Kanchan Gupta: Why only Ahmedabad? Let's ban Kolkata too

February 12th

i would go one step further and say, ban cricket altogether and india would be much better off.

but kanchan gupta does have a valid point regardless of your opinions about cricket. why is gujarat considered the one and only violation of human rights in india ever? kashmir is a far bigger crime. and he does enumerate many others, in particular the massacre of sikhs in 1984.

kanchan forgets the moplah rebellion in kerala in 1921. and its small scale rerun, maraad 2003.

note that pioneer pages disappear after a day. this must be one of the most bizarre decisions taken by any newspaper on the web: to remove its valuable content after a day. why, are they running out of storage or something? disk space is incredibly cheap these days, guys! keep your content online forever!

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The Pioneer / 12.02.05/ Oped page

Why only Ahmedabad? Let’s ban Kolkata too!

By Kanchan Gupta

There is something perverse about the manner in which
attention continues to be focussed on the 2002 riots
in Gujarat, as if never before had communal violence
taken a terrible toll of human life and property in
India. If the rioting that followed the burning of
Hindus by Muslim mobs at Godhra deserves unequivocal
condemnation, do does the despicable manner in which
that violence continues to be used for achieving
political ends.

First, the Congress and the Left used the riots for
pillorying Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Then the
jholawalla brigade led by Teesta Setalvad made it into
a judicial carnival (it now transpires that claimed
affidavits from riot victims submitted in court were
no more than printed pamphlets, but that is another
story). During last year’s general election, graphic
visuals of the riots were used for mobilising Muslim
votes; a cynical abuse of victims’ misery that is
being repeated in Bihar by Lalu Prasad Yadav.

We are now told that a member of Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh’s Council of Ministers has taken the
liberty of discouraging the Pakistan Cricket Board
from including Ahmedabad in the itinerary of the
Pakistani team’s forthcoming tour because playing in
riot-tainted Gujarat is just not cricket. The
Pakistanis, of course, have been more than happy to
oblige the UPA worthy.

If communal violence must permanently tar a State’s
reputation and condemn it to living in ignominy
forever, then no State in our Union would come out
clean. If we were to accept the logic of Pakistanis
skipping Ahmedabad, then we should also insist that
Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi and Guwahati should never ever
host a sporting event.

The terrible blood-letting in Kolkata on August 16,
1946, the Muslim League’s “Direct Action Day”, should
strike this city and West Bengal off the list of
cricketing venues. The series of communal riots in
Mumbai (the violence of 1993 pales into insignificance
compared to riots in the 1970s and 1980s) should lead
to the blacklisting of India’s financial capital.

The Nellie massacre of 1983, when the Congress was in
power in both New Delhi and Guwahati, in which 3,300
Muslim men, women and children, many of them suckling
infants, were killed, should have a similar impact.
And Delhi should not host any international event
because of the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 when Congress
hoodlums went around slaughtering more than 4,000
Sikhs to lessen their grief over Mrs Indira Gandhi’s
assassination...