the RSS has saved many lives during those riots. But D'Souza's selective perception so conveniently overlooks the contribution of the sole group of concerned human beings who stepped into that Congress engineered horror. But then, to D'Souza the RSS personifies that dirty "H-word", and to praise it is worse than admitting that he is nothing but a fanatic Hindu-baiter. I think this narrow-minded Leftist bigot should spare us his pretensions. At least Rediff could print an addendum to his article giving credit where credit is due.
Date sent: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 09:49:40 PST
Congratulations on writing another article describing your hatred for the BJP. You are guilty of the same things that you are accusing the BJP of. Your article made no sense whatsoever but after I replaced Congress with the BJP then it started making some sense. Also, remember Bal Thackeray is not just a man, he has guts to stand for something unlike guys like you. It is because of great men like Bal Thackeray that we have a place called India. Jai Hind. |
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