Shiv Sena attack condemned

New Delhi: All India Christian Council (aicc) has strongly condemned the attack on Outlook office in Mumbai by Siva Shiv activists.

In a press release issued by aicc Secretary General Dr John Dayal, also Member of the National Integration Council, President of All India Catholic Union and former Treasurer of Editors Guild of India, said, “Shiv Sena goons, like their spiritual brothers of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), Bajrang Dal and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh elsewhere in India, remind us that 60 years after Independence, India has not been able to exorcise the demons that divided brothers in Partition and continue to divide people even today.”

Dr Dayal said they had been a cause of bloodshed much greater than in any war with an enemy nation, or even a minor epidemic. The attack on Mumbai offices of Outlook magazine – one of the rare journals in the country to have consistently defied and challenged the forces of communalism, obscurantism and anarchy in the short years of its founding – was but a shade different from the unrepentant MIM attack on Bangladeshi exiled woman writer Taslima Nasreen at Hyderabad Press Club or the many attacks on Pastors and Nuns in various parts of the country. “They show the ugly and intolerant face of political forces struggling for power in a space where reason, civilisation values and tolerance should have held sway. Those are ideals Tagore sang about, and Jawaharlal Nehru promised in India after a hard won Independence from colonialism, feudalism and bigotry.”

The disclosures that the Pogrom in Gujarat 2002 was on the direct orders of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the continuing reminders in the Srikrishna Report of the nexus between powerful politicians and murderous gangs in the mass murders of 1993, and the protection that these elements have from Indian politicians, criminal elements – the two often indistinguishable from each other — posed a major challenge to modern Indian society and the governance. “Above all, it is for the Central and State governments to act, and to act fast. Governments’ conscience will be clear, and their hands strengthened, if they show courage to prosecute the attackers of Outlook, who indeed are no other than the killers of Muslims in Mumbai of 1993, and whose kin have on their hands the blood of innocent children and women of all communities, and particularly those of religious minorities. Verbal or written condemnation is the least the rest of us can do in the face of such concerted assault on Freedom of Expression. I express my solidarity with Editors Vinod Mehta and Alok Mehta, with their journalists and staff, and with the ethos of Outlook magazine,” Dr John Dayal said.

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