Hi NL Team,

I am a long time subscriber and I have finished my letter in about 650 words, I hope you get the time to read it in its entirety.

“One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic.”

These words are as true today, as they were when Stalin supposedly said them to Churchill during the Tehran Conference.

If you turn on your TV, open a web browser or switch on the radio, the news is filled with such statistics and they don’t affect us in any way. The dinner continues with a condescending, sympathetic or an insensitive remark about the incident.

Terming the behaviour of the Indian media towards Rohingyas as insensitive would be an understatement. However, the “sensitive” sections of the global and domestic media also lack nuance and historical understanding of the problem. We have created a false dichotomy where either you have to support them irrespective of their ideology or oppose them in spite of the prosecution they face. There’s a difference between situational awareness, victim blaming and assigning personal responsibility. I think it is important to have a more nuanced approach to the subject.

Rohingyas are not ethnic to Rakhine, they were relocated there after the British occupation of Burma. Rohingyas are ethnic to the Chittagong district of Bangladesh. As a community, they were deeply influenced by the Farai-di movement in Bengal that propagated the ideology of the Wahhabis of Arabia, which advocated settling ikhwan (agricultural communities) and waging of a holy war against the non-believers.

If you read the detailed account of the history of Rohingyas by the Historian Aye Chan, he mentions that Violence and tensions always existed between the Arakanese Buddhists and the Rohingyas, it reached its peak during the WW2, “when the British armed the Rohingyas to resist the Japanese invasion. The volunteers, instead of fighting the Japanese… massacred thousands of Arakanese civilians in the towns and villages.”

Rohingyas never really considered themselves to be Burmese, they insisted on a separate identity, demanded to be a part of a Muslim majority country (East Pakistan) and later a Muslim Autonomous State. As is the case with most Islamic minorities. They don’t want to live as a minority.

There’s a mutual distrust between the communities, one of these communities is in power and is prosecuting the other, I don’t think I will be wrong if I say that the conditions of the Buddhists would have been much worse, had the roles been reversed.

There is an elephant in the room and people are too politically correct to acknowledge it. Muslims when in minority want a secular state with “special rights”, this love for secularism dies when they become a majority. It is the only religion that acts like a mafia, insult the prophet and you will be killed, doesn’t matter which part of the world you reside in. While there are reformist Muslims who are trying to reform the religion, most moderates and extremists agree with severe punishments for blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality etc.

A devout Muslim wishes for a society where the infidels are either converted, subjugated or killed. It is time we acknowledged and obliged the Muslims and bleeding heart liberals like Manisha to acknowledge that intolerance and extremism are pretty common among Muslims. Islam represents a rejection of everything that a secular, tolerant and pluralist. Ataturk acknowledged it a century back, why can’t the left-liberals in India do the same now?

You talk about “safety” of Muslims in India. Try living as a devout Hindu in a Muslim majority neighbourhood. Celebrating something as vapid as India’s win over Pakistan becomes risky. This bigotry of low expectations, that many “liberals like Manisha” show, needs to go.

You may quote exceptions, yes there are some, but most of these exceptions are not because of Islam but in spite of it.

Regards,

Anonymous.

P.S: What happened to the Lets Talk About series, Murthal story? You guys need to stick to timelines.

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Hi NL Team,

Am a regular follower of Hafta. A few thoughts since Abhinandan is gonna start with the word count, let me try to  keep it short.

1) Would be great if you folks discuss your weekly suggestions a bit more. Spend some more time on them, maybe you can discuss one-week-old suggestions after some of you have read through them rather than on Arnab/ Modi/Trump /Rajdeep/ AAP…Because as we know, it is difficult to expect these men to do sensible things when their salary depends on not being sensible.

2) Next time Ranga Uncle talks of Social Darwinism I am gonna reach for a gun or something, either spend some time and explain what the hell it is in English or stop using it to label everything plus I have a suspicion that he himself is writing under some pseudonym about consequential something. Is he?

3) Abhinandan, you have got the most unbiased mind among the lot. I am not gonna say mind your tongue, but  definitely that might give a wrong impression about your attitude when you are in a debate. In other words, you are good at shouting people down though you don’t need to.

4) Ms Trehan is very much like my mother. Though most of the times, she gets her analysis right. There are some moments of absolute brainfreeze (national anthem!!!!).

5) Manisha, a great fan of yours, period.

6) Anand Vardhan, a great addition but needs to be countered  from the Left. Yes, Nikku, you are the one who has to do it which brings me to the point that it would be great of you folks to prepare in advance on what topics are going to be there…..

Do keep up the good work……

Rahul

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Hello team,

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve renewed my subscription for another year. Unfortunately, I can only afford the Disruptor subscription as I am a student. I spent a week deciding between purchasing a pair of jeans and this subscription and decided that the subscription was more important.

I honestly believe that you guys deserve all the support because you are in this line to educate the public, sometimes at the cost of your own lives.

I hope that my small subscription can help you guys in this mission.

Keep up the awesome work!

Regards,

Binoy Lewis

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Hello NL Team,

Pratyush here. I am your typical AI-engineer based in Bangalore, trying to build the next big product. I’ve followed you guys since the very beginning.

I am writing this letter mainly to point out a couple of things I have noticed about Abhinandan.

1. Your world-view seems heavily influenced by American pop-culture.
   You used the debate around American healthcare to explain the debate around Rohingya refugees in India. Analogies are supposed to make things easier to understand!!! Unless your listeners are mostly Amriki NRIs (quite possible), it would have left most of us bizarrely confused. This is just one in many such examples. Also, add to this your constant harking back to Bill Maher, NPR and tons of random celebrities. Maher, Colbert, John Oliver etc are primarily comedians who happened to have found an audience in the righteous liberal outrage genre. Please for the sake of your subscribers don’t take their ‘takedowns’ too seriously. Or I’ll start calling you the Karan Johar of Newslaundry.

2. Your complaints against Twitter seem very elitist. Twitter has greatly enhanced the marketplace of ideas. It has also de-centralisd the media’s earlier top-down control over narrative. I have personally learnt a lot from interacting with different accounts. Sure, the level of discourse on television news will fall if editors choose to go with a story just because it trended online. But they should know better. It’s their job. Don’t blame Twitter for their failure.

I’ll put out this quote from an American TV show, Silicon Valley:

“How a monkey chooses to use a technology is not an indictment of the technology itself.”

You’ve said Hafta is an exercise in revealing biases. So I hope you’ll take my perception and criticism of them positively. I am pretty glad about Anand Vardhan’s presence. Being a fellow PBO (Person of Bihari Origin), I am quite happy to see heartland political wisdom making its way to a new-age English outlet.

The rest of the panel is great as always except Ranga Uncle, who continues to make things as complex as possible but no more complex. I enjoyed the article on CRISPR. It would be great if you could do some stories on other game-changing technologies like artificial intelligence, crypto-currencies etc. And also point out how woefully ill-prepared India is for them.

Thanks and hope you get more money soon.

Pratyush Sinha