'Communal' UPA's 'secular' terrorism

by V Sundaram

A superb and grandiloquent message was given by Sonia Gandhi to her party workers in the morning in New Delhi on Saturday, 13 September 2008, to fight against forces that are trying to ‘communalise’ the politics of the country.

She told her party workers, ‘There is a deliberate attempt to ‘communalise’ society in different parts of the country. What we are witnessing in States like Orissa most recently is a carefully orchestrated ploy by the BJP and its sister organisations to inflame religious prejudices and passions. We must expose the mischievous designs of the Sangh Parivar and fight to rubbish the malicious propaganda’. She showed her transcendental ‘political wisdom’ when she took particular ‘secular’ care and caution to make no reference whatsoever to the cold blooded murder of Swami Lakshmanananda in the tribal district of Khandamal in Orissa by Christian missionaries (one of whom is certainly Radhakant Nayak, Congress MP according to VHP President Ashok Singhalji.)

Sonia Gandhi’s clairvoyant vision as a statesman became known to the whole world within a few hours on that very day (13-9-2008) in the evening when at about 6.30 p.m., in five different crowded parts of New Delhi, bombs planted by Islamic Terrorists exploded in the space of 40 minutes, killing more than 30 people and causing grievous injuries to more than 150 innocent citizens. Indian Mujahideen, a front of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), has claimed full responsibility for the blasts. Islamic terrorism is viewed as ‘secularism’ by Sonia Gandhi and her equally ‘secular’ colleagues like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Amar Singh, Karunanidhi, Deve Gowda and the like. Communists also belong to this ant-Hindu category regardless of whether they are part of the UPA or not.

Sonia Gandhi’s daily working message to our incapable Prime Minister and equally rudderless Union Home Minister seems to be this: ‘Organised High-Powered Ignorance about Islamic Terrorists and Islamic Terrorism is a blessed state of secular bliss. Colossal callous ignorance is indeed a blessed state of secular heaven. Dealing effectively with Islamic terrorism and saving innocent victims of terrorism would only amount to non-secular ‘communalism’ and obscurantist ‘fundamentalism’’.

Ever since the minority UPA government came to power in 2004, the Islamic Terrorists have been having a free run in India, with the soulless UPA government choosing to remain ‘secularly neutral’, between the fire and fire-brigade—between the perpetrators of terrorism and the victims of terrorism. A comfortable operational space was officially created for the Islamic terrorists when POTA was repealed by the UPA government in 2004. POTA was discarded by the UPA government only to appease the Muslim terrorists of India. This impolitic step was taken at a time when the whole world, including the United States, was moving towards a regime of harsher laws to tackle terrorism. Effeminate and non-descript Congress leaders have been perversely saying that a law like POTA did not prevent terrorist attacks earlier during NDA regime. Does this mean that its repeal in 2004 has helped the UPA to eliminate terrorism? Laws are meant only to equip the society to deal effectively with crime and miscreants. They are intended as preventive deterrents and they cannot be expected to operate as automatic power brakes.

During the last three months, the Islamic terrorists have demonstrated their lethal power to strike anywhere and everywhere with impunity in all parts of India. Through their glorious ‘strike’ successes, they have shown that India has no Prime Minister or Union Home Minister or National Security (Insecurity!) Advisor or Director of Intelligence (Director of Vacuous, Vaporous and Gaseous Information founded on secular Islam-embracing nonsense!) or Director of RAW. India has become the classic example of a totally failed State under a surrogate Prime Minister who has been reduced to the level of a meandering ZOMBIE ZERO.

Islamic Terrorists are reveling in daily depredations in Jammu and Kashmir. The whole world knows that with the full knowledge and cooperation of the government of India, the innocent and peace loving pundits of Kashmir have become homeless in their own ancestral homeland. Nearly 500,000 pundits of Kashmir have become refugees. Thousands of Hindus have been killed in Kashmir. In the last seven years, targets of Islamic terrorists have been as varied as Delhi (2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2008), Kolkatta (2002), Mumbai (2003, 2006), Ayodhya (2005), Malegaon (2006), Varanasi (2006), Bangalore (2005, 2008), Hyderabad (2007, 2007…), Lucknow (2007), Ludhiana (2007), Jaipur (2008), Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar (2002, 2008) and Surat (2008). Islamic Terrorists attack wherever their infrastructure allows them to do so. Gujarat Police have proved that there exists an organised network of terror modules or terrorist ‘sleeper’ cells in a wide swathe of the country.

