India’s self-goal in Gujarat
The evil now consuming Gujarat emerged from the BJP's communal 'laboratory experiments' in the state. The massacres of Muslims thus do not represent a failure but rather a perverse success.
The teams of rescue workers that flew into Gujarat from around the world following the devastating 26 January 2001 earthquake came prepared for every imaginable disaster. Sniffing dogs, metal cutters, cranes, mobile hospitals — you name it. But what confounded them were the separate lines of survivors that queued up for relief. Caste and community mattered here even when the earth had yawned open and nearly every high-rise building had keeled over. This was, after all, BJP-ruled Gujarat, where men were not equal before god, much less before ignorant relief workers from strange lands.
It was only after the dust had settled, several rounds of learned seminars had been held and large dollops of compensation paid out that it became apparent that the casualties from the earthquake could have been fewer and the damage much less if only someone had bothered to enforce basic building by-laws. But the typical affluent Gujarati has a healthy contempt for laws and by-laws and has long replaced them with the famous chal se (anything goes) attitude. Sadly, unlike man-made laws, the laws of physics cannot be replaced by attitudes, and if a high-rise building does not have the specified foundation it will keel over in an earthquake. But Gujarati ingenuity backed by pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the centre and state levels quickly ensured that money poured in by temporarily suspending such pesky things as the Foreign Contribution Regulatory Act (FCRA) for the first and only time. In contrast, the poor souls who survived the Orissa super-cyclone are still waiting to be rehabilitated.
A visitor to Gujarat, which is still burning two months after a pogrom was unleashed there against a prosperous but peaceful Muslim community to avenge the torching of a train at Godhra station, was told that the "days of that 'choothia', Gandhi", were long gone. No more turning the other cheek. The hero of the day is Narendra Modi, who bears more than a passing resemblance to the talented Bollywood actor Paresh Raval in one of his more villainous roles. That Modi can count on his popularity having risen as a result of the mayhem in Gujarat — and actually wants to hold mid-terms elections in the state because of it — is testimony to how much values have actually changed in Gandhi's homeland. With more than a hundred thousand people reduced to being refugees in their own homeland and the army still out, the election commission would most certainly have shot down any snap poll. A sobering thought though is the prospect of Modi attempting to engineer another post-Godhra situation to rustle up anti-Muslim sentiment when the state is actually due to go to polls next year. Besides its fanaticism, the BJP has little else to offer the electorate in Gujarat except a reputation for widespread corruption and lawlessness.
Yes, the days of Gandhi and scrupulous respect for the truth that he preached are indeed gone. New experiments with truth are what concern latter day Gujaratis on the make, inspired as they are by Messrs Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parikh. The manipulations of the latter have ruined not only hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors who put their money into the stock markets as the government requested them to do but also salary earners trustingly put their money in government mutual funds such as the Unit Trust of India (Uri). Actually it is not difficult to see why the Indian middle class now associates the BJP government more with Ravan than with Ram.
Gujarat is also where Hindus are "rediscovering" themselves more than anywhere else in the country. This could be in the shape of dubious archaeological finds that purport to push back Hindu civilisation by a couple of millennia. Or it could be in the form of pernicious attacks on Christians and their institutions because they are threat to Hinduism — never mind that they form less than two percent of India's population and have made real contributions in such areas as education and social upliftment. What is left unspoken is the fact that such commendable efforts tend to upset established hierarchies and privileges that are inimical to modernity. On the other hand, archaeological finds by people of dubvious academic antecedents can be conveniently used to establish such preposterous ideas as that the Aryans went from India to the European steppes, rather than the other way around. To control the future you must control the past.
But as to the present, whether the pogrom was preplanned (as many accounts including that of the British High Commission allege) or not, Godhra provided the perfect trigger for the pogrom. Here were kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, where they had been participating in the Hindutva brigade's project to build a Ram temple. Tempers were already running high over the government insisting that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) heed the supreme court stay on construction at the disputed site and temporarily abandon the grandiose plans set out at the last Maha Kumbh at Allahabad, which was attended by 20 million people. The greatest support for the Ram Temple, not only in terms of donations but also in the sheer number of available kar seyaks, actually came from Gujarat. And many of them had been thwarted by police from fulfilling the VHP boast that a 100,000 people would gather at Ayodhya for the 15 March function. And on top of all that, the BJP fared poorly in the Uttar Pradesh elections, finishing a disappointing third behind the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in spite of the fuss over the shila daan ceremony. The inference was clear – the Ram temple issue no longer inspired voters in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP first began its politics of divism and hate.
The more immediate concern for the BJP was to somehow hold on to the only state where it still held power, Gujarat. After all, Gujarat is the laboratory of Hindutva's failed experiments which are now being conducted under the direction of Dr Modi. Gujarat is where government officials were allowed to join the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the fascist organisation once banned for its role in the assassination of that same old Gandhi. These days, the RSS sees nothing wrong in declaring openly that the safety of Muslims lies in the goodwill of Hindus. The Sangh is only a shade better than Nazi Germany, which inspired the RSS founders. With the solid support he enjoys in the RSS there is no way that Modi can be sacked by the BJP as has been vehemently demanded by the secular allies of the BJPled government at the centre. That would be the equivalent of closing down the laboratory altogether. And so Vajpayee's government must go through contortions insisting that what has been referred to as 'pogrom' and 'genocide' is the internal matter of Gujarat in which even parliament has no right to interfere. And of course any statement made by foreign diplomats is an infringement of India's sovereignty, never mind the plethora of international conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which New Delhi is signatory and which has been clearly violated. So ferocious was the reaction of India's External Affairs Ministry, ascribed by the noted jurist Fali Nariman to a pre- World War II mentality, that well-meaning diplomats backed off, mumbling that they were more anguished than angered. The British High Commission disassociated itself from a "leaked internal report" which said the pogrom was pre-planned and apologetically said any concern was prompted by the large Gujarati diaspora in the United Kingdom.
Omar Abdullah, who offered his resignation as minister of state for foreign affairs rather than have his National Conference support the Vajpayee government on Gujarat, was frank enough to admit that the entire diplomatic effort mounted against Pakistan is now in shambles. No longer can India claim the high moral ground that it has assiduously sought to gain through a diplomatic blitz in which Abdullah played no mean part, especially in influential Muslim countries. The BJP in Gujarat has just scored a spectacular self-goal for India.