Arms and the nation

[Nitro Express]

The following article was published in today's issue of The Telegraph.

ARMS AND THE NATION
- Like the US, India is dangerously divided over its gun laws
DIPLOMACY - K.P. NAYAR


“Happy 15th,” an Indian American greeted me on Sunday at a reception at the residence of the Indian ambassador in Washington as I stared at him without comprehension. He probably thought I was rude and moved on. A little later, when the greeting was repeated by another man, I rolled my eyes, but this time I was offered an explanation. “On July 4, the American Independence Day, ‘Happy 4th’ is the standard greeting here,” I was apprised. “So it is appropriate for Indians to wish each other ‘Happy 15th’ on India’s Independence Day.”

Americans who are sceptical of the ritualistic praise for Indo-US relations as a product of shared values and a shared destiny often joke that ever since Atal Bihari Vajpayee elevated Indo-US relations to the status of a natural alliance during Bill Clinton’s presidential visit in 2000, a common fate has befallen both countries. India, they say, suffered from cross-border terrorism for at least 15 years before the United States of America too became a major victim of big-time terror from abroad.

After aides to George W. Bush promised that they would help India to become a superpower, the two countries got into a tighter embrace. The joke continues that, as a result, while India has been a victim of Enron from 1993, the US too became the company’s victim in 2001. A new, expanded version of this joke is that when America suffered from the worst offshore oil spill in April this year, India, its “natural ally”, was not far behind with its own oil spill off the Mumbai coast this month.

It is a matter of serious concern, however, that the flippancy with which these anecdotes are treated is now making way for some common causes, which threaten to have catastrophic effects on Indian society because of a tendency to look at the American way of life as a role model. This column could list several examples of this trend, but by far the most serious of these threats to India’s way of life comes from a very organized attempt to import America’s gun culture into India.

Nothing highlights the depravity of gun rights advocates trying to scuttle the Union home ministry’s laudable efforts to tighten the Arms Act as their readiness to defile the memory of the Father of the Nation by misrepresenting his views in support of the demand for the ‘right’ for Indians to bear arms.

On websites in support of US-style, lax gun-ownership laws for Indians, and in lobbying material for the purpose of defeating an Arms Act (Amendment) Bill 2010, to be shortly introduced in Parliament, those who look to the US for inspiration in this regard opportunistically use the following quotation from M.K. Gandhi: “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”

The Mahatma did, indeed, express this opinion with reference to the Arms Act of 1878, which discriminated in favour of Europeans by giving them the privilege of carrying arms and prevented Indians from having access to weapons. It is true that the 1878 law was a political instrument to subjugate Indians after their 1857 fight for freedom. But the full quote from Gandhi on this subject is as follows: “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.”

Gandhi first wrote these words in a pamphlet he published during World War I asking Indians to fight with the British, which they did in large numbers. It was only in 1927, well after the end of the war, that his opinion about the Arms Act was incorporated into his famous autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. It is abundantly clear from the full quote that the Mahatma saw in the black British law an opportunity for a political struggle against the colonial rulers and for the repeal of the unjust Arms Act. In the pamphlet, he also laid out for Indians a clear course to press for the repeal of a patently unjust law.

However, today’s gun rights advocates would have us believe, by selectively using his quote, that what Gandhi was campaigning for was for more Indians to have access to guns. This is precisely the kind of disinformation that the National Rifle Association in the US constantly spreads with a disdain for truth that would put Nazi propagandist, Paul Joseph Goebbels, to shame. As the Congress general secretary, Digvijay Singh, and the young MP, Naveen Jindal, who have thrust themselves to the forefront of a campaign to prevent amendments tightening the Arms Act, prepare their lobbying effort to deal a setback to the home minister, P. Chidambaram, on this score, they would do well to talk to the surviving family of the professor, G.V. Loganathan, of Tamil Nadu’s Erode district.

