May 14, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 1, 1423

NEW DELHI: Faced with widespread disgust at its handling of what many have called a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, the pro-Hindu Indian government seems intent on laying on “international terrorism” the blame for the violence raging there for two months.

Consistent with this approach is the move to appoint a tough, trigger-happy policeman as “security adviser” to Narendra Modi, Gujarat’s chief minister that many critics as well as allies of India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), want removed from his post.

This policeman, Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, is wrongly credited with having put down, with harsh methods, the separatist Sikh (Khalistani) militancy in the Punjab in the early 1990s.

This appointment is unprecedented in India. Technically, it is the Gujarat government that assigned Gill the job, but the move was definitely made in the Cabinet of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Under India’s quasi-federal political set-up, New Delhi can take such a step only under extreme, rare, conditions. Gill’s assignment gives the lie to the official claim that the Gujarat situation is fast returning to normal barring “minor” incidents — which daily take an average toll of five lives — and that the state’s police is fully capable of dealing with it.

But even more important, the move suggests a larger game plan: to put a “terrorist” spin on the Gujarat violence, and to turn the tables on the minority Muslims, and thus to further the intensely sectarian Hindu-majoritarian agenda of the BJP, which Vajpayee heads and which leads the beleaguered 27-party coalition ruling in New Delhi. The Vajpayee leadership cynically sees advancing that agenda as the best political-electoral option before the BJP.

On Friday, Interior Minister Lal Krishna Advani said ”underworld elements” in league with Pakistan were planning “retaliatory actions” on Gujarat. Police in the national capital said they have discovered plans by the Lashkar-e-Taiba to blow up oil pipelines in Gujarat and to recruit males from among riot-hit Muslims in Gujarat.

In fact, the BJP’s original line, duly picked up by New Delhi and Gujarat, was to attribute the so-called “trigger event” of the Gujarat pogrom — the Feb 27 burning alive of 58 people at Godhra town in the state — to a “terrorist conspiracy” involving Indian Muslims and the Pakistani secret service.

The Modi government has repeatedly justified the pogrom of Muslims, which followed, as a “natural and spontaneous” Hindu reaction to the Godhra incident. Independent inquiries have concluded that there was no causal link between Godhra and the pre-planned, organised, and far-from-spontaneous violence of Feb 28 onwards — the pogrom would have taken place in the communally charged climate of Gujarat, long vitiated by Hindu fundamentalists.

The trigger was probably provided by the raucous campaign to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya town, northern India — where a 16th century mosque once stood — launched by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a militant BJP associate.

Independent investigators also agree that the Godhra carnage was a largely spontaneous, if condemnable, over-reaction by criminalized elements in the Muslim community of riot-prone Godhra. The BJP and government ministers made the “conspiracy” charge about Godhra without an iota of evidence. Ten weeks on, India’s official agencies — usually quick to obtain telltale “confessions” — have failed to substantiate the charge.

There is speculation among the Gujarat police, as reported in the “Hindustan Times” and “The Hindu” newspaper, that one of Gill’s main jobs will be to “unearth” such evidence.

Plans are afoot to launch massive “combing” operations in a number of cities and to impound materials of daily household use such as kerosene, pipes, knives, glass bottles, nails and acid, among others.

Experienced police officials find it hard to understand what role “anti-terrorist” commandos and yet higher numbers of armed police could possibly play in Gujarat, where the violence is perpetrated by organised groups or mobs which selectively target Muslims, with the collusion of the state. K. S. Subramaniam, a former high police official who visited Gujarat as part of a Citizens’ Forum inquiry, argues that what Gujarat needs is a non-partisan, responsible political leadership committed to constitutional-secular values, which allows the state apparatus to function in an impartial, professional manner.—Dawn/InterPress Service.