Time has gone by lazily. It's been over a month since my last post. What I intented to be a weekly post has already missed 5 eposides.

So much for adventure.

Well I am to be blamed for the most part, but perhaps not solely. My internet service provider turned out to be just as lazy as me. He would't renew my internet connection which expired in the first week of January inspite of my repeated persuations. It turns out he is too lazy to make his money.

We all know what we want and what is good for us and yet it turns out some of us are too lazy to even try. Same goes with me. Lazyness and fear are perhaps the only two things that prevent a person from getting things that are good for him.

Today is Martyr's Day, 30th Jan 1948 is when Mahatma Gandhi was assasinated by religious fanatics. Only yesterday I finisher a book on freedom and partition of India "Freedom at Midnight - Dominique Lapierre and Larry Colins". It belongs to a friend who recommended I should read it. Facts in the book appear to be well documented and provides a whole lot of references, so for now, I take it to be authentic. A deeply moving book that I could not let go once I started reading it. I finshed it over a weekend, starting friday evening I was done by Sunday dusk. For once I showed no lazyness in reading a book worth reading and a history every Indian ought to know.

The Mahatma died a martyr and achieved in his death what he had sought so dearly to achieve in his fasts. Secession of communal frenzy. Perhaps in guilt of what the people of India had done to themselves they finally gave up rioting. They were perhaps seeking vengence for what had happed to them or their friends and family, but they were seeking vengence by killing another group of innocent people. Beacuse Hindus were thown out of their homes in Pakistan, Muslims were thrown out of their homes in India.

The fact that Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu was considered by the establishment as a necessary point to be emphasised in offical news broad casts, in order to avoid more backlash on Muslims. But I believe, had it been a Muslim who murdered the Mahatma the guilt would have been the same, and perhaps people would have felt it the same way.

The police were too lazy to apprahend the people responsible. The first assasination attempt that had failed on 20th of January perhaps left enough clues. If nothing else then it had left behind a co-conspirator of the attack, Madanla Pahwa who had detonated the guncotton bomb which was ment to distract people while others did the act and was caught. Other consprators froze and panicked and could not do what they had come out to do. They dispersed. The police turns out was too lazy to get Pahwa to reveal every thing he knew. He took them to the site in Delhi where they had stayed, he could have even taken them to the places in Poona and Bombay and Ahmednagar and Gwalior where he had been if nothing else the police had enought time to carry him around in trying to identify the co-conpirators. Some senior police officer in Poone was too lazy to hand over the photographs of Nathuram Ghodse the person who finally commited the crime 10 days later over to the police in Delhi, even though he had a report on his desk. I wish they were less lazy.

After reading the chapter "Our people have gone mad" I felt India is as communally sensitive as ever. In 8 weeks of rioting about 200,000 to 2 million people died. The estimates are as they are estimates. But even the lower estimate is too big to believe. The families wrecked by the killings will carry the wound for generations to come. But perhaps in many cases entire families had been murdered.
The stories of abduction and rape and mutilation were too grotesque to repeat. Half the people of what Americans lost in 2nd world war in 4 years were killed in rioting in 8 weeks of mayhem.

Gandhi was killed by his murderers who were organized and not just some rogue group of angry people. They were also well financed for their task enough to afford a flight from Mumbai to Delhi and to pay any price demanded for their murder weopan. He was murdered because he opposed the rioting and because he fasted to make the government pay the 550 million rupees that Indian government owed and refused to pay Pakistan believing it would be used to procure weapons that would be used in Kashmir.

Why do I belive India is as communally sensitive today as then? Because I have in my lifetime already witnessed 3 major communal riots. Anti Sikh riots of 1984 when Indira Gandhi was assasinated by his Sikh bodyguards because they thought she was anti-Sikh, the riots of 1992 and the riots in Gujarat after the burning of a train in Godhra. Not that I was affected by these riots. Lukily for me I was not, but I have known people who have witnessed two of them.

When the news about the burning of the train reached newspapers all over India, I was in college and I remember discussing it in a college canteen with friends. I remeber how we felt disgusted by what was done and how we immediately knew that riots will follow in Gujrat.That is precisely what happened. The right wing parties called for a bandh in Gujrat and riots followed.

I wish police and administration is less lazy in dealing with riots, because only a few gangs of crazy people riot and 100 times more suffer either direcly or indirectly because of their acts.

I wonder why the rioters aren't too lazy to seek revenge by killing those who are innocent. Cowards they are for sure if not lazy.