ACCORDING TO A RELIABLE ESTIMATE, THE DEATH TOLL FROM ISLAMIC TERRORIST VIOLENCE FROM THE 1980S TO 2001 WAS 94000, VERY MUCH MORE THAN IN ALL THE WARS FOUGHT BY INDIA SINCE INDEPENDENCE. This will be clear from the datapresented below:

1.Indo-Pakistani War of 1948: 1,104 killed & 3,152 wounded
2.Sino-Indian War 1962: 3,128 killed & 1,697 wounded
3.Indo-Pakistani War of 1965: 3,264 killed & 8,623 wounded
4.Indo-Pakistani War of 1971: 3,843 killed & 9,851 wounded
5.Kargil War: 527 killed & 1,363 wounded

To summarize, the total number of men belonging to the armed forces who lost their lives in the five major wars from 1947 to 1999 has been only 11,866. The total number wounded has been 24,684. More lives – 94000 — have been lost on account of Islamic terrorism in 20 years between 1980 and 2000. More than 250,000 people have been grievously injured on account of acts of Islamic terrorism. The expenditure on security forces during this period has been more than Rs.56500 crores.

Home grown Islamic terrorists have shown that Jihadi Terrorism is not just Kashmir-centric but has a wider design of destabilising the whole country. They have made it clear in their recent e-mail message, which says ‘The Indian Mujahideen accepts the sole responsibility of Delhi serial blasts, and we claim this, through our third consecutive e-mail, which is, unfortunately, still a mystery for you. It is very sad to see the bad condition of your cyber forensics that has still failed to find out our technique of sending the ‘MESSAGE OF DEATH’. And yet our government continues to be in a state of secular INFATUATION FOR ISLAMIC TERRORISM.

Nothing seems to move or stir our government of India. Our Prime Minister is known to spend a sleepless night only when an unknown Islamic terrorist gets arrested for certain penal offences in a foreign country like Australia. Even if thousands of Hindus get killed by Islamic terrorists, he would blissfully oscillate (fortified with nods of Regal approvals from the Chairman of the UPA Co-ordination Committee from time to time!) between two states of voluntary and involuntary sleep – states of an inebriated voluntary non-being! Sadly and badly for India we don’t have patriotic national leaders who can rouse our sleepy nation to dynamic action.

Just as the Islamist terror attacks in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Surat and Delhi have shown a pattern, likewise the response of our ever-sleeping Union Home Minister during the last three years has also followed a set pattern. Our Union Home Minister, who is expected to take control, has been so inarticulate in emergencies that he has never failed to join the victims in their wailing cries and calls for help from somewhere. In the immediate aftermath of the Jaipur blasts, the only contribution made by our ‘fit for nothing’ Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil lay in his blaming the BJP government in Jaipur. His standard counter-terror strategy has always followed a predictable pattern. He will make grandiose statements like ‘We will not tolerate acts of terrorism’, ‘Our secular nation will not be cowed down by such acts of cowardice’, ‘Our great people are capable of maintaining social and communal harmony at any cost in spite of all terror’ etc. He will then make a hurried visit to the spots or scenes of Islamic terror, changing his dress 60 times in a minute on a one is to one basis, surrounded by his sycophantic dancing dervishes like the Union Home Secretary and the Director of the Intelligence Bureau etc. and in the process impose an avoidable burden on the already stretched and battered law and order and relief missionary in each affected area. Then he will give a press conference filled with usual secular platitudes to enable the known anti-Hindu secular mafia of mass media – both print and electronic – to play the known and planned game of mock competition for generating different types of exciting theories about the perpetrators and the roots of terrorism. Invariably it would all end with one conclusion ‘We have already warned the States about the impending terrorist attacks in their respective territories and we cannot understand the reasons for their ineptitude, inaction or inactivity’. This standard Sonia-Congress criticism will be directed only against BJP-ruled States and not against Congress-ruled States!! Then finally there will be recourse to the use of known free size secular socks in this manner ‘Our ever vigilant and never failing Intelligence Agencies (animated and controlled by our ever young National Security Advisor) can clearly see the hand of Pakistan and ISI behind these cowardly terrorist attacks. This however will not in any way derange or derail the noble on-going process of peace talks with Pakistan’.

