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September 2013

RSS Anoints Modi As PM - Candidate: Stooping to a new communal low

The Bharatiya Janata Party has committed a historic blunder by allowing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—a secretive, conspiratorial, unelected body with a deeply sectarian anti-democratic agenda—to dictate the choice of its Prime Ministerial candidate for the next election. It’s no surprise that the candidate is India’s vilest and most hated political figure, who has blood on his hands, pure aggression in his veins, and a slavishly pro-corporate agenda in his heart.

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Winning by polarising the Gangetic plains?

The shortest, if dirtiest, route to victory in the circumstances is to polarise politics along religious lines by engineering communal violence. This is exactly what happened in Muzaffarnagar-Shamli in Western UP. A minor incident—a youth allegedly made lewd remarks to a girl of another community—was converted by RSS-VHP-BJP rumour-mills into “love jihad” (seduction-abduction of Hindu women), triggering Jat-Muslim clashes, in which 40 people were killed and 50,000 displaced.

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Defending reason against superstition

The assassination of Indian anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune is an ugly black mark on society. The forces of fanatical intolerance, superstition, irrationality and social reaction which killed Dabholkar did so not because he threatened their faith or freedom of expression, but because he believed that it’s wrong to exploit people through black magic, sorcery, and sleights-of-hand while invoking supernatural powers.

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