UPA has failed to defend secular fabric of India

New Delhi, Sep 27: The UPA Government's ''wanton failure'' to defend the secular fabric of the country and restore the faith and equal rights of minorities constitutes ''profound betrayal'' of the people's mandate, says the latest report by an NGO.

Delhi-based 'Anahad' in its ''National Consultation on Communalism'' report 2006 said the future generations will pay the price of this ''unconscionable abdication''.

''Its two years in office shows little awareness of its responsibility to the future generations... It needed to recognise the deep significance.... that its actions would influence profoundly the future course our country will take,'' it said.

The first set of unmet expectations relate to reclaiming healing and justice to the Gujarat riot survivors, who, the report claims, were denied even elementary reparation and rehabilitation by an ''unashamedly hostile government''.

''As legal justice is openly subverted and economic boycott and fear persist, no hand has reached out from the Central Government or parties to wipe their tears. Their is no rehabilitation package, no measure to secure independent investigation, prosecution and trial,'' it alleged.

It said life of the survivors of the state-sponsored carnage has not improved in any way.

About a law on communal violence promised in the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) to prevent state impunity in communal massacres, the report said the Government has produced a draft that adds to the powers of the State, including measures from POTA and Armed Forces Act, which will be used against the minorities.

''Many hopes were pinned to the law....The expectation was a law that would strengthen the hands of citizens by codifying the mandatory duties of the state to prevent communal violence and to secure e reparation and legal justice,'' it observed.

The NGO accused the Central Government of plotting a ''dangerous conspiracy of silence'' about the continued hate mobilisation against Muslims by the Sangh organistaions and attacks on Christian in many parts of the country. ''Communal tempers are mounting dangerously in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Sangh schools continue to propagate hate in young minds... the content of their text books defy the Indian Constitution,'' claimed the report, which brings together various sessions of national consultations organised by Anahad on January 26 and 27.

In the 71-page report, Anahad alleged that the previous NDA regime, behind its superficial facade of modernisation, ''cynically and recklessly'' engineered communal divide.

''People of India are passing through deeply troubled times.

Despite the current installation in the Central Government of a political alliance formally committed to secular character of the Indian nation, a small but powerful minority of social and political forces that ate well organised and resourced continue to assault and subvert secular democracy,'' the report said.

''These organisations have mounted in recent decades an unprecedented challenge to the very idea of India.'' Pseudo-religious extremist organisations have systematically demonised the entire Muslim community, especially within the influential middle class, as ''implacably unpatriotic, regressive and violent'', it said.

''The manufacture of hatred has extended, especially in distant tribal regions of central India, to other minority groups like Christians.'' The report claimed that textbooks have been rewritten and popular cultural forms like cinema distorted to propagate a false, dangerously communal and inegalitarian vision of our history and cultural legacy.

''In this moment of crisis, unprecedented in modern India, democratic institutions both of state and the people stand eroded, and corrupted,'' it added.

UNI