Jagadish Tytler is definitely in a fix. The papers, especially the Indian Express’ front page is inundated with the news. Their front page headline–the Web edition–has changed at least thrice in about a two-hour span. The same goes more or less, for the other papers, too.

As usual, I turned to the blog world: for reading sensible stuff that the mainstream media has discarded long ago. Amit Varma first who remarked the day before: what now? And followed it up with the Left’s womb-to-tomb disease: Amnesia of Convenience (link courtesy: Amit Varma) And today, the same disease makes them speak thusly:

The government came under pressure in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday on continuance of Jagdish Tytler as Union Minister with Left parties joining Opposition NDA in demanding action against those named in the Nanavati Commission report on 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

So I was talking about the blog world. Nitin presents his analysis:

But no political calculus justify shielding those accused of crimes against humanity. There is no honourable course open to the Indian government other than to prosecute those suspected, however ‘probable’ their guilt may be, for the question of guilt is for the courts to decide. [.] However, the Congress party seems to have already decided that it will choose the low road and protect its black sheep.

A probable–perhaps, convincing–reason why the prosecution won’t happen even if they’re proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt can be gleaned from this excellent piece.

Pogroms are not communicated on official stationery, nor may there be any recording of the orders, such things are done in absolute secrecy, with the use of cut-outs, and you may never know who sanctioned it, unless there is painstaking investigation in that direction, in the manner of the Nuremberg trials. And even there, Hitler’s closest aides denied absolute knowledge of the Holocaust. For three days, Delhi burnt with anti-Sikh violence, the President, Zail Singh, was powerless to intervene, P.V.Narasimha Rao, to his eternal shame, did not act as home minister, and Delhi Police was blatantly partisan against the community.

More significantly,

How could all this happen without the concurrence of the Congress government? To turn the question around, if the government had no stake in the violence, why didn’t it order the army earlier than three days, why the delay? Clearly, Tytler, Sajjan Kumar, Bhagat, Shastri, the lot, were pawns, who were doing as ordered, although it is possible that in their individual zeal to show loyalty to the Gandhi family, they overdid the violence. It was state terror, no less, and only the investigation of the 1984 riots as state terror will lead us to the real murderers, and that the present regime will not allow.

I remember reading in a biography of Sanjay Gandhi–written in Kannada–that Sanjay, in order to project himself as the “supreme” leader of the Congress party, ordered a massive drive to recruit people to the party. His eye was on the numbers. And so it transpired that any person who could afford One Rupee as party fee could join. And it also transpired that this singular act of Sanjay completely banished any vestige of ideology which the Congress stood for–or at least pretended to stand for. Principles, code of conduct, character, and all those nice things were automatically imbibed by anyone who paid One Rupee. At the end of two (or three? my memory fails) years, the party membership had swelled to about thirteen lakhs. Of which close to 90% had criminal records–from struggling pickpockets to crime pashas. Some of the folks from this crowd are now ministers. Of course, I didn’t mean to include Jagadish Tytler & Co in this club for I know very little about the man’s background. They were as the analysis says, following orders from “the top.”

But who sat at the top?

Update: The pawn has been sacrificed. What is significant is the way he did it: he tendered his resignation to Maino, the Super PM instead of the Prime Minister. The reason? Entirely predictable.

Tytler is understood to have told that the reason he submitted the resignation to Sonia instead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was because he thought she was his leader.

Thought?