All-Out Effort to Boost Stock Market

that these people did not belong to Maliana at all but to Multannagar, another nearby village. They had fled Multannagar and sought shelter in Kalejari after getting to know of the massacre in Maliana. Those missing from Maliana were still missing and the massacre of Maliana had very much taken place. A few days later this was admitted even by the UP government's information director in New Delhi who told The Telegraph: "We know nobody had returned to Maliana and that the 85 people found belong to another locality!' Clearly, in reporting communal disturbances some sections of the press are eager to dilute their standards of checking and verifying facts when the reports in question, by implication, exonerate the government or the hindu community. A related instance is the 'news' prominently carried by The Times of India (Bombay) on June 18 on the front page under a three-column heading: 'New group owns up killings1. The report pertained to the killing of 14 persons in south Delhi on June 13, hitherto believed to have been the work of Sikh terrorists, and said that a group calling itself the 'Green Muslim Commando Force' had owned responsibility for the killings which, it further claimed, had been carried out to "avenge the death of a large number of muslims in Meerut, Delhi and Maliana". The south Delhi killings had already created a sense of anger and insecurity in the capital which in any case had been the scene of communal riots only last month. So the casting of suspicion on a muslim group as the perpetrator of the south Delhi killings could not but stoke anti- muslim feeling. The Times of India nevertheless chose to play up the report about the so-called Green Muslim Commando Force. And what was the evidence on the basis of which this was done? The sole evidence consisted of a post-card said to have been received by the The Times of India supposedly from the group. The report elaborately pointed out that the post-card had been written in urdu and began "with the invocation of 'Ya Allah, Ya Mohammed' "