Loganathan’s life as an academic of great promise was tragically cut short at the age of 53: he was one of the 32 people killed at Virginia Tech when a student at the university trained his two firearms on students and teachers in America’s worst case of campus gun violence. Or ask the widow of Gopi K. Podila, chairman of the department of biological sciences at the University of Alabama, who was killed in February in the most recent fatal gun assault on an Indian professor in the US. Podila was not killed by a robber or any criminal against whom, gun rights advocates like Jindal argue, Indians need protection. He was shot at point-blank range by another biology professor, a 42-year-old woman, who had a gun that was legally acquired under American laws, which Digvijay Singh and others like him would like to see enacted in India.

Although there are no conclusive statistics, going by announcements in the ethnic Indian media and networks, more Indians are killed in the US from gun violence than in road accidents. Today, Indian parents, learning from the tragedies of children they send to America — like the gun victim, Abhijit Mahato, a PhD student at Duke University in North Carolina and alumnus of Jadavpur University — have the option not to risk their children to a country like the US where death at the barrel of a gun is a daily occurrence. The laws that India’s gun lobby wants to promote will bring this American problem home to India, its streets, its factories and its universities, and deny people the safety they now have from legal firearms.

Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, which won awards at Cannes and during the Oscars, has a scene where the filmmaker walks into a bank in his home state of Michigan, makes a fixed deposit and collects a rifle as his promotional gift. Reading a recent report about guns being handed out in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh as an incentive for family planning operations was a chilling reminder of this scene.

Perhaps the differences between Digvijay Singh and P. Chidambaram on the issue of gun control are really differences of sub-nationalism. In large swathes of north India, it is not unusual to see people getting into buses, shopping in the mandis or going about other business with a gun slung on their shoulders. But not in most parts of south India. To that extent the divide over gun laws may turn out to be a significant difference in recent years between the two Indias.

But the problem with gun laws is also that there is huge money involved, as the American experience has shown. And once the stops are pulled out, there is no knowing where a slippery slope will lead. As in the incredibly picturesque Utah town called Virgin, where the gun lobby was able to get a law passed that made it mandatory for every household to buy a gun for their own protection.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100818/j ... 820047.jsp

Happy reading.

Nitro Express

[thomast1]

selectively using his quote

in the authors words for using M.K. Gandhi's Quotes, is exactly what the author has done about "Bowling for Columbine". Comfortably forgot the facts in that documentary. Where the narrator \ Director walks over to Canada and finds legal guns and responsible owners..


Responsible owners , should be allowed guns, this is a must for protection of one's self, family and the society , and for a nation, what more is right than arming the right people!!

Thomas

[hvj1]

Here is my feedback to the telegraph, I request all my friends to provide a resounding reply to Mr. K.P. Nayar.

Dear Mr. K.P.Nayar,
I reproduce Mahatma Gandhi's opinion;
“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn.”

Even the dimmest of dimwit can see that there is absolutely no ambiguity in the above statement, the hour of trial, as mentioned clearly refers to attack on this country by another, so far our defence forces have countered all such attacks with aplomb. There have been numerous instances, where, civillians in the initial stages of the attacks have countered the invading armies with their own civillian issue weapons, providing a 'holding action', till such time the regulars moved in.
That is one of the reasons, you will find, states like Punjab, Rajasthan, J.K. Arunachal Pradesh, who have faced the initial brunt of these attacks, carrying weapons openly. Now what else would you expect from the legally armed ciivillians , have they not stood up and be counted?
Also northern states, like Bihar, U.P. Haryana, where the first line of protection from dacoity is faced by the aam admi, hence the open carrying of arms for purpose of self defence.
I find your statement, that infers that southern states are more aligned towards stricter arms acts and perhaps , as you would personally like it- to defrock the civillian populace of all legal arms as DIVISIVE.
For your kind information, though I have doubts, whether it could illuninate your mind, Women in a village of Haryana, have all stood up and asked the district administration for licenses, so that they can protect themselves adequately. Or have you not read the story of Rukhsar, from J&K, the brave girl who snatched the weapon from a terrorist and shot him?
You are very kindly requested to do some research on the subject, instead of hoisting your two cents worth of uniformed opinion on the public at large.
Yours Sincerely.

[xl_target]

going by announcements in the ethnic Indian media and networks, more Indians are killed in the US from gun violence than in road accidents.

Just you watch, all the anti-gun idiots will be spouting this "statistic" pretty soon.

