Stung by TV - Riots Still Haunt Narendra Modi
Amulya Ganguli
The Staesman, 2 November
That the Narendra Modi government played a dubious role during the Gujarat riots was never a secret. The Tehelka exposé, therefore, has revealed nothing new. Yet, if the state government considered it prudent to black out the telecasts, the reason was that the despicable boasts of the “half-crazed” rapists and killers, to quote a saffron scribe, of the Hindutva brigade would have shocked even the committed supporters of the BJP. Till now, only Atal Behari Vajpayee has had the honesty to admit that the Sangh Parivar activists were involved in the pogrom. Some of them, he had said, were influenced by their emotions (bhavnao se parichalit thhey) to commit the atrocities. Others have been eager to pull the curtains down on the murderous episode lest it should permanently stain the BJP's reputation.
There were also some, like George Fernandes, who were less than apologetic. He was even shameless enough to tell Parliament that rapes were not uncommon during violent outbreaks, a disgraceful observation which drew a prompt reprimand from LK Advani, who said that the NDA convener’s remarks were totally uncalled for (mujhe kuchh atpata sa laga). Subsequently, Fernandes’ party colleague, Nitish Kumar, tried feebly to explain that the former's lack of command over Hindi was responsible for the supposed misinterpretation of what he had said.
Never sorry
What all these events show is that the Sangh Parivar has never really been sorry about what happened. Nor is this surprising considering that it was known at the time that even sections of the chattering classes in Gujarat were saying that the Muslims deserved the “treatment”. It may also be pointed out that historian Tapan Raychaudhuri was appalled when he heard identical statements being made in Kolkata's upper middle class circles. And, of course, the saffron brotherhood itself was cock-a-hoop over the killings, boasting that it represented an awakening of the Hindus. Modi himself was lauded as by far the primus inter pares of the BJP’s GeNext with his Moditva virtually replacing Hindutva as the party’s new weltanschhung.
Arguably, only Vajpayee among the party’s leaders realised the damage which the unrepentant chief minister had inflicted on himself and the organisation. As is known, Vajpayee had wanted to sack Modi soon after the riots, but was stopped from doing so by Arun Jaitley, Pramod Mahajan and others. When the then Prime Minister found that he wasn’t powerful enough to remove his own party’s chief minister, he went to the other extreme of justifying the outbreak by asking who lit the fire (aag kisne lagayi) and accusing the Muslims of being unable to live in harmony with others (ghul mil ke nahin rahte hain). Yet, his conscience must have continued to trouble him, for after the 2004 verdict, he blamed the riots for the BJP’s defeat.
Modi himself seemed to have gradually realised that he had shot himself in the foot so far as his future political ambitions were concerned. He is even said to have confided to his close associates that he had let things go too far. Not surprisingly, he has clamped up totally in the last few years so far as 2002 is concerned. No one has been able to get a word out of him about the riots. His focus, as he claims, is now only on Gujarat’s development and all its people, although he can never bring himself to utter the word, Muslims, in this context. The ingrained animosity of a Parivar apparatchik towards the minorities probably stops him.
His drum-beaters in the party and in the saffron media endorse this abrupt cutting off of the past. One must move on, they say, since referring to the grisly incidents will only exacerbate tension and harm Gujarat’s progress. It is a view, which has always been expressed by the Hindutva warriors. Their contention is that punishing the guilty after a riot would only revive communal animosity. Little wonder that the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra had wound up the Srikrishna Commission and it was left to Vajpayee (again!) to revive it during his 13 days as Prime Minister in 1996.
Keeping a lid on communal passions is clearly not the only reason for this aversion of the saffron lobby towards its past activities. If the disturbances are probed and the culprits punished, it will mean that the Parivar’s stormtroopers will be less enthusiastic on the next occasion to target the minorities. It is only when they are assured of official and political protection during and after the riots that they can freely indulge in arson, rape and murder.