The Indian Mujahideen have boldly announced their victories putting their faith in Allah, the Most Magnificent and the Most Merciful (!!). Our Union Home Minister has shamelessly defended his total ignominious defeat putting his whole faith in Sonia Gandhi in this manner. ‘I enjoy the full blessings and confidence of my leader Congress President Sonia Gandhi’. The whole of India knows that for him and his Prime Minister, this matters more than the lives of the victims of terrorism in New Delhi or elsewhere. Is this not shameless secularism on stilts?

In these columns yesterday, I wrote about the grim national disaster of our country being condemned today to the hopeless state of our having a Union Home Minister who is instinctively geared up to a level of round the clock alert only to distinguish between Sonia Gandhi and non-Sonia Gandhi and not between law and lawlessness, between order and anarchy and between effective governance and despicable non-governance. Let me quote his own words (as reported in the media) to prove this point.

‘Well, I have the full blessings of my leader, Sonia Gandhi. I enjoy the complete confidence of my leader’. Perhaps national survival only means survival of Sonia Gandhi and her family at any cost. Nothing else is more sacred or sublime to the Union Ministers like Shivraj Patil and the gang of equally ineffective several other Union Ministers in the UPA government. Our ineffective Union Home Minister has responded like a petty Mafussil politician to the following responsible statement of Narendra Modi ‘Ten days prior to the bomb blasts in New Delhi, I had gone to Delhi and personally met and informed the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister that Gujarat government had received disturbing information to the effect that Islamic terrorists were planning their next attack on New Delhi. I had duly alerted them.

I also requested them to give their immediate clearance for the Gujarat Control of Organized Crime Bill (GUJCOC) which we had submitted to government of India in June 2004 for Presidential assent and which is still pending. In the absence of a Central Act, serious incidents of terrorism will have to be tried under ordinary laws, which are meant for normal situations. Islamic terrorism has to be tackled as a national problem and petty party differences should not be allowed to come into play in dealing with this sensitive and complex problem’.

When some pressmen asked Shivraj Patil as to what was his official response to the above balanced statement of Narendra Modi, Shivraj Patil replied like an undergraduate student participating in a college debate to score a petty point when he said ‘The Centre had information about the possibility of terror attacks in the national capital EVEN BEFORE Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi conveyed it to us’.

Perhaps the Union Home Minister is only capable of scoring trivial technical victories through his small-minded one-upmanship!! The whole country knows that our Central Intelligence Bureau, amidst all the turmoil of unrest, confusion, anarchy and sudden death caused by unforeseen acts of Islamic terrorism in different parts of India from time to time, is in a blissful state of voluntary coma and amnesia bordering on death.

This intelligence machinery is geared only to meeting the ever shifting ‘private political needs’ of some select Congress Ministers and more particularly those of Sonia Gandhi and her family. Against this disgusting background, the observations of our Union Home Minister on intelligence failure seem somewhat childish and ludicrous: ‘I refute all charges of intelligence failure.

In respect of all incidents information was given to the concerned States. It was available with us in Delhi also. But what were not available were the timing, the place and the method to be used for the purpose by the terrorists. DIFFICULTIES AROSE IN THE ABSENCE OF ACTIONABLE INFORMATION ON THE TIMING AND PLACE OF THE PLANNED ATTACKS’. Perhaps our Union Home Minister, ably aided and assisted by his Home Secretary, might like to send a Show Cause Notice to the Indian Mujahideen, for their gross dereliction of duty and deliberate failure, bordering on contempt of duly constituted administrative authority, to keep the Union Home Minister and Union Home Secretary duly informed (with detailed facts and figures) in advance about the terrorist attacks they carried out in New Delhi on the September 13 2008. Shivaraj Patil complains about absence of actionable information in advance.

And yet he took no action on the vital information furnished by Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat ten days prior to the actual bomb blasts in New Delhi. Thanks to the secular stranglehold of Sonia Gandhi on the Prime Minister and the Union Home Minister, even misleading information provided by Indian Mujahideen in advance through e-mail would have been considered as publicly more important and relevant than what came from communal Narandra Modi of the Sangh Parivar.

