India: Citizens, armed forces veterans write to President, PM Modi on hate speech / Aditi Mittal: Deafening silence in a year of hate speech

Source: https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2021/12/citizens-armed-forces-veterans-write-to.html

Citizens, armed forces veterans write to President, PM Modi on hate speech / Aditi Mittal: Deafening silence in a year of hate speech

- Friday, December 31, 2021

Five former chiefs of the armed forces and a number of other prominent citizens including bureaucrats have written a letter to President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the recent incidents of hate speeches and urged them to take appropriate measures. In a letter, the group of over 100 people also referred to the communal comments made at an event in Haridwar recently and condemned “in no uncertain terms” such “incitement” to violence.

“We cannot allow such incitement to violence together with public expressions of hate – which not only constitute serious breaches of internal security but which could also tear apart the social fabric of our nation,” they said in the letter.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/hate-speech-india-veterans-pm-modi-president-kovind-7700817/

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Aditi Mittal: Deafening silence in a year of hate speech

2021 was a year of speech – free speech, hate speech, funny speech — and a year of silence. I grew up during India’s Mile sur mera tumhara era. My grandparents were all too familiar with the horrors of Partition and they often spoke of the riots that followed — about neighbours who told on each other to rioters and about identifying family members in piles of bodies. They talked of “divide and rule”, an insidious British policy that was meant to keep us fighting among ourselves so that we would not pay attention to the poor state of affairs in which we were living. They recounted how years of poisoning the minds of people against each other had exploded as a bomb, the shrapnel of which flew around us for years and the wounds from which took decades to heal.

In the refugee colony of Mumbai where they ended up, they promised themselves they would never live in a world where we dehumanised one another. The British might have forsaken us, but we would not forsake each other, they insisted. They would never passively watch their country burn. Never again. In the India they chose to live in, we constantly flooded into every neighbourhood house with vessels full of food to celebrate festivals, offer condolences, and watch out for each other in need….

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/aditi-mittal-writes-deafening-silence-a-year-of-hate-speech-7700596/