e-Paper
Indian cricket board president and former national team captain Sourav Ganguly's daughter Sana took the cyber world by storm on Wednesday with her Instagram post quoting late author Khushwant Singh who was highly critical of the right-wing Sangh Parivar.
Coming in the backdrop of the raging protest in the country against the new citizenship law - Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the post railing against "fascism" soon became viral, prompting her illustrious father to take to Twitter later in the night and plead that she was too young to "know about anything in politics".
"Please keep Sana out of all these issues... this post is not true... she is too young a girl to know about anything in politics," Mr Ganguly posted as his daughter's post was deleted.
But by then the 18-year-old's post had caught the attention of netizens in a big way and was widely shared.
Sana, a trained Odissi dancer like her mother Dona and with over 68,000 followers on Instagram, did not make any personal comment in her Instagram post, but only shared an excerpt from Mr Singh's book "The End of India" that was published in 2003, when the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government of prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in power at the Centre.
The excerpt read: "Every fascist regime needs communities and groups it can demonise in order to thrive. It starts with one group or two. But it never ends there. A movement built on hate can only sustain itself by continually creating fear and strife."
On Wednesday, thousands took to the streets in India again against the CAA as Karnataka imposed curbs on public gatherings to pre-empt further demonstrations.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP-led government says the CAA is intended to address the persecution of non-Muslim minorities such as Hindus, Sikhs and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Those groups, many of whom have been languishing in India for years without rights, will now get an automatic path to Indian nationality if they came from these three countries before 2015.
The Supreme Court turned down a plea on Wednesday to halt implementation of the law but said it would hold hearings next month on the sweeping measure, which critics have described as anti-Muslim.
Protesters say the exclusion of Muslims betrays a deep-seated bias against the community, which makes up 14 per cent of India's population, and that the law is the latest move in a series by the Hindu nationalist government to marginalise them.
With more demonstrations scheduled yesterday, authorities in Karnataka moved to ban large public gatherings in at least three major cities, including the state capital Bengaluru where offices of dozens of multinational companies, including Flipkart, Uber, Infosys and Wipro, are based. "People are using this opportunity to create problems and we want to keep Bengaluru peaceful," police officer Umesh Kumar told Reuters.
Similar restrictions will also be imposed in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh, to head off protests, a local official said.
At a news conference in Washington on Wednesday, India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar repeated the government's line that it was a measure designed to address the needs of persecuted religious minorities.
On Wednesday, police fired shots in the air in a Muslim-dominated part of Delhi to repel thousands of demonstrators throwing stones and glass bottles and demanding the law be withdrawn. In Assam, which has seen some of the most violent protests against the CAA, thousands of people came out on the streets in several cities.
"We shall continue with our agitation till we get a favourable response from the Supreme Court," said Mr Samujjal Bhattacharya of the All Assam Students' Union.
In West Bengal, where some protests have also turned violent, four people were injured in scuffles in the Uttar Dinajpur district after a procession against the CAA.
Indo-Asian News Service, Reuters
"Please keep Sana out of all these issues... this post is not true... she is too young a girl to know about anything in politics." - Indian cricket board president and former national team captain Sourav Ganguly