The self-respecting Hindus of Gujarat and India have not forgotten the description of Narendra Modi as ‘Mauth ka Saudegar’!! (Merchant of Death).The Union Home Secretary and the Union Home Minister seem to be kindred souls and spirits. While the Union Home Minister spoke about his operational difficulty arising from the absence of actionable advance information relating to the timing and place of the planned terrorists attacks, the Union Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta rose to ecstatic heights immediately after the blasts in New Delhi, when he made a historic declaration to this effect: ‘With every blast we are gaining a new experience. We have been observing that these kinds of blasts are happening in cities across the country. In each incident you learn, gain experiences’.Soon after the blasts in New Delhi, in a sham dramatic manner, RJD chief and Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi and discussed the situation in the wake of serial Delhi blasts on 13 September 2008 Saturday that claimed several lives.

He had the temerity to say, ‘UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi should call an all-party meeting to debate the issue of terrorism. A special Cabinet meeting should be called to discuss threadbare issues arising out of the blasts in Delhi. Intelligence failure is responsible for the Delhi blasts and inputs from the IB are always ‘vague’. They should be more specific. I demand the constitution of a special task force to deal with terrorism-related cases. A mechanism should be evolved to tackle such situation. There should be accountability fixed on the part of bureaucracy. It is the bureaucracy which will ensure the proper operationalisation of the law’.

After giving the above statement, Lalu Prasad contradicted himself by saying that there is no need for any more stringent laws to tackle the current menace of Islamic Terrorism. He said, ‘No law can prevent human bombs. There was a POTA when Parliament was attacked. So just passing laws is not the solution in such cases’. About a month ago a Judge of the Delhi High Court removed the official Ban on SIMI. Thus the Delhi High Court had no compunction in handing over India to the hands of Islamic terrorists! Completely shaken up by this removal of ban on SIMI, which has been behind all the Islamic Blasts in India during the last 25 years, government of India moved the Supreme Court for the stay of the Delhi High Court Order.

Mercifully the Supreme Court of India immediately stayed the Orders of the Delhi High Court and therefore the government of India ban on SIMI continues. Soon after the Delhi High Court removed the ban on SIMI, the RJD Chief and Union Minister for Railways Lalu Yadav and the Samajwadi party Chief Mulayam Singh Yadav heartily welcomed the removal of ban on SIMI. Both of them wanted the immediate ban to be impose on the RSS.

The Congress Minister of State for Home Shakeel Ahmad, spoke like the Imam of Jama Masjid, when he said ‘The RSS has been banned three times in the past and I do not think the demand to ban it again is unjustified’. The joke is he spoke like a clown when he said that he was speaking on behalf of the Congress Party and not the government! This is not very much different from an Islamic terrorist caught in the act saying, ‘I have done this not as a terrorist but as a devout Muslim’. Soon after Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav welcomed the removal of ban on SIMI, blasts took place in Ahmedabad and Surat.

This was followed by the recent blasts in New Delhi. Both these irresponsible and anti-national, self-proclaimed National Leaders, later wanted a ban to be imposed on VHP, Bajrang Dal and the RSS. After saying all this, within 2 weeks Lalu Yadav has paid tribute to the glorious relief work done by the RSS in Bihar Floods. So much for inconsistent political hypocrisy! Working together in a spirit of masterly inactivity, both the Union Home Minister and the Union Home Secretary seem to be jointly singing to us the following chorus which seems to combine the ‘comic’ and the ‘cosmic’ aspects of their management of terrorism: We know that Islamic terrorism has become the Law!Don’t we know?There is a reigning confusion of aimsThat rules and reignsWithout reason or rhymeIn the meantime.UnfortunatelyWe do not knowAnd sadly our Party Chief Sonia do not want us to knowThe cause and the effects of terrorismBut we know that it has become the Law!Don’t we know?Terrorism is Islamic secularism!Secularism is Sonia Congress Communal Terrorism!Whatever that be we wish to tell you,Individually and severallyBoth speaking clearly and most severely,

Terrorism is as we have told you often before,
Terrorism is as you all know we suppose,
Terrorism is but let us declare it once more,
With Sonia secular fervour,
And shorn of communal frenzy
And Sangh Pariwar fervour
Terrorism is The Law
The Law of our Constitution
The Law of our Polity
The Law of our Legislature
The Law of our Executive
And the overriding Law of our Land!
We don’t ever say that God only knows
About the reigning mystery of Terrorism
Without abdicating our sense of public responsibility
We wish to declare
With our High Command approval
Don’t you all know?
Even the Great God
Does not know
Or ever wish to know
The causes and the roots
Of ever merciful
Islamic terrorism!

