Teesta, it Hit Your Face

The news fresh from the oven is how the mass of concocted turd that Teesta Setalvad threw against Modi came back and landed on her own face after seven years. Teesta has understandably vanished from the public glare, given that she has lots of cleaning up to do. Moping up seven years of accumulated excreta takes a long time.

Every new finding on the Gujarat riots seems to be doing two things: lessening the culpability of Modi, and exposing the fabrications of charlatans of the Gujarat Riots Milking Federation, which Teesta heads. And so it is with the latest report by the Special Investigation Team’s (SIT). For once, the Slimes sums up the report’s essence well:

The SIT also found no truth in the following incidents widely publicised by the NGOs:

• A pregnant Muslim woman Kausar Banu was gangraped by a mob, who then gouged out the foetus with sharp weapons
• Dumping of dead bodies into a well by rioteers at Naroda Patiya
• Police botching up investigation into the killing of British nationals, who were on a visit to Gujarat and unfortunately got caught in the riots

But this is not all. Now, I’m a staunch advocate of something called historical sense, which helps us put things in proper perspective.

Teesta Setalvad is a solid specimen of the vilest form of profiteering: from other people’s misery. She’s so vile that if no misery actually exists, she’ll invent one. Exhibit 1:

Zarina Mansuri, a 30-year-old Muslim woman who was believed to have been brutally hacked to death and later burnt to ashes by a mob in the Naroda Patiya massacre of February 28, 2002, was not even alive at that time. She had died of tuberculosis (TB) some four months earlier.

From the same news report, Exhibit 2:

About the rape of one of her friends, Shabana (15), which Anisha is said to have witnessed (according to her statement recorded by police on May 15, 2002), Yunus’s deposition said: “This, again, is wrong. Anisha had witnessed nothing like that that day. We, along with several others, were hiding on the same terrace of a house in Gangotarinagar at that time and none of us had seen anything like that.”

Exhibit 3 is more renowned. It concerns the curious tale of a certain Zahira Shaikh, her carefully-nurtured “eyewitness” who turned around and bit her in unmentionable places. Teesta being Teesta, she took her “revenge” by defecating in the form of a few PDFdocuments. You can reasonably mark Zahira’s U-turn as the beginning of Teesta’s rapid slide into public infamy. All media houses carried this sensational event on their front pages for a few days. Till then a very fiery and highly visible Teesta gradually evaporated, shrewdly deducing that her crusader image was suddenly dented in the most unprecedented manner.

But the skeletons didn’t stop falling. In December 2008, her trusted aide, Raees Khan defected, revealing even fouler details. To her further dismay, the Nanavati Commission submitted the first part of its report, which absolves Narendra Modi of any complicity in the Gujarat riots. And now, the SIT report, which directly implicates her.

“It is clear from the report that the horrendous allegations made by the NGO were false. Cyclostyled affidavits were supplied by a social activist and the allegations made in them were untrue…

The picture of Teesta that finally emerges but which we knew all along: an impostor with a hidden agenda. Recall that Teesta was the only person that went after Narendra Modi with singleminded determination almost every single day for at least 3 years. A measure of success of her brazen activism is the Supreme Court’s premature pronouncement of Modi as the “modern day Nero.” The SIT report clearly shows some of the dubious and outright illegal methods she followed in her quest for “justice” (sic):

• Tutoring witnesses
• Filing false affidavits
• Lying openly
• Manufacturing tales of incidents that didn’t actually occur
• Threatening witnesses and aides who didn’t “obey” her

In other words, she didn’t have a case. But she got away with it for some time not because she was good at it but because she was hysterically vocal about it, and assumed that those who were with her were as ethically decrepit as she was. However, Teesta’s spurious activism has done significant damage: it spawned off an entire cottage industry built on the edifice of falsehood. This cottage industry was awash with tons of funds because it was able to convince idiots abroad that the “fight for justice” was genuine. On the more dangerous side, some of these were well-intentioned idiots but others were active traitors. Gujarat was the perfect opportunity. Also, her sisters-in-crime like Arundhati Roy spun kilometres of yarn based on the Ripped Foetus Theory postulated by Teesta. Indeed, the theory holds a mirror to Teesta’s macabre imagination: I mean, she could’ve simply said: Kausar Banu’s head was severed or some such thing. But Teesta’s sadisitic mental imagery stretches it to: Kausar Banu was gangraped by a mob, who then gouged out the foetus with sharp weapons. No, don’t try to visualize that. Writing it was horrible enough for me.

And now, where is Tehelka, which broke the “most important story of our time” just when the Gujarat elections were about to follow?

Meanwhile, it’s also highly interesting to note that Teesta has received several awards for her fearless quest for justice. Here’s the list:

• Padma Shri: in 2007
• M.A.Thomas National Human Rights Award from the Vigil India Movement.
• Parliamentarians for Global Action ‘Defender of Democracy’ award, jointly with Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
• The Nuernberg Human Rights Award 2003

And the unkindest cut of all: The Nani A Palkhivala Award in 2006. An award named after the defender of Indian democracy given to a swindler of public conscience. Says a lot about the mental health of the jury.

Now that she’s been comprehensively exposed, will those institutions rescind the awards?

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