02 March 2005	Wednesday	20 Muharram 1426

NEW DELHI, March 1: The Gujarat pogroms in February-March 2002 were staged as part of a "conspiracy" between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments in the state and the Centre , which also led to the army not being given powers to stem the violence, then president K.R. Narayanan has said.

Mr Narayanan told the Malayalam magazine Manava Samskrithi that he, as president, wrote several letters to then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. "But he did not do anything positive," the former President said about the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in which 2,000 people were killed.

Holding the Vajpayee government culpable for the army's failure in controlling the situation, he said: "I asked the army to be deployed to suppress the violence. The army was sent, but there was no shooting against those who created the violence. Had that been done, a lot of gruesome incidents that occurred later, could have been prevented."

"If the army had been given the powers to suppress the violence, said Mr Narayanan, the gruesome tragedy in Gujarat could have been eliminated. "But the state government did not do it; the Centre also did not do it. It was a conspiracy between the state and the central government that was responsible for the Gujarat violence."