Notes From All Over (13/04/09)

Sheikh Abul Bashar hoped, Gujarat Police investigators say, to deepen the bombers’ theological understanding of the war they were engaged in. He came armed with Salamat-e-Kayamat, an evangelical video replete with scriptural prophecies of the triumph of Islam before the day of judgment. He also acquired a copy of Faruk Camp, a paean to Taliban rule in Afghanistan, from Usman Aggarbattiwala, a young commerce graduate from Vadodara’s Maharaja Sayaji University who allegedly programmed the integrated circuits used as timers for a separate set of bombs planted in Surat.

Bored by the religious polemic, though, Bashar’s students turned instead to Anurag Kashyap’s movie Black Friday — a riveting account of just how a group of hard-drinking, womanising gangsters carried out the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai to avenge the anti-Muslim riots that that tore apart the city after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

For now, the fate of the Blue Dogs is sealed, their doom is at hand. They can’t save themselves voting this way or that, or collecting money from this lobby or that, or running attack ads against this opponent or that. Their problem is far too profound to solve with such petty and trivial machinations.

Again – I’m not looking for civility or nuance or anything of that nature.  Public political discourse is and will always be nasty and ugly, even if it’s far better than the alternative.  Instead, all that is required for an effective and non-violent political discourse is two sides who fight by responding to actual arguments, however wrong those responses are, rather than just repeating the same rote response over and over again or feigning victimhood.