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Fable of the bulls and the butcher By Jawed Naqvi The Russian Marxist theoretician Leon Trotsky narrated his version of an Aesop fable with telling effect. A cattle dealer once drove some bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came in the night with his sharp knife. "Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner on our horns," suggested one of the bulls. "If you please, in what way is the butcher any worse than the dealer who drove us hither with his cudgel?" replied the bulls, who had received their political education at the Comintern. "But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as well afterwards." "Nothing doing," replied the bulls firm, in their principles, to the counsellor. "You are trying, from the left, to shield our enemies - you are a social butcher yourself." And they refused to close ranks. The story is instructive or tragic depending on your proximity to the fight against fascism. Gujarat is as good an example as any, where Trotsky's warning runs the risk of not being heeded. Take the case of Zaheera Sheikh. She was once regarded as a crucial witness to the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Today she is being accused of taking all of one point eight million rupees to recant on her evidence. If she indeed has taken the money from the Bharatiya Janata Party's lawmakers in Gujarat, effectively a bribe to keep quiet in the trial, a suggestion strongly made by last week's Tehelka expose, the courts will deal with the matter accordingly. If she did not demand the money to change her testimony in what is known as the Best Bakery massacre, one of the many that were carried out in the Gujarat pogrom of February-March 2002, then the question becomes harder to answer: why did she recant? Before the courts could even address the issue some mullahs of an obscure group called Majlis-i-Shura quickly issued a fatwa seeking to throw Zaheera out from her community, if such an act is legally or religiously possible. Simultaneously, well-meaning secular activists fighting to provide legal aid and social protection to the victims of Gujarat have tended to approve of or at best look the other way when some of their own have burnt Zaheera's effigies in protest in different parts of Gujarat and elsewhere. This is not the only ridiculous thing. Hindus and Muslims alike are turning Zaheera into a pariah and our secular activists do not look too worried about it. Yes, her recanting has harmed the legal case against the BJP's killing squads in Gujarat. But suppose Zaheera Sheikh had kept to her testimony. Would it have been fair to her? Suppose Teesta Setalvad goes on to win the Best Bakery case, would it stall the fascist movement for a moment, and change Zaheera's fortunes for the better? The fascist movement in Italy was a spontaneous movement of large masses. Trotsky saw it as plebian movement in origin, "directed and financed by capitalist powers". It issued forth from "the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses". Is Zaheera a mere Muslim victim or does she also have a class character? And could she at some point identify with any of the classes that were lured by Mussolini's charismatic personality, as so many seem to be by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, for example. The sense of urgency, the paucity of time as marked out by Trotsky in the fight against fascism has dissipated in Gujarat into a bunch of legal battles with their familiar baggage of clever arguments and counter arguments. Take two examples from the BJP's recent successes, and the situation in Gujarat would look even more worrying. The Ayodhya movement that led to the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 has not waned. It did successfully install a temple at the site of the razed mosque and thousands of simple folk daily throng there under police protection. The mosque was not protected by the state but the makeshift temple is. The Supreme Court cannot decide any issue that goes into the realm of mythology. The only question is therefore to build the temple properly "by mutual consent". In the 1993 January-February anti-Muslim violence in Mumbai by the Shiv Sena, a partner of the BJP, hundreds were killed. The findings of the independent inquiry commission led by Justice Shri Krishna indicted the Shiv Sena. The Congress has been ruling Maharashtra for much of the period since then. Little has been done to punish anyone. So why should we expect anything better from Gujarat, which is ruled by the BJP? It is clear that fascism cannot be fought legally. The last time it was vanquished it took the combined might of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin and two American presidents to snuff it out. The Nuremberg Trials became possible only after the political battle was won. Zaheera Sheikh belongs to the category of Indians - or even liberal Indian Muslims, if you like - such as Arif Mohammed Khan and Najma Heptullah, who recently joined the BJP, after the Gujarat massacres, claiming that the usually centrist Congress was more anti-Muslim than the Hindutva party. To an extent they are right. The Congress party's leader in Gujarat is Shankar Singh Vaghela, a former leader of the Muslim-baiting Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. But the butcher, as Trotsky warned, is already sharpening his knives for any Congress versus BJP debate to have any relevance for the moment. Zaheera Sheikhs will happen if there is no political movement that supports the work of people like Teesta Setalvad or provides cover to the efforts of the Tehelka newspaper. Hitler was not driven to suicide by a bunch of well-meaning NGOs. The military forces of rightward leaning Churchill and the leftist dictator Stalin, who lived on to fight a bit of the Cold War, overwhelmed him. * * * * * Questions are being raised about why the late former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was not cremated in Delhi on the banks of the Jamuna river as was done in the case of other Congress prime ministers of the Gandhi-Nehru family. Usually the cremation site becomes a centre for people to pay their annual homage to the departed soul. And so Rao's body was taken to Hyderabad where he was given a state funeral - but not before the Andhra Pradesh High Court rejected a representation moved by NGOs opposed to the cremation on the banks of the city's main water reservoir, the Hussainsagar lake. The environmental NGOs moved a house motion before Chief Justice Devendra Gupta through a fax on Friday, saying that the government's decision about selecting the site of the cremation was a violation of an earlier High Court judgement on public cremation and protecting Hussainsagar. The Chief Justice rejected the representation, saying: "People should ... realize the stature of the person and his contribution to the nation and state in particular." Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
