Parallels between UPA Government attitude and the conduct of the Nazi Party during Hitler's rise in Germany
Two very uncomfortable events occurred in India recently.Other commentators seem to have ignored them.
On June 1 2006 police shot dead three heavily armed Islamic terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Tayiba terror group when they carried out an attack on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in Nagpur.
While police investigations revealed that these attackers were indeed members of the Islamic terror group Lashkar-e-Tayiba, Muslim vote-banking politicians in the UPA, like Lallu Prasad and Mulayam Singh made ridiculous accusations against the RSS itself. They claimed that the RSS had carried out the attack on its own headquarters itself. They did not say anything as to why the RSS would do that, nor did they offer any proof of any kind at all.
The accusation was so ridiculous and so completely unsubstantiated by fact that it was difficult to believe that such claims were indeed being made by people who were not inmates of mental asylums.
However, that was not the end of it.
Barely a month later, after the horrific Mumbai blasts that killed over 200 and crippled over 700 innocent Indians in train blasts in Mumbai, Mulayam Singh again alleged that the RSS had carried out those attacks.
Again, he offered no reason why the RSS would do something like that. And again, his accusations were completely unsubstantiated by fact. Indeed, police investigations revealed that the attacks had been carried out by people belonging to the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) -- an extremist Islamic group based in India -- and the Lashkar-e-Tayiba -- a well-known Pakistani terror group.
Even after this, Mulayam Singh and the UPA's Lallu continued their allegations against the RSS. Indeed, Mulayam went so far as to give a character certificate to the SIMI, declaring that SIMI could not have had anything to do with the Mumbai terror attacks -- a ridiculous claim that cannot even be taken seriously unless one also believes that Mulayam actually knows who carried out the attacks through inside knowledge that investigators and the police do not have -- in other words, if he himself were a co-conspirator. Unless Mulayam himself organized those attacks (and therefore knows that SIMI did not do it) how would he know any more than the police investigators as to whether SIMI carried them out or not ?
Lallu and Mulayam -- these two idiots have been regularly making these brainless claims with absolutely no basis in fact, and making the ridiculous allegations against the RSS, for about a month now.
Nobody is putting them in mental asylums. Is somebody -- say the UPA, the so-called "secular" forces -- encouraging them from behind the scenes to make these claims ?
One might almost suspect that there was some ulterior motive being seved through making these ridiculous allegations against the RSS.
Say something enough number of times, and people eventually take it for the truth.
Is the stage being prepared for another outright attack on the RSS by the so-called "secular" forces ?
Falsely blame someone loudly enough, and enough number of times; misuse Government power to put them in jail or kill them off, and thus wipe them out.
[Talking about killing off inconvenient people: Remember Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Rajesh Pilot and Madhav Rao Scindia ? None of them had exactly very above-board fair-and-square deaths. Who benefited from each of those deaths ? A certain very powerful Dynasty in Indian politics that has ruled India for all but 10 years -- 5 years of Narasimha Rao and 5 years of Atal Bihari rule... any guesses ? The Nehru Dynasty. That would be the subject of another article some other time.]
Is the RSS the target of the Nehru Dynasty's "secular" pogrom again ?
If so, it would not be the first time something like this has been done. A glowing example of this can be found from Nazi Germany, fresh in history, just about 70 years ago.
Before Hitler got absolute control of Germany, the German Communist Party was very powerful there. To destroy the Communist power in Germany, Hitler used a clever trick.
Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor and head of the coalition government on January 30, 1933. His first act was to ask Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag so that he could increase the number of Nazi seats in the government. Hitler's request was granted and elections were set for March 5, 1933. Hitler's aim was to abolish democracy in a more or less legal fashion by activating the Enabling Act. The Enabling Act was a special power allowed by the Weimar Constitution to give the Chancellor the power to pass laws by decree, without the involvement of the Reichstag. Under the existing Weimar constitution, under Article 48, the President could rule by decree in times of emergency.
The unprecedented element of the Enabling Act was that the government itself possessed these powers. The Enabling Act was only supposed to be used in times of extreme emergency, and in fact had only been used once before, in 1923-24 when the government used the Enabling Act to rescue Germany from hyperinflation. To activate the Enabling Act required a vote by a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag. In January 1933, the Nazis had only 32% of the seats and thus were in no position to activate the Enabling Act. It had a four-year application and would have to be renewed after this.
During the election campaign, the Nazis had run on a platform of fervent anti-communism, insisting that Germany was on the verge of a Communist revolution, and that the only way to stop the revolution was to pass the Enabling Act. Hitler's platform in the campaign comprised little more than demands that voters increase the Nazi share of seats so that the Enabling Act could be passed. In order to decrease the number of opposition members who could vote against the Enabling Act, Hitler had planned to ban the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (the Communist Party of Germany or KPD), which at the time held 17% of the parliament's seats, after the elections and before the new Reichstag convened.
