One of the most memorable scene in Frederick Forsythe’s iconic novel, ‘The day of the Jackal’, happens much before the cat and mouse game between the charismatic British assassin and his plodding French cop nemesis begins in earnest. In this scene, the British PM summons Thomas, the detective following up on an inter-departmental help request from the French police about the possibility of General De Gaulle’s assassin having base in Britain. Things are not good between the British PM and the French premiere, who cost the British PM an important political achievement a few months ago. Thomas expects an unofficial reprimand for helping the French out. He is surprised when the British PM tells him that General De Gaulle is the PM’s personal friend and asks the cop to extend every co-operation to the French authorities. In his only scene in the novel, the British PM stands tall as a man who would not allow political rivalry come in way of personal safety of a fellow head of state.

As I watched the Ishrat Jehan story uncover in the last few months, my mind kept going back to this scene from Forsythe’s novel and wondered if the scene would have stayed or cut if the novel was set in present day. Literature is often said to be mirror of the real life. There was a time when we were told there was no percentage in killing a cop since cops closed ranks and hunted down a cop killer irrespective of their internal differences. We were told politicians drew the line at political assassins, no matter how bitter their rivalries. As we see cops torturing one of their own at the behest of politicians, and as we saw the politicians themselves not only ignoring risks to their opponent’s lives, but go out of their way to keep it a secret, one has to wonder if this is the new normal, if politicians like the British PM in the Day of the Jackal and writers like Forsythe simply represent a bygone era.

As sad as the turn of events may be, it takes even sinister tones when you account for the political background and the back history of some of the parties involved in this case. While reading my twitter feed and comments section of news on this, most common reaction is outrage. How could P Chidambaram, in cold blood, change the affidavit and take the references to possible attempts on Narendra Modi’s life out? A few readers also indicated this as a sign of how desperate Congress was to get rid of Modi. I wish I could write this entire episode on cold blooded politicians and fear of Modi. I am afraid the truth is more sinister than that.

To understand the turn of events that might have led a sitting home minister of a sovereign country to ignore a security threat as brazenly as Chidambaram did, we must dig a little in the way Chidarmbaram’s ideological side, the Congress+ Left secular combine views its opposition. To make my point I am quoting a few “intellectuals” talking about incidents where Hindu lives (among other) were lost.

Teesta Setelvad talking about the horrific Godhra massacre- “While I condemn today's gruesome attack, you cannot pick up an incident in isolation. Let us not forget the provocation. These people were not going for a benign assembly. They were indulging in blatant and unlawful mobilization to build a temple and deliberately provoke the Muslims in India."

Or how about Ramchandra Guha and Rana Ayyub who quoted from Harinder Baweja’s article about how Babri Masjid demolition caused Azhar Masood to wage war against India. (https://twitter.com/Ram_Guha/status/687841431713525760) Rana, who once described herself as ‘pro-justice, fiercely anti bigotry’ in her twitter bio, called the article, a cringe worthy exercise in terror apology, as “brilliant and insightful” Guha mentioned how Masood “may never have turned his attention to India were it not for demolition of Babri Masjid.”

Let’s not also forget P Chidambaram himself, who as a Home MInister in August 2010, first used the phrase “saffron terror” and cautioned the nation against it. His party colleague Digvijay Singh attended the launch of a book titled “26/11 a RSS conspiracy”. That time, I just laughed off these antics as the lengths to which Congress leaders would go to appease Muslims. But here is the thing folks- the middle class Muslims, the peace loving ones at least, always knew the RSS conspiracy was hogwash. Diggy raja knew this too. So why was he going to these absurd lengths to frame a Hindu organization?

We have discussed such articles and the liberal’s defence of terror often from the view point of “root cause” theory. This theory basically speculates as to why some people have this deep seated urge to kill their fellow human beings in large numbers. It is time to view from other end of the telescope and see such articles (or remarks by Teesta) as a deliberate effort to dehumanize victims of these attacks. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the more insidious side of the story and we can ignore it no more.

All of us have seen that one clip where a young Barkha explains(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPZFmO2xL30) how Kashmiri Pandits systematically disenfranchised Kashmiri Muslim youth economically to a point where picking weapons and chasing their aggressors out of the valley was the only recourse left to the youth. What is common to that clip and Teesta’s remarks about the 59 men, women and children murdered in the most gruesome manner by Islamic fanatics? Both attempt to create a mitigating circumstances argument for the perpetrators by dehumanizing the victims. They were asking for it, and in any case who were the victims- those blatantly and unlawfully mobilizing to build a temple in one case and those systematically disenfranchising young people from one community in other. Should we cry for them? No need, you see. This is the beginning of concentration camps and holocausts, make no mistake about it. A society that accepts that sometimes it is necessary to char 59 human beings to death is also a society that will soon rationalize extermination of people based on their religion. Strike one for team Dehumanizers.