If we exclude Israel, then no other country in the world can be said to have suffered so much at the hands of Islamic terrorists as India. Nearly one lakh of people in India have been killed by Islamic terrorists from 1980 to 2000.

No one can understand how the continuous and unending blows by Islamic terrorists on the vast continental mass of India which has resulted in the large scale death of thousands of innocent citizens and in which five times that number have been grievously hurt, are being absorbed with such stoic patience and shrugged off as government-supported nuisance by the masses of India. This vast and great country takes a lot to stir. Any intelligent observer can clearly see that for the sake of Muslim minority vote bank politics, different grades and shades of Islamic terrorism are being fully politically backed (and perhaps many times supported in dubious ways) by the so-called secular parties of India like the Sonia Congress, RJD, the SP, the LJS, DMK etc. It will not be too much to say that for these anti-Hindu parties the divided Hindus of India in majority are less important politically and electorally than the united Muslims of India in minority! Perhaps no country other than India in world history has shamelessly exhibited such a frozen and petrified attitude of tolerance and cowardice in dealing with those Islamic terrorists who have been holding our country to ransom and who have been responsible for brutalising the psyche of our nation by killing and maiming our sons and daughters by the thousands, with an unabashed impunity and contempt.

The treasonable way in which political leaders like Ram Vilas Paswan, Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav, have been openly demanding the lifting of ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) is indeed shocking to say the least. Two of these irresponsible worthies are Cabinet Ministers. Under the Representation of People Act 1951, any registered party has to specifically mention in the party’s regulation that it shall bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India. The SP, RJD and LJP are duly registered parties, yet their national presidents are openly supporting and advocating the cause of SIMI, which doesn’t believe in the Constitution. The Prime Minister and Congress president too have maintained a studied silence.

I can assert with certainty that in no other country can any one, more so a minister, a public representative, get away by openly siding with a movement banned by the government on the charge of indulging in anti-national activities bordering on treason and sedition. Moreover Supreme Court’s interim judicial endorsement of the ban on SIMI makes the case of such open support to SIMI extended by these two Union Cabinet Ministers, a serious offence for their prosecution under the law. Our Prime Minister’s freedom of speech (and action) is tightly controlled by the Chairman of UPA Co-ordination Committee. Thus his studied silence relating to the treasonable conduct of his two senior Cabinet Ministers in regard to SIMI detailed above calls for no elaborate explanation. Then to crown it all, we have a President who has been placed there only to act as the mouthpiece of Sonia Congress Party. We cannot expect our President to use her overriding Constitutional Authority for admonishing Ram Vilas Paswan and Lalu Prasad Yadav for their politically motivated speeches asking for a removal of ban on SIMI. Though the Constitution says that a Minister shall hold Office at the pleasure of the President of India, yet in actual practice in the Indian context today, every Minister holds Office only at the whimsical pleasure of Sonia Gandhi, the Chairman of the UPA Co-ordination Committee.

At last our Prime Minister has admitted that there are too many gaps in intelligence. He has also conceded that there is an urgent public need for a tougher law on terror. It is widely rumored that government of India are going to create a new post of Internal Security Minister in the rank of Minister of State. We should not get misled by these foamy and frothy announcements of our Prime Minister who is only a helpless puppet in the hands of the Chairman of the UPA Co-ordination Committee.