At 9:14 PM on the night of February 27, 1933, a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze. The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber of Deputies in flames.
Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, shirtless, inside the building. Van der Lubbe was a Dutch insurrectionary council communist and unemployed bricklayer who had recently arrived in Germany.
Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring arrived soon after, and, when they were shown van der Lubbe, Göring immediately declared the fire was set by the Communists and had the party leaders arrested. Hitler declared a state of emergency and encouraged aging president Paul von Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending the basic rights provisions of the Weimar constitution.
The Reichstag Fire allowed Hitler to accelerate the banning of the Communist Party and was used to confirm Nazi claims of a pending Communist revolution. The Nazis argued the Reichstag fire was meant to serve as a signal to launch the revolution, and warned the German public about the grisly fate they would suffer under Communist rule.
According to the Berlin police, Van der Lubbe claimed to have set the fire as a protest against the rising power of the Nazis. Under torture, he confessed again and was brought to trial along with the leaders of the opposition Communist Party. As a consequence of the Reichstag Fire Decree, the police and the SA, actually a paramilitary organization of Hitler's party, seized all Communist Party buildings in Germany, along with weapons they claimed were to be used in the coup. The KPD was never banned, in case communists switched to the SPD.
With their leaders in jail and denied access to the press, the Communists were badly disorganized. Those Communist (and some Social Democratic) deputies that were elected to the Reichstag were prevented from taking their seats by the SA. The Nazis increased their share of the vote to 44%, which gave the Nazis and their coalition allies, the German National People's Party, a 52% majority in the Reichstag. The March elections were a major success for the Nazis but not to the extent they were hoping for. (The Nazis had hoped to win 50%-55% of the vote.) The Nazis coerced and bribed the remaining parties except for the Social Democrats to give them the two-thirds majority for the Enabling Act, which gave them the right to rule by decree and suspended most civil liberties. Despite considerable pressure, only the Social Democrats voted against the Enabling Act. In the months that followed, all of the non-Nazi parties were either banned or dissolved themselves to avoid arrests and concentration camp imprisonment.
Historians generally agree that van der Lubbe was involved in the Reichstag fire. The extent of the damage, however, has led to considerable debate over whether he acted alone. Considering the speed with which the fire engulfed the building, van der Lubbe's reputation as a mentally disturbed arsonist hungry for fame, and cryptic comments by leading Nazi officials, it is generally believed the Nazi hierarchy was involved in order to reap political gain — and it obviously did.
The similarity between the two cases is troubling. Hitler organized an Emergency situation -- the burning of the German Parliament -- and blamed the Communists for doing it; a ridiculous charge, as the Communists' only political power came from having their Members of Parliament; getting rid of Parliament would have caused them to gain nothing. In contrast, the Nazis controlled the Chancellor's position (Hitler was Chancellor of Germany) and getting rid of the pesky Parliament would have made -- and did make -- Hitler the unchallenged leader of Germany.
Similarly, the UPA is seeming to create an environment where lots of terror attacks are happening every few weeks in various parts of India -- an Emergency situation -- and ridiculous charges are being made against the RSS.
The pattern is very troubling to say the least.
The RSS has been falsely accused and banned three times before, each time by a Congress Government.
The first time was in 1948, right after the murder of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, when with absolutely no evidence, Jawahar Lal Nehru's Government blamed the RSS for the killing and promptly banned it. The RSS challenged it in Court and finally in 1949 Nehru, unable to defend his non-existent case in Court, had to lift the ban.
The second time was when Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975-1977 after losing the elections and being caught and taken to Court for election fraud and misuse of Government power and machinery for her election campaign. The RSS was seen as a dangerous enemy by the Dictator Indira, and promptly banned.
The third time was after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, when once again, without a shred of evidence the RSS was banned by the Congress Government, and had to lift the ban after failing to prove its non-existent case in Court.
Totalitarianism is not new to India. Indira Nehru almost succeeded in turning India into her personal fiefdom in 1975-1977. She would have surely succeeded if not for leaders like Loknayak Jai Prakash Narayan and his hundreds of thousands of supporters who valiantly fought for Democracy and laid down their lives -- dying in hospitals or jails from police torture, or disappearing altogether from the face of the earth into the dungeons reserved for the political enemies of a Totalitarian State.
Recent acts by the UPA Government, such as the Tiananmen Square style brutal suppression of the school and college students protesting against Casteist Reservations -- something no Indian had imagined would happen in India -- smack of Authoritarianism. The journey into Totalitarianism cannot be ruled out.
Is the UPA Government preparing to ban the RSS again ?
posted by Harsh Vardhan @ 8:40 pm
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