Dehumanizing, psychology 101 will tell you, is the process of denying “humanness” to other people. Of its two most popular forms, animalistic dehumanization is employed to deny the said humanness to a group of people. If you analyse liberals’ behaviour in today’s discourse, you will see how well the description fits. Language that likens some human beings to non-human (animals for example) is one of the most garden variety example of dehumanization. When your MSM journalist call you a troll, he or she is not merely insulting you, he is also trying to take part of your humanness away from you. If something bad were to happen to you, say getting shot in the head by extremists or getting blown to bits by a suicide bomber, the MSM journalist will slyly remind the rest- yes, tragic, but he was only a troll. Not a real human being, you see.

Seen in this light, one can imagine, how Chidambaram, an otherwise decent man might have decided there was nothing wrong in sweeping a terror tip under the rug. He was not settling scores with a fellow politician, his decades of careful dehumanizing indoctrination told him, he was merely letting one group of extremist take on other group of extremist. I bet that is an easier moral decision to make than deliberately allowing terrorists bandwidth to hit your opponent.

Nowhere, this dehumanization as starkly evident as in the treatment of right wing women leaders in India. When HRD Minister Smriti Irani reported that she found a camera in the changing room of the clothes shop she was at, a prominent liberal tweeted- I did not know the shop made clothes in xxxxxxxxl size. Text- an unkind poke at Irani’s girth. Subtext- oh, it is only that fat right wing woman leader, why accord her dignity? She is not really a woman like the rest of us, you see.

Even the study of facilitating factors of dehumanization fits our context very well. Very often social distance from the target group is necessary for dehumanization. When you read Rahul Pandita’s tweet about the earthquake victims (https://twitter.com/rahulpandita/status/719111856422424576) you intuitively realize that today’s left wing including the mainstream media and academics are far removed from the common man’s life. What we very often ignore is that this removal may be deliberate on their part.

Is this unique to India then? Not really, politicians and terrorists have been dehumanizing the other side as long as we can remember. The only unique aspect of the Indian episode is that a handful of people are doing it, quite successfully too, to the majority. I do not have empirical evidence on the next statement but I feel the large number of educated Hindus, carefully weaned on the majority guilt by an education system horribly biased against them helps too. The right wing has an innate desire to be fair to everyone, even to those who are not fair to them. That makes instilling guilt and giving reason for violence against them easy. It is a deadly combination of Stockholm syndrome and dehumanization and right now it is really decimating the right wing.

How to fight back then?

For starters, we must recognize the root cause theory as an integral part of the dehumanization process. We must reject it with everything we have. Not accepting root cause theory is not enough, we as a society must refuse to even engage with anyone espousing this theory.

Second, we must understand in this war, victimhood is high ground and if we do not occupy it our enemies will. If we occupy this ground, we will use it to keep ourselves free. If our enemies occupy it, they will use it to engineer and justify a genocide of us. Both survival instinct and morality asks we stake claim to this ground. Victimhood does not mean being vengeful and inciting hatred. It means accepting and acknowledging our history without shame, and without rancour, and base our decisions on common sense, rather than political correctness.

Thirdly, we must instil or reinforce respect for our law enforcement agencies in the mind of our younger generation. It should anger every young man and woman in India that honest IB officers were tortured in Ishrat case, it should but it really doesn’t. I blame popular culture (movies/novels) and their careful portrayal of our police and armed forces as either barbarians raping and pillaging those they swore to protect or as weak puppets in the hands of politicians. From the recent fake molestation case in Kashmir to the Ishrat case are sad reminders of how easy it is to make us believe that our men and women in uniform are villains. This must change. When the proverbial shit hits the fan, we will be dependent on the same men and women to save us, let us get off on the right foot by telling them we believe in them. We will deal with the bad apples on a case to case basis. This is right not only from the present situation view point but also form the age old doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty”.

As for those who are trying to even now defend the UPA government by claiming the fake encounter to be real issue, let’s not forget the slippery slope of this argument. They are really not interested in the law and order part of it, if there were, they would have never supported Mao terrorists and their sloganeering JNU buddies. They are interested in more cannon fodder for the fixed system of dehumanizing they have built for years. They want more Islamic extremists to be arrested and if possible given death penalty so that the long procedure of appeals and mercy petitions may start. After all, tomorrow’s Kanahaiyas need new names to shout with Azadi. The moment Isharat and her co-conspirators were killed, the dehumanizers were denied raw material for their toxic process.

Now they are angry, because they could not even make the “police state” narrative stick.

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