Introspecting Aloud

Just found out from this post about the report on Cultural Policing in Dakshin Kannada(PDF) just released by The People’s Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka (PUCL-K). An interesting excerpt mentioned in the blog post:

As one observer, who has been covering the events in Dakshina Kannada, put it, “Today saffron is the colour of power. You just walk around with a big red tilak and see how people treat you. Right from the shop keeper to the bus conductor to the policeman, everybody gives you respect. Without the tilak you are nothing, with the tilak you become a power structure.” Munir Kattipalya of the DYFI echoes this sentiment when he says, “This district is not only communalized but also progressively criminalized.”

What is indicated by such statements is that there is a strong link between communalization and criminalization. It is precisely because the state has chosen not to act when criminal activities are perpetrated under the garb of religion that criminal elements now feel that they have the sanction to perpetrate violence and Cultural Policing in Dakshina Kannada other forms of intimidation by using the garb of religion. This possibly explains the proliferation of vigilante groups in Dakshina Kannada.

Just one single news article (Hindu.com) today upset me to no end.

• Call by multiple parties for a caste based census in 2011. This has not been allowed for the last few decades for the simple reason that it leads to caste based policy, which till a few years back was something people had uniformly been against. Now it is already a state policy.
• The idea behind the census is to justify inclusion of creamy layer into the reservation. This is even after the government has already increased the inclusion criteria to someone with a salary of about Rs. 40,000/month. BTW, BSP thought that was not enough, and increased it further to Rs. 5 lakh/annum.
• There is a demand of reservation not only in education and jobs in the private sector, but also in the media.

This, however, was a jaw dropping revelation.

Extending support to the Telangana statehood movement, Ramadoss said his party had always supported the idea of carving out small states from bigger ones.

Right. Break up the entire country into pieces. And while you are at it, why don’t you break up J&K into J and K, and put this subcontinent out of it’s misery?