Rumours mask the brutal reality of Gujarat violence

YOU remember idols of Lord Ganesha drinking milk all over the country, in fact all over the world, a few years ago? I too had witnessed the “miracle” at that time, in a Sri Lankan temple in Colombo.

Flashing the journalist’s accreditation card had helped, as always, to go straight to the sanctum sanctorum, avoiding mile-long queues of obviously the more genuine devotees. A Hindu priest took me through a short-cut that opened to a side entrance of the shrine. Therefore, instead of feeding Ganeshji with milk, because he was looking away from me, I ended up feeding a marble statue of the Nandi bull, Lord Shiva’s vehicle, who gulped down all of the brimming teaspoonful of the white liquid without trace.

In Delhi too, there were miles upon miles of meandering queues, during the few days the “miracle” lasted, of devotees at various temples where the so-called milk-drinking marathon was underway. As often happens at the time of these inexplicable mysterious events, there arrived on the stage a few groups of science students from the premier technology institutes of Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai etc who tried very hard to explain the whole affair as an optical illusion or as what they called a capillary action of the marble or stone statues that “appeared” to gulp down tons of milk each day.

As often happens in contemporary India, there were no takers for the rationalists and their scientific theories of capillary action.

People just love to go berserk in India. As they did when a “monkey man” appeared one day in a mohalla recently who attacked residents, mostly housewives, at will. In one case he bit off someone’s ear and left scratch marks on the bodies of others. Newspapers were again full of these stories.

The mystery creature was said in several reports to have been spotted by a lot of people but in reality not one journalist or policeman came up with a single eyewitness who could actually describe the beast cogently. The whole thing turned out to be a hoax.

Rumours and myth-making always play a major role of aggravating the insecurity of fractious societies. One full year before the Babri mosque was razed by a Hindu mob in Ayodhya, hundreds of people were calling newspaper offices to find out whether the mosque had been bombed or simply pulled down with bare hands of the karsewaks (volunteers). One year before the event mind you.

And invariably the callers would say that they knew so and so who had heard the news of the demolition on the BBC! So in India if you want to float a rumour, you quote the BBC, and if you want to crush a breaking story, you quote the Doordarshan. That’s the equation between their respective credibility profiles that came into play on the day of the imagined demolition of the mosque, roughly a year before Dec 6, 1992.

There have been some rare exceptions to this insidious procession of rumour-mongers in in the country’s history. Sardar Patel, generally regarded with suspicion by many for his pro-Hindutva leanings, did the one good turn of his life when he grabbed the radio upon Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination to tell the world that his killer was a Hindu Brahmin. That one announcement had saved goodness knows how many innocent lives as communal tempers were quickly calmed all across the country.

Sustained disinformation, superstition, irrational core beliefs, rumour-mongering, everything has played a hand in the ongoing conflagration in Gujarat. Just take that one criminal carnage in Godhra that was efficiently used by quasi-fascist groups and their political patrons in Delhi to rationalize the “natural reaction of the Hindus” to allegations of pre-planned Muslim assault on their train.

That the phrase, “natural reaction”, is not Newtonian but very often a convenient fascist construct is evident from its use elsewhere. For example, when a bunch of Muslims allegedly attacked a Christian school not too long ago in Hyderabad over some all too familiar claim of disrespect to Islam, the local Muslim leader used precisely the same phrase, “natural reaction”, to justify the vandalism against the school by his goons.

But rarely has the phrase been used to such devastating effect by everyone conniving in the anti-Muslim pogroms, from ministers to the junior most fanatic, as happened in Gujarat.

Nirmala Deshpande, the indefatigable octogenarian Gandhian activist, was speechless after what she saw in Ahmedabad. The lady has seen a few riots, but never she said had she ever witnessed the kind of brutality that she saw in Gujarat. For days after he traumatic visit, Deshpande couldn’t speak. Words would get stuck in her throat. Her terrified eyes and trembling hands and lips were all proof of what she had seen.