The fact that he made this up, like most of his article,

Although there are no conclusive statistics

will have no effect on their belief in the "truth".

What a bunch of half truths and perverted conclusions. Today, this is the face of Journalism everywhere.
This is the kind of "reporting" that is hastening newspapers down the path of extinction (in the US). Good Riddance!

[Nitro Express]

The problem with 99% of the so called learned population of India is lack of knowledge and access to correct information.

Mr. K. P. Nayar, Diplomatic Editor and Correspondent for the Americas, The Telegraph is part of this population.

It is not Mr. Nayar's fault.Many more Mr. Nayars are or will be be of the same opinion due to their ignorance of such issues.

Unless the media is properly sensitized on such issues, many more such articles will appear.

Nitro Express.

[Virendra S Rathore]

Women in a village of Haryana, have all stood up and asked the district administration for licenses, so that they can protect themselves adequately.

Do you have the name of that village? I tried looking it up on net but in vain. I'd like to include the name of that village in my reply to Telepgraph about their great editor's "Writing for the sake of writing".

Is it just me or did he really made no sense ??

[kanwar76]

Do you have the name of that village? I tried looking it up on net but in vain. I'd like to include the name of that village in my reply to Telepgraph about their great editor's "Writing for the sake of writing".

Is it just me or did he really made no sense ??

I think HVJ is talking about these women: http://www.gulabigang.org/en/index.html

They are not from Haryana but from UP

-Inder

PS: This article needs a befitting reply as it was done to BAN airguns article. Somebody need to clear mess from collective heads of these reporters and that somebody are going to be us.

[Anand]

People in India and other countries are dying from snake bites, lets regulate and license snakes, better yet lets ban snakes, wait a minute, how about mosquitoes? How about cars? electricity? fire? how about swimming because so many people die from drowning? How about air travel?
Most of the above have very heavy economic consequences so are unlikely to be banned!So the guise of "public safety" raises its head only when economics are not in the picture.

There is a term for people like Mr.Nayar who are either inherently afraid of firearms(weapons in general) or have been exposed incessantly to negative media about guns and have formed a bias against them,they are called Hoplophobs.
As with most phobias, this can probably be treated or rectified only by a trained psychiatrist!

Anand

[Virendra S Rathore]

they are called Hoplophobs.
As with most phobias, this can probably be treated or rectified only by a trained psychiatrist!

[cottage cheese]

People in India and other countries are dying from snake bites, lets regulate and license snakes, better yet lets ban snakes, wait a minute, how about mosquitoes? How about cars? electricity? fire? how about swimming because so many people die from drowning? How about air travel?

...one thing that must get the ban-itchy babus in a twist is what to ban when people die of starvation when our granaries are spilling over crawling with well fed rodents ...

Anyway, the poor weed is all thunder and lightning with his "fearsome command of facts" and morals in his article, but as mentioned earlier, behind all that facade, its just plain inane disjointed, cherry-picked anti drivel.

Hoplophob... now that's new. I though we had a shrink at IFG ...


regards
cc

[Virendra S Rathore]

his fearsome command of facts

???? .. Somehow, I don't see it

[nagarifle]

anyway what goes on in USA is not the same as India. if you want to take something from the USA, why stop at shootouts.

overall the article is not that anti, may lack some FACTS, like the town in USA, where its mandatory for all over 18 to have arms at home. and no crime. that speaks volumes in it self.

[hvj1]

Women in a village of Haryana, have all stood up and asked the district administration for licenses, so that they can protect themselves adequately.

Do you have the name of that village? I tried looking it up on net but in vain. I'd like to include the name of that village in my reply to Telepgraph about their great editor's "Writing for the sake of writing".

Is it just me or did he really made no sense ??

I read this article in the newspaper roughly a month or two ago, if I am not mistaken, it may be Johri Village, not sure whether in UP/Haryana. I am also looking for it.
Regards

[nagarifle]

check out this link
http://indiansforguns.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10477

[hvj1]

Thanks Naga,
Also check out 'Indian Women Granted Gun Permits to Fend Off Armed Robbers' on the internet. Will somebody please tell me how to link a topic here.
And Gentlemen,
Lets as many of us give a fitting broadside to this pseudo intellectual fart.