There is something profoundly worrying,in the response of what might be called the secular establishment to the massacre in Godhra.''
On how the secular establishment reacted to the Godhra massacre, he said ``every non-BJP leader on TV and almost all of the media treated the massacre as a response to the Ayodhya movement.'' That is, the victims, Karsevaks, themselves, had provoked the Muslims to burn them.
``If a trainload of VHP volunteers had been attacked,'' like in Godhra, after the demolition of the Babri masjid in December 1992, he argued, ``that would still have been wrong, but, at least one could have understood the provocation.''
But, at Godhra, ``there has been no real provocation at all,'' he said. ``And yet,'' he wrote, ``the sub-text to all secular commentary is the same: the karsevaks had it coming to them.'' ``Basically,'' he continued, ``the secular establishment condemns the crime; but blames the victims.''
That the victims were Hindus is enough to change the conduct of the secular establishment. It establishes that the secular rule of standing by the victims will not apply if the victims were Hindus. A different test will apply to them - that is, whether the Hindu victims perished by their own wrongs.
The editor asked whether we said that ``the US had it coming when the Twin Towers were attacked last year?'' The secular India never attributed the attack to the Muslims' resentment of US policies. He said ``we didn't even consider whether t