Two senior journalists, including an Indian and a British correspondent, and a senior officer of the Indian administrative service have given us spot reports that cannot be questioned for their objectivity. They try to demolish some of the myths widely circulated by the quasi-fascist Sangh groups and even more widely believed.

Says Saeed Naqvi, a senior Indian journalist, after visiting the Godhra railway station: “The kar sevaks, on their way back, were misbehaving with some Muslims in the train. They were teasing Muslim women in burkas, and asking Muslims to say “Jai Sri Ram”. It was completely uneducated and crude behaviour on the part of these sevaks. There was a lot of sloganeering in the trains all along, and these incidents of misbehaviour.”

Naqvi’s story is corroborated by a news report in the Jan Morcha newspaper, a Hindi daily published from Faizabad, near Ayodhya, on Feb 25, the place and the time the unfortunate train started its long journey. It also tallies with the findings of Peter Popham of the London-based The Independent newspaper.

“Remember, there were only 58 dead bodies in the train,” says Naqvi, flagging us to a problem that lies ahead. “What happened to the rest of the karsevaks? Also, remember, the 58 people to die were mainly women and children. So what happened to the men - the karsevaks?

“How do I know all these things? I know this because I asked the station superintendent. And what is stopping the administration from doing the same and getting to the bottom of the matter?

There are so many missing links in this. How did they actually die? Why isn’t the administration trying to answer these questions? Why aren’t they taking the list from the ticket collector and tracing the people who escaped from the train? They are all eyewitnesses, aren’t they? Track them down. When the Sept 11 attacks happened at the World Trade Center, the US authorities didn’t have any names. Here, we have so many.

Peter Popham’s account of the Godhra incident is equally revealing insofar as it questions all the axioms of the original sin that triggered the calamity.

“Official investigations are in under way, but the massacre has become a political football and it is hard to imagine any conclusions untainted by political calculation. Fortunately, conscientious local journalists have been hard at work. The evidence they have amassed, together with new witness accounts obtained by The Independent, paints a clear and persuasive picture of an avoidable tragedy,” Popham wrote last week after visiting Godhra.

He adds: “What happened in car S/6 was the hideous finale. The story began nearly 36 hours earlier.

“On the evening of Monday, Feb 25, at 5.30pm, several hundred karsevaks in the temple town of Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, tramped to the nearby station of Faizabad and boarded the Sabarmati Express. They were Gujaratis, and they were going home. Gujarat, in western India, has been the most fruitful breeding ground in the whole country for Hindu nationalists.

“And the karsevaks are Hindu nationalists in the raw: young men with modest education and poor prospects inflamed, thanks to clever propaganda, with a zeal to right India’s historic wrongs and repair the Hindus’ wounded pride. The organizations that find, inspire and recruit these suggestible young men are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal _ pseudo-religious paramilitary groups committed to building the Ram temple, creating true Hindu rule in India and putting India’s 150 million Muslims in their place.

“These were the sort of people who joined the train that Monday evening: young men, heads wrapped in saffron headbands, happy and elated after their stint at the holy site. Think football supporters on the move in one of the old supporters’ specials. Many were also drunk or stoned, or equipped to get that way: flexible, tolerant Hinduism has no hard and fast rules about such things. And they were coming back to Gujarat, the only state in the Indian union that is still ‘dry’. All the more reason to have a bottle or two tucked away.”

Popham then goes into a description of the scuffles and the carnage. Journalists always exaggerate, goes the fascist health warning attached to most sensible news reporting out of Gujarat. But Harsh Mander is a serving government official. What does he make of his visit to Ahmedabad and its surrounding regions?

“As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration. The law did not require any of them to await orders from their political supervisors before they organized the decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to protect vulnerable women and children from the organized, murderous mobs. The law instead required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with courage and compassion.

“If (any present) official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police and magistracy. The blood of hundreds of innocents are on the hands of the police and civil authorities of Gujarat, and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country.”

There is much more detail, gory detail of man turning into beast in all the above accounts. But before we go into that, we have to resolve whether we have the ability to divine a rumour from a fact.