What is the Difference?
By Badri Raina , ZNet, Feb 9, 2010
I
The Victorian police chief, Simon Overland, has finally found the answer to the attacks that Indians have been subjected to down under.
“Try to look as poor as you can,” he advises Indian immigrants to Australia: “don’t display your iPods, valuable watch, valuable jewellery.”
The implication here is explicit: if you don’t flaunt, you will not tempt.
Thus, the onus that the state and law-enforcement ought to bear is neatly transferred to the victim on a principle of the call of “nature,” if you will. To wit, men will be sinners; so the best course is to seduce as little as possible.
The Indian community has characterized this approach to crime as “ridiculous”—with justice.
I have no doubt we shall soon have fiercely outraged debates on Mr.Overland’s take on crime here on Indian TV channels.
But do ask yourself: how is Mr.Overland’s advice here any very different from what Indian women are routinely advised by our own custodians of morality? Or custodians of morality in large parts of the world?
If you flaunt, you invite rape—and on the same principle of “nature” that informs Overland’s counsel to Indians down under. Thus, bigots of all hue argue that it is not the rapist and the molester who is out of order but the women who are thus raped or molested.
Peace and Justice Post 
India: Shiv Sena Fascists and the People.
February 16, 2010I
History now and again offers moments of hope that seem small and fleeting but, placed in larger contexts and taken at the tide, promise reconstructions of far-reaching magnitude.
What happened in the city of Mumbai today was one such moment.
The fascist Shiv Sena had threatened not to allow the screening of the film My Name is Khan till such time as Shah Rukh Khan, the main actor in the movie and a Bollywood icon, had apologized for having expressed the view that Pakistani cricketers should have been participants in the forthcoming Indian Premier League. Shah Rukh, to his great credit, refused to do so—indeed the first Bollywood personality to have thus defied the Sena. With the exception, as I recall, of Mahesh Bhatt.
It needs to be remembered that Shah Rukh Khan’s father had not only been a freedom fighter during India’s anti-colonial movement, but uniquely a Muslim who chose after the partition of the country to leave the new nation of Pakistan and relocate his family in India.
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See also: Shiv Sena in Wikipedia
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Tags:Badri Raina, Bal Thackeray, film: My Name is Khan, Mumbai, Rahul Gandhi, Shah Rukh Khan, Shiv Sena
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