Tapes Indicate Bombay Police Sided With Hindus in Riots

Two threads of fear ran through the orgy of violence: that Muslims were in danger just for being Muslims, and that police would do nothing to stop the rampaging Hindus calling for Muslim blood.
"The tapes show the strong communal bias of the Bombay police," said Asghar Ali Engineer, the director of the Institute of Islamic Studies in Bombay. "This has been happening in Bombay for years, whenever there is Hindu-Muslim violence."
A reporter for Business India magazine who said she monitored and recorded police frequencies released an unofficial transcript to other Indian journalists.
But the transcript was hardly used by Business India or other Indian publications, which commonly do not identify the players in religious violence, fearing it would inflame passions. The first major publication to refer to the tapes was the New York Times, which cited them Thursday.
One section of the transcript quotes a voice from the control room saying, "Don't burn anything that belongs to a Maharashtrian," a reference to the Hindus of Maharashtra state, whose capital is Bombay. "But burn everything belonging to a Miyan (Muslim)."
At another point, a patrol reported a Muslim business on fire. "Let it burn," the control room responded.
Throughout the transcript, Muslims were referred to in vulgar terms. One frequently used expression was landgiya , a pejorative word in the Maharashtrian language referring to a circumcised man.
In one transmission, the control room demanded that officers keep milk from reaching Muslim riot victims: "Who has milk been distributed to? . . . Do you get me? Do not distribute milk to landgiya. Do you get me?"
The Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights took the transcript and petitioned the Bombay High Court to seize all the tapes recorded by the police control room from Jan. 5-17.
The group charged the police opened fire primarily on Muslim mobs, failed to protect Muslims and obstructed army and paramilitary forces sent to help quell the unrest.
On Wednesday, the court instructed police to preserve 77 tapes of radio dispatches until it rules whether the cassettes can be used as evidence in a judicial inquiry into the riots.


http://articles.latimes.com/1993-02-05/news/mn-1009_1_bombay-police

Shibboleths

Shibboleths have been used by different subcultures throughout the world at different times. Regional differences, level of expertise, and computer coding techniques are several forms that shibboleths have taken.

The legend goes that before the Guldensporenslag (Battle of the Golden Spurs) in May 1302, the Flemish slaughtered every Frenchman they could find in the city of Bruges, an act known as the Brugse Metten.^[11] They identified Frenchmen based on their inability to pronounce the Flemish phrase schilt ende vriend (shield and friend), or possibly 's Gilden vriend (friend of the Guilds). However, many Medieval Flemish dialects did not contain the cluster sch- either (even today's Kortrijk dialect has sk-), and Medieval French rolled the r just as Flemish did.^[12]

MENU

0:00

Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries

Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gijn oprjochte Fries ( example (help·info)) means "Butter, rye bread and green cheese, whoever cannot say that is not a genuine Frisian" was used by the Frisian Pier Gerlofs Donia during a Frisian rebellion (1515–1523). Ships whose crew could not pronounce this properly were usually plundered and soldiers who could not were beheaded by Donia himself.^[13]

The Dutch used the name of the seaside town of Scheveningen as a shibboleth to tell Germans from the Dutch ("Sch" in Dutch is analyzed as the letter "s" and the digraph "ch", producing the consonant cluster [sx], while in German it is analyzed as the trigraph "sch," pronounced [ʃ]).^[14][15]

In October 1937 the Spanish word for parsley, perejil, was used as a shibboleth to identify Haitian immigrants living along the border in the Dominican Republic. The president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, ordered the execution of these people. It is alleged that between 20,000 and 30,000 individuals were murdered within a few days in theParsley Massacre although more recent scholarship and the lack of evidence such as mass graves puts the actual total as low as 1000.^[16]

During the Black July riots of Sri Lanka in 1983 many Tamils were massacred by Sinhalese youths. In many cases these massacres took the form of boarding buses and getting the passengers to pronounce words that had hard BAs at the start of the word (like "Baldiya" - bucket) and executing the people who found it difficult.^[17][18][19]

