NEW DELHI: More than three weeks after it erupted, a communal bloodbath in India’s western Gujarat state shows no signs of ending. Official estimates place the death toll at 700, but grassroots groups say it has exceeded 2,000.
What is certain is that more than half-a-million people are affected and 65,000 people, mostly Muslims, have become refugees in a state ruled by the pro-Hindu, right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
India’s most industrialized and urbanized state will remain gripped by extreme insecurity and maniacal violence so long as it is ruled by chief minister Narendra Modi, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) or National Self-help Organization, which provides muscle and ideology to the BJP.
There is every reason to believe that Modi is primarily responsible for the violence that has shaken Gujarat since Feb 28, a day after 58 Hindus belonging to another extremist BJP affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), were torched to death in railway coaches at Godhra town.
Gujarat’s post-Godhra violence is not just some kind of “communal” or intra-religious riot or sectarian clash, of which there have been many in India in 55 years. Rather, it is a pogrom, a targeted massacre of Muslims, with the full complicity of the state.
The Feb 27 incident was probably a largely spontaneous — but thoroughly condemnable — response to militant Hindus’ harassment of Muslim women and petty traders for several days.
What is not in doubt is that the reprisals that followed were planned and organized.
Every report, whether from citizens’ groups, academics, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory body, or the media, suggests that the mobs that went marauding, looting and killing from Feb 28 on were tacitly encouraged by Modi, his key ministers, and the bureaucracy.
The police failed at the critical, early stage to take follow well-established procedures specified in 100 year-old riot- control manuals.
Muslims’ homes and shops were identified through electoral rolls and police maps, and systematically targeted, especially in Ahmedabad, the state’s commercial capital. This could not have been done by mobs as large as 10,000-strong, without state complicity or collusion.
“It is simply impossible for a few thousand people to rampage with kerosene cans, ‘trishuls’ (VHP-trademark metal tridents), or swords, without state collusion,” says Vibhuti Narain Rai, an outstanding police officer-scholar who has studied the nature and dynamics of sectarian violence in India.
Modi repeatedly justified this butchery of Muslims as a “spontaneous and natural reaction” to Godhra, even citing Newton’s Third Law.
The pogrom involved reports of extraordinary bestiality, savagery, and sexual violence — people were burned or electrocuted to death with high-tension wires, pregnant women’s bellies were slit open and their fetuses chopped into bits. Two year-old children were knifed and tortured.
There is a total breakdown of all constitutional order in Gujarat. The government has comprehensively failed to defend the citizen’s elementary right — to life.
Each day Modi stays on in power aggravates the situation. As NHRC chairman J S Verma put it after a three-day visit to Gujarat: “People are insecure” and a “fear psychosis” prevails.
The magnitude and ferocity of the violence has shocked the world and millions of Indians. Yet, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has not had the decency to acknowledge the horror, or visit Gujarat to console the victims. When he spoke on television within a week of the carnage, he was expressionless.
India’s hawkish home minister, Lal Krishna Advani, has been repeatedly elected to Parliament from Gujarat. He only thought fit to visit his “home state” for a few hours.
Both Advani and Vajpayee are proud card-holding members of the RSS, which was banned in 1948 for complicity in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, a native of Gujarat.
The RSS was banned by Congress party governments on two other occasions — in 1995 after the promulgation of a national emergency and then in 1992 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya triggered riots in which more than 3,000 people died.
With the BJP in power at the centre, although in reality only leading a multi-party coalition, the RSS, along with the VHP, has freely and aggressively revived plans to build a temple where the mosque once stood, utterly disregarding the sentiments of minority Muslims.
At a convention this month in Bangalore, the RSS called on Muslims in India to “understand that their safety lies in the goodwill of the majority”.
At work here is not just monumental callousness. BJP leaders are ardent believers in Hindu totalitarianism. They deny India’s pluralist, strongly multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural character. Implicitly or explicitly, they rationalize violence against the minorities.
They and their mentors believe the Hindus are fully justified in “getting even” with, and “correcting”, history’s wrongs “invasions” by “outsiders”, especially Muslims. They are bent upon exterminating all signs of a Muslim presence in India. They want Hindu pre-eminence established through the disenfranchisement of other communities.
The energies they have put into the Ayodhya campaign even after 1992 can only be explained by this hate-driven agenda. So too can Vajpayee’s description of that campaign as a “national movement”, not a parochial-sectarian one.
What Gujarat has witnessed since Feb 28 could well be the future of many other parts of India — unless the pro-Hindu forces led by Vajpayee are countered. This can only happen if there is a frontal domestic challenge to the BJP, and the world recognises its true ideological moorings and the unique threat it poses.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.