How Many Children Did Maya Kodnani Have?
By Mustafa Khan
07 April, 2009
Countercurrents.org
As she wished from behind the bars that especially women would show through ballot box how she has been handled by the police, Maya Kodnani deserves closer attention. It need not be electoral but clinical. The clinical couch is in Vienna and she is without one in the dungeon. Even so why should she appeal to women? If she were really concerned for women she must have come across scores of naked women who were raped and sticks and rods were still clinging to their vagina as they made their way to the relief camps of Shah Alam and other places in Ahemdabad and elsewhere in 2002. Most of these victims were traumatized and pulled their battered bodies on their enfeebled feet smeared with blood, urine and what not. Neither their souls nor their minds even gave them company to the relief camps. When fellow victims sighted them they carried them in their arms to the nearby pathetic medical help that was available.
Those who care for the development of women and the welfare of children must be made of different stuff than that of Lady Macbeth. One can either have children whose brains she could dash against rocks to fulfill her ambition as does Lady Macbeth or claim victims of violence as her own despite their birth in different religion from that of her own. No religion is born yet to claim such a woman.
But there are others who claim such a woman as their own. The learned judge who granted her anticipatory bail quintessentially observed that she as a woman would not abuse her office and position to obstruct investigation into the Naroda Patia and Naroda Gaon massacre in which 106 were brutally killed. Some of them fell by the bullets she fired from her pistol. The judge was right if he felt that women have the dregs of decency of not going underground when investigation is on. Why should a woman of decent birth hide in other people’s bedrooms when the police are after her? Our Indian culture without the distinction of religion makes it unthinkable unless you have a distinct culture nurtured in a laboratory which allows a self proclaimed murderer like Babu Bajrangi and police officer Narendra Amin [the murderer of Sohrabuddin’s wife as well as a youth in a police station of Hyderabad] enjoy state patronage and hibernate in Gujarat State Guest house at Mount Abu or the posh middle class colonies in Ahemdabad. But then she absconded from the police from February 2 to the end of March. No trace of hers until Justice DH Waghela struck down her bail. If she could play truant with law what else could she have not played and where! People rush to generalize on the contrarily. No other than Prime Minister AB Vajpayee in the conclave of his party at Goa on the heels of the pogroms of 2002 chimed in with Samuel Huntington that Muslims do not live with their neighbours peacefully! Maya Kodnani’s case is an eloquent disavowal that the woman is capable of breaking from the ranks of her society. Hence the research worthy question of how many children did Lady Macbeth have. If you have breast fed your own how could you dash the brains of the children of others, let alone your own!
Maya Kodnani and LK Advani share many things in common. Both have deep rooted hatred for Muslims. Their presence at the scenes of historic violence and destruction are full of subterfuges. He it was who hectored round the country on his ominous rath yatra for the cause of building the Ram temple at the site of the Babri mosque and was very much present on the dais when the unwieldy crowd was singing chorus to give one more push to the mosque and it would be over for good. He did nothing to reprimand the crowds. He did not raise his hand to stop the onslaught. The atmosphere was charged communally against the mute inanimate mosque which stood defenceless though surrounded by thousands of well armed policemen and army men. He simply enjoyed from the privileged ring side view the most cherished spectacle of his life for which he had taken out the juggernaut round the country to make it happen. Maya Kodnani was also present at the most horrendous site of genocide, the hole at the Naroda Patia. Unofficial toll was very high, in many hundreds or else why should the commissioner of Police PC Pandy ask that the dead bodies be scattered all over the city! She also was busy throughout the fateful day of February 28, 2002 exhorting and inciting people to kill Muslims in large numbers. How could her victims forget this virago going around howling the horrible banshee wail against them? Even those who were engaged in the crimes against humanity went on record like Prakash Rathod saying that Mayaben patrolled the streets urging the rioters to kill more Muslims!
As Maya Kodnani moved around she cannot pretend to be ignorant of several members of her own community who were in the forefront of attacks on the Muslims. For example
Bipin Panchal also known as Bipin Sindhi had 400 to 500 gas cylinders in stock which were freely given out to the mobs to burn the houses and shops of the Muslims. He is the owner of the Uday gas agency. Maya must have nursed her constituency well. She could have also known Natarajwala Sindhi, Sangeet Furniturewala Sindhi. Advani also nursed his constituency in Gujarat well and did remember Maya when she was made a minister, the first Sindhi to get the berth in Gujarat ministry.
If she was the leader of the people she did nothing to stop the crowds from perpetrating violence. This is another benchmark which measures her performance to be of the level of LK Advani. If she wanted the anticipatory bail to escape the investigation by the SIT how could she convince the court that she was moving around the area to pacify the people rather? She was named by eight people right on the day of the crimes and forty more witnesses named her in due course of time. Even so the police continued to omit her name from their record. She must have been playing the end game like Martha and George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?” of Edward Albee, killing imaginary children. Her patron too must have been lost in imaginary scaling the heights of the historic mosque way back in history.
The work of Albee belongs to the theatre of the absurd. It is based on a lie as the American couple wait for their son to come home so that they could celebrate his birth day past midnight. In fact they just don’t have any son and it is their pastime to play such a joke in the presence of young couples, who visit them on the college campus, In a way Kodnani and Advani also play the drama of their catastrophic life based on lies like that of the chief minister of UP who had given undertaking in court that he would protect the Babri mosque and therefore Advani goes to Ayodhya to see how a man of integrity is Kalyan Singh in carrying out his undertaking. Or, the lie that the Godhra happened because the Muslims hatched a conspiracy to burn just one coach, S6. In fact the lie is maintained as of today, that is, evening of Sunday April 5, 2009 when Advani told a gathering at Satana that if Afzal Guru were any Anand Singh the present Congress government would have long back hanged him. His senility has overtaken him so much that he does not remember that the attack on the parliament had taken place when he was the home minister as well as the deputy prime minister of India, and that his government had mobilized the army to attack Pakistan as a response to it. Could they not have hanged Afzal Guru?
Or, Modi and Advani’s current promise that they would bring the fabulous wealth deposited in the Swiss banks. Why, they had made the same promise in the election which brought them to power at the centre in the late nineties. Thus this is their absurd drama through which they want to beguile the Indian voters. A good pastime as lies cost nothing. Satana is a neighbouring town of Malegaon and the prime ministerial candidate recently had good pastime on conjecturing and crying foul how Pragyasingh Thakur was humiliated. Of course, in the Satana speech he said nothing about terrorism. May be it was too close to Malegaon! Good he remembered the gender difference between Anand and Pragya.
