Mangalore Dementia Dasu Krishnamoorty

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What happened at Mangalore that the government and media hallucinated a Hindu Taliban? According to a report in Indian Express.com, “Ten suspected activists of Sri Rama Sene have been taken into custody on charges of assaulting customers of a pub in the busy Balmatta Road in the heart of the city. About 15 to 20 activists, reportedly belonging to Sri Rama Sene, barged into the pub late last night and assaulted boys and girls dancing there, according to IGP (Western Range) A.M.Prasad. He said. that the attackers alleged that the pub owner was allowing boys and girls to dance in an obscene manner. No damage has been done in the incident, he added.”

Is this flash-in-the-pan incident any match to the violence unleashed by highly educated lawyers in Tamil Nadu inviting shoot at sight order and closure of courts throughout the State? Yet the Union Government and the English media reacted to the Mangalore madness with a vehemence out of proportion to what happened. One would believe that a national calamity had occurred. Because women were the victims, the National Commission for Women naturally asked one of its members in Karnataka to investigate the incident. Her report irritated Union Minster for Women and Child Development Renuka Choudhary who used the word Taliban to identify the hooligans. She immediately sent a central team to Mangalore to look at the incident as she saw it. Did the Center send any team to Tamil Nadu?

Several columnists used the words “sexually assaulted” or “sexually molested.” TV clips on the YouTube do not show any such frame except a ruffian threatening to hit a woman crouched in a chair fending off a likely blow. Somini Sengupta’s report for the New York Times merely mentions that the ‘video broadcast repeatedly showed some women ‘covering and shielding their faces.’ Her report showed that the entire affair was a case of pub culture debate turning violent. The Karnataka Inspector General of Police did not refer to any such sexual assault in his press briefing. It is very clear that media fabricated lies to compare the act to a Taliban outrage. NDTV telecast did not show any sexual assault.

The government reaction was excessive and clearly showed a yen to score some points over the BJP on the eve of the general election. This is a political game familiar to the man in the street. But the media becoming a party to such games is reprehensible. I do not know whether it is Hindustan Times or a Union Minister who first used the word Taliban (later changed to Hindu Taliban) to describe the attack. Both the government and the media know what Taliban means. To us it just means a threat to India’s security, not the handful of buffoons performing for the benefit of TV cameras. But this unknown local Mangalore group of loonies is a threat to national security, according to Chidamabaram. He simply does not know how close the Taliban are to India’s border.

The words Hindu Taliban appear as the title of the Hindu editorial. Read the editorial without the heading, it makes a lot of sense. But the heading is the defining feature of an editorial, persuading you to absorb the content in a desired manner. The word Taliban does not figure anywhere in the Hindu editorial. It does not say if the Rama Sene gang had beheaded or stoned to death or publicly flogged its targets or poured acid on their faces, the hallmark of Taliban policing. The editorial is unexceptionable in that it condemns vandalism and violence but also betrays an anxiety to invent a phenomenon merely to convince minorities of its secular credentials and tell them it is not a fringe phenomenon.

The veteran Inder Malhotra also says the same thing, “It cannot be dismissed as a mere aberration by a small lunatic fringe,” in an article in the Decccan Chronicle. Malhotra did not hide his political loyalties. For a while he forgot the communal carnages that became part of Congress history and the country’s social milieu. The anti-Sikh riots took place under the very nose of Rajiv Gandhi, not very far from where Malhotra lived. The most sensible point in his article is his reference to the Taliban’s impending takeover of Pakistan which has already ceded a part of the territory from where the Taliban can legitimately operate. Inder Malhotra’s heading Malegaon to Mangalore is mischievous and begs the question. Those who endlessly bristle at labeling minorities ought not to play the same game with the majority. One of the most respected journalists of the country Kuldip Nayar too succumbed to the temptation when he told the Washington Post ‘you have the Muslim Taliban and (now) the Hindu Taliban.’

Nobody has glossed over the use of violence in Mangalore. All political parties condemned the attack besides critics of pub culture. Several chief ministers and Union Minister Ambumni Ramadoss deplored the spread of public culture but condemned the use of violence at Mangalore. What happened at Mangalore happened umpteen times in the past. Women riding Delhi buses or Mumbai local trains experience such violence every day. Nor ‘moral policing’ is new that justifies the kind of media hysteria one witnessed as the aftermath of Mangalore. Such crimes are a shame on the society but not greater shame than converting such violence into political capital. Couldn’t one regard the Mangalore madness as grandstanding by ‘a band of pathetic lumpens,’ as BJP ideologue Swapan Dasgupta put it?

There is a certain class bias that surfaces from media reporting and commentaries. Agreed, the Mangalore attack is heinous because the victims are women. But is this an isolated act that happened only in Mangalore and only on whatever day of the week it was? Not just lumpens, well-bred slickers from elite families do it every day everywhere, sans the Rama Sene tag. The media are shocked that lumpens should torment girls from elite strata. Women of the underclass are daily raped, molested, battered and maimed at home and outside without attracting an inch of space in the media.

Mangalore insanity is no justification for media dementia.