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Letters

In name of Minorities
It is interesting to note that Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a Pakistani Parliamentarian from minority Hindu community and patron-in -chief of Pakistan Hindu Council, has demanded a complete ban on alcohol throughout the year in the Islamic nation where alcohol is otherwise freely available in name of minorities. Dr Vankwani has described sale of alcohol in name of minorities as blasphemy!

It would have been better if Pakistan government would have taken steps to develop a feeling of security amongst minority Hindus in a manner that they would have loved Pakistan rather than running to India for shelter. However such gimmicks like making alcohol freely available in name of non-muslims do provide a sort of privilege and prominence to minority communities where majority muslims easily manage alcoholic drinks for themselves but only through non-muslims!
Madhu Agrawal, Delhi

NDTV
To prevent NDTV from functioning for a day is to impose a fine on it without a trial and without a conviction. If NDTV did in fact break any law, it should have been charged under that law. Presumably the government knew that it had no case.
Mukul Dube, Delhi

Eliminating ‘‘Enemies’’
The extra-judicial killing of the eight under-trial Muslim political prisoners carried out by the Madhya Pradesh police once again proves that the state will with impunity eliminate its "enemies" (to be read as Dalits, Adivasis , and Muslims) ruthlessly. While the Prime Minister sheds crocodile tears over the plight of Muslim women, whose fundamental rights are allegedly violated due to the enforcement of personal laws that have legal sanctity, the governments run by his party kill Muslim under-trial prisoners flouting all the norms laid down by the law of the land and neither Ministers at the Centre nor the Madhya Pradesh government show the slightest inclination to uphold that proper procedure should be followed and rule of law should prevail.

The law enforcing (?!) agencies have become so brazen that the chief of the Madhya Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad, Mr Sanjeev Shami, is reported to have admitted that the eight men were indeed unarmed contradictory to what other police officers and the government were claiming. More and more incriminating evidence is emerging from the analysis of the visuals as well as the audio tapes that the whole event is scripted and executed by the state controlled forces under the diktat of their masters to further their communal agenda.

Little wonder OVER 55 per cent of under-trials across the country are either Muslims, Dalits or tribals, according to the National Crime Records Bureau's prison data for 2015. According to the NCRB, over two-thirds of all jail inmates are under-trials. The data also shows that more than 70 percent of under-trials have not passed Class 10. The data also shows that most of the under-trials have to spend over three months in jail before they can secure bail - close to 65 percent spend between three months and five years.

True, India is surging ahead, day by day, as those in power make universal contributions to the progress of torture methods, to the techniques used in killing people and ideas, to the cultivation of silence, to the multiplication of impotence and the sowing of fear.
Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, New Delhi

Frontier
Vol. 49, No.21, Nov 27 - Dec 3, 2016