I am back in London after two months in India. I was in Mumbai on the night of November 26. I didn’t sleep much that night or the three nights following. Like much of the rest of the country I stayed awake or woke up periodically to follow the TV reports of the terror that had struck the city in the person of 10 murderers crazed with some half-baked philosophy of Armageddon.
We saw the Taj hotel in flames, heard the explosions, followed the step-by-step reporting, so emotional in its tenor, by reporters who stood steadfastly, though discernibly fatigued, at the scene of the crime.
There have been thousands of reports and hours of TV time devoted to reporting, retracing and analysing the events of what is being called ‘26/11’, marking November as the cruellest month. I won’t add, in this space at any rate, any personal recall or analysis of those days of slaughter or speak of our outrage at the depths to which the human animal can sink.
In Britain, I find that there has been an outpouring of protest about another assault, a verbal one on a popular radio programme of the BBC. Two jokers, one Jonathan Ross and the other Russell Brand, the highest paid comedians in the country, with Ross averaging £8 million a year for hosting TV and radio chat shows and Brand running up with £2 million, are accused of bullying and bad taste.
They phoned up a 78-year-old actor called Andrew Sachs and Brand told him in crude and nasty terms that he had had sex with his young underage granddaughter. Brand and Ross recorded this remark and others and played the response on Jonathan Ross’s radio show to demonstrate how funny and avant-garde they were and how the old fumbler had reacted to the abuse.
A prank of the Facebook generation or just plain unfunny evil? Gathering anonymous people to converse with each other in large numbers globally has led to suspension of values and morals — but again this is not what I wish to discuss in this space. Another time.
No, I want to return to the terror in Mumbai and another controversy concerning the BBC. It seems the corporation has officially forbidden its journalists and panellists from calling the murderers of Mumbai ‘terrorists’. The word must not be used in BBC
bulletins. The terrorists must instead be labelled ‘militants’.
This is not a misprint. You read it correctly the first time! Yes, I meant the ‘BBC’ not the WBC (Wahabi Broadcasting Corporation). Through linguistic funk, some convoluted pandering to the greater untruth generated by definitional casuistry, the BBC pulls back from calling these murderers what they are.
One of them guns down 59 people, 28 of them Muslims, at a terminus of Mumbai, for no reason except to cause panic. Militancy or terror? Over 150 others are killed, some of them tortured. Militancy or terror? Grenades, RDX, training camps, planned attacks to spread fear. No aim, no goal: no hostages, no demands, no ransoms, no political statement. Kill, spread fear. “We were ordered to kill at least 5000,” says Amir Kasab, the captured terrorist.
“Militants”? In what cause? If some ayatollah at the BBC imagines that this attempt to turn the slaughter of innocents into some heroic act of political resistance or retaliation, he should read his Koran again. But there are no ayatollahs at the BBC, just some apostate Christians on bloated salaries making these offensive decisions.
Why? Because with their limited appreciation of the Muslim communities of Britain they believe there may be support for the terrorists which they do not wish to alienate. Their justification is a convoluted bluff which puts a curse on definition.
May those who murder the partners and children of these sophists in their beds be labelled ‘militants’ and ‘martyrs’ by the rest of the world. May no one in India turns to the Bullshit Broadcasting Corporation till this hypocrisy is exposed and militantly wiped out.
The writer is a scriptwriter based in London