During World War II, some United States soldiers in the Pacific theater used the word lollapalooza as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people often pronounce the letter L as R or confuse Rs with Ls; the word is also an American colloquialism that even a foreign person fairly well-versed in American English would probably mispronounce or be unfamiliar with.^[20] In George Stimpson's A Book about a Thousand Things, the author notes that, in the war, Japanese spies would often approach checkpoints posing as American or Filipino military personnel. A shibboleth such as "lollapalooza" would be used by the sentry, who, if the first two syllables come back as rorra, would "open fire without waiting to hear the remainder".^[21]

During The Troubles in Northern Ireland, use of the name Derry or Londonderry for the province's second-largest city was often taken as an indication of the speaker's political stance, and as such frequently implied more than simply naming a location.^[22]

Shibboleths in fiction[edit]

Main article: List of shibboleths § Shibboleths in fiction

In an episode of The West Wing titled "Shibboleth", President Bartlet becomes certain that a group of Chinese asylum seekers are indeed Christians in faith, when their representative uses the word shibboleth during their meeting.^[23]

"Shibboleth" is the title to an episode of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" originally aired on 3/27/05. The main suspect's pronunciation of "battery" and "city," in a taped 911 call, in which he pronounces the "t"s as "t"s and not as "d"s helps to convince detectives that this is their perpetrator.

paraprosdokian

A paraprosdokian (/pærəprɒsˈdoʊkiən/) is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.^[1] Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of an early phrase, but they also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a form of syllepsis.

Wellerisms

Wellerisms, named after Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, make fun of established clichés and proverbs by showing that they are wrong in certain situations, often when taken literally.^[1] In this sense, wellerisms that include proverbs are a type of anti-proverb. Typically a wellerism consists of three parts: a proverb or saying, a speaker, and an often humorously literal explanation.

Sam Weller's propensity to use the types of constructions now called "wellerisms" have inspired plays; sometimes, the playwrights have created even more wellerisms.^[2]

Some researchers concentrate on wellerisms found in English and European languages, but Alan Dundes documented them in the Yoruba language of Nigeria (Dundes 1964), with African scholars confirming and adding to his findings (Ojoade 1980, Opata 1988, 1990). Wellerisms are also common in many Ethiopian languages, including Guji Oromo.^[3]They are also found in ancient Sumerian: "The fox, having urinated into the sea, said: 'The depths of the sea are my urine!'"^[4] In a number of languages of Africa, wellerisms are formed with animals as the speaker. In some cases, the choice of the animal may not carry much significance. However, in some cases, such as in the Chumburung language of Ghana, the choice of the specific animal as speaker is a significant part of some proverbs, "chosen precisely for characteristics that illustrate the proverb... Chameleon says quickly quickly is good and slowly slowly is good."^[5] The Antillean Creole French spoken on the island of Martinique also maintains some African wellerisms, such as, "Rabbit says, 'Eat everything, drink everything, but don't tell everything.'"^[6]

A type of wellerism called a Tom Swifty incorporates a speaker attribution that puns on the quoted statement.^[1]

Wellerisms are similar but not identical to dialogue proverbs. Wellerisms contain the speech of one speaker, but dialogue proverbs contain direct speech from more than one. They are found in a number of languages, including Kasena of Ghana, Georgian, Armenian.^[7]

• "Let me go, Spider!" "How can I let go of my meat?" "Then get on with it, eat me!" "How can I eat a fly?" - Kasena^[8]
• "I have caught a bear." "Get of him." "I can’t, he won’t let me go." - Armenian^[9]

Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις, "abuse"), originally meaning a semantic misuse or error—e.g., using "militate" for "mitigate", "decimate" for "devastate", "our mutual friend" for "our friend in common", "chronic" for "severe", "anachronism" for "anomaly", "alibi" for "excuse", etc.—is also the name given to many different types of figure of speech in which a word or phrase is being applied in a way that significantly departs from conventional (or traditional) usage.^[1]

A double bind is an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, and one message negates the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will automatically be wrong regardless of response. The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore can neither resolve it nor opt out of the situation.

Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.^[1]

Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them both difficult to respond to as well as to resist.^[2]

"The perfect is the enemy of the good"

In La Bégueule (1772), Voltaire wrote Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, which is often translated as "The perfect is the enemy of the good" (literally: "The best is the enemy of the good")