Any police action on Bal Thackeray's call for Hindu fidayeen ?

The Statesman,
21 June 2008

Editorial

Rule of law

The Shiv Sena and its undisputed boss, Mr Bal Thackeray, may not tire of stirring the communal cauldron ever so often, but public patience is wearing thin. The latest shenanigan ~ calling for a Hindu bomb and Hindu fidayeen ~ fails to amuse in the least. What should ensue is prompt police action. There is enough inflammatory rhetoric in the Saamna editorial to warrant prosecution under a raft of charges, including perhaps waging war against the state, which incitement to terrorism undoubtedly is. Unfortunately, no government in India ~ and no political party or leader, for that matter ~ has the courage to take on such incendiary behaviour when it comes from a powerful person. No doubt, a number of excuses will be trotted out to explain inaction ~ pre-eminent among them will be the totally disingenuous plea that taking action against Mr Thackeray will prompt Shiv Sainiks to unleash mayhem in Maharashtra. That is a poor excuse ~ it amounts to the government virtually abdicating its role of maintaining law and order, one of its principal functions. Nothing, surely, prevents the law-enforcement agencies from resorting to widespread arrests to prevent people from breaking the law. This, of course, will not happen. We have seen in the past the government’s failure to act when a Muslim lawmaker from Uttar Pradesh offered a reward for the beheading of the Danish cartoonist who had supposedly depicted Prophet Muhammad in an insulting manner. Nor did it act when a Hindu organisation announced a similar reward over some imagined insult. Both of these are, to say the least, incitement to murder, punishable, needless to say, under law.
If it were a simple matter of cowardice it would be one thing. But the problem is bigger. No government, party or leader wants to act to uphold the law in cases such as this because they fear something more than a law-and-order situation ~ what they fear is that they will lose votes of hardline elements. Their perspective is so skewed that they do not see that hardliners are a small minority in both communities and that by acting according to its remit no government can fail to attract the support of the majority of right-thinking people.