To come back to the ‘mundane’ policy aspects of effectively dealing with Islamic terrorism, who are the people responsible for negligence in the field of intelligence? The first and foremost is the government of India, especially the Ministry of Home Affairs. What is being cleverly hidden from public view is the fact that in February 2001, a Group of Ministers (GOM) gave their recommendations for re-structuring our National Security System after the Kargil episode. This report was titled ‘Reforming the National Security System’. No concrete action has been taken by the Ministry of Home Affairs till date. The present National Security Advisor M K Narayanan was fully involved in this exercise. The report stated ‘The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has the nodal responsibility of Internal Security in the country and has to ultimately deal with the consequences of any dereliction of responsibility at the local level and must therefore play a more pro-active role vis-à-vis the State Governments. The MHA would also have to catalyze the process of modernizing and upgrading the Central Para Military Forces and the State Police Forces. Appropriate re-structuring of the MHA is called for in order to better equip it to deal more effectively with the problems of internal security’. (Para 4.10 of the report) Again the same report stated, ‘The National Security Council (NSC), Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) should evolve an effective counter strategy against security threats posed by Pak ISI. This strategy should be pro-active rather than reactive’. (Para 4.23 of the report) Here is another recommendation from that report: ‘The MHA had proposed setting up of a federal agency to deal with grave offences, which have inter-state and nationwide ramifications. This was opposed by the States, on the plea that it infringed their Constitutional Right to maintain Law and Order. Considering the worrisome internal security scenario in the country, the States may be approached again…. since it may become increasingly difficult for the State governments to handle such crimes on their own’. (Para 4.27 of the report)

The people of India would like to know what action has been taken by the UPA government during the last four years to implement these recommendations apart from convening endless and fruitless meetings? I am not excluding the never-ending peace talks with the internationally known official terrorists in the government of Pakistan. What has The National Security Council done with its three Officers of Secretary Rank working under the National Security Advisor? What has our National Security Advisor M K Narayan himself done to re-structure the Intelligence Agencies apart from blaming Pakistan from time to time with total secular focus on strict economy of truth?

Who will take our Prime Minister seriously on issues relating to National Security and Islamic Terrorism? How pro-terrorist and anti-national the UPA Government is can be seen from the stand taken by the Central government in open court yesterday in the case relating to the release of Nalini Sriharan, a life convict in the Rajiv Gandhi murder case. Government of India through their counsel have stated ‘No action of the Central government is challenged. And no relief has been sought from the Centre. Thus the centre has sought to pass the buck on Nalini. For the Central government, Rajiv Gandhi is dead and gone and is politically irrelevant today!

Even after the Supreme Court have sentenced Afzal Guru to death by hanging for his terrorist attack on Parliament more than five years ago, the UPA government is still sleeping over it for its own secular reasons – infatuation for the Muslims and their appeasement as shown by the appointment of totally unnecessary Justice Sachar Committee, its concern only for minority Muslim Vote Bank Politics etc. etc. And yet the Congress Spokesmen like Abhishek Singhvi and Manish Tiwari (disposable puppets of Sonia Gandhi) continue to harp on the so-called ineffectiveness of POTA when it was in force prior to the coming of UPA government in 2004 and how it failed to prevent the terrorist attacks on our Parliament. The main accused in that attack, Afzal Guru, who has been sentenced to death by our Supreme Court, is still being treated as a VVIP by the UPA government!

The problem of Islamic terrorism transcends all political divides and must be faced as a national crisis. No government can meet these challenges without active public support. We as a country must start getting united forgetting the factional and ideological differences, as the Islamic terrorist adversaries want to destroy us all. Ashok Karnik, formerly Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, government of India has rightly stated: ‘Since India is too vast to be conquered through an armed conquest, the adversaries intend to bleed us through dagger thrusts. Terrorists aim to destroy the people’s faith in their Government. They believe that India would collapse under the weight of its contradictions and squabbles. To outsiders, India gives an impression of being at war with itself; is seen as if it has no stomach for hardships. It is necessary to reverse this perception’.

When I see the hopeless political drama being enacted everyday by our pathetic puppet of a Prime Minister and other equally helpless cabinet minister, I am reminded of one of the most beautiful observations of a character, expressing all human futility, in one of the immortal novels of William Faulkner (1897-1963): ‘How do our lives ravel into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant, echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings; in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls’. Such an utterance furnishes a prose counter point to the poetic lines of T S Elliot (1888-1965) in his ‘The Hallow Men’, with its drab vista and sense of cosmic exhaustion:

We are the Hallow Men
We are the Stuffed Men
Shape without form, Shade without Colour,
Paralyzed force, gesture without emotion…
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent Souls, but only
As the hollow men
The Stuffed Men.