An Impotent Mind

Pakistan's daily Dawn is a sober newspaper that carries meaningful opinions -- which we greatly respect notwithstanding their sometimes antipathy to India.

This is why we are puzzled by their sponsorship of Jawed Naqvi and his astonishingly offensive Dateline Delhi.

Writing there about the nuclear deal, he invokes horrible imagery -- in fact, rationalizing a profoundly racist, anti-Indian, song written by South African Mbongeni Ngema where he insinuates that Indians in that country are part of a new apartheid.

Mr. Naqvi chooses to see the nuclear deal in these bizzare terms. He then insults Dr. Manmohan Singh in terms so offensive that they take one's breath away. Here they are:

Jean Paul Sartre may have never heard of Manmohan Singh, but he had a fair idea of what he would be like. In the introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he describes the prototype thus: “The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed.

These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words (Parthenon! Brotherhood!) and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open (...thenon! ...therhood!) It was the golden age.”

This aggressively secular blog condemned in the strongest terms the offensive cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammad. Mr. Naqvi's insult to India falls in the same category.

We demand that Dawn apologize for this outrageous calumny and remove this disgraceful columnist from their august pages. We hope other Indians will join us and demand the same by flooding the newspaper with protest letters written in the sternest possible language.

Mr. Naqvi has the right to free expression, but surely Dawn's readers deserve better than the flaccid thoughts of an impotent mind.