Selma Carvalho writes: "Not for one moment can I imagine a member of the Nehru family, sitting in their offices writing memos and contemplating on deplorable situations. No, they would be in the thick of it, walking the streets, talking to people and risking the bullet if need be. Nehru himself would have jumped into the fray, asking to be killed first. Unfortunately Manmohan proved to be an administrator rather than a man of action."
----------------------------------------------------- While almost every Indian with basic human values would be upset over the recent tragic incidents in Orissa and I can understand Selma's pain and anguish over this, what I fail to understand is how she can extol the virtues of the Nehru- Gandhi family who, if I were to recall history, were involved in similar, if not worse incidents in the past. Does Selma forget how Indira Gandhi brought democracy "to a grinding halt" by imposing the Emergency rule - the darkest period in Indian democratic history, when civil rights and liberties were suspended and the Constitution turned into a meaningless document, when Parliament and the courts were made virtually ineffective, and when thousands of protestors, political opponents and strike leaders were arrested and brutally tortured in horrible prison cells? Does she also forget the 1984 Anti-Sikh pogrom that took place in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination, when the caretaker Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi delayed sending the Indian Army by 3 days, giving mobs of Congress workers and activists led by leaders like H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, and Jagdish Tytler virtually a free hand to ransack and loot Sikh establishments, enter Sikh Colonies, pull out Sikh passengers from buses and trains to be either lynched or doused with kerosene and burnt, thereby massacring nearly 3000 Sikhs in the process. And does she also forget how Rajiv Gandhi tried to justify this horrible and gruesome Carnage with his infamous statement "When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake". We always knew that Public memory is short but now we know that Selma's memory is even shorter! Or maybe this is just one more of her off-days :-) Cheers Sandeep