10 Questions for Manmohan Singh – By Dilip D’Souza
Dilip D’Souza
Ten questions for Manmohan Singh, as he savours an election victory and gets ready to embark on a second term in office.
Note that this is by no means an exhaustive list. There are plenty of other questions to ask, plenty of other concerns to pay attention to. In particular, there are foreign concerns: like the goings-on in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, to pick two. Those are important, no doubt.
But I tend to believe in the maxim that we must clean our own house first, before looking outward. And I believe too that there are questions to be asked about justice in particular. So with no further ado, ten questions. About justice.
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Sir, perhaps you can’t actually do something about the questions I ask below, given both the compulsions of politics and what are state subjects and what aren’t. Yet as Prime Minister, and one who has just won the clearest mandate Indians have given in two decades, your voice carries an authority that cannot easily be ignored. Thus:
- Will you raise your voice about bringing to justice those responsible for the massacre of Indians in Delhi, 1984?
- Will you raise your voice about bringing to justice those responsible for the massacre of Indians in Bombay, 1992-93?
- Will you raise your voice about bringing to justice those responsible for the massacre of Indians in Gujarat, 2002?
- Will you raise your voice about the sorry plight of Kashmiri Pandits, this country’s forgotten refugees? About finding a way to return them in safety and dignity and on their own terms, even now, to their homes in that state?
- Will you raise your voice about the imprisonment of Dr Binayak Sen for two years and counting now?
- Will you raise your voice about how an administration only shirks its duty when it arms civilians and calls this “Salwa Judum”? About how this futile exercise only deepens a bloody and tragic crisis? About enlightened and statesmanlike ways to address both the great threat of Naxalism and the reasons for its rise?
- Will you raise your voice about the unprovoked venom and attacks against “North Indians” in Bombay, and similar attacks elsewhere in the country? About how we are all daughters and sons of this Indian soil?
- Will you raise your voice about the attacks on ordinary Indians and their places of worship in Mangalore and Orissa over the last several months?
- Will you raise your voice about the attacks on women in the name of protecting Indian culture, in Mangalore and elsewhere?
- Will you raise your voice about the way too many people are treated in the name of “development” — whether in proposed SEZs or in the Narmada Valley? About the meaning of development in the light of such treatment?
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Binayaksen.net is one of many efforts by well wishers and supporters of Dr Binayak Sen to bring the injustice being done to him by the government of Chhattisgarh to the attention of people around the world. 
AN EYE OPENER
Is raising one’s voice enough? Dr. Singh condemned the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 and the incidents of violence against innocent Muslims and Christians, as well as instances of moral policing, but we need to ensure by deeds, not words, that such things don’t happen again. But I am glad that you also remembered the Kashmiri Pandits, who are often forgotten victims in such discussions.