NEW DELHI, May 12 (Agencies): In a stinging attack on the saffron opposition to painter M F Hussain's works and to an arts exhibition in a Gujarat university, BJP MP Maneka Gandhi today said the party and VHP activists have gone "too far" in their protests.
She also opposed the arrest of two arts students of M S University in Vadodra in BJP-ruled Gujarat.
"VHP and BJP activists attacked and damaged their paintings.
This is unacceptable behaviour and I am sure, as a reasonable and open-minded person, you will realise that we offend the entire cultural world and thinking when we do this," she said in a letter to senior party leader L K Advani.
The Pilibhit MP, who praised Hussain for his charity, alleged that his paintings had been misread deliberately and suggested that they were worthy of being displayed in a museum.
"Even if they have been interpreted correctly, and objected to, that is the purpose of good art: to arouse debate, to create emotion and passion, to be a means of communicating the artist's own thoughts.
"Otherwise, all art would be a mediocre representation of the real world and would have no value except as a photograph imitative record of the world," Gandhi wrote.
She regretted that Hussain was living in a self-imposed exile in Dubai and London apparently for fears he could be attacked because of his paintings.
"He should be here in India and we should have a museum of his works on public display, instead of considering which ones to ban and destroy," Gandhi said as she requested Advani to advise the party in Gujarat and Maharashtra to call off their campaign against Hussain.
The BJP, she suggested, should concentrate its energies on its core beliefs instead of "hitting out at artists without any reason".
In an attack on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, she alleged that the state had the highest incidence of cow slaughter.
"I have pointed this out to the CM and Home Minister many times.
No attempt is being made to make sure that the police, who are hand in glove with cattle smugglers, stop this open killing of something that the BJP stands for," she said.
Last year, the BJP declined ticket to Gandhi's son Varun Gandhi for the Vidisha Lok Sabha seat and instead fielded a Madhya Pradesh leader from the RSS stronghold.
Indian-controlled Kashmir is under virtual martial law: Indian human rights activists NEW DELHI, May 12 (Agencies): The military runs Indian-controlled Kashmir as if it were under martial law, denying basic freedoms and repeatedly targeting civilians, according to a report by Indian human rights activists.
The report, issued Friday after a weeklong fact-finding mission to the Himalayan region, accuses the military of having a vice-like grip on the civilian population.
"The rural areas continue to be completely captive to the armed forces, and the people can do nothing which does not meet the approval of the army," said the report, signed by 11 prominent Indian rights activists.
"The army, which is supposed to merely aid the civil administration under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, has completely supplanted the civil administration.
The only name for this is martial law," said the report, authored by K.
Balagopal of the Human Rights Forum, a group based in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
The mission also included activists from the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, the People's Democratic Forum of Karnataka and the Center for the Study of Developing Societies.
The activists also accused the military of using civilians as human shields while trying to detain militants, arresting minors, and employing criminal gangs to help subjugate the population.
The military denied the charges, saying any civilian suffering was caused by militants operating within the civilian population.
"Civilians suffer because of the presence of militants in civilian clothes in the civil areas," said Lt.
Mathur, an army spokesman in Srinagar, the summer capital of India's Jammu-Kashmir state.
Jammu-Kashmir is India's only Muslim-majority state, and most of its people favor independence from mainly Hindu India, or a merger with predominantly Muslim Pakistan.
India has an estimated 700,000 soldiers in Kashmir, fighting nearly a dozen rebel groups since a separatist insurgency erupted in 1989.
In many areas, the region has the feel of an occupied country, with soldiers in full combat gear patrolling streets and frisking civilians.
More than 68,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the conflict.
The rebels have also been frequently accused of rights violations, particularly against civilians suspected of working with the army.
