Restore India’s dignity

THE unthinkable happened a few days ago. An otherwise quiet evening on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in New Delhi was rent by the cries of Babur ki aulad hosh me aao, hosh me aao.

Standing outside my house, and watching the 200-strong students’ march, hate and anger writ large on their face, I wondered what had gone wrong. Why raise provocative slogans at my doorstep? Have we, as teachers, failed to inculcate the values of tolerance and decency in our students? Why the erosion of secular and radical values? Where, if I may ask, are the Yechuris (Sitaram) and Karats (Prakash) at the beginning of this millennium?

I sought and secured the University Rector’s intervention. But what happens to the hapless victims in Gujarat? They are trapped in a world that is clearly not their own. Strangers in the land they have inhabited for centuries, nobody responds to their cries or comes to rescue them from the rampaging mobs.

The tragic story of Ahsan Jaffrey’s brutal murder is the story of every Gujarati Muslim — lonely, isolated and vulnerable to more attacks. Today, the army has reined in the VHP goons. Tomorrow, they will return armed with swords and trishuls to attack the descendants of Babur. The army will buy ‘peace’, but it will not be easy to heal the wounds inflicted by so few on so many.

Today, the chief minister of Gujarat quotes Newton’s third law — ‘every action has an equal and opposite reaction’ — to virtually justify the carnage in his own state. Tomorrow, he may pursue the game of brinkmanship and find an alibi for his inaction and criminal negligence.

Yes, Mr Prime Minister, Narendra Modi is a blot (‘kalank’) on the nation’s image. He has unleashed a reign of terror, and his deeds and public pronouncements merit unequivocal condemnation. Although the BJP government has itself forfeited the moral right to remain in power in Gujarat, you will do well to sack the chief minister, an irresponsible sangh pracharak, as a first step towards the restoration of peace in Gujarat.

At the outset let me reiterate a view widely expressed by Muslim leaders and Muslim organisations — that the brutal attack on the Sabarmati Express on February 27 is both regrettable and condemnable. Such an occurrence should never have taken place.

Yet, a newspaper editor construes silence, in some quarters, as acquiescence in the brutal murder of the kar sevaks in Godhra. The VHP’s general secretary pours venom against Muslims on a television network, while the Union law minister, instead of ridiculing him, pontificates on the virtues of self-censorship in reporting the ghastly happenings in Gujarat.

Admittedly, the murderous assault on the kar sevaks was planned in advance, and the Godhra incident, caused by some Muslim miscreants, triggered the violence in other parts of Gujarat. Still, this explains neither the conduct of the chief minister, the home minister and the police force nor the brutal retaliation of the Hindu mobs.

When the authorities do not act decisively to contain and control riots, it is not because they do not have the means to do so, but because they choose not to do so.

Let us not forget that the assembly elections in Gujarat will take place in January 2003. The BJP’s state unit may well benefit from the riots: they give it the opportunity to stand forth as the protector of one community against the alleged threats of the other, and they help it paint its political rivals, i.e. the Congress, as protectors of the other community.

In this context, four issues need to be addressed: first, the criminal negligence of the administration; the level of intensity, destruction, and murder in particular times and places; the promptness and efficiency displayed by a mixture of lumpen elements and others in systematically destroying Muslim-owned commercial establishments; and, finally, the sources and causes of the deep-seated hatred and hostility towards Muslims.

The persistence of Hindu-Muslim violence is not unusual. What is new is the rapid spread of the cult of violence aimed at the intimidation of Muslims, their selective killing, and the destruction of their properties. In this cult of violence, Muslims continue to be portrayed as the aggressors, and the Hindus as defenders. Somebody has to set the record straight.

Social and economic explanations exist but, in addition, something is fundamentally amiss in Gujarat’s history and contemporary polity that makes it prone to the recurrence of large-scale violence. At the heart of the explanation, past and present, is the fact that the social and cultural bonding — once the hallmark of that society — have weakened over the decades. Pride in a Gujarati identity, based on language and region, has disappeared leading to the crystallisation of sharply demarcated communitarian identities.

In 1969, extensive Hindu-Muslim violence at Ahmedabad fractured Gujarat’s polity and breached the citadel of composite living. Though the state limped back to some degree of normalcy, there was no attempt to address the conflicts and violence through political and policy changes, and changes in leadership, institutions, and structures. Instead, the BJP turned the official secular ideology on its head by making a case, albeit a flawed one, for a Hindu Rashtra.

In the late 1980s, Hindu nationalism, riding on the crest of a popular wave, widened the existing cleavage. L.K. Advani’s rath yatra from Somnath was the last straw. The intensification of Hindu-Muslim ill will during the Ram Janambhoomi movement was part of a political design to create a new Hindu community. The very nature of that exercise was profoundly divisive. The roots of the present violent conflagration lie in the evocative symbols deployed by the BJP to enlarge its political constituency.

The pogrom in Gujarat epitomises the tragedy of a weary nation caught up in the quagmire of ethnic, caste and communal conflicts. Today, the prime minister terms the Gujarat carnage as a ‘blot on the nation’s image’; tomorrow, the international community may well challenge our claims over Kashmir and the high moral ground we occupy in the world-wide coalition against terrorism.

The project of building the temple must be abandoned in the interest of the Indian nation and its citizens. This will, surely, restore the dignity of our country. Above all, it is certain to bring peace and comfort to Lord Ram.

Earlier Columns