In Gujarat, the government and the party could protect these activists only up to a point, for they had no respite once the Supreme Court stepped into the picture by transferring the most serious of cases to law courts outside the state, and reopening the hundreds of criminal cases which the police had earlier hurriedly closed for alleged lack of evidence. But court cases take place in a limited space and do not have an impact on the wider public outside. Even when a judgment outlines in gruesome detail the horrendous nature of the crime which the accused had committed, the ordinary people mostly remain unaffected.
But a TV exposé is different. Even the hazy visuals leave nothing to the imagination. So, the most committed of the BJP's supporters might begin to wonder about the kind of monsters harboured by the party. Hence, the blackout, which had come a few days after Modi had stormed out of a television studio when Karan Thapar began asking him about the riots. Similarly, the favourite of the BJP’s GeNext had shown his less appealing side during an interactive session sponsored by the Hindustan Times when the focus turned to the riots. Once you have committed a crime, it is not easy to hide. It is by now clear that the BJP may win in Gujarat, but Modi will always remain a pariah.
An aberration
The party, of course, always refers to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in an attempt to absolve itself of its own sins. But there is a difference between the two. The rampage against the Sikhs in which Congressmen were involved was a tragedy provoked by Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards and could be regarded as an aberration. It wasn’t the outcome of decades of vicious communal propaganda against the minorities by a brotherhood of pseudo-nationalists like the Parivar. It has to be remembered that the latter’s Guru Golwalkar propounded a thesis identifying the Muslims and the Christians as Internal Threats, which were to be a danger to the nation. There is no such doctrine of hate guiding the Congress.
Where the Hindutva brigade is concerned, when it is not engaged in a major riot, its members routinely attack members of the minority communities in accordance with their Guru’s diktat. Only recently, five nuns were set upon by saffron activists in Indore in Madhya Pradesh and, a day later, it was these victims who were booked by the state's BJP government in a replay of the much bigger outrage in Gujarat. A comparison between the 1984 and the 2002 riots is, therefore, ridiculous. The latter was the result of a vicious mindset, the former a tragic exception.
The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman
The Staesman, 2 November
That the Narendra Modi government played a dubious role during the Gujarat riots was never a secret. The Tehelka exposé, therefore, has revealed nothing new. Yet, if the state government considered it prudent to black out the telecasts, the reason was that the despicable boasts of the “half-crazed” rapists and killers, to quote a saffron scribe, of the Hindutva brigade would have shocked even the committed supporters of the BJP. Till now, only Atal Behari Vajpayee has had the honesty to admit that the Sangh Parivar activists were involved in the pogrom. Some of them, he had said, were influenced by their emotions (bhavnao se parichalit thhey) to commit the atrocities. Others have been eager to pull the curtains down on the murderous episode lest it should permanently stain the BJP's reputation.
There were also some, like George Fernandes, who were less than apologetic. He was even shameless enough to tell Parliament that rapes were not uncommon during violent outbreaks, a disgraceful observation which drew a prompt reprimand from LK Advani, who said that the NDA convener’s remarks were totally uncalled for (mujhe kuchh atpata sa laga). Subsequently, Fernandes’ party colleague, Nitish Kumar, tried feebly to explain that the former's lack of command over Hindi was responsible for the supposed misinterpretation of what he had said.
Never sorry
What all these events show is that the Sangh Parivar has never really been sorry about what happened. Nor is this surprising considering that it was known at the time that even sections of the chattering classes in Gujarat were saying that the Muslims deserved the “treatment”. It may also be pointed out that historian Tapan Raychaudhuri was appalled when he heard identical statements being made in Kolkata's upper middle class circles. And, of course, the saffron brotherhood itself was cock-a-hoop over the killings, boasting that it represented an awakening of the Hindus. Modi himself was lauded as by far the primus inter pares of the BJP’s GeNext with his Moditva virtually replacing Hindutva as the party’s new weltanschhung.
Arguably, only Vajpayee among the party’s leaders realised the damage which the unrepentant chief minister had inflicted on himself and the organisation. As is known, Vajpayee had wanted to sack Modi soon after the riots, but was stopped from doing so by Arun Jaitley, Pramod Mahajan and others. When the then Prime Minister found that he wasn’t powerful enough to remove his own party’s chief minister, he went to the other extreme of justifying the outbreak by asking who lit the fire (aag kisne lagayi) and accusing the Muslims of being unable to live in harmony with others (ghul mil ke nahin rahte hain). Yet, his conscience must have continued to trouble him, for after the 2004 verdict, he blamed the riots for the BJP’s defeat.
Modi himself seemed to have gradually realised that he had shot himself in the foot so far as his future political ambitions were concerned. He is even said to have confided to his close associates that he had let things go too far. Not surprisingly, he has clamped up totally in the last few years so far as 2002 is concerned. No one has been able to get a word out of him about the riots. His focus, as he claims, is now only on Gujarat’s development and all its people, although he can never bring himself to utter the word, Muslims, in this context. The ingrained animosity of a Parivar apparatchik towards the minorities probably stops him.
His drum-beaters in the party and in the saffron media endorse this abrupt cutting off of the past. One must move on, they say, since referring to the grisly incidents will only exacerbate tension and harm Gujarat’s progress. It is a view, which has always been expressed by the Hindutva warriors. Their contention is that punishing the guilty after a riot would only revive communal animosity. Little wonder that the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra had wound up the Srikrishna Commission and it was left to Vajpayee (again!) to revive it during his 13 days as Prime Minister in 1996.
Keeping a lid on communal passions is clearly not the only reason for this aversion of the saffron lobby towards its past activities. If the disturbances are probed and the culprits punished, it will mean that the Parivar’s stormtroopers will be less enthusiastic on the next occasion to target the minorities. It is only when they are assured of official and political protection during and after the riots that they can freely indulge in arson, rape and murder.
In Gujarat, the government and the party could protect these activists only up to a point, for they had no respite once the Supreme Court stepped into the picture by transferring the most serious of cases to law courts outside the state, and reopening the hundreds of criminal cases which the police had earlier hurriedly closed for alleged lack of evidence. But court cases take place in a limited space and do not have an impact on the wider public outside. Even when a judgment outlines in gruesome detail the horrendous nature of the crime which the accused had committed, the ordinary people mostly remain unaffected.
But a TV exposé is different. Even the hazy visuals leave nothing to the imagination. So, the most committed of the BJP's supporters might begin to wonder about the kind of monsters harboured by the party. Hence, the blackout, which had come a few days after Modi had stormed out of a television studio when Karan Thapar began asking him about the riots. Similarly, the favourite of the BJP’s GeNext had shown his less appealing side during an interactive session sponsored by the Hindustan Times when the focus turned to the riots. Once you have committed a crime, it is not easy to hide. It is by now clear that the BJP may win in Gujarat, but Modi will always remain a pariah.
An aberration
The party, of course, always refers to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in an attempt to absolve itself of its own sins. But there is a difference between the two. The rampage against the Sikhs in which Congressmen were involved was a tragedy provoked by Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards and could be regarded as an aberration. It wasn’t the outcome of decades of vicious communal propaganda against the minorities by a brotherhood of pseudo-nationalists like the Parivar. It has to be remembered that the latter’s Guru Golwalkar propounded a thesis identifying the Muslims and the Christians as Internal Threats, which were to be a danger to the nation. There is no such doctrine of hate guiding the Congress.
Where the Hindutva brigade is concerned, when it is not engaged in a major riot, its members routinely attack members of the minority communities in accordance with their Guru’s diktat. Only recently, five nuns were set upon by saffron activists in Indore in Madhya Pradesh and, a day later, it was these victims who were booked by the state's BJP government in a replay of the much bigger outrage in Gujarat. A comparison between the 1984 and the 2002 riots is, therefore, ridiculous. The latter was the result of a vicious mindset, the former a tragic exception.
